音乐、语言、心灵和身体的起源外文翻译资料

英语原文共 2 页，剩余内容已隐藏，支付完成后下载完整资料

外文原文

The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body

by Steven Mithen

Why are humans musical? Why do people in all cultures sing or play instruments? Why do we appear to have specialized neurological apparatus for hearing and interpreting music as distinct from other sounds? And how does our musicality relate to language and to our evolutionary history?

Anthropologists and archaeologists have paid little attention to the origin of music and musicality — far less than for either language or lsquo;artrsquo;. While art has been seen as an index of cognitive complexity and language as an essential tool of communication, music has suffered from our perception that it is an epiphenomenal lsquo;leisure activityrsquo;, and archaeologically inaccessible to boot. Nothing could be further from the truth, according to Steven Mithen; music is integral to human social life, he argues, and we can investigate its ancestry with the same rich range of analyses — neurological, physiological, ethnographic, linguistic, ethological and even archaeological — which have been deployed to study language.

In The Singing Neanderthals Steven Mithen poses these questions and proposes a bold hypothesis to answer them. Mithen argues that musicality is a fundamental part of being human, that this capacity is of great antiquity, and that a holistic protolanguage of musical emotive expression predates language and was an essential precursor to it.

This is an argument with implications which extend far beyond the mere origins of music itself into the very motives of human origins. Any argument of such range is bound to attract discussion and critique; we here present commentaries by archaeologists Clive Gamble and Iain Morley and linguists Alison Wray and Maggie Tallerman, along with Mithenrsquo;s response to them. Whether right or wrong, Mithen has raised fascinating and important issues. And it adds a great deal of charm to the time-honoured, perhaps shopworn image of the Neanderthals shambling ineffectively through the pages of Pleistocene prehistory to imagine them humming, crooning or belting out a cappella harmonies as they went.

While there has been considerable discussion and debate within palaeoanthropology regarding the origin and evolution of language and art, that of music and dance have been neglected. This is as surprising as it is unfortunate as these behaviours are universal amongst human communities today and in the historically documented past. We cannot understand the origin and nature of Homo sapiens without addressing why and how we are a musical species.

The Singing Neanderthals argues that while both language and art are most likely restricted to Homo sapiens, musicality has a significantly earlier appearance in human evolution and was utilized by a wide range of hominin ancestors and relatives. Indeed, the failure to appreciate this leaves us with a very restrictive understanding of past communication methods and lifestyles in general. Moreover, we remain constrained in our understanding of how not only music but also language originated in modern humans. To address these issues, The Singing Neanderthals draws on evidence and theories from a wide range of disciplines including neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, musicology and palaeoanthropology. By building a synthesis of material from these fields it seeks to not only understand how our capacities for language and music evolved but also to construct a more informed understanding of the past.

At present, there are two key approaches to the evolution of language with regard to the nature of proto-language. One of these can be called lsquo;compositionalrsquo; and is especially associated with the work of Derek Bickerton and Ray Jackendoff. In essence, this argues that words came before grammar, and it is the evolution of syntax that differentiates the vocal communication system of Homo sapiens from all of those that went before. An alternative approach is that developed by Alison Wray and Michael Arbib. They suggest that pre-modern communication was constituted by lsquo;holisticrsquo; phrases, each of which had a unique meaning and which could not be broken down into meaningful constituent parts. As such, discrete words that can be combined to make new and unique utterances were a relatively late development in the evolutionary process that led to language. I favour the holistic approach and envisage such phrases as also making extensive use of variation in pitch, rhythm and melody to communicate information, express emotion and induce emotion in other individuals. As such, both language and music have a common origin in a communication system that I refer to as lsquo;Hmmmmmrsquo; because it had the following characteristics: it was Holistic, manipulative, multi-modal, musical and mimetic.

Appreciating that human ancestors and relatives had a sophisticated vocal communication system of this type helps to explain numerous features of the archaeological and fossil record. The long-running debate about the linguistic capabilities of the Neanderthals arises from apparently contradictory lines of evidence that can now be resolved. That from their skeletal remains suggests a capability for vocal communication similar to that of modern humans (and which has, therefore, been assumed to be language) while the archaeological evidence provides few, if any, traces for linguistically mediated behaviour. This seeming paradox is resolved by appreciating that the Neanderthals did indeed have a complex vocal communication system, but it was a type of Hmmmmm rather than language. Another type of Hmmmmm was used by the immediate ancestors of Homo sapiens in Africa, both having originated from a lsquo;proto-Hmmmmmrsquo; used by a common ancestor.

The Singing Neanderthals examines and interprets the fossil and archaeological records to provide a feasible scenario for how Hmmmmm would have originated and evolved into a sufficiently complex communication system

剩余内容已隐藏，支付完成后下载完整资料

资料编号：[604376]，资料为PDF文档或Word文档，PDF文档可免费转换为Word