New Journal on Evolution of Language
The Oxford University Press has announced a new Journal of Language Evolution. Its editors are Dan Dediu and Bart de Boer, two investigators notable for both the seriousness of their research and original thinking. They describe their intentions here. I'm wishing them the best of luck. (Source: Babel's Dawn)
Source: Babel's Dawn - December 12, 2015 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
A Lifetime of Pondering
Discovering a Problem
I was the kind of kid who hit upon questions rather than answers. One time, I was thinking about how French kids learned French from their parents and American kids learned English. That process went back to the cavemen, but who did the cavemen learn language from?
Verboten
In college I asked a visiting teacher how language could have begun and was told that the question was forbidden. It had been banned for a century. I was not going to learn the answer by joining a group of scholars already hard at work on the puzzle.
Sijamwona
During my days as a Peace Corps teacher I used...
Source: Babel's Dawn - December 8, 2015 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
Signaling the Intent to Signal
Before I get distracted by too much nit-picking, let me get to the summary paragraph: Thomas Scott-Phillips' book, Speaking Our Minds, contributes seriously to the study of language origins. First and foremost, it demands that pragmatics—the study of language in its social context—be included in the effort to understand language origins. What's more, it makes good on its case. Pragmatics has been underplayed and anybody who thinks about language origins should read and study the book. If the book were not so danged expensive, I would even urge you to buy a copy. (By the way, I've mentioned Scott-Phillips before—see R...
Source: Babel's Dawn - January 4, 2015 Category: Medical Scientists Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
Old Dates Pose Problems for Old Theories
One of the running quarrels on this blog concerns the age of language. I think it began about 1.8 million years ago while a great many linguists and archaeologists date it, at most, as 0.1 million years ago. The main argument in favor of what I may call a recent origin is archaeological. Symbolic artifacts start showing up late in the record of human activity. That's why I was pleased when one of my regular blog readers, Vic Sarjoo, drew my attention to a letter in the latest Nature reporting the discovery of an engraving made on a shell 0.5 million years ago. The shell was likely drilled open, the mussel inside eaten, and...
Source: Babel's Dawn - December 6, 2014 Category: Medical Scientists Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
Words for the Wise
There's an interesting paper titled The Latent Structure of Dictionariesfloating around the Internet. Written by a Canadian-led team, it forces clearer thinking about words.
Dictionaries rest on a well-known paradox. They use words to define words. So I might look up the word justice and read "the quality of being just; fairness." Ok. So I look up fairness and find "free from favoritism, self-interest, or preference in judgment." Oh, boy. I could look up all those words too, but a black hole emerges before me. The task stretches out to infinity.
Thanks to the computer, however, the endless task can be accomplished....
Source: Babel's Dawn - November 16, 2014 Category: Medical Scientists Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
Grumble, Mumble Rumble
I ended my last post with a grumble about the impoverished view of humanity that I often encounter when I read linguistic musings. Most of the articlesI report on do not seem to grasp how much had to change for a lineage of apes to become a lineage of, say, Kalahari hunter-gatherers that can sit around a fire and tell each other about their emotions.
We had to go through an evolutionary process that involved a lot more than developing a recursive function. We are at least as different from apes as ants are from grasshoppers, and any theory of language evolution ought to acknowledge that language requires unusual kind ...
Source: Babel's Dawn - November 9, 2014 Category: Medical Scientists Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
Bickerton: Round Two
A few years back Derek Bickerton published a book called Adam's Tongue which I reviewed in three posts (here, here and here). That book was disappointingly breezy, a lively account that made bold assertions and brushed objections aside with the swat of a hand. Say this for the guy, he's willing to keep plugging. Earlier this year he published an entirely non-breezy account of his theory: More than Nature Needs — Language, Mind, and Evolution. After reading the book I went back and read my old posts on the first work. I find that the theory has changed only a bit but the process is much more clear.
Step 1 – Escape from...
Source: Babel's Dawn - October 12, 2014 Category: Medical Scientists Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
The End of Orthodoxy?
Rejecting Aristotle is always a sign of a break with scientific orthodoxy.
The past month has been bad for orthodox linguists.
First came the Surprise Meeting at the Summit which showed that instead of searching for new empirical data or even new theoretical arguments (metaphysics), orthodox linguistics has turned to politics to patrol its turf.
Next came two consecutive posts (here and here) on a paper reporting a review of empirical studies that indicates brain circuitry divides language into a basic syntax that deals with the concrete world that one can point to, and an extended syntax that allows for things that can...
Source: Babel's Dawn - October 5, 2014 Category: Medical Scientists Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
Syntax Eases Communication (Well duh)
Yesterday I posted [here] a description of Maggie Tallerman's retort [abstract here] to the thought-firsters' idea that language evolved as a means of improved thought by allowing concepts to combine; we only later developed a way to externalize the thought as speech or signing. In that post I presented Tallerman's argument that words and concepts are not interchangeable and that words alone have properties that allow meaningful combinations. They get those properties via common usage.
Today I want to look at her treatment of syntax. Basically, she makes the same point: the rules of syntax are formed via general usage, or...
Source: Babel's Dawn - September 29, 2014 Category: Medical Scientists Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
Chasing Leprechaun Gold
Have linguists been hunting for a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow?
The argument in favor of language beginning as personal thought is now dead and should be buried. What? You have always assumed language began as a tool for telling things to one another? You must be new to this blog. At the start of this month I posted a report on a paper by Bolhuis et al. that rehashes the argument that language began as a new and improved way of thinking. Speech and signing came only later when internal thinking was "externalized." Technically speaking, there was a mutation that improved the way an ancestor thought, making things ...
Source: Babel's Dawn - September 28, 2014 Category: Medical Scientists Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
Dolphins Know Each Other by Name
Signature whistles can be heard in a variety of dolphin species.
Suppose I had an eight-month old baby who liked to say something like gork, and I told you that one day I heard the baby's two-year-old brother make a perfect imitation of the gork sound, to which the baby responded, hello. Would you conclude from this evidence that the baby is already using language? Careful, for it seems that bottlenose dolphins can participate in these sorts of exchanges.
While most people agree that only people use language, there does not appear to be nearly as much agreement on what makes language so special. One common test is ...
Source: Babel's Dawn - September 15, 2014 Category: Medical Scientists Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
More on Basic and Extended Syntax
In conclusion
I consider the distinction between basic and extended language to be a major find, something that I feel sure will be part of my thinking from this point on. It should not be surprising that I disagree with the authors over what underlies the difference. We disagree on how language works. The great thing about science is that even when questions of interpretation persist, progress can continue. (Source: Babel's Dawn)
Source: Babel's Dawn - September 8, 2014 Category: Medical Scientists Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
A Breakthrough Paper
Sophie's Story looks at the strengths and limitations of Specific Language Impairment.
The story of language and its origins that has been emerging on this blog is fairly simple:
Members of the human lineage began using words when a population became communal enough to trust one another with shared knowledge.
Those first language users differed from their ancestors in the nature of their community, not in the acquisition of some new verbal skill.
Once populations of language users became competitive, selection pressures to enrich language functions grew stronger and new verbal abilities did evolve.
The competit...
Source: Babel's Dawn - September 7, 2014 Category: Medical Scientists Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
A Surprising Meeting at the Summit
Napoleon and the tsar meet at Tilsit to agree on their spheres of interest. (But Tolstoy still got a story to tell)
Talk about a marriage of irreconcilables! PLOS Biology has published an article titled "How Could Language Have Evolved?" and like all PLOS papers it is available online to anybody interested. The topic is absolutely the question I've been asking myself for the past 45 years so it should be up my alley. Regrettably it doesn't seem to say anything that hasn't already been discussed in this blog. Nevertheless, it has a distinguished set of authors who are famous for their contrasting perspectives. I don't supp...
Source: Babel's Dawn - September 2, 2014 Category: Medical Scientists Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
Which Came First, the Word or the Gesture?
I got a good laugh out of this cartoon on Alex Baker's Cake or Death cartoon file. And it fits in with this post's point: gestures have their limits.
Susan Goldin-Meadow is a hero on this blog because her work is both serious and original. It fills a gap in our understanding. In 2008 she presented a report on gesture that has stayed with me. It made clear that gestures are a natural way of illustrating what is not included in a grammatical structure. For example, a person might say, "The plane ride was very…" and then illustrate the ride by moving the hand horizontally while simultaneously bouncing it up and down. Ever...
Source: Babel's Dawn - August 19, 2014 Category: Medical Scientists Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
