From metonymy to syntax in the communication of events
Résumé
Language, from its early hominin origin to now, was not primarily being used for practical purposes. We suggest that an essential function of protolanguage was to signal 'noteworthy' events, as humans still systematically do. Words could not be so specific as to refer to whole, non-recurring, situations. They referred to elements such as objects or locations, and the communicated event was inferred metonymically. Compositionality was achieved, without syntax, through multi-metonymy, as words referring to elements of the same situation were concatenated into proto-utterances.