ABSTRACT
The origin of symbolic language belongs among the most fascinating enigmas of phylogenesis. Just as, in ontogeny, the development of language competence makes the unfolding of autobiographical memory possible and thus raises all other further progress in competence to a new, self-reflexive level, so, on the phylogenetic level, the origin of symbolic forms of communication had the effect of a developmental accelerator par excellence. Only by possessing communicable symbols is abstraction from concrete situations possible, permitting the transfer of information, knowledge and learning over the expanse of space and time. Within the frame of this book, it would not be possible or necessary to speculate on how language may have originated in the course of human evolution, but we want to allude briefly to our basic assumption that language originated from the successive extension of communicative techniques and competences and that probably, at least theoretically, a course of development can be hypothesized from nonsymbolic communication through sounds and gestures all the way up to symbolic communication through linguistic symbols and words. This assumption is sound because the ontogenetic path toward language progresses from presymbolic forms of communication. Communication, that is, social exchange about one’s well-being and needs, functions before language in infants, and so we do not find it convincing to “explain” the phenomenon of human speech capacity by the assumption of a single, simple origin, such as the existence of a so-called language gene (compare Chomsky, 1998 [1975]; Pinker, 1994).
