Causal Reasoning and Event Cognition as Evolutionary Determinants of Language Structure

Abstract

The aim of this article is to provide an evolutionarily grounded explanation of central aspects of the structure of language. It begins with an account of the evolution of human causal reasoning. A comparison between humans and non-human primates suggests that human causal cognition is based on reasoning about the underlying forces that are involved in events, while other primates hardly understand external forces. This is illustrated by an analysis of the causal cognition required for early hominin tool use. Second, the thinking concerning forces in causation is used to motivate a model of human event cognition. A mental representation of an event contains two vectors representing a cause as well as a result but also entities such as agents, patients, instruments and locations. The fundamental connection between event representations and language is that declarative sentences express events (or states). The event structure also explains why sentences are constituted of noun phrases and verb phrases. Finally, the components of the event representation show up in language, where causes and effects are expressed by verbs, agents and patients by nouns (modified by adjectives), locations by prepositions, etc. Thus, the evolution of the complexity of mental event representations also provides insight into the evolution of the structure of language.

Teaching as evolutionary precursor to language

“…My main thesis in this article is that the evolution of teaching is central for the evolution of increasingly complex communicative systems in the hominin species. Building on the argument that demonstration is evolutionarily prior to pantomime for instruction, which in turn is evolutionarily prior to pantomime (Gärdenfors, 2021), I have shown that such a series can provide an evolutionary explanation of different functions of communication.…”

“…However, what distinguishes narration is that it represents a globally coherent sequence of events (Ferretti et al, 2017). Thus, it presupposes a well-developed event cognition (Radvansky and Zacks, 2014) which in turn builds on advanced causal thinking (Gärdenfors, 2021).…”