meaningful pitch movements,satisfies the criterion for being a joint
feature of language and music,and a scaffold on which both systems
could have developed.This first musilanguage stage would have been a
system of unitary lexical-tonal elements which could have been com-
bined to form phrases.Combinatorial Phrase Formation
Given the establishment of a lexical tone-based vocalization system,we
can envision the next evolutionary step in the musilanguage system’s
development whereby sequences of lexical-tonal units are strung
together to make simple,unordered phrases having higher-order mean-
ings.The semantic meaning of such phrases has both compound and
global sources.The compound sources are derived from the relational
juxtaposition of the individual semantic units being combined.A global
level of meaning,due to the overall melodic contour of the phrase,is
a second important semantic feature of a phrase-based system not pos-
sible in a single-unit system,such as the first musilanguage stage.These
phrase-level melodies correspond to categorical formulas for conveying
emotive and/or pragmatic meaning (see Richman,this volume).In the
domain of speech,they include such discrete phonological formulas as
question intonations and surprise intonations. Thus, phrase-based
systems provide a dual advantage over single-unit systems in that they
have two levels of meaning:compound—meaningful relations between
the individual units,and global—categorical formulas characterizing the
phrase as a whole.Such combinatorial phrases have not only a melodic
structure but a rhythmic structure as well,and the rhythmic patterns of
such phrases are derivable,at least in large part,from the temporal
arrangement of elemental units.
I maintain that whereas the basic ingredients of hierarchical organiza-
tion are present in such a system,this second musilanguage stage has
neither a sense of ordering nor a strong sense of hierarchical grouping.
The one exception to this,described below,is the notion of prominence.
In general,hierarchical organization would have emerged in a modality-
specific fashion after divergence from the musilanguage stage,leading to
the creation of the specific grammars of language and music.Therefore,
one important implication of this model is thatthe general capacity for
combinatoriality preceded the evolution of modality-specific syntaxesAs
such,this model shares features with Bickerton’s (1995) protolanguage
model.The musilanguage stage should have had neither the propositional
syntax of language nor the blending syntax of music,but should have
merely been a system of combinatorial relations between basic elements
in which an additional,global level of meaning was superimposed on the
relational level of meaning.However,despite this absence of a complex285 The “Musilanguage”Model of Music