Archive for 'Linguistics' Category

Cultural Diversity, Economic Development and Societal Instability

Most of you in the science blogosphere have probably come across Razib’s recent post on linguistic diversity and poverty. The basic argument being that linguistic homogeneity is good for economic development and general prosperity. I was quite happy to let the debate unfold and limit my stance on the subject to the following few sentences [...]

Words as alleles: A null-model for language evolution?

For me, recent computational accounts of language evolution provide a compelling rationale that cultural, as opposed to biological, evolution is fundamental in understanding the design features of language. The basis for this rests on the simple notion of language being not only a conveyor of cultural information, but also a socially learned and culturally transmitted [...]

Can linguistic features reveal time depths as deep as 50,000 years ago?

Throughout much of our history language was transitory, existing only briefly within its speech community. The invention of writing systems heralded a way of recording some of its recent history, but for the most part linguists lack the stone tools archaeologists use to explore the early history of ancient technological industries. The question of how [...]

Answering Wallace’s challenge: Relaxed Selection and Language Evolution

How does natural selection account for language? Darwin wrestled with it, Chomsky sidestepped it, and Pinker claimed to solve it. Discerning the evolution of language is therefore a much sought endeavour, with a vast number of explanations emerging that offer a plethora of choice, but little in the way of consensus. This is hardly new, [...]

Evolang 2010

Over at Babel’s Dawn, Edmund Blair Bolles has written several blog posts about the recent Evolang 2010 conference. They’re all worth reading, just to get a gist of the varying approaches taken to language evolution, with Bolles singling out talks by Morten Christiansen and Terrence Deacon as being particular highlights. Not too surprisingly, Deacon is [...]

Podcasts about language as a complex adaptive system

For those of you more interested in listening rather than reading, then the journal Language Learning has a load of podcasts about language as a complex adaptive system. If you fancy some reading, here is the position paper by the Five Graces group. Below is the abstract: Language has a fundamentally social function. Processes of [...]

Social Networks and Linguistic Research

I’m always interested in ways of using social networking sites as massive pools of data for researchers to mine. So on that note check out The Adventures of Auck‘s post on Cultural Variation and Social Networks. The post is more of a rumination, accompanied by some simple statistical analyses, than a detailed exposition. But it [...]

Phylogenetics, cultural evolution and horizontal transmission

For some time now, evolutionary biologists have used phylogenetics. It is a well-established, powerful set of tools that allow us to test evolutionary hypotheses. More recently, however, these methods are being imported to analyse linguistic and cultural phenomena. For instance, the use of phylogenetics has led to observations that languages evolve in punctuational bursts, explored [...]

The Evolution of Symbolic Language

Terrence Deacon and Ursula Goodenough have written a great article on the evolution of symbolic language. I’m mentioning it because they make two particularly interesting points. First point: Language is in effect an emergent function, not some prior function that just required fine-tuning. Our inherited (“instinctive”) vocalizations, such as laughter, shrieks of fright, and cries [...]

The Cultural Evolution of Language

One of the major shifts in thinking about language came in 1990, when Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom published their groundbreaking paper: Natural language and natural selection. In it, they argue natural selection was the central process in shaping the biological structures underpinning language. Since then, the field of language evolution has blossomed into a [...]