who asked the first question? - International Research Center For ...

341• Question intonation is arguably the biggest universal of human languages andcommunication. All languages of the world without exception, tonal, non-tonal,intonational and accented – use the rising “question intonation” for the “yes-no”questions, very popular in human communication (Bolinger, 1972:314; Cruttenden,1986:169-174). [The only dubious exception reported in 1946 was Chitimacha, but as“only one person was reported as speaking the language, we should not pin too muchtheoretical significance to this statement.” (Swadesh, 1946:317, cited from Cruttenden,1986:158)]• According to Chomsky, the grammatical means of formulating questions arealso among the strongest syntactic universals of the languages of the world (Chomsky,1957), although the use of question intonation to formulate questions must beevolutionary earlier.• According to child psychologists, question asking appears among children in theform of question intonation in the babbling stage of their language development beforethey turn one, much earlier than the use of any grammatical structures.All these facts strongly suggest that the origins of question intonation and thegeneral human ability to ask questions must be amongst the oldest, most basic and mostimportant elements of human communication and human language. Most importantly,despite its crucial importance, the emergence of the question phenomenon was notconnected with the late stages of language development. Questions could have emergedat the earliest, pre-syntax, "one signal" stage of language development. The syntacticforms of questions that Chomsky is talking about must be a later phenomenon.The foregoing strongly suggests that although the ability to ask questions wascreated for communication and expressed by communicative signals, its emergence wasprimarily an event of cognitive significance. This was a cognitive revolution, leadinglater to language and social revolution.• Is there a genetic component for questioningbehavior?The absence of the ability to ask questions among apes, who successfullycommunicate with their human trainers using elements of language and simple sentences,who can comprehend complex sentences with embedded meanings, can manipulate theirtrainers using elements of the TOM (theory of mind), understand the idea of question,know the question words and can answer complex questions, but at the same time still donot use them in communication and do not ask questions can give us a clue about thegenetic character of questioning.A couple of suggestions made by scholars as to why apes do not (or can not) askquestions also suggests there is something in the inner organization of their intellectualabilities: