December 2012
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123 Reads
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17 Citations
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Publications (54)
January 2012
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21 Reads
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2 Citations
March 2010
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15 Reads
November 2008
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23 Reads
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7 Citations
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
That language is shaped to fit the human brain is close to the Chomskyan position. The target article by Christiansen & Chater (C&C) assumes an entity, "(the) language," outside individual heads. What is the nature of this entity? Linguistic niche-construction and co-evolution of language and genes are possible, with some of what evolved being language-specific. Recent generative theory postulates much less than the old Universal Grammar (UG).
August 2008
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1,396 Reads
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38 Citations
Human languages are far more complex than any animal communication system. Furthermore, they are learned, rather than innate, a fact which partially accounts for their great diversity. Human languages are semantically compositional, generating new meaningful combinations as functions of the meanings of their elementary parts (words). This is unlike any known animal communication system (except the limited waggle dance of honeybees). Humans can use language to describe and refer to objects and events in the far distant past and the far distant future, another feature which distinguishes language from animal communication systems. The complexity of languages arises partly from self-organization through cultural transmission over many generations of users. The human willingness altruistically to impart information is also unique.
June 2007
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7 Reads
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
The overlap of representations of past and future is not a completely new idea. Suddendorf & Corballis (S&C) usefully discuss the problems of testing the existence of such representations. Our taxonomy of memory differs from theirs, emphasizing the late evolutionary emergence of notions of time in memory.
May 2007
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92 Reads
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28 Citations
Lingua
A strong constraint on the arithmetical combinations allowed in compound numerals, called the Packing Strategy, applies very widely to numeral systems across the world. A previous attempt to explain the existence of the strong universal constraint, in terms of a gradual socio-historical process of standardization, will not scale up to higher-valued numerals. It is proposed that the real explanation for the Packing Strategy is that it reflects two natural principles applied in the practical task of counting objects. These two principles, “Go as far as you can with the resources you have”, and “Minimize the number of entities you are dealing with”, are not specific to the counting task, but are of more general application to practical tasks.
March 2007
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299 Reads
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15 Citations
Lingua
This paper argues for an alternative answer to Carstairs-McCarthy's (1999) question “Why do all languages distinguish between NPs and sentences?” While agreeing on basic philosophical points with Carstairs-McCarthy, such as the lack of a distinction between truth and reference independent of grammar, I argue that the S/NP distinction is rooted in the basic communicative distinction between Topic and Comment. In the very earliest mental processes, long antedating language, binary structure can be found, with components that one can associate with the functions of identifying or locating an object and representing some information about it. When private thought went public, the earliest messages in any code with rudimentary syntax were of similar bipartite structure, with one part conveying information presumed to be already known to the hearer, and identifying the object that the message is about. The other part of the bipartite message conveyed information presumed to be new to the hearer. This bipartite structure, with its concomitant distinction between types of expression that could fulfil the respective roles, was so central to the main function of public language, namely communication, that it was never eroded away, and is the basis of the bipartite structure found universally in languages today.
March 2006
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4 Reads
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3 Citations
September 2003
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47 Reads
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16 Citations
Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Pure synonymy is rare. By contrast, homonymy is common in languages. Human avoidance of synonymy is plausibly innate, as theorists of differing persuasions have claimed. Innate dispositions to synonymy and homonymy are modelled here, in relation to alternative roles of speaking and hearing in determining fitness. In the computer model, linguistic signs are acquired via different genetically determined strategies, variously (in)tolerant to synonymy or homonymy. The model defines communicative success as the probability of a speaker getting a message across to a hearer; interpretive success is the probability of a hearer correctly interpreting a speaker’s signal. Communicative and interpretive success are compared as bases for reproductive fitness. When communicative success is the basis for fitness, a genotype evolves which is averse to synonymy, while tolerating homonymy. Conversely, when interpretive success is the basis for fitness, a genotype evolves which is averse to homonymy, while tolerating synonymy.
Citations (39)
... Only language, a structured and codified human-made communication system (Knight et al. 2000), allows this feat. Language is a tool that enables people to cooperate to achieve goals and update information; it also provides opportunities for exchanging experiences and solving problems, in limitless proportions. ...
- Citing Chapter
November 2000
... Linguists have tried other methods to establish grammatical processes and earlier forms of a language or languages. Recent research on language evolution (Hurford & Dediu 2009;Hurford 2011a; 2011b, among others) and evolution of grammar (Heine & Kuteva 2007), along with research on the typology of the world's languages (Haspelmath et al. 2005) lead us to present the following arguments in favour of Great Andamanese retaining one of the archaic structures of human language. ...
- Citing Article
December 2012
... No term just appears out of nowhere. Whatever we talk about may have early traces in the dawn of human history (Hurford et al., 1998). This development likely went along with the evolution of humankind (Hauser et al., 2014, Christiansen & Kirby, 2003. ...
- Citing Article
December 1999
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
... Moreover, Hurford (2003Hurford ( , 2006Hurford ( , 2007 argues that clause-sized units themselves emerged because they correspond to the limits of primate global visual attention (taking in an entire scene at once) and also to the limits of short-term memory. Predicates in natural language take a maximum of around four arguments, though four is rare and most predicates have fewer arguments. ...
- Citing Conference Paper
March 2006
... However, there is no agreement yet about how and when our ancestors started using predicate phrases while communicating, that is, when they became Homo praedicans. Variability, plasticity, gradualism and mosaic evolution are now seen as characterizing the origin and evolution of the Homo genus (Aiello & Antón, 2012), and even language evolution is now seen as gradual (Hurford, 2012). We avail ourselves of this new awareness to explore the context and timing of how predication might have gradually emerged in our lineage, while ignoring the hypotheses positing that it happened " in a blink, " through a mutation. ...
Reference:
Homo praedicans
- Citing Conference Paper
January 2012
... In recent decades the empirical study of animal communication from a linguistic perspective has advanced considerably, moving well beyond the classic examples featured in many linguistic textbooks, such as honeybee waggle dance, vervet monkey alarm calls, and the ape language experiments of the mid 20th-century (for summaries and perspectives on this earlier research see e.g. Seyfarth & Cheney, 2003;Munz, 2005;Anderson, 2006;Radick, 2007;Hurford, 2007;Pepperburg, 2017;Rendall, 2021;inter alia). The more recent findings have revealed similarities with natural languages and natural language use at all levels of analysis, from phonology to pragmatics. ...
- Citing Article
... Although this is rather speculative, it has been assumed that at the earliest stage of language, the category noun dominated the grammar, perhaps along with a handful of verbs, such as motion verbs "come" and "go" (Aitchison 1996: 110-111;Heine & Kuteva 2002: 390), although Hurford (1990Hurford ( , 2003 claims that it was pronouns, not nouns, that existed first. Heine and Kuteva (2007) more specifically analyse the emergence of noun and verb from an evolutionary perspective based on various grammaticalisation patterns. ...
- Citing Article
December 1990
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
... Considering the repeated measures design of our experiment with Ss reading identical materials, we included random error terms as (1) an intercept for the subjects, (2) an intercept for the items, (3) a slope for scenarios across subjects, and (4) a slope for scenarios across items as four random effects in the (G)LMMs. As preliminary processing prior to fitting the (G)LMMs, all complexity measures were scaled by centring, and frequencies were converted to their logarithmic values using base 10 for the correction of the original Zipfian distributions 39 . To address the data noted as NA, the maximum likelihood estimation approach was applied, and parameters in the (G)LMMs were updated based on the imputed values by the expectation-maximisation algorithm. ...
- Citing Article
... Before moving on, it is worth pointing out that EGS is not the only phenomenon that presents a challenge to (2). In Pak (in press) I offer a similar analysis of opacity effects in an /h/dropping dialect of Cockney English described in Hurford (1972Hurford ( , 1974, where a is selected before heart, half, etc. even though the /h/ is later dropped, producing surface hiatus. Again, this pattern is mysterious under (2), but can be attributed to a rule-ordering effect under my proposal: ...
- Citing Article
December 1974
Lingua
... See also Kemmerer (2015). For criticisms of the role of mirror neurons in language evolution see Hickok (2014), Hurford (2004). For a review of early studies of mirror neurons on macaques and humans, as well as their importance in action understanding see Rizzolatti & Craighero (2004). ...
- Citing Article