GRAMMAR CHANGE - A CASE OF DARWINIAN COGNITIVE EVOLUTION (original) (raw)
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'Intelligent design' of grammars – a result of cognitive evolution
In: Aria Adli & Marco García García & Göz Kaufmann (eds.): Variation in Language: System- and Usage-based Approaches. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter. p. 205-240., 2015
Evolution is at work whenever there is a self-reproducing system that allows for variation and an environment that sieves out (viz. selection). Darwin himself realized that his theory of evolution is not substance bound. Its modus operandi is the same for biological structures as well as for cognitive structures. It will be argued that the adaptive properties of human language grammars are the result of cognitive evolution. Grammars should be viewed as cognitive viruses, and like viruses their adaptive qualities are the consequences of the basic mechanisms of evolution.
The Biological Background of Syntax Evolution
Biological Foundations and Origin of Syntax, 2009
It is difficult to gain an understanding of language since we do not know how it is processed in the brain. Many areas of the human brain are involved in language-related activities, including syntactic operations. Aspects of the language faculty have significant heritability. There seems to have been positive selection for enhanced linguistic ability in our evolutionary past, even if most implied genes are unlikely to affect only the language faculty. Complex theory of mind, teaching, understanding of cause and effect, tool making, imitation, complex cooperation, accurate motor control, shared intentionality, and language form together a synergistic adaptive suite in the human race. Some crucial intermediate phenotypes, such as analogical inference, could have played an important role in several of these capacities. Pleiotropic effects may have accelerated, rather than retarded, evolution. In particular, it is plausible that genes changed during evolution so as to render the human brain more proficient in linguistic processing.
In any interdisciplinary endeavour that aims to link the comparative ethology of animals with linguistics, a crucial question is which theory of language is to serve as a starting point. The challenge lies in adequately specifying the grammar of human languages in an evolutionary perspective. The contribution of linguistics to such interdisciplinary research has often been inadequate for two reasons. First of all, current linguistic theories are usually based on a longstanding tradition of normative grammar and an analysis of written language—hence the relevance of grammaticality and competence in Chomsky’s models. In everyday speech language use is more variable and more context-dependent and changes-in-progress are pervasive. If we compare humans to animals, the dominant informal behaviour of humans should be the starting point for comparisons and not highly formalized behaviours regulated by institutions like schools, academies, etc. Second, linguists have a historical bias towards logical (analytic) descriptions and lack dynamic or self-organizing models. Therefore classificatory devices and hierarchical knowledge trees like phrase structures are emphasized, while the underlying forces, goals, benefits, trends, and changes are neglected. As a consequence, the intrinsic relation of language to holistic action patterns or to multichannel cognition (visual imagination, musical structure) is misrepresented in the standard models. Evolutionary biologists should turn instead to cognitive linguistics (semantics) and to pragmatic and dynamic linguistics (cf. Wildgen, 1994). In an interdisciplinary cooperation between biologists, psychologists, and linguists, one must assume that new models will be necessary that are not just versions of current types of grammars. In the following sections I will sketch the features of a model suitable for cooperative research in evolutionary biology and linguistics.
A Grammatical View of Language Evolution
akira.ruc.dk
Abstract. Language evolves gradually through its use: over time, new forms come into fashion and others become obsolete. While traditionally a grammar provides a snapshot of an individual's or a society's linguistic competence at a given point in time, our aim is to extend ...
The evolutionary dynamics of language
Bio Systems, 2018
The well-established framework of evolutionary dynamics can be applied to the fascinating open problems how human brains are able to acquire and adapt language and how languages change in a population. Schemas for handling grammatical constructions are the replicating unit. They emerge and multiply with variation in the brains of individuals and undergo selection based on their contribution to needed expressive power, communicative success and the reduction of cognitive effort. Adopting this perspective has two major benefits. (i) It makes a bridge to neurobiological models of the brain that have also adopted an evolutionary dynamics point of view, thus opening a new horizon for studying how human brains achieve the remarkably complex competence for language. And (ii) it suggests a new foundation for studying cultural language change as an evolutionary dynamics process. The paper sketches this novel perspective, provides references to empirical data and computational experiments, an...
Do principles of language processing in the brain affect the way grammar evolves over time or is language change just a matter of socio-historical contingency? While the balance of evidence has been ambiguous and controversial, we identify here a neurophysiological constraint on the processing of language that has a systematic effect on the evolution of how noun phrases are marked by case (i.e. by such contrasts as between the English base form she and the object form her). In neurophysiological experiments across diverse languages we found that during processing, participants initially interpret the first base-form noun phrase they hear (e.g. she. . .) as an agent (which would fit a continuation like . . . greeted him), even when the sentence later requires the interpretation of a patient role (as in . . . was greeted). We show that this processing principle is also operative in Hindi, a language where initial base-form noun phrases most commonly denote patients because many agents receive a special case marker ("ergative") and are often left out in discourse. This finding suggests that the principle is species-wide and independent of the structural affordances of specific languages. As such, the principle favors the development and maintenance of case-marking systems that equate base-form cases with agents rather than with patients. We confirm this evolutionary bias by statistical analyses of phylogenetic signals in over 600 languages worldwide, controlling for confounding effects from language contact. Our findings suggest that at least one core property of grammar systematically adapts in its evolution to the neurophysiological conditions of the brain, independently of socio-historical factors. This opens up new avenues for understanding how specific properties of grammar have developed in tight interaction with the biological evolution of our species.