4th Birthday!

Today marks the 4th Birthday of this Blog, and although I haven't managed to post anything in quite a while, I thought I'd use this happy occasion to point out some interesting links:

First, James Hurford's sequel to his 2007 "The Origins of Meaning" has finally been published:

With, 808 pages "The Origins of Grammar"is twice as long as his 2007 volume and consists of three parts. To quote from the book description:

"The book is divided into three parts. In the first the author surveys the syntactic structures evident in the communicative behaviour of animals, such as birds and whales, and discusses how vocabularies of learned symbols could have evolved and the effects this had on human thought. In the second he considers how far the evolution of grammar depended on biological or cultural factors. In the third and final part he describes the probable route by which the human language faculty and languages evolved from simple beginnings to their present complex state."

An almost 100-page-long sample chapter, dealing with the question whether non-human animals have syntax, can be found here. In this chapter, Hurford analyses the structure of whale song, bird song, and primate calls, and comes to the conclusion that:

"No non-human has any semantically compositional syntax, where the form of the syntactic combination determines how the meanings of the parts combine to make the meaning of the whole."

Second, in the first part of a 5-part documentary series on language, Stephen Fry explores the evolution of language. Although there are some minor quibbles (e.g. Stephen Fry stating that language arose from primates grunts about 50,000 years ago, and him speculating that "it really is" language that makes us different from other primates without anyone to back him up), it's a thoroughly enjoyable documentary featuring interviews with people like Steven Pinker, and Michael Tomasello and Wolfgang Enard (of FOXP2-fame) at the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

Hat tip: */ˈdɪːkæf/

Update: Sean of Replicated Typo points to a pretty detailed (and pretty harsh) critique over at badlinguistics

John Hawks: How language eats brains, and why it matters to language evolution.

John Hawks has posted a fascinating discussion of a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (here) by Bedny et al. that shows that in congenitally blind adults, "brain regions that are thought to have evolved for vision can take on language processing as a result of early experience." (to quote from the abstract) (see also John Lehrer's discussion, here)

These results show the brain's immense plasticity, especially in early development. Crucially, the fact that "brain regions that did not evolve for language can nevertheless participate in language processing" (Bedny et al.) poses the questions whether language-specific processing functions need to have evolved at all.

To quote from John Hawk's discussion at lenght:

"The blind subjects tell us that the ground for language processing is almost as fertile elsewhere in the cortex. Many brain areas have the genetic equipment to recruit and organize neurons into useful circuits for language processing. Language development is developmentally robust because it can rely on a rich language environment, not because of genetic standardization. The basic problems of language evolution must be explained by showing how robust language communities emerged. I don't preclude genetics, far from it -- weaker language environments may have become stronger because of evolutionary change. But that evolution must have been substantially domain-general, because language processing is not specifically canalized by genetics.

I like this scenario because it means we shouldn't be looking for lots of language-specific genetic changes in the last few hundred thousand years. The Neandertal genome suggests that there may not have been any at all"

To me, these results also seem compatible with arguments made by Morten Christiansen, Nick Chater, and others, who argue that language was shaped by the human brain and its learning and processing mechanisms, instead of there being a language-specific biological endowment. On this view, then "language evolution is a process of cultural change, in which linguistic structures are shaped through repeated cycles of learning and use by domain-general mechanisms" (Chater & Christiansen 2010).

UPDATE [21/03/11]: John Hawks has written another highly interesting post that is also relevant to this topic and the question of the evolution of language and cognition more generally: The development of sharing and cooperation from infancy to school-age and (here).

Some Links

The Exploratorium (in San Francisco) and the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology have a nice site up called "Exploratiorium Evidence: How Do We Know What We Know?"

"Science is an active process of observation and investigation. Evidence: How Do We Know What We Know? examines that process, revealing the ways in which ideas and information become knowledge and understanding.
[...]
In this case study in human origins, we explore how scientific evidence is being used to shape our current understanding of ourselves: What makes us human—and how did we get this way?"

Hat-tip: Afarensis

Sandy G of The Mouse Trap also has a nice post up called "What is it like to be a zombie?"

Also, Ed Yong of Not Exactly Rocket Science reports on research which found that Chimps use Swiss army toolkit to rob beehives
I find the possible implications of the fact that chimpanzees use several multi-functional tools for honey-extraction quite fascinating.
As I've written before (see also this post), linguists like Dieter Wunderlich argue that the ability to change an existing structure and then further work on the qualitatively changed output in a hierarchical, recursive, and compositional manner - as for example exemplified by crafting hand axes - is a precursor to or even the same process athis the compositionality found in language. If chimpanzees are able ts io work with and modify tooln a compositional manner this would provide another insight into the possible cognitive platform from which language evolved.

Back to Blogging Soon

Today I handed in my last essay for this term and I really hope I'll be able to post more regularly now.

Meanhwile, both Neurophilosophy and Babel's Dawn have interesting posts up regarding work done by Ofer Tchernichovski, Olga Feher, and her colleagues regarding the tendency of birdsong to converge on the on the standard wildtype-model after a few generations when the first generation was isolate and had no model output they could adopt. (although I find it a bit misleading if birdsong is called language as is done over at the otherwise excellent blog Neurophilosopy)

This happened by small variations the birds made to their input over a couple of generations. These variations accumulated an in the end yielded the wild-type.

In the words of the authors:

"Thus, species-typical song culture can appear de novo. Our study has parallels with language change and evolution. In analogy to models in quantitative genetics, we model song culture as a multigenerational phenotype partly encoded genetically in an isolate founding population, influenced by environmental variables and taking multiple generations to emerge." (Feher et al. 2009).

The question now is inhowfar we can draw a parallel to how human language may be genetically encoded. The topic has been covered previously (here) and although there are also opposing views, (see, for example, Derek Bickerton here), it seems that a consensus is about to emerge that sees language acquisition as the interplay between social learning, innate biases, and more general cognitive capacities. (see, e.g. here and here)

Social Cognition and Linguistic Innateness I

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Laughing Man of Complex Adaptive Systems has asked an interesting question regarding my post announcing that Michael Tomasello had published a new book on “The Origins of Human Communication:”

“A point I don't get: How does this argument (Gricean maxims of cooperation evolved from general cooperative human structure) criticise Chomsky's innateness theory?”

He refers to the following passage from the book description:

“Challenging the Chomskian view that linguistic knowledge is innate, Tomasello proposes instead that the most fundamental aspects of uniquely human communication are biological adaptations for cooperative social interaction in general and that the purely linguistic dimensions of human communication are cultural conventions and constructions created by and passed along within particular cultural groups”

As Laughing Man rightly points out, the evolutionary priority of cooperative, social-communicative capacities to our capacity for linguistic communication is in principle compatible with an innatist position regarding language acquisition. A generativist more interested in interdisciplinary matters than Chomsky, as for example, Ray Jackendoff, would be sure to agree with the importance of social interaction for language acquisition.

However, Tomasello’s argument goes further than that. He claims that general skills of social interaction such as human intention-reading skills, along with primate pattern finding skills, are all what is needed for a child to be able to learn a language when placed in the right environment. I haven’t looked at Tomasello’s newest work, but in his previous books “The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition” (1999), and “Constructing A Language” (2003), he makes a strong case why we needn’t postulate a language-specific, innate “Universal Grammar” specifying the architecture and input conditions of a domain-specific language system.

In Contrast, here’s Ray Jackendoff’s opinion on the relationship between social cognition and an inbuilt specialized linguistic toolkit:

“Language acquisition of course rests on social skills such as theory of mind (rudimentary in chimpanzees) and understanding pointing (not found in chimpanzees), as well as on more general perceptual machinery such as attention. These provide scaffolding for language acquisition but do not themselves provide the material out of which knowledge of language is built. “

Language also relies on many other domain-general cognitive capacities, but

“what is special about language is the collection of mental structures it employs – phonology and syntax – and the interfaces between them and conceptual structure. The processing and acquisition of these structures may be accomplished by brain-general mechanisms of long-term memory, integration in working memory, learning (including statistically-based learning), and attention, and may rely as well on understanding of social interaction and theory of mind. But unless the specific unique building blocks for phonology, syntax, and their connection to concepts are present, language and language acquisition are not possible. It is these building blocks that constitute the narrow language faculty.” (Jackendoff 2007: 388f.)

References:

Jackendoff, Ray (2007): Linguistics in Cognitive Science: The State of the Art, The Linguistic Review 24, 347-401.

Tomasello, Michael (1999): The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: Harvard University Press.

Tomasello, Michael (2003): Constructing A Language. A Usage-Based Approach. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: Harvard University Press.

Thomas Hobbes on the Evolution of Language

During my research for my term paper on Friedrich Nietzsche’s theory of the evolution of language and consciousness I came across a very interesting German book on the debate about the origin of language in the 18^th century by Cordula Neis (2003), who has also written an article on the topic in the 14 Volume Elsevier Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics (Neis 2006). In 1769 the Berlin Academy of Science issued a prize contest regarding the origin of language:

"After a long internal discussion, the Academy invited scholars from across Europe to submit their essays on the origin of language. As language was considered an essential component of the natural constitution of man, it was required to reveal how man might have invented it and whether he might have been able to create it on his own." (Neis 2006: 100)

[...]

"By announcing the prize topic as being the origin of language in 1769, the Berlin Academy endeavored to find a persuasive solution that defended the possibility of human invention. Scholars considered the question as highly important, 31 essays were submitted to the Academy, an unusually high number of entries." (Neis 2006: 101)

The German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder won the contest, and as a result, was the only contributor whose name was made public so that most of the authors of the manuscripts are still unknown. Of the 31 anonymous contributions, only 24 still exist, but all reviews of the judges are still there. Still, posthumous identification is made extremely hard by the fact that contributions were sent in in three different languages (German, French, and Latin. Two contributions were even written in what Neis calls “Fantasy-French:” Due to the fact that French was maybe the most prestigious language at that time, the authors apparently felt obliged to sent in papers in French even if they couldn’t really speak the language…). Apart from that, sloppy 18^th century handwriting is extremely hard to read (for me: absolutely impossible to read).:

Nevertheless, there are a lot of topics common to all the manuscripts, for example explicit or implicit references to the influential philosophers Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) (to whom I’ll maybe come back in a later post) and Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). Hobbes is especially well known for his view of man as being “homo homini lupus” (man is the wolf of man) and his book “Leviathan” in which he argues that only if everybody adheres to a social contract and submits most of his freedom to the state can the natural “bellum omnium contra omnes” (the war of all against all) be stopped. Anyway, even though Hobbes was a man of his time and thus was a creationist who believed that “the first author of speech was God himself, that instructed Adam how to name such creatures as He presented to his sight,” some of his thoughts on the topic of language evolution/origin/function are really interesting. Hobbes speculates that Adam couldn’t possibly have invented all words, especially as all speech was confounded after the Tower of Babel incident.

For Hobbes, language is adaptive in that it is shaped by what speakers and hearers need to communicate about:

“And being hereby forced to disperse themselves into several parts of the world, it must needs be that the diversity of tongues that now is, proceeded by degrees from them in such manner as need, the mother of all inventions, taught them, and in tract of time grew everywhere more copious. “

But what I find most interesting is Hobbes’ view of the function of language:

“The general use of speech is to transfer our mental discourse into verbal, or the train of our thoughts into a train of words, and that for two commodities; whereof one is the registering of the consequences of our thoughts, which being apt to slip out of our memory and put us to a new labour, may again be recalled by such words as they were marked by. So that the first use of names is to serve for marks or notes of remembrance. Another is when many use the same words to signify, by their connexion and order one to another, what they conceive or think of each matter; and also what they desire, fear, or have any other passion for. And for this use they are called signs”

References:
Neis, Cordula (2003) Anthropologie im Sprachdenken des 18. Jahrhunderts ‑ Die Berliner Preisfrage nach dem Ursprung der Sprache (1771). New York: de Gruyter.

Neis, Cordula (2006): Origin of Language Debate. in: Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (ELL). Ed. By Keith Brown (Editor-in-Chief). Second edition. Oxford. Elsevier.

Perspective, Language Evolution & Genes

As I wrote in my last post, according to Edmund Blair Bolles, evolang08 can be seen as an all-out attack on the Chomskian paradigm. Whereas Bolles’ thinks that the downfall of the Chomskian paradigm is near, I am more skeptical. Of course, many of the talks at evolang08 seem to have dealt severe blows to general conceptions of Chomskyan linguistics, but given that the field of language evolution studies was opposed to many of Chomsky’s ideas from the start, this seems a natural development.

So will the Chomskyan Paradigm simply go extinct in the sense of Kuhn’s (1962) “Structure of Scientific Revolutions”? Clearly in this field people like Juan Uriagereka are in the minority, and this speaks for the diminishing influence of some Chomskian ideas, especially ‘syntactocentrism’, i.e. the idea that "that it is 'as if syntax carved the path interpretation must blindly follow.'" (Chomsky 2007: 24) in general, but on the whole I think that the Chomskyan research paradigm is alive and well, speaking in terms of ‘believers’, as Derek Bickerton (2008) puts it, in the generative enterprise.

EBB himself writes that: “It is only the odd ones among them who are interested enough in the evolution of language to even think of attending such a conference, but the absence of all the leaders of the effort to understand the evolution of generative grammar—Steven Pinker, Marc Hauser, Tecumseh Fitch, Ray Jackendoff, and Paul Bloom — cannot be entirely a coincidence.”

An example of biologically informed research in linguistics – Biolinguistics – in the Chomskyan tradition is the open access journal with the same title which was inaugurated in 2007 and whose second issue appeared this week. The second issue features two very cool papers.

The first, by Boban Arsenijević (2008), of whom I must admit I’d never heard before, is about how we got “From Spatial Cognition to Language.” Arsenijević argues that cognitive mechanisms for spatial computation switched from domain-specific to a domain-general non-spatial use, enabling the production of generative conceptual structures, i.e. complex kinds of displaced concepts which could be located in some kind of ‘cognitive map’ which weren’t inextricably bound to a spatial situation anymore, but instead became a ‘decoupled representation’ (Sterelny 2003).

This cool proposal is also consistent with Brian MacWhinney’s “Perspective Hypothesis”, which argues that: Perspective taking is an essential property of human communication and higher-level cognition, and that

"1. Perspective taking operates online using images created in five systems: direct experience, space/time deixis, plans, social roles, and mental acts.

2. Language uses perspective taking to bind together these five imagery subsystems.

3. Grammar emerges from conversation as a method for supporting accurate tracking and switching of perspective.

4. By tracing perspective shifts in language, children are able to learn the cognitive pathways and mental models sanctioned by their culture.“ (Macwhinney 2005: 198)

I would argue that we can visualize this new representational perspectival format with Bühler’s (1934) ‘coordinate system of subjective orientation’, i.e. as a systemic space (Köller 2004) which through communication is made available to both interlocutors, becomes a shared, ‘mutually manifest’ (Eilan 2005) representation.

Similarly, in a paper for evolang 08, Benôit Dubreuil argues that the key shift to modern human behavior, such as language and other shared symbolic artifacts, was a “domain-general cognitive change”, namely “the capacity to fully represent the point of view of other, what psychologists call ‘level-2 perspective-taking’” (see, e.g., Flavell 1988).

There is another really cool paper in this issue of Biolinguistics called “Languages and Genes: Reflections on Biolinguistics and the Nature–Nurture Question” by D. Robert Ladd, Dan Dediu & Anna R. Kinsella of Edinburgh University. Ladd & Dediu published a really cool paper in the Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences in 2007 (Dediu & Ladd 2007), in which they described their two genes related to brain growth and development, ASPM and Microcephalin, which show signs of relatively recent natural selection and exist in a more recent (ASPM -D; about 5,800 years old, and MCPH-D, about 37,000 years old) and an older form (ASPM, MCPH).
It turns out that the geographical distribution of these genes is highly correlated with whether people speak tonal languages (like Chinese) or non-tonal languages (like English). In general, populations speaking tonal languages possess the older forms, and populations speaking non-tonal languages have the D (for derived)-versions of the genes, though there of course are exceptions and cases of contamination. In their present paper Ladd et al. (2008) discuss the importance of genetic findings for the linguistic theory. They clarify that they

“are not proposing any sort of deterministic relation between genes and language, only a very indirect and probabilistic one; we certainly are not suggesting that there are 'genes for Chinese'. But we believe that the broad outlines of an explanation based on the interaction of bias and cultural transmission are very plausible indeed“ (Ladd et al. 2008: 118).

They also argue against the notion that the linguistic effects of ASPM-D and MCPH-D were the driving forces of the genes’ natural selection, but rather see them as selectively neutral side-effects, as there are no obvious differences between tonal and non-tonal languages in regards to biological fitness, as both are equally suited to support and scaffold all sorts of varieties of complex human behaviors. (Ladd et al. 2008: 120)
To take an example, in the time of early skyscraper-building in America, a lot of the construction workers were Mohawks, because they were free from giddiness. And although the modern urban environment was completely different from that of their own homes, as were the affordances of steel construction work, they constantly used their native language to communicate about their work, had absolutely no problem to adapt their linguistic output to this new world, and even taught some of their co-workers their language to facilitate communication.

In all, Ladd et al. (2008) propose to move beyond dualistic nature or nature-view and take seriously the fact that

"there is a fundamentally complex and irreducible interaction between one’s genes and one’s language and culture — between nature and nurture” (Ladd et al. 2008: 120).

As an example they cite the recent finding that breastfeeding can indeed have positive effects on a baby’s IQ, but only if she possesses a certain variant of the FADS2 gene (Caspi et al. 2007, Ladd et al. 2008: 120f.).

In their view this also raises problems with static generativist views of language capacities as a perfect system, because from an evolutionary point of view, it makes much more sense to treat language competency as a complex dynamic system, which instead is “diverse and dynamic” and constantly changing on the timeline of both cultural transmission as well as individual development (Ladd et al. 2008: 121).

Ladd et al. see their results on the genetic influences “on typological linguistic features” as being in favor of the claim that there are innate linguistic ‘biases’, “deep cognitive, and ultimately genetic, causes” (Ladd et al. 2008: 121) of some properties of language, thus supporting the Chomskyan research paradigm in some ways. However, they also remark that

“Linguistic theorizing in general, and biolinguistics in particular, must take into account and integrate the idea that human linguistic capacities are variable and probably still evolving" (Ladd et al. 2008: 121).

Moreover, they are also opposed to Chomsky’s stance on the evolution of language, which he renewed in the first issue of Biolinguistics (Chomsky 2007), in which he wrote that:

"The core principle of language, unbounded Merge, must have arisen from some rewiring of the brain, presumably the effect of some small mutation” (Chomsky 2007: 22).

And that this property yielded

“a language of thought, later externalized and used in many ways” (Chomsky 2007: 24).

In contrast, Ladd et al. hold that

“language has evolved through the standard mechanisms of evolutionary biology, in a gradual manner, and that it continues to do so” (Ladd et al. 2008: 122).

In my next post I’ll come back to Chomsky’s position on these issues and some neuroscientific evidence that argues against it.

References:

Arsenijević, Boban (2008): From Spatial Cognition to Language Biolinguistics 2.1, 3–23.

Bickerton, Derek (2008): Bastard Tongues: A Trailblazing Linguist Finds Clues to Our Common Humanity in the World's Lowliest Languages. New York: Hill and Wang

Bühler, Karl (1934): Sprachtheorie: Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache. Stuttgart: Fischer.

Caspi, Avshalom, Benjamin Williams, Julia Kim–Cohen, Ian W. Craig, Barry J. Milne, Richie Poulton, Leonard C. Schalkwyk, Alan Taylor, Helen Werts & Terrie E. Moffitt. (2007) Moderation of breastfeeding effects on the IQ by genetic variation in fatty acid metabolism. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 104, 18860-18865.

Chomsky, Noam (2007): Of Minds and Language. In: Biolinguistics 1, 9-27.

Dediu, Dan & D. Robert Ladd. (2007) Linguistic tone is related to the population frequency of the adaptive haplogroups of two brain size genes, ASPM and Microcephalin. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 104, 10944-10949.

Eilan, Naomi (2005): Joint Attention, Communication, and Mind. In: Naomi Eilan, Christoph Hoerl, Teresa McCormack und Johannes Roessler (Eds.): Joint Attention: Communicationd and Other Minds. Oxford: Clarendon Press (Issues in Philosophy and Psychology), 1-33.

Flavell, John H. (1988): The Development of Children’s Knowledge about the Mind: From Cognitive Connections to Mental Representations. In: Janet W. Astington, Paul L. Harris und David R. Olson (Eds..): Developing Theories of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 141-172.

Kuhn, Thomas S. (1962): The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ladd, D.Robert, Dan Dediu & Anna R. Kinsella (2008): Languages and Genes: Reflections on Biolinguistics and the Nature–Nurture Question. In: Biolinguistics 2.1, 114–126

MacWhinney, Brian (2005): The Emergence of Grammar from Perspective. In: Diane Pecher und Rolf A. Zwaan (Eds.), The Grounding of Cognition: The Role of Perception and Action in Memory, Language, and Thinking. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 199-223.

Sterelny, Kim (2003): Thought in a Hostile World: The Evolution of Human Cognition. Malden: Blackwell.

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.

Language Evolution V: Christiansen & Kirby (2003)

As I’m going home over the vacation and thus will only have relatively infrequent access to the internet, I’ll write some kind of preliminary presentation of my discussion of language evolution by presenting the contributions found in Kirby and Christiansen’s (2003) anthology “Language Evolution.” Kirby and Christansen tried to get together the “big names” in the study of language evolution, and had them write some kind of an introduction to their take on the key issues on the topic. I will present the contributions when I find the time, probably infrequently.

The book includes 17 contributions, with the first chapter being some kind of general introduction by the editors. I will briefly discuss each contribution, trying to give a short overview on the main approaches to the topic.

The contributors are (in order of appearance) :

• Steven Pinker, who still stands by his incremental, adaptationist view of language evolution, which he first proposed in Pinker & Bloom (1990), though by now he places this view with the broader context of evolutionary psychology.

• James Hurford, who is now prof.emeritus at the University of Edinburgh and worked at the Language Evolution and Computation there. Hurford’s main focus is a comprehensive framework for identifying the parts of the “language mosaic” which enables fruitful research into the various ‘pre-adaptations’ for language

• Frederick J. Newmeyer, who is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington, and stresses the necessity that linguists engage themselves into the study of language evolution and especially in interdisciplinary discussion, if they really want the field to progress.

• Derek Bickerton, an Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the University of Hawai, who, originially specialized in creoles, by now definitely is one of the most prominent figures in the field. He is especially famous for his introduction of the term ‘proto-language’ into the study of language origins.

• Terrence W. Deacon, who is a , and had a major impact on the field with his 1996 book “The Symbolic Species”. In it he focussed on our ability for counterintuitive, hierarchically organized ‘symbolic reference’ and the role of the prefrontal cortex in these kinds of computations.

• Iain Davidson, an archaeologist who, mostly together with the psychologist William Noble, has published extensively on the archaeological evidence for symbolic evolution, and insists on the close relation of language and thought.

• Marc D. Hauser and W. Tecumseh Fitch, who we already know from their paper they published with Noam Chomsky in 2002. Both are champions of the comparative approach to language evolution and human cognition, with Fitch specializing in animal vocal communication and the evolution of the human vocal tract, and Hauser integrating research from primatology, infant cognitive development, and cognitive neuroscience.

• Michael A. Arbib, a professor involved in the discovery of mirror neurons. These neurons, fire both when an action is performed or perceived and are located in the monkey F5 premotor cortex, a homologue to Broca’s Area, which led Arbib and others to investigate their role in the evolution of language and social cognition.

• Michael C. Corballis, who is a professor of psychology at the University of Auckland, and argues that gestural communication preceded spoken language, drawing on evidence from sign languages, cerebral asymmetry, and the fact that primates are much better at manual than at vocal control.

• Robin I. M. Dunbar, who is professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Liverpool, and does research on the relation of cortex size and number of group members, and argues for the importance (both presently and evolutionary) of language as a mechanism of group cohesion and social bonding.

• The speech scientists Michael Studdert-Kennedy and Lous Goldstein, who investigate the articulatory aspects of language and speculate on the evolutionary pathway of phonetic and phonology capacity, stressing the importance of biophysical and neurological explanations.

• Philip Lieberman, who could be described as the enfant terrible of language evolutionary studies, and focuses on the ‘messy’ aspects, namely their direct neural implementation. Lieberman argues for a continuous view of human language evolution and sees motor control as a precursor to syntax, and as a determiner of the structure of language in general.

• Simon Kirby, who is I think the only lecturer in the evolution of language in the whole world, and Morten H. Christiansen, , who use computational methods and models for genetic and cultural transmission to gain insight into the evolutionary dynamics of language.

• Ted Briscoe, who also uses computer models but arrives at conclusions somewhat different from that of Kirby and Christiansen, because he poses the existence of some innate genetically transmitted domain-specific structure which aids language learning, something Kirby and Chrisitansen remain agnostic and critical about.

• Finally, Natalia L. Komarova and Martin A. Nowak, who employ mathematical models and evolutionary game theory to describe language evolution, and give a very clear account for the theoretical underpinnings of language learning and follow Chomsky in posing the necessity of innate expectation for language.

Of course, since then a lot of interesting things happened, and some approaches defintiely have gained importance. The most influential elaborations were I think in the Area of Social Cognition, as illustrated by Tomasello et al.'s (2005) paper, and, for example, this excellent new blog post by Edmund Blair Bolles. The other area were much progress was made was theoretical inquiry into the dynamics of cultural evolution, and especially its (mathematical) application to historical language evolution.

So in my next post I’ll write about Pinker’s approach, or rather about the extensions and modifications of his original framework in (Pinker & Bloom 1990)

Language Evolution IV: HCF + PJ + FHC + JP =/= ♥

As could be expected, the framework established by HCF led to much criticism from proponents of what HCF called hypothesis 2. Thus, in 2005, Pinker and Jackendoff (PJ) responded to HCF by asking:

“The faculty of language: what’s special about it?”

The controversy led to further discussion in the same year when Fitch, Hauser and Chomsky (FHC) defended their viewpoint in

“The evolution of the language faculty: Clarifications and implications”

and Jackendoff and Pinker renewed their disagreement debating

“The nature of the language faculty and its implications for the evolution of language“.

PJ’s first critique mainly focuses on the “recursion-only claim” of HCF, because they feel that there is more that is special to language. Furthermore, they question that recursion evolved as an exaptation (Pinker/Jackendoff 2005: 205). They especially defend the “Speech is Special” (SiS) hypothesis posed by Alvin Liberman and others, which was rejected by HFC (Pinker/Jackendoff 2005: 206), because it seems that the speech perception system and vocal production in humans have been specially adapted for language (Pinker/Jackendoff 2005: 206-209), and not for vocal imitation or size exaggeration as HCF suggested (Pinker/Jackendoff 2005: 209f.). They also assess that

"words, as shared, organized linkages of phonological, conceptual, and grammatical structures, are a distinctive language-specific part of human knowledge” (Pinker/Jackendoff 2005: 215).

They also question the usefulness of the FLB/FLN distinction in general and criticize HCF/FHC’s blurring of the difference between homology and analogy. (Jackendoff/Pinker 2005: 214-216) Further, they cite genetic evidence as an argument against the recursion-only claim, namely that the FOXP2-gene, though present for example in mice, chimpanzees, and humans has been positively selected in the human lineage, and is critical for

"articulation, production, comprehension, and judgments in a variety of domains of grammar, together with difficulties in producing sequences of orofacial movements”

and not only for recursion (Pinker/Jackendoff 2005: 218).
Finally, they criticize Chomsky’s Minimalist Program (MP) as a rationale of HCF’s research program, which they find problematic because of the massive counterevidence against it. In their opinion, the adaptationist view of language seems much more plausible (Pinker/Jackendoff 2005: 231).

In their reply, FHC emphasize their independence of the MP (Fitch/Hauser/Chomsky 2005: 183), and stress that

"most of the data PJ discuss concern mechanisms that are part of FLB by definition, because related mechanisms exist in other species and/or other cognitive domains”

(Fitch/Hauser/Chomsky 2005: 204), which in their view clearly is an adaptation shaped by natural selection (Fitch/Hauser/Chomsky 2005: 189). They further argue that, though welcoming demonstrations

"that other mechanisms should be added to FLN” (Fitch/Hauser/Chomsky 2005: 204),

SiS would not present a testable, strong hypothesis and thus could be accepted as given (Fitch/Hauser/Chomsky 2005: 219).
Citing the phoneme discrimination abilities by macaques and other evidence as arguments against SiS (Fitch/Hauser/ Chomsky 2005: 195), they conclude that their

“hypothesis 3 is not only plausible, but that no data refuting it currently exist” (Fitch/Hauser/Chomsky 2005: 205).

FHC also introduce the current utility/functional origins dichotomy, on which I elaborated in chapter 3, and argue that

“from an empirical perspective, there are not and probably never will be data capable of discriminating among the many plausible speculations that have been offered about the original function(s) of language.”

Thus, Pinker and Jackendoff’s framing of questions about language evolution would be of little scientific value (Fitch/Hauser/Chomsky 2005: 185f.) JP contradict this statement. In their view, current adaptation, „what the trait was selected for in the species being considered”, poses one of the biologically most interesting questions about a trait and can be addressed empirically by reverse-engineering or functional analysis, which is able to “shed light on its likely evolutionary history.” (Jackendoff/Pinker 2005: 212-214).

The debate regarding recursion heated up once again when Gentner et al. (2006) claimed to have found recursion-abilities in starlings, and Perruchet & Rey criticized Fitch and Hauser’s original experiment that established the inability of monekys to master “phrase structure grammars” (Fitch & Hauser 2004). Regarding the ability of recursion in starlings, these two posts are especially interesting. First this one by Mark Liberman, and the other, where David Beaver regards the recursion-abilities of starlings which in the respect of center-embedded grammars actually seem to be better than ours, and comes to the ironical conclusion that

“we have firm and amazing evidence for a biologically unique language module. The trouble is, starlings have it, and we don't.”

Other excellent post from the Language Log about HCF's claims can be found here, here, here, here, and here.

References:


Hauser, Marc D., Noam Chomsky and W. Tecumseh Fitch 2002. “The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?” In: Science 298, 1569-1579.

Fitch, W. Tecumseh and Marc. D Hauser. 2004. “Computational Constraints on Syntactic Processing in a Nonhuman Primate” In: Science 303: 377-380


Fitch, W. Tecumseh, Marc D. Hauser and Noam Chomsky 2005. “The Evolution of the Language Faculty: Clarifications and Implications.” In: Cognition 97, 179-210.

Jackendoff, Ray & Steven Pinker 2005. “The Nature of the Language Faculty and its Implications for Evolution of Language (Reply to Fitch, Hauser, and Chomsky).” In: Cognition 97, 211-225.

Pinker, Steven & Ray Jackendoff 2005. “The Faculty of Language: What’s Special about it?” In: Cognition 95, 201-236.

Language Evolution III: Hauser, Chomsky, Fitch 2002

When Hauser, known for his strong continuist position, and Chomsky, known as a strong discontinuist, collaborated on the programmatic paper “The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?” together with W. Tecumseh Fitch, it was, as Derek Bickerton states,

“almost as if Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat had coauthored a position paper on the Middle East” (Bickerton 2007: 519).

Just as the 1990 paper by Pinker and Bloom, this paper reviews other hypotheses about language evolution and then, synthesizing a massive amount of comparative data, proposes a new research agenda. It gives a good impression of the state of the discussion in the first decade of the twenty-first century, especially when taking into account the heated debate that revolved around this research program between these authors and Pinker and Jackendoff, which I will describe in my next post.

HCF distinguish between the faculty of language in the broad sense (FLB) and the faculty of language in the narrow sense (FLN). FLB consists of a “sensory-motor” system, including phonetics and phonology, as well as a “conceptual-intentional” system, including semantics and pragmatics (Fitch/Hauser/Chomsky 2005: 182), and maybe other systems (Hauser/Chomsky/Fitch 2002: 1571f.). It

“includes all of the many mechanisms involved in speech and language, regardless of their overlap with other cognitive domains or with other species”.

FLB also comprises FLN, a subset which contains the aspects of language that are responsible for the fact that humans are the only species capable of language, and thereby should be a unique aspect of language as well as humanness (Fitch/Hauser/Chomsky 2005: 180f.).
Thus, research into the evolution of language is divided into three different areas of inquiry, according to the computational systems that comprise the faculty of language, as well as a fourth that is concerned with the interfaces between them. For each component, it has to be assessed whether the capacity is a uniquely human trait or if it is shared with other species, second, whether it developed gradual or saltational, and third, if it was an adaptation for communication or an exaptation of some other computational function (Hauser/Chomsky/ Fitch 2002: 1571).

HCF present three hypotheses which display the opinions of various scholars, with the third as their own viewpoint. The first hypothesis assumes that the faculty of language is strictly homologous to communication components of animals. The second hypothesis, which for example is stated by Pinker and Bloom, is that the faculty of language is a derived, uniquely human and highly complex adaptation for language “and many of its core components can be viewed as individual traits that have been subjected to selection and perfected in recent human evolutionary history”, and can be accounted for by natural selection (Hauser/Chomsky/Fitch 2002: 1572). HFC take a different stand. Their hypothesis is that only the core component of recursion, that is narrow syntax and the mappings to interfaces of FLB,

“is recently evolved and unique to our species” (Hauser/Chomsky/Fitch 2002: 1573).

Furthermore, they argue that “FLN may have evolved for reasons other than language” (Hauser/Chomsky/Fitch 2002: 1571), and that recursion could be an exaptation that originally

“evolved to solve other computational problems such as navigation, number quantification, or social relationships” (Hauser/Chomsky/Fitch 2002: 1578).

FHC emphasize that their hypothesis needs further empirical research (Hauser/Chomsky/Fitch 2002: 1578) but is superior to many other theories because it presents itself in a tentative and testable manner (Hauser/Chomsky/Fitch 2002: 1572). They advocate that inquiry into problems of language evolution is in need of massive multidisciplinary efforts and much more sampling of comparative data to assess whether a trait evolved specifically for human language or is homologous to animal computations,

“although it may be part of the language faculty and play an intimate role in language processing” (Hauser/Chomsky/Fitch 2002: 1572).

One thing I have to say about the article is that, although I wrote that it offers a good starting point, it actually is pretty murky and unclear, and without reading their “Carifications and Implications” I probably wouldn’t have understood what the whole paper really was about. And I think that the description of the language faculty as “narrow syntax and the mappings to interfaces of FLB,” doesn’t really tell us much regarding explanatory adequacy or how the thing really is supposed to work.

Nevertheless, or maybe even because of this, their proposal caused quite a fuzz, both in the blogosphere (An excellent discussion by Carl Zimmer can be found here (Part I) and here (Part II)
and in the form of other articles launched to attack or to enforce HCF’s theory. The most prominent attack probably came from Steven Pinker and their paper “The Faculty of Language: What’s special about it?” I will describe the debate between those two ‘teams’ in my next post.

P.S.: Over at the Language Evolution blog, you can find the second presentation in a series about "Major Language Evolution Papers", this time about a paper by Mesoudi et al. (2004), which discusses the cultural dynamics of evolutionary processes.

References:

Bickerton, Derek 2007. “Language Evolution: A Brief Guide for Linguists.” In: Lingua 117, 510–526.

Fitch, W. Tecumseh, Marc D. Hauser and Noam Chomsky 2005. “The Evolution of the Language Faculty: Clarifications and Implications.” In: Cognition 97, 179-210.

Hauser, Marc D., Noam Chomsky and W. Tecumseh Fitch 2002. “The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?” In: Science 298, 1569-1579.

Language Evolution II: Pinker & Bloom

If there is one paper you definitely should cite when writing about Language Evolution, it is the seminal article “Natural Language and Natural Selection” (the prefinal draft can be found here) by Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom, which offers a good starting point for giving an overview of discussions about language evolution (Christiansen/Kirby 2003b: 15) because they review the contemporary theoretical paradigms of the field – like that of Chomsky, which I described in my last post – and then argue against them.
They refute the view that language is wholly incompatible with Darwinian theory as well as the theory that language could be an exaptation (Pinker/Bloom 1990: 707). In their opinion, language shows signs of “adaptive complexity”, the term describing “any system composed of many interacting parts where the details of the parts' structure and arrangement suggest design to fulfill some function” (Pinker/Bloom 1990: 709). Natural selection, that is the hypothesis that “the differential reproductive success associated with heritable variation is the primary organizing force in the evolution of organisms”, is the only scientific explanation for the development of such complexity (Pinker/Bloom 1990: 708), which could only have evolved gradually (Pinker/Bloom 1990: 711).
The function language evolved for was the communication of complex propositions. As the authors themselves point out, their paper does not so much present a new theory of language evolution as set the methodological framework for a new scientific research program (Pinker/Bloom 1990: 726f.).
The paper had a tremendous impact. In the open peer commentary, Jim Hurford (1990) hailed it as a “Liberation!” and saw it as the crucial step “Beyond the roadblock in linguistic evolution studies” most clearly represented by the 1866 ban on papers about language origin by the Linguistic Society of Paris and the rumored “Gentleman’s Agreement” with a similar notion by the Linguistic Society of America (Indeed, no paper about the topic appeared in the society’s journal, ‘Language’ until 2000 (Newmeyer 2003)), while Philip Lieberman (1990) (rightly) argued that he was making the same claim for years. To others, however, for example Richard Lewontin (Lewontin 1990: 740) and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (Piattelli-Palmarini 1990: 754), language still appeared as “a system of such complexity that its selective value [still was] difficult to imagine” (Studdert-Kennedy/Knight/Hurford 1998: 3)
Regarding its impact, Christiansen and Kirby (2002) write that

“According to the ISI Web of Knowledge index, the rate at which language evolution work appears in the literature increased tenfold in the decade following the Pinker and Bloom paper. Thus, when counting the papers that contain both “language” and “evolution” in title, keywords, or abstract, the publishing rate for 1981-1989 was 9 per year, whereas it was 86 per year for the period 1990-1999, and 134 per year between 2002 and 2002. (Christiansen/Kirby: 3)

Surely there were other crucial factors for these massive expansions, like the technological, neurobiological and overall scientific advances made in the ‘Decade of the Brain’ and in subsequent years. Still, in the “Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography” Pinker & Bloom’s paper is listed as the most cited with 135 Citations, followed by Terrence Deacons’s “The Symbolic Species” on which I will focus in a later post, with 116, and Steven Pinker’s “The Language Instinct” with 94.
References:

Christiansen, Morten H. and Simon Kirby 2003. “Language Evolution: The Hardest Problem in Science?” In: Christiansen, Morten H. and Simon Kirby (eds.) 2003. Language Evolution. Oxford / New York: Oxford University Press. 1-15.

Hurford, James R.1990. “Beyond the roadblock in linguistic evolution studies.” In: Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13.4, 736.

Lewontin, R.C. 1990. “How much did the Brain have to Change for Speech?” In: Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13.4, 740-741.

Lieberman, Philip 1990. “Not invented here.” In: Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13.4: 741.

Newmeyer, Frederick J. 2003. “Grammar is grammar and usage is usage.” In: Language 79: 682-707.

Piattelli-Palmarini, Massimo 1990. “An Ideological Battle over Modals and Quantifiers.” In: Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13.4, 752-754.

Pinker, Steven & Paul Bloom 1990. “Natural Language and Natural Selection.” In: Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13.4: 707-726.

Studdert-Kennedy, Michael, Chris Knight and James R. Hurford 1998. “Introduction: New Approaches to Language Evolution.“ In: James R. Hurford, Michael Studdert-Kennedy and Chris Knight (eds.). Approaches to the Evolution of Language. Social and Cognitive Bases. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1-5.