In the evolutionary theory, a central tenet is that complex forms evolved from simpler ones, according to a bottom-up process. When it comes to the evolution of language, however, a bottom-up approach is problematic. In this case, such an approach often assumes that minimal units that are inflexibly associated to their meaning come first, where the wider discourse is only a later product. In the present paper, I shall argue that we need to assume a top-down perspective on language evolution, (...) which claims that the wider discourse is the evolutionary starting point rather than the final achievement. This approach involves the necessity to focus on the pragmatic abilities of our ancestors and on the biological mechanisms underlying them. Combining a top-down model of language evolution with an embodied account of cognition, I shall argue that a basic mechanism of affordance perception supports core pragmatic processes by enabling the individual to determine not only her own action possibilities in the physical environment but also the action possibilities of others and, thereby, enabling her to determine other people’s intentions. As a result, I shall introduce the notion of an embodied pragmatics as a key to account for the evolution of language. (shrink)

Vocal theories of the origin of language rarely make a case for the precursor functions that underlay the evolution of speech. The vocal expression of emotion is unquestionably the best candidate for such a precursor, although most evolutionary models of both language and speech ignore emotion and prosody altogether. I present here a model for a joint prosodic precursor of language and music in which ritualized group-level vocalizations served as the ancestral state. This precursor combined not only affective and intonational (...) aspects of prosody, but also holistic and combinatorial mechanisms of phrase generation. From this common stage, there was a bifurcation to form language and music as separate, though homologous, specializations. This separation of language and music was accompanied by their (re)unification in songs with words. (shrink)

Wilkins & Wakefield's identification of anatomical features in the Koobi Fora endocast, which may be thought to carry some functional significance in relation to organization for language, raises fundamental problems of method: attention is drawn to some limitations of the evidence, of endocasts and of the neuroanatomical map used to interpret them.

Contra Wilkins & Wakefield, we argue that an evolutionarily inspired approach to language must consider different facets of language (i.e., more than syntax and semantics), and must explore the possibility of nonhuman precursors. Several examples are discussed, illustrating the power of the comparative approach in illuminating our understanding of language evolution.

One important difference between existing accounts of protolanguage lies in their assumptions on the semantic complexity of protolinguistic utterances. I bring evidence about the nature of linguistic communication to bear on the plausibility of these assumptions, and show that communication is fundamentally inferential and characterised by semantic uncertainty. This not only allows individuals to maintain variation in linguistic representation, but also imposes a selection pressure that meanings be reconstructible from context. I argue that protolanguage utterances had varying degrees of semantic (...) complexity, and developed into complex language gradually, through the same processes of re-analysis and analogy which still underpin continual change in modern languages. (shrink)

Wilkins and Wakefield's hypothesis that language is fundamentally a cognitive rather than cominunicational adaptation is reasonable, but there are flaws in their anatomical and fossil evidence. Their analysis of reorganization also needs clarification. Finally, the origin of language ability must have occurred with australopithecine rather than habiline adaptations on entry into the novel hominid adaptive zone.

Robert Sokolowski: Phenomenology of the Human Person Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s10746-010-9145-x Authors Hans Pedersen, Department of Philosophy, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, PA USA Journal Human Studies Online ISSN 1572-851X Print ISSN 0163-8548 Journal Volume Volume 33 Journal Issue Volume 33, Numbers 2-3.

Wilkins & Wakefield's intriguing model of language evolution is deficient in evidence of human uniqueness in metaphorical matching, amodal representation, reference, conceptual structure, hierarchical organization, linguistic comprehension, sign use, laterality, and handedness. Primates show communicative reference, laterality, and handedness, and apes in particular show hierarchical organization, conceptual structure, cross-modal abilities, sign use, and displaced reference.

Three issues are addressed in this commentary. (1) Wilkins & Wakefield are commended for placing the complex behavior they discuss within an evolutionary matrix. (2) They err on a number of points in regard to their treatment of this complex behavior. These involve (a) their emphasis on the evolution of conceptual structure rather than language, (b) their equation of meaning with reference, (c) their minimalist view of learning theory, and (d) their separation of the evolution of speech from that of (...) language. (3) They adopt a framework for neural preconditions that has been clearly discredited on both behavioral and neuroanatomical grounds. Finally, recent research involving modern neuroimaging techniques casts further doubt on the authors' postulated functions for the neural areas they discuss. (shrink)

Descartes argued that productivity, namely our ability to generate an unlimited number of new thoughts or ideas from previous ones, derives from a single undividable source in the human soul. Cognitive scientists, in contrast, have viewed productivity as a modular phenomenon. According to this latter view, syntactic, semantic, musical or visual productivity emerges each from their own generative engines in the human brain. Recent evidence has, however, led some authors to revitalize the Cartesian theory. According to this view, a single (...) source or a single mechanism in the human brain produces productivity in every cognitive domain, whether in the domain of music, semantics or syntax. In this article, we will address recent evidence concerning the single source hypothesis from brain-imaging studies, linguistics, cognitive theories of music perception, biology of cognition and cognitive development, along with several objections that have been presented against this hypothesis. We formulate two versions of the Cartesian theory which combine the more recent computational theory of cognition with Descartes' view on productivity. (shrink)

Modern human beings are most sharply distinguished from all other organisms alive today by their possession of symbolic reasoning, the cognitive capacity that makes possible the mental construction of alternative versions of the world. Scrutiny of the human fossil and archaeological records reveals that, while brain sizes expanded independently in several hominid lineages over the course of the Pleistocene, this qualitatively distinctive symbolic faculty only emerged in our own. What is more, this acquisition was made remarkably recently: well within the (...) 200,000-year tenure on Earth of our anatomically distinctive species Homo sapiens. The earliest anatomical Homo sapiens appear to have behaved in much the same manner as their non-symbolic contemporaries, although it is highly likely that they had acquired the neural wiring necessary for symbolic thought in the same event of developmental reorganization that gave Homo sapiens its strikingly derived bony morphology. Only subsequent to about 100,000 years ago do archaeological traces suggest that our forebears had actually begun to think symbolically. This implies that the new capacity was released by a purely cultural stimulus. I suggest that cultural trigger involved was the spontaneous invention of language by members of a small population isolate of Homo sapiens in Africa, at some time after about 100,000 years ago. Structured, rule-bound language is intricately intertwined with symbolic thought as we experience it today; and it is possible to conceive at least in principle how each could have fed back into the other to create a new dynamic. (shrink)

Drawing on convergent work in a broad range of disciplines, this article uses the tipping point paradigm to frame a new account of how early human ancestors may have first broken free from, as Bickerton calls it, the “prison of animal communication.” Under building pressure for an enhanced signaling system capable of supporting joint attentional-intentional activities, a cultural tradition of disambiguated indexical pointing, combined with increasingly sophisticated mindreading circuitry and prosocial tendencies, may have sparked the first in the series of (...) biocultural explosions that led from a simple protolanguage to fully modern human language. This account successfully integrates at least ten other competing hypotheses, and is shown to pass nine important tests that have been proposed for language origin scenarios of its type. (shrink)

Toolmaking requires motor skills that in turn require handedness, so that there is no competition between the two sides of the brain. Thus, handedness is not necessarily linked to vocalization but to the origin of causal beliefs required for making complex tools. Language may have evolved from these processes.

Preadaptation for language is an unnecessary assumption because intermediate stages of linguistic ability are possible and adaptive. Language could have evolved through gradual selection from structures exhibiting few features associated with modern structures. Without physical evidence pertaining to language ability in prehabilis hominids, it remains possible that selective pressures for language use preceded and necessitated modern neurolinguistic structures.

The fact that all languages known are digital poses the question of their origin. The answer developed here treats language as the interface of information theory and molecular development by showing previously unrecognized isomorphisms between the analog and digital features of language and life at the molecular level. Human language is a special case of signal transduction and hence is subject to the coding aspects of Shannon's theorems and the analog aspects of pattern recognition, each represented by genotype and phenotype. (...) Digital language acquisition is late in evolution and postnatal development and requires a neural reorganization by a mechanism of somatic network programming in response to the environment. Such a mechanism would solve the Chomsky conundrum of how children can learn any language without knowing rules of grammar too numerous to be encoded genotypically. BioEssays 25:489–500, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

The syntactic structures of natural languages reflect conceptual categories more directly than they reflect communicative categories. This fact supports the main premise of the target article, namely, that the most important event in language evolution was the development of a hierarchical conceptual structure.

Our core hypothesis is that the emergence of human language arose very rapidly from the linking of two pre-adapted systems found elsewhere in the animal world—an expression system, found, for example, in birdsong, and a lexical system, suggestively found in non-human primate calls (Miyagawa et al., 2013, 2014 ). We challenge the view that language has undergone a series of gradual changes—or a single preliminary protolinguistic stage—before achieving its full character. We argue that a full-fledged combinatorial operation Merge triggered the (...) integration of these two pre-adapted systems, giving rise to a fully developed language. This goes against the gradualist view that there existed a structureless, protolinguistic stage, in which a rudimentary proto-Merge operation generated internally flat words. It is argued that compounds in present-day language are a fossilized form of this prior stage, a point which we will question. (shrink)

This commentary criticizes Wilkins & Wakefield's thesis that the neurological precursors of language provide a cognitive Rubicon to linguistically divide human from nonhuman primates. A causal model of their theory is presented, followed by a discussion of the relationship between brain expansion and tool use, Broca's area and the parietaloccipital-temporal junction (POT).

This commentary confronts one of the central tenets advanced in Wilkins & Wakefield's target article: By adopting a very narrow perspective on language, the authors have effectively limited discussion of earlier linguistic capabilities thought to be at least facilitative of, if not prerequisite to language defined as a An alternative conceptualization for describing semiogenesis is offered.

Inferences made from endocasts of fossil skulls cannot provide information on the function of particular neocortical areas or the subcortical pathways to prefrontal cortex that form part of the neural substrate for speech, syntax, and certain aspects of cognition. The neural bases of syntax cannot be disassociated from “communication.” Manual motor control was probably a preadaptive factor in the evolution of humansyntactic ability, but neurophysiological data on living humans show that speech motor control and syntax are more closely linked. The (...) evolution of fully modern speech occurred fairly recently; thoughHomo habilismay have had some degree of speech and syntactic ability, it was not fully modern. Stone tools are uncertain indices of language or cognition. (shrink)

Several claims made by Wilkins & Wakefield require qualification. First, the proposed delineation of the parietal-occipital-temporal junction (POT) is overly restrictive. Second, focusing exclusively on the evolutionary importance of manual manipulation oversimplifies interacting evolutionary preconditions for language. Finally, Wilkins and Wakefield's perspective adheres to a homocentric, formal, linguistic definition of language instead of viewing language as a multimodal sensory enhancement system unique to each species.

According to Chomsky, creativity is a critical property of human language, particularly the aspect of ?the creative use of language? concerning the appropriateness to a situation. How language can be creative but appropriate to a situation is an unsolvable mystery from the Chomskyan point of view. We propose that language appropriateness can be explained by considering the role of the human capacity for Mental Time Travel at its foundation, together with social and ecological intelligences within a triadic language-grounding system. Our (...) proposal is based on the change of perspective from the analysis of individual sentences to the flux of speech in which the temporal dimension of language is much more relevant. (shrink)

The precise manner in which language serves its communicative function suggests that natural selection, rather than exaptation or reappropriation, played the major role in its evolution. Natural selection is more readily invoked, I suggest, if it is assumed that language originated as a system of manual gestures, and later switched to an oral mode.

Wilkins & Wakefield assign importance to motor systems but skip from anatomy to cognitive structure with little attention to behavior. Organisms, no matter how sophisticated, that do not behave in accord with what they know will fall by the evolutionary wayside. Facts about behavior can supplement the authors' theory, whose hierarchical structures can accommodate an evolutionary scenario in which a million years or more of functionally varied utterances mainly limited to single words is followed by an explosion of linguistic diversity (...) with the development in the last 50,000 years or so of syntactically organized multiple word utterances. (shrink)