In the week 5 tutorial you already discussed two accounts of protolanguage: a gestural and a vocal one. This week we would like you to look at holistic and synthetic protolanguage, by discussing two influential papers: Wray (1998) and Tallerman (2007) (both authors are women; that’s good to keep in mind when discussing the papers).
Wray’s article was written in a time when many evolutionary linguists implicitly assumed that evolutionarily early language must have consisted of words (more in line with synthetic/lexical protolanguage). Wray’s view was presented as a viable alternative to that. (Wray’s work has been important in the iterated learning paradigm, that will be discussed in week 8.)
Tallerman lists a number of arguments against holistic protolanguage. The debate would work best if you would start with Wray’s work, and then cover Tallerman’s criticism.
A brief note on terminology: Synthetic protolanguage is more or less what Fitch calls lexical protolanguage. In more recent publications it is sometimes called compositional protolanguage.
Team A will read:
Wray, A. (1998). Protolanguage as a holistic system for social interaction. Language & communication, 18(1), 47-67.
Pdf available here.
Team B will read:
Tallerman, M. (2007). Did our ancestors speak a holistic protolanguage?. Lingua, 117(3), 579-604.
A pdf is available from Sciencedirect