Lecture Notes: Language and Evolution (original) (raw)
2007
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Abstract
The study of evolution and language provides a unique opportunity for carefully examining basic questions about evolution, language, and the kinds of explanations available for sources of order in physical, biological, cognitive and cultural domains.
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Language in Language Evolution Research
Biolinguistics
Many controversies in language evolution research derive from the fact that language is itself a natural language word, which makes the underlying concept fuzzy and cumbersome, and a common perception is that progress in language evolution research is hindered because researchers do not ‘talk about the same thing’. In this article, we claim that agreement on a single, top-down definition of language is not a sine qua non for good and productive research in the field of language evolution. First, we use the example of the notion FLN (‘faculty of language in the narrow sense’) to demonstrate how the specific wording of an important top-down definition of (the faculty of) language can—surprisingly—be inconsequential to actual research practice. We then review four approaches to language evolution that we estimate to be particularly influential in the last decade. We show how their breadth precludes a single common conceptualization of language but instead leads to a family resemblance ...
Language as an evolutionary system
Physics of Life Reviews, 2005
John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry argued that human language signified the eighth major transition in evolution: human language marked a new form of information transmission from one generation to another [Maynard Smith J, Szathmáry E. The major transitions in evolution. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press; 1995]. According to this view language codes cultural information and as such forms the basis for the evolution of complexity in human culture. In this article we develop the theory that language also codes information in another sense: languages code information on their own structure. As a result, languages themselves provide information that influences their own survival. To understand the consequences of this theory we discuss recent computational models of linguistic evolution. Linguistic evolution is the process by which languages themselves evolve. This article draws together this recent work on linguistic evolution and highlights the significance of this process in understanding the evolution of linguistic complexity. Our conclusions are that: (1) the process of linguistic transmission constitutes the basis for an evolutionary system, and (2), that this evolutionary system is only superficially comparable to the process of biological evolution.
The mystery of language evolution
Frontiers in psychology, 2014
Understanding the evolution of language requires evidence regarding origins and processes that led to change. In the last 40 years, there has been an explosion of research on this problem as well as a sense that considerable progress has been made. We argue instead that the richness of ideas is accompanied by a poverty of evidence, with essentially no explanation of how and why our linguistic computations and representations evolved. We show that, to date, (1) studies of nonhuman animals provide virtually no relevant parallels to human linguistic communication, and none to the underlying biological capacity; (2) the fossil and archaeological evidence does not inform our understanding of the computations and representations of our earliest ancestors, leaving details of origins and selective pressure unresolved; (3) our understanding of the genetics of language is so impoverished that there is little hope of connecting genes to linguistic processes any time soon; (4) all modeling atte...
The Ongoing Debate on Language Evolution
How and why language has evolved to become what it is today, is the subject of intense debate. Chomsky long ago proposed that human language competence should be seen as a set of biologically inherited language principles. The adaptationist view suggests that the human cognitive apparatus must be specialized to language and was selected for by evolution. The non-adaptationist view rejects that idea and instead suggests emergence via a non-adaptationist route. Recently a third view language as shaped by the brain suggests that language is easy to learn and use because language has developed in such that it adapted to the capacities of our brains (which developed before language began to emerge). In this view, language acquisition is seen as resting on general cognitive processes, and constraints thereof. An alternative view suggests major aspects of UG are neither biological nor cultural in origin; rather that they reflect universal semiotic constraints inherent in the requirements for producing symbolic reference itself. Details of the evolutionary path of language remain unknown because we cannot revisit the world in ancient times to properly examine the subject of our speculation. A serious obstacle in this debate is the lack of scientific evidence supporting a coherent definition of Universal Grammar. Clarity with regard to this debate requires an in depth understanding of facts, concepts and theories which currently belong to different scientific disciplines.
The major transitions in the evolution of language
The origins of human language, with its extraordinarily complex structure and multitude of functions, remains among the most challenging problems for evolutionary biology and the cognitive sciences. Although many will agree progress on this issue would have important consequences for linguistic theory, many remain sceptical about whether the topic is amenable to rigorous, scientific research at all. Complementing recent developments toward better empirical validation, this thesis explores how formal models from both linguistics and evolutionary biology can help to constrain the many theories and scenarios in this field. I first review a number of foundational mathematical models from three branches of evolutionary biology -- population genetics, evolutionary game theory and social evolution theory -- and discuss the relation between them. This discussion yields a list of ten requirements on evolutionary scenarios for language, and highlights the assumptions implicit in the various formalisms. I then look in more details at one specific step-by-step scenario, proposed by Ray Jackendoff, and consider the linguistic formalisms that could be used to characterise the evolutionary transitions from one stage to the next. I conclude from this review that the main challenges in evolutionary linguistics are to explain how three major linguistic innovations -- combinatorial phonology, compositional semantics and hierarchical phrase-structure -- could have spread through a population where they are initially rare. In the second part of the thesis, I critically evaluate some existing formal models of each of these major transitions and present three novel alternatives. In an abstract model of the evolution of speech sounds (viewed as trajectories through an acoustic space), I show that combinatorial phonology is a solution for robustness against noise and the only evolutionary stable strategy (ESS). In a model of the evolution of simple lexicons in a noisy environment, I show that the optimal lexicon uses a structured mapping from meanings to sounds, providing a rudimentary compositional semantics. Lexicons with this property are also ESS's. Finally, in a model of the evolution and acquisition of context-free grammars, I evaluate the conditions under which hierarchical phrase-structure will be favoured by natural selection, or will be the outcome of a process of cultural evolution. In the last chapter of the thesis, I discuss the implications of these models for the debates in linguistics on innateness and learnability, and on the nature of language universals. A mainly negative point to make is that formal learnability results cannot be used as evidence for an innate, language-specific specialisation for language. A positive point is that with the evolutionary models of language, we can begin to understand how universal properties and tendencies in natural languages can result from the intricate interaction between innate learning biases and a process of cultural evolution over many generations.
linguist reared in the then dominant structuralist tradition associated with Leonard Bloomfield, together with Richard Ascher, an anthropological palaeontologist, published an an article in Current Anthropology entitled "The human revolution" (Hockett and Ascher 1964). In this article the authors made a bold attempt to bring together what was then known about hominid palaeontology, new understandings of the environmental changes in Africa, and speculations about the important consequences of bipedalism, to suggest what may have been involved in the evolutionary emergence of humans. However, almost for the first time within the framework of discussions of this sort, they presented the steps and stages involved in the evolution of language. As they pointed out, in previous discussions of human evolution from a palaeontological perspective, language was generally overlooked or dealt with purely in terms of evidence for the presence or absence of articulate speech. In this article, the authors make use of Hockett's notion that human language is a complex of "design features", some of which are found to be in common with other animal communication systems (see Hockett 1960). By setting out these features it was possible to specify more precisely what it was that had to evolve to bring into being a system of communication with all the features of human language. On this approach, language did not evolve as a single package, but in a more piecemeal fashion, each separable feature having its own evolutionary history. Hockett and Ascher supposed that an early step would have been for a primate call system-their proto-hominid model was based on what was then known of gibbon calls, which had been described with some thoroughness by C. R. Carpenter (1940)-to be transformed from a closed system to an open system through 'blending', a process by which calls of different meanings could be joined together to make calls with more complex meanings. It was then further transformed by the discovery of the possibility of what Hockett referred to as "duality of patterning", according to which meaningful units within the system are created through combinations and re-combinations of sound units that have no meaning in themselves but which function to keep meaningful units distinct from one another. Hockett and Ascher's article, in accordance with Current Anthropology practice, was accompanied by commentaries by a number of other scholars. In this way, this discussion of language origins was brought to the attention of a wider audience of scholars in disciplines such as palaeoanthropology, archaeology, anthropology, and even linguistics. The article had the effect, thus, of beginning the process of re-legitimating the topic of language origins. Shortly after this, and from another quarter, came the publication of Eric Lenneberg's Biological Foundations of Language (1967). In this book Lenneberg set out to show, in great detail, the biological features of humans that seemed to be special adaptations for speech and language, arguing that humans are biologically specialised as speaking creatures. This book contained an appendix by Noam Chomsky in which the idea that humans
Ritt, Nikolaus. 1995. Language change as evolution: looking for linguistic genes. Vienna English Working Papers 4. 43-56., 1995
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2003
The leading scholars in the rapidly growing field of language evolution give readable accounts of their theories on the origins of language and reflect on the most important current issues and debates. As well as providing a guide to their own published research in this area they highlight what they see as the most relevant research of others. The authors come from a wide range of disciplines involved in language evolution including linguistics, cognitive science, computational science, primatology, and archaeology.
Inference. International Review of Science, 2020
Sticking with the traditional use of the terms, I argue here that the term “language evolution” should be used to refer to the plausibly biological processes that formed the modern human faculty of language, and that the term “language change” should be reserved to refer to processes that alter the structure of languages over historical time, as in, for example, the shift from Latin to Spanish.
The Origins of Language: An Introduction to Evolutionary Linguistics (book review)
Verbum, 2024
The scientific interest in the evolutionary origins of language has grown recently among both researchers from a wide array of fields and in the general reading public. Despite the widely recognized problem of access to evidence, the theoretical importance of the question itself prevents us from setting it aside. Every comprehensive theory of language, not to mention the related fields in the cognitive sciences, faces the question. If the findings from ongoing empirical work cannot at some point consider plausible hypotheses about evolutionary origins that are compatible in some way with the conceptual framework of this work then there is the possibility of a wider inconsistency. Thus, even though the evidence appears as remote, the research problem is irresistible.
Like any other animal species, humans have developed, over thousands of years, varied waysof communication, such as mural paintings and stone carvings. However, there is overall agreementthat language is the sole property of the human race as no similar communication system of suchcomplexity has been observed in the animal kingdom. Another feature that also fascinatedresearchers is how language has evolved with time. The earliest vocal human language can beroughly traced back as far as 20.000 years ago, although anthropologists agree that pin!pointing theexact date is not "uite relevant to our understanding of language and the significant changes whichoccurred in the course of recorded history. And whether they be spontaneously implementedchanges or, in a modern time frame, academic reforms, the impact of these modification onmainstream culture is of greater proportions than one might think.
The evolution of speech and language
The paper deals with the topic of the evolution of speech and language and aims to, through a multidisciplinary approach and based on different material and available data and results, answer the question of the appearance of modern language and speech. Especially interesting is the question of whether modern language appeared through the process of saltation or in combination with some other elements of “modernity” (the so called “Human revolution model” or “Cognitive revolution model”) or if it is a result of a longer evolutionary development in which certain conditions and elements necessary for the development of speech and language appeared before others did. The authors attempted to answer these questions through the results of comparative research done on our closest evolutionary cousins, apes, through comparative anatomy, fossil material and archaeological material sensu stricto, that is, through remains of material culture. Based on available material, we conclude that modern language is a result of a long evolutionary development and that different elements appeared at different times during the evolutionary history of the tribe hominini.
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 2000
The contributors largely agree that there was continuity between pre-language and the emergence of language. Where to find channels of continuity becomes the problem. They eschew looking to some one thing but, rather, see language resulting from a convergence of physical and cognitive developments in the context of expanding social life. They note that monkeys and apes are cognitively capable of learning social relationships and attributing them to one another and learning instrumental relationships that link goals with actions that use instruments. This leads to "a key hypothesis: the internal representation of language meaning in the brain derives from the primate representation of social situations" (Worden, p. 153). An obvious question concerns the emergence of phonologically discrete speech sounds by which, in their various combinations, humans create vocabularies. It is difficult to see this capacity as being selected for to this end in the first place. Nor can one see articulated human speech as simply an elaboration of primate calls. Rather, it must have resulted from changes in the vocal tract that were adaptations to erect posture and which incidentally resulted in articulatory capabilities. Once there, these capabilities began to be exploited to make a variety of different sound sequences that could be used to communicate wants and feeling states in social interaction. Naming things as an adjunct to gesturing would naturally accompany
What are the levels and mechanisms/processes of language evolution
k e y w o r d s Origin and evolution of language Units and levels of evolution Evolutionary mechanisms Processes Hierarchies Extended Synthesis Applied Evolutionary Epistemology Philosophy of biology a b s t r a c t Modern evolutionary biology is currently characterized by epistemological divergence because, beyond organisms and genes, scholars nowadays investigate a plurality of units of evolution, they recognize multilevel selection, and especially from within the Extended Synthesis, scholars have identified a plurality of evolutionary mechanisms that besides natural selection can explain how the evolution of anatomical form and functional behavior occur. Evolutionary linguists have also implicated a multitude of units, levels and mechanisms involved in (aspects of) language evolution, which has also brought forth epistemological divergence on how language possibly evolved. Here, we examine how a general evolutionary methodology can become abstracted from how biologists study evolution, and how this methodology can become implemented into the field of Evolutionary Linguistics. Applied Evolutionary Epistemology (AEE) involves a systematic search and analysis of the units (that what evolves), levels (loci where evolution takes place), and mechanisms (means whereby evolution occurs) of language evolution, allocating them into ontological hierarchies, and distinguishing them from other kinds of evolution. In this paper in particular, we give an in-depth analysis of how AEE enables an identification, examination, and evaluation of levels and mechanisms of language evolution, and we hone in on how hierarchies and mechanisms of language (evolution) can and have been defined differentially. For an in-depth analysis of units of language evolution, we refer the reader to Gontier (2017) for which this paper functions as a follow-up. Thus, rather than present a specific theory of how language evolved, we present a methodology that enables us to unite existing research programs as well as to develop theories on the subject at hand.