EVOLANG XII (2018): Call for Papers

The 12th International Conference on the Evolution of Language invites substantive contributions relating to the evolution of human language.

IMPORTANT DATES
Abstract submission: 1 September 2017 Add deadline to calendar
Notification of acceptance: 1 December 2017
Early-bird fee: 31 December 2017
Conference: 16-19 April 2018

Submission Information
Submissions may be in any relevant discipline, including, but not limited to: anthropology, archeology, artificial life, biology, cognitive science, genetics, linguistics, modeling, paleontology, physiology, primatology, philosophy, semiotics, and psychology. Normal standards of academic excellence apply. Submitted papers should aim to make clear their own substantive claim, relating this to the relevant, up to date scientific literature in the field of language evolution. Submissions should set out the method by which the claim is substantiated, the nature of the relevant data, and/or the core of the theoretical argument concerned. Novel and original theory-based submissions are welcome. Submissions centred around empirical studies should not rest on preliminary results.

Please see http://evolang.org/submissions for submission templates and further guidance on submission preparation. Submissions can be made via EasyChair (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=evolang12) by SEPTEMBER 1, 2017 for both podium presentations (20 minute presentation with additional time for discussion) and poster presentations. All submissions will be refereed by at least three relevant referees, and acceptance is based on a scoring scheme pooling the reports of the referees. In recent conferences, the acceptance rate has been about 50%. Notification of acceptance will be given by December 1, 2017.

For any questions regarding submissions to the main conference please contact scientific-committee@evolang.org.

Workshops: in addition to the general session, EVOLANG XII will host up to five thematically focused, half-day workshops. See here for the Call for Workshops.

Deadline extended for Triggers of Change in the Language Sciences

The deadline for the 2nd XLanS conference on Triggers of Change in the Language Sciences has extended its submission deadline to June 14th.

This year’s topic is ‘triggers of change’:  What causes a sound system or lexicon or grammatical system to change?  How can we explain rapid changes followed by periods of stability?  Can we predict the direction and rate of change according to external influences?

We have also added two new researchers to our keynote speaker list, which now stands as:

 

Wh-words sound similar to aid rapid turn taking

A new paper by Anita Slonimska and myself attempts to link global tendencies in the lexicon to constraints from turn taking in conversation.

Question words in English sound similar (who, why, where, what …), so much so that this class of words are often referred to as wh-words. This regularity exists in many languages, though the phonetic similarity differs, for example:

English Latvian Yaqui Telugu
haw ka: jachinia elaa
haw mɛni tsik jaikim enni
haw mətʃ tsik jaiki enta
wət kas jita eem;eemi[Ti]
wɛn kad jakko eppuDu
wɛr kuɾ jaksa eTa; eedi; ekkaDa
wɪtʃ kuɾʃ jita eevi
hu kas jabesa ewaru
waj ˈkaːpeːts jaisakai en[du]ceeta; enduku

In her Master’s thesis, Anita suggested that these similarities help conversation flow smoothly.  Turn taking in conversation is surprisingly swift, with the usual gap between turns being only 200ms.  This is even more surprising when one considers that the amount of time it takes to retrieve, plan and begin pronouncing one word is 600ms.  Therefore, speakers must begin planning what they will say before current speaker has finished speaking (as demonstrated by many recent studies, e.g. Barthel et al., 2017). Starting your turn late can be interpreted as uncooperative, or lead to missing out on a chance to speak.

Perhaps the harshest environment for turn-taking is answering a content question.  Responders must understand the question, retrieve the answer, plan their utterance and begin speaking.  It makes sense to expect that cues would evolve to help responders recognise that a question is coming.  Indeed there are many paralinguistic cues, such as rising intonation (even at the beginning of sentences) and eye gaze.  Another obvious cue is question words, especially when they appear at the beginning of question sentences. Slonimska hypothesised that wh-words sound similar in order to provide an extra cue that a question is about to be asked, so that the speaker can begin preparing their turn early.

We tried to test this hypothesis, firstly by simply asking whether wh-words really do have a tendency to sound similar within languages.  We combined several lexical databases to produce a word list for 1000 concepts in 226 languages, including question words.  We found that question words are:

  • More similar within languages than between languages
  • More similar than other sets of words (e.g. pronouns)
  • Often composed of salient phonemes

Of course, there are several possible confounds, such as languages being historically related, and many wh-words being derived from other wh-words within a language. We attempted to control for this using stratified permutation, excluding analysable forms, and comparing wh words to many other sets of words such as pronouns which are subject to the same processes.  Not all languages have similar-sounding wh-words, but across the whole database the tendancy was robust.

Another prediction is that the wh-word cues should be more useful if they appear at the beginning of question sentences.  We tested this using typological data on whether wh-words appear in initial position.  While the trend was in the right direction, the result was not significant when controlling for historical and areal relationships.

Despite this, we hope that our study shows that it is possible to connect constraints from turn taking to macro-level patterns across languages, and then test the link using large corpora and custom methods.

Anita will be presenting an experimental approach to this question at this year’s CogSci conference.  We show that /w,h/ is a good predictor of questions in real English conversations, and that people actually use /w,h/ to help predict that a question is coming up.

Slonimska, A., & Roberts, S. G. (2017). A case for systematic sound symbolism in pragmatics: Universals in wh-words. Journal of Pragmatics, 116, 1-20. ArticlePDF.

All data and scripts are available in this github repository.

Call for Posters – Minds, Mechanisms and Interaction in the Evolution of Language

The workshop “Minds, Mechanisms and Interaction in the Evolution of Language” will be hosted at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands on 21st-22nd September 2017. The workshop will include a poster session on topics related to the themes of the meeting. We are interested in contributions investigating the emergence and evolution of language, specifically in relation to interaction.

We are looking for work in the following areas:

  • biases and pre-adaptations for language and interaction
  • cognitive and cultural mechanisms for linguistic emergence
  • interaction as a driver for language evolution

We invite submissions of abstracts for posters, particularly from PhD students and junior researchers.

Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words (word count not including references) by email to hannah.little@mpi.nl.  Please include a title, authors, affiliations and contact email addresses.  

Deadline: July 9th 2017

Outcome of decision process by: 24th July

Abstracts will be reviewed by the workshop committee.

The poster session will take place on the evening of Thursday September 21st 2017.

Registration is free (details to follow).

Plenary speakers:

  • David Leavens, University of Sussex
  • Jennie Pyers, Wellesley College
  • Monica Tamariz, Heriot Watt University

The workshop also includes presentations from the Levinson group (Language Evolution and Interaction Scholars of Nijmegen)  and an introduction by Stephen Levinson himself!

Summer school:

The workshop will also be bookended with a summer school on 20th and 23rd September specifically aimed at PhD students. The school will consist of a short tutorial series covering experimental and statistical methods that should be of broad interest to a general audience, though focussed around the theme of the workshop. In this tutorial series, we will cover all aspects of creating, hosting, and analysing the data from a set of experiments that will be run live (online) during the workshop! More details for the summer school and registration will follow.

2 PhD positions available with Bart de Boer in Brussels!

Two PhD positions are available in the AI lab at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel with Bart de Boer.

One position is on modelling an emerging sign language:

We are looking for a PhD student to work on modeling the emergence of sign languages, with a focus on modeling the social dynamics underlying existing signing communities.  The project relies on specialist expertise of the Kata Kolok signing community that has emerged in a Balinese village over the course of several generations. The emergence of Kata Kolok, and the demographics of the village have been closely studied by geneticists, anthropologists, and linguists. A preliminary model has been built in Python, simulating this emergence. The aim of the project is to investigate, using a combination of linguistic field research and computational modeling which factors – cultural, genetic, linguistic and others –  determine the way language emerges. There will be one PhD student in Nijmegen conducting primary field research on Kata Kolok and one based in Brussels (as advertised here) to be involved in the computational aspect of the project. Both positions are part of a FWO-NWO funded collaboration of the Artificial Intelligence lab of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the Center for Language Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen and the advertised position is supervised by profs. Bart de Boer and Connie de Vos.

Advertisement here: https://ai.vub.ac.be/PhDKataKolok

The other is on modelling acquisition of speech:

We are looking for someone who has (or who is about to complete) a master’s degree in artificial intelligence, speech technology, computer science or equivalent. You will work on a project that investigates advanced techniques for learning the building blocks of speech, with a focus on spectro-temporal features and dynamic Bayesian networks. It is part of the Artificial Intelligence lab of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and is supervised by prof. Bart de Boer.

Advertisement here: https://ai.vub.ac.be/PhD_Spectrotemporal_DBN

The deadline for application is 1st July 2017. Other details available at the links above.

Questions about details of the positions themselves should be directed to Bart de Boer (bart@arti.vub.ac.be). However, I myself did my PhD with Bart at the VUB, so I’d also be happy to answer more informal questions about working in the lab/living in Belgium/other things (hannah@ai.vub.ac.be).

Iconicity evolves by random mutation and biased selection

A new paper by Monica Tamariz, myself, Isidro Martínez and Julio Santiago uses an iterated learning paradigm to investigate the emergence of iconicity in the lexicon.  The languages were mappings between written forms and a set of shapes that varied in colour, outline and, importantly, how spiky or round they were.

We found that languages which begin with no iconic mapping develop a bouba-kiki relationship when the languages are used for communication between two participants, but not when they are just learned and reproduced.  The measure of the iconicity of the words came from naive raters.

Here’s one of the languages at the end of a communication chain, and you can see that the labels for spiky shapes ‘sound’ more spiky:

An example language from the final generation of our experiment: meanings, labels and spikiness ratings.

These experiments were actually run way back in 2013, but as is often the case, the project lost momentum.  Monica and I met last year to look at it again, and we did some new analyses.  We worked out whether each new innovation that participants created increased or decreased iconicity.  We found that new innovations are equally likely to result in higher or lower iconicity: mutation is random.  However, in the communication condition, participants re-used more iconic forms: selection is biased.  That fits with a number of other studies on iconicity, including Verhoef et al., 2015 (CogSci proceedings) and Blasi et al. (2017).

Matthew Jones, Gabriella Vigliocco and colleagues have been working on similar experiments, though their results are slightly different.  Jones presented this work at the recent symposium on iconicity in language and literature (you can read the abstract here), and will also present at this year’s CogSci conference, which I’m looking forward to reading:

Jones, M., Vinson, D., Clostre, N., Zhu, A. L., Santiago, J., Vigliocco, G. (forthcoming). The bouba effect: sound-shape iconicity in iterated and implicit learning. Proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.

Our paper is quite short, so I won’t spend any more time on it here, apart from one other cool thing:  For the final set of labels in each generation we measured iconicity using scores from nieve raters, but for the analysis of innovations we had hundreds of extra forms.  We used a random forest to predict iconicity ratings for the extra labels from unigrams and bigrams of the rated labels.  It accounted for 89% of the variance in participant ratings on unseen data.  This is a good improvement over some old techniques such as using the average iconicity of the individual letters in the label, since random forests allows the weighting of particular letters to be estimated from the data, and also allows for non-linear effects when two letters are combined.

However, it turns out that most of the prediction is done by this simple decision tree with just 3 unigram variables. Shapes were rated as more spiky if they contained a ‘k’, ‘j’ and ‘z’ (our experiment was run in Spanish):

So the method was a bit overkill in this case, but might be useful for future studies.

All data and code for doing the analyses and random forest prediction is available in the supporting information of the paper, or in this github repository.

Tamariz, M., Roberts, S. G., Martínez, J. I. and Santiago, J. (2017), The Interactive Origin of Iconicity. Cogn Sci. doi:10.1111/cogs.12497[pdf from MPI]

Biggest linguistics experiment ever links perception with linguistic history

Back in March 2014, Hedvig Skirgård and I wrote a post about the Great Language Game.  Today we’ve published those results in PLOS ONE, together with the Game’s creator Lars Yencken.

One of the fundamental principles of linguistics is that speakers that are separated in time or space will start sound different, while speakers who interact with each other will start to sound similar.  Historical linguists have traced the diversification of languages using objective linguistic measurements, but so far there has never been a widespread test of whether languages further away on a family tree or more physically distant from each other actually sound different to human listeners.

An opportunity arose to test this in the form of The Great Language Game: a web-based game where players listen to a clip of someone talking and have to guess which language is being spoken.  It was played by nearly one million people from 80 countries, and so is, as far as we know, the biggest linguistic experiment ever.  Actually, this is probably my favourite table I’ve ever published (note the last row):

Continent of IP-address Number of guesses
Europe 7,963,630
North America 5,980,767
Asia 841,609
Oceania 364,390
South America 356,390
Africa 74,032
Antarctica 11

We calculated the probability of confusing any of the 78 languages in the Great Language Game for any of the others (excluding guesses about a language if it was an official language of the country the player was in).  Players were good at this game – on average getting 70% of guesses correct.

Using partial Mantel tests, we found that languages are more likely to be confused if they are:

  • Geographically close to each other;
  • Similar in their phoneme inventories
  • Similar in their lexicon
  • Closely related historically (but this effect disappears when controlling for geographic proximity)

We also used Random Forests analyses to show that a language is more likely to be guessed correctly if it is often mentioned in literature, is the main language of an economically powerful country, is spoken by many people or is spoken in many countries.

We visualised the perceptual similarity of languages by using the inverse probability of confusion to create a neighbour net:

This diagram shows a kind of subway map for the way languages sound. The shortest route between two languages indicates how often they are confused for one another – so Swedish and Norwegian sound similar, but Italian and Japanese sound very different. The further you have to travel, the more different two languages sound.  So French and German are far away from many languages, since these were the best-guessed in the corpus.

The labels we’ve given to some of the clusters are descriptive, rather than being official terms that linguists use.  The first striking pattern is that some languages are more closely connected than others, for example the Slavic languages are all grouped together, indicating that people have a hard time distinguishing between them. Some of the other groups are more based on geographic area, such as the ‘Dravidian’ or ‘African’ cluster. The ‘North Sea’ cluster is interesting: it includes Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic.  These diverged from each other a long time ago in the Indo-European family tree, but have had more recent contact due to trade and invasion across the North Sea.

The whole graph splits between ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ languages (we refer to the political/cultural divide rather than any linguistic classification). This probably reflects the fact that most players were Western, or at least could probably read the English website.  That would certainly explain the linguistically confused “East Asian” cluster.  There are also a lot of interconnected lines, which indicates that some languages are confused for multiple groups, for example Turkish is placed halfway between “West” and “East” languages.

It was also possible to create neighbour nets for responses from specific parts of the world. While the general pattern is similar, there are also some interesting differences.  For example, respondents from North America were quite likely to confused Yiddish and Hebrew.  They come from different language families, but are spoken by a mainly Jewish population and this may form part of players’ cultural knowledge of these languages.

In contrast, players from African placed Hebrew with the other Afro-Asiatic languages.

Results like this suggest that perception may be shaped by our linguistic history and cultural knowledge.

We also did some preliminary analyses on the phoneme inventories of languages, using a binary decision tree to explore which sounds made a language distinctive.  Binary decision trees identified some rare and salient features as critical cues to distinctiveness.

The future

http://is5.mzstatic.com/image/thumb/Purple69/v4/bd/32/7d/bd327d24-f55c-b340-2f89-511ccf7ab870/source/175x175bb.jpg

The analyses were complicated because we knew little about the individuals playing beyond the country of their IP address.  However, Hedvig and I, together with a team from the Language in Interaction consortium (Mark Dingemanse, Pashiera Barkhuysen and Peter Withers) create a version of the game called LingQuest that does collect people’s linguistic background.  It also asks participants to compare sound files directly, rather than use written labels.

You can download LingQuest as an apple App, or play it online here.

 

 

 

Conference: Triggers of change in the language sciences

The University of Lyon 2 is proud to announce ‘Triggers of Language Change in the Language Sciences’.

October 11th-14th 2017, University of Lyon, France.

See the website for our call for papers and further details.

The conference is part of the “X in the Language Sciences” (XLanS) series which aims to bring a wide range of researchers together to focus on a particular topic in language that interests them.  The goal is to identify the crucial issues and connect them with cutting-edge techniques in order to develop better explanations of linguistic phenomena (see details of the first conference “Causality in the language sciences” here).

This year’s topic is ‘triggers of change’:  What causes a sound system or lexicon or grammatical system to change?  How can we explain rapid changes followed by periods of stability?  Can we predict the direction and rate of change according to external influences?

Our keynote speakers include:
Michael C. Gavin (Colorado State University)
Monica Tamariz (Heriot Watt University)
Sarah Thomason (University of Michigan)
Brigitte Pakendorf (University of Lyon)
Alan Yu (University of Chicago)
We are pleased to be able to offer scholarships to cover travel for students from the developing world and reduced rates for lower-income attendees.  See the Registration Details page for details.

The XLanS committee,

Christophe Coupé, Damián Blasi, Dan Dediu, Hedvig Skirgård, Julia Uddén, Seán Roberts

Women in Language Evolution

It’s International Women’s day!  Language Evolution is a largely male dominated discipline: women account for only 8 out of the top 100 most cited authors, and only 14 out of 82 invited speakers at the Evolution of Language Conference (see here).  To promote the contribution of women to our field, we’ve compiled a list of 100 female researchers in language evolution.

The list is by no means exhaustive, and is largely based on attendance at the most recent EvoLang conference.  Topics cover both language origins and evolutionary approaches to linguistics more generally.  A recent paper by each author is also included, though it may not be the best representation of their work.  All mistakes with regards to links and citations are my own.

 

Adele E. Goldberg

Goldberg, A. E. (2015). Subtle implicit language facts emerge from the functions of constructions. Frontiers in psychology, 6.

Alexandra Carstensen

Regier, T., Carstensen, A., & Kemp, C. (2016). Languages support efficient communication about the environment: words for snow revisited. PloS one, 11(4), e0151138.

Amy Bauernfeind

Bauernfeind AL, Soderblom EJ, Turner ME, Moseley MA, Ely JJ, Hof PR, Sherwood CC, Wray GA, Babbitt CC. Evolutionary divergence of gene and protein expression in the brains of humans and chimpanzees. Genome Biology and Evolution. doi: 10.1093/gbe/evv132

Amy Perfors

A Perfors (in press). On simplicity and emergence: Commentary on Johnson (2016) Psychonomic Bulletin and Review: Special issue on language evolution

Andrea Claude

Calude, A & Verkerk, A. (2016). How to build the Number Line in Indo-European – a Phylogenetic Study. Journal of Language Evolution [link]

Andreea Geambasu

Geambașu A., Ravigniani A. & Levelt C.C. (2016), Preliminary Experiments on Human Sensitivity to Rhythmic Structure in a Grammar with Recursive Self-Similarity, Frontiers in Neuroscience 10.

Anna Jon-And

Jon-And (2016) Modeling language change triggered by language shift. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Anna Maria Di Sciullo

Sciullo (2016) Emergent syntax and syntactic variation. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Anne Kandler

Kandler, A., Wilder, B., & Fortunato, L. (2017). Inferring individual-level processes from population-level patterns in cultural evolution. bioRxiv, 111575.

Annemarie Verkerk

Calude, A & Verkerk, A. (2016). How to build the Number Line in Indo-European – a Phylogenetic Study. Journal of Language Evolution [link]

Anu Vastenius

(2016) Constituent order in pictorial representations of events is influenced by language. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Ashley Micklos

Micklos (2016) Interaction for facilitating conventionalization: negotiating the silent gesture communication of noun-verb pairs. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Asifa Majid

Majid, A., Jordan, F., & Dunn, M. (2015). Semantic systems in closely related languages.

Brenda McCowan

Beisner, B. A., Hannibal, D. L., Finn, K. R., Fushing, H., & McCowan, B. (2016). Social power, conflict policing, and the role of subordination signals in rhesus macaque society. American journal of physical anthropology.

Bridget Samuels

Samuels, B. D. (2015). Can a bird brain do phonology?. Frontiers in psychology, 6.

Brigitte Pakendorf

Pakendorf, B. (2014). Coevolution of languages and genes. Current opinion in genetics & development, 29, 39-44.

Buddhamas Kriengwatana

Kriengwatana (2016) A general auditory bias for handling speaker variability in speech? evidence in humans and songbirds. . The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Camilla Power

Power, C., Finnegan, M., & Callan, H. (2016). Human Origins: Contributions from Social Anthropology.

Carmen Saldana

(2016) The cultural evolution of complexity in linguistic structure. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Carol Padden

Padden, C., Meir, I., Aronoff, M. and Sandler, W. (in press) The grammar of space in two new sign languages. In D. Brentari (Ed.), Sign Languages: A Cambridge Survey. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Catherine Hobaiter

Hobaiter, C., Poisot, T., Zuberbühler, K., Hoppitt, W., & Gruber, T. (2014). Social network analysis shows direct evidence for social transmission of tool use in wild chimpanzees. PLoS Biol, 12(9), e1001960.

Catriona Silvey

Silvey, C., Kirby, S., & Smith, K. (2015). Word meanings evolve to selectively preserve distinctions on salient dimensions. Cognitive Science, 39(1), 212-226.

Cecilia Heyes

Heyes, C. (2016). Blackboxing: social learning strategies and cultural evolution. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B, 371(1693), 20150369.

Chiara Barbieri

Barbieri, C., Güldemann, T., Naumann, C., Gerlach, L., Berthold, F., Nakagawa, H., … & Pakendorf, B. (2014). Unraveling the complex maternal history of Southern African Khoisan populations. American journal of physical anthropology, 153(3), 435-448.

Christina Behme

Behme, C. (2015). Is the ontology of biolinguistics coherent?. Language Sciences, 47, 32-42.

Christine Caldwell

Caldwell CA, Atkinson M & Renner E (2016) Experimental approaches to studying cumulative cultural evolution, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 25 (3), pp. 191-195.

Christine Cuskley

Cuskley, C., Simner, J. and Kirby, S. (2015). Phonological and orthographic influences in the bouba-kiki effect. Psychological Research, doi: 10.1007/s00426-015-0709-2.

Claire Bowern

Bowern, C. (2015). Linguistics: Evolution and Language Change. Current Biology, 25(1), R41-R43.

Colleen Reichmuth

Reichmuth, C., & Casey, C. (2014). Vocal learning in seals, sea lions, and walruses. Current opinion in neurobiology, 28, 66-71.

Cory Cuthbertson

(2016) Empirically assessing linguistic ability with stone tools. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Dean Falk

Falk, D. (2016). Evolution of Brain and Culture. Journal of Anthropological Sciences, 94, 1.

Deborah Kerr

(2016) The spontaneous emergence of linguistic diversity in an artificial language. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Dedre Gentner

Gentner, D. (2016). Language as cognitive tool kit: How language supports relational thought. American Psychologist, 71(8), 650.

Diane Reiss

Maust-Mohl, M., Soltis, J., & Reiss, D. (2015). Acoustic and behavioral repertoires of the hippopotamus (Hippopotamus amphibius). The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 138(2), 545-554.

Ekaterina Abramova

(2016) Triadic ontogenetic ritualization: an overlooked possibility. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Elizabeth Irvine

Irvine (2016) Deictic tools can limit the emergence of referential symbol systems. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Emilia Garcia-Casademont

Garcia-Casademont, E. (2017). A Case Study in the Emergence of Recursive Phrase Structure. In First Complex Systems Digital Campus World E-Conference 2015 (pp. 333-336). Springer, Cham.

Emily Morgan

(2016) Frequency-dependent regularization in iterated learning. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Erica Cartmill

Cartmill, E. A., Hunsicker, D., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2014). Pointing and naming are not redundant: Children use gesture to modify nouns before they modify nouns in speech. Developmental psychology, 50(6), 1660.

Esther Clarke

Clarke, E., Reichard, U. H., & Zuberbühler, K. (2015). Context-specific close-range “hoo” calls in wild gibbons (Hylobates lar). BMC evolutionary biology, 15(1), 56.

Eva Zehentner

(2016) A game theoretic account of semantic subjectification in the cultural evolution of languages. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Evelina Fedorenko

Piantadosi, S. T., & Fedorenko, E. (2016). Infinitely productive language can arise from chance under communicative pressure.

Federica Cavicchio

Cavicchio (2016) Are emotional displays an evolutionary precursor to compositionality in language?. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Fiona Jordan

Jordan, FM & Huber, B, 2013, ‘Evolutionary approaches to cross-cultural anthropology’. Cross-Cultural Research, vol 47., pp. 91-101

Florencia Reali

Reali, F., Chater, N., & Christiansen, M. H. (2014, March). The paradox of linguistic complexity and community size. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG X). Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd (pp. 270-279).

Francesca Tria

Tria (2016) Modeling the emergence of creole languages. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Gabriella Vigliocco

Vigliocco, G., Perniss, P., & Vinson, D. (2014). Language as a multimodal phenomenon: implications for language learning, processing and evolution.

Hannah Cornish

Cornish, H., Dale, R., Kirby, S., & Christiansen, M. H. (2017). Sequence Memory Constraints Give Rise to Language-Like Structure through Iterated Learning. PloS one, 12(1), e0168532.

Hannah Haynie

Haynie, H., Bowern, C., & LaPalombara, H. (2014). Sound symbolism in the languages of Australia. PloS one, 9(4), e92852.

Hannah Little

(2016) Emergence of signal structure: effects of duration constraints. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Heidi Lyn

Lyn, H. (2017). The question of capacity: Why enculturated and trained animals have much to tell us about the evolution of language. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 24(1), 85-90.

Hope Morgan

(2016) The effect of modality on signal space in natural languages. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Irene Pepperberg

Pepperberg, I. M. (2016). Animal language studies: What happened? Psychonomic Bulletin & Review Psychon Bull Rev. doi:10.3758/s13423-016-1101-y

Irit Meir

Meir, I., Aronoff, M., Börstell, C., Hwang, S. O., Ilkbasaran, D., Kastner, I., … & Sandler, W. (2017). The effect of being human and the basis of grammatical word order: Insights from novel communication systems and young sign languages. Cognition, 158, 189-207.

Janet Mann

Mann, J., & Singh, L. (2015). Culture, Diffusion, and Networks in Social Animals. Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences: An Interdisciplinary, Searchable, and Linkable Resource.

Jasmeen Kanwal

(2016) The evolution of Zipf’s law of abbreviation. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Jennifer Culbertson

Culbertson, J., & Newport, E. L. (2015). Harmonic biases in child learners: In support of language universals. Cognition, 139, 71-82.

Jesse Snedeker

Kocab, A., Senghas, A., & Snedeker, J. (2016). The emergence of temporal language in Nicaraguan Sign Language. Cognition, 156, 147-163.

Jiani Chen

Chen, J., & ten Cate, C. (2015). Zebra finches can use positional and transitional cues to distinguish vocal element strings. Behavioural processes, 117, 29-34.

Joan Bybee

Bybee, Joan. Language change. Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Joanna Bryson

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An Open Letter to Dan Everett about Literary Criticism

If you’ve heard of Dan Everett at all, most likely you’ve heard about his work among the Pirahã and his battle with Noam Chomsky and the generative grammarians. He went into the Amazon to live among the Pirahã in the mid-1970s with the intention of learning their language, translating the Bible into it, and converting them to Christianity. Things didn’t work out that way. Yes, he learned their language, and managed to translate a bit of the Bible into Pirahã. But, no, he didn’t convert them. They converted him, as it were, so he is now an atheist.

Not only did Everett learn Pirahã, but he compiled a grammar and reached the conclusion – a bit reluctantly at first – that it lacks recursion. Recursion is the property that Chomsky believes is irreducibly intrinsic to human language. And so Everett found himself in pitched battle with Chomsky, the man whose work revolutionized linguistics in the mid-1950s. If that interests you, well you can run a search on something like “Everett Chomsky recursion” (don’t type the quotes into the search box) and get more hits than you can shake a stick at.

I’ve never met Dan face-to-face, but I know him on Facebook where I’m one of 10 to 20 folks who chat with him on intellectual matters. Not so long ago I reviewed his most recent book, Dark Matter of the Mindover at 3 Quarks Daily. I thus know him, after a fashion.

And so I thought I’d address an open letter to him on my current hobbyhorse: What’s up with literary criticism?

* * * * *

Dear Dan,

I’ve been trying to make sense of literary criticism for a long time. In particular, I’ve been trying to figure out why literary critics give so little descriptive attention to the formal properties of literary texts. I don’t expect you to answer the question for me but, who knows, as an outsider to the discipline and with an interest in language and culture, perhaps you might have an idea or two.

I figured I’d start by quoting a fellow linguist, one moreover with an affection for Brazil, Haj Ross. Then I look at Shakespeare as a window into the practice of literary criticism. I introduce the emic/etic distinction in that discussion. After that we’ll take a look at Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in the course of which I introduce the question, What would I teach in a first level undergraduate class? I find that to be a very useful way of thinking about the discipline; I figure that might also appeal to you as a Dean and Acting Provost. I conclude by returning to the abstractosphere by distinguishing between naturalist and ethical criticism. Alas, it’s a long way through, so you might want to pour yourself a scotch.

Haj’s Problem: Interpretation and Poetics

Let’s start with the opening paragraphs from a letter that Haj Ross has posted to Academia.edu. Of course you know who Haj is, but I think it’s useful to note that, back in the 1960s when he was getting a degree in linguistics under Chomsky at MIT, he was also studying poetics under Roman Jakobson at Harvard, and that, over the years, he has produced a significant body of descriptive work on poetry that, for the most part, exists ‘between the cracks’ in the world of academic publication. The letter is dated November 30, 1989 and it was written when Haj was in Brazil at Departamento de Lingüística, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte [1]. He’s not sure whom he wrote it to, but thinks it was one Bill Darden. He posted it with the title “Kinds of meanings for poetic architectures” and with a one-line abstract: “How number can become the fabric on which the light of the poem can be projected”. Here’s the opening two paragraphs:

You correctly point out that I don’t have any theory of how all these structures that I find connect to what/how the poem means. You say that one should start with a discussion of meaning first.

That kind of discussion, which I have not heard much of, but already enough for me, I think, seems to be what people in literature departments are quite content to engage in for hours. What I want to know, however, is: what do we do when disputes arise as to what two people think something means? This is not a straw question – I have heard Freudians ram Freudian interpretations down poems’ throats, and I think also Marxists, etc., and somehow, just as most discussions among Western philosophers leave me between cold and impatient, so do these literary ones. So, for that matter, do purely theoretical, exampleless linguistic discussions. Armies may march on their stomachs; I march on examples. So I would much rather hear how the [p]’s in a poem are arrayed than about how the latent Oedipal etc., etc. In the former case, I know where to begin to make comments, in the latter, ich verstumme.

You’ll have to read the whole letter to find out what he meant by that one-line abstract, but I assure you that it’s both naïve and deep at one and the same time, mentioning, among other things, the “joy of babbling” and the role of the tamboura in Indian classical music. At the moment I’m interested in just those two opening paragraphs.

While I got my degree in literary criticism and understand the drive/will to meaning, I also understand Haj’s attraction to verifiable pattern/structures and his willingness to pursue that even though he cannot connect it to meaning. Yes, meaning is the primary objective of academic literary criticism and, yes, justifying proposed meanings is (deeply) problematic. I also know that the academic discipline of literary criticism was NOT founded on the activity of interpreting texts. It was founded in the late 19th century on philology, literary history, and editing – that is, editing the canonical literary works for study by students and scholars. Roughly speaking, the interest in interpretation dates back to the second quarter of the 20th century, but it didn’t become firmly institutionalized until the third quarter of the century. You can see that institutionalization in this Ngram search on the phrase “close reading”, which is a term of art for interpretive analysis:

close reading

Figure 1: “Close reading”

And that’s when things became interesting. As more and more critics came to focus on interpretation, the profession became acutely aware of a problem: different critics produced different interpretations, which is the correct interpretation? Some critics even began to wonder whether or not there was such a thing as the correct interpretation. We are now well within the scope of the problem that bothered Haj: How do you justify one interpretation over another?

That’s the issue that was in play when I entered Johns Hopkins as a freshman in 1965. Though I had declared an interest in psychology, once I’d been accepted I gravitated toward literature. Which means that, even as I was working as hard as I could to figure out how to interpret a literary text, I was also party to conversations about the problematic nature of interpretation. As I have written elsewhere about those years at Hopkins [2] there’s no need to recount them here. The important point is simply that literary critics were acutely aware of the problematic nature of interpretation and devoted considerable effort to resolving the problem.

In the course of that problematic thrashing about, literary critics turned to philosophy, mostly Continental (though not entirely), and linguistics, mostly structuralist linguistics. In 1975 Jonathan Culler published Structuralist Poetics, which garnered him speaking invitations all over America and made his career. For Culler, and for American academia, structuralism was mostly French: Saussure, Jakobson (not French, obviously), Greimas, Barthes, and Lévi-Strauss, among others. But Culler also wrote of literary competence, clearly modeled on Chomsky’s notion of linguistic competence, and even deep structure. At this point literary critics, not just Culler, were interested in linguistics.

Here’s a paragraph from Culler’s preface (xiv-xv):

The type of literary study which structuralism helps one to envisage would not be primarily interpretive; it would not offer a method which, when applied to literary works, produced new and hitherto unexpected meanings. Rather than a criticism which discovers or assigns meanings, it would be a poetics which strives to define the conditions of meaning. Granting new attention to the activity of reading, it would attempt to specify how we go about making sense of texts, what are the interpretive operations on which literature itself, as an institution, is based. Just as the speaker of a language has assimilated a complex grammar which enables him to read a series of sounds or letters as a sentence with a meaning, so the reader of literature has acquired, through his encounters with literary works, implicit mastery of various semiotic conventions which enable him to read series of sentences as poems or novels endowed with shape and meaning. The study of literature, as opposed to the perusal and discussion of individual works, would become an attempt to understand the conventions which make literature possible. The major purpose of this book is to show how such a poetics emerges from structuralism, to indicate what it has already achieved, and to sketch what it might become.

However much critics may have been interested in this book, that interest did not produce a flourishing poetics. Even Culler himself abandoned poetics after this book. Interpretation had become firmly established as the profession’s focus.

As for the problem of justifying one interpretation over another, deconstructive critics argued that the meaning of texts was indeterminate and so, ultimately, there is no justification. Reader response critics produced a similar result by different means. The issue was debated into the 1990s and then more or less put on the shelf without having been resolved.

I have no quarrel with that. I think the basic problem is that literary texts of whatever kind – lyric or narrative poetry, drama, prose fiction – are different in kind from the discursive texts written to explicate them. There is no well-formed way of translating meaning from a literary to a discursive text. When you further consider that different critics may have different values, the problem becomes more intractable. Interpretation cannot, in principle, be strongly determined.

What, you might ask, what about the meaning that exists in a reader’s mind prior to any attempt at interpretation? Good question. But how do we get at THAT? It simply is not available for inspection.

What happens, though, when you give up the search for meaning? Or, if not give up, you at least bracket it and subordinate it to an interest in pattern and structure as intrinsic properties of texts? Is a poetics possible? Let’s set that aside for awhile and take a detour though the profession’s treatment of The Bard, William Shakespeare, son of a glover and London actor.

Continue reading “An Open Letter to Dan Everett about Literary Criticism”