Matt Spike (1st year PhD student) will be giving this week’s LEC talk, on “What can linguistic convention tell us about the cultural evolution of language?”. Tuesday 4th June 11am, DSB 1.17. Abstract below.

“What can linguistic convention tell us about the cultural evolution of language?”

While every human language is highly systematic, no two languages share the same system. Speech communities agree on the sounds, words and structures they use, but this occurs in the absence of any conscious planning or coordination. The question of how populations reach a consensus on the conventional aspects of language is not a trivial one. Steels (2012) claims that self-organisation and selection for communicative success alone can explain the cultural evolution of language in its entirety. In my talk, I will argue that neither of these criteria provide a satisfying explanation, but that a cultural evolutionary analysis of how conventions arise may provide some insight. I will do this by first looking at some simple conventions, both non-linguistic and linguistic. I will then compare a number of models from several different fields of the emergence of a structured convention, learned symbolic communication. Although the models make quite different assumptions about the mechanisms responsible, I will show that they all share at least certain qualities, and then discuss how this constrains the possible types of cultural evolution leading to structured conventions. Finally, I will consider the possibility that individual processes might contribute towards conventionality at several levels of organisation in language.

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