#biolinguistics

i may or may not make separate posts about what i write, but please feel free to engage with anything i put down. :-] bolded points are for my own clarity for assignments

linguistic hotbeds are immensely rich, but endangered (page 27)

some language names can be ‘to speak / to talk’, some have many names (page 28)

point 1: major reason of languages being unknown is many linguists work on the familiar languages rather than 4k not described accurately (point 28)

over half of world speaks 1 of 15 top languages, many speak ones w under 10k (page 28)

83% of languages spoken in one country (page 29)

at least 25x amount of languages vs countries (page 29)

point 2: many countries have instances of diglossia (functional specialization — like haitian creole in casual interactions and french in business and education and government) (page 30)

english itself was in a diglossic relationship with latin / french

1582 (why not english?) / 1700: latin out for academic texts (page 30)

some people cannot stop at bilingualism (Saami) (page 31)

languages can be unwritten, unrecognized, only in local communities / small groups (page 32)

genetic classification deals with historic origin, while typology classification groups languages togethers on commonality of features (page 34)

an indo-european language is dominant in all americas (page 35)

language families = stocks , and Americas are greatest, but austronesian and niger-congo have a lot of languages (page 36)

residual zones have high diversity, spread zones do not (page 38)

spread initially caused by local ecology, but now agriculture conflict and colonization drive spread too (page 38)

point 3: <4% of languages are official in their region (page 39), but even protection means little (Hawaii/Ireland)

north / south america and Australia / pacific have over 20% languages with <150 speakers (page 40)

Hi! Astro- and xenolinguistics are a field of linguistics associated with aliens, both of which are highly interrelated with each other, and considered hypothetical because of the major caveat of needing to meet aliens before being able to study their language(s). Another synonym would be exolinguistics.

This field of linguistics is highly associated with SETI (”search for extraterrestrial intelligence”), a term used to refer to such searches, though it has a few organizations attached to the idea.

While these are considered hypothetical, their precedence is based upon the methodology found in the various studies under anthropology, as well as heavily relying upon the ideas found in biolinguistics - that language evolves in relation to the species (and cultures!) speaking it, which is a highly interdisciplinary field that bases its many of its theories upon STEM-field research.

Conlangers, who create their own languages - see Lord of the Rings and related, rely upon many of the same precepts found in astrolinguistics because they face the same difficulties: inability to contact native speakers, concepts are largely guesses, any data acquired is capable of being completely misunderstood because of a lack of contextual framework, and there’s a lot of arguments about results because there’s no real way to verify them.

Further reading:

Astrolinguistics - Wikipedia

Alien language - Wikipedia

Search for extraterrestrial intelligence - Wikipedia

SETI Institute

Biolinguistics - Wikipedia

Historical linguistics - Wikipedia

Archaeoastronomy - Wikipedia

Xenoarchaeology - Wikipedia

When Charles Darwin (eventually) published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859, one species on whose origins he remained deliberately quiet or, at most, vague was Homo sapiens, i.e. us. That humans had evolved from a ‘lower animal’ was profoundly controversial in Darwin’s time (I say was, but it remains controversial for many even now, as Richard Dawkins continually reminds his readers). One of the major difficulties lay in accounting for the differences between humans’ mental capacities and those of other animals, and one of the chief differences concerned the evolution of language.

Darwin addressed the evolution of Homo sapiens in The Descent of Man published in 1871. It’s quite a hefty work and dedicates all of about 10 pages to the evolution of language, but those pages are full of insights and observations and many of the ideas and conclusions were ahead of their time. I’ll run through some of them, but it is well worth reading the original!

Darwin made the crucial distinction between articulate language, which he said was peculiar to humans, and things such as cries, gestures, facial expressions, etc, which are found in many species besides humans. This distinction is often blurred, especially when people talk about the evolution of “communication” as opposed to the evolution of language.

It is also common to blur the distinction between speech and language, but Darwin was careful to separate the two, with language being primarily a mental capacity. Drawing on several observations, Darwin concluded that the defining aspect of language was not in “the understanding of articulate sounds”, nor in “the mere articulation”, nor even in “the mere capacity of connecting definite sounds with definite ideas”, all of which are found in some other species or other. Instead, “the lower animals differ from man solely in his almost infinitely larger power of associating together the most diversified sounds and ideas; and this obviously depends on the high development of his mental powers” (the aspects of language which are uniquely human and those which are not might nowadays be referred to as Faculty of Language in the Narrow (FLN) and Broad (FLB) Senses respectively (see Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch 2002)). Exactly what is meant by this “almost infinitely larger power” (a vast lexicon, or the principle of compositionality, maybe?), the major point here is hard to miss – language is primarily a mental faculty and its evolution is tied in with the evolution of human cognition.

Darwin makes a very interesting analogy with birdsong. Songbirds show an instinctive tendency to sing and go through a ‘babbling’ stage, but ultimately they learn the particular song of their parents. In the same vein, particular languages have to be learned but there is an instinct to learn a language in the first place. Over evolutionary time, speaking and singing lead to improved modifications in the vocal organs, but Darwin pointed out that “the relation between the continued use of language and the development of the brain has no doubt been far more important.” As evidence that the brain and language are connected, Darwin observed that there are cases of “brain-disease” which specifically affect language or parts of language. In these observations, Darwin was using comparative and neurological evidence – a highly interdisciplinary undertaking!

Darwin argued that things like the human capacity for concept formation evolved from more rudimentary capacities. He showed that many animals form concepts and do so without language. Language is thus not a pre-requisite for concept formation, as was argued by some at the time. Incidentally, the claim in some of the recent Minimalist literature that the appearance of the operation Merge (the operation used to form sets) was the break-through moment in the evolution of language strikes me as implausible: concept formation presumably involves the ability to form sets and determine whether an entity is a member of a set or not, and if non-human animals can do this, then Merge presumably existed before language.

There’s a nice summary of Darwin’s arguments and the history of ideas of language evolution in Fitch’s book The Evolution of Language, including an entertaining section of the intellectual battle between Darwin and the linguist Max Müller. Darwin’s ideas on language evolution are by no means the final word on the matter (to the extent that there ever can be a final word on this subject), but Darwin’s ideas go to show that careful observation, interdisciplinary evidence, and courage and perseverance to pursue ideas despite various (apparent) challenges and problems can be both fruitful and illuminating.

(Non-Darwin) References

Fitch, W. T. (2005). The Evolution of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hauser, M., Chomsky, N., & Fitch, W. T. (2002). The language faculty: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? Science 298: 1569–1579.

I haven't written anything for a while since I've been so busy recently (been working a lot on the typology of relative clauses - perhaps I'll post something about that soon). This evening I watched an interview (on YouTube) from the late 1970's (1977, I think) with Chomsky. The interview is from a series called "Men of Ideas" produced by the BBC.

It's a great interview - stimulating and perceptive questions and, of course, stimulating and perceptive answers! Many things caught my attention, one of which being that Chomsky spoke of two factors playing a role in language design, namely the biological endowment (i.e. Universal Grammar (UG) - the species- and domain-specific cognitive 'organ' dealing with language) and linguistic experience (i.e. the primary linguistic data from which we acquire our native language(s)). The idea was that all humans are born with a capacity for language, i.e. UG is innate in humans, provided by our genetic makeup. The data we encounter as children is so scant and degenerate (full of false starts, sentence fragments, etc.) that it would be virtually impossible to acquire a grammar in the short amount of time that it takes any normal child to do so the world over...unless we came pre-programmed for such a task. The idea was that UG was this pre-programming. UG was thought to be richly specified with linguistic principles (all genetically encoded) that would help children in the task of language acquisition by severely constraining the possible hypotheses that any child would postulate when acquiring a grammar to generate the data the child was exposed to. That was then.

Nowadays, Chomsky speaks not of two factors, but of three factors of language design. UG and the primary linguistic data are the first and second factors respectively. The third factor is made up of general principles of data analysis and efficient computation. The idea is that children can bring these domain-general (i.e. not exclusively related to language) tools to language acquisition. The third factor allows the first factor, i.e. UG, to be made much smaller. In other words, UG is no longer thought to be as richly specified as it once was. In fact, the aim is to make UG as small as possible. This is desirable for a number of reasons, but a particularly pertinent reason concerns the evolution of language, i.e. the evolution of the capacity for language in humans. As an 'organ' of the mind, UG is a biological entity, and as such it must have evolved (though not necessarily through direct selection, as Chomsky points out in the interview!). Given that chimpanzees do not have UG, UG must have evolved some time in the last 5-7 million years or so. It is therefore unlikely that something as rich and complex as UG as it was originally conceived could have evolved in such an evolutionarily short space of time. The third factors, however, need not be specific to language, nor do they need to be specific to humans. Therefore, it is conceptually desirable if we can explain the design of language in terms of third factors. This is, in fact, viewed as the only source of principled explanation in Chomskyan syntax nowadays.

Importantly, although UG is far smaller than it was and may only consist of very few things (a recursive structure building operation at the very least), it is nevertheless still thought to exist. The UG hypothesis in its modern incarnation is thus still very different from approaches which deny the existence of UG altogether.

Anyway, if you're interested, I suggest reading Chomsky's (2005) paper:

I have just finished reading Lenneberg’s 1967 seminal book The Biological Foundations of Language. It was, and still is, an incredibly insightful attempt to bring linguistics and biology closer together into what is currently called biolinguistics. It was also way ahead of its time in terms of the conceptual framework which underpins the biological theory of language proposed in the book. By amassing and integrating evidence from anatomy, neurology, cognitive science, evolutionary theory, developmental biology, child language acquisition, semantics, phonology and syntax, Lenneberg creates a theory of language based on a few far-reaching principles.

First, language is viewed as a species-specific behaviour. Every species is different in terms of how they develop and mature. To the extent that behaviour is based on neurophysiological properties of the organism and that neurophysiology is a product of species-specific paths of development and maturation, language can be considered a species-specific behaviour resulting from the human-specific ontogenetic process. Evidence for this includes well-documented and universal milestones in language development, sometimes even in the absence of appropriate linguistic stimuli.

Second, there does not appear to be any part of the brain dedicated to language. Certainly, there are regions of the brain (and particularly of the left hemisphere) which play a more significant role in language, but in general language is well-integrated into the cerebral structure as a whole. This makes it likely that language evolved from the outset as a complex integration of many parts; it is unlikely that the subcomponents of language evolved separately and only recently became unified.

Third, language structure exhibits evidence of three basic processes: (1) categorisation, (2) differentiation, and (3) transformation. Categorisation involves generalising over stimuli, i.e. creating an abstract representation. Differentiation involves splitting categories in various ways. Transformation involves being able to identify similarities between categories, i.e. being able to identify how one category is related to another in a systematic way. Lenneberg argues that these are cognitive skills which have been integrated into the structure of language. Furthermore, because every infant effectively creates language anew, these are the processes involved in language acquisition, for example, early child utterances go through a one-word stage, followed by a two-word stage, then simple sentences etc. This potentially shows differentiation in that one-word utterances are whole child sentences. As the child differentiates the earliest syntactic category into two (say, head and modifier), we begin to observe two-word utterances etc.

Fourth, environmental triggers are necessary for the proper actualisation of one’s innate potential for language. These triggers must be available during maturation otherwise the behaviour will not develop properly, i.e. there is a critical period for (first) language acquisition. The acquisition of language is thus a matter of nature and nurture, innateness and learning.