why we talk the evolutionary origins of language mar 2007

[...]... Saussure, who Wrst deWned, in the early years of the twentieth century, a fundamental characteristic of language: the fact that the signs we use, words in particular, bear no relationship of likeness to the objects, actions, or phenomena to which they refer In other words, if we leave aside onomatopoeia, the relation between the signiWer (the word) and the signiWed (the object, the action, etc.) is purely... their acoustical form This is why we can posit that the immediate eVect of the communication act is the making of a mental representation If that is the case, then the eVect of one of these monkeys giving the call usually associated with the presence of a leopard will be to call to the minds of all its fellows something like the image of a leopard, deriving from the memory of actual situations Experimental... is the alarm calls of vervets (also known as green or grass monkeys) These small monkeys have a varied range of cries which they use for warning of the approach of a predator or the 6 Why We Talk presence of individuals from another troop The meanings of these alarm calls are very precise, as has been demonstrated in experiments using recordings of them When individual monkeys hear a recording of the. .. communication 17 In addresses as codiWed in Europe, there is a similarity between the order of the house numbers and the relative positions of the houses in the street In the main, our language relies on the use of a code which is not only discrete but also non-analogue In many respects, language is a digital system The digital aspect of language As a code, it is a remarkable feature of language that it is digital... correspondences, unlike the ideal relationships of mathematics, in which every expression is univocal In the early days of analytical philosophy some thinkers fancied they could do away with this diVerence between everyday language and the language of mathematics by reducing the signiWer–signiWed link to a simple bijection As we shall see, the interface between the system of signs and their meanings is in... Introduction to Part I To reconstruct the circumstances which may have led to the emergence of language in the evolution of our ancestors, we can set about it in three stages First we can put language behaviour into the broader context of the evolution of species Then we can analyse the structure of language so as to link it to a biological function Thirdly, we can identify the conditions which may have made... out how the bees’ dancing had evolved out of simulations of Xight, performed outside the hive When the dance is done in the darkness of the hive, the replacement of the angle of the sun by the bee’s alignment, vertical rather than horizontal, say, or standing in some relation to the angle of entry to the hive, does entail a certain arbitrariness Similarly, it seems likely that the alarm calls of many... relies on the use of a code Interpretation of signs produced by the communicating individual is impossible for any other individual who does not know the meaning of them There is, however, a fundamental diVerence between the code used by bees and the type of code we use when we speak In the dancing of bees there is a feature that semioticians describe as ‘iconic’: just as an image resembles the concrete... abdomen The nearest of the bees that follow her about pick up her movements from the faint sounds and the breeze she makes during her dance The speed and the number of abdomen waggles indicate the distance between the hive and the source of food: the nearer the food, the quicker the dance A threesecond burst, for example, indicates a distance of 500 metres What is most spectacular is the encoding of direction,... the use of a Weld, the bee’s movements, to represent a diVerent Weld, spatial locations All this would be far less interesting if the bee merely guided the others by Xying oV towards her Wnd However, the language of bees does diVer in several ways from our idea of our own mode of communication One of the essential diVerences lies in the Wxed and genetically programmed character of the dance All the . 20 1.6 Use of language by humans 23 1.7 The originality of language 28 2 Culture, languages, and language 30 2.1 Why are there many languages? 30 2.2 The myth of the mothe r language 34 2.3 Language. Tallerman 5 The Talking Ape How Language Evolved Robbins Burling 6 The Emergence of Speech Pierre-Yves Oudeyer translated by James R. Hurford 7 Why We Talk The Evolutionary Origins of Language Jean-Louis. 299 15.3 The recursive nature of argumentation 301 15.4 The proximal function of language 307 15.5 The origin of conversational modes 312 16 Language as an evolutionary paradox 315 16.1 The theory of