Vico, Metaphor and the Origin of Language: A Review

Vico, Metaphor and the Origin of Language

Author: Marcel Danesi

Year: 1993

Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press

Pages: 191

The book is written by Marcel Danesi (b. 1946), a professor of Semiotics and Linguistic Anthropology at the University of Toronto. This is one of his first major publications where he attempts to re-view the idea of origin of language with reference to Giambattista Vico's New Science. The book is divided into seven chapters. 

Chapter one discusses various theories of the origin of language. Those theories are also categorized in Echoic theories, Gestural theories, and Pragmo-Communicative theories. After that author discusses the scientific evidences in the study of the origin of language, such as Swadesh’s analysis of high and non-high vowels associated with some specific meaning. Historical-comparative studies and reconstruction are also discussed. Genetic perspective is also put forward.

Second chapter talks about the idea of primitive mind and how Vico’s ideas are influential here. The chapter begins with the reasons why Vico’s ideas are not yet very popular in Anglo-American academic discourses. This section also includes some of his ideas which are now-knowingly, and unknowingly-worked upon in non-Cartesian cognitive sciences. Next section gives a brief review of the works on Vico in English. Then basic Vichian concepts such as Science, Metaphor, myth, common sense as communal sense, etc. are presented and defined. The last section of the chapter tries to reconstruct the primitive mind from Vichian perspective which differentiates two layers: Deep and Surface.

Third chapter entitled “Language and Imagination” dwells into Vichian discourse and sheds light on the idea of metaphor. Though Vico never directly talked about glottogenesis, the chapter tries to get clues from his writing, specifically from The New Science, and attempts to reconstruct his understanding of the origins of language. In the section, ‘Reconstructing the Primal Scene,’ following Vico, Danesi says that the link between the language and imagination is metaphor, and then he discusses the Events put forward by Vico in the form of hypothesis: Iconicity hypothesis, Visual mimesis hypothesis, Audio-Oral osmosis hypothesis, and Metaphoricity hypothesis. Here, he also discusses some characteristics of metaphor based on Vichian perspective. The verbal tropes are claimed to be emanated from metaphorical capacity. In the last section, the evolution of culture is discussed; again it is divided into three stages: Age of God, Age of heroes, and Age of humans. Here, myths gradually replaced by the legends, which in turn converted into histories in the process of gradual development of culture.

Fourth chapter, the Dawn of Language, primarily deals with the idea of iconicity and the idea of mimesis. First section tries to describe the nature of iconicity. Here, both the iconicity and indexicality are discussed from various perspectives, including semiotic ones. Discussion also includes the idea of Deixis and how it may have come into existence. Second section elaborates on the research on imagery, iconicity, and gesture. The modern cognitive perspectives, such as Image Schemata are also given enough space. Last section discusses the idea of iconic representation at the beginning of language and its present scenario. It discusses primitive art, various writing systems, and ends with the discussion on the integrational idea of writing, as proposed by Roy Harris, that both writing and spoken language are two equal contenders for our inbuilt faculty to produce signs, the writing is not just an extension of spoken sound.

Chapter five deals with the journey of homo sapiens from Language to Speech. Here, Language is understood is any form of communication, while Speech primarily refers to the oral approach to communication – today, majority of scholars equate the two. Here, Onomatopoeia and interjections are two of the basic operative strategies in the discourse and Vico hypothesizes them to be at the beginning of the language. First section, audio-oral osmosis discusses how our ancestors have shifted from visual to aural means of communication. And the sub-section here attempts to draw the nature of audio-oral speech. It states that audio-oral speech entails psycho-physiological capacity to produce sounds and distinguish them. This also implies that certain physiological changes must have taken place in human anatomy which is briefly explained. Next sub-section provides an overview on the studies on core vocabulary by various scholars who have attempted to explain the etymology based on osmotic formation. Second section studies the ontogenesis of speech where drawing the similarities from earlier scholars the child language acquisition is used to understand the language development in proto-humans or early homo sapiens. The argument is, like children, early humans also develop the language in stages, starting from single words to develop fully-formed sentence structures. Another analogy is in terms of imitation – the way child imitates the elder’s language; early humans may have imitated the natural sounds – onomatopoeia and interjections. The last section elaborates on the hypothesis stated above – Language and Speech. Vichian glottogenetic suggests that language was already present at some deep level and speech is just a manifestation, and like Chomsky’s Universals, Vico suggests ‘Imaginative Universals.’

The sixth chapter discusses the hypothesis of metaphoricity in the context of glottogenesis. It goes with the hypothesis that metaphor is the evolutionary link between perception and conceptualization. The first section talks about the nature of metaphor, while the sub-section there provides a brief survey of the research on metaphor, not only as a figure of speech but also as a cognitive process. From a Vichian perspective, the abstract thought is a direct offspring of metaphorical capacity. Brief discussion about conceptual metaphors is given. The most crucial element in Metaphorical Language Programming, according to Danesi, was that the metaphoricity is connected to iconicity. Metaphorical thinking involves iconicity and it fills conceptual gaps. And over the period, the concepts which are born as metaphors become frozen. According to Vico, the imaginative and conceptual structures are cultural but they become language-dependent when they enter into metaphoricity. In neurological coordinates, author talks about neurological research where the connection between Right Hemisphere and Left Hemisphere, and the iconicity and metaphor’s connections with hemispheres. It tells that the metaphoricity develops in the Right Hemisphere. Thus, the interpretation of proverbs, metaphors, and myths are dependent on RH.

The last chapter provides a perspective on sociobiological and computationist perspectives on language, and Vico’s insights therein. The first section revisits earlier three chapters on three Vichian hypothesis as a summary of Vichian glottogenetic scenario. In this summary the ideas of sequence, monogenesis, and polygenesis are briefly discussed. Second section revisits the genetic perspectives of sociobiology and computationism. In the discussion on sociobiology, the research on color terminology is presented at length, concluding against the dominant Berlin and Kay’s work in the field. The entire discussion takes an opposite view from Cartesian linguistics which continues in the discussion on innateness paradigm too. Computationism primarily works from the perspective of “mind as a computer” metaphor and criticizes various computational models of mind. The last section provides Danesi’s conclusions, where he explicitly states that “the imagination and Metaphor are the essence of mind” and argues that glottogeneticists should make New Science by Vico as a basic point of reference. He also adds that this Vichian scenario is descriptive in nature – it tries to explain the development of language from the perspective of how and not why. 

My reading of these hypothesis include the understanding that the humans were homo eloquent at the second stage of iconicity, but we turn into civilized beings at the third stage when we started referring to signs non-literarily, the hypothesis of metaphoricity.