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The Instinct to Acquire an Art: How Darwinian are recent approaches to the cultural evolution of language?| old_uid | 7680 |
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| title | The Instinct to Acquire an Art: How Darwinian are recent approaches to the cultural evolution of language? |
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| start_date | 2009/11/24 |
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| schedule | 15h45-17h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | salle 1.63 |
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| summary | Looking back at Darwin's view of language, set out in both The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, it is striking how modern it appears in many respects. For example, he correctly identifies that our capacity for language is fundamentally cognitive, as opposed to articulatory, and that language is neither a "true instinct" nor one of the "ordinary arts". In this talk, I will consider our own work on the cultural evolution of language in the light of some of Darwin's observations.
Individuals in a population learn the structure of their language by observing the utterances produced by other individuals who acquired their language in the same way. Darwin points out that this means language is not a deliberate invention, but develops "unconsciously ... by many steps". The implications of this obvious fact are surprisingly poorly understood, but we can begin to get a handle on it by building computational and experimental models of the relationship between individual learners and population-level emergent behaviours. I will survey our results suggesting that the very fact that language is transmitted culturally makes language itself an evolutionary system. This leaves us with two fascinating, but as yet unanswered questions. Is language evolution in this sense Darwinian? And what implications does our work have for Darwin's own suggestions about the origins of the faculty for language in our species? |
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| responsibles | Zondervan |
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