Early Human Language Was Isolating- Monocategorial-associational

Isolating-Monocategorial-Associational (IMA) Language is language with the following three properties: (a) morphologically isolating, without word-internal morphological structure; (b) syntactically monocategorial, without distinct syntactic categories; and (c) semantically associational, without distinct construction-specific semantic rules, compositional semantics relying instead on the association operator, which says that the meaning of a composite expression is associated with the meanings of its constituents in an underspecified fashion. IMA Language is present in the following five domains: (a) phylogeny: at some stage in evolution, early language was IMA Language; (b) ontogeny: at some stage in acquisition, early child language is IMA Language; (c) semiotics: some artificial languages are IMA Language; (d) typology: some languages are closer than others to IMA Language; and (e) cognition: IMA Language is a feature of general human cognition. This paper presents arguments pertaining to the first of these domains, namely phylogeny, citing evidence from the linguistic behaviour of captive apes which points towards the conclusion that early human language was IMA Language.