Babel's Dawn

Semantics Returns from the Grave

Barcelona is a modern city that remembers the old. It made a fine site for the 7th Evolang conference.

The Evolang conference in Barcelona that ran from March 12 through 15 gave a strong boost to two ideas that Terrence Deacon promoted as anti-Chomskyan heresies in his book The Symbolic Species: Language and the Brain Co-Evolved (discussed in last week’s post) and Language’s controlling element is semantics, not syntax. For non-linguists this idea is plain common sense, but for linguists of the Chomsky era it is a resurrection as shocking as watching dead Lazarus return from his tomb.

Co-Evolution Idea Won Big in Barcelona

Audience at a presentation of the Evolang confererence in Barcelona.

Last week’s post summarized the outcome of the just-completed Evolang conference in Barcelona by reporting the collapse of the long dominant paradigm of generative grammar founded by Noam Chomsky and expanded by many others. The old paradigm made no contributions to the new results reported in Barcelona; reports often contradicted the generative paradigm; some speakers directly and energetically criticized the old paradigm and got away scott free in the discussions that followed. So what did the Barcelona conference leave its participants to build on?

Paradigm Lost

Barcelona's Museum of Science hosted the Evolang 2008 conference that ran this past week from March 11-15.

The Barcelona conference on the evolution of language has ended and I want to digest what I have learned about the way forward. However, it is clear that the old paradigm of speech is the fruit of a generative grammar can no longer stand. (Generative grammar is the theory launched by Noam Chomsky that mathematical rules and algorithmic procedures can be written precisely enough to “generate” all the possible sentences of a natural, human language and only the possible sentences. In other words, it can generate a sentence like The boy took a swing at the ball, but not The ball took a swing at the boy.)

Neanderthals Had Language

Neanderthals had language comparable to that of Homo sapiens, Bordeaux-based archaeologist Francisco D’Errico told participants in the Evolang conference in Barcelona this morning (Saturday, March 15, 2008). This claim totally discards the older Big Bang theory that said language arose only very recently (40 to 75 thousand years ago), and also challenges the Out-of-Africa theory that proposes Homo sapiens emerged in Africa about 200 thousand years ago and spread over the rest of the world, carrying language and culture with them, beginning about 60 thousand years ago. A new history will have to be written.

Recursion Can Be a "Side Effect"

A second attack on the importance of recursive processes in producing sentences took place today (Saturday March 15, 2008) at the Evolang conference in Barcelona. A few hours after Derek Bickerton argued that recursive processes are not needed to generate sentences, Joris Bleys argued in a workshop that even if they are needed they require no special evolutionary jumps to appear. Recursion (the transformation of preliminary phrases into final sentences by embedding some preliminary phrases into others) can simply be a side-effect of trying to keep linguistic knowledge as simple as possible. If the Bickerton and Bleys papers stand there seems to be no syntactical reason why language should be limited to humans.

Words Are More Human than Syntax

The central event in the evolution of language was not the rise of syntax but the emergence of a modern lexicon, words with properties “typical of any human language,” linguist Derek Bickerton told the Evolang conference in Barcelona this morning (Saturday March 15, 2008). The presentation was offered as a rejection to an oft-rebutted, but still influential paper, by Marc Hauser, Noam Chomsky, and Tecumseh Fitch on “The Faculty of Language” (available here). In its place, Bickerton championed Terrence Deacon’s work that asserts symbolic units are unique to humans and that aspects of the lexicon are genuine human universals.

Apes are Not Us

The role of gesture is much discussed at the Evolang conference in Barcelona this week. The ability of apes to learn some hand signs has always made people wonder how much more is possible. But after a series of presentations this afternoon (Friday, March 14, 2008) I will be hard put to believe that ape gestures have anything to do with the start of human language. I say this despite a very touching (so to speak) film clip showing an orangutan putting out its hand to a fellow orang, who took and held the offered hand. Who’s heart could not cry out Ahh at that scene?

Fossil Evidence of Speech?

One very obvious difference between the vocalizations of all our ape cousins and humans is the presence of air sacs in all the apes. Air sacs are essentially large bags that attach to the throat and lie atop the upper chest. Apes use them to make great big sounds, noises that make them sound larger than they are, rather like putting a truck horn on a Volkswagen to command respect. Humans do not have air sacs. Dutch linguist Bart de Boer has looked into the question of whether the absence of air sacs in humans has something to do with the rise of language. If it does, we can date language to at least 800 thousand years ago he told the Evolang conference in Barcelona this evening (Friday, March 14, 2008).

Some Say versus Others Say

Language is an internal feature of culture, and not the other way around. In other words, culture yielded language; language did not yield culture. That was the central idea presented in a meeting by social anthropologists Chris Knight and Camilla Power at the Evolang conference this morning (Friday, March 14, 2008) in Barcelona. Their presentation would have been called revolutionary, except that the outline of their ideas have been around for a few years and have yet to persuade modelers and linguists to return to square one and think again. Even so their attack on the linguistic and informational fundamentals is serious and deserves serious consideration.

A Plea for More Rigor

One of the secondary themes at the Evolang conference in Barcelona this week is that the investigators into the evolution of language are getting too big for their britches. They are overly boastful and do not know what they are really talking about. This theme was repeated this morning (Friday, March 14, 2008) by South African linguist Rudolf Botha as he chastised linguists for talking about evolution in much too breezy a fashion, without really having the data to back up their assertions. He insisted that accounts of language evolution need to be supported by a fuller and more systematic use of the pertinent theory, especially evolutionary theory. In particular, he lamented the off-hand appeal to pre-adaptations, or exaptations as they are known in formal evolutionary theory.