Sławomir Wacewicz

Language Evolution: Why Hockett's Design Features are a Non-Starter.

The set of design features developed by Charles Hockett in the 1950s and 1960s remains probably the most influential means of juxtaposing animal communication with human language. However, the general theoretical perspective of Hockett is largely incompatible with that of modern language evolution research. Consequently, we argue that his classificatory system—while useful for some descriptive purposes—is of very limited use as a theoretical framework for evolutionary linguistics. We see this incompatibility as related to the ontology of language, i.e. deriving from Hockett’s interest in language as a product rather than a suite of sensorimotor, cognitive and social abilities that enable the use but also acquisition of language by biological creatures (the faculty of language). After a reconstruction of Hockett’s views on design features, we raise two criticisms: focus on the means at the expense of content and focus on the code itself rather than the cognitive abilities of its users. Finally, referring to empirical data, we illustrate some of the problems resulting from Hockett’s approach by addressing three specific points—namely arbitrariness and semanticity, cultural transmission, and displacement—and show how the change of perspective allows to overcome those difficulties.

Human Honest Signalling and Nonverbal Communication

Abstract The issue of signal reliability (‘honesty’) is widely recognised in language evolution research as one of the most fundamental problems concerning the evolutionary emergence of protolanguage, i.e. early language-like communication. We propose that nonverbal communication is likely to have played an important but underestimated role in language evolution: not directly in the transfer of message contents, but rather in stabilising the emerging protolanguage. We single out one subset of nonverbal cues - nonvocal nonverbal paralinguistic adaptors (NNPAs) - based on their role as indicators of reliability in present-day communication of humans. We suggest that the relatively involuntary and therefore reliable NNPAs might have served to stabilise more volitionally controlled, and therefore less reliable, verbal communication at the initial, bootstrapping stages of its phylogenetic development.

Vocal-auditory feedback and the modality transition problem in language evolution

This is a pre-print version. This article has been published in Reti Saperi Linguaggi, 1/2016 a. 5 (9), 157–178, [DOI: 10.12832/83923]. Copyright Societa editrice il Mulino. The publisher should be contacted for permission to re-use or reprint the material in any form.

Concepts As Correlates Of Lexical Items

This is a submitted manuscript version. The publisher should be contacted for permission to re-use or reprint the material in any form. Final published version, copyright Peter Lang: https://doi.org/10.3726/978-3-653-05287-9The content of this article amounts to a somewhat controversial terminological proposal: the term ‘concept’ is most fruitfully construed as ‘a mental representations having a lexical correlate’. Such a definition makes it possible to treat ‘concept’ as a technical term across the cognitive sciences, but also preserving most intuitions from a looser use of this word in the literature. The central points consist in a) appreciating the qualitative difference between the mental representations correlated with lexical labels and other mental representations, and b) accepting this difference as an effect of the causal influence of language on cognition. The argument is supported by a review of recent empirical results.

The relevance of body language to evolution of language research

The heterogeneous category of phenomena covered by the term body language (roughly equivalent to nonverbal communication, NVC), although essential to human day-to-day communication, is also largely dissociable from human verbal behaviour. As such, it has received little attention in the area of evolution of language research. In this paper we point to an important factor – signal reliability (honesty) as an elementary constraint on communication as an evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) – which shows promise of restoring the relevance of broadly construed body language to the evolution of language. Contemporary research on the emergence of language-like communication has tended to target the language-related cognitive capacities, with relatively less focus on the fundamental game-theoretic constraints as dictated by evolutionary logic. Communication, in order to remain an ESS, must be honest, i.e. signals must be reliably correlated with those aspects of the environment for which they are shorthand 1 . Despite suggestions at possible mechanisms (e.g. Scott-Phillips 2008), the origin of honest, cooperative signalling in human phylogeny remains among the least understood aspects of the evolution of language. It has been compellingly argued that the evolution of communication in nonhuman animals is reception-driven, i.e. it is the receivers that are selected to “acquire information from signalers who do not, in the human sense, intend to provide it” (Seyfarth & Cheney 2003: 168). Body language is characterised by similar properties, that is the transfer of information not intentionally provided by the signaller. Crucially, it is this last property that makes body language resistant to manipulation, and thus endows it with relatively high signal reliability (honesty). At the same time, in mimetic (Donald 1991) creatures, body

Evolutionary Stability of Linguistic Politeness and the Politeness Equilibrium Principle

Unlike many facets of language – phonology, syntax, semantics or even pragmatics – linguistic politeness (LP) has attracted little attention of evolutionarily minded researchers. We think that this lack of interest – apart from a few isolated attempts (van Rooy, 2003; Żywiczyński, 2012; Wacewicz et al., 2015; Pleyer & Pleyer, 2016) is not dictated by a peripheral status of LP for the description of language, and especially for language evolution. LP is a universal characteristic of languages (cf. Brown & Levinson, 1987) but its specific markers are subject to considerable cultural variation, a combination of features that makes it an interesting target for evolutionary modeling. Next, LP is first and foremost a set of interactional strategies, and hence naturally lends itself to rendering in game-theoretic terms (cf. Quinley, 2011). In this paper, we take a game-theoretic approach and make a case that LP can be subsumed under a more general explanatory principle: disalignment of interests. This is formally expressed as the Politeness Equilibrium Principle (PEP), whereby the more disalignment there is between the interests of Speaker and Hearer, the more LP Speaker needs to use to offset the imbalance. Furthermore, we present a game-theoretic model to show that the use of LP predicated on the PEP forms an evolutionary stable system.

Pantolang: A synthetic cognitive-semiotic approach to language origins

The key concept of the project is that of pantomime, a communication system based on whole-body re-enactment of events, relying predominantly on iconicity/resemblance (Zywiczynski et al., 2016; Zlatev et al., 2017). As the foremost communicative manifestation of the uniquely human capacity for bodily mimesis (Donald, 2001; Zlatev, 2014), pantomime arguably introduced a new level of semiotic complexity: an open system of signs, rather than a closed system of association-based signals. While other theories have appealed to “gesture” or even “pantomime” as a precursor to language (e.g. Arbib, 2005; Tomasello, 2008), our approach is unique in defining the notion consistently and making it the cornerstone of a theory of language origins. Further, to explain the transition from pantomime to language, we focus on three central cognitive-semiotic factors. The first is intersubjectivity, which implies human-specific levels of (mind) sharing and trust. We distinguish 548

Humans do not perceive conspecifics with a greater exposed sclera as more trustworthy: a preliminary cross-ethnic study of the function of the overexposed human sclera

Understanding the adaptive function of the unique morphology of the human eye, in particular its overexposed white sclera, may have profound implications for the fields of evolutionary behavioural science, and specifically the areas of human interaction and social cognition. Existing hypotheses, such as the cooperative eye hypothesis, have attracted a lot of attention but remain untested. Here, we: (i) analysed variation in the visible sclera size in humans from different ethnic backgrounds and (ii) examined whether intraspecific variation of exposed sclera size is related to trust. We used 596 facial photographs of men and women, assessed for perceived trustworthiness, from four different self-declared racial backgrounds. The size of the exposed sclera was measured as the ratio between the width of the exposed eyeball and the diameter of the iris (sclera size index, SSI). The SSI did not differ in the four examined races and was sexually monomorphic except for Whites, where males had a larger SSI than females. In general, the association between the SSI and trustworthiness was statistically insignificant. An inverted U-shaped link was found only in White women, yet the strength of the effect of interaction between sex and race was very small. Our results did not provide evidence for the link between exposed sclera size and trustworthiness. We conclude that further investigation is necessary in order to properly assess the hypotheses relating to the socially relevant functions of overexposed sclera.

A contemporary look at language origins

Why is language unique? How did language come about? When did this happen? These questions, although quite emblematic of the Western intellectual tradition since its ancient beginnings, so far have not found satisfying answers. Indeed, many still question the very possibility of addressing these basic problems of the origins of language with proper scientific rigor (see e.g. Hauser et al. 2014). However, an emerging consensus is that current research in the field of language evolution is in fact bearing fruit, making it at least possible to judge in an informed manner which of these competing scenarios are far more or less probable. In what follows, I guide the reader through some of this research and some of these scenarios; for more details, I refer the reader to a recent book (Żywiczynski & Wacewicz 2015), which is the first monograph that presents this developing field of language evolution research to the Polish reader.