Teaching As a Human Trait

What did people have to talk about when language was new? They had been getting along fine without words, and suddenly they had a few, but what was there to say?Donald M. Morrison has   written a book (The Coevolution of Language, Teaching, and Civil Discourse among Humans) that proposes language got up and running as a teaching system. Speculation about teaching is common, but usually limited to teaching how to make stone tools. Opinions are mixed as to whether language was necessary to teach how to make the early tools, especially Oldowan tools. Showing without talking might well have been enough to teach how to make these simple tools. And then these tools stayed unchanged for eons and could not have helped that much in advancing language. But Morrison takes the subject of teaching more seriously and imagines it had a role in much more than telling apprentices,smash here.One thing I really like about this approach is that it provides a natural means for the evolution of the speech triangle, which, on this blog, is the defining relationship of language. The speech triangle is formed by a (1) speaker and a (2) listener paying joint attention to a (3) topic. Normal animal and machine communications are limited to a one-dimensional relationship in which a (1) controller manipulates a (2) controlee. There is no obvious way to get from the one-dimensional relation to the speech triangle, or at least I never spotted one until Morrison came along.The teacher student relationship ...
Source: Babel's Dawn - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Source Type: blogs