Formulaic Language: A Living Linguistic Fossil for a Holistic Protolanguage

Humans today have the ability to use language. The common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans probably did not. During recent decades evolutionary linguists have attempted to explain how the gap between a non-linguistic ancestor and our linguistic species was bridged. In this direction, it has become common to invoke the notion of a protolanguage as a stable intermediary stage in the evolution of language. A key dispute among the currently-available hypotheses of protolanguage is represented by the distinction between holistic and synthetic accounts: did human protolanguage consist of holistic utterances – later segmented into single words – or did it start with simple units that were added together into more complex structures? The synthetic account is generally recognized as “the standard model,” thus assuming that the earliest forms of a presumed protolanguage were compositional, that is built up from single words, where one word corresponds to one concept. However, recent years have seen the consolidation of the alternative idea: each element of a protolanguage would have been linguistically unanalyzable and referred to a whole situation. This paper presents the case of formulaic language as evidence – a living linguistic fossil – which corroborates arguments in support of a holistic protolanguage account.