P01593/U00559 Origins and Evolution of Language
http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~jim/origins11-12.html
MSc Module / Linguistics Honours Option, (overlapping content.)
Prof. James R
Hurford, with help from Dr. Kenny Smith.
Prerequisites
This is a core module in the MSc in Evolution
of Language and Cognition.
There are no Honours prerequisites for Linguistics undergraduates taking this course.
All 3rd and 4th year Honours students may take this course.
Aims and objectives
The course will show how understanding of all
the main subdisciplines of Linguistics can be enhanced by viewing them from an
evolutionary perspective. Thus, in cases where other approaches to language do
little more than describe the linguistic facts, or at best explain them by
stipulated abstract principles, Evolutionary Linguistics can often
provide more satisfactory explanations by showing a route by which the facts
could have arisen. In short, where much linguistics says `This is how language
is', evolutionary linguistics attempts to say 'This is how language got to be
that way'. The course will apply this approach to all levels of linguistic
analysis, thus outlining areas aptly labelled as Evolutionary Pragmatics,
Evolutionary Phonetics, Evolutionary Semantics, Evolutionary Phonology, and
Evolutionary Syntax.
In addition, the course aims to give Linguistics students a survey of the
main issues in the evolution and origins of the human language faculty and of
actual human languages. The subject matter is inevitably somewhat speculative,
but the course will set out a basis of relevant facts accumulated from a range
of disciplines within and outwith Linguistics, including animal behaviour,
evolutionary theory, computer modelling, genetics, language acquisition,
paleontology, archaeology Where facts are scarce, methodological questions about
how best to proceed will be examined. After the course, students should be able
to speak and write informedly and responsibly about the origins of language,
know how to keep track of fresh developments in the field, and be able to put
such developments in perspective.
Course Structure
Lectures (with some discussion): Monday
afternoons, 2.00 - 4.00, in Teviot Lecture Theatre. This lecture
theatre is located on the ground floor of the old Medical School --
enter by doorway 5 (down steps) from the Quadrangle.
Tutorials:
MSc students - Tuesdays at 5.00 in Room 1.17, Dugald Stewart Building.
Tutorials start in Week 2.
Undergraduates - EITHER Tuesdays at 10.00 in Room 1.17, Dugald Stewart
Building OR
Tuesdays at 3.00 in room 4.01 David Hume Tower. Tutorials start in Week
2.
Readings are specified below for each week of the course. There is
a lot to read, more than can be done in the time. Students should read
at
least two of the specified papers each week.
Course content: Weekly topics and readings
- Week 1, Sept. 19th:
Preliminaries.
Biological and cultural evolution. Phylogeny,
glossogeny and ontogeny. Adaptation, preadaptations, natural selection,
spandrels, linguistic selection. Language as the outcome of interacting
complex systems.
Readings:
Hurford, James R. 2003 ``The Language Mosaic and its Evolution''. In Language Evolution, edited by Morten
Christiansen and Simon Kirby, Oxford University Press, pp.38-57.
- Hurford, James R. 1999 ``The Evolution of
Language and Languages''. In Robin Dunbar, Chris Knight and Camilla
Power (eds) The Evolution of Culture, Edinburgh University Press.
pp.173-193.
Powerpoint slides: To access these slides, you need the class
username and password:
Weeks 2 & 3, Sept. 26th and Oct. 3rd: Evolutionary
semantics.
Animal concepts, simple and complex. The origin of predicate-argument
structure. The origin of reference in deixis. The human semantic
explosion due to symbols and compositional syntax.
Reading: - Wynne, Clive D L
``Other Ways of Seeing the
World -- II: Abstract Dimensions'', Chapter 5 of his book Animal
Cognition: the mental lives of animals (Palgrave, Houndmills,
Hampshire, 2001).
- Chapters 1 - 5 of James R Hurford The Origins of
Meaning Oxford University Press, 2007:
Chapter 1,
Chapter 2,
Chapter 3,
Chapter 4,
Chapter 5 ,
and Chapter 2 of James R Hurford The Origins of
Grammar Oxford University Press, 2011:
Chapter
2.
To access these files, you need a username and a password, which will
be announced in class.
Powerpoint slides: To access these slides, you need the class
username and password:
Tutorial sheet
for week 2 - study and discuss in tutorial.
Tutorial, week 3: Discussion of the readings mentioned above.
Weeks 4 & 5: Oct. 10th and 17th: Evolutionary Pragmatics.
Social and socio-psychological preadaptations for language. Acts,
ritualization, mindreading and manipulation, theory of mind. Conveying practical
information, gossip, courtship, deception, manipulation. Machiavellian
intelligence, social intelligence. Group size, altruism, mimesis.
Readings:
- Krebs, J. R., and Dawkins, R. 1984.
``Animal Signals: Mind-Reading
and Manipulation'', In Behavioural Ecology: An Evolutionary Approach,
edited by J.R.Krebs and N.B.Davies, Blackwell Scientific Publications,
Oxford.
- Haiman, John (1994)
``Ritualization and the Development of
Language'', in Pagliuca, William (ed.) Perspectives on
Grammaticalization John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam, pp.1-28.
- Chapters 6 - 9 of James R Hurford The Origins of
Meaning Oxford University Press, 2007:
To access these files, you need a username and a password, which will
be announced in class.
Chapter 6,
Chapter 7,
Chapter 8,
Chapter 9.
Powerpoint slides: To access these slides, you need the class
username and password:
Weeks 6 & 7, Oct. 24th and 31st: Evolutionary syntax.
Animal precursors of syntax. Is recursion the key to human
syntactic ability, and can only humans control recursion? Grammaticalization
and creolization. Compositionality, rules with variables and generalization
by learners. Self-organizing spread of compositional syntax across
generations. Are syntactic universals specific to language?
Reading: In order of importance (but they all important)
- Heine, Bernd, and Tania Kuteva,
``On the Evolution of
Grammatical Forms'', Chapter 18 of The Transition to Language,
edited by Alison Wray, Oxford University Press, 2002.
- Newmeyer, Frederick J.,
``Uniformitarian Assumptions and Language
Evolution Research'', Chapter 17 of The Transition to Language,
edited by Alison Wray, Oxford University Press, 2002.
- Jackendoff, Ray,
``An Evolutionary Perspective on the
Architecture'', Chapter 8 of his Foundations of Language: Brain,
Meaning, Grammar, Evolution, Oxford University Press, 2002.
- Selected chapters of J. R. Hurford
(2011) The Origins of
Grammar. Most recommended are:
Chapter 1, on
syntax in animals - birdsong etc.;
Chapter 5,
what languages are like;
Chapter 8, an
early-stage evolutionary story;
Chapter 9,
grammaticalization. (Class username and password neeeded.)
Powerpoint slides: To access these slides, you need the class
username and password:
Weeks 8 & 9, Nov. 7th and 14th: Evolutionary phonology.
Evolution of characteristic phonological systems. Syllables, consonants and vowels as basic units of speech, distinctive features.
Reading: At least one of
- Lindblom, B., MacNeilage, P., and Studdert-Kennedy, M. 1984.
``Self-organizing processes and the explanation of phonological universals''.
In B.Butterworth, B.Comrie, and ?ten Dahl (Eds.), Explanations for Language Universals, Berlin: Mouton. 181-203.
- de Boer, Bart (2000)
``Self organization in vowel systems'', Journal of Phonetics 28 (4), pp. 441?465
- de Boer, Bart (2000)
``Emergence of vowel systems through self-organisation'' AI Communications 13 pp. 27-39.
Powerpoint slides: To access these slides, you need the class
username and password:
Weeks 10, Nov. 21st: Evolutionary phonetics.
Human and animal hearing compared. Evolution of the human vocal tract and fine control over the vocal apparatus.
Reading: Two chapters from Philip Lieberman's book The
Biology and Evolution of Language (1984, Harvard University Press).
Powerpoint slides: To access these slides, you need the class
username and password:
Week 11, Nov. 28th: Guest lectures on the theme ``Recent
experiments about language evolution''
Hannah Cornish: ``Using artificial
languages to study the cultural evolution of natural languages''
Christine Cuskley: ``Experimenting
with cross-modality to shed light on
the evolution of language''
Keelin Murray: ``Musical Protolanguage -- Did your Ancestors Sing
First?''
Assessment
- For MSc students: a 3000-word essay/project, on a topic to be
agreed with the instructor, worth 100% of the course mark.
Deadline: 4.00 p.m. on Monday December 12th 2011. Submit one
hard copy and one electronic copy to Toni Noble.
- For undergraduates: a 2000-word essay project on an agreed
topic, worth 50% of the course mark. Deadlines: EITHER 12.00 noon
Thursday
November 3rd 2011, OR 12.00 noon Thursday December 1st 2011;
Students should choose which deadline they prefer and tell Prof Hurford of
their choice. Once a student is committed to a particular deadline, the
normal rules for deadlines will apply.
Submit one hard copy and one electronic copy to
the Linguistics undergraduate secretary in Room 4.05 DSB.
Plus a 2-hour exam,
worth 50% of the course mark. This exam will be held from 9.30am to
11.30am on Monday 12th December, in the Richard Verney Health Centre.
http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~jim/origins09-10.html
updated 26 September 2009