On Tuesday 7th June from 11-12.30 in room 1.17 DSB, Erin Brown will give a talk on her thesis work:

Where do symbols come from?

A central issue in language origins is the emergence of symbolic communication. Recognizing the problems associated with establishing symbolic reference, many authors have proposed that nonarbitrary communication must have preceded symbolic communication, with nonarbitrary forms serving to ground arbitrary ones. Precisely how this bootstrapping of symbols took place continues to be debated, and questions remain regarding how meaning came to be represented in arbitrary forms and in which modality symbols first arose. Using semiotic theory, I identify two factors underlying the establishment of symbolic representation and examine research in experimental semiotics, new signed languages and computational modeling with these concepts in mind. I will discuss how these findings, together with a consideration of the particular qualities of human communication, can inform our understanding of the development of symbols in language evolution.

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