Externalization and Language Design

This contribution discusses Ferretti's view of language origins, based on a gradualist model of language evolution and on the cognitive prominence of a narrative representation of reality, enhanced by the role played by pantomimes in early stages of hominin evolution. It is argued that Ferretti's model correctly strives to incorporate key properties of language, such as sentence structure and propositional thought, within a broader model of human cognition, without relegating word order and other parameters of linguistic diversity into the systems by means of which language is "externalised" in communication. At the same time, it is also argued that the narrative view of language origins does not adequately account for two key properties of human syntax, that is, the presence of a (fixed) array of functional words, and the hierarchical reanalysis of language strings in graph-theoretic (or set-theoretic) terms. Moreover, a sentence-based analysis of language should not be equated with a bias towards propositional thought, since current models of both syntax and semantics are by no means constrained by sentence boundaries. All in all, it is fair to conclude that neither Chomskian theories of language evolution (including the view of language as a spandrel or as exaptation) nor narrative theories based on the role of gestural expression and communication are entirely satisfactory as solution to the Hard Problem of language origins.