An attempt at a proxemic description of politeness from the ethological-evolutionary persepctive

The article reflects on different aspects of politeness theory viewed from the ethological and evolutionary perspective. The author offers an explanation of politeness phenomena along proxemic lines – accordingly, politeness is shown to be an essentially distancing mechanism, consisting of three major types of sociofugal (i.e. distance-increasing) strategies – discourse dislocation, cognitive distancing, and personal distancing. These findings are then related to the ethology of territorial behaviours – it is hypothesised that politeness constitutes a verbal means of aggression appeasement. Finally, the author attempts to explain the transfer of spatial behaviours to the domain of discursive interaction by appealing to Donald’s conception of mimesis

How research on language evolution contributes to linguistics

Since its inception in the second part of the 20th century, the science of language evolution has been exerting a growing and formative pressure on linguistics. More obviously, given its interdisciplinary character, the science of language evolution provides a platform on which linguists can meet and discuss a variety of problems pertaining to the nature of language and ways of investigating it with representatives of other disciplines and research traditions. It was largely in this way that the attention of linguists was attracted to the study of emerging sign languages and gestures, as well as to the resultant reflection on the way different modalities impact communicative systems that use them. But linguistics also benefits from the findings made by language evolution researchers in the context of their own research questions and methodologies. The most important of these findings come out of the experimental research on bootstrapping communication systems and the evolution of communicative structure, and from mass comparison studies that correlate linguists data with a wide range of environmental variables

Language Origins: From mythology to science, 226 s.

The science of language evolution appeared at the end of the last century but top¬ically belongs to language origins – the domain of investigation that is concerned with the beginnings and diversification of language. Language evolution as a research area contrasts with the antiquity of language origins, which can be traced back to the earliest forms of traditional reflection. Language evolution emphasises its scientific orientation, whereas throughout most of its history language origins constituted a complex mixture of mythology, philosophy of language, as well as religiously and scientifically inspired speculation. This work is the first book-long attempt to document the whole history of language origins and situate language evolution in this wide intellectual context

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)

From the narrow to the broad. Multiple perspectives on language evolution

Although many of the recent controversies in the field of language evolution research are empirical, the deepest divides seem to remain theoretical in nature. Specifically, defining language in incompatible ways has led to radically different views on language evolution as a programme, including evaluation of its current success and future progress. Despite recent manifestos from the “narrow” camp (Hauser et al. 2014; Bolhuis et al. 2014), who along the lines of Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch (2002) equates language with the syntactic processor, the rival approach seems to be gaining momentum. It embodies a move in exactly the opposite direction, by understanding language broadly and assuming an inclusive perspective on its origins, which results in ongoing expansion of the field of language evolution. New areas of academic reflection (such as normativity) are being brought to bear, new areas of linguistics are being included (such as pragmatics or linguistic politeness); and, interestingly, existing linguistic methods are now being used to inform animal communication studies

The cooperative nature of conversation. Evidence from conversational exchanges

The cooperative dimension of human linguistic communication has been gaining increasing recognition as a central problem in the evolution of language. Our paper documents the phenomenon of cooperative norms in conversation, with evidence gained through the application of the tools of Conversational Analysis (CA) to a corpus of spoken conversational exchanges. The backdrop to our discussion is the concept of planbox escalation, a ‘default’ exclusively goal-oriented strategy, which we relate to the notion of Pan economicus from comparative psychology. We focus on the way conversational exchanges, especially what we call economic exchanges, diverge from the predictions of this model, thus pointing to the existence of cooperative norms

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

Pantomimic Conceptions of Language Origins

This is a draft of a chapter that has been accepted for publication by Oxford University Press in the forthcoming book Oxford Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution, 2nd edition, edited by A. Lock, C. Sinha, N. Gontier, due for publication in 2020.Could pantomime have been the key step in the evolutionary emergence of symbolic communication? Such a possibility has been consistently present in the intellectual reflection on language origins. What makes pantomime interesting from this perspective is its rich expressive potential, since it can convey open-ended, semantically universal and displaced meanings without relying on semiotic conventions, so that spontaneous pantomimes can be recognized as such and successfully interpreted. Definitions are important in classifying a particular scenario as “pantomimic”. In this chapter, we employ a ‘rich’ definition of pantomime: we describe it as bodily-mimetic communication which is non-conventional, improvised, performed with the whole body, holistic, communicatively and semantically complex. Based on this foundation, we review and evaluate pantomimic accounts of language origins, from the past to the present, and we particularly focus on the contemporary pantomime accounts given by Michael Arbib, Michael Tomasello, and Jordan Zlatev

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

Language origins: Fitness consequences, platform of trust, cooperation, and turn-taking

This is a post-print version. This article will be published in Interaction Studies, vol 19. Expected July 2018, copyright John Benjamins Publishing Company. The publisher should be contacted for permission to re-use or reprint the material in any form.In this paper, we complement proximate or ‘how’ explanations for the origins of language, broadening our perspective to include fitness-consequences explanations, i.e. ultimate, or ‘why’ explanations. We identify the platform of trust as a fundamental prerequisite for the development of a language-like system of symbolic communication. The platform of trust is a social niche in which cheap but honest communication with non-kin is possible, because messages tend to be trusted as a default. We briefly consider the place of the platform of trust on the road map as laid out in the Mirror System Hypothesis. We then turn to recent research on turn-taking in primates, which has been proposed as a precursor of the cooperative structuring of conversation in humans. We suggest, instead, that human turn-taking, in its full richness that makes it an interesting explanatory target, may only appear in a communicative system that is already founded on a community-wide, cooperative platform of trust