Sverker Johansson | Dalarna University (original) (raw)

Papers by Sverker Johansson

All peoples today have language and speech. Long ago, our distant pre-human ancestors did not hav... more All peoples today have language and speech. Long ago, our distant pre-human ancestors did not have language, and could not speak. Between then and now, our language faculties must have evolved. We do not know as much as we would have liked about this evolutionary process, and we do not have answers to a lot of questions about language evolution. But the mere fact that our language faculty and speech capabilities are the result of evolution can be used to constrain our theories about language and speech.

Identifying possible stages of protolanguage critically depends on the underlying nature of langu... more Identifying possible stages of protolanguage critically depends on the underlying nature of language. Theories of language differ in evolvability, and in whether they permit protolanguage stages. In this presentation, I will study the protolanguage potential and evolvability of Construction Grammar. Postulating that CG is a biologically real description of language, its evolvability through a sequence of intermediate protolanguages is investigated. a It is assumed here, as argued by e.g. Johansson (2014), that language evolved for communicative purposes.

Science, 1995

The optical properties of the ice at the geographical South Pole have been investigated at depths... more The optical properties of the ice at the geographical South Pole have been investigated at depths between 0.8 and 1 kilometers. The absorption and scattering lengths of visible light (515 nm) have been measured in situ using the laser calibration setup

Zeitschrift für Physik C Particles and Fields, 1995

Area. An overview of the apparatus is shown in Figure la. The main components are OCR Output The ... more Area. An overview of the apparatus is shown in Figure la. The main components are OCR Output The HELIOS spectrometer is situated in the H8 beam line of the CERN SPS North 2.2 Apparatus reliably and stably throughout the experiment.

Virtual Sites as Learning Spaces, 2019

Wikipedia is interesting to study from many perspectives, and its huge influence as a learning si... more Wikipedia is interesting to study from many perspectives, and its huge influence as a learning site makes it important to study. This chapter reviews the Wikipedia community and culture, and the process of article creation on Wikipedia, after which results are presented from a study of the argumentative genre that uses Wikipedia discussions as a corpus.

Most assessment of students is based on artificial assignments, done purely for assessment, only ... more Most assessment of students is based on artificial assignments, done purely for assessment, only read by assessing teachers. Much has been written on “authentic assessment” (reviewed in Frey et al. ...

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia, written entirely by volunteers in 288 different languages. I... more Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia, written entirely by volunteers in 288 different languages. It is the 6th most visited of all websites, and is both the largest and the most used encyclopedia of ...

The crowdsourced encyclopediaWikipedia is the 6th most visited of all websites. Wikipedia article... more The crowdsourced encyclopediaWikipedia is the 6th most visited of all websites. Wikipedia articles are written in a social process with heated arguments on dedicated discussion pages, one for each ...

Why do humans have language at all and how did we become language users? These are central questi... more Why do humans have language at all and how did we become language users? These are central questions in language evolution, but no general consensus exists on the answers, nor even on what methods to use to find answers. This is a complex topic that requires input from many disciplines, including, but not limited to, linguistics, evolutionary biology, palaeoanthropology, neurobiology, archaeology, cognitive science, and primatology. Nobody is an expert in all these areas, and experts in one area sometimes overlook needed input from other areas. Consensus does not even exist among linguists on what language is—opinions range from the physical speech acts themselves to language as an abstract social communication system to language as computational machinery in the individual and to language as an innate species-defining, genetically encoded capacity of humans. These different views of language imply very different evolutionary explanations. At the same time, all of these perspectives have some validity; the speech acts do occur, language use does take place in a social context, the individual language user does somehow produce and parse sentences, and human babies are born with a predisposition for language learning that ape babies lack. The disagreements are mainly a matter of emphasis, namely which aspects are regarded as of primary interest, requiring explanation. The preeminent linguist of the early 20th century, Ferdinand de Saussure, focused on the first two perspectives with his distinction between parole (speech acts) and langue (the social system). The preeminent linguist of the late 20th century, Noam Chomsky, focuses instead on the latter two, especially the computational machinery, and he regards the first two as not worthy of a linguist’s attention. But neither focus is adequate on its own; a viable theory of language evolution must be able to explain all aspects of language, notably both the evolution of the language capacity that resides in each human brain and the evolution of the human social context in which language is used. No generally accepted theory exists today. Instead of a single accepted theory, the field of language evolution is awash with a multitude of different models, scenarios, and hypotheses about how things might have happened. To make matters worse, something of a paradigm split exists in the study of language origins. The split is largely along the line between Saussure and Chomsky mentioned above. To put it simply, those researchers who use the label “biolinguistics” try to explain the origin of Chomsky’s computational machinery (see Biolinguistics) whereas most work on language evolution is concerned with explaining the origins of Saussure’s langue, language as a social system; the latter is here called “mainstream evolutionary linguistics.” Language evolution is not, however, about the origin of individual languages (English, Chinese, etc.). Sometimes “language evolution” is used to refer to diachronic language change in recent times, as studied by historical linguists, and an evolutionary perspective can indeed be fruitful in this area. But this article does not cover that kind of language evolution, except peripherally in Cultural Evolution.

The origin of language is a problem involving complex interactions between a number of different ... more The origin of language is a problem involving complex interactions between a number of different evolving systems. Language per se, regarded as a cultural/memetic entity, is one of the evolving sys ...

Behovet av en sprakstrategi for Sverige : Slutrapport med forslag fran Arbetsgruppen for sprakamnen

All you need is love… or what?Language is essentially always present in groups of modern humans. ... more All you need is love… or what?Language is essentially always present in groups of modern humans. Even in the exceptional groups that for some reason are formed without language, language will invar ...

Nuclear Physics B - Proceedings Supplements, 1997

Converging Evidence in Language and Communication Research, 2005

The Oxford Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution, 2021

This chapter aims to describe how cultures have emerged in interactions among users of the multit... more This chapter aims to describe how cultures have emerged in interactions among users of the multitude of online platforms that have become available over the past few decades. It discusses innovations regarding uses of representations to communicate identity, time, and space in social practices with technology, and how cybercultures are played out in theory and in practice. Cybercultures resemble cultures in the non-virtual world—but display significant differences regarding social rules, identity, and spatiotemporal issues. Case studies of three types of cybercultures in social media: information and knowledge building on Wikipedia, culture, and virtual world building on Second Life, and dating practices on online dating services, such as Tinder, will shed light on how cyberspace allows for developing both symbolic representations and social practices through computer-mediated communication (CMC), and how users are situated in the continuum virtual-real.

All peoples today have language and speech. Long ago, our distant pre-human ancestors did not hav... more All peoples today have language and speech. Long ago, our distant pre-human ancestors did not have language, and could not speak. Between then and now, our language faculties must have evolved. We do not know as much as we would have liked about this evolutionary process, and we do not have answers to a lot of questions about language evolution. But the mere fact that our language faculty and speech capabilities are the result of evolution can be used to constrain our theories about language and speech.

Identifying possible stages of protolanguage critically depends on the underlying nature of langu... more Identifying possible stages of protolanguage critically depends on the underlying nature of language. Theories of language differ in evolvability, and in whether they permit protolanguage stages. In this presentation, I will study the protolanguage potential and evolvability of Construction Grammar. Postulating that CG is a biologically real description of language, its evolvability through a sequence of intermediate protolanguages is investigated. a It is assumed here, as argued by e.g. Johansson (2014), that language evolved for communicative purposes.

Science, 1995

The optical properties of the ice at the geographical South Pole have been investigated at depths... more The optical properties of the ice at the geographical South Pole have been investigated at depths between 0.8 and 1 kilometers. The absorption and scattering lengths of visible light (515 nm) have been measured in situ using the laser calibration setup

Zeitschrift für Physik C Particles and Fields, 1995

Area. An overview of the apparatus is shown in Figure la. The main components are OCR Output The ... more Area. An overview of the apparatus is shown in Figure la. The main components are OCR Output The HELIOS spectrometer is situated in the H8 beam line of the CERN SPS North 2.2 Apparatus reliably and stably throughout the experiment.

Virtual Sites as Learning Spaces, 2019

Wikipedia is interesting to study from many perspectives, and its huge influence as a learning si... more Wikipedia is interesting to study from many perspectives, and its huge influence as a learning site makes it important to study. This chapter reviews the Wikipedia community and culture, and the process of article creation on Wikipedia, after which results are presented from a study of the argumentative genre that uses Wikipedia discussions as a corpus.

Most assessment of students is based on artificial assignments, done purely for assessment, only ... more Most assessment of students is based on artificial assignments, done purely for assessment, only read by assessing teachers. Much has been written on “authentic assessment” (reviewed in Frey et al. ...

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia, written entirely by volunteers in 288 different languages. I... more Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia, written entirely by volunteers in 288 different languages. It is the 6th most visited of all websites, and is both the largest and the most used encyclopedia of ...

The crowdsourced encyclopediaWikipedia is the 6th most visited of all websites. Wikipedia article... more The crowdsourced encyclopediaWikipedia is the 6th most visited of all websites. Wikipedia articles are written in a social process with heated arguments on dedicated discussion pages, one for each ...

Why do humans have language at all and how did we become language users? These are central questi... more Why do humans have language at all and how did we become language users? These are central questions in language evolution, but no general consensus exists on the answers, nor even on what methods to use to find answers. This is a complex topic that requires input from many disciplines, including, but not limited to, linguistics, evolutionary biology, palaeoanthropology, neurobiology, archaeology, cognitive science, and primatology. Nobody is an expert in all these areas, and experts in one area sometimes overlook needed input from other areas. Consensus does not even exist among linguists on what language is—opinions range from the physical speech acts themselves to language as an abstract social communication system to language as computational machinery in the individual and to language as an innate species-defining, genetically encoded capacity of humans. These different views of language imply very different evolutionary explanations. At the same time, all of these perspectives have some validity; the speech acts do occur, language use does take place in a social context, the individual language user does somehow produce and parse sentences, and human babies are born with a predisposition for language learning that ape babies lack. The disagreements are mainly a matter of emphasis, namely which aspects are regarded as of primary interest, requiring explanation. The preeminent linguist of the early 20th century, Ferdinand de Saussure, focused on the first two perspectives with his distinction between parole (speech acts) and langue (the social system). The preeminent linguist of the late 20th century, Noam Chomsky, focuses instead on the latter two, especially the computational machinery, and he regards the first two as not worthy of a linguist’s attention. But neither focus is adequate on its own; a viable theory of language evolution must be able to explain all aspects of language, notably both the evolution of the language capacity that resides in each human brain and the evolution of the human social context in which language is used. No generally accepted theory exists today. Instead of a single accepted theory, the field of language evolution is awash with a multitude of different models, scenarios, and hypotheses about how things might have happened. To make matters worse, something of a paradigm split exists in the study of language origins. The split is largely along the line between Saussure and Chomsky mentioned above. To put it simply, those researchers who use the label “biolinguistics” try to explain the origin of Chomsky’s computational machinery (see Biolinguistics) whereas most work on language evolution is concerned with explaining the origins of Saussure’s langue, language as a social system; the latter is here called “mainstream evolutionary linguistics.” Language evolution is not, however, about the origin of individual languages (English, Chinese, etc.). Sometimes “language evolution” is used to refer to diachronic language change in recent times, as studied by historical linguists, and an evolutionary perspective can indeed be fruitful in this area. But this article does not cover that kind of language evolution, except peripherally in Cultural Evolution.

The origin of language is a problem involving complex interactions between a number of different ... more The origin of language is a problem involving complex interactions between a number of different evolving systems. Language per se, regarded as a cultural/memetic entity, is one of the evolving sys ...

Behovet av en sprakstrategi for Sverige : Slutrapport med forslag fran Arbetsgruppen for sprakamnen

All you need is love… or what?Language is essentially always present in groups of modern humans. ... more All you need is love… or what?Language is essentially always present in groups of modern humans. Even in the exceptional groups that for some reason are formed without language, language will invar ...

Nuclear Physics B - Proceedings Supplements, 1997

Converging Evidence in Language and Communication Research, 2005

The Oxford Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution, 2021

This chapter aims to describe how cultures have emerged in interactions among users of the multit... more This chapter aims to describe how cultures have emerged in interactions among users of the multitude of online platforms that have become available over the past few decades. It discusses innovations regarding uses of representations to communicate identity, time, and space in social practices with technology, and how cybercultures are played out in theory and in practice. Cybercultures resemble cultures in the non-virtual world—but display significant differences regarding social rules, identity, and spatiotemporal issues. Case studies of three types of cybercultures in social media: information and knowledge building on Wikipedia, culture, and virtual world building on Second Life, and dating practices on online dating services, such as Tinder, will shed light on how cyberspace allows for developing both symbolic representations and social practices through computer-mediated communication (CMC), and how users are situated in the continuum virtual-real.