The Hand by Frank R. Wilson

Author:Frank R. Wilson [Wilson, Frank R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-77277-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-10-27T04:00:00+00:00

A quarter-century after Vygotsky wrote those words, Chomsky established that the child’s long tutorial associating sounds with things and events in the real world could not explain human language. As we have seen, the heart of Chomsky’s argument was that sentences in almost every language are built by the same rules, and children learn these rules without ever having to be formally taught them and without being able to explain why they follow them.*

These rules are innate. So Chomsky took the Vygotsky claim one step further: sound-experience associations not only fail to explain the origins of thought but also fail to explain the origins of language.

If neither anthropology nor human ontogeny can expose an evolutionary path to language via modifications in the human airway, why would linguists not propose the hand and its specialized use for communication as a prime mover in the evolution of language? There may be several reasons: first, very few linguists have personally adopted sign as a mode of communication, hence they cannot bring experiential knowledge to their conclusions about gestural theories of language origins;* second (as has been suggested by linguists who do sign), the prevailing assumptions in linguistics concerning the aural/oral origins of language have severely impeded the development of alternative explanations. Notwithstanding these impediments, however, interest in the possible gestural origins of language has recently been gaining serious support.

Armstrong, Stokoe, and Wilcox, prominent linguists whose proposal for a “taxonomy of gesture” we encountered earlier, have presented a comprehensive case for the gestural origins of language in their new book, Gesture and the Nature of Language. While their case cannot be reviewed in detail here, its most provocative assertions are important to note:

the term “gesture” includes vocal-articulatory as well as limb movements, and is defined as “an equivalence class of coordinated movements that achieve some end”;

the visual channel is superior to the auditory channel for processing object relations in relation to a body schema and physical interactions with external objects;†

syntax and semantics cannot be separated, and “embryo sentences are already inherent in simple visible gestures.”

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