Constraints and preadaptations in the earliest stages of language evolution
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Dorothy L. Cheney
Abstract
If we accept the view that language first evolved from the conceptual structure of our pre-linguistic ancestors, several questions arise, including: What kind of structure? Concepts about what? Here we review research on the vocal communication and cognition of nonhuman primates, focusing on results that may be relevant to the earliest stages of language evolution. From these data we conclude, first, that nonhuman primates’ inability to represent the mental states of others makes their communication fundamentally different from human language. Second, while nonhuman primates’ production of vocalizations is highly constrained, their ability to extract complex information from sounds is not. Upon hearing vocalizations, listeners acquire information about their social companions that is referential, discretely coded, hierarchically structured, rule-governed, and propositional. We therefore suggest that, in the earliest stages of language evolution, communication had a formal structure that grew out of its speakers’ knowledge of social relations.
Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG
Articles in the same Issue
- Editorial preface
- On the status of linguistics as a cognitive science
- Constraints and preadaptations in the earliest stages of language evolution
- Functional organization of speech across the life span: A critique of generative phonology
- Beyond formalities: The case of language acquisition
- What language creation in the manual modality tells us about the foundations of language
- Linguistics, cognitive science, and all that jazz
- The nature of semantics: On Jackendoff’s arguments
- Anatomy matters
- The pied piper of Cambridge
- Lateralization of language: Toward a biologically based model of language
- The science of language
- Attention and empirical studies of grammar
- Psycholinguistics, formal grammars, and cognitive science
- Alternatives to the combinatorial paradigm of linguistic theory based on domain general principles of human cognition
- Subject-auxiliary inversion: A natural category
- Generative linguistics within the cognitive neuroscience of language
- Language as a natural object – linguistics as a natural science
- Contributors
- Publications received
- Language index
- Subject index
- Contents of volume 22
Articles in the same Issue
- Editorial preface
- On the status of linguistics as a cognitive science
- Constraints and preadaptations in the earliest stages of language evolution
- Functional organization of speech across the life span: A critique of generative phonology
- Beyond formalities: The case of language acquisition
- What language creation in the manual modality tells us about the foundations of language
- Linguistics, cognitive science, and all that jazz
- The nature of semantics: On Jackendoff’s arguments
- Anatomy matters
- The pied piper of Cambridge
- Lateralization of language: Toward a biologically based model of language
- The science of language
- Attention and empirical studies of grammar
- Psycholinguistics, formal grammars, and cognitive science
- Alternatives to the combinatorial paradigm of linguistic theory based on domain general principles of human cognition
- Subject-auxiliary inversion: A natural category
- Generative linguistics within the cognitive neuroscience of language
- Language as a natural object – linguistics as a natural science
- Contributors
- Publications received
- Language index
- Subject index
- Contents of volume 22
