CfP Evolition at ICLC 11, 2011 Xian

[Jordan Zlatev]

Call for Papers for a Theme Session at the ICLC 11, July 11-17, 2011, Xi'an, China

Language Evolution: Biological, Cultural and Bio-Cultural

Organizers:    Arie Verhagen (Leiden University, email Arie.Verhagen at hum.leidenuniv.nl)
                     Jordan Zlatev (Lund University, email Jordan.Zlatev at ling.lu.se)

Oct. 10, 2010: Deadline for submitting presentation proposals to the session organizers (Title, and mini-abstract of at most three lines)
Nov. 15, 2010: Deadline for submitting full abstracts to ICLC 11 (http://www.iclc11.org)

Evolution of language is emerging as a prominent interdisciplinary field of research, bringing together linguists, biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, literary scholars, semioticians and cognitive scientists. A key challenge is to unify theories of language and cognition with the theory of biological evolution: language has evidently evolved in the human lineage, but it has some very special features that make it “one of the most significant and interesting evolutionary events […] during the entire history of life on Earth” (Fitch 2010: 1): it is a “cheap”, honest, flexible, and powerful system of communication (and thought) that no other animal species appears to have and that must have required some special circumstances to have evolved.
           A central issue of debate is the relation between biological and cultural factors involved in the evolution of Homo Sapiens on the hand, and of modern languages on the other. It is undeniable that mechanisms and principles beyond those involved in biological evolution play a role in cultural evolution, but there is considerable room for variation and even disagreement on what these mechanisms are, how big a role each of them plays, how they interact with each other and with biological factors, and –very fundamentally– to what extent an overall account, incorporating such mechanisms, can still be considered Darwinian. At one end, the view is found that both the biological evolution of the brain (and body) necessary for language, and the historical changes that have given rise to the 6000+ languages spoken today are explainable in terms of standard evolutionary theory, based on the dynamics of variation, selection and replication combined (e.g. Croft 2000). Others hold that even biological evolution, and much more so cultural evolution of language and other institutional practices involves principles such as “autopoiesis” and “qualitative emergence” that intrinsically lead to complexification (e.g. Kull 2009). Whether such processes are fundamentally different from (if somewhat analogous to) Darwinian processes is an additional issue. Yet another one is the extent to which genetic evolution per se, cultural evolution per se and/or the interaction of biological and cultural processes (among which gene-culture co-evolution and niche-construction) account for modern human cognition, language, and culture in general. Different positions and discussion of the nature and consequences of mechanisms and principles being proposed can be found in publications by researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds, e.g. Deacon (1997), Levinson (2000), Laland & Brown (2002), Odling-Smee et al. (2003), Heine and Kuteva (2007), Brier (2008), Sinha (2010).

We invite contributions addressing linguistic issues, based on theoretical argumentation and empirical evidence, that contribute to this debate. Some examples (non-exhaustive!) of possible topics include:
‑    Construal: how does the capacity to construe the same object of conceptualization in different ways fit into an evolutionary perspective (biological and/or cultural)?
‑    Grammaticalization and semantic change as cultural evolution.
‑    Grammatical and lexical systems as adaptations, to cultural and/or biological environments.
‑    Co-evolution of cognition (e.g. intersubjectivity, shared intentionality), language, and culture; cultural/linguistic niche-construction.
‑    Co-evolution of communicative and collaborative practices and linguistic systems.
-   The roles of narrative, writing and symbolic artifacts in the cultural evolution of language.
References

Brier, Søren (2008). Biosemiotics: Why Information is not Enough. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Croft, William (2000), Explaining Language Change. An Evolutionary Approach. London, etc.: Longman.
Deacon, Terrence W. (1997), The Symbolic Species: The Coevolution of Language and the Brain. New York: W.W. Norton.
Fitch, Tecumseh W. (2010), The Evolution of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heine, Bernd and Tania Kuteva (2007), The Genesis of Grammar. A Reconstruction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kull, Kalevi, (2009) Vegetative, animal, and propositional semiosis: The semiotic threshold zones. Cognitive Semiotics #4.
Laland, Kevin H. & Gillian R. Brown (2002), Sense and Nonsense. Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behaviour. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Levinson, Stephen C. (2000), Language as nature and language as art. In: R. Hide, J. Mittelstrass, W. Singer (eds.), Changing concepts of nature at the turn of the millennium. Vatican City: Pontifical Academy of Sciences, 257‑287.
Odling-Smee, F.J., Laland, K.N. and Feldman, M.W.: 2003.,Niche Construction. The Neglected Process in Evolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Sinha, C. (2010). Language as a biocultural niche and social institution. In V. Evans, & S. Pourcel (eds.), New Directions in Cognitive Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.