Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

440 Roman Jakobson
@, p. 334) has suggestively compared the molecular codes which ‘reflect the
processes of the forthcoming development and growth’ with ‘language as a
psycho-biological and psycho-social structure’ endowed with an anticipatory
‘model of the future’.
How should one interpret all these salient homologies between the genetic code
which ‘appears to be essentially the same in all organisms’ (185, p. 386) and the
architectonic model underlying the verbal codes of all human languages and,
nota bene, shared by no semiotic systems other than natural language or its
substitutes ? The question of these isomorphic features becomes particularly
instructive when we realize that they find!no analogue in any system of animal
communication.
The genetic code, the primary manifestation of life, and, on the other hand,
Ianguage, the universal endowment of humanity and its momentous leap from
genetics to civilization, are the two fundamental stores of information transmitted
from the ancestry to the progeny, the molecular heredity and the verbal
legacy as a necessary prerequisite of cultural tradition.
The outlined properties common to the systems of verbal and genetic information
ensure both speciation and boundless individualization. When biologists
maintain that the species ‘is the keystone of evolution’, and that without speciation
there would be no diversification of the organic world and no adaptive
radiation (119, p. 621 ; 43; 49, similarly, languages, with their structural regularities,
dynamic equilibrium, and cohesive power, appear as necessary corollaries
of the universal laws underlying any verbal structuration. If, furthermore,
biologists realize that the indispensable diversity of all individual organisms,
far from being incidental, presents ‘a universal and necessary phenomenon of
living things’ (161, p. 386), linguists, in turn, recognize the creativeness of
language in the unlimited variability of personal speech and in the infinite
diversification of verbal messages. Linguistics shares with biology the view that
‘stability and variability reside in the same structure’ (112, p. 99) and imply
each other.
Now, since ‘heredity, itself, is fundamentally a form of communication’ (184,
p. 71), and since the universal architectonic design of the verbal code is
undoubtedly a molecular endowment of every Homo sapiens, one could venture
the legitimate question whether the isomorphism exhibited by these two different
codes, genetic and verbal, results from a mere convergence induced by similar
needs, or whether, perhaps, the foundations of the overt linguistic patterns
superimposed upon molecular communication have been modeled directly
upon its structural principles.
The molecular hereditary order has no bearing on the diverse variables in
the formal and semantic make-up of different languages. There is, however, a
certain facet of individual speech that permits us to presume the possibility of a
genetic endowment. In addition to the multiform intentional information, our
talk carries inalienable and unalterable characteristics which are generated
chiefly in the inferior part of the speech apparatus, from the abdomen-diaphragmal
area to the pharynx. The study of these physiognomic characteristics was
inaugurated by Edward Severs under the label Schallanalyse and developed by