Vocate: Luria on development of language

supported by extralinguistic (sympractic) aids--knowledge of the situation, facial expression, gestures . . . information can be transmitted by extralinguistic aids, and incomplete expansion, ellipsis, the participation of intonation, and so on, can exist. ( Luria, 1976a, pp. 36-37)
Although this difference may be observed in the successive developmental states of childhood language acquisition, it originates in the historical development of language:
It is an important fact that in the early period of history language did not include all the constructions necessary to express a complex communication. Language itself was an inseparable part of practical activity, it had a relatively simple structure, and the adequate understanding of these relatively simple constructions requires the participation of a "sympractic context"; for this reason, primitive languages could remain unknown without knowledge of the concrete situation in which a particular communication was used, of the gestures that accompanied it, of the intonation with which it was uttered, and so on. That is why, as the famous ethnologist Malinowski ( 1930) pointed out, the expressions used by many peoples standing at a primitive level of social development can be understood only if the concrete situation is known and if their gestures are observed . . . .
Only in the course of its long historical development has language gradually developed its own "synsemantic" forms of expression of relations, and so, as Buhler ( 1934) stated, it has become "a system that includes in itself all the means of expressiveness." Thus the whole evolution of language can with full justification be represented as the path of liberation from dependence on the sympractic context and of gradual formulation of methods increasing the role of the linguistic (grammatically constructed) synsemantic context proper. ( Luria, 1976a, p. 156)
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