Contenu du sommaire : L'origine du langage, sous la direction de Bernard Laks et Bernard Victorri

Darwinism comes into play as a scientific paradigm in a history-oriented grammar based on both anthropology and comparative mythology. Evolutionism was claimed by linguists such as Schleicher and Darmesteter whose hypotheses fuelled other work from Darwin in return. Its posterity has lasted to this day in language science research. However, one can wonder whether the proposed reinterpretation is well founded.

The comparatist framework which have undergone a remarkable development in the 19th century and have declined in the 20th century, has recently made a noticeable come back on the international scientific scene. The mixing of the comparatist and reconstructivist perspective with population genetics lead to the so called "new synthesis". The same uncontrolled metaphors and the same genealogical conceptions are set to work in this new framework. We first introduce a critical analysis of classical comparatism stressing how and why the genealogical notion of Stammbaum was deconstructed. We then show how modern genetic comparatism rests on the very same ideas without having answered the critics addressed to the classical one. Finally, we show that within a neo Darwinian paradigm many fruitful alternatives to the genetic-genealogical framework exists which allows for new ways of questioning diachronic relations among languages

There are three - and only three - mechanisms of grammatical change: Reanalysis (including the different aspects of grammaticalization), Analogy, and External Borrowing. These three mechanisms, implying processes of de-categorization, or generalization, or language contact, are described in detail. Examples are taken in typologically different languages. The motivations of grammatical change that could trigger off the mechanisms are the following: (i) semantic-pragmatic change (processes of metaphorization, of pragmatic inferencing or metonymyzation, of subjectification), (ii) typological extension, (iii) structural requirement, (iv) phonological change. The semantic-pragmatic change, related to conceptual change and different cognitive processes, is crucial.

Creole languages are sometimes considered a "laboratory" where language genesis could be observed in vivo. One reason for this belief is that Creoles are the only natural languages now extant, the emergence of which can be dated and localized with some precision because (i) it is recent (a century for some); (ii) it presents (or seems to present) the characters of a "catastrophe" as opposed to the continuous process of change whereby "old" languages like French and English acquired their identities. Another reason is the present currency of a theory which views the origin of language and the formation of Creoles as due to the same cause, viz. the sudden replacement of protolanguage by full human language. This article evaluates the claims of this theory with respect to Creole formation. It shows its main drawback to lie in the fact that full languages were crucially present on the scenes where creole languages emerged, if only as lexicon purveyors, so that no convincing inferences may be drawn from the historical situation in which Creoles appeared to the prehistorical setting where language originated.

In this paper, it is shown that the speech production system can be explained from deforming an acoustic tube with the objective of producing sounds with both ieconomy of effortî and maximum acoustic contrast between one another. This deductive approach automatically infers standard places of articulation for vowels and consonants, thereby identifying physical bases for phonological distinctions. A brief discussion of the implications of the findings concludes the paper.

Recent and independent progresses achieved in population genetics and historical linguistics led to the comparison of their results on the origins and migrations of modern humans. Here we present and discuss several studies that show evidence for a strong link between genetic and linguistic differentiation among human populations at the continental scale. We further present the first results of our "boundaries" method, a new interdisciplinary approach used to compare genetic and linguistic data.

Results on animal communications have exploded these last 20 years. If nobody still thinks that animal may have a kind of language as humans have, complexity of animal communications have been shown to be much more complex that what had been previously thought: traditions, meta-communication, innovation and abilities to manipulate information through deception, especially among primates, as well as great plasticity in referential processes have been observed. Simple syntaxes and dialogic situations have also been shown among animal communications, but no species studied to date seem able to naturally refer to presentles phenomena. We nevertheless must be cautious. Our intuitions about animal communications are often wrong. Examples of not yet solved problems abond. We can refer to what G. Bateson said about inability of animal to express negation, suggestion by P. Marier that play behaviour is the great analog with human language in animals, or D. Dennett's about the lack of secrecy among vervet monkeys. It seems to be an illusory belief to look for THE great feature of human language, compared with animal communications. It is more fruitful to consider that a number of meaningful differences distinguish language and animal communications. Such a careful and technical position being adopted here had already been defended by British biologist J.B.S. Haldane in the fifties, but it is still the best one.

The observation of our spontaneous communicative behaviour should offer some clues about the reason why the ability to communicate through language emerged in our species. This observation reveals that human beings universally communicate about salient events, what we call the shannonian function of language. Shannonian communication seems specific to homo sapiens and can be modelled in the frame of probability theory. We hypothesize that (proto)language, in a previous stage of our evolution to language, may have been used for the only purpose of signalling salient events.

What is at stake in this paper is the origin of the human language from an evolutionary point of view. It is argued that the emergence of the narrative function started the process that led to the acquisition of the very specific properties the human language is endowed with. This hypothesis is compatible with our current knowledge of the last steps of hominid evolution, and it permits to understand the development of a novel level of organisation, specific to our species, in which socio-cultural laws replace, to a large extent, the socio-biological constraints governing all the rest of the animal kingdom.