Brady Clark

Scavenging, the stag hunt, and the evolution of language

This article evaluates Derek Bickertons 2009 theory of language evolution. Bickerton argues that language was the result of a need to recruit individuals to help in the scavenging of carcasses of megafauna. The signals used for recruitment at the earliest stage of language evolution were iconic and could be used to refer to objects outside the sensory range of the receiver(s). Bickertons scenario is an example of what is described in game theory as a stag hunt. We can, by recasting Bickertons scenario as a stag hunt, identify criteria that any account of the transition to language must satisfy. There are several hurdles we would need to jump over to demonstrate that Bickertons model is valid. First, not much is known about early hominin scavenging. While the available evidence is compatible with Bickertons scenario, it is compatible with other scenarios as well. Second, Bickerton argues that, at the initial stage of language evolution, signals were grounded in salient aspects of the environment. The empirical support for natural salience as a determinant of the communication systems used at the earliest stages of language evolution is mixed at best; communication systems can arise spontaneously in the absence of natural salience. Third, maintaining communication systems is nontrivial because of the incentive to deceive.

The role of speaker beliefs in determining accent placement

In English and other languages, the distribution of nuclear pitch accents within a sentence usually reflects how the meaningful parts of the sentence relate to the context. Generally speaking, the nuclear pitch accent can only occur felicitously on focused parts of the sentence, corresponding to information that is not contextually retrievable or given. In most contemporary theories, focus is formally represented by an abstract syntactic feature ‘F’. Those parts of the sentence that are given tend to resist F-marking and thus nuclear accentuation. In short, there is a more or less tight coupling between (i) the contextual information status of parts of the sentence; (ii) the focus structure of the sentence (represented by the distribution of syntactic F-marking); and (iii) the actual accent placement in the phonological form.

Evolutionary Frameworks for Language Change: The Price Equation Approach

Models and concepts from biology have informed the study of language change for several centuries. In this article, I take a comparative look across the disciplines of historical linguistics and evolutionary biology and ask if an evolutionary perspective on language change drawing on Darwins theory of adaptation through natural selection can contribute in a substantive way to theorizing within the study of language change. This article discusses a framework for language change that borrows concepts from evolutionary theory, the framework presented in Mufwene (2008). Building on Jager (2008), I suggest that George Prices “General Theory of Selection” provides a useful and precise framework in which to mathematically represent evolutionary frameworks for language change such as Mufwenes. In the final part of the paper, I propose that the Price equation approach to the levels of selection debate in biology can provide insight into the ways in which different levels of linguistic information interact during language change.