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Balancing arbitrariness and systematicity in language evolution / Padraic Monaghan, Morten H. Christiansen, Stanka Fitneva -- Speaker-independent perception of human speech by zebra finches / Verena R. Ohms [und weitere] -- An avian model for language evolution / Irene Pepperberg -- Grooming gestures of chimpanzees in the wild : first insights into meaning and function / Simone Pika, Chris Knight -- The relevance ofthe developmental stress hypothesis to the evolution of language / Anne Pritchard -- Co-evolution of language and social network structure through cultural transmission / Justin Quillinan, Simon Kirby, Kenny Smith -- The origins of sociolinguistic marking and its role in language ...
This volume comprises refereed papers and abstracts from the 7th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG7), held in Barcelona in March 2008. As the leading international conference in the field, the biennial EVOLANG meeting is characterized by an invigorating, multidisciplinary approach to the origins and evolution of human language, and brings together researchers from many fields including anthropology, archeology, artificial life, biology, cognitive science, computer science, ethology, genetics, linguistics, neuroscience, paleontology, primatology, psychology and statistical physics.The latest theoretical, experimental and modeling research on language evolution is presented in this collection. It includes contributions from leading scientists such as Derek Bickerton, Rudolf Botha, Camilo Cela Conde, Francesco d'Erico, Susan Goldin-Meadow, Simon Kirby, Gary Marcus, Friedemann Pulvermüller and Juan Uriagereka./a
A provocative case for the inherently political nature of language In The Politics of Language, David Beaver and Jason Stanley present a radical new approach to the theory of meaning, offering an account of communication in which political and social identity, affect, and shared practices play as important a role as information. This new view of language, they argue, has dramatic consequences for free speech, democracy, and a range of other areas in which speech plays a central role. Drawing on a wealth of disciplines, The Politics of Language argues that the function of speech—whether in dialogue, larger group interactions, or mass communication—is to attune people to something, be it a...
The Talking Heads Experiment, conducted in the years 1999-2001, was the first large-scale experiment in which open populations of situated embodied agents created for the first time ever a new shared vocabulary by playing language games about real world scenes in front of them. The agents could teleport to different physical sites in the world through the Internet. Sites, in Antwerp, Brussels, Paris, Tokyo, London, Cambridge and several other locations were linked into the network. Humans could interact with the robotic agents either on site or remotely through the Internet and thus influence the evolving ontologies and languages of the artificial agents. The present book describes in detail the motivation, the cognitive mechanisms used by the agents, the various installations of the Talking Heads, the experimental results that were obtained, and the interaction with humans. It also provides a perspective on what happened in the field after these initial groundbreaking experiments. The book is invaluable reading for anyone interested in the history of agent-based models of language evolution and the future of Artificial Intelligence.
In this book, leading linguists explore the empirical scope of syntactic theory, by concentrating on a set of phenomena for which both syntactic and nonsyntactic analyses appear plausible. The volume is organized into four thematic sections: architectures; syntax and information structure; syntax and the lexicon; and lexical items at the interfaces
This book constitutes the proceedings of the International Workshop on Vagueness in Communication, VIC 2009, held as part of ESSLLI 2009, in Bordeaux, France, July 20-24, 2009. The 11 contributions presented shed a light on new aspects in the area of vagueness in natural language communication. In contrast to the classical instruments of dealing with vagueness - like multi-valued logics, truth value gaps or gluts, or supervaluations - this volume presents new approaches like context-sensitivity of vagueness, the sharpening of vague predicates in context, and the modeling of precision levels.
This volume is the first to bring together researchers studying a range of different types of emerging sign languages in the Americas, and their relationship to the gestures produced in the surrounding communities of hearing individuals. Contents Acknowledgements Olivier Le Guen, Marie Coppola and Josefina Safar Introduction: How Emerging Sign Languages in the Americas contributes to the study of linguistics and (emerging) sign languages Part I: Emerging sign languages of the Americas. Descriptions and analysis John Haviland Signs, interaction, coordination, and gaze: interactive foundations of “Z”—an emerging (sign) language from Chiapas, Mexico Laura Horton Representational strategie...
Explores the cultural side of language evolution. This book proposes a framework based on linguistic selection and self-organization. It investigates how particular types of language systems can emerge in the population of language game playing agents and how they can continue to evolve in order to cope with changes in ecological conditions.
Symbolic thought is what makes us human. Claude Lévi-Strauss stated that we can never know the genesis of symbolic thought, but in this powerful new study Alan Barnard argues that we can. Continuing the line of analysis initiated in Social Anthropology and Human Origins (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Genesis of Symbolic Thought applies ideas from social anthropology, old and new, to understand some of the areas also being explored in fields as diverse as archaeology, linguistics, genetics and neuroscience. Barnard aims to answer questions including: when and why did language come into being? What was the earliest religion? And what form did social organization take before humanity dispersed from the African continent? Rejecting the notion of hunter-gatherers as 'primitive', Barnard hails the great sophistication of the complex means of their linguistic and symbolic expression and places the possible origin of symbolic thought at as early as 130,000 years ago.
Bringing together a team of well-known scholars, this book examines the link between linguistic cognition and morphological diversity.