Jim Hurford: What is wrong, and what is right, about current theories of language, in the light of evolution?

As I mentioned in my previous post, the 2012 Poznań Linguistic Meeting (PLM) features a thematic section on “Theory and evidence in language evolution research.” This section’s invited speaker was Jim Hurford, who is Emeritus Professor at Edinburgh University. Hurford is a very eminent figure in language evolution research and has published two very influential and substantive volumes on “Language in the Light of Evolution”: The Origins of Meaning (2007) and The Origins of Grammar (2011).

In his Talk, Hurford asked “What is wrong, and what is right, about current theories of language, in the light of evolution?” (you can find the abstract here).

Hurford presented two extreme positions on the evolution of language (which nevertheless are advocated by quite a number of evolutionary linguists) and then discussed what kinds of evidence and lines of reasoning support or seem to go against these positions.

Extreme position A, which basically is the Chomskyan position of Generative Grammar, holds that:

(1) There was a single biological mutation which (2) created a new unique cognitive domain, which then (3) immediately enabled the unlimited command of complex structures via the computational operation of merge. Further, according to this extreme position, (4) this domain is used primarily for advanced private thought and only derivatively for public communication and lastly (5) it was not promoted by natural selection.

On the other end of the spectrum there is extreme position B, which holds that:

(1) there were many cumulative mutations which (2) allowed the expanding interactions of pre-existing cognitive domains creating a new domain, which however is not characterized by principles unique to language. This then (3) gradually enabled the command of successively more complex structures. Also, on this view, this capacity was used primarily for public communication, and only derivatively for advanced private thought and was (5) promoted by natural selection.

Hurford then went on to discuss which of these individual points were more likely to capture what actually happened in the evolution of language.

He first looked at the debate over the role of natural selection in the evolution of language. In Generative Grammar there is a biological neurological mechanism or computational apparatus, called Universal Grammar (UG) by Chomsky, which determines what languages human infants could possibly acquire. In former Generative Paradigms, like the Government & Binding Approach of the 1980s, UG was thought to be extremely complex. What was more, some of these factors and structures seemed extremely arbitrary. Thus, from this perspective, it seemed inconceivable that they could have been selected for by natural selection. This is illustrated quite nicely in a famous quote by David Lightfoot:

“Subjacency has many virtues, but I am not sure that it could have increased the chances of having fruitful sex (Lightfoot 1991: 69)”

Continue reading “Jim Hurford: What is wrong, and what is right, about current theories of language, in the light of evolution?”

PLM2012 Coverage: Pleyer & Winters: Integrating Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution Research

Today James and I are giving a talk at the Poznań Linguistic Meeting (PLM) on “Integrating Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution Research.”  It’s a talk in a thematic section on “Theory and evidence in language evolution research”, which I hope to blog about a bit tomorrow.

We’ll come back to our talk later on and talk about it in a bit more detail but for the time being here’s our abstract:

Cognitive Linguistics is a school of modern linguistic theory and practice that sees language as an integral part of cognition and tries to explain linguistic phenomena with relation to general cognitive capacities (e.g. Evans 2012; Geeraerts & Cuyckens, 2007). In this talk, we argue that there is a wealth of relevant research and theorizing in Cognitive Linguistics that can make important contributions to the study of the evolution of language and cognition. This is in line with recent developments in the field, which have attempted to apply key insights from Cognitive Linguistics on the nature of language and its relation to cognition and culture to the question of language evolution and change (cf. e.g. Evans, 2012; Pleyer, 2012; Sinha, 2009; Tomasello, 2008)

We illustrate this proposal with relation to the three timescales that have a bearing on explicating the structure and evolution of language (Kirby, 2012):

  1. The ontogenetic timescale of individuals acquiring language
  2. The glossogenetic timescale of historical language change
  3. The phylogenetic timescale of the evolution of the species

Continue reading “PLM2012 Coverage: Pleyer & Winters: Integrating Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution Research”

PLM2012 Coverage: Dirk Geeraerts: Corpus Evidence for Non-Modularity

The first plenary talk at this year’s Poznań Linguistic Meeting was by Dirk Geeraerts, who is professor of linguistics at the University of Leuven, Belgium.

In his talk, he discussed the possibility that corpus studies could yield evidence against the supposed modularity of language and mind endorsed by, for example, Generative linguists (you can find the abstract here)

Geeraerts began his talk by stating that there seems to be a paradigm shift in linguistics from an analysis of structure that is based on introspection to analyses of behaviour based on quantitative linguistic studies. More and more researchers are adopting quantified corpus-based analyses, which test hypotheses using statistical testing of language behaviour. As a data-set they use experimental data or large corpora. In his talk, he discussed the possibility that corpus studies could yield evidence against the supposed modularity of language and mind endorsed by, for example, Generative linguists (you can find the abstract here)

Multifactoriality

One further trend Geeraerts identified in this paradigm shift is that these kinds of analyses become more and more multifactorial in that they include multiple different factors which are both internal and external to language. Importantly, this way of doing linguistics is fundamentally different than the mainstream late 20th century view of linguistics.

What is important to note here when comparing this trend to other approaches to studying language is that multifactoriality goes against Chomsky’s idea of grammar as an ideal mental system that can be studied through introspection. In the traditional view, it is supposed that there is some kind of ideal language system which everyone has access to. This line of reasoning then justifies introspection as a method of studying the whole system of language and making valid generalizations about it. However, this goes against the emerging corpus linguistic view of language. On this view a random speaker is not representative for the linguistic community as a whole. The linguistic system is not homogenous across all speakers, and therefore introspection doesn’t suffice.

Modularity

The main thrust of Geeraerts’ talk was that research within this emerging paradigm also might call into question the assumption of the modularity of the mind (as advocated, for example by Jerry Fodor or Neil Smith): The view of the mind as a compartmentalized system consisting of discrete components or modules (for example, the visual system, language) plus a central processor.

Continue reading “PLM2012 Coverage: Dirk Geeraerts: Corpus Evidence for Non-Modularity”

Evolutionary Linguistics conferences in Beijing and Geneva

Two recent calls for papers in evolutionary Linguistics:

Conference in Evolutionary Linguistics 2012.  November 9th-11th, 2012, Peking University. Submission deadline: September 1st.

The keynote speakers include Prof. William S.-Y. Wang, William Labov and Morten Christiansen.

Session on Origin of language and human cognition at the International Congress of Linguistics. July 22nd-27th, Geneva. Submission deadline: September 1st.

I found out about these through MusiCoLinguistics.  Confusingly, some publicised calls for the Peking University conference link to the conference in Geneva.

Evolution of the Speech Code: Higher-Order Symbolism and the Linguistic Big Bang

Two months ago Daniel Silverman (San Jose State University) gave a talk at the LEC on the Evolution of the Speech Code: Higher-Order Symbolism and the Linguistic Big Bang. With his permission, I’ve posted below a PDF of a paper he’s written based on the talk — it’s really fascinating stuff and chock-a-block with ideas. Keep in mind that it’s a work in progress, but I’m sure he’ll appreciate any (informative) comments. So, on that note, go and read:

[gview file=”http://seedyroad.com/academics/Evolutionofthespeechcode.pdf” save=”1″]

Visualising language similarity through translation statistics

A tweet put me on to UNESCO’s Index Translationum – World Bibliography of Translation.  It’s a list of books that have been translated from one language into another.  I wondered if there was a way to use this to look at language similarity which took bilingualism into account.  Essentially, if two languages are very different and there are few bilingual speakers, then there should be a lot of translations.  If two languages are spoken bilingually by many people, then there should be less cause for translations.  Of course, there economic, cultural and political factors, too, but let’s see how far we can get.  Here’s a visualisation of the data using Gephi:

Thresh1002

At first, some predictions are not borne out.  There are 3616 publications translated from Spanish into Catalan, while there are 9244 publications from Spanish into English.  This suggests that Spanish and Catalan are closer.  Of course, there are only 12 publications translated from Spanish to Hindi, but it’s unlikely that this is being caused by a large Spanish-Hindi bilingual community.  That is, low numbers could mean no need to translate because of language similarity, or that there is no economic or cultural incentive for translating between them (or lack of data).

Still, we can put the translation matrix into a clustering algorithm and create a cluster diagram.  Using the inverse of the (log) number of publications as a distance measure (so that languages with lots of translated books are closer), we get some sensible clusterings:

Continue reading “Visualising language similarity through translation statistics”

Ancient theories of language evolution: The origin of the monolingual myth

Here’s a talk by János Németh on the Prehistory of Evolutionary Linguistics.   Németh demonstrates that thinking about the origins of language predates the Enlightenment by over a thousand years.  Ideas that actually appear pretty modern were discussed in Ancient Greece.  However, after this initial burst of progress, there was a thousand year gap where no progress was made.  Why is this?  Németh argues that the Judeo-Christian tradition of creation would make questioning the origins of langauge difficult for centuries.

I found his discussion of Ancient theories of langauge evolution interesting from an online resource and use them here to grind my own particular axe: the monolingual bias in linguistics (all the source material and the vast majority of the argument here comes from Németh’s thesis).

Continue reading “Ancient theories of language evolution: The origin of the monolingual myth”

Higgs Boson and Big Data

It’s not about cultural evolution, but I think most people who have even a passing interest in science are gearing up to welcome Higgs Boson to the elementary particle party. Anyway, here’s a nicely put together video on explaining what the Higgs Boson is and why its discovery is significant:

The Higgs Boson Explained from PHD Comics on Vimeo.

There’s also a more general point about needing to gather a huge amount of data (15 petabytes a year — enough to fill more than 1.7 million dual-layer DVDs a year) to find the very small effect size that is predicted for the Higgs Boson. In itself, data of this magnitude will likely come with significantly more noise, which means physicists have needed to develop well-defined statistical methods (they even have their own statistics committee). It really is a massive achievement for modern science.

 

5 million years

Blatant abuse of the blog for personal reasons.  But what else is a blog for?

In 5 days time my band is performing at our first gig.

To promote it, I’ve written a parody of 5 Years time by Noah and the Whale

It’s about 5 million years of language evolution.

Luckily, I won’t be playing the ukulele at the gig.  But there will be 4 comedy music acts, an instrument that the whole audience plays though a room full of balloons and an appearance by Dr. Gordon Freeman.  It’s at the City Cafe, Edinburgh, at 7pm on the 1st July.  Here’s a promotional video made using the Half-Life 3D engine.

Plenary talk videos from Evolang

Videos from the plenary lectures of the Evolution of Language conference are now online, here. The setup is quite impressive, with seperate videos of the speakers and slides.

The cover shot comes from one of my favourite moments of EvoLang, when Russel Gray taught us how to play a cut shot in cricket (about 43 minutes into his talk).

You can read some reviews of talks at Evolang on Replicated Typo:

Network structure and the effect of L2 learners on language change
Simon Fisher: Molecular Windows into Speech and Language
Boeckx on integrating biolingustics and cultural evolution
Luke McCrohon on horizontal transfer
Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini’s plenary talk
Brain activity during the emergence of a grounded communication game
Animal Communication and the Evolution of Language
Bart de Boer on Fact-free science
Cognitive Construal, Mental Spaces, and the Evolution of Language and Cognition
The Evolution of Morphological Agreement
Holistic or synthetic protolanguage: evidence from iterated learning of whistled signals
A Bottom Up Approach to Language Evolution

The Nomothetic approach to language evolution

Honest Signalling between plants and insects

On linguistic replicators
Evolang coverage: Andrew Smith: Linguistic replicators are not observable, nor replicators
Evolang Coverage: More on linguistic replicators
In Search of the Wild Replicator
Wild Replicator’s Got Funky Rhythm, Part 1
Wild Replicator’s Got Funky Rhythm, Part 2