Call for papers: Language, gesture, community & language evolution

[Leila F. Monaghan]

CALL FOR PAPERS
Language, gesture and community: Linguistic anthropologists engage theories of language evolution.

Society for Linguistic Anthropology, American Anthropological Association, San Francisco, November 2008

Deadlines: Contact organizers asap.  Draft of abstract due March 29 to organizers.

We are looking for papers from a wide variety of methods and approaches that will highlight the importance of community oriented communicative competences and that detail the connections between these patterns and questions of language evolution. 

Organizers: Leila Monaghan: Leila.Monaghan at gmail.com
Angela Nonaka: angelanonaka at mail.utexas.edu
Richard Senghas: Richard. Senghas at sonoma.edu


DRAFT SESSION PROPOSAL

At the heart of all human communication is creating and interpreting patterns.  Linguists and psycholinguists such as Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker have tended to focus on the grammar of these communication forms, while linguistic anthropologists like Dell Hymes, Richard Bauman, Alessandro Duranti, Charles Goodwin, Marjorie Harness Goodwin, Bambi Schiefflin, and Paul Kroskrity have focused on on seeing patterns in immediate contexts, performances and, more broadly speaking, language ideologies.  While linguists, psychologists and biologists have often dominated discussions on the evolution of human communication, this panel shows that linguistic anthropologists, working from the richness found in community interactions, have crucial insights to offer this general conversation.  In this panel we examine current theories on language evolution and how recent linguistic anthropology scholarship and other interaction-oriented theory shed light on the creative and ever-changing biological and cultural phenomenon that is language.  

Language and more the general communication forms that all human communities use today developed in social settings.  We argue that evolutionary pressures were for not one specific kind of patterning such as found in syntax or phonology, but for multiple and redundant communicative forms making general communication among people as comprehensible as possible.  This includes examining the creative use of language.  Chomskian linguists often have a narrow definition of creativity.  We recognize that a wide range of creative language forms including poetry and other performance genres are part of both everyday and special occasion communicative patterns.  Rather than seeing these forms as unusual, we see them as an essential part of understanding the nature of communication.

One key aspect of this panel will be reviewing current work on sign language, particularly work on new languages like that found in the indigenous sign language community of Bhan Khor, Thailand.  We argue these communities are not exceptions to the norms of the widespread use of spoken languages, but instead manifestations under specific circumstances of a general combined spoken-gestural communication system.  Part of our argument is that spoken and gestural communication co-evolved, that we cannot say that one aspect or the other evolved first.  

Another aspect of our argument is that grammatical and performance patterns of any communication system will reflect the environments in which they exist, particularly the environments in which children are socialized.  Ways to address questions of language evolution include analysis of observed behavior in natural language settings. We consider indigenous signing communities, children acquiring culture as part of language acquisition, and cross-cultural comparisons of what happens to language in different socialization contexts. 

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