I have more to say about many-voiced kind of talking later,but for
now,let me add that it,too,through the huge amounts of repetition and
expectancies of what is to follow that it contains for all participants,is
a good model of how early formulas were fixed.It is relatively easy to
imagine the business of setting up group-interactive vocalizing,with
much repetition and expectancy that would have been the best situation
for the first fixing of formulas.It does not require anything beyond some
basic kinds of behaviors that are quite common in many groups of
animals and also in much human vocalizing.
First,all participants must try to repeat what they have just heard from
others as best they can,as soon and as often as they can.The desire to
repeat seems to be a basic,strong drive in all human beings,particularly
infants and children.Listen to young children:my daughter constantly
echoes a television dialog she likes,repeats bits of song lyrics,and replays
to herself snippets of conversations from school.This is a fierce biologi-
cal drive that ensures that human beings become and stay involved in
speech and in interaction with others.This drive to repeat throws people
into language and into vocal interactions with each other.It also ensures
that their interactions will be in rhythmic synchrony with each other as
their repetitions create an interactive rhythm.Such interactive rhythmic
synchrony is crucial for people being able to predict and understand the
communicative moves and movements of others.Finally,it ensures that
people constantly show and demonstrate their agreement and accep-
tance of language terms by repeating them.
This is what we could imagine for the group vocal setting of the first
fixing of formulas:a group of people or animals around a circle.(I am
imagining a situation similar to what happens when present-day hunter-
gatherers chat or sing through the night around a campfire,or go off into
the forest loudly singing and talking among themselves.) In the ancient
prelanguage period,everyone was compelled to express the current emo-
tional or social conflicts they felt through somewhat random sequences
of sounds.All participants tried to repeat some sequences that others just
said,and they tried to keep on beat with the others.Attempts at repeti-
tion and mimicry overlapped,and this produced a dense vocal fabric
with many cross-rhythms.Attempts at repetition,although constant and
compelling,were not exact.A dissonance of melody and a dissonance
of rhythm drew people in.People wanted to participate,to get in,and
resolve those dissonances.
Constant,frequent repetition of the same few formulas by many voices
makes it easy for people to remember these sequences as whole units.
This is a kind of behavioral conditioning.It conditions people into
remembering them as whole units,and enables them to recognize them
whenever they came up and to repeat them with fidelity.The next step305 On Rhythm,Repetition,and Meaning