James R Hurford, University of Edinburgh

"Origins of Meaning in Human Language"

ABSTRACT

This lecture concerns prelinguistic semantics, which deals with
conceptual representations of the world independently of any system of
communication, and with the subsequent symbolic mapping of these
representations to words, phrases and sentences.  The lecture weaves
together (a) a summary of recent work relating meaning to discoveries in
neuroscience, (b) a general survey of animal concepts, and (c) some new
speculations on a unification of semantic representations in an attempt
to accommodate to neural processes.

Animals and babies have quite complex conceptual representations.  Truth
and reference originate in relations between mental representations and
the world.  In the mind, truth and reference are not significantly
different.  Communication may conceivably lag far behind internal mental
representation.  The discovery of mirror neurons gives us some clue
about how the brain represents concepts, but it does not immediately
illuminate our impressive human ability to associate concepts with
symbols.  Learning a symbol involves assigning a public signal to a
pre-existing internal representation.  Captive, trained animals
(chimpanzees, gorillas, orang-utans, parrots) have shown ability to
learn symbols, up to several hundred.  But no animal is known to learn
symbolic behaviour in the wild. 

We can ask : What conceptual representations do animals have? Concepts
are grounded in experience of external objects and situations, via the
senses, and of internal sensations (hunger, pain, pleasure, effort,
...…).  It can be shown that animals have some quite complex concepts. 
The most elementary logical structure, namely PREDICATE(x), can be
related to very basic neural processes, shared by humans and many
animals.  Even a parrot can be shown to have concepts well beyond First
Order Predicate Logic.  It can also be argued that animals have simple
concepts corresponding to human PAST and FUTURE.  The issue of the
categoriality of animal concepts will be addressed

But for humans, language adds a massive final twist to our possible
concepts.  Given symbols for concepts grounded in experience, and some
syntax, new kinds of abstract concepts can be defined, in words.  We can
talk, and think, about enormously high numbers, about virtue, love, and
ambition, about unicorns, black swans and about even square circles. 
Cultural evolution provides us with a whole cascade of concepts that
only we humans can possibly have.  Conveivably, too, the very fact of
being tied symbolically to external signals adds a degree of
categoriality to original prelinguistic conceptual representations.

The more speculative portion of the lecture will briefly advance
arguments aimed at (a) reducing all predications to one-place
predications; (b) conflating representations of eventualities and
objects ("Objects are events"); (c) conflating the part-whole
relationship with participation in an event; and (d) removing the
origins of the syntactic categories Noun and Verb from prelinguistic
semantics, and locating them rather in (postlinguistic) discourse
patterns.