Chris Sinha

University of East Anglia | UEA · School of Psychology

Niche construction theory is a relatively new approach in evolutionary biology that seeks to integrate an ecological dimension into the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection. It is regarded by many evolutionary biologists as providing a significant revision of the Neo-Darwinian modern synthesis that unified Darwin’s theory of natural a...

It is widely assumed that there is a natural, prelinguistic conceptual domain of time whose linguistic organization is universally structured via metaphoric mapping from the lexicon and grammar of space and motion. We challenge this assumption on the basis of our research on the Amondawa (Tupi Kawahib) language and culture of Amazonia. Using both o...

This article sheds light on the history of the sciences of mind within which the development of cognitive linguistics can be situated. It shows that it is the modern inheritor of an older tradition, antedating the behaviorist ascendancy in mid-twentieth century psychology which preceded classical cognitive science. This tradition, centered in psych...

Our aim in this article is to argue that an adequate account of semantic development in early first language acquisition requires a theory and methodology that synthesize the insights of cognitive and cultural linguistics with a Vygotskian socio-cultural approach to human development. This involves recasting and extending the notion of Embodiment,...

The biological and neurological capacity to symbolize, and the products of behavioral, cognitive, sociocultural, linguistic, and technological uses of symbols (symbolism), are fundamental to every aspect of human life. The Oxford Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution explores the origins of our characteristically human abilities-our ability to speak...

Moving beyond a more traditional view of language as a discrete sociocultural and cognitive entity that distorts our understanding of surrounding ecologies, this book argues that the starting point for ecolinguistics is an appreciation of language as not just about nature, but of nature. Exploring this conceptual change in the field, the book prese...

The turn of the century witnessed key developments in biological sciences with profound implications both for biological theory and for the sciences of language. The decoding of the human genome showed that humans share with their closest living relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, between 95% and 98% of their genes, depending on the methodology for...

Our aim in this chapter is to critically examine the sciences of language as practices/theories in a complex of inter-related social, cultural, political and ideological ecologies. The specific topic around which we try to disentangle and illuminate this web of practice/theory is the study of endangered (especially, Indigenous minority) languages a...

Openings in the past and present between semiotics and theories of human development and evolution are explored in this chapter. The foundations in theories of the sign of the psychological theories of Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky and Karl Bühler are summarized. Limitations as well as innovations of these 20th century approaches are identified. Key ch...

The Chinese directional motion verbs wang往 and lai来can be glossed in English as ‘go’ and ‘come’, and the distinction between ‘go’ and ‘come’ in English is comparable to that between wang and lai in Chinese. Their usage in the YiChing is described and analyzed in this article. In the YiChing, wang and lai frequently co-occur in the same sentence, as...

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

• I argue that Kravchenko overestimates the extent of the dominance of the traditional approach that the author criticizes, while underestimating the continuing influence of different approaches in the history of language sciences. Karl Bühler's Sprachtheorie is taken as a key example, and current developments drawing on 4E theories of cognition an...

This article addresses two previously unresolved puzzles regarding the relationship between temporal and spatial conceptualizations in Mandarin Chinese. First, apparently conflicting data have led to disagreement over whether temporal usages of the terms qian and hou, whose spatial meanings of 'front' and 'back' are often considered to be primary,...

Openings in the past and present between semiotics and theories of human development and evolution are explored. The foundations in theories of the sign of the psychological theories of Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky and Karl Bühler are summarized. Limitations as well as innovations of these 20 th century approaches are identified. Key characteristics o...

This article addresses two previously unresolved puzzles regarding the relationship between temporal and spatial conceptualizations in Mandarin Chinese. First, apparently conflicting data have led to disagreement over whether temporal usages of the terms qian and hou, whose spatial meanings of ‘front’ and ‘back’ are often considered to be primary,...

This review essay addresses the long-standing problem of the nature of time in life, mind, language and world, a problem often viewed as intractable. Our approach is interdisciplinary, drawing on natural, life, social and cognitive sciences. We situate our research findings on concepts of time in indigenous societies of Amazonia in this broad inter...

Money is a human creation arising from organic, technological, and symbolic resources. The complexity of its operations makes it difficult to comprehend. The origins of money can be dated with some accuracy, but the social and symbolic processes that led to this world-changing invention are poorly understood. One of the most persistent misunder sta...

This chapter reviews the history, main theoretical issues, methods and selected key research topics in the study of language, culture and cognition. The chapter emphasizes the interdisciplinary nature of the field, summarizing the contributions of anthropology and psychology as well as linguistics. It traces the development of cultural linguistics...

In this article, we compare and contrast the versions of national populism propagated by Boris Johnson and the UK Conservative Party, and Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party. Britain is a liberal democracy, while China is an increasingly authoritarian one-party state. Britain is a declining power, while China is a rising one. Despite these d...

Niche construction theory is a relatively new approach in the biological and socio-cultural sciences that seeks to integrate an ecological dimension into the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection. Language itself can be considered as a biocultural niche and evolutionary artifact. An analysis of the cognitive and semiotic status of arti...

This Handbook is available in hardback and e-book editions (published 1st February 2024) as well as this online edition. If your institution subscribes to Oxford Handbooks Online, you will be able to download individual chapters from this website: https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/44743 Please note that the online publication date for this e...

Reprint of the article originally appearing in: Interaction Studies 19: 1-2 370-387 (2018)

This article focuses on the interweaving of constructive praxis with communication in ontogenesis, in phylogenesis and in biocultural niche evolution (ecogenesis), within an EvoDevoSocio framework. I begin by discussing the nature of symbolization, its evolution from communicative signaling and its elaboration into semantic systems. I distinguish b...

THE PUBLISHED VERSION OF THIS CHAPTER CAN NOW BE DOWNLOADED FROM RESEARCH GATE This Handbook chapter provides an overview of the interdisciplinary field of language, cognition and culture. The chapter explores the historical background of research from anthropological, psychological and linguistic perspectives. The key concepts of linguistic rela...

In this chapter, we attempt to unmask the ideological bias inherent in influential conceptions of the methods, motivations and practices of endangered language documentation research (ELDR). We highlight the extent to which common justifications for ELDR suppress the sociocultural and historical relations within which its practices are situated. We...

In this paper we address ontological metaphorical linguistic expressions in a Brazilian Tupian language and culture, based on conceptual metaphor theory. We focus on metaphors of personification and body part constructions in the Amondawa language; analyzing examples from retellings of mythical narrative texts and from complex sentences and compoun...

This article investigates optional ergative marking in Tujia, an endangered Tibeto-Burman language spoken in south-central China. It is shown that the Agent in Tujia is optionally marked, and that the use of the optional ergative marker ko ³⁵ is multifunctional. It is used to disambiguate the semantic role of Agent, to emphasize agency, and to foca...

We present a new road map for research on “How the Brain Got Language” that adopts an EvoDevoSocio perspective and highlights comparative neuroprimatology – the comparative study of brain, behavior and communication in extant monkeys and great apes – as providing a key grounding for hypotheses on the last common ancestor of humans and monkeys (LCA-...

This article focuses on the interweaving of constructive praxis with communication in ontogenesis, in phylogenesis and in biocultural niche evolution (ecogenesis), within an EvoDevoSocio framework. I begin by discussing the nature of symbolization, its evolution from communicative signaling and its elaboration into semantic systems. I distinguish b...

This article focuses on the interweaving of constructive praxis with communication in ontogenesis, in phylogenesis and in biocultural niche evolution (ecogenesis), within an EvoDevoSocio framework. I begin by discussing the nature of symbolization, its evolution from communicative signaling and its elaboration into semantic systems. I distinguish b...

In this interdisciplinary collection of lectures, Chris Sinha presents an overview of topics ranging from language in children’s play, through cultural conceptualizations of time, to philosophical and linguistic relativism. The intertwining of the evolutionary and individual time scales of human development is a key theme unifying the lectures, as...

Neste trabalho, contestamos a Hipótese do Mapeamento Universal com baseem pesquisa realizada com uma língua Tupi-Kawahib, da Amazônia brasileira: a língua amondawa. Salientamos, entretanto, que não contestamos a hipotética universalidade dos fundamentos cognitivos do mapeamento linguístico espaçotempo.

Linguistic theory has been preoccupied since midway through the twentieth century with the search for universals of language. However, more recently there has been increasing attention across the different disciplines that contribute to research in language to variation and difference. This goes together with a more recent focus on culture and lang...

In this chapter, we attempt to unmask the ideological bias inherent in influential conceptions of the methods, motivations and practices of endangered language documentation research (ELDR) by addressing the unequal exchange that frequently characterizes the relationship between the linguistic researcher, on the one hand, and the language community...

It is widely assumed that there is a natural, prelinguistic conceptual domain of time whose linguistic organization is universally structured via metaphoric mapping from the lexicon and grammar of space and motion. We challenge this assumption on the basis of our research on the Amondawa (Tupi Kawahib) language and culture of Amazonia. Using both o...

Cada língua possui recursos lexicais e gramaticais para especificar as relações entre eventos, objetos e falantes no espaço e no tempo. A linguagem do espaço e a linguagem do tempo estão intimamente relacionadas na maioria das línguas, senão em todas as línguas, e tem sido proposto que a linguagem do tempo é universalmente derivada da língua do esp...

Arbib hypothesizes that evolutionary modern language significantly postdates human speciation. Why should this be so? I propose an account based on niche construction theory, in which Arbib's language-ready brain is primarily a consequence of epigenetically-driven adaptation to the biocultural niche of protolanguage and (subsequently) early languag...

Time is at once familiar and mysterious, its status in the physical universe being uncertain and contested. Time seems to be fundamental to both biology and to the world of human experience. It seems certain that human beings in all cultures experience time, and have ways of linguistically referring to relations between events in time. It has been...

We propose an event-based account of the cognitive and linguistic representation of time and temporal relations. Human beings differ from nonhuman animals in entertaining and communicating elaborate detached (as opposed to cued) event representations and temporal relational schemas. We distinguish deictically based (D-time) from sequentially based...

Who would have thought that clocks could be so controversial

There exists broad agreement that participatory, intersubjective engagements in infancy and early childhood, particularly triadic engagements, pave the way for the folk psychological capacities that emerge in middle childhood. There is little agreement, however, about the extent to which early participatory engagements are cognitively prerequisite...

Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Grammars … refer to real structures, though not to psychologically real structures in the processing sense … a grammar is a description of our knowledge of a social institution—the language—and because of this basis in social or institutional reality, rather than in cognitive functioning, grammars and psychological proces...

Intersubjectivity is understood by the authors represented in this book as the sharing of experiential content (e.g., feelings, perceptions, thoughts, and linguistic meanings) among a plurality of subjects. Although some non-human species manifest some aspects of the capacity or capacities that make up intersubjectivity, they appear to lack others....

The launch of Biological Theory is, for those whose main interest is in human cognition, development, and evolution, exciting and timely. It takes place at a time of increasing convergence between the biological and cognitive sciences in the quest for a resolution of the apparent paradox of human evolution. The paradox is one of discontinuity in co...

The focus in blending theory on the dynamics of meaning construction makes it a productive tool for analysing psychological processes in a developmental perspective. However, blending theory has largely preserved the traditionally mentalist and individualist assumptions of classical cognitive science. This article argues for an extension of the ran...

Laying foundations for an interdisciplinary approach to the study of evolution in communication systems with tools from evolutionary biology, linguistics, animal behavior, developmental psychology, philosophy, cognitive sciences, robotics, and neural network modeling. The search for origins of communication in a wide variety of species including hu...

this paper, I focus on symbolization as a phylogenetically emergent property of communication, as well as upon its epigenetic development in infancy. Elaboration By elaboration I mean the process whereby development gives rise to increased complexity of organism, behaviour and cognition. Increase in complexity usually involves both form and functio...

this paper was supported by the Danish Humanities Research Council Framework Project in Cognitive Science. We wish to thank Kim Plunkett for making available to us the Danish transcripts

Introduction: Two dogmas of reificatory semantics What is meaning, what is it for a sign to be meaningful, how can meaning best be analyzed, and in what sense is linguistic meaning proper or unique to language? Cognitive linguistics offers answers to these questions that challenge two traditional dogmas of linguistic theory, philosophy of language...

This paper outlines the epigenetic logic of the emergence and elaboration of symbolization. The account is based upon considerations arising from the study of the ontogenesis and phylogenesis of symbolic communication, abstraction from which yields generalizations regarding the necessary developmental pre-requisites for the capacity for symbolizati...

Introduction To view learning and cognition as situated is usually understood to involve rethinking cognitive and learning processes in terms of their framing by context, communication and social practice---in contradistinction to traditional views which focus upon the "isolated, individual subject" in confrontation with a cognitive or learning tas...

In this commentary I focus initially on the shared critical perspective of de Lemos (2000) and Nelson (2000) upon developmental psychology’s construction of the developing subject. I suggest that the plurality of temporalities which underpin the human self and human culture is reduced, in most theories of development, to a unitary and deterministic...

Müller's review of the neuroscientific evidence undermines nativist claims for autonomous syntax and the argument from the poverty of the stimulus. Generativists will appeal to data from language acquisition, but here too there is growing evidence against the nativist position. Epigenetic naturalism, the developmental alternative to nativism, can b...

Darwin's theory of evolution caused a revolutionary change in the concept of time. Evolution did not merely extend history backwards, it brought into being an entirely different order of time, in which different time-scales (durees) co-existed. Understanding the relations between time-scales?phylogenetic, ontogenetic, histor- ical?was a major preoc...

The “local semantics” approach to the analysis of the meaning of locative particles (e.g. spatial prepositions) is examined, criticized and rejected. An alternative, distributed approach to spatial relational semantics and its linguistic expression is argued for. In the first part of the paper, it is argued that spatial relational semantic informat...

A coding system is presented for the semantic description of natural language expressions referring to spatial relations. The coding system has been developed with the principal (but not exclusive) aim of conducting cross-linguistic analyses of spatial language acquisition and development. Theoretical and methodological problems attendant upon the...

La signification des relations spatiales est exprimee en anglais, et dans d'autres langues apprentees, par le systeme des particules locatives. Mais, meme entre des langues etroitement liees comme le danois et l'anglais, il existe des differences substantielles dans la semantique et la morphologie des particules locatives. Le japonais, meme s'il ut...

This paper is both about human cognition, its origin and development; and about prevailing notions of cognition and rationality, their origin and history. What I shall propose, more speculatively than argumentatively, is that to understand the linkage between these two genetic processes is one way to understand, or to give content to, the concept o...

Argues for an epigenetic developmental interpretation of connectionist modelling of human cognitive processes, and proposes that parallel distributed processing (PDP) models provide a superior account of developmental phenomena than that offered by cognitivist (symbolic) computational theories. After comparing some of the general characteristics of...

The Symbolic Grounding Problem is viewed as a by-product of the classical cognitivist approach to studying the mind. In contrast, an epigenetic interpretation of connectionist approaches to studying the mind is shown to offer an account of symbolic skills as an emergent, developmental phenomenon. We describe a connectionist model of concept formati...

A critical exploration of the use by Vygotsky of the concept of internalization in the context of Enlightenment and evolutionary understandings of temporality.

The topic addressed in this paper is the nature of persuasive discourse in the political domain. The paper seeks to place social theory in relation to linguistic pragmatics through the examination of how a social category - ideology - achieves its realization and effect in particular forms of discourse, with the aid of theories both of ideology and...

The question of how to read Vygotsky is not, of course, a merely exegetical one. It is not simply a matter of establishing a Vygotsky canon. In the first place, the nature of Vygotsky’s writings militates against any purported finalization - whether interpretative or axiomatic - of their meaning. It has become a commonplace of criticism that the pr...

Early twentieth century sociological, anthropological and psychological theories departed from crude biologism and evolutionism, and interpreted Darwin within a framework which returned in some respects to Enlightenment assumptions. They were faced, however, with the problem of explaining how the ’socialization’ of the biological individual - an ev...