Asif A. Ghazanfar and Daniel Y. Takahashi, ‘The evolution of speech: vision, rhythm, cooperation’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 18 (2014), 543-53.

Ghazanfar and Takahashi examine some key characteristics of human speech: rhythmic vocal acoustics, the coordination of these with rhythmic facial motions, and turn-taking. They find similarities and contrasts with the way other primates communicate with one another. The evolution of language is treated as separate from the evolution of speech in order to focus on these cross-species qualities. The authors acknowledge that the question of language bears on their interests, and vice versa.
      For some reason, despite the sidelining of language, this made me think about drama, which depends on rhythms of voice and body (the flow of syntax, metrical forms, coordinated movements and expressions), and which is built so often on turn-taking (it’s so much easier for the audience when speakers don’t overlap one another). I thought of excess: verse drama, different formal structures, and the exaggerated turn-taking that some kinds of scene depict. I also thought of degeneration, or regression – opposites of evolution – where literary speech falls short of these long-learned ideals. Failures of rhythm and turn-taking might complement – but might be independent of – a descent into linguistic incoherence.

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I have observed before that I always think of Shakespeare and Beckett in this blog. Here too. In the mad scenes of King Lear, the King, his Fool, and Edgar (as Poor Tom) weave strange, incoherent speeches into one another. In Titus Andronicus Marcus has to speak at, to, with, for, over – other prepositions would work too – his voiceless niece, and his ability to engage and respond seems compromised as a result.
      Beckett sees to go even further, contorting his actors’ bodies so that their speech and movement are at odds (most famously in Not I), and altering the dynamics of turn-taking (in
Krapp’s Last Tape, for example). Throughout Waiting for Godot there is a feeling that the characters are displaying the characteristics of evolved speech, but that they are now vestigial, not really suited to a strange world and what has happened to its words. Lucky’s outburst, where turn-taking breaks down and where also the link between words and facial expression is hard to sustain, feels curiously timely. Didi and Gogo try to ask and answer questions, to collaborate in speech, but it does not lead anywhere.
      Literature depends on language, obviously. But if we allow Ghazanfar and Takahashi to isolate speech as a phenomenon of sound and body, then we might see writers doing the same, revealing a major degeneration in characters and their societies by having these basics, rhythm and turn-taking, turn towards the nightmarish.