The shades of social. A discussion of "The social origins of language", ed. Daniel Dor, Chris Knight and Jerome Lewis

Turning to the social dimension has been an influential trend in recent language evolution literature, as documented by e.g. Dunbar  et al. (ed. 2014), Scott-Phillips (2014), or Pina and Gontier (ed. 2014). The social origins of language , edited by Daniel Dor, Chris Knight and Jerome Lewis, is of special interest, because rather than just being part of this trend, it aims to redefine the current discourse in language origins research, making it inclusive and “society first”. Collectively, the twenty four chapters of this volume make a powerful statement for a broad, incorporative, “everything counts” approach to language evolution. By demonstrating the relevance to language evolution research of a wide variety of social, cultural and cognitive factors, The social origins of language  is potentially – and hopefully – a game changing contribution to this field of study

The narrow faculty of language: What is it, who has it, and how is it defined?

The evolution of language, as a research area, is special in many ways. One of those ways is its inherently interdisciplinary status with its usual afflictions, i.e. the terminological barriers to fruitful communication of researchers with different backgrounds. The FLN/FLB concept, created with intent to improve this condition, has now become an influential but fundamentally confused bit of terminology, complicating rather than clarifying dialogue across disciplinary borders. The suggested overall conclusions are twofold. Firstly, researchers into language evolution should not accept the FLN/FLB distinction at face value, but rather refer meticulously to primary literature. Ultimately, it is hoped that the FLN/FLB distinction will be supplanted by a more compelling one, driven by a more coherent research agenda. Until then, FLN1, i.e. FLN as defined in Hauser et al. (2002), should probably be used, both for reasons of priority and theoretical usefulness. As a second point, it is astonishing that such a major conceptual inconsistency between the two definitions of FLN/FLB has remained essentially unnoticed or ignored. This may be due to the proclaimed “clarification” of this issue in Fitch et al. (2005); however, as has been demonstrated, this “clarification,” based on demonstrably false claims, only added to the confusion. It may signal a need for a radical top-down examination and discussion of the terminological-conceptual inventory of the evolution of language before this field develops its own tertiary literature

Concepts as Correlates of Lexical Labels. A Cognitivist Perspective, 274 s.

This is a submitted manuscript version. The publisher should be contacted for permission to re-use or reprint the material in any form. Final published version, copyright Peter Lang: https://doi.org/10.3726/978-3-653-05287-9The study of language becomes particularly attractive when it is not practised as an isolated descriptive enterprise, but when it has wide-ranging implications for the study of the human mind. Such is the spirit of this book. While categorisation may be the single most basic cognitive process in organisms, and as an area of inquiry, it is fundamental to Cognitive Science as a whole, at the other end of the spectrum, high-level cognition is organised and permeated by language, giving rise to categories that count and function as concepts. Working from considering the philosophical assumptions of the cognitivist perspective, this study offers an argument for a very productive understanding of the relation between concepts, categories, and their theoretical models

Concepts As Correlates Of Lexical Items

The content of this article amounts to a somewhat controversial terminological proposal: the term ‘concept’ is most fruitfully construed as ‘a mental representations having a lexical correlate’. Such a definition makes it possible to treat ‘concept’ as a technical term across the cognitive sciences, but also preserving most intuitions from a looser use of this word in the literature. The central points consist in a) appreciating the qualitative difference between the mental representations correlated with lexical labels and other mental representations, and b) accepting this difference as an effect of the causal influence of language on cognition. The argument is supported by a review of recent empirical results

Towards an Exemplar Based Approach to Lexical Categorisation

The exemplar-based approach to categorisation has recently become perhaps the most influential one within cognitive psychology. Still, it seems to be largely disregarded in other fields of cognitive science, such as philosophy or linguistics. In this article, I describe exemplar models against the background of classical and prototype theories, and try to explain the difficulties concerning wider application of exemplar models to categorisation studies in lexical semantics. I begin with a few general remarks on the nature of categorisation and the necessity to understand this notion in a broader theoretical frame. In a brief discussion of models of categorisation, I focus on the distinction between classical and ‘similarity’ models (the latter meaning prototype and exemplar models) and its far reaching implications, as well as explain the distinction between categorisation by prototypes and exemplars. By way of conclusion, I venture a suggestion that in thinking about categorisation in humans, different views should be treated as complementary rather than contradictory accounts

The narrow faculty of language: What is it, who has it, and how is it defined?

In 2002, Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch introduced a terminological/conceptual distinction that became central to the entire field of language evolution research, by dividing the faculty of language into FLN (Faculty of language – narrow sense) and FLB (Faculty of language – broad sense). Unfortunately, three years later the three authors dropped their original definition and replaced it with another (Fitch et al. 2005). Far from achieving their goal “to clarify misunderstandings and aid interdisciplinary rapprochement” (Fitch et al. 2005: 179), the existence of two conflicting definitions of FLN/FLB had the effect of further adding to the confusion. This paper argues that a) the concept of FLN/FLB has acquired central importance in the evolution of language and has also achieved recognisable status beyond that field; b) the two definitions of the FLN/FLB concept do not just differ insignificantly, but rather they differ fundamentally in a way that precludes their reconciliation c) because of the centrality of the FLN/FLB concept, the conflict between the two definitions is not a trivial terminological matter but has important consequences for the research field of the evolution of language. As a conclusion, it is astonishing that such a major conceptual inconsistency between the two definitions of FLN/FLB has remained essentially unnoticed or ignored. It may signal a need for a radical top-down examination and discussion of the terminological-conceptual inventory of the evolution of language before this field extends its own tertiary literature

Language and Thinking: Motives of Pinker’s Criticism of Whorfian Linguistic Relativism

In The Language Instinct (1995 [1994], henceforth: TLI), a book that despite its popular character has become virtually a classic in discussions concerning the innateness of language, Steven Pinker attacks the broadly understood “Whorfian” standpoint according to which human thinking is influenced in fundamental ways by one’s native language. Due to the status of the author and popularity of the book, it is an influential voice in the ongoing debate on the mutual relation between language and “thought.” Rather than joining this debate, in the present text I would like to examine the construction and integrity of Pinker’s argumentation in TLI. I suggest that this author’s attack on broadly understood interdependence of language and thought is motivated by his general theoretical commitments, rather than by independent evidence

Broadcast Transmission, Signal Secrecy And Gestural Primacy Hypothesis

In current literature, a number of standard lines of evidence reemerge in support of the hypothesis that the initial, “bootstrapping” stage of the evolution of language was gestural. However, one specific feature of gestural communication consistent with this hypothesis has been given surprisingly little attention. The visual modality makes gestural signals more secret than vocal signals (lack of broadcast transmission). The high relevance of secrecy is derived from the fundamental constraint on language evolution: the transfer of honest messages itself is a form of cooperation, and therefore not a naturally evolutionarily stable strategy. Consequently, greater secrecy of gestural communication constitutes a potentially important factor that should not fail to be represented in more comprehensive models of the emergence of protolanguage

Beyond protolanguage: Contemporary problems in the evolution of language

The emergence of the uniquely human ability to acquire and use language has invariably been perceived as a problem that is both exceptionally difficult and intriguing. Conjectures regarding the sources of language have never been in short supply, substantiating some of the mistrust in the purposefulness of this type of study. The earliest manifestations of this mistrust – such as the famous 1866 “ban” on the inquiry into language origins, found in the statute of Société de Linguistique de Paris – have acquired a  legendary status; but it is interesting to observe that as recently as thirty years ago it was fair for linguists to claim that the phylogeny of language was irrelevant to linguistic research, constituting a proprietary area of mythological, religious or philosophical reflection (e.g. Fisiak 1985)

The relevance of body language to evolution of language research

Long abstract for Evolang 8 conferenceThe heterogeneous category of phenomena covered by the term body language (roughly equivalent to nonverbal communication, NVC), although essential to human day-to-day communication, is also largely dissociable from human verbal behaviour. As such, it has received little attention in the area of evolution of language research. In this paper we point to an important factor – signal reliability (honesty) as an elementary constraint on communication as an evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) – which shows promise of restoring the relevance of broadly construed body language to the evolution of language