Category: Extra readings

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Extra readings language

Classic language evolution paper: Pinker & Bloom 1990

This is mostly just for fun (it’s 50 pages long), and out of historical interest as well: This was the paper where Pinker and Bloom were like “uhhh…guys…yes the royal society(or some other academic society?) did place a ban on the subject of evolutionary linguistics…BUT THAT WAS OVER A CENTURY AGO, AND THINGS HAVE CHANGED! Hello???” and the response ranged between “STFU, you’re nuts” and “OMG I’VE BEEN THINKING THAT ALL ALONG, THANK YOU! =D”. tl;dr — this paper was quite important to the development of the field.

See, when you strip academic discourse of its flowery language, the whole thing degrades to little more than your usual internet flamewar…

Natural Language and Natural Selection — Pinker & Bloom 1990 Behav Sci

PS: Also, I’ve met Pinker =P   Turns out he exudes pure charisma, and his hair is real. Yeah, that’s right, do be jealous.

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Extra readings language

ME TARZAN – Simple language morphology as a feature of large cross-cultural language communities

Have you ever wondered why English seems so simple compared to some other languages, particularly those notious for complex grammar like Russian or German? Have you wondered whether there was any reason why the local languages are so complex and filled with intricate grammar?

May I interest you in a very fresh awesome paper from PLoS ONE:

Language Structure Is Partly Determined by Social Structure Lupyan & Dale 2010 (open access; that is, no VPN required. Also, do support Open Access whenever possible! =D Publically-funded research must be made accessible to the public!)

They examined 2236(!) languages and looked for correlation between their morphological complexity and the ‘linguistic niche’ — whether the language is spoken over a vast area mostly by strangers, or used within a small tightly-knit community. The majority of the world’s languages are ‘esoteric’ (smaller population, fewer neighbouring languages, smaller area; eg. Tatar, Piraha, Ju|’hoan, Nuu-chah-nulth), contrary to what is most obvious to us, ie the ‘exoteric’ languages like English or Swahili. One would expect that the use of an exoteric language as a lingua franca may result in some changes in its structure, as its ‘purpose’ or ‘function’, if you will, is quite different. Anyway, they found that:

Continue reading “ME TARZAN – Simple language morphology as a feature of large cross-cultural language communities”

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Extra readings language Week 2 Weekly Posts

Universal Grammar and Linguistic Evolution

Okay, first off. I don’t know how familiar people are with the concept of Universal Grammar, but I’ll try to boil it down and give you a straightforward version. UG is composed of all things that are common to all human languages. This is not confined to spoken languages (ie, it includes sign language, which interestingly does seem to share many features with spoken language) but makes no attempts to explain orthography.

Now, here’s my point. If we’ve got UG, and we assume that there are certain features shared between languages that are selected for depending on the environment and the sociopolitical landscape (as some linguists have done, notably Oudeyer and Kaplan), UG probably won’t consist of a series of features, per se, since (by definition) those features will vary depending on where you are in the world. To assume otherwise would be rather like assuming that all organisms must consist of certain genes in order to be organisms.

What UG would consist of is rather what all those various linguistic features have in common, not just those things shared by successful features. If the linguistic features are genes, UG would therefore be analogous to the base pairs that compose all DNA.

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Extra readings

Phylogeny for the faint of heart

In case any of you are keen to devour more phylogeny stuff:

“Phylogeny for the faint of heart: a tutorial” SL Baldauf 2003 Tr Genet

doi:10.1016/S0168-9525(03)00112-4

Also, highly recommend this review as a resource; it’s semi-required/strongly recommended as a reference after Wayne’s talk:

Understanding Evolutionary Trees. T Ryan Gregory* 2008 Evol Edu Outreach

*He’s visiting UBC in March; does really cool genome size evolution stuff!

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Extra readings

What is an organism?

Meanwhile, biologists are still trying to figure out what an organism is…

“Evolution: What Is an Organism?” West & Kiers 2009 Curr Biol

Original article:

“Beyond society: the evolution of organismality” Queller & Strassman 2009 Phil Trans R Soc B

Another interesting topic to discuss, perhaps sometime later. Becomes very relevant when trying to figure out if there’s anything analogous in other systems (culture, language)…

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