EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE

 Whether language is peculiar to human beings; how it evolved; how the human brain
handles language; and what can go wrong with it
 How infants acquire language
 How we succeed in learning other languages
 How we store words; find them; assemble them; understand speech

Linguistic Universals

Every human has a language which can be broken down into smaller parts:

 It always has a lexicon and a grammar. The lexicon refers to how meaning is highly
organised in terms of lexis (hierarchy).
 All languages contain references to entities: there are pronouns, means for dealing
with time, space and number, true/false and logic.
 Every language has a structures grammar which is organised in hierarchical
structures (NPs, VPs, etc.)
 It also has phonology (sound system): vowels and consonants
 It contains rules on word order; intonation; transformation of sentence types
(varying word order).

Understanding language

The process of understanding language consists of coding, encoding and decoding.

We need to understand the different segments, break them down (the child is not able to
do that at birth) and then matching those segments to environmental stimuli (what we see,
our experience). We also need to decode the segments morphologically and syntactically.

Productivity

Productivity is one of the facets of human language. You can create a sentence that has
never been spoken before or, better said, that you have never heard before. The process of
learning a language does not involve memorizing chunks and reciting them, that’s why it is
said to be productive. Language is a system and we acquired the ability to use that system.
Productivity also implies recursivity, sentences do not need to have an end, you can always
add something else.

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Lexicon

The lexicon is all the words used in a particular language or subject, or a dictionary. It is a
unique and universal facet to human language. There are different theories on how we store
language, but we have to consider what type of words we are talking about since some
words have more meaning than others.

Words are organised hierarchically by meaning

but also by phonology. A child has to go
through different stages to organize his mental
lexicon.

Language evolution

Many of the question of child language acquisition are linked to the origins of our language:
 Is language uniquely human?
 Is it different to other animal communication system?
 Is it innate? Or do we learn it like anything else?

Knowledge about the evolutionary history of our language can help us answer these
questions.

Language myths

 Tower of Babel: according to the story, a united humanity in the generations

following the Great Flood, speaking a single language and migrating eastward, comes
to the land of Shinar. There they agree to build a city and a tower tall enough to
reach heaven. This was badly seen by God who punished them by making them
speak different languages.
 Hindu Goddess Vak (goddess of language): Vāk is a Vedic goddess, a personified
form of speech. She enters into the inspired poets and visionaries, gives expression
and energy to those she loves.
 Indigenous Australians believed that language was acquired by a goddess female
spirit who cause fire to a peer… According to the Aboriginals, the ‘Dreaming’ era

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 preceded our own and was when spirit beings formed creation. It is believed that a
culture of heroes (gods) travelled across a land without form and created sacred
sites and other significant places, giving the language to people.

The plethora of language creation myths show us:

 The importance of language to us as a society

 The natural interest we have in such a fundamental question about ourselves

Surprisingly they often contain an element of truth to them (as far as we know). Often
involves floods, famine, natural disasters. But we can also be a little more scientific about
our ideas about how language has evolved without relying upon language myths. If we are
talking about evolution, it is necessary for us to talk a little bit about evolution by natural
selection.

Evolution by natural selection

History vs. Evolution

About 400 million years ago the first aquatic vertebrates evolved; at least two million years
ago man’s ancestors first chipped stones to make simple tools. Less than 10,000 years ago,
in the Neolithic revolution, animals and plants were still domesticated. In a film, if greatly
speeded up, were to be made of vertebrate evolution, to run for a total of two hours, tool-
making man would appear only in the last minute. If another two-hour film were to be
made of the history of toll-making man, the domestication of animals and plants would be
shown only in the last half minute, and the period between the invention of the steam
engine, and the discovery of atomic energy would be only a second.

The vast majority of scientists today follow some version of neo-Darwinian evolutionary
theory (evolution by natural selection). It was first proposed by the British Alfred Russell
Wallace and Charles Darwin; most famously expounded Darwin’s On the Origin of Species
(1859). It put down the idea of evolution being a gradual process that takes place over
generations. It is based upon the ideas that certain traits can emerge within a species that
adapts that species to its environment and makes it more likely the survive and pass the
trait onto the next generation.

Examples:
 Antibiotic resistance bacteria
 Butterflies that changed their colour along time to camouflage and avoid being eaten
by predators

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Important facts about evolution

We talk about adaptation, but this is not an individual adapting their surroundings. Instead,
it works at species level. This is because most individual adaptations don’t affect the
genotype, then can’t be passed on. So, evolution takes a very, very long time. Therefore,
language has changed along a long period of time.

Apes vs Human vocal tract

Human
physiology is
poorer when
regarding eating
as food can pass
through the
lungs. However,
apes’ tongue
cannot move so
they do not take
the risk of
choking, but they
are not able to produce the same sounds as humans. We have more space to resonate in
different manners.

Human vocal tract

The human vocal tract is very different to that of the ape. Tongue, epiglottis and larynx have
different shapes and positions. Human vocal tract has a right-angled bend whereas apes’
tract is much shallower. Humans can manipulate the larynx to create different sound which
lead to communication.

We know that all parts of our vocal tract have purposes other than using them for speech.
We have changed our vocal tract (sometimes endangering our lives) to make it more
successful for language.

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After birth, babies’ anatomy is much more similar to the apes’ one; there’s less danger of
liquid going into their lungs. Then as they grow, their vocal tract starts reshaping until it is
like the adults’ one.

Protolanguage

Protolanguage is the language that existed before the language we know today. It lacked
many of the formal structures of our current language.
 No grammatical markers
 No subcategorization
 No phrases or clauses: no hierarchical structure
 No ‘null’ elements: plural markers (Bickerton, 1981/2016)

Burling (2005) argues our language cannot have evolved from primates’ signals as we still
have these.

Perhaps gradual changes from protolanguage formed through natural selection as

advantageous.

Advantages of human language?

Language evolved because of the advantages given to the human species:

 Move to a hunter-gather society
 Use of vocal as opposed to gestural communication
 Social society required better communication and also complex tools and caring for
sick and elderly

So what happened?

Steven Pinker, a famous linguist, says we probably had protolanguage 5-7 million years ago.
However, we have been developing differently from other primates for the last 40,000
years. Certain hominids were developing bigger brains.

Example of Hominid skulls

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Brain size parallels to some degree the language process

Neanderthal vs. Cro-Magnon

Two different types of hominids but only one survived. Neanderthals were advanced in
many ways but kept certain primitive features, they were also more muscular and fast-
running. On the other hand, Cro-Magnon were physically weaker but had developed vocal
tract.

Survival

So, for the physically weaker Cro-Magnon to survive (and became us!) languages must have
been crucial. Having language enhances problem solving abilities and advanced culture
increased selective advantage of speech. Burling suggests language is crucial as we are social
creatures.

Continuous vs. discontinuous ideas about language evolution

Usually the kinds of abilities people think of are systems of animal communication that are
not language.

 Continuous ideas explain that language is a more complex version of other forms of
communication, but it is essentially no different. Language underwent different
stages until the language of today.
 Discontinues ideas argue that you can’t explain language as a more complex form of
other types of communication. Language is something completely different.

How might continuous theories work

Essentially, the evolutionary precursor to us and our nearest cousins would have had some
communication system. Modern humans, then, slowly developed, by evolution, greater
cognitive capacities:
 Greater memory
 Reasoning
 Attention
 Learning mechanisms

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These then allowed a more complex version of this communication system to develop,
which we call language.

However, there is no evidence of examples of other primates using less complex forms of
communication.

Missing simple language problem

Deacon (1997 : 40-41)

 Imagine a language-like system but simpler:

o So some units, and some ways of combining them
o These talk about things in the outside world
o Maybe only a few “words” and basic “syntax”

 Why don’t we see these?

o Inside our own species
o We have tried to teach some of these to other primates, with little success
o But surely even a simple language would not be an issue in terms of general
cognitive capacities, so why do we fail?

Bickerton’s paradox

Bickerton’s paradox of continuity

“Language must have evolved out of some prior systems, and yet there does not seem to be
any such system out of which it could have evolved” (Bickerton Language and Species
1990:8)

“This lack of precedent makes language a problem for biologists. Evolutionary explanations
are about biological continuity, so a lack of continuity limits the use of the comparative
method in several important ways. We can’t ask, ‘what ecological variable correlates with
increasing language use in a sample of species’”. Deacon (1997:34)

Human and animal language

One was the major ways people go about answering this question by looking at
communication systems of other animals, and asking whether they are the same or different
in kind to language

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If we can argue that some other forms of communication are the same in type to human
communication, then the idea that language grew out of something like this seems more
plausible.

More complex, or completely different?

Birdsong is often cited as an example of communication system that has potentially similar
structure to language.
 The idea of “phonological syntax” (Berwick et al., 2011)
 Argument that we have things like syllables and higher hierarchical units in some
birds (Zebra Finch: Doupe and Kuhl, 1999)

Primate communication has been studied extensively

 Both in wild and in the lab
 Famous cases – Nim Chimpsky (chimp); Washoe (chimp); Koko (gorilla)

Primate calls
 Vervet monkey

So why do people think they might be different?

Hockett’s design features of language

Major differences:
 Duality of the pattering: meaningful units are made up of meaningless units
 Displacement: we can talk about things removed in time and space
 Productivity
 Arbitrariness: no inherent link between sound and meaning
 Discreteness: you can divide speech into smaller units. The unit has a complete
different meaning to what it represents

Although some animal languages have one or two of these, no other communication system
has all of them except human language.

Innateness of language

Lieberman states that human speech involves innate, genetically transmitted mechanisms.
Linguistic nativism is the theory that humans are born with some knowledge of language.
One acquires a language not entirely through learning.

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Idea of critical period: the first few years of life constitute the time during which language
develops readily and after which language acquisition is much more difficult and ultimately
less successful

Innateness is technically different from continuity

A little bit on Chomsky

 Believes that humans are born with unique ability to learn language
 Attributes this is a “mental machine” called the faculty of language
 It means we don’t have to start from a blank slate
o We still need to hear/learn words but the faculty of language helps us work
out things like syntax
o This can aid our learning of language
 Evidence commonly drawn upon:
o Uniqueness of language
o Poverty of the stimulus
 Chomsky believes that this faculty of language is different to other forms of
communication (discontinuous) and part of our genetic endowment (innate)

Evolution of language

If we follow Darwin’s theory of evolution, we know a structure must evolve from a prior
antecedent.

Pinker states that Chomsky’s theory of language acquisition is incompatible with Darwin’s
theory.

See also the evolutionary biologist Marc Hauser

 Many arguments come from the differences between animal and human
communication

If we accept Chomsky, then we don’t have to worry about the Biverton paradox

But there is an issue

Deacon (1997:35) “hopeful monsters”

Basically a single evolutionary change that has a massive phenotypic change.

“[Chomsky’s theory] provides an end point, an assessment of what a language evolution
theory ultimately needs to explain. It rephrases it by giving it a new name. But this offers

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little more than the miraculous accident theory provided: a formal redescription of what
remains unexplained. Unfortunately, I think it also misses the forest for the trees, even in
this endeavor.” (ibid: 38-39).

Conclusions

 It is very difficult to know very much about the evolution of language

o Very little hard evidence
o Nearly every fact is hotly debated by linguists, anthropologists,
neuroscientists, evolutionary biologists, etc.

 The major dividing source of opinion can be split into two types of theory:
o Continuity theories: language evolved out of a prior ability. It is simply a more
complex form of communication, but no different in type
o Discontinuity theories: language is completely different to other forms of
communication. Cannot have grown out of pre-existing abilities.

 Language development seems to have been crucial for our survival as a species.

SEMINAR

Morphology

 Morpheme: smallest unit of information

o Inflectional:
o Derivational: changes the word class

Grammar

 Premodifier: word that comes before the head of a phrase and adds some
information to it.
 Postmodifier: word that comes after the head of a phrases and adds some
information to it.

Semantics

 Synonym
 Antonym
 Meronym: refers to a segment, something that is part of another thing (hand-finger)
 Polysemy: a word that has two or more meanings and one is derived from the other

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  Homonymy: a word that has two or more meanings with no etymological relation,
no connection between the different meanings.
 Hyponyms

Pragmatics

 Locutionary act: the sound, the way in which the language is encoded, how you utter
a sentence
 Illocutionary act: what you want to convey, to happen
 Perlocutionary act: what actually happens as a result

 Performative verbs: verbs that need certain conditions to be enacted. Verbs that
fundamentally change something our social world

Phonetics

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