Language Evolution and Musicality: An Interwoven Saga, Tecumseh Fitch (University of Vienna)
In the same way that music and language have been interwoven in Ray Jackendoff's illustrious career, I will outline the evidence that these two uniquely human capabilities have been tightly interwoven during human evolution. My story builds upon Jackendoff's parallel architecture developed in "Foundations," and upon the evolutionary process offered in Jackendoff (1999), but differs in seeing a central role for musicality in the evolution of language, particularly in the early stages of language evolution. The key role of vocal learning in both music and language was the starting point, as suggested by Darwin with his "musical protolanguage." Musical syntax also has many shared features with linguistic syntax, despite their very different building blocks (morphemes and words versus notes and chords), suggesting some common ancestry in a "mimetic protolanguage". The central point of divergence between music and language came with semantics and meaning, with language adding an entirely new component to the parallel architecture in the form of highly articulated links to conceptual structures. Whatever meaning music conveys is more expressive, aesthetic and emotional than the clear and highly specific propositional meanings that can be conveyed with language. This supports the notion that human musicality evolved in tandem with the language capacity, up until their divergence in our species with regard to semantic meaning.