Universals of human communication

For many years, linguists (especially in the US) have discussed concepts such as Language Universals and Universal Grammar (UG), in an attempt to find features or patterns shared by all languages in the world. The idea seems interesting but... is there anything really 'universal' in language? In a recent article, Nicholas Evans and Stephen Levinson have reviewed the concept of language universals, offering a great deal of examples that contradict even the most basic of the universals proposed by Greenberg and other linguists. According to the authors of the article, the only thing that can be established is a series of statistical tendencies (following Greenberg's nomenclature) that may be inferred from typological analysis. As for Chomsky's UG, I personally think it is one of the most irrelevant concepts ever devised in linguistics.

So it seems that there might be nothing really 'universal' about human language, but what about human communication? In two recent posts (here and here), I put forward some ideas about the origin of language and grammar. In my opinion, the main difference between human and non-human 'language' is the fact that we can use the narrative/descriptive vs imperative contrast in our utterances; in fact, there's no way we can produce an utterance ouside these parameters. If I say a word or a sentence, I'm either narrating/describing something or telling someone to do something, or maybe a combination of both, whereas in non-human communication, it is not clear that this contrast is used meaningfully, or consciously. At first, I thought of it in terms of 'language' or 'grammar', but then I realized that it is present in both verbal and non-verbal types of human communication. Whenever we communicate, with words or with gestures, we are actually creating narrative, descriptive or imperative contexts, and our listeners have an ability to decode this variety of meanings. The grammatical components associated with this contrast, e.g. the various moods (imperative, optative, indicative, etc.) were probably preceded by a non-verbal 'grammar' that set the foundations for human oral language as we know it. Without this previous development, which may have originated at a very early stage in our development as a species, our verbal communication would be limited to a simple set of calls.

Now, what about universals? Is it possible to find them at the level of human communication? I can see at least two possible candidates:

1. All human groups use verbal language, unless their members are physically impaired to develop this ability, e.g. deaf and dumb people.

2. In all types of human communication, both verbal and non-verbal, a significant contrast is established between narrative/descriptive and imperative contents.

Sources of the pictures, (added on Jan31, 2010): 1st and 3rd, from Inimagine; 2nd picture, from this interesting article in PNAS.

The birth of grammar

It was in the papers recently (as you can see here or here): according to some researchers, there is a species of monkeys, known as Campbell's monkeys, who have developed a complex system of alert calls which, in some of its features (e.g. meaningful combination of distinctive units), would resemble some form of syntax. Of course, this discovery has caused some stir among the linguistic community, and now there's an ongoing debate about this question: "Are these monkeys, actually, using syntax?", a question which, probably, cannot be answered.

Campbell's monkeys use their language as alert calls, whenever there is a potential danger in sight, e.g. an approaching predator or a falling tree. They use a variety of calls (at least six: Boom, Krak, Hok, Hok-oo, Krak-oo, Wak-oo) and combine them in different ways to convey meaning. Let's imagine one of these alert situations: a group of monkeys are eating fruit from a tree, and then one of them sees a leopard a few metres away. As an immediate response he shouts an alert: Hok-oo Krak Boom! (I've invented the combination just to use it as an example). On hearing this, the other monkeys react and run for safety. The situation is clear: there is a message and a reaction to the message. Now, what does the message involve?

This series (Hok-oo Krak Boom!) can be understood at least in two different ways:

1. as an imperative: run from the approaching leopard!
2. as a narrative/description: a leopard is approaching!

Maybe the monkeys do not go as far as interpreting the utterance one way or the other. But, for us, linguistic utterances do have a form. In interpretations 1 and 2 above we have the same situation, and roughly the same meaning, but different language. An imperative is not the same as a narrative. Let's imagine our human ancestors milions of years ago. Maybe at some point they started to develop an ability to distinguish between imperative and narrative/description. Let's see another example from the animal world: bees.

It is well known that bees use body language to explain location of food sources to other bees in the hive. They perform what is sometimes referred to as a 'dance': a series of vibrations of their bodies in various positions that the other bees can interpret as a maningful message. The question is: is this language? How could we translate this waggle dance into human language. Let's see an example:

1. I have found some nice pollen in the southwest.
2. Go to the sothwest to get some nice pollen!

Number 1 is a narrative, number 2 an imperative. Again, bees are not likely to care much about these details, but for us humans, they make a difference. A linguistic difference.

In my post about the birth of language I talked about grammar as the application of logical thought and our capacity for abstraction to a particular problem: the growing amount of linguisitc units facilitated by our rich verbal ability, inherent to humans. I thought of individual units meaning 'red rock' or 'go to the river!', and then a later development where abstractions such as 'nouns', 'adjectives' or verbs' would be used as a more economical and efficient way of storing linguistic units. One of the first examples that came to my mind was the use of imperatives, as the most basic verb form. However, the examples from the animal world (see above) have shown me that the implemenation of narrative/descriptive mechanisms could perfectly be at the same level of abstraction. Of course, in our languages of today we are used to a complex array of verb features (mood, voice, tense, aspect) which offer an endless range of possiblities, but when I think of the first steps of human language, it seems to me that the difference between these two basic moods, which I call 'imperative' and 'narrative/descriptive', could have been quite relevant. What was the first 'mood' that gave birth to the original forms of verbal expression? Was it the need to tell the others what they should do? Or was it the need to narrate things? Was our first alert call understood as 'climb the tree (because there's a lion approaching)!' or simply 'there's a lion approaching!'? Difficult to know.
Last update: 4-Oct-2020.
Note: The images in this post are all paintings by the French artist Henri Rousseau, aka 'Le Douanier' Rousseau.

Populations and languages: the Strait of Gibraltar

Many years ago I made a trip to Gibraltar. At that time I was a post-graduate student at the University of Valencia, and one of the courses I took was about dialectology and sociolinguistics. We had to do some research as the final assignment of the course and in my group we decided to go to Gibraltar to do some field-work about the linguistic situation of this peculiar place. We spent three days there, with our questionnaires and interviews, and we also had time to do some sightseeing: we walked around the city, we saw the famous monkeys and we finally climbed the Rock, from where we had some spectacular views of both Spain and the African coast, which is a mere 14 km away. We can imagine that, throughout history and prehistory, many humans living on either side of the Strait must have felt curious to know about the land that they could see across the water, and this curiosity could have led to a significant movement of human populations in both directions.
The surprising fact, however, is that the Strait of Gibraltar has been a barrier for human migration in all ages, especially in prehistory. The main reason for this is geological: the Strait of Gibraltar has remained as it is now for the last 5 million years, even at the various glacial ages, where the sea level lowered significantly all over the world. We also have other types of evidence, e.g. the archaeological record, but the most important confirmation has come from population genetics. I recently read an interesting article about this subject: Bosch et al, 2001, High-Resolution Analysis of Human Y-Chromosome Variation Shows a Sharp Discontinuity and Limited Gene Flow between Northwestern Africa and the Iberian Peninsula, American Journal of Human Genetics, 68:1019-1029). In this article, the authors analysed the genetic components of various populations in Spain and Morocco, combined with other evidence from archaeology and history, and reached a series of interesting conclusions. It seems for example that in both cases, the populations of today are mostly the descendants of the people who lived in these areas in the Paleolithic, with a minor impact of migration from the Middle East, probably associated with Neolithic expansion. On the other hand, the genetic components of Iberian and NW African populations show that they come from different origins. Human settlement in Iberia is connected with the expansion of modern humans into Europe from Eurasia or Anatolia, whereas the population of NW Africa is mostly connected with components that originated in the African continent. The gene flow across the Strait of Gibraltar is not considered relevant; it can be estimated at about 5%, and it could, at least partially, show the traces of some recent historical phenomena, like the expansion of the Roman Empire or the Arabic conquest of Iberia. There’s no doubt that the Strait of Gibraltar, as a natural barrier, has played a decisive role in the distribution of human populations, both for modern humans and for older types of hominids. Instead of crossing the 14 km stretch of water that separates Africa from Europe, it took humans a few thousand years to go all the way to the Middle East and eastern Europe until they reached the Iberian Peninsula. This is what I would call a ‘Grand Tour’.

Now, what are the linguistic consequences of all this? Is there also a linguistic barrier as well? Has this language barrier existed from prehistoric times? In a previous post I wrote about the expansion of Arabic as a consequence of the Islamic Empire. The main conclusion I reached was that Arabic dialects are spoken today only in areas where other Afro-Asiatic languages (formerly known as Hamito-Semitic) were already spoken before the arrival of the Arabs, and not in areas where there were other types of languages, e.g. in Persia or Iberia. I’m not sure if anyone had realised this simple fact before, but it looks quite clear in my opinion. The important factor here is affinity. The language of the conquerors (in this case Arabic) has a varying degree of influence on the languages of the conquered depending on the affinity between them. When the Arabs arrived in northern Africa they found Berber-speaking populations, and Berber languages belong to the Afro-Asiatic group. The subsequent process of hybridization led to the linguistic situation that we find in the area today, with a series of dialects which are considered regional variations of Arabic (with the exception of the areas where Berber languages have survived until today). What about Iberia? The languages spoken in this territory were quite different from Arabic; they were connected with Latin, an Indo-European language belonging to the Italic group. The Islamic conquest brought about a process of hybridization, with a significant exchange of linguistic (mainly lexical) material in both directions, as can be seen in the vocabulary of Spanish, Portuguese and other Ibero-Romance languages, and also in many features of the Hispano-Arabic dialect. However, Arabic and Romance languages were always perceived as something different. There were not enough opportunities for hybridization to produce significant hybrids between them; people spoke one of the languages, or both, but not a mixture of them (except perhaps in some local, pidgin-like cases). Another example of the importance of affinity in situations of language contact can be seen in the Roman conquest. The influence of the Romans was linguistically relevant in the Iberian Peninsula, where there was already a background of Indo-European languages, whereas it was rather insignificant in northern Africa, with no Indo-European background (see this post for more details and some maps).

It seems therefore that the population/language distribution in NW Africa and Iberia corresponds to a pattern that dates back to Paleolithic times, when modern humans arrived in these areas via different routes. The Strait of Gibraltar, as a natural barrier, was the main factor behind the whole process, limiting the possibilities of genetic or cultural exchange. Later developments, associated with the rise and fall of empires and the expansion of religions, were not strong enough to change the overall picture.

Notes on the illustrations:
- First picture: The Strait of Gibraltar from Spain. Source: OjoDigital (here).
- Second picture: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Alboran Sea. Source: NASA (here).