Abstrakt
This paper focuses on an exploration of the problem presented by Terrence W. Deacon in his famous book The Symbolic Species (1997).
Deacon has proposed the thesis that there is an insurmountable rupture between human language and all other communication of non-human species. Deacon refers to this fundamentally limiting presupposition as the 'symbolic threshold' (or 'symbolic barrier').
Deacon identifies the speciesspecific nature of human natural language on the basis of its combinatorial power, however the crucial difference is humanity's possession of a mental symbol system. A symptom of this threshold is the unprovability of anything that we might describe as 'simple language.' The aim off my paper is to attempt to deterritorialize Deacon's ideas from the fields of evolutionary neuroanthropology and linguistics to the cognitive semiotics of music.
If we start from the assumption that music is, next to language, the second most important way in which humans organise sound, a number of questions arise. Is music - analogous to language - an exclusively human activity? What happens if we cautiously ask whether music is not something that might - in Deacon's terms - manifest (or not manifest) aspects of the sought-after simple language?