Abstract
Maynard Smith and Szathmáry (1995) propose a series of major transitions in the evolutionary history of life. Their work provides a rich framework for thinking about replication. They identified the importance of language in this light, but language is a new system of replication in more than one sense: it is both an enabler of cultural replicators with unlimited heredity, and also a new kind of evolutionary system itself. Iterated learning is the process of linguistic transmission, and it drives both language change and the transitions to qualitatively new kinds of linguistic system. By seeing language as an evolutionary system, the biggest payoff we get may be the ability to take biologists’ insights into the evolution of life and apply them to the evolution of language.
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Notes
- 1.
Croft (2000, this volume) elaborates a specific proposal along these lines, motivated by a theoretical framework for linguistic representation known as Construction Grammar. Croft treats constructions as replicators—linguemes in his terminology.
- 2.
Note that there are potentially confusing difference in the interpretation of “cultural”. I will use “cultural” to mean any behaviour that is inherited socially rather than genetically. “Culture” in the sense of the specific identifying practices of a society is transmitted culturally, but so too are behaviours like language.
- 3.
See Jackendoff (1999) for a more detailed proposal of a sequence of trajectories language could have gone through. Jackendoff’s trajectories may be broadly compatible with the view presented here, but note that the driving mechanism I propose is cultural rather than biological evolution.
- 4.
Idioms and holistic formulae are multi-word, so may appear to be compositional rather than holophrastic. However, in an idiom like bought the farm the meaning (died) has no systematic relationship to the meaning of the parts of the idiom so it is non-compositional. In the case of holistic formulae such as how’s it going? although the meaning is arguably compositional, it is likely that in actual use this utterance is not processed by either speaker or hearer compositionally, but rather as a holistic chunk. See Wray (1998) for more discussion. These apparently compositional holophrases exist in fully modern human language because it is indeed largely compositional. In the hypothesised protolanguage stage, the holophrases would have been entirely idiosyncratic in form, rather like the mono-morphemic lexicon of any modern language.
- 5.
Another way of thinking about this is that the bottleneck sets the level of granularity of dividing up the meanings at which a language can afford to be idiosyncratic and non-compositional. Simulation results demonstrate that frequently expressed meanings can be described holistically, whereas infrequent ones must be compositional (Kirby 2001). Similarly, languages typically exhibit irregular morphology among frequent items (Francis and Kucera 1982). Consider the past tenses of frequent verbs in English such as be/was, go/went etc. for example. In this view, the word or morpheme is simply the level at which the language can afford to be holistic and still be transmitted faithfully.
- 6.
Although, see Kirby (2007) for a model where the structure of meanings themselves can similarly be seen to adapt to improve learnability.
- 7.
There is no particular need here to take a position on exactly how best to represent these replicators formally. For example, in the simulation model discussed in this section, vocabulary items and rules were represented formally using a traditional grammar formalism from computational linguistics (a DCG). Other modellers have formalised construction grammar (e.g. Steels 2009), which lends itself well to an analysis in terms of replicators.
- 8.
More recently, similar results have been obtained in a laboratory experiment by Verhoef and colleagues (Verhoef et al. 2011; Verhoef and de Boer 2011). Here, participants learn a system of whistled signals that are transmitted culturally from one participant to the next. Over these artificial generations, discrete sub-signals emerge that are reused and recombined systematically.
- 9.
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Kirby, S. (2013). Transitions: The Evolution of Linguistic Replicators. In: Binder, PM., Smith, K. (eds) The Language Phenomenon. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36086-2_6
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