«Pragmatics and the aims of language evolution»

Thomas C. Scott-Phillips
«Pragmatics and the aims of language evolution»
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, February 2017, Volume 24, Issue 1

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review | Psychonomic Society (@Psychonomic_Soc) | Madison (Wisconsin) | ESTADOS UNIDOS


Extracto del apartado en páginas 187-188 de la publicación en PDF. Véanse las referencias en la publicación original del texto.

«A pragmatic perspective tells us what the key aims of language evolution should be

»In Relevance: Communication and Cognition (1995), not to mention many publications since, Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson developed a detailed and compelling argument that linguistic communication exists on a continuum with other, nonlinguistic forms of communication, canonical examples of which include points, shrugs, and other nonverbal gestures. The overall category here is that of ostensive communication: communication that involves the expression and recognition of intentions—that is, “strong” pragmatics.

»The intentions involved are, specifically, communicative intentions (which can be roughly glossed as an intention to make apparent to the audience that one is trying to communicate) and informative intentions (which can be roughly glossed as an intention to make apparent to the audience what one is trying to communicate). Ostensive communication can be used for a great many communicative ends, but its expressivity is hugely increased by the addition of words, grammar, and the other communicative conventions that collectively comprise a language. I can make a request of others by ostensively pushing unchopped vegetables in their direction, but with specific conventions I can make requests about things remote in time and space.

»Linguistic communication is, then, a special case of ostensive communication, namely one in which expressivity is hugely increased by the existence of shared communicative conventions (Scott-Phillips, 2014).

»If all this is correct, then already a pragmatic perspective has earned its keep, because it tells what two of the most central questions for language evolution should be. They are:

»1.

»How and why did humans evolve ostensive communication/strong pragmatics?; and

»2.

»How do collections of communicative conventions develop, and how and why do they evolve, culturally, to take the forms that they do?

»Question 1 is about the biological evolution of ostensive communication, Question 2 about the cultural evolution of languages. My own answers to these questions are described at length in my book, Speaking Our Minds (2014; see Scott-Phillips, 2015c, for a précis).

»The two questions above encompass many subquestions, and together they cover the majority of topics investigated in the name of language evolution (but see the next section for an exception).

»_ Regarding Question 1, the relevant issues include:

»_ The cognitive basis of nonhuman communication (What, exactly, are the cognitive mechanisms that make ostensive communication possible in the first place? Does any other species communicate in an ostensive way?)

»_ The selection pressures responsible for the evolution of ostensive communication (Sociality? Gossip? Teaching? Sex? Hunting?)

»_ The evolutionary stability of human communication (What processes maintain the stability of human communication? Why do the potential benefits of deception not cause the system to collapse?)

»Regarding Question 2, the relevant issues include:

»_ The creation of novel sign systems (How do new systems get started? What role does iconicity play? How do we signal signalhood?)

»_ The factors that influence the direction of language change/evolution (In which directions do languages tend to evolve? Why? What factors play a causal role in this process? Which of these factors are shared with other species?)

»_ The nature of protolanguage (Analytic or synthetic? Gestural, vocal, or multimodal?)

»These lists are not intended to be exhaustive. They are simply indicative lists of the sorts of issues that fall under each of the two main topic areas identified above. Note also that the domain of Question 2 is different from the domain of language change, which is concerned with changes from one established linguistic state to another (see Scott-Phillips & Kirby, 2010, for further discussion).

»The importance of (strong) pragmatics does not stop here, with description of the important questions. A pragmatic perspective is also essential to answering these questions. Question 1 is fundamentally about pragmatics itself, and good answers to Question 2 will almost certainly include an important role for pragmatics, because the demands of expressing oneself in a comprehensible manner—that is, of pragmatics—are clearly a critical factor in the cultural evolution of languages.

»Where, then, should future work be directed? In the case of Question 1, the further development of comparative approaches is clearly critical. As was mentioned above, pragmatics in the weaker sense of the term is biologically widespread; but what about pragmatics in the stronger sense of the term? One example of a relevant finding is the discovery that interactive turn-taking in communication takes place in all major primate clades (Levinson, 2016).

»However, there is much more to be done, and more focus should be directed to noncommunicative social cognition. Strong pragmatics is in the end a matter of mutually assisted social cognition: Signalers aim to affect the mental states of their audience, and the audience attempts to infer those intentions—and as such, comparisons between the social cognition of humans and other species is of high relevance to the evolution of ostensive communication (Scott-Phillips, 2015a, b; Tomasello, 2008).

»Regarding Question 2, a key goal should be to link the study of the cultural evolution of languages with cognitive anthropology, one of the central concerns of which is how and why cultural items emerge and remain stable (see, e.g., Sperber, 1996). As was discussed above, languages are sets of cultural, communicative conventions, and language evolution is concerned with how these conventions develop the sort of properties that make them linguistic in the first place. As such, language evolution and cognitive anthropology each have much to offer the other—but this potential for mutually beneficial exchange has not yet been exploited in any substantial way.»