Stefan Hartmann

CfP: New directions in language evolution research (Special Issue of “Language Dynamics and Change”)

A couple of months ago, Peeter Tinits, Jonas Nölle and I organized a theme session with the fairly generic title “New directions in language evolution research” at the SLE conference in Tartu. Now we are planning a Special Issue of the journal “Language Dynamics and Change” (LDC) that covers the topics addressed at the workshop (and perhaps a few more). Our goal is to emphasize the “New Directions” aspect, i.e. to gather really innovative approaches to the evolution of language. We would like to open up the CfP beyond the circle of workshop participants – so everybody interested is invited to submit an abstract, on the basis of which we will make a first selection and invite full papers. Note that if we can’t include your paper in the Special Issue, you can of course still submit it as a regular paper to LDC. If you are interested in contributing, please send an abstract to newdir.langev@gmail.com until December 15th.

Here’s the description of our theme session again:

Research on language evolution is undoubtedly among the fastest-growing topics in linguistics. This is not a coincidence: While scholars have always been interested in the origin and evolution of language, it is only now that many questions can be addressed empirically drawing on a wealth of data and a multitude of methodological approaches developed in the different disciplines that try to find answers to what has been called “the hardest problem in science” (Christiansen & Kirby 2003). Importantly, any theory of how language may have emerged requires a solid understanding of how language and other communication systems work. As such, the questions in language evolution research are manifold and interface in multiple ways with key open questions in historical and theoretical linguistics: What exactly makes human language unique compared to animal communication systems? How do cognition, communication and transmission shape grammar? Which factors can explain linguistic diversity? How and why do languages change? To what extent is thestructure of language(s) shaped by extra-linguistic, environmental factors?

Over the last 20 years or so, evolutionary linguistics has set out to find answers to these and many more questions. As, e.g., Dediu & De Boer (2016) have noted, the field of language evolution research is currently coming of age, and it has developed a rich toolkit of widely-adopted methods both for comparative research, which investigates the commonalities and differences between human language and animal communication systems, and for studying the cumulative cultural evolution of sign systems in experimental settings, including both computational and behavioral approaches (see e.g. Tallerman & Gibson 2012; Fitch 2017). In addition, large-scale typological studies have gained importance in recent research on language evolution (e.g. Evans 2010).

The goal of this workshop is to discuss innovative theoretical and methodological approaches that go beyond the current state of the art by proposing and empirically testing new hypotheses, by developing new or refining existing methods for thestudy of language evolution, and/or by reinterpreting the available evidence inthe light of innovative theoretical frameworks. In this vein, our workshop aims at bringing together researchers from multiple disciplines and theoretical backgrounds to discuss the latest developments in language evolution research. Topics include

– experimental approaches investigating the emergence and/or development of sign systems in frameworks such as experimental semiotics (e.g. Galantucci & Garrod 2010) or artificial language learning (e.g. Kirby et al. 2014);
– empirical research on non-human communication systems as well as comparative research on animal cognition with respect to its relevance for the evolution of cognitive prerequisites for fully-fledged human language (Kirby 2017);
– approaches using computational modelling and robotics (Steels 2011) in order to investigate problems like the grounding of symbol systems in non-symbolic representations (Harnad 1990), the emergence of the particular features that make human language unique (Kirby2017, Smith 2014), or the question to what extent these features are domain-specific, i.e. evolved by natural selection for a specifically linguistic function (Culbertson & Kirby 2016);
– research that explicitly combines expertise from multiple different disciplines, e.g. typology and neurolinguistics (Bickel et al. 2015); genomics, archaeology, and linguistics (Pakendorf 2014, Theofanopoulou et al. 2017); comparative biology and philosophy of language (Moore 2016); and many more.

This latter trend to cross disciplinary boundaries is also evident in the proposed workshop contributions listed below. For instance, many of them approach long-standing questions from historical-typological linguistics from an evolutionary point of view by combining analyses of large typological databases with computational modelling, focusing on the emergence of (near-)universal patterns or the much-discussed topic of a potential connection between group size andlinguistic complexity. Others draw on insights from biology to discuss how thehuman capacity for language came about. What all have in common, however, is that they combine multiple perspectives to shed new light on the question of how language evolved and continues to evolve.

References

Bickel, Balthasar, Alena Witzlack-Makarevich, Kamal K. Choudhary,Matthias Schlesewsky & Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky. 2015. TheNeurophysiology of Language Processing Shapes the Evolution of Grammar:Evidence from Case Marking. PLOS ONE 10(8). e0132819.
Christiansen, Morten H. & Simon Kirby. 2003. Language Evolution:The Hardest Problem in Science. In Morten H. Christiansen & Simon Kirby(eds.), Language Evolution, 1–15.(Oxford Studies in the Evolution of Language 3). Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.
Culbertson, Jennifer & Simon Kirby. 2016. Simplicity andSpecificity in Language: Domain-General Biases Have Domain-Specific Effects. Frontiers in Psychology 6.doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01964.
Dediu, Dan & Bart de Boer. 2016. Language evolution needs its ownjournal. Journal of Language Evolution1(1). 1–6.
Evans, Nicholas. 2010. Language diversity as a tool for understandingcultural evolution. In Peter J. Richerson & Morten H. Christiansen (eds.),Cultural Evolution : Society, Technology, Language, and Religion, 233–268.Cambridge: MIT Press.
Fitch, W. Tecumseh. 2017. Empirical approaches to the study of languageevolution. Psychonomic Bulletin &Review 24(1). 3–33.
Galantucci, Bruno & Simon Garrod. 2010. Experimental Semiotics: Anew approach for studying the emergence and the evolution of humancommunication. Interaction Studies11(1). 1–13.
Harnad, Stevan. 1990. The symbol grounding problem. Physica D 42. 335–346.
Kirby, Simon, Tom Griffiths & Kenny Smith. 2014. Iterated Learningand the Evolution of Language. CurrentOpinion in Neurobiology 28. 108–114.
Kirby, Simon. 2017. Culture and biology in the origins of linguisticstructure. Psychonomic Bulletin &Review 24(1). 118–137.
Moore, Richard. 2016. Meaning and ostension in great ape gesturalcommunication. Animal Cognition19(1). 223–231.
Pakendorf, Brigitte. 2014. Coevolution of languages and genes. Current Opinion in Genetics &Development 29. 39–44.
Smith, Andrew D.M. 2014. Models of language evolution and change:Language evolution and change. WileyInterdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science 5(3). 281–293.
Steels, Luc. 2011. Modeling the Cultural Evolution of Language. Physics of Life Reviews 8. 339–356.
Tallerman, Maggie & Kathleen R. Gibson (eds.). 2012. The Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution.Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Theofanopoulou, Constantina, Simone Gastaldon, Thomas O’Rourke, Bridget D. Samuels, Angela Messner, Pedro Tiago Martins, Francesco Delogu, Saleh Alamri& Cedric Boeckx. 2017. Self-domestication in Homo sapiens: Insights fromcomparative genomics. PLOS ONE12(10). e0185306.

CfP: Construal and language dynamics (ICLC-15 workshop proposal)

What do we mean when we talk about the “cognitive foundations” of language or the “cognitive principles” behind linguistic phenomena? And how can we tap into the cognitive underpinnings of language? These questions lie at the heart of a workshop that Michael Pleyer and I are going to propose for the next International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. Here’s our Call for Papers:

Construal and language dynamics: Interdisciplinary and cross-linguistic perspectives on linguistic conceptualization
– Workshop proposal for the 15th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Nishinomiya, Japan, August 6–11, 2019 –

Convenors:
Stefan Hartmann, University of Bamberg
Michael Pleyer, University of Koblenz-Landau

The concept of construal has become a key notion in many theories within the broader framework of Cognitive Linguistics. It lies at the heart of Langacker’s (1987, 1991, 2008) Cognitive Grammar, but it also plays a key role in Croft’s (2012) account of verbal argument structure as well as in the emerging framework of experimental semantics (Bergen 2012; Matlock & Winter 2015). Indirectly it also figures in Talmy’s (2000) theory of cognitive semantics, especially in his “imaging systems” approach (see e.g. Verhagen 2007).

According to Langacker (2015: 120), “[c]onstrual is our ability to conceive and portray the same situation in alternate ways.” From the perspective of Cognitive Grammar, an expression’s meaning consists of conceptual content – which can, in principle, be captured in truth-conditional terms – and its construal, which encompasses aspects such as perspective, specificity, prominence, and dynamicity. Croft & Cruse (2004) summarize the construal operations proposed in previous research, arriving at more than 20 linguistic construal operations that are seen as instances of general cognitive processes.

Given the “quantitative turn” in Cognitive Linguistics (e.g. Janda 2013), the question arises how the theoretical concepts proposed in the foundational works of the framework can be empirically tested and how they can be refined on the basis of empirical findings. Much work in the domains of experimental linguistics and corpus linguistics has established a research cycle whereby hypotheses are generated on the basis of theoretical concepts from Cognitive Linguistics, such as construal operations, and then tested using behavioral and/or corpus-linguistic methods (see e.g. Hilpert 2008; Matlock 2010; Schönefeld 2011; Matlock et al. 2012; Krawczak & Glynn forthc., among many others).

Arguably one of the most important testing grounds for theories of linguistic construal is the domain of language dynamics. Recent years have seen increasing convergence between Cognitive-Linguistic theories on the one hand and theories conceiving of language as a complex adaptive system on the other (Beckner et al. 2009; Frank & Gontier 2010; Fusaroli & Tylén 2012; Pleyer 2017). In this framework, language can be understood as a dynamic system unfolding on the timescales of individual learning, socio-cultural transmission, and biological evolution (Kirby 2012, Enfield 2014). Linguistic construal operations can be seen as important factors shaping the structure of language both on a historical timescale and in ontogenetic development (e.g. Pleyer & Winters 2014).

Empirical studies of language acquisition, language change, and language variation can therefore help us understand the nature of linguistic construal operations and can also contribute to refining theories of linguistic construal. Interdisciplinary and cross-linguistic perspectives can prove particularly insightful in this regard. Findings from cognitive science and developmental psychology can contribute substantially to our understanding of the cognitive principles behind language dynamics. Cross-linguistic comparison can, on the one hand, lead to the discovery of striking similarities across languages that might point to shared underlying cognitive principles (e.g. common pathways of grammaticalization, see e.g. Bybee et al. 1994, or similarities in the domain of metaphorical construal, see Taylor 2003: 140), but it can also safeguard against premature generalizations from findings obtained in one single language to human cognition at large (see e.g. Goschler 2017).

For our proposed workshop, we invite contributions that explicitly connect theoretical approaches to linguistic construal operations with empirical evidence from e.g. corpus linguistics, experimental studies, or typological research. In line with the cross-linguistic outlook of the main conference, we are particularly interested in papers that compare linguistic construals across different languages. Also, we would like to include interdisciplinary perspectives from the behavioural and cognitive sciences.

The topics that can be addressed in the workshop include, but are not limited to,

the role of construal operations such as perspectivation and specificity in language production and processing;
the acquisition and diachronic change of linguistic categories;
the question of whether individual construal operations that have been proposed in the literature are cognitively realistic (see e.g. Broccias & Hollmann 2007) and whether they can be tested empirically;
the refinement of construal-related concepts such as “salience” or “prominence” based on empirical findings (see e.g. Schmid & Günther 2016);
the relationship between linguistic construal operations and domain-general cognitive processes;
the relationship between empirical observations and the conclusions we draw from them about the organization of the human mind, including the viability of concepts such as the “corpus-to-cognition” principle (see e.g. Arppe et al. 2010) or the mapping of behavioral findings to cognitive processes.

Please send a short abstract (max. 1 page excl. references) and a ~100-word summary to construal.iclc15@gmail.com by ~~August 31st, 2018~~ September 10th, 2018. We will inform all potential contributors in early September whether your paper can be included in our workshop proposal. If we are unable to accommodate your submission, you can of course submit it to the general session of the conference. The same applies if our workshop proposal as a whole is rejected.

References

Arppe, Antti, Gaëtanelle Gilquin, Dylan Glynn, Martin Hilpert & Arne Zeschel. 2010. Cognitive Corpus Linguistics: Five Points of Debate on Current Theory and Methodology. Corpora 5(1). 1–27.

Beckner, Clay, Richard Blythe, Joan Bybee, Morten H. Christiansen, William Croft, Nick C. Ellis, John Holland, Jinyun Ke, Diane Larsen-Freeman & Tom Schoenemann. 2009. Language is a Complex Adaptive System: Position Paper. Language Learning 59 Suppl. 1. 1–26.

Bergen, Benjamin K. 2012. Louder than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning. New York: Basic Books.

Broccias, Cristiano & Willem B. Hollmann. 2007. Do we need Summary and Sequential Scanning in (Cognitive) Grammar? Cognitive Linguistics 18. 487–522.

Bybee, Joan L., Revere Perkins & William Pagliuca. 1994. The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Croft, William & Alan Cruse. 2004. Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Enfield, N.J. 2014. Natural causes of language: frames, biases, and cultural transmission. (Conceptual Foundations of Language Science 1). Berlin: Language Science Press.

Frank, Roslyn M. & Nathalie Gontier. 2010. On Constructing a Research Model for Historical Cognitive Linguistics (HCL): Some Theoretical Considerations. In Margaret E. Winters, Heli Tissari & Kathryn Allan (eds.), Historical Cognitive Linguistics, 31–69. (Cognitive Linguistics Research 47). Berlin, New York: De Gruyter.

Fusaroli, Riccardo & Kristian Tylén. 2012. Carving language for social coordination: A dynamical approach. Interaction Studies 13(1). 103–124.

Goschler, Juliana. 2017. A contrastive view on the cognitive motivation of linguistic patterns: Concord in English and German. In Stefan Hartmann (ed.), Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association 2017, 119–128.

Hilpert, Martin. 2008. New evidence against the modularity of grammar: Constructions, collocations, and speech perception. Cognitive Linguistics 19(3). 491–511.

Janda, Laura (ed.). 2013. Cognitive Linguistics: The Quantitative Turn. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter.

Kirby, Simon. 2012. Language is an Adaptive System: The Role of Cultural Evolution in the Origins of Structure. In Maggie Tallerman & Kathleen R. Gibson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution, 589–604. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Krawczak, Karolina & Dylan Glynn. forthc. Operationalising construal. Of / about prepositional profiling for cognition and communication predicates. In C. M. Bretones Callejas & Chris Sinha (eds.), Construals in language and thought. What shapes what? Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Langacker, Ronald W. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Vol. 1: Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Langacker, Ronald W. 1991. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Vol. 2: Descriptive Application. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Langacker, Ronald W. 2008. Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Langacker, Ronald W. 2015. Construal. In Ewa Dąbrowska & Dagmar Divjak (eds.), Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, 120–142. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter.

Matlock, Teenie. 2010. Abstract Motion is No Longer Abstract. Language and Cognition 2(2). 243–260.

Matlock, Teenie, David Sparks, Justin L. Matthews, Jeremy Hunter & Stephanie Huette. 2012. Smashing New Results on Aspectual Framing: How People Talk about Car Accidents. Studies in Language 36(3). 700–721.

Matlock, Teenie & Bodo Winter. 2015. Experimental Semantics. In Bernd Heine & Heiko Narrog (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis, 771–790. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pleyer, Michael & James Winters. 2014. Integrating Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution Research. Theoria et Historia Scientiarum 11. 19–43.

Schmid, Hans-Jörg & Franziska Günther. 2016. Toward a Unified Socio-Cognitive Framework for Salience in Language. Frontiers in Psychology 7. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01110 (31 March, 2018).

Schönefeld, Doris (ed.). 2011. Converging evidence: methodological and theoretical issues for linguistic research. (Human Cognitive Processing 33). Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Taylor, John R. 2003. Linguistic Categorization. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Verhagen, Arie. 2007. Construal and Perspectivization. In Dirk Geeraerts & Hubert Cuyckens (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, 48–81. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CfP: New Directions in Language Evolution Research

Panorama of Tallinn from the sea (Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ATallinnPan.jpg, by Terker, CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Jonas Nölle, Peeter Tinits and I are going to submit a workshop proposal to next year’s Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE), which will be held in Tallinn from August 29th to September 1st, 2018. We thought this would be a nice opportunity to bring evolutionary linguistics to SLE – and a also a good opportunity to discuss novel and innovative approaches to language evolution in a condensed workshop setting.

Please note that there will be – as usual at SLE – a three-step selection process:

Step 1: You submit a 300-word abstract to us (the organizers: newdir.langev@gmail.com) by November 10th. We then select up to 12 papers that we include in our workshop proposal. As we want the “New directions” in our title to be more than a shallow phrase, we will base our selection as much as possible on the innovativeness of the abstracts we receive. If we’re unable to consider your paper for the workshop, there’s still the option to submit to the general session.

Step 2: Our workshop proposal is then reviewed by the scientific committee, and we’ll receive a notification of acceptance or rejection by December 15th. Good news: If you’ve submitted an abstract, there’s nothing for you to do at this point except for keeping your fingers crossed.

Step 3: If the workshop is accepted, we will ask you to submit a 500-word abstract via the conference submission system, which will be peer-reviewed like any general session paper. Notifications of acceptance or rejection can be expected in March 2018.

We’re looking forward to your contributions, and regardless of the outcome of our proposal, we hope to see many of you in Tallinn!

Here’s our CfP, which will also appear on Linguist List and on the official SLE2018 website soon:

Research on language evolution is undoubtedly among the fastest-growing topics in linguistics. This is not a coincidence: While scholars have always been interested in the origins and evolution of language, it is only now that many questions can be addressed empirically drawing on a wealth of data and a multitude of methodological approaches developed in the different disciplines that try to find answers to what has been called “the hardest problem in science” (Christiansen & Kirby 2003). Importantly, any theory of how language may have emerged requires a solid understanding of how language and other communication systems work. As such, the questions in language evolution research are manifold and interface in multiple ways with key open questions in historical and theoretical linguistics: What exactly makes human language unique compared to animal communication systems? How do cognition, communication and transmission shape grammar? Which factors can explain linguistic diversity? How and why do languages change? To what extent is the structure of language(s) shaped by extra-linguistic, environmental factors?

Over the last 20 years or so, evolutionary linguistics has set out to find answers to these and many more questions. As, e.g., Dediu & De Boer (2016) have noted, the field of language evolution research is currently coming of age, and it has developed a rich toolkit of widely-adopted methods both for comparative research, which investigates the commonalities and differences between human language and animal communication systems, and for studying the cumulative cultural evolution of sign systems in experimental settings, including both computational and behavioral approaches (see e.g. Tallerman & Gibson 2012; Fitch 2017). In addition, large-scale typological studies have gained importance in recent research on language evolution (e.g. Evans 2010).

The goal of this workshop is to discuss innovative theoretical and methodological approaches that go beyond the current state of the art by proposing and empirically testing new hypotheses, by developing new or refining existing methods for the study of language evolution, and/or by reinterpreting the available evidence in the light of innovative theoretical frameworks. In this vein, we aim at bringing together researchers from multiple disciplines and theoretical backgrounds to discuss the latest developments in language evolution research. Topics include, but are not limited to,

experimental approaches investigating the emergence and/or development of sign systems in frameworks such as experimental semiotics (e.g. Galantucci & Garrod 2010) or artificial language learning (e.g. Kirby et al. 2014);

empirical research on non-human communication systems as well as comparative research on animal cognition with respect to its relevance for the evolution of cognitive prerequisites for fully-fledged human language (Kirby 2017);

approaches using computational modelling and robotics (Steels 2011) in order to investigate problems like the grounding of symbol systems in non-symbolic representations (Harnad 1990), the emergence of the particular features that make human language unique (Kirby 2017, Smith 2014), or the question to what extent these features are domain-specific, i.e. evolved by natural selection for a specifically linguistic function (Culbertson & Kirby 2016);

research that explicitly combines expertise from multiple different disciplines, e.g. typology and neurolinguistics (Bickel et al. 2015); genomics, archaeology, and linguistics (Pakendorf 2014, Theofanopoulou et al. 2017); comparative biology and philosophy of language (Moore 2016); and many more.

If you are interested in participating in the workshop, please send an abstract (c. 300 words) to the organizers (newdir.langev@gmail.com) by November 10th. We will let you know by November 15th if your paper is eligible for the proposed workshop. If our workshop proposal is accepted, you will be required to submit an anonymous abstract of ca. 500 words via the SLE submission system by January 15th. If our proposal is not accepted or if we cannot accommodate your paper in the workshop, you can still submit your abstract as a general session paper.

References

Bickel, Balthasar, Alena Witzlack-Makarevich, Kamal K. Choudhary, Matthias Schlesewsky & Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky. 2015. The Neurophysiology of Language Processing Shapes the Evolution of Grammar: Evidence from Case Marking. PLOS ONE 10(8). e0132819.

Christiansen, Morten H. & Simon Kirby. 2003. Language Evolution: The Hardest Problem in Science. In Morten H. Christiansen & Simon Kirby (eds.), Language Evolution, 1–15. (Oxford Studies in the Evolution of Language 3). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Culbertson, Jennifer & Simon Kirby. 2016. Simplicity and Specificity in Language: Domain-General Biases Have Domain-Specific Effects. Frontiers in Psychology 6. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01964.

Dediu, Dan & Bart de Boer. 2016. Language evolution needs its own journal. Journal of Language Evolution 1(1). 1–6.

Evans, Nicholas. 2010. Language diversity as a tool for understanding cultural evolution. In Peter J. Richerson & Morten H. Christiansen (eds.), Cultural Evolution : Society, Technology, Language, and Religion, 233–268. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Fitch, W. Tecumseh. 2017. Empirical approaches to the study of language evolution. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 24(1). 3–33.

Galantucci, Bruno & Simon Garrod. 2010. Experimental Semiotics: A new approach for studying the emergence and the evolution of human communication. Interaction Studies 11(1). 1–13.

Harnad, Stevan. 1990. The symbol grounding problem. Physica D 42. 335–346.

Kirby, Simon, Tom Griffiths & Kenny Smith. 2014. Iterated Learning and the Evolution of Language. Current Opinion in Neurobiology 28. 108–114.

Kirby, Simon. 2017. Culture and biology in the origins of linguistic structure. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 24(1). 118–137.

Moore, Richard. 2016. Meaning and ostension in great ape gestural communication. Animal Cognition 19(1). 223–231.

Pakendorf, Brigitte. 2014. Coevolution of languages and genes. Current Opinion in Genetics & Development 29. 39–44.

Smith, Andrew D.M. 2014. Models of language evolution and change: Language evolution and change. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science 5(3). 281–293.

Steels, Luc. 2011. Modeling the Cultural Evolution of Language. Physics of Life Reviews 8. 339–356.

Tallerman, Maggie & Kathleen R. Gibson (eds.). 2012. The Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Theofanopoulou, Constantina, Simone Gastaldon, Thomas O’Rourke, Bridget D. Samuels, Angela Messner, Pedro Tiago Martins, Francesco Delogu, Saleh Alamri & Cedric Boeckx. 2017. Self-domestication in Homo sapiens: Insights from comparative genomics. PLOS ONE 12(10). e0185306.

Usage context and overspecification

A new issue of the Journal of Language Evolution has just appeared, including a paper by Peeter Tinits, Jonas Nölle, and myself on the influence of usage context on the emergence of overspecification. (It has actually been published online already a couple of weeks ago, and an earlier version of it was included in last year’s Evolang proceedings.) Some of the volunteers who participated in our experiment have actually been recruited via Replicated Typo – thanks to everyone who helped us out! Without you, this study wouldn’t have been possible.

I hope that I’ll find time to write a bit more about this paper in the near future, especially about its development, which might itself qualify as an interesting example of cultural evolution. Even though the paper just reports on a tiny experimental case study, adressing a fairly specific phenomenon, we discovered, in the process of writing, that each of the three authors had quite different ideas of how language works, which made the write-up process much more challenging than expected (but arguably also more interesting).

For now, however, I’ll just link to the paper and quote our abstract:

This article investigates the influence of contextual pressures on the evolution of overspecification, i.e. the degree to which communicatively irrelevant meaning dimensions are specified, in an iterated learning setup. To this end, we combine two lines of research: In artificial language learning studies, it has been shown that (miniature) languages adapt to their contexts of use. In experimental pragmatics, it has been shown that referential overspecification in natural language is more likely to occur in contexts in which the communicatively relevant feature dimensions are harder to discern. We test whether similar functional pressures can promote the cumulative growth of referential overspecification in iterated artificial language learning. Participants were trained on an artificial language which they then used to refer to objects. The output of each participant was used as input for the next participant. The initial language was designed such that it did not show any overspecification, but it allowed for overspecification to emerge in 16 out of 32 usage contexts. Between conditions, we manipulated the referential context in which the target items appear, so that the relative visuospatial complexity of the scene would make the communicatively relevant feature dimensions more difficult to discern in one of them. The artificial languages became overspecified more quickly and to a significantly higher degree in this condition, indicating that the trend toward overspecification was stronger in these contexts, as suggested by experimental pragmatics research. These results add further support to the hypothesis that linguistic conventions can be partly determined by usage context and shows that experimental pragmatics can be fruitfully combined with artificial language learning to offer valuable insights into the mechanisms involved in the evolution of linguistic phenomena.

In addition to our article, there’s also a number of other papers in the new JoLE issue that are well worth a read, including another Iterated Learning paper by Clay Beckner, Janet Pierrehumbert, and Jennifer Hay, who have conducted a follow-up on the seminal Kirby, Cornish & Smith (2008) study. Apart from presenting highly relevant findings, they also make some very interesting methodological points.

Empirical approaches to the study of language evolution (PBR Special Issue)

There is no shortage of special issues on language evolution in the current landscape of academic journals. However, probably none of the three upcoming special issues I know of (or the many more I don’t know of) will match Tecumseh Fitch’s special issue on “Empirical approaches in the study of Language Evolution” in “Psychonomic Bulletin and Review”, at least in terms of sheer size – by my count, the issue contains no less than 36 contributions by 39 mostly very well-known researchers.

The volume starts out with an impressive overview – which also serves as a review paper on recent advances in language evolution research – by Fitch himself. Like some of the other contributions, it is freely available with open access. As all contributions are available as “online first” papers at the moment and have not been assigned to an issue of the journal yet, the references section of the overview is also a good starting point for retrieving the other papers in the special issue.

Some of the papers are response articles to other contributions in the volume, which nicely highlights some key debates and open questions in the field. For example, both David Adger and Dan Bowling react to Simon Kirby’s paper on “Culture and biology in the emergence of linguistic structure”. Reviewing a large number of (both computational and behavioral) experiments using the Iterated Learning paradigm, including recent work on Bayesian Iterated Learning, Kirby argues that linguistic structure emerges as sets of behaviors (utterances) are transmitted through an informational bottleneck (the limited data available to the language learner) and the behaviors adapt to better pass through the bottleneck. According to Kirby, “[a]n overarching universal arising from this cultural process is that compressible sets of behaviours pass through the bottleneck more easily. If behaviours also need to be expressive then rich systematic structure appears to be the inevitable result.” Adger, however, argues that expressivity and compressibility are not sufficient to explain the emergence of structure. He points out that the systematicity of human languages is restricted in particular ways and that in the case of some grammatical phenomena, the simplest and most expressive option is logically possible but unattested in the world’s languages. He therefore argues that the human language capacity imposes strong constraints on language development, while the structures of particular languages arise in the way envisaged by the Iterated Learning model.

Kirby also discusses the relation between biological and cultural factors in language evolution. Probably the most far-reaching conclusion he draws from Iterated Learning models (in particular, from work by Bill Thompson et al.) is that the language faculty can only contain weak domain-specific constraints, while any hard constraints on the acquisition of language will almost certainly be domain-general. Bowling’s response is targeted at this aspect of Kirby’s theory. While being sympathetic with the emphasis on cultural evolution, he argues that it “fails to leave the nature-nurture dichotomy behind”, as constraints are identified as either cultural or biological. Unfortunately, Bowling doesn’t really have enough space to unfold this argument in more detail in this very short response paper.

A second paper in the special issue that is accompanied by a short commentary is Mark Johnson‘s “Marr’s levels and the minimalist program” (preprint). He discusses the question “what kind of simplicity is likely to be most related to the plausibility of an evolutionary event introducing a change to a cognitive system?” Obviously, this question bears important implications for Chomsky’s minimalist theory of language evolution, according to which a single mutation gave rise to the operation Merge, “a simple formal operation that yields the kinds of hierarchical structures found in human languages”. Johnson points out that just because a cognitive system is easy to describe does not necessarily mean that it is evolutionarily plausible. In order to approach the question “What kind of simplicity?”, he takes up David Marr’s levels of analysis of cognitive systems: the implementational level (the “hardware”), the algorithmic level (the representations and data structures involved), and the computational level (the goal(s) of the system; the information it manipulates; the constraints it must satisfy). He suggests that complexity of genomic encoding might be most closely related to complexity at the implementational level. The introduction of Merge, however, is complex at the computational level, while the changes on the other two levels could be quite complex. To strengthen the minimalist account of language evolution, then, one would have to either show systematic connections between the three levels, or demonstrate that a simple change to neural architecture can give rise to human language.

In her response paper, Amy Perfors (preprint) basically seconds Johnson’s position. However, she also points out that, from the perspective of Occam’s razor, computational simplicity might nevertheless be an important factor in model selection: “Because the more computationally complex a model or a theory is, the more difficult it is, plausibly, to represent or learn. For those reasons the simplicity of Merge is a theoretical asset when evaluating its cognitive plausibility.”

Kirby’s and Johnson’s papers and the respective responses can of course only give a glimpse of the thematic breadth of the special issue and the diversity of theoretical frameworks represented in the volume. Other topics include, e.g., the architecture of the “language-ready brain”, advances and missed opportunities in comparative research, and the role of different modalities in the evolution of language.

CfP: Interaction and Iconicity in the Evolution of Language

Following the ICLC theme session on “Cognitive Linguistics and the Evolution of Language” last year, I’m guest-editing a Special Issue of the journal Interaction Studies together with Michael Pleyer, James Winters, and Jordan Zlatev. This volume, entitled “Interaction and Iconicity in the Evolution of Language: Converging Perspectives from Cognitive and Evolutionary Linguistics”, will focus on issues that emerged as common themes during the ICLC workshop.

Although many contributors to the theme session have already agreed to submit a paper, we would like to invite a limited number of additional contributions relevant to the topic of the volume. Here’s our Call for Papers.

Continue reading “CfP: Interaction and Iconicity in the Evolution of Language”

Learn an Alien Language!

I’ve set up a little experiment in collaboration with a small armada of co-authors (Jonas Nölle, Peeter Tinits, and Michael Pleyer). Be a pioneer in interstellar communication and try to accomplish an important mission:

http://tsamtrah.bplaced.net/

Many thanks to Thomas Hartmann for programming the online interface and to James Winters for some enormously helpful advice on the design of the experiment.

We’ll keep you posted about the results…

Cognitive Linguistics and the Evolution of Language

On Tuesday, July 21st, this year’s International Cognitive Linguistics Conference will host a theme session on “Cognitive Linguistics and the Evolution of Language” co-organized by three Replicated Typo authors: Michael Pleyer, James Winters, and myself. In addition, two Replicated Typo bloggers are co-authors on papers presented in the theme session.

The general idea of this session goes back to previous work by James and Michael, who promoted the idea of integrating Cognitive Linguistics and language evolution research in several conference talks as well as in a 2014 paper – published, quite fittingly, in a journal called “Theoria et Historia Scientiarum”, as the very idea of combining these frameworks requires some meta-theoretical reflection. As both cognitive and evolutionary linguistics are in themselves quite heterogeneous frameworks, the question emerges what we actually mean when we speak of “cognitive” or “evolutionary” linguistics, respectively.

I might come back to this meta-scientific discussion in a later post. For now, I will confine myself to giving a brief overview of the eight talks in our session. The full abstracts can be found here.

In the first talk, Vyv Evans (Bangor) proposes a two-step scenario of the evolution of language, informed by concepts from Cognitive Linguistics in general and Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar in particular:

The first stage, logically, had to be a symbolic reference in what I term a words-to-world direction, bootstrapping extant capacities that Autralopithecines, and later ancestral Homo shared with the great apes. But the emergence of a grammatical capacity is also associated with a shift towards a words-to-words direction symbolic reference: words and other grammatical constructions can symbolically refer to other symbolic units.

Roz Frank (Iowa) then outlines “The relevance of a ‘Complex Adaptive Systems’ approach to ‘language’” – note the scarequotes. She argues that “the CAS approach serves to replace older historical linguistic notions of languages as ‘organisms’ and as ‘species’”.

Sabine van der Ham, Hannah Little, Kerem Eryılmaz, and Bart de Boer (Brussels) then talk about two sets of experiments investigating the role of individual learning biases and cultural transmission in shaping language, in a talk entitled “Experimental Evidence on the Emergence of Phonological Structure”.

In the next talk, Seán Roberts and Stephen Levinson (Nijmegen) provide experimental evidence for the hypothesis that “On-line pressures from turn taking constrain the cultural evolution of word order”. Chris Sinha’s talk, entitled “Eco-Evo-Devo: Biocultural synergies in language evolution”, is more theoretical in nature, but no less interesting. Starting from the hypothesis that “many species construct “artefactual” niches, and language itself may be considered as a transcultural component of the species-specific human biocultural niche”, he argues that

Treating language as a biocultural niche yields a new perspective on both the human language capacity and on the evolution of this capacity. It also enables us to understand the significance of language as the symbolic ground of the special subclass of symbolic cognitive artefacts.

Arie Verhagen (Leiden) then discusses the question if public and private communication are “Stages in the Evolution of Language”. He argues against Tomasello’s idea that ““joint” intentionality emerged first and evolved into what is essentially still its present state, which set the stage for the subsequent evolution of “collective” intentionality” and instead defends the view that

these two kinds of processes and capacities evolved ‘in tandem’: A gradual increase in the role of culture (learned patterns of behaviour) produced differences and thus competition between groups of (proto-)humans, which in turn provided selection pressures for an increased capability and motivation of individuals to engage in collaborative activities with others.

James Winters (Edinburgh) then provides experimental evidence that “Linguistic systems adapt to their contextual niche”, addressing two major questions with the help of an artificial-language communication game:

(i) To what extent does the situational context influence the encoding of features in the linguistic system? (ii) How does the effect of the situational context work its way into the structure of language?

His results “support the general hypothesis that language structure adapts to the situational contexts in which it is learned and used, with short-term strategies for conveying the intended meaning feeding back into long-term, system-wider changes.”

The final talk, entitled “Communicating events using bodily mimesis with and without vocalization” is co-authored by Jordan Zlatev, Sławomir Wacewicz, Przemysław Żywiczyński, andJoost van de Weijer (Lund/Torun). They introduce an experiment on event communication and discuss to what extent the greater potential for iconic representation in bodily reenactment compared to in vocalization might lend support for a “bodily mimesis hypothesis of language origins”.

In the closing session of the workshop, this highly promising array of papers is discussed with one of the “founding fathers” of modern language evolution research, Jim Hurford (Edinburgh).

But that’s not all: Just one coffee break after the theme session, there will be a panel on “Language and Evolution” in the general session of the conference, featuring papers by Gareth Roberts & Maryia Fedzechkina; Jonas Nölle; Carmen Saldana, Simon Kirby & Kenny Smith; Yasamin Motamedi, Kenny Smith, Marieke Schouwstra & Simon Kirby; and Andrew Feeney.

Empty Constructions and the Meaning of “Meaning”

Textbooks are boring. In most cases, they consist of a rather tiring collection of more or less undisputed facts, and they omit the really interesting stuff such as controversial discussions or problematic cases that pose a serious challenge to a specific scientific theory. However, Martin Hilpert’s “Construction Grammar and its Application to English” is an admirable exception since it discusses various potential problems for Construction Grammar at length. What I found particularly interesting was the problem of “meaningless constructions”. In what follows, I will present some examples for such constructions and discuss what they might tell us about the nature of linguistic constructions. First, however, I will outline some basic assumptions of Construction Grammar. Continue reading “Empty Constructions and the Meaning of “Meaning””

Language as a multimodal phenomenon

The issue of multimodality has become a widely discussed topic in several branches of linguistics and especially in research on the evolution of language. Now, a special issue of the “Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B” has been dedicated to “Language as a multimodal phenomenon”. The issue, edited by Gabriella Vigliocco, Pamela Perniss, and David Vinson, features a variety of interesting papers by outstanding scholars from different fields such as gesture research, signed language research, neurolinguistics, and evolutionary linguistics.

For example, Susan Goldin-Meadow discusses “what the manual modality reveals about language, learning and cognition”, arguing that, in child language acquisition, manual gestures “precede, and predict, the acquisition of structures in speech”.

Ulf Liszkowski addresses the question of how infants communicate before they have acquired a language, and Aslı Özyürek reviews neuroscientific findings on “Hearning and seeing meaning in speech and gesture”. Jeremy Skipper discusses “how auditory cortex hears context during speech perception”, and Stephen Levinson and Judith Holler, in a paper entitled “The origin of human multi-modal communication”, talk about “the different roles that the different modalities play in human communication, as well as how they function as one integrated system despite their different roles and origins.”

Martin Sereno, in his opinion piece on the “Origin of symbol-using systems”, argues that we have to distinguish “the origin of a system capable of evolution from the subsequent evolution that system becomes capable of”. According to Sereno,

“Human language arose on a substrate of a system already capable of Darwinian evolution; the genetically supported uniquely human ability to learn a language reflects a key contact point between Darwinian evolution and language. Though implemented in brains generated by DNA symbols coding for protein meaning, the second higher-level symbol-using system of language now operates in a world mostly decoupled from Darwinian evolutionary constraints.”

Padraic Monaghan, Richard C. Shillcock, Morten H. Christiansen, and Simon Kirby address the question “How arbitrary is language?” Drawing on a large-scale corpus analysis, they show that

“sound–meaning mappings are more systematic than would be expected by chance. Furthermore, this systematicity is more pronounced for words involved in the early stages of language acquisition and reduces in later vocabulary development.”

Mutsumi Imai and Sotaro Kita propose a “sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis for language acquisition and language evolution”, arguing that “sound symbolism helps infants and toddlers associate speech sounds with their referents to establish a lexical representation” and that sound symbolism might be deeply related to language evolution.

Karen Emmorey discusses the role of iconicity in sign language grammar and processing, and in the final paper, Pamela Perniss and Gabriella Vigliocco argue that ” iconicity in face-to-face communication (spoken and signed) is a powerful vehicle for bridging between language and human sensori-motor experience, and, as such, iconicity provides a key to understanding language evolution, development and processing.”

The special issue is available here. Some of the papers are open access, all others can be accessed freely until October 19th ( User name: language; Password: tb1651 – since this information was distributed by the Royal Sociaty via several mailing lists, I guess I’m free to share it here).