Everything about Evolutionary Linguistics totally explained
Evolutionary linguistics is the
scientific study of the
origins and development of language. The main challenge in this research is the lack of
empirical data: spoken
language leaves no traces. This led to an abandonment of the field for more than a century. Since the late 1980s, the field has been revived in the wake of progress made in the related fields of
psycholinguistics,
neurolinguistics,
evolutionary anthropology and
cognitive science.
History
August Schleicher (1821-1868) and his ‘Stammbaumtheorie’ are often quoted as the starting point of evolutionary linguistics. Inspired by the natural sciences, especially
biology, Schleicher was the first to compare languages to evolving
species. He introduced the representation of language families as an evolutionary tree in articles published in 1853.
Joseph Jastrow published a gestural theory of the evolution of language in the seventh volume of
Science
The Stammbaumtheorie proved to be very productive for
comparative linguistics, but didn't solve the major problem of evolutionary linguistics: the lack of
fossil records. The question of the origin of language was abandoned as unsolvable. Famously, the
Société Linguistique de Paris in
1866 refused to admit any further papers on the subject.
The field has re-appeared in 1988 in the
Linguistic Bibliography, as a subfield of
psycholinguistics. A dedicated research conference was first held in 1996.
The
Studies in the Evolution of Language series has been appearing with
Oxford University Press since 2001.
Study methods
One of these researchers is Professor Dr.
Luc Steels, head of the research units of Sony CSL in
Paris and the AI Lab at the
Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He and his team are investigating ways in which artificial agents self-organize languages with natural-like properties and how meaning can co-evolve with language. Their research is based on the hypothesis that language is a
complex adaptive system that emerges through adaptive interactions between agents and continues to evolve in order to remain adapted to the needs and capabilities of the agents. This research has been implemented in
fluid construction grammar (FCG), a formalism for construction grammars that has been specially designed for the origins and evolution of language.
The approach of computational modeling and the use of robotic agents grounded in real life is theory independent. It enables the researcher to find out exactly what cognitive capacities are needed for certain language phenomena to emerge. It also focuses the researcher in formulating hypotheses in a precise and exact manner, whereas theoretical models often stay very vague. The precision and theory independence of these kinds of experiments make them of great value for the scientific debate.
Some linguists, such as
John McWhorter, have analyzed the evolution and construction of basic
communication methods such as
Pidginization and
Creolization.
"Nativist" models of "
Universal Grammar" are informed by
linguistic universals such as the existence of
pronouns and
demonstratives, and the similarities in each languages process of
nominalization (The process of
verbs becoming
nouns) as well as the reverse, the process of turning nouns into verbs. This is a purely descriptive approach to what we mean by "
natural language" without attempting to address its emergence.
Evolution Factors
It seems that languages show different rates of change in different environments. Languages whose speakers are isolated, for example, apparently change more slowly—
Icelandic is an outstanding example of this.
Norsemen brought Icelandic to
Iceland in the 9th century; as its speakers had little contact with the outside world, it has changed very little during its 1100 years of development. It has changed so little, in fact, that Icelandic texts written 800 years ago are intelligible to speakers of Icelandic in the 21st century. The language is also highly
inflected, and much more so than other
Germanic languages.
EVOLANG Conference
The Evolution of Language International Conferences
(External Link
) have been held biennially since 1996.
- 1996 Edinburgh: Hurford, J. R., Studdert-Kennedy, M. & Knight C. (eds), Approaches to the Evolution of Language - Social and Cognitive Bases, Cambridge University Press, 1998.
- 1998 London: Chris Knight, James R. Hurford and Michael Studdert-Kennedy (eds), The Evolutionary Emergence of Language: Social function and the origins of linguistic form, Cambridge University Press,
- 2000 Paris: J. L. Desalles & L. Ghadakpour (eds.), Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on the Evolution of Language
- 2002 Harvard: J. Hurford & T. Fitch (eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on the Evolution of Language
- 2004 Leipzig
- 2006 Rome: Kenny. Smith, Andrew, D. M. Smith, Angelo Cangelosi, The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on the Evolution of Language, World Scientific, ISBN 9812566562.
- 2008 Barcelona (External Link)
Further Information
Get more info on 'Evolutionary Linguistics'.
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