This post focuses on two recent Trends papers about language. They aren’t things that literature might purport to know things about, as far as I can tell, but there’s an obvious overlap of interests.

* Michael C. Corballis, ‘Language Evolution: A Changing Perspective’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21 (2017), 229-36.

This gives a helpful summary of theories about the evolution of language, tracing the changing views of some key thinkers (such as Chomsky) and various emerging possibilities. Corballis sees signs of a big rapprochement. I think the essay’s most interesting contributions are to promote (i) the idea that ‘some nonhuman animals are capable of more “advanced” cognition [e.g. mental time-travel, mind-reading] than hitherto realized, suggesting evolutionary continuity rather than a sudden shift in cognition that somehow made humans special’, and (ii) the idea that apes’ use of sign-language ‘raises the possibility that language originated, not from vocal calls, but from manual gestures’.
      There are various strands and nuances and counter-possibilities. Corballis suggests that hand gestures might have blended into mouth gestures and these could have accumulated acoustic components. The arbitrariness of the acoustic code, ‘sustained largely through culture’, however, is not a property of manual gesture. He suggests it might be ‘an early example of miniaturization — tucking the burden of communication into the mouth and freeing the hands and arms for activities such as carrying or making and using tools’, and I found this quite appealing, perhaps because to think of the origin of language as something so linguistically pleasing as ‘tucking a burden’.

* Philippe Schlenker, Emmanuel Chemla, and Klaus Zuberbühler, ‘What Do Monkey Calls Mean?’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20 (2016), 894-904.

You’re the kind of reader who knows that when they say monkeys they don’t mean apes, right? Because that does matter, in that it’s a bit more of a thing to analyse the meaning of monkey calls in such a human way, than it would be to do that with our nearer relatives. And I expect you’re the kind of reader who has a clearer idea than I have what we mean when we say ‘meaning’; it seems like a wobbly term.
      Schlenker et al. tell us that field experiments show that monkey calls, while radically different from our languages, might productively be analysed with linguistic tools. They have morphology, syntax, and semantics. They might be addressed in the terms of pragmatics, i.e. by considering not just what is encoded in an utterance but the work of inference drawn by its hearers. Rather than positing complex communicative intentions, they stick to a basic ‘Informativity Principle’ similar to one found in human communication, i.e. priority is given to things which bring new information. This might not seem like a lot, but the more language-like the monkey calls seem, the more (unexpectedly to some) this essay achieves the goal it shares with the Corballis one above, to put back into the maelstrom of animal evolution something that has been taken to prove humans are special.
      One element that caught my eye was an interest in what sounds like turn-taking (often on my mind — see some links from here for example — and more to follow one day, I hope). There is competition among the calls (‘more informative calls are normally preferred to less specific ones’) and protocols among the callers about ‘call sequencing’. This draws on, and is arguing with, lots of complex specialisms; another highly suggestive piece.