The co-evolution of human intersubjectivity, morality and language

The chapter argues that language, which rests on the sharing of linguistic norms, honest information, and moral norms, evolved through a co-evolutionary process with a pivotal role for intersubjectivity. Mainstream evolutionary models, based only on individual-level and gene-level selection, are argued to be incapable to account for such sharing of care, values and information, thus implying the need to evoke multi-level selection, including (cultural) group selection. Four of the most influential current theories of the evolution of human-scale sociality, those of Dunbar, Deacon, Tomasello and Hrdy, are compared and evaluated on the basis of their answers to five questions: (1) Why we and not others? (2) How: by what mechanisms? (3) When? (4) In what kind of social settings? (5) What are the implications for ontogeny? The conclusions are that the theories are to a large degree complementary, and that they all assume, explicitly or not, a role for group selection. Hrdy’s theory, focusing on the evolution of alloparenting, is argued to provide the best explanation for the onset of the evolution of human intersubjectivity, and can furthermore offer a Darwinian framework for Tomasello’s theory of shared intentionality. Deacon’s theory deals rather with the evolution of morality and its co-evolution with “symbolic reference”, but these are necessarily antecedent to the primary evolution of human intersubjectivity. Dunbar’s theory on the transition from “musical” vocal-grooming to vocal “gossip” can be seen as providing a partial explanation for evolution of spoken language, most likely with Homo heidelbergensis 0.5 MYA, but presupposes the capacities accounted for by the other models

Embodiment, language and mimesis

The present focus on embodiment in cognitive science undervalues concepts such as convention/norm, representation and consciousness. I argue that these concepts constitute essential properties of language, and this makes it problematic for “embodiment theories” to account for human language and cognition. These difficulties are illustrated by examining a particular, highly influential approach to embodied cognition, that of Lakoff and Johnson (1999), and exposing the problematic character of the notion of the “cognitive unconscious”. To attempt a reconciliation between embodiment and language, I turn to the concept of (bodily) mimesis, and propose the notion of mimetic schema as a mediator between the individual human body and collective language

Turning back to experience in Cognitive Linguistics via phenomenology

Cognitive Linguistics began as an apotheosis of lived experience, but has over the years diversified into many different stands, interpreting the notion of "experience" and along with it the notion of "cognition" in conflicting ways: individual or social, prelinguistic or linguistic, unconscious or conscious? These issues are not only philosophical as they hold crucial implications for methodology. Here, I propose that most of them can be resolved with the help of phenomenology, "the study of human experience and of the ways things present themselves to us in and through such experience" (Sokolowski 2000. Introduction to phenomenology. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2). Cogent syntheses are proposed to the individual/social and prelinguistic/linguistic debates, showing that scholars like Langacker, Talmy and Itkonen have focused on complementary aspects of implicitly phenomenological investigations. Third-person, "objective" methods are necessary for extending the scope of such investigations, but epistemologically secondary. Thus, the focus of Cognitive Linguistics can be brought back to experience, albeit in a more mature manner than 30 years ago

Language may indeed influence thought

We discuss four interconnected issues that we believe have hindered investigations into how language may affect thinking. These have had a tendency to reappear in the debate concerning linguistic relativity over the past decades, despite numerous empirical findings. The first is the claim that it is impossible to disentangle language from thought, making the question concerning “influence” pointless. The second is the argument that it is impossible to disentangle language from culture in general, and from social interaction in particular, so it is impossible to attribute any differences in the thought patterns of the members of different cultures to language per se. The third issue is the objection that methodological and empirical problems defeat all but the most trivial version of the thesis of linguistic influence: that language gives new factual information. The fourth is the assumption that since language can potentially influence thought from “not at all” to “completely,” the possible forms of linguistic influence can be placed on a cline, and competing theories can be seen as debating the actual position on this cline. We analyze these claims and show that the first three do not constitute in-principle objections against the validity of the project of investigating linguistic influence on thought, and that the last one is not the best way to frame the empirical challenges at hand. While we do not argue for any specific theory or mechanism for linguistic influence on thought, our discussion and the reviewed literature show that such influence is clearly possible, and hence in need of further investigations

Bodily mimesisas “the missing link” in human cognitive evolution

It is fairly uncontroversial that there is a large gap between the communicative and cognitive systems of non-human animals and those of human beings. There is much less consensus, however, on what the nature of this gap is, and even less on how it was bridged in evolution

Cognitive and semiotic determinants of sign order in gestural and pictorial event representations

The way people order signs in non-verbal event representations of events has been a topic of extensive research in recent decades, with conflicting findings. Based on a literature review, we distinguish the following factors that have been argued to influence sign order: (a) diagrammatic iconicity, (b) manipulation vs. construction events, (c) reversibility, (d) most common word order of L1, (e) the semiotic system (gesture, depiction) used, and (f) a putative “natural” Agent–Patient–Act order. To test the role of these factors, we conducted a study where Swedish participants observed events that varied with respect to reversibility and construction/manipulation status, and then had to communicate them to an addressee using gestures for half the stimuli. For the other half, they used sequences of simple drawings of the event participants and the action. The results showed the huge influence of the semiotic system (e) on sign order. There was a role of reversibility (c) only when gestures were used, while L1 word order (d) only had an effect when sequences of pictures were used. The “ontological status” of the Patient (b) was shown to affect the representations in both semiotic systems but was much stronger for gestures. Even the two most general factors (a) and (f) where shown to be sensitive to the type of semiotic system. Future studies of how such cognitive and semiotic determinants interact are needed to fully understand the phenomenon of sign order preference

Multimodal-first or pantomime-first?

A persistent controversy in language evolution research has been whether language emerged in the gestural-visual or in the vocal-auditory modality. A “dialectic” solution to this age-old debate has now been gaining ground: language was fully multimodal from the start, and remains so to this day. In this paper, we show this solution to be too simplistic and outline a more specific theoretical proposal, which we designate as pantomime-first. To decide between the multimodal-first and pantomime-first alternatives, we review several lines of interdisciplinary evidence and complement it with a cognitive-semiotic experiment. In the study, the participants saw – and then matched to hand-drawn images – recordings of short transitive events enacted by 4 actors in two conditions: visual (only body movement), and multimodal (body movement accompanied by nonlinguistic vocalization). Significantly, the matching accuracy was greater in the visual than the multimodal condition, though a follow-up experiment revealed that the emotional profiles of the events enacted in the multimodal condition could be reliably detected from the sound alone. We see these results as supporting the proposed pantomime-first scenari

Analyzing polysemiosis: Language, gesture, and depiction in two cultural practices with sand drawing

Human communication is by default polysemiotic: it involves the spontaneous combination of two or more semiotic systems, the most important ones being language, gesture, and depiction. We formulate an original cognitive-semiotic framework for the analysis of polysemiosis, contrasting this with more familiar systems based on the ambiguous term “multimodality.” To be fully explicit, we developed a coding system for the analysis of polysemiotic utterances containing speech, gesture, and drawing, and implemented this in the ELAN video annotation software. We used this to analyze 23 video-recordings of sand drawing performances on Paama, Vanuatu and 20 sand stories of the Pitjantjatjara culture in Central Australia. Methodologically we used the conceptual-empirical loop of cognitive semiotics: our theoretical framework guided general considerations, such as distinguishing between the “tiers” of gesture and depiction, and the three kinds of semiotic grounds (iconic, indexical, symbolic), but the precise decisions on how to operationalize these were made only after extensive work with the material. We describe the coding system in detail and provide illustrative examples from the Paamese and Pitjantjatjara data, remarking on both similarities and differences in the polysemiosis of the two cultural practices. We conclude by summarizing the contributions of the study and point to some directions for future research

Constraints on communicating the order of events in stories through pantomime

Pantomime is a means of bodily visual communication that is based on iconic gestures that are not fully conventional. It has become a key element in many models of language evolution and a strong candidate for the original human-specific communicative system (Zlatev et al. 2020). Although pantomime affords successful communication in many contexts, it has some semiotic limitations. In this study, we looked at one of them, connected with communicating the order of events in stories. We assumed that pantomime is well-suited for communicating simple stories, where events are arranged in chronological order, and less so for communicating complex stories, where events are arranged in a non-chronological order. To test this assumption, we designed a semiotic game in which participants took turns as directors and matchers. The task of the directors was to mime a story in one of two conditions: chronological or non-chronological; the task of the matchers was to interpret what was mimed. The results showed that the chronological condition was easier for the participants. In the non-chronological condition, we observed that initially, poor communicative success improved as the participants started to use various markers of event order. The results of our study provide insight into the early stages of conventionalisation in bodily visual communication, a potential first step towards protolanguage