The precedence of syntax in the rapid emergence of human language in evolution as defined by the integration hypothesis

Nóbrega, Vitor Augusto; Miyagawa, Shigeru

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00271

Cited by 28 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 76 publications

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“…Language belongs to ‘communicative niche construction’, as the passing down of encoded information in material form across generations, constructing inheritable cultures which can endure far beyond the life-time of the individual and which are themselves operative in the shaping of our environment. It has multiple ancient origins, which include primate calls (Nóbrega and Miyagawa 2015), lip-smacking (Ghazanfar et al 2012), mutual grooming (Dunbar 1996) and dexterity (Cartmill et al 2012; Steele et al 2012), as well as our capacity to produce musical sounds (Masataka 2009) and to dance (Hagendoorn 2010). These origins place language within the ‘face-to-face’ of our social bonding, or what Sloterdijk calls the ‘species-wide, interfacial, greenhouse effect’ (Dor et al 2014; Sloterdijk 2011: 169).…”

Section: Niche Constructionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Niche construction, social cognition, and language: hypothesizing the human as the production of place

Davies

2016

Cult. Brain

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New data is emerging from evolutionary anthropology and the neuroscience of social cognition on our species-specific hyper-cooperation (HC). This paper attempts an integration of third-person archaeological and second-person, neuroscientific perspectives on the structure of HC, through a post-Ricoeurian development in hermeneutical phenomenology. We argue for the relatively late evolution of advanced linguistic consciousness (ALC) (Hiscock in Biological Theory 9:27–41, 2014), as a reflexive system based on the ‘in-between’ or ‘cognitive system’ as reported by Vogeley et al. (in: Interdisziplinäre anthropologie, Heidelberg, Springer, 2014) of face-to-face social cognition, as well as tool use. The possibility of a positive or negative tension between the more recent ALC and the more ancient, pre-thematic, self-organizing ‘in-between’ frames an ‘internal’ niche construction. This indexes the internal structure of HC as ‘convergence’, where complex, engaged, social reasoning in ALC mirrors the cognitive structure of the pre-thematic ‘in-between’, extending the bio-energy of our social cognition, through reflexive amplification, in the production of ‘social place’ as ‘humanized space’. If individual word/phrase acquisition, in contextual actuality, is the distinctive feature of human language (Hurford in European Reviews 12:551–565, 2004), then human language is a hyperbolic, species-wide training in particularized co-location, developing consciousness of a shared world. The humanization of space and production of HC, through co-location, requires the ‘disarming’ of language as a medium of control, and a foregrounding of the materiality of the sign. The production of ‘hyper-place’ as solidarity beyond the face-to-face, typical of world religions, becomes possible where internal niche construction as convergence with the ‘in-between’ (world in us) combines with religious cosmologies reflecting an external ‘cosmic’ niche construction (world outside us).

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Section: Niche Constructionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Niche construction, social cognition, and language: hypothesizing the human as the production of place

Davies

2016

Cult. Brain

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“…Finally, these compounds specialize for derogatory reference and insult when referring to humans. Contrary to Nóbrega and Miyagawa's (2015) view, in order for these compounds to count as approximations ("living fossils") of early stages of syntax, they do not necessarily need to be found in every human language, with exactly the same characteristics (see Progovac 2013;2019a,b for arguments against the assumption of uniformity of syntactic structure across all languages and constructions). Different languages in fact offer different types of fossillike structures in this sense, some rare to find across modern languages (Progovac 2015).…”

Section: Fossil Compounds: the Simplest Possible Verb-noun Grammarsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Natural/sexual selection: What’s language (evolution) got to do with it?

Progovac

2019

Yearbook of the Poznan Linguistic Meeting

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By considering a specific scenario of early language evolution, here I advocate taking into account one of the most obvious players in the evolution of human language capacity: (sexual) selection. The proposal is based both on an internal reconstruction using syntactic theory, and on comparative typological evidence, directly bringing together, formal, typological, and evolutionary considerations. As one possible test case, transitivity is decomposed into evolutionary primitives of syntactic structure, revealing a common denominator and the building blocks for crosslinguistic variation in transitivity. The approximations of this early grammar, identified by such a reconstruction, while not identical constructs, are at least as good proxies of the earliest stages of grammar as one can find among tools, cave paintings, or bird song. One subtype of such "living fossils" interacts directly with biological considerations of survival, aggression, and mate choice, while others clearly distinguish themselves in fMRI experiments. The fMRI findings are consistent with the proposal that the pressures to be able to master ever more and more complex syntax were at least partly responsible for driving the selection processes which gradually increased the connectivity of the Broca's-basal ganglia network, crucial for syntactic processing, among other important functions.

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“…Se as especificidades mencionadas acima são verdadeiras, então a definição de GU como sendo um único e simples mecanismo combinatorial recursivo facilita o entendimento acerca da evolução da FL (Cf. CHOMSKY, 2007;NÓBREGA, 2018).…”

Section: Colocando a Teoria Da Linguagem No Interior Da Biologiaunclassified

Uma perspectiva etiológica sobre a função natural da Faculdade da Linguagem / An etiological perspective on the natural function of the Faculty of Language

Matos

2019

RELIN

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Neste artigo, discutimos, com base em Wright (1973), alguns pormenores que devem ser levados em consideração quando se busca falar em função dentro da biologia evolutiva. Tratamos, especificamente, de realizar uma acomodação da abordagem etiológica de função proposta pelo filósofo da biologia Larry Wright à tese do linguista Noam Chomsky e colaboradores acerca da natureza e da evolução da Faculdade da Linguagem (FL) na espécie humana, partindo do pressuposto de que a sua função natural não é a comunicação. Juntamente com Chomsky, defendemos que a comunicação deve ser mais apropriadamente compreendida como um subproduto, isto é, uma atividade/comportamento acidental relacionado à nossa FL, mas não sua função natural propriamente. Entendemos que a função da FL é primariamente interna à mente, e que a externalização de pensamento para fins de comunicação se deu posteriormente ao seu surgimento. Partindo de tal entendimento, o eixo da nossa argumentação está na ideia de que um evento no futuro não pode ter eficácia causal sobre um evento que o precede, de modo que parece inapropriada uma explicação funcional para a FL que a iguale com comunicação. A nossa discussão reforça o entendimento, segundo Chomsky, de que a função da FL é nos possibilitar, por um meio finito, infinitas combinações de símbolos estruturados hierarquicamente, sob a forma de o que Chomsky argumenta ser um sistema de pensamento sofisticado e único. Palavras-chave: Faculdade da Linguagem; evolução; função natural; externalização da linguagem; explicação causal; biolinguística.

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The precedence of syntax in the rapid emergence of human language in evolution as defined by the integration hypothesis

Cited by 28 publications

References 76 publications

Niche construction, social cognition, and language: hypothesizing the human as the production of place

Niche construction, social cognition, and language: hypothesizing the human as the production of place

Natural/sexual selection: What’s language (evolution) got to do with it?

Uma perspectiva etiológica sobre a função natural da Faculdade da Linguagem / An etiological perspective on the natural function of the Faculty of Language

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