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Christine Kenneally |
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8 Part 1: Language Evolution: What is language? Psametichus, Frederick II, Rousseau,Herder, Darwin, The first view, solidly anchored in popular linguistic theory, holds that language is a uniquely human phenomenon, distinct from the adaptions of all other organisms on the planet. We are the only species that communicates like we do. Not only does language differentiate us from all other animal life; it also exists separate from other cognitive abilities like memory, perception, and even the act of speech itself. Researchers of this tradition have searched for a „language organ“, a part of the brain devoted solely to linguistic skills. They have sought the roots of language in the fine grain of the human genome, maintaining, in some cases, that certain genes may exist for the sole purpose of encoding grammar. One evolutionary scenario in this view maintains that modern language exploded onto the planet with a big genetic bang, the result of a mutation that blessed (…us) with the gift of tongues. Boe: Linguistics - In the alternative view language is not a singular phenomenon or a specific thing. Rather, it is multidimensional - interdependent and interconnected with other human abilities and other cognitive tasks. Speech, for example, is crucial to language. And because we have a common ancestor, there is a strong family connection between our complex linguistic skills and the simple word and syntax skills that chimpanzees can acquire. Indeed, though our language system is unique, the progressive nature of language evolution also reveals an intimate relationship between our linguistic skills and the ability is of less closely related animals, like monkeys and parrots. Language is accordingly a higher cognitive function - one that emerges from multiple sites and operations in the brain. In this view, language is not a monolithic thing that we have; rather, it is this thing that we do. It arises from the coordination of many genetic settings; these are expressed as a set of physical, perceptual, and conceptual biases that underlie certain abilities and behaviours, all of which allows us to learn language. Boe: autopoetic systems, Medium Sinn – Medium Sprache 10 Part II: How language evolved? The language suite: what abilities you have if you have human language, the sounds we make, the way we string them together, our interactions, and the learning in speech, our gestures, imitation. 11 Ideas:..this book is shaped by the fact that reporting on the life of an idea is a slippery task. If it were simply a matter of trying to render the intangible tangible, it would be hard. But it is made more difficult by the fact that the abstract doesn't exist, so to speak, in the abstract. Ideas are frustratingly anchored in the heads of individuals, and each of those individuals has his own version of any one thought. They all agree on some of the implications and none of the others. And everyone has a slightly different set of assumptions, not all of which he is conscious of or willing to admit to. Additionally, even though ideas come from nowhere but the heads of people, attributing them to individuals is tricky. Most ideas have been around forever in some form or other, yet the tides of thought follow no clear pattern. An idea can lie neglected for a millennium and then suddenly become invigorated by the agenda of a new age. We all want to believe that ideas rise or fall on their own merits, but in the real world they don't. Both personality and ideology shape the pursuit of knowledge and affect the way an idea gets lost and found over the years. What we are finding is that culture - which at its most basic is an interaction between two individuals - is a great force of evolution. Our personalities, our ideologies, and our ideas all arise from the same place - the intersection between biology and experience. Boe: nature – nurture, evolution of ideas – Ideenevolution (Luhmann) 13 Why does language evolution matter? Because the story of language evolution underlies every other story that has ever existed and every story that ever will. Without this one tale, there are simply no such things as beginnings, middles, and ends. Only because the evolutionary plot unfolded in the way it did to we have fables, and parables, tragedies, farces, and thrillers, numerous reports, urban legends, and embarrassing anecdotes from childhood. The ultimate goal of this book is to present fragments from an epic about an animal that evolved, started talking, started talking about the fact that it was talking, and then paused briefly before asking itself how it started talking in the first place. Boe: humans are storytelling animals – narration (Jerome Bruner) - Noam Chomsky 30 Aspects – a slim but extremely difficult book further explained key Chomskyan concepts like deep structure and surface structure, and has since become a classic text. All the ideas in Aspects rest on the notion that language can be divided into, on the one hand, everything that goes along with actually speaking in a given situation and, on the other, all that is stable and universal. Chomsky called us the difference between competence and performance. Competence, which includes syntax (a perfect, mathematical system), is the innate basis of language and it's the same from speak at a speaker. Performance includes what ever is individual or context specific in language. The role of the language specialist was fundamentally changed by these ideas. Linguists were no longer mere catalogers but scholars who were perfectly positioned to unearth the deepest mysteries of their subject. What mattered about the language was not that it came from a particular region, but that it came from our heads. With generative linguistics, the terrain that the linguist explored shifted from the corners of the planet to the depths of the human mind. Universal grammar specified every rule for every language, and controlled the child's ability to develop the correct rules and syntax of each language. It was believed in the early days that universal grammar, or the language organ, was hardwired into people's brains. Anyone born with universal grammar was born with the potential to learn any language. Even though searching for the universal principles of language was hugely different from the way scholars had previously thought about language, early generative linguistics still divided language in the brain in much the same way that linguists of the 1950s had divided languages in the field. Field linguists wrote a grammar by analysing its structure, sound, and meaning and separate sections. They also believed that when you weren't learning a language from scratch and assembling its grammar, you should keep these parts of language completely separate - you should never mix levels. Generative linguists began to divide language in the brain in the same way. They looked for evidence of a module that controlled syntax, a module that controlled meaning, and a module that processed sounds. It was thought that these modules are independent of one another and that language was produced by a coarse-grained interaction between them. Additionally, the separate systems of language have their own subsystems. For example, the syntactic module was made up of a set of smaller modules, each dealing with a different part of syntax, each autonomous. In this model, when someone heard speech, the separate modules divided up the signal. The syntactic module extracted from the sound wave all the information regarding syntax, the Internation module analysed all the pitch variation, and so on. Once each module had sufficiently analysed the component for which it was responsible, the brain put them all back together as language. One implication of this theory is that when you heard someone else speak, the grammar part of your brain somehow extracted the grammatical information from the sound waves but ignored any other information in those waves that might help interpret it. The workings of the language organ were also thought to be completely separate from other parts of the brain. They were separate from the context of spoken language, and they will also completely different from similar systems, like music. Gesture was peripheral and uninteresting. Moreover, human language was entirely distinct from the communication that takes place between other animals. This model of language was consistent with general theories at the time about how the brain functioned - namely, as a series of separate boxes, each of which computes different parts of the world. Boe: langue-parole (Saussure) - modularity – computation (the brain is a computer) – rules (algorithms) – syntax vs. Semantics – language production (generative grammar) vs. language comprehension Poverty of stimulus – language aquisition device – genetic mutation – not evolved!! Noam Chomsky, the world's best-known linguist, and Stephen Jay Gould, the world's best-known evolutionary theorist, had repeatedly suggested language may not be the product of natural selection but the side effect of other evolutionary forces such as an increase in overall brain size and constraints of as yet unknown laws of structure and growth. In many discussions with cognitive scientists we have found that adaption and natural selection have become dirty words. An e-mail exchange between the two authors and Chomsky ensued. In his e-mail, I Chomsky made a series of unambiguously clear statements about the evolution of language. He said that he was not at all opposed to the idea that language evolved - of course it did - and that many parts of it were adapted for communication. But he had great reservations about whether what he and serious linguists called language - the unique and mental syntactic component - originated in the act of communication. Because this talking network is so important, knowing what our interlocutors are feeling, thinking, and meaning is also pretty important to survival, and the language is superb for interpreting the thoughts and feelings of others as well. Moreover, there are distinct advantages to evolving a language that uses sound as a medium. The kind of communication we specialise in, said Pinker and Bloom, is the production of propositions: I am hungry, There is a bear, You are cute. And the communication of propositions is fundamentally connected to the channel in which it occurs - sound, from mouth to ear. This means that propositions occur one after the other, not all at once. Language is essentially serial. The building blocks of serial communication, they explained, are nouns and verbs and the rules of structure and sound with which we put them together. They allow us to talk about events, objects, places and times, agents and patients, our intentions and others. Words and rules allow us to build complicated sentences from smaller ones, and they help us to pick the right meaning in an ambiguous statement. Boe: Pinker The Language Instinct 1994 – Humans have not inherited language genes and there is no language instinct, but we humans are the best communicators among all social animals, we inherited a communication instinct. 67 After Pinker and Bloom, more and more people stopped asking, „Did language evolve?“ and instead wondered, „How did language evolve?“ instead of being treated as an indivisible mystery, the problem of language use and began to fracturing too many good unanswerable questions, like „What does gesture have to do with human language?“ „How did categorical perception evolve?“ „What ist he relationship between music and language?“ |
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