Separating chicken and eggs with ostensive-inferential communication

Sverker Johansson, Dalarna University, Sweden

“Who did the first speaker talk with?” is a classic chicken-and-egg argument against the Darwinian evolution of language, still occasionally heard as an argument for non-communicative language origins. Various language-origins scenarios solve the problem in different ways. But I will argue that ancestral ostensive-inferential communication provides a general solution, insensitive to scenario details. Apes use communicative gestures intentionally and likely ostensively (Moore 2016; pace Scott-Phillips 2015), and interpret each other’s gestures accordingly. Such proto-ostensive-inferential abilities in proto-humans will handle new expressive abilities in “speakers” without requiring simultaneous changes in “listeners”, thus relaxing chicken-and-egg constraints on language evolution. Dendrophilia (Fitch 2014), if evolved for non-linguistic hierarchic-processing purposes, may similarly help bootstrapping the final step from proto-language to modern language. Chicken-and-egg is a problem for language evolution only if communication is a coding-decoding process. Ostensive-inferential communication can handle substantial mismatches between speakers and hearers, separating chicken from eggs.

Beyond the synthetic-holistic distinction for the human protolanguage

Arturs Semenuks, University of California San Diego, USA

The concept of protolanguage is often invoked to explain the initial step of the evolution of structure possessed by human language. How might have the protolanguage been structured itself? Two hypotheses are usually pitted against each other: the holistic account and the synthetic account. In the former, protolanguage consisted of sub-structureless signals conveying complex propositional meanings. In the latter, protolanguage consisted of signals which conveyed atomic meanings and could be strung together in arbitrary order. Using evidence from comparative and developmental psychology, neuroscience, pragmatics, typological linguistics, and philosophy, I will argue that the very first protolanguage systems likely could not be analyzed as either holistic or synthetic due to (i) the unclearness of the distinction between simple and complex meanings in simple communicative systems and (ii) the repertoire of theory of mind and other cognitive skills likely possessed by human ancestors that could be used in meaning construction.

From Protolanguage to Language: Symbolization, construal, and cultural complexity

Chris Sinha, Hunan University, China

I begin by discussing the nature of symbolization, its evolution from communicative signaling and its elaboration into sign systems. Linguistic conceptualization is defined in terms of its dual grounding in organism and language system. Protolanguage is distinguished from evolutionarily modern language in terms of flexibility of construal motivating grammaticalization. There follows an outline account of language as an artefactual niche, and the interpenetration in the human biocultural niche-complex of semiosphere and technosphere. Symbolization (the foundation of the semiosphere) is by definition normative; the normative character of the technosphere is demonstrated by the interrelations in human development between affordance, action schema and canonical functional object schema. A speculative model of the neurocomputational implementation of dual grounding is proposed, leading to a hypothesized path of transition from symbol-ready brain via protolanguage to language-ready brain, and the emergence of evolutionary modern language from symbolic culture.

From lexical protolanguage to modern language with functional categories

Haruka Fujita, Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, Kyoto University, Japan

Although there are diverse opinions about what protolanguage was like, this talk proposes that protolanguage had only lexical categories, based on empirical grounds such as the nature of grammatical structures (cf. Progovac 2015) and grammaticalization (Heine & Kuteva 2007). Then the question is how functional categories (FCs) have emerged. Here it is important to notice that there are two types of FCs, each with distinct adaptive functions. The first type (contextual FCs, CFCs) specify temporal-spatial information and their disintegration from lexical categories (Fujita & Fujita 2016) is crucial to the creativity of language. In contrast, the second type (structural FCs, SFCs) are adaptive for communication as they clarify structural/inter-word relationships which are often obscured by linearization. This observation predicts that SFCs have evolved by cultural process like grammaticalization and show more cross-linguistic variation than CFCs, which is borne out by typological evidence (Bickel & Nichols 2013, Corbett 2013 et seq.).