Launching Language: The Gestural Origin of Discrete Infinity

2 'Human language is based on an elementary property that also seems to be biologically isolated: the property of discrete infinity.'-Noam Chomsky (2000:3) 0.1 Introduction 'Discrete infinity' refers to the property by which language constructs from a few dozen discrete elements an infinite variety of expressions of thought, imagination and feeling. The property 'seems to be biologically isolated', because it is unique among systems of animal communication. From another point of view, however, it is not isolated at all, but rather an instance of a general principle common to all natural systems that 'make infinite use of finite means' (Humboldt 1836/1999: 91), including physics, chemistry, genetics and language, namely, 'the particulate principle of self-diversifying systems' (Abler 1989). According to the particulate principle, the only route to unbounded diversity of form and function is through a combinatorial hierarchy in which discrete elements, drawn from a finite set, are repeatedly permuted and combined to yield larger units higher in the hierarchy and more diverse in structure and function than their constituents. The particulate units in physical chemistry include atoms, ions, and molecules, in biological inheritance, chemical radicals, genes and proteins, in language, gestures (as will be argued below), segments, syllables, words and phrases. A parallel between languages and genetic systems has repeatedly been remarked by physicists (e. for example, wrote: 'Linguistics has furnished genetics with an excellent model. The image which best describes heredity is that of a chemical message…written…with the combination…of just four chemical radicals. The four units…are combined and permuted infinitely, just as are the letters of the alphabet throughout the length of a text. As a phrase corresponds to a segment of text so does a gene correspond to a segment of the nucleic acid fiber' (Jacob 1977:187). Like Jakobson (1970), Jacob emphasized that for such a system to work its basic units must themselves be devoid of meaning or function. In language, only if phonetic units have no meaning can they be commuted across contexts to form new words with new meanings. Jacob went on to observe that the principle of combining discrete units to form successive levels of a hierarchy '…is not limited to language and heredity …[but]…appears to operate in nature each time there is a question of generating a large diversity of structures using a restricted number of building blocks' (1977:188). But Jacob did not try to explain why systems as apparently diverse as language, …