The Social Origins of Language

179 Pages·2017·1.805 MB·

by  Robert M. Seyfarth, Dorothy L. Cheney, Michael L. Platt (ed.)

THE SOCIAL ORIGINS
OF LANGUAGE

THE SOCIAL ORIGINS
OF LANGUAGE
ROBERT M. SEYFARTH
AND
DOROTHY L. CHENEY
Edited and Introduced by Michael L. Platt
Princeton University Press
Princeton and Oxford
Copyright © 2018 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,
6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR
Cover photo by Dorothy L. Cheney
press.princeton.edu
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 978- 0- 691- 17723- 6
Library of Congress Control Number 2017952280
British Library Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Sabon Next
Printed on acid- free paper ∞
Printed in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
C
ontents
The Contributors vii
Introduction 1
Michael L. Platt
Part 1
The Social Origins of Language 9
Robert M. Seyfarth and Dorothy L. Cheney
Part 2
1. Linguistics and Pragmatics 37
John McWhorter
2. Where Is Continuity Likely to Be Found? 46
Ljiljana Progovac
3. Fluency Effects in Human Language 62
Jennifer E. Arnold
4. Relational Knowledge and the Origins of Language 79
Benjamin Wilson and Christopher I. Petkov
5. Primates, Cephalopods, and the Evolution of
Communication 102
Peter Godfrey- Smith
Part 3
Conclusion 123
Robert M. Seyfarth and Dorothy L. Cheney
Notes 131
References 135
Index 163

t C
he ontributors
Dorothy Cheney is Professor of Biology and Robert Seyfarth is
Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. They
have spent over 40 years studying the social behavior, cogni-
tion, and communication of monkeys in their natural habitat.
Michael Platt is Professor of Neuroscience, Psychology, and
Marketing at the University of Pennsylvania, and Director of
the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative. Michael’s work focuses
on the biological mechanisms underlying decision making and
social behavior, development of improved therapies for treating
impairments in these functions, and translation of these discov-
eries into applications that can improve business, education,
and public policy.
John McWhorter specializes in language change and contact
and teaches linguistics at Columbia University. He has written
The Power of Babel, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, Words
on the Move, and other books on language, including the aca-
demic books Language Interrupted and Defining Creole.
Ljiljana Progovac is a linguist, with research interests in syntax,
Slavic syntax, and evolution of syntax, and is currently professor
and director of the Linguistics Program at Wayne State Univer-
sity in Detroit. Among other publications, she is the author of
Evolutionary Syntax (Oxford University Press, 2015) and Nega-
tive and Positive Polarity (Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Jennifer Arnold is a professor at the University of North Caro-
lina at Chapel Hill, and received her Ph.D. from Stanford Uni-
versity. She studies the cognitive mechanisms of language use in
viii THE CONTRIBUTORS
both adults and children, examining how language is used and
understood in social and discourse contexts.
Benjamin Wilson is a Sir Henry Wellcome Fellow in the Labora-
tory of Comparative Neuropsychology at the Newcastle Uni-
versity School of Medicine. His research focuses on understand-
ing the neurobiological systems that support language, and the
evolution of these brain networks. His work combines a range
of behavioral and neuroscientific techniques to investigate the
extent to which cognitive abilities underpinning human lan-
guage might be shared by nonhuman primates, and how far these
abilities are supported by evolutionarily conserved networks of
brain areas.
Christopher I. Petkov is a professor of neuroscience at the New-
castle University School of Medicine. His research is guided by
the notion that information on how the human brain changed
during its evolutionary history will be indispensable for under-
standing how to improve treatments for human brain disorders.
His Laboratory of Comparative Neuropsychology uses advanced
imaging and neurophysiological methods to study perceptual
awareness and cognition, with an emphasis on communication,
in particular auditory and multisensory communication.
Peter Godfrey-Smith is Professor of the History and Philosophy
of Science at the University of Sydney, Australia. His main re-
search interests are the philosophy of biology and the philoso-
phy of mind, though he also works on pragmatism and various
other parts of philosophy. He has written five books, including
the widely used textbook Theory and Reality: An Introduction
to the Philosophy of Science (Chicago, 2003) and Darwinian
Populations and Natural Selection (Oxford, 2009), which won
the 2010 Lakatos Award. His most recent book is Other Minds:
The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2016).
THE SOCIAL ORIGINS
OF LANGUAGE