Category: Uncategorized

This is a guest post by Angarika Deb.

Sexual Selection theory, though much celebrated, has faced criticism since its inception. A new model now proposes sexual reproduction and reproductive social behaviour to be cooperative instead of competitive, as was initially advocated earlier by Darwin.

After the sensational theory of natural selection, Darwin outlined the theory of sexual selection in his book, The Origin of Species (Darwin, 1869) and developed it in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (Darwin, 1871). This was in an effort to explain the structural and behavioural peculiarities in animals that did not make complete sense under the light of natural selection, for example ornamented plumage, mate signalling under predation risk etc. Natural selection is dependent on a struggle for enhancing individual survival; whereas sexual selection advocates a struggle between the sexes (intersexual competition) and amongst them (intrasexual competition) for rearing maximum progeny. ‘The result is not death to the unsuccessful competitor, but few or no offspring’, as explained by Darwin (1871). Heritable traits that are deemed detrimental to survival, were explained by sexual selection as conferring an advantage in intrasexual competition for finding mates and intersexual competition between mates to increase their own future reproductive fitness.

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.

This is a guest post by Angarika Deb.

In a lineage of ancestors, humans are the only species left without a coat of body hair. Keeping in mind thermoregulation of bare skin, we speculate conditions for evolution of nakedness. Can it be coupled with bipedality?

One of the salient features of the Mammals group is possession of body hair. Well, most of them at least. But we stand living proof against that. How, where and why did our body hair disappear and nakedness evolve? While Darwin argued that nakedness evolved for sexual ornamental purposes, Andersson[3] disagrees on the premise that, if sexual traits like a shiny plumage are indicative of good health, skin devoid of hair would convey poor health and won’t attract mates. It is important to determine the initial step of this denudation. This useful source states that a coat of body hair prevents too much heat reaching the body in daytime as well as shielding from cold at night. Protection from wind, wounds, bites, and UV radiation also feature in the advantages. Why then, did Homo sapiens end up losing one great layer of protection? If one believes in ‘Survival of the Fittest’, the benefits stemming from near disappearance of human body hair must surely be great enough to outweigh the costs of these protective functions. The repository of hypotheses trying to explain this step of evolution is still growing.

This year at EvoLang, I’m releasing CHIELD: The Causal Hypotheses in Evolutionary Linguistics Database.  It’s a collection of theories about the evolution of language, expressed as causal graphs.  The aim of CHIELD is to build a comprehensive overview of evolutionary approaches to language.  Hopefully it’ll help us find competing and supporting evidence, link hypotheses together into bigger theories and generally help make our ideas more transparent. You can access CHIELD right now, but hang around for details of the challenges.

The first thing that CHIELD can help express is the (sometimes unexpected) causal complexity of theories.  For example, Dunbar (2004) suggests that gossip replaced physical grooming in humans to support increasingly complicated social interactions in larger groups.  However, the whole theory is actually composed of 29 links, involving predation risk, endorphins and resource density:

The graph above might seem very complicated, but it was actually constructed just by going through the text of Dunbar (2004) and recording each claim about variables that were causally linked.  By dividing the theory into individual links it becomes easier to think about each part.

Second, CHIELD also helps find other theories that intersect with this one through variables like theory of mind, population size or the problem of freeriders, so you can also use CHIELD to explore multiple documents at once.  For example, here are all the connections that link population size and morphological complexity (9 papers so far in the database):

The first thing to notice is that there are multiple hypotheses about how population size and morphological complexity are linked.  We can also see at a glance that there are different types of evidence for each link.  Some are supported from multiple studies and methods, while others are currently just hypotheses without direct evidence.

However, CHIELD won’t work without your help!  CHIELD has built-in tools for you – yes YOU – to contribute.  You can edit data, discuss problems and add your own hypotheses.  It’s far from perfect and of course there will be disagreements.  But hopefully it will lead to productive discussions and a more cohesive field.

Which brings us to the challenges …

The EvoLang Causal Graph challenge: Contribute your own hypotheses

You can add data to CHIELD using the web interface.  The challenge is to draw your EvoLang paper as a causal graph.  It’s fun!  The first two papers to be contributed will become part of my poster at EvoLang.

Here are some tips:

• Break down your hypothesis into individual causal links.
• Try to use existing variable names, so that your hypothesis connects to other work.  You can find a list of variables here, or the web interface will suggest some.  But don’t be afraid to add new variables.
• Try to add direct quotes from the paper to the “Notes” field to support the link.
• If your paper is already included, do you agree about the interpretation? If not, you can raise an issue or edit the data yourself.

More help is available here.  Click here to add data now!  Your data will become available on CHIELD, and your name will be added to the list of contributors.

Bonus Challenge: Contribute 5 papers, become a co-author!

I’ll be writing an article about the database and some initial findings for the Journal of Language Evolution.  If you contribute 5 papers or more, then you’ll be added as a co-author.  As an incentive to contribute further, co-authors will be ordered by the number of papers they contribute.  This offer is open to anyone studying evolutionary linguistics, not just people presenting at EvoLang.  You should check first whether the paper you want to add has already been included.

Bonus Challenge: Contribute some code, become a co-author!

CHIELD is open source.  The GitHub repository for CHIELD has some outstanding issues. If you contribute some programming to address them, you’ll become a co-author on the journal article.

Submissions are being sought for a special issue of Language and Cognition on Experimental approaches to iconicity in language. We welcome submissions related to any aspect of the many forms and functions of iconicity in natural language (see below). Papers may feature new experimental findings, or may present novel theoretical syntheses of experimental work on iconicity in language. Manuscripts should be a maximum of 8,000 words, with shorter submissions preferred.

Many researchers in language and cognition now recognize that iconicity – resemblance between form and meaning – is a fundamental feature of human languages, spoken and signed alike (Nuckolls 1999; Taub 2001; Perniss, Thompson, & Vigliocco, 2010; Dingemanse et al., 2015; Perry, Perlman & Lupyan, 2015; Ortega, 2017). Iconicity is found across all levels
of linguistic structure, spanning discourse, grammar, morphology, lexicon, phonology and phonetics, and even orthography. It is found in the prosody of speech and sign and in the gestures that accompany linguistic behaviour.

While experimental research on iconicity in speech has long favoured the study of pseudowords like bouba and kiki, a growing body of experimental research shows that iconicity plays an active role in a number of basic language processes, cutting across cognition, development, cultural and biological evolution. The special issue aims to feature some of the most exciting new experimental research on the many forms, functions, and
timescales of iconicity in human language.

Special issue editors
Marcus Perlman, University of Birmingham
Pamela Perniss, University of Brighton
Mark Dingemanse, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

References
Dingemanse, M., Blasi, D.E., Lupyan, G., Christiansen, M.H., & Monaghan, P. (2015). Arbitrariness, iconicity, and systematicity in language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19, 603-615.
Nuckolls, J.B. (1999). The case for sound symbolism. Annual Review of Anthropology, 28, 255-282.
Ortega, Gerardo. “Iconicity and Sign Lexical Acquisition: A Review.” Frontiers in Psychology 8 (2017). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01280.
Perniss, P., Thompson, R.L., & Vigliocco, G. (2010). Iconicity as a general property of language: Evidence from spoken and signed languages. Frontiers in Psychology, 1, 227.
Perry, L.K., Perlman, M. & Lupyan, G. (2015). Iconicity in English and Spanish and its relation to lexical category and age of acquisition. PLoS ONE, 10, e0137147.
Taub, S. (2001). Language from the body: Iconicity and metaphor in American Sign Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

How to submit. If you would like to contribute, please email us an 800-1000-word abstract by 1st April, 2018. Abstracts should be sent to Marcus Perlman (m.perlman@bham.ac.uk). We will return a decision on your abstract by 15th April, and first submissions will be due on 15th August. Manuscripts will be submitted through the Language and Cognition submission interface. We aim to put out the complete issue by the beginning of 2019. Notably, submissions that proceed faster can appear online first.

Call for papers of IACS3 in Toronto is below, including research topics of experimental semiotics, speech and gesture and the evolution of language. And lots more, of course. Full call can be seen here: http://www.perceptualartifacts.org/iacs-2018/cfp.html