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

Linguistics 445
ful units, namely morphemes and words; 3) incest taboo, conclusively inter-
preted by anthropologists (115; 188; 105; 151) as the indispensable precondition
for a wider exchange of mates and hereby for an expansion of kinship and for a
consequent buildup of economic, cooperative, and defensive alliances. In brief,
this device serves to create men’s ‘solidarity transcending the family’ (133).
As a matter of fact, all of these three innovations introduce pure auxiliaries,
secondary tools necessary for the foundation of human society with its material,
verbal, and spiritual culture. An abstract mediate principle lies in the idea of
secondary tools, and the emergence of all of their three aspects must have been
the cardinal step from ‘animality’ toward the thoroughly human mind. The
rudiments of these three fundamentally similar possessions must have emerged
within the same paleontological period, and the earliest excavated specimens
of tools - such as gravers or burins (129, p. 95) - destined to make tools enable
us to posit a conjectural glottogonic epoch. In particular, the need of articalate
speech for the formulation of rules which define and prohibit incest and inaugu-
rate exogamy (187) prompts a further specification of the evolutionary sequence.
As the psychologist puts it, ‘distinctions between those who are permitted or
favored as mates and those who are ruled out as “incestuous” are governed by a
system of naming that can only be mastered by one who can handle a human
language’ (21, p. 75). The importance of speech for the development and diffu-
sion of tool manufacture may be likewise assumed.
The physiology of speech production overcomes its former piecemeal,
atomizing stage and acquires an ever broader interdisciplinary range. Among
instructive examples one could cite Zinkin’s comprehensive tabulation of speech
mechanisms (195) and the fruitful experiments going on especially in the labora-
tories of Leningrad, Los Angeles, Lund, New York, Prague, Santa Barbara,
Stockholm, Tokyo, etc. The novel biomechanical interpretation of programmed
and controlled movements which has been developed by Bernitejn and his
collaborators (9) ought to be taken into account by phoneticians as well. The
study of speech sounds as goal-directed motor commands and acts, with partic-
ular reference to their auditory effect and to the purpose they serve in language,
requires co-ordinate efforts of experts in all the facets of phonic phenomena,
from the biomechanic aspect of articulatory movements to the subtleties of a
purely phonological analysis. As soon as such teamwork is achieved, the speech
analysis will obtain its thoroughly scientific foundations and wil respond to the
‘exigencies of relativistic invariance’ as the binding methodological requirement
for any field of modern research (14, p. 71).
The deepest discernment of the relation between the human organism and its
verbal abilities and activities is achieved by the mutual help of neurobiologists
and linguists in a comparative inquiry into the various lesions of the cortex and
the resulting aphasic impairments. An intrinsically linguistic analysis discloses
three dichotomies underlying those six types of aphasia which have been
delineated by Luria (110) and corroborated by observations of other contem-
porary neurobiologists (64). The classification of aphasic impairments based on
this analysis yields a patently coherent and symmetrical relational pattern, and
when we confront this strictly linguistic pattern with the anatomical data, it