Jumping language

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

The following should pique the curiosity of a few linguistically inclined people as well as that, I presume, of various palaeo-creationists

Language evolved in a leap
Conflicting needs may have driven rapid development of communication.
22 January 2003

PHILIP BALL

Speakers want few words; listeners want many.
© GettyImages

Language probably leapt, not crept, from squeaks to Shakespeare, two physicists have calculated. Human communication, they propose, underwent a 'phase transition', like solid ice melting to liquid water.

The richness of human languages is a fine-tuned compromise between the needs of speakers and of listeners, explain Ramon Ferrer i Cancho and Ricard Solé of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. Just a slight imbalance of these demands prevents the exchange of complex information, they argue.

So languages between those of present-day humans and the limited signalling of some animals cannot really exist. There must, at some point, have been a switch from rudimentary to sophisticated language.

This contrasts with some linguists' view that language evolution was a gradual affair in which new words accumulated steadily.

Greek or grunt

A language that conveyed all information unambiguously, say Ferrer i Cancho and Solé, would have a separate word for every thing, concept or action it referred to. Such a language would be formidably complicated for the speaker: the green of grass, for example, would be represented by a totally different word to the green of sea, an emerald or an oak leaf. But it would be ideal for the listener, who wouldn't have to work out any meanings from a word's context.

Ideal for the speaker is a language of few words, where simple, short utterances serve many purposes. The extreme case is a language with a single sound that conveys everything that needs saying. Some might suggest that teenagers prefer this kind of minimal-effort tongue that forces others to figure out what their grunts actually mean.

Ferrer i Cancho and Solé have devised a mathematical model in which the cost of using a language depends on the balance between these conflicting preferences1. They calculate the properties of the lexicon that requires minimal effort for different degrees of compromise, from exhaustive vocabularies to one-word languages.

They find that the change from one extreme to the other does not happen smoothly. There is a jump in the amount of communication, from very little to near-perfect, at a certain value of the relative weightings of speaker and hearer preferences.

Human languages, say the duo, seem to sit right on this sudden change. When it happens, the frequency of word usages develops a distinctive mathematical form, called a power law. The power law disappears on either side of the communication jump.

It has been known since the 1940s that human languages do indeed show just this kind of statistical distribution of word usage - the social scientist George Kingsley Zipf spotted the power-law behaviour. But it has never been satisfactorily explained before, although Zipf himself speculated that it might represent some kind of "principle of least effort".
References

   # Ferrer i Cancho, R. & Solé, R. V. Least effort and the origins of scaling in human language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, published online, doi:10.1073/pnas.0335980100 (2003). |Article|


© Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2003

It would be interesting if someone, with quick and easy access to PNAS, were to tell us a bit more about this "communication jump" and what it may imply or how it can be interpreted from an evolutionary/palaeoanthropological point-of-view.

Jacques Cinq-Mars

[lagarvelho]

Jacques:

The following should pique the curiosity of a few linguistically inclined people as well as that, I presume, of various palaeo-creationists

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "paleocreationists", but I *did* post this article on palanthsci and various other paleoanthropology lists to which I belong.  Don't know what to make of it, exactly,  other than that it proposes "sudden" acquisition of language.  And this has been proposed by various poeple for some time now.
Anne G

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "paleocreationists",

"Palaeocreationists": just a new bit of jargon designed to label a broad range of aficionados of "deus ex machina"  evolutionary mechanisms or explanations.

but I *did* post this article on palanthsci and various other paleoanthropology lists to which I belong.  Don't know what to make of it, exactly,  other than that it proposes "sudden" acquisition of language.  And this has been proposed by various poeple for some time now.
Anne G

Ergo, I would say that a few of the "various people" you are referring to deserve wearing this label.

At any rate, what I am interested in is to find out more about this proposed model and about whether or not it can credibly serve to explain the rapid shift, jump, or leap being referred to. Is it, for example, compatible with whatever else we think we know about human evolution or is it just another "joker" in an increasingly confusing game?

Jacques Cinq-Mars
PS   This is not very important, but what is the exact meaning of the * in *did*?

Jacques

[colin]

As Anne says, others have proposed the sudden creation of human language before. It sounds to me in evolutionary terms about as likely as a short-necked creature suddenly giving birth to a creature with a three-metre neck called a giraffe.

BTW, I like the term palaeo-creationist - I think it serves very well for those who Dr Brace once described who, rather than focusing  on the processes involved in human evolution, explain changes by saying in effect "then a miracle happened".
Cheers
Colin

[lagarvelho]

Jacques:

"At any rate, what I am interested in is to find out more about this proposed model and about whether or not it can credibly serve to explain the rapid shift, jump, or leap being referred to. Is it, for example, compatible with whatever else we think we know about human evolution or is it just another "joker" in an increasingly confusing game?"

There is a piece in the current PNAS that people with access to PNAS can download in PDF.  I don't have access, and a very kind soul on another list tried to attach the relevant PDF for me.  Unfortunately, I have a couple of programs that get rid of viruses, but they also strip attachments, so I'm out of luck until I can get a direct access.  Otherwise, I'd send it to you and you could see for yourself what's there.  Maybe someone else could do the job. . . .
Anne G

[lagarvelho]

Colin:

"BTW, I like the term palaeo-creationist - I think it serves very well for those who Dr Brace once described who, rather than focusing  on the processes involved in human evolution, explain changes by saying in effect "then a miracle happened". "

I think we all know who these folks are.  Well, most of us do, anyway.
Anne G

[skeptical1]

The following should pique the curiosity of a few linguistically inclined people as well as that, I presume, of various palaeo-creationists

Language evolved in a leap
Conflicting needs may have driven rapid development of communication.
22 January 2003
PHILIP BALL

BIG SNIP

It has been known since the 1940s that human languages do indeed show just this kind of statistical distribution of word usage - the social scientist George Kingsley Zipf spotted the power-law behaviour. But it has never been satisfactorily explained before, although Zipf himself speculated that it might represent some kind of "principle of least effort".

It would be interesting if someone, with quick and easy access to PNAS, were to tell us a bit more about this "communication jump" and what it may imply or how it can be interpreted from an evolutionary/palaeoanthropological point-of-view.

Jacques Cinq-Mars

I'm afraid this paper is more likely to be of interest to a fringe group of mathematicians than to linguists, let alone paleoanthropologists. Most mathematicians accept that Zipf's law is merely an artifact of the stochastic nature of information. But I'll recap as briefly as possible:

The law boils down to:
rf = C
where
r is the rank of a word;
f is the frequency of occurrence of the word;
C is a constant that depends on the text being analyzed.
The law thus shows a correlation between a word's rank, the number of different words and their frequency of use.

There are two alternatives. Either Zipf's law reflects a universal property of the human mind or else it merely represents some necessary consequence of the laws of probabilities (George Miller 1965). Zipf chose the former (synthetic) hypothesis and derived a Principle of Least Effort. Almost all mathematicians chose the latter (analytic) hypothesis and searched for a probabilistic explanation; according to this, Zipf's curves are merely "one way to express a necessary consequence of regarding a message source as a stochastic process" (George Miller 1965).

The principle behind Zip's law is disappointing: it can be derived as a consequence of very simple chaos. Thus texts consisting of randomly generated letters and spaces also obey the law. Indeed it has been shown that monkeys typing random letters on a keyboard produce "texts" whose "word" frequencies obey Zipf's law.

A real problem became that "mathematicians believe in Zipf's law because they think that linguists have established it to be a linguistic law, and linguists believe in it because they on their part think that mathematicians have established it to be a mathematical law" (Herdan, 1966). In truth it is neither.

Most mathematicians thereafter lost interest in any real-world properties of the "law". However, the new interest in natural language processing and computerization sparked a revival of interest in the issue as evidenced in the paper "Zipf's law and the structure and evolution of languages" (Tsonis, Schultz and Tsonis 1997). This paper attempted to distinguish the case of natural language from the case of the typing monkeys. This paper was rebutted (IMHO) by Li in a "Letters to the Editor", published in the journal Complexity in 1998. (I can go into this in more detail if anyone wants, but it's highly technical).

Further attempts have been made to rehabilitate the matter. For example, the authors of the current paper published "Zipf's Law and Random Texts" in the journal Advances in Complex Systems (Cancho and Sole, 2002), arguing that when random texts and real texts are compared through (a) the lexical spectrum and (b) the distribution of words of similar length, it can be shown that real texts fill the lexical spectrum more efficiently and regardless of the word length, suggesting that the meaningfulness of Zipf's law is high, according to them.

I suspect the current paper is a follow-on to that earlier one. The authors' viewpoint remains a minority one. Although I have not seen the curent paper, I remain very skeptical as to what if anything the authors may have succeeded in proving. From my perspective Zipf's "law" remains a peculiar property of chaotic systems, nothing more.

Harry (Skeptical1)

[ambyers]

My response to this general thesis will be a brief as possible. The premises of this thesis on the sudden emergence of language seem to me to be faulty, these being that communication is adequately characterized in terms of reference and that there is the possibility of uttering a context-free statement. The latter is impossible since every statement implicates a context that fixes the meanings of its terms. "Cut the cake" and "Cut the grass" entail two different and equally literal meanings of the verb "cut." But if I went out and started stabbing the grass with a cake knife, I would be taken to have misunderstood the directive. The same if if I were to run the lawn mower over the cake. Therefore, no utterance can ever be meaningful if context-free. This means that  all communication relies on implication and, in fact, it is likely that prior to reference there was implicature. For example, it is probably more adequate to characterize the vervet monkey's "leopard alarm" as a conventionalized form of implicating rather than as referencing the leopard. The upshot is that if any sudden emergence of language were to have occurred it would have been preceded by a long period of communicative evolution. This criticism also relates to the first mentioned premise, that reference characterizes language. As a very effective communicative device, language is an action system and it presupposes a long evolution of communicative practices that were probably based primarily on implicature and only more recently on reference and early referencing did not have to be symbolic in the sense we normally mean.

Best regards,

Martin Byers