ABSTRACT
Linguists and anthropologists have been interested in questions of origins. There are two foci of discussions about origins of language forms: the emergence of human language as such and its universal or variable features, and the historical reconstruction of worldwide or regional language families, such as the categories of Indo-European, Austronesian, etc. Language also enables the creation of a kind of narrative memory distinct from episodic memory of events and narrative implies that the memory is shared among individuals in social relationships, feeding into what Dan Everett has called the dark matter of culture. In Melpa language stories from Mount Hagen, each new piece of this kind is linked grammatically to the piece before it with a specific participle verb form indicating that the new subject of the piece is the same as or different from the preceding piece. A systematic scheme of theorizing on the origins of language is provided by Derek Bickerton.
