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This paper challenges recent assumptions that holophrastic utterances could be planned, processed, stored and retrieved from storage, focussing on three specific issues: (i) Problems in conceptual planning of multi-proposition utterances of the type proposed by Arbib (2005), Mithen (2005); (ii) The question of whether holophrastic protolanguage could have been processed by a special ‘holistic’ mode, the precursor to a projected ‘idiom mode’ in modern language; (iii) The implications for learning a holophrastic proto-lexicon in light of lexical constraints on word learning. Modern speakers only plan utterances in clause-sized units, and it is improbable that protolanguage speakers had more complex abilities. Moreover, the production and comprehension of idioms sheds no light on a putative ‘holistic’ mode of language processing, since idioms are not processed in this way. Finally, innate constraints on learning …