Replicated Typo

The Past, Present and Future of Language Evolution Research

During this year’s EvoLang conference, a book was launched with perspectives on the last conference. The past, present and future of language evolution research (McCrohon, Thompson, Verhoef & Yamauchi, 2014) is a volume of student responses to EvoLang9 in Kyoto. It includes basic reviews and criticism, synthesis of current approaches, experiments and sociological perspectives.

It makes for interesting reading. What comes across in all the papers is a drive for collaboration and integration of fields and ideas, as the diagram from the contribution by Barcceló-Coblijn and Martin shows. These are serious attempts to understand what has been learned so far and find new perspectives that incorporate empirical evidence. Many papers see neuroscientific evidence as a key to expanding many areas of research.

Continue reading “The Past, Present and Future of Language Evolution Research”

Empirical Advances in Language Evolution

This is a guest post by Jeremy Collins

Hauser, Yang, Berwick, Tattersall, Ryan, Watamull, Chomsky and Lewontin have recently published an article entitled ‘The Mystery of Language Evolution‘ (see also Sean’s post), in which they argue that theories of language evolution today are ‘accompanied by a poverty of evidence’ and that ‘the most fundamental questions about the origins and evolution of our linguistic capacity remain as mysterious as ever’. Rather than criticise their article, I thought I would summarise what I think some of the empirical advances have been, in defence of the field. A few well-known lines of research seem to have fleshed out some details of how language evolved, even if they are still in their infancy.

1. Vocal learning in other species.

Culturally transmitted song has evolved multiple times in various bird species, dolphins and bats. Although Hauser et al. dismiss bird song as irrelevant in that it is ‘finite’ and lacks compositional meaning (p.6), these species shed light on why culturally transmitted vocalisation evolved in humans. These species typically live in groups of unrelated individuals, for instance, who co-operate in foraging. The complexity of their learnt song may have evolved in the context of recognising and being altruistic towards kin (Sharp et al. 2005) (or by extension any unrelated members who exploit this altruism by managing to acquire the song of the group). In a similar way, much of the complexity and cultural variability of human language may have developed in the context of in-group identification, such as our ability to detect subtle variations in accent (Fitch 2004). While sexual selection is an important reason for the evolution of vocal learning in some of these species, it is unlikely to be the main driving force in humans given the lack of sexual dimorphism in language use, in contrast with song birds (Fitch 2004), although its role in human pair bonding is similar to pair bonding in monogamous parrot species (Pepperberg 1999). Pepperberg (1999) showed that African Grey Parrots can learn to use spoken words and correctly answer questions involving abstract semantic categories, and with some understanding of syntax, showing how bird vocal learning is not necessarily as qualitatively different from human language acquisition as Hauser et al. suggest.

2. The genetics of language.

The precise relationships between genes and language are unknown, as the authors say; but specific language disorders at least show that syntax and fluency of speech are heritable, which is an advance in its own right. Vocabulary size and vocabulary acquisition patterns (e.g. rate of learning words at different ages in infancy) have also been shown to be heritable (Stromswold 2001). Although these are not genes ‘for’ these specific linguistic traits,they are likely to have been selected for partly in the context of language use, given the vast difference in syntactic complexity and vocabulary size between human languages and languages that primates, such as Kanzi or Nim Chimpsky, can acquire.

3. The neurobiology of language and tool use.

The neural circuitry for language is likely to have been co-opted in part from the transmission and use of tools; they both involve complex motor actions and have been suggested to use similar areas of the brain such as Broca’s area, which is activated in experiments involving complex tool manufacture (Higuchi et al. 2009), and which is often lateralised differently in the brain in left-handed individuals (Knecht et al. 2000). The prevalence of gesture in spoken languages, the fact that we can acquire complex sign languages, and the range of innate gestures in gorillas and chimpanzees (contrasted with their absence of vocalization) suggest that gesture may have been a platform for the evolution of language, and manual dexterity for the evolution of recursive syntax in particular (Arbib 2012). If the authors want an evolutionary origin for ‘discrete infinity’, this is one candidate.

4. The study of sound symbolism.

Three lines of evidence suggest that sound-symbolism helped spoken language evolve: robust sound-meaning pairings tested across 6000 languages, controlling for language family and region (such as proximal demonstratives and words for ‘small’ using a front vowel) (Blasi et al. 2014); rich systems of ideophones, namely words similar to onomatopoeia but which go beyond sound in being able to depict appearance, texture, motion, tastes, and emotions, in language families in Africa, Southeast Asia and the Americas (Dingemanse 2012); and innate associations of sounds and shapes independent of language, as suggested by ideophones, and the bouba/kiki and similar tests (Ramachandran 2013).

5. The study of the diversity of grammar.

As an example, grammatical categories regularly develop from simpler, lexical categories, in ways that recur across many language families: e.g.pre-/post-positions develop from abstract nouns and verbs, adjectives develop from forms of nouns and verbs, tense and aspect markers develop from adverbs or nominalizers (e.g. the development of English ‘-ing’ from a nominal affix to a gerund marker to a participle marker), and so on (Heine and Kuteva 2007). Cross-linguistic work can therefore shed light on what the first languages may have been like, such as having more weakly differentiated grammatical categories (e.g. collapsing adjectives or adpositions with nouns and verbs). Studies on patterns of basic word order suggest that that subject-object-verb order is likely to have been used, given its dominance in spoken languages today when controlling for geography and language family (Gell-Mann and Ruhlen 2011, Dryer 1992), and the way that people spontaneously converge on that word order when gesturing (Goldin-Meadow et al. 2008). Languages spoken by small populations tend to develop case-marking and other complex morphology (Lupyan and Dale 2010), suggesting that this may also have been a feature of early languages. Increasingly detailed surveys of linguistic diversity can help generate hypotheses like these, and hopefully soon allow ways of testing them.

Hauser et al.’s paper has some valid criticisms of the field (such as of models of the cultural evolution of compositionality, and the evidence for Neanderthal language), but I think that their assessment that ‘the fundamental questions remain as mysterious as ever’ is too pessimistic. Others have noted that none of the authors were at the last Evolution of Language conference, which is not surprising given what I remember of meeting Charles Yang, the second author on that paper, at the previous conference in Kyoto. He was sitting gloomily at dinner with a group of Japanese generativists, who were not talking. I asked him whether he had enjoyed any of the talks, and he said ‘Almost none. Their notion of language is so…impoverished.’ He brightened up when the conversation turned back to Chomsky, whom he had had dinner with recently. ‘We drank a lot of wine. And Noam had two desserts.’

Jeremy Collins designs kitchens and bathrooms at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. His homepage is here.

References

Arbib M. A. (2012) Tool use and constructions. Behav Brain Sci. 35(4):218-9.

Blasi et al. (2014) Sound symbolism and the origins of language. IN

Cartmill, Roberts, Lyn & Cornsih (Eds. ) The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 10th EvoLang Conference.

Dingemanse, Mark. 2012. “Advances in the Cross-Linguistic Study of
Ideophones.” Language and Linguistics Compass 6 (10): 654–72.
doi:10.1002/lnc3.361.

Dryer, M. (1992). The Greenbergian word order correlations. Language, pages 81–138.

Fitch, W. T. (2004). The evolution of language. In: The Cognitive Neurosciences (3rd Edition, Ed. by Gazzaniga, M.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Gell-Mann, M. and Ruhlen, M. (2011). The origin and evolution of word order. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(42):17290–17295.

Goldin-Meadow, S., So, W. C., O ̈zyu ̈rek, A., and Mylander, C. (2008). The natural order of events: How speakers of different languages represent events nonverbally. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(27):9163–9168.

Higuchi, S., Chaminade, T., Imamizu, H., and Kawato, M. (2009). Shared neural correlates for language and tool use in broca’s area. Neuroreport, 20(15):1376–1381.

Knecht, S., Dr ̈ager, B., Deppe, M., Bobe, L., Lohmann, H., Fl ̈oel, A., Ringelstein, E.-B., and Henningsen, H. (2000). Handedness and hemispheric language dominance in healthy humans. Brain, 123(12):2512–2518.

Lupyan, G. and Dale, R. (2010). Language structure is partly determined by social structure. PLoS ONE, 5(1):e8559.

Pepperberg, I.M. (1999). The Alex Studies: Cognitive and Communicative Abilities of Grey Parrots. Harvard.

Sharp, S.P., McGowan, A., Wood, M.J., and Hatchwell, B.J. (2005). Learned kin recognition cues in a social bird. Nature, 434:1127-1130

Stromswold, K. (2001). The heritability of language: A review and metaanalysis of twin, adoption, and linkage studies. Language, 77(4):647–723.

Digital Criticism Comes of Age, a Post at 3QD

I’ve got a new post at 3 Quarks Daily: The Only Game in Town: Digital Criticism Comes of Age.

I open with Moretti – natch – then to Willard McCarty’s 2013 Busa Award Lecture, where he talks of embracing the computer as Other. I end with Said on his belief in an autonomous aesthetic realm, despite the difficulties of conceptualizing how it could possibly work. The thrust of the article, though, is whether or not we can actually get this venture moving, really moving. What are the chances of really embracing the Other?

Though I made my peace with the computer years ago, and so am biased, I don’t know the answer to that question. But I’ve made some progress in figuring out what that question entails and that form the bulk of my essay.

The issue is one that’s been with academic literary study since the early 20th Century. In the 1920s the matter was stated most succinctly by Archibald MacLeish, that poems should not mean but be. In that late 1950s we find ourselves in the “Polemical Introduction” to Northrup Frye’s well-known Anatomy of Criticism (pp. 27-28):

The reading of literature should, like prayer in the Gospels, step out of the talking world of criticism into the private and secret presence of literature. Otherwise the reading will not be a genuine literary experience, but a mere reflection of critical conventions, memories, and prejudices. The presence of incommunicable experienced in center of criticism will always keep criticism as art, as long as the critic recognized that criticism comes out of it but cannot be built on it.

The issue came home to me in a rejection letter for my first essay on “Kubla Khan” – which ended up going into Language and Style in 1985 – where the reviewer complained that the essay “ought to argue with itself, to put into question some of the patterns it establishes-or better, perhaps to let the poem talk back.”

What does he mean, “let the poem talk back”? I know very well that the statement isn’t meant to be taken literally. But what’s the non-literal version of the statement? Under what circumstances could a poem do something like talk back?

Under face-to-face performance circumstances. To be sure, the poem doesn’t talk, but the poet does. The poet recites the poem, the teller spins the tale, the audience reacts with silence, groans, laughter, remarks, and the poet replies. There we the poet/story-teller on an even footing, in the same “space,” one that really IS interactive. But criticism really isn’t like that, no matter how much this or that critic wishes otherwise. Continue reading “Digital Criticism Comes of Age, a Post at 3QD”

The Mystery of Language Evolution: We can’t know more until we do

Hauser, Yang, Berwick, Tattersall, Ryan, Watumull, Chomsky and Lewontin have a co-authored article on The Mystery of Language Evolution. It’s a review of current directions in the field with the basic message that we don’t yet understand enough for empirical evidence from animal studies, archaeology, palaeontology, genetics or modelling to inform theories of language evolution. Here I summarise the paper and offer some criticisms.

The core language phenotype of interest, according to the authors, is discrete infinity as exemplified in recursive operations found in combinatorial phonology and hierarchical syntax. The authors argue that the methods of evolutionary biology cannot yet be adequately applied to the evolution of this phenotype.

The paper begins with an illustration of the methods of evolutionary biology in a case where this kind of inference is possible. Túngara frogs (pictured above) have a very simple communication system (males croak to attract females), and we know a lot about the mechanisms underlying production and perception and how it links to fitness. However, the obvious adaptive hypothesis (perception adapted after production) was proven wrong by comparison with living sister species (they had similar perception, but not production capacities, so production adapted to perception). This method is hard to apply to language evolution, because we don’t have a good idea of the mechanisms involved and we have no sister-species to compare ourselves to.

Specifically, the authors focus on 4 domains of inquiry, which they claim cannot contribute to theories of language evolution.

Continue reading “The Mystery of Language Evolution: We can’t know more until we do”

Toward a Computational Historicism. Part 4: Into the Autonomous Aesthetic

This is the fourth and last in a series of posts that began with Discourse and Conceptual Topology, moved to From History to Abstraction, and then Abstraction at the Time Scale of History.

In the 6th pamphlet from Stanford’s Literary Lab, “Operationalizing”: or, the Function of Measurement in Modern Literary Theory, Franco Moretti ended with a call to explicate the theoretical consequences of computing for literary study. That’s what I’ve been doing. It is now time to wrap up the exposition.

Let us begin with a passage from one of the last essays published by Edward Said, Globalizing Literary Study (PMLA, Vol. 116, No. 1, 2001, pp. 64-68). In his second paragraph Said notes: “An increasing number of us, I think, feel that there is something basically unworkable or at least drastically changed about the traditional frameworks in which we study literature“ (p. 64). Agreed. He goes on (pp. 64-65):

I myself have no doubt, for instance, that an autonomous aesthetic realm exists, yet how it exists in relation to history, politics, social structures, and the like, is really difficult to specify. Questions and doubts about all these other relations have eroded the formerly perdurable national and aesthetic frameworks, limits, and boundaries almost completely. The notion neither of author, nor of work, nor of nation is as dependable as it once was, and for that matter the role of imagination, which used to be a central one, along with that of identity has undergone a Copernican transformation in the common understanding of it.

What has happened to all those things, as Alan Liu has noted in “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities” (PMLA 128, 2013, 409-423) is that they have dissolved into vast networks of objects and processes interacting across many different spatial and temporal scales, from the syllables of a haiku dropping into a neural net through the process of rendering ancient texts into movies made in Hollywood, Bollywood, or “Chinawood” (that is, Hengdian, in Zhejiang Province) and shown around the world. Continue reading “Toward a Computational Historicism. Part 4: Into the Autonomous Aesthetic”

Toward a Computational Historicism. Part 3: Abstraction at the Time Scale of History

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which humanity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sign to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
–Percy Bysshe Shelley

In the first post in this series, Discourse and Conceptual Topology, I reviewed network models on three scales, micro, meso, and macro. In the second post, From History to Abstraction, I moved to the micro scale and argued that the mechanism of abstraction proposed by David Hays gives us a way of thinking about how a historical process can lead to subsequent abstraction and illustrated the model through an examination of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129. In this post I examine Heuser and Le-Khac on the 19th Century British novel and undertake a formal comparison of The Winter’s Tale and Wuthering Heights in which I argue that Brontë had the advantage of conceptual machinery unavailable to Shakespeare, though in some way anticipated by him. I hope to conclude this series with a fourth post in which I return to purely theoretical and methodological matters.

History: Showing and Telling

As we all know, one of the major problems of literary studies up to now is that it has concentrated its attentions on a relatively small body of texts, the so-called canon, and has allowed the examination of those texts to stand as a proxy for all of literary history. The assumption is either that, because of their quality, those are the only texts that matter or, perhaps, their quality allows them to “stand-in” for the rest. The widespread availability of powerful computers now allows as to put these assumptions to the test or, rather, simply to abandon them.

Sister disciplines have developed techniques for analyzing large bodies of texts, corpus linguistics, and literary critics are applying these to newly available digital text collections. I want to examine one such study, Ryan Heuser and Long Le-Khac, A Quantitative Literary History of 2,958 Nineteenth-Century British Novels: The Semantic Cohort Method (Stanford Literary Lab, Pamphlet 4, May 2012; HERE is an older post on this study). Their corpus included almost 3000 British novels spanning the period from 1785 to 1900. What they discovered, roughly speaking, is a shift from abstract terms to concrete, which they characterize as shift from telling (abstract terminology) showing (concrete terms). They read this shift through Raymond Williams (The Country and the City) as reflecting a population shift from small rural closely-knit communities to large urban communities where people are constantly amid strangers. Continue reading “Toward a Computational Historicism. Part 3: Abstraction at the Time Scale of History”

Toward a Computational Historicism. Part II: From History to Abstraction

I examined three different uses of network vizualizations, topic models, Moretti’s plot diagrams, and cognitive networks in first part of this essay, Discourse and Conceptual Topology. When I posted that I imagined only a second part. In the writing, though, that second part grew and grew, so I cut it in two.

In this part I pose the problem of time and discuss two essays by Stephen Greenblatt, “The Cultivation of Anxiety: King Lear and His Heirs” and “Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture” and then compare Amleth (Saxo-Grammaticus) with Hamlet (Shakespeare). I then move back to cognitive networks and talk about Hays’s concept of metalingual defintion and conclude with more Shakespeare, Sonnet 129. I’ll get to Heuser and Le-Khac in Part 3: Prophesy.

Time and History

For physics, I understand, time presents a problem. It seems to have a direction, as some processes are irreversible. Why? If you drop a small quantity of ink into a tumbler of water – as I did in A Primer on Self-Organization: With some tabletop physics you can do at home – it diffuses, irreversibly so. The ink particles never collect together into the compact volume they had when first dropped into the water. Why?

Continue reading “Toward a Computational Historicism. Part II: From History to Abstraction”

Toward a Computational Historicism. Part 1: Discourse and Conceptual Topology

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
– Percy Bysshe Shelley

… it is precisely because we are talking about ordinary language that we need to adopt a notation as different from ordinary language as possible, to keep us from getting lost in confusion between the object of description and the means of description.
¬–Sydney Lamb

Worlds within worlds – that’s how Tim Perper, my friend and colleague, described biology. At the smallest scale we have individual molecules, with DNA being of prime importance. At the largest scale we have the earth as a whole, with all living beings interacting in a single ecosystem over billions of years. In between we have cells, tissues, and organs of various sizes, autonomous organisms, populations of organisms on various scales from the invisible to continent-spanning, and interactions among populations of organisms on various scales.

Literature too is like that, from single figures and tropes, even single words (think of Joyce’s portmanteaus) through complete works of various sizes, from haiku to oral epics, from short stories through multi-volume novels, onto whole bodies of literature circulating locally, regionally, across continents and between them, from weeks and years to centuries and millennia. Somehow we as humanists and literary critics must comprehend it all. Breathtaking, no?

In this essay I sketch a potential computational historicism operating at multiple scales, both in time and textual extent. In the first part I consider network models on three scale: 1) topic models at the macroscale, 2) Moretti’s plot networks at the mesoscale, and 3) cognitive networks, taken from computational linguistics, at the microscale. I give examples of each and conclude by sketching relationships among them. I open the second part by presenting an account of abstraction given by David Hays in the early 1970s; in this model abstract concepts are defined over stories. I then move on to Hauser and Le-Khac on 19th Century novels, Stephen Greenblatt on self and person, and consider several texts, Amleth, Hamlet, The Winter’s Tale, Wuthering Heights, and Heart of Darkness.

Graphs and Networks

To the mathematician the image below depicts a topological object called a graph. Civilians tend to call such objects networks. The nodes or vertices, as they are called, are connected by arcs or edges.

Such graphs can be used to represent many different kinds of phenomena, a road map is an obvious example, a kinship tree is another, sentence structure is a third example. The point is that such graphs are signs of phenomena, notations. They are not the phenomena itself. Continue reading “Toward a Computational Historicism. Part 1: Discourse and Conceptual Topology”

The Only Game in Town: Remarks on Alan Liu and Digital Humanities

I’ve collected five New Savanna posts on Alan Liu into a single PDF; you can download it from my SSRN page, Remarks on Alan Liu and the Digital Humanities,
A Working Paper. Abstract and introduction below.

* * * * *

Abstract: Alan Liu has been organizing and conceptualizing digital humanities (DH) for two decades. I consider a major essay, “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities,” two interviews, one with Katherine Hayles and the other with Scott Pound, and a major blog post in which Liu engages Stephen Ramsay. Other investigators included: Willard McCarty and Franco Moretti. Some of Liu’s themes: DH as symbolic of the future of the humanities, the need for theory as well as practical projects, the role of DH in enlarging the scope of the “thinkable,” the importance of an engineering mindset, and the need for a long-term effort in revivifying the humanities.

* * * * *

Computation has theoretical consequences—possibly, more than any other field of literary study. The time has come, to make them explicit.
–Franco Moretti

I first heard about Alan Liu back in the late 1990s, when he was working on Voice of the Shuttle. I may or may not have submitted some links, I don’t really remember, but if so, that would have been it. Since then I gather that he’s been acting as a Johnny Appleseed for what has come to be called digital humanities, an ambassador, or in the corporate jargon of Apple Inc., an evangelist.

But it wasn’t until early in 2012 that I started to focus on the so-called digital humanities (aka DH). To be sure, Matt Kirschenbaum showed up at The Valve (alas, now dormant) for the Moretti book event (Graphs, Maps, Trees) and, for that matter, Moretti himself put in a few appearances. I snagged a promising book reference from Kirschenbaum (Dominic Widdows, Geometry and Meaning), but for me that event was about Moretti, not DH. It took Stanley Fish to get me thinking about DH. He’d gone to the MLA convention, attended some DH sessions, and blogged about it in January, 2012: Mind Your P’s and B’s: The Digital Humanities and Interpretation. Of my posts tagged “digital humanities”, only a bit less than a quarter of them were written before Fish. The rest come after.

Sometime in the wake of Fish I came across anxiety within the DH community about the lack of Theory, with Alan Liu prominent among the worriers. Now I was irritated. On the one hand, it seems to me that Theory has lost most of its energy – for what it’s worth, it was an examination of that morbidity that had attracted me to The Valve (the discussions of Theory’s Empire) in the summer of 2005. On the other hand, there’s a rich body of theory around computation, language, the mind, and evolutionary process (read: history) which is relevant, it seemed to me, to DH and yet which has been for the most part neglected. There is more to theorizing humanity than is dreamt of in Theory.

Finally, in March of this year I saw a video of Liu’s Meaning of the Humanities talk at NYU. I watched it, liked it, and contacted Alan. He responded by sending me a PDF of his PMLA article of the same title (“The Meaning of the Digital Humanities”, PMLA 128, 2013, 409-423). That prompted me to write the first of the blog posts I’ve collected here: Computer as Symbol and Model: On reading Alan Liu.

Liu begins and ends his PMLA article with the figure of Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose structuralism was “a midpoint on the long modern path toward understanding the world as system” (p. 418). If understanding world as system is included in the remit of DH, then I’m on board. In between his invocations of Lévi-Strauss Liu manages to argue against the notion that “there are immaculately separate human and machinic orders” (p. 416). I’m down with that too. Continue reading “The Only Game in Town: Remarks on Alan Liu and Digital Humanities”

Call for papers: The University of Edinburgh’s LEL Postgraduate Conference, 28th – 30th May 2014

Every year postgraduate linguists at the University of Edinburgh get together and run a conference. The deadline for submissions is fast approaching (15th April, 2014), but it’s only 500 words, so I’m sure you’ll be able to cobble something together. For more information, visit the website: http://resource.ppls.ed.ac.uk/lelpgc/ .

Here’s the call for papers (lifted from the website):

The University of Edinburgh Linguistics and English Language Postgraduate Conference in is an annual event where postgraduates present ongoing work and discuss their research with their peers and the LEL faculty. This year’s conference will be held on 28th-30th May 2014. We will be celebrating the 20th year of the conference, and we would like to invite all students of Linguistics, English Language and related disciplines to join us for this special occasion.

The conference offers a great opportunity to refine thoughts, share concerns and receive constructive criticism in a supportive and convivial environment. Additionally, it’s a great way to gain experience in conference presentation and find out about some of the exciting things going on in LEL!

We are now accepting submissions for oral presentations and posters. The standard length of a talk will be 20 minutes, followed by 10 minutes of questions. Any papers relevant to Linguistics and English Language are welcome and submissions by both University of Edinburgh and external students are highly encouraged. Tea and coffee will be provided on all three days, and there will also be a conference dinner in the evening of the 28th May (details to follow).

To apply, please submit an abstract (maximum 500 words in .doc, .docx, .tex or .rtf format; bibliographies do not count toward the word limit) by email to lel-pgc@ed.ac.uk, no later than 23:55 on 15th April 2014. Please indicate whether you would prefer to be considered for a talk or a poster.