evolang 08 (Wish I'd been there)

My fiancée and I finally managed to get back from her family, who were constantly tying to stuff us with food until we’d swell up like balloons. This also means that I have access to the internet again, so my withdrawal symptoms should be about to stop somewhere in the near future.

I handed in my term paper on the cognitive foundations of linguistic perspectivity today (and just discovered that I have a typo on the title page – ARGH) and am still working on my paper on “The Dynamics of Meaning Construal in The Maltese Falcon” (which I find is a much better title than, and which, as a Disclaimer, is partly stolen from an article by Raymond W. Gibbs).

As it seems I missed out on a lot of cool stuff (my newsreader told me that I had about 400 unread posts…) that took place while I was away.

Most notably and of special interest for this blog, the 7^th biennial evolution of language conference (evolang 2008) was held in Barcelona from March 11-15. You can read about it on Babel’s Dawn as well as on the language evolution blog, whose authors both attended the conference (for which I envy them enormously … well, maybe I’ll manage to attend in 2010… or 2012… or… hmm. damn)

On the Language Evolution blog , there are three post on the conference.

The first focuses on the talks of Duane Rumbaugh, who, with a lot of examples from Kanzi, stressed the insightful and intelligent behavioral capacities of primates, Dave Leavens, who published extensively on pointing behavior in primates according to Chris, made a case for the importance of joint attention congruent with the Shared Intentionality-Hypothesis argued for by Michael Tomasello and his colleagues, and William Hopkins, who argued and presented evidence for hemispheral lateralization in non-human primates.

In the second post, he summarizes the talk of Gary Marcus, who presented some ideas of his new book “Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of The Human Mind”, arguing that language shouldn’t be seen as an almost optimal, Pinkeresque adaptation, or a perfect Chomskian System, but as a “a clumsy or inelegant solution to a problem. Think duct-tape, rubber bands, and MacGyver.”

In his post, Chris also writes about Susan Goldin-Meadow’s talk, who’s an expert on sign languages and the knowledge system directly connected to our gestures, which sometimes competes with our linguistically uttered beliefs. Goldin-Meadow made a case for the gesture-first, speech-later evolutionary scenario.

The last post on the conferences addresses the talks of Rudolf Botha, who often addresses problems of language evolution studies from a philosophy of science-perspective, and Friedemann Pulvermüller, a neurolinguist who has developed a quite extensive model of language capacities as implemented in the brain through a complex neural system of related cell assemblies (e.g. Pulvermüller 1999).

As Carl Zimmer observed, Edmund Blair Bolles’ of Babel's Dawn was “live-blogging” like crazy about the the conference, and is still summarizing its overall results.

There’s really a smorgasboard of summaries of a lot of talks of evolang08 on Babel’s Dawn now, including posts on:

• Friedemann Pulvermüller’s talk, especially regarding its implications for Chomsky’s postion on Innateness and the evolution of language

• Gary Marcus’ talk

• Spanish anthropologist Camilo José Cela Conde’s talk, in which he apparently argued t-hat there is no way of getting to know how language really evolved and so we should, in a Wittgensteinian fashion, be silent on the subject

• Simon Kirby’s talk. Kirby is a Reader in the Evolution of Language and Cognition at the University of Edinburgh, which is about the coolest academic title there is, if you ask me. Kirby focuses on computational models of language evolution and the importance of adaptive co-evolutionary processes of cultural transmission in the evolution of language.

• Susan Goldin-Meadow’s talk

(see also this post on the gestural abilities of non-human primates and the possibility that these capacities were the foundations for human language)

• David Gil’s talk. Gil, who is an expert on grammatically ‘simple’ languages such as the Indeonesian language, which are just as fine for expressing yourself than more ‘complex’ languages, which, in Bolles’ words, implies that syntactic complexity should be seen “as the result of self-organization that is not adaptive but driven by system-internal forces”

• Juan Uriagereka’s talk. Uriagerika is a syntactician from the Chomskyan camp who holds a position diametrically opposed to that of Gil, in that he argues that ‘syntactic thought’ is one of the most important features of human cognition, and that it is unlikey to have come about in a gradual way.

• Rudolf Botha’s talk

• A talk by social anthropologists Chris Knight and Camilla Powers, who argued for treating language as a part of culture, not of biology. To be honest, although I’ve read Edmund Blair Bolles’ summary and am familiar with some of Chris Knight’s work, I didn’t really get what Knight and Powers were getting at.

• A talk by Dutch linguist Bart de Boer on the evolution of speech

• A talk by famous Creolist Derek Bickerton, who argued against the importance of recursion in syntax and for the primacy of offline, symbolic computational units for human language and cognition.

• (See also this posts on other evolang08-participants who criticized Chomsky’s notion that recursion is a fundamental property language on computational ground, and instead saw recursion as some kind of “side-effect” of communicative processes)

• A talk by Francisco D’Errico, who argued that Neanderthals were capable of language

• Bolles has another post on the nature of the nature-nurture/biology-culture debate at evolang08, http://ebbolles.typepad.com/babels_dawn/2008/03/the-eternal-dua.html

• and three post which summarize the overall results and implications of the conference: which seem to be

1. It has become clear that linguistics in a Chomskyan vein have a hard time coming to grips with the facts of language evolution
   

2. The idea that the co-evolutionary relationship of language and brain is one of the most important factors in the evolution of language has moved to the center stage

3. “Language’s controlling element is semantics, not syntax.”

phew. Given that the conference seems to be covered so well by Babel’s Dawn and Language Evolution, I wonder if there’s any need for the book anymore... (Just kidding!) Enjoy!

As there’s still so much interesting stuff left, I’ll post a bit more about cool language evolution research tomorrow.