ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF

LANGUAGES
ANIMAL COMMUNICATION
Animal communication: definition
Transmission of information from one animal to another by
means of sound, visible sign or behaviour, taste or odour,
electrical impulse, touch, or a combination of these.
Process by which one animal provides information that other
animals can incorporate into their decision making. The
vehicle for the provision of this information is called a signal.
The signal may be a sound, colour pattern, posture,
movement, electrical discharge, touch, release of an odorant,
or some combination of these mediums.
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/25653/animal
-communication

Different contexts require different kinds of
information and thus different signals. The
number of signals in a species repertoire can
range from 5 or 6 in the simplest nonsocial
animals to 1020 in social insects, such as bees
and ants, or to 3040 in social vertebrates, such
as wolves and primates.
.
Functions of communication

Many species have distinctive threat displays that are
made during competition over food, mates or
territory.

courtship rituals
courtship rituals: signals made by members of
one sex to attract or maintain the attention of
potential mate

alarm calls
Alarm calls -signals made in the presence of a
threat from a predator, allowing all members of
a social group to run for cover, become
immobile, or gather into a group to reduce the
risk of attack.


bottlenose dolphins can recognize identity
information from whistles
dolphins are the only animals other than humans
that have been shown to transmit identity
information independent of the callers voice or
location.


Animals and language?
Is language use a uniquely human ability?
Parrots - can memorize chunks of human
speech
Polly wanna cracker
But are they really producing utterances
based on an underlying meaning?

Animals and language?
Is language use a uniquely human ability?

I believe you
mentioned something
about food

Dogs - can learn to associate food or walk
with particular behaviors

But is that the same thing as understanding the
meaning of food and walk?

Animals and language?
Is language use a uniquely human ability?
Angle of the dance indicates
direction
Rate of looping indicates distance
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7ijI-
g4jHg&feature=related




Honey bees dance to indicate where a source
of nectar is.

Can Chimpanzees Talk?

It seems that we have a 'language organ' which other
species do not possess, a segment of our brain which
is triggered by a stage of development, much the same
as walking is.
The results suggest that while chimpanzees and
gorillas are quite intelligent they are not capable of
human language. Rather, they have a primitive version
of the semantic ability children use to begin learning
language.
Human beings seem to have a different kind of
intelligence.
The following properties of human language have
been argued to separate it from animal
communication:
Arbitrariness: There is no rational relationship between
a sound or sign and its meaning.
Cultural transmission: Language is passed from one
language user to the next, consciously or
unconsciously.
Discreteness: Language is composed of discrete units
that are used in combination to create meaning.
Displacement: Languages can be used to communicate
ideas about things that are not in the immediate
vicinity either spatially or temporally
Duality: Language works on two levels at once, a
surface level and a semantic (meaningful) level.
Metalinguistics: Ability to discuss language itself.
Productivity: A finite number of units can be used
to create an infinite number of utterances.
Research with apes, like that of Francine
Patterson with Koko or Herbert Terrace with
Nim Chimpsky, suggested that apes are capable
of using language that meets some of these
requirements.
However, no experiment has shown a non-
human being to be proficient in all of these
areas.

Origin and Evolution of Languages
To ask where language comes from is to raise the
question of the origin of the cognitively modern
human mind.
the precise form of language must be acquired
through exposure to a speech community. Words
are definitely not inborn, but the capacity to acquire
language and use it creatively seems to be inborn.
Noam Chomsky calls this ability the LAD (Language
Acquisition Device).
1) Belief in divine creation. Many societies
throughout history believed that language is the
gift of the gods to humans. The most familiar is
found in Genesis 2:20, which tells us that Adam
gave names to all living creatures. This belief
predicates that humans were created from the
start with an innate capacity to use language.
2) Natural evolution hypothesis. At some
point in time humans evolved a language
acquisition device.
According to the natural evolution hypothesis,
as soon as humans developed the biological, or
neurological, capacity for creative language, the
cultural development of some specific system of
forms with meanings would have been an
inevitable next step.
There are four imitation hypotheses that hold that
language began through some sort of human mimicry :
-1) The "ding-dong" hypothesis -This hypothesis
holds that the first human words were a type of verbal
icon, a sign whose form is an exact image of its
meaning: crash became the word for thunder, boom for
explosion
2) The "pooh-pooh" hypothesis holds that the first
words came from involuntary exclamations of dislike,
hunger, pain, or pleasure, eventually leading to the
expression of more developed ideas and emotions.
4) Charles Darwin hypothesized: the organs of
speech were used to imitate the gestures of the
hand. In other words, language developed
from gestures that began to be imitated by the
organs of speech
1) Warning hypothesis. Language may have
evolved from warning signals such as those used
by animals. Perhaps language started with a
warning to others, such as Look out, Run, or Help
to alert members of the tribe when some
lumbering beast was approaching.
Nativists vs. empiricists
Nativist theories Chomsky is the preeminent
name hereplace the distinctiveness of
language in specific genetic endowment for a
specifically genetically instructed language
module. Under that view, there is minimal
learning involved in acquiring a language.
Empiricists like Hobbes and Locke argued that
knowledge emerge ultimately from abstracted
sense impressions.
Was there one or more than one original
language?

There are about 5,000 languages spoken on Earth
today. We know that there were even more spoken in the
past, when most people lived in small tribes rather than in
large states.
1) The oldest belief is that there was a single, original
language. The idea of a single ancestor tongue is known
today as monogenesis.
In Judeo-Christian tradition, the original language was
confused by divine intervention, as described in the story
of the Tower of Babel in Genesis.
The hypothesis of multiple linguistic origins that
often goes along with this hypothesis is known
as polygenesis. The major language families of
today would be descended from these separate
mother tongues.
CONCEPTUAL INTEGRATION
THEORY (CIT)
Recent work in conceptual integration theory
(CIT) shows that cognitively modern human
beings are equipped with an advanced form of a
basic mental operation that makes it possible for
them to develop a number of human
singularities: art, music, science, fashions of
dress, dance, mathematics. This basic mental
operation is conceptual integration, and the
advanced form is double-scope integration.
Conceptual integration is an operation with
principles and constraints. The gist of the
operation is that two or more mental spaces can
be partially matched and their structure can be
partially projected to a new, blended space that
develops emergent structure. These mental
spaces and their relations constitute a
conceptual integration network.
A central feature of integration networks is their
ability to compress diffuse conceptual structure
into intelligible and manipulable human scale
situations in the blended space.
"Our genes may be largely identical to those of a
chimp or gorilla, but our cognitive architecture is
not.
Nativist theoriesChomksy is the preeminent
name hereplace the distinctiveness of
language in specific genetic endowment for a
specifically genetically instructed language
module.
Under that view, there is minimal learning
involved in acquiring a language. Most of the
language module is already in place.
There are also coevolutionary proposals,
including an influential recent proposal by
Terrence Deacon. Language, he argues, is
not an instinct and there is no genetically
installed linguistic black box in our brains.
Language arose slowly through cognitive
and cultural inventiveness.
THE ORIGIN OF COGNITIVELY
MODERN HUMANS
Some theories, like those of Terrence Deacon on one
hand and Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom on the other,
propose gradual evolutionary or coevolutionary
development of language ability.
Language assisted social interaction, social
interaction assisted the cultural development of
language and language assisted the elaboration of
tool use, as the tree of culture put forward these
exceptional new products.