Incomplete Preliminary Draft – Comments Welcome!
CIEL-2, 2010, Nankai University
William S-Y. Wang, [email protected]
The Evolution of Evolutionary Linguistics1
0. Preliminaries.
Language is a behavior that is shaped by two evolutionary forces, one biological
the other social. Although human language emerged perhaps a hundred thousand years
ago, the systematic study of its evolution could only begin with the development of the
theory of evolution, starting with the landmark works of Charles Darwin, followed by the
important discoveries in many disciplines, especially anthropology, biology and
psychology, with support from the very powerful methods recently developed in statistics
and computer science.
In recent years the study of language evolution became more structured with a
very successful series of international, interdisciplinary conferences called EVOLANG.
The first one in this biannual series was held at Edinburgh in 1996. The last one,
EVOLANG-8 was just held in Utrecht. It attracted the attention of the journal SCIENCE
and was discussed by one of its journalists, M. Balter. The next one, EVOLANG-9, is
expected to take place in Kyoto in 2012.
Balter’s discussion2 centers on just one interesting question in evolutionary
linguistics, whether the initial stages of human language relied more on manual gestures
or more on articulated sounds. No-one would deny of course that the two modalities of
communication, by eye and by ear, are both important. However, recent experimental
studies of communication among primates and birds have considerably deepened our
understanding of this question. There are many other questions in evolutionary
linguistics which are just as fascinating, and these have been richly represented in the
EVOLANG conferences.
Our own series of Conferences In Evolutionary Linguistics was started last year in
Guangzhou by a group of forward looking Chinese linguists, CIEL-13. Plans are
underway to hold CIEL-3 in Shanghai. When I suggested the acronym of CIEL, which
1
Presented at the Conference on Evolutionary Linguistics II, Nankai University, May 2010. I thank
Professor SHI Feng for his invitation, and James Minett and Yaching Tsai for their help in putting together
these remarks.
2
Balter, M. (2010). Animal communication helps reveal roots of language. Science 328.969.
3
Wong, Y. W. (2009) Report: Conference in Evolutionary Linguistics I, Guangzhou, 2009. Journal of
Chinese Linguistics, 37(2), 386-396.
1
means ‘sky’ or ‘heaven’ in French, Professor Zhu Xiaonong immediately connected it to
the use of 天 in the terms used in Chinese for evolutionary theory4. Indeed, when 严复
translated the lectures of Thomas Huxley into Chinese at the end of the 19th century, he
chose for his volume the title of 天演论, and used the phrases 物竞天择, 适者生存5. So
we all should be glad that our conference has such celestial connections.
Language evolution proceeds at various time scales. Reflecting on this issue
some years back6, I proposed three of these scales as macrohistory, mesohistory, and
microhistory. When investigators explore how chimpanzee gestures and bird songs relate
to the emergence of language, as Balter discusses, they are working in the area of
macrohistory – the transition that humanity made from ‘no language’ to ‘language’.
Answers here will provide knowledge of the initial conditions for our field –
corresponding to the ‘big bang’ of cosmology.
The kind of research which studies how languages diversify across centuries or
millennia, due to either vertical or horizontal transmission, we might call mesohistory.
This is the area of traditional historical and typological linguistics, centered around
comparison and reconstruction. Given the extensive time depth of texts as well as the
great variety of her languages and dialects, Chinese linguistics is well endowed to made
important contributions here. Microhistory deals with topics for which we have direct
access to first hand data produced by live speakers, be they the early utterances of an
infant, the accented pronunciation of a language learner, or an ongoing sound change that
can be revealed by speakers of different social or age groups.
We would expect that these three time scales are importantly related to each other.
Having direct access to live speakers, for instance, gives us unique opportunities to
understand the past. Phoneticians have long been investigating the dynamic structure of
the vocal tract in efforts to explain why certain sound changes recur over and over again
in many parts of the world in terms of processes of articulation. Now that brain imaging
tools have become widely available, hopefully we will soon have a better understanding
of the mental processes which underlie all of language, perhaps with reference to the
various types of memory and computation which are involved. Having such an empirical
base of biological facts will move linguistics forward beyond the futile syntactic and
semantic controversies which have plagued our field for many decades. In any case, it is
imperative that we ponder deeply how exactly these three time scales are related to each
other in order to eventually arrive at a coherent account of human language that is
informed by all three.
4
Email communication, April 6, 2009.
Pan, J. (1984). "Charles Darwin's Chinese Sources." Isis 75(3): 530-534. This paper provides interesting
observations on Darwin’s efforts to incorporate Chinese data into his studies.
6
Wang, W. S.-Y. (1978). The three scales of diachrony. Linguistics in the Seventies: Directions and
Prospects. B. B. Kachru, Department of Linguistics, University of Illinois: 63-75.
5
2
1. Early Seeds of Linguistics.
My purpose in this essay is much less ambitious. I aim to sketch out in rough
outline the major trajectories of the historical development of evolutionary linguistics,
especially from a Chinese perspective. The seeds of evolutionary linguistics trace back to
the philosophers of ancient times. Plato in Greece (ca. 428–348 BCE) and Xunzi in
China (ca. 312–230 BCE) recognized that the arbitrary bond between sound and meaning
of words is due to conventionalization7. Xunzi called it 约定俗成. By the time of the
Song dynasty, a Chinese scholar was writing about the important distinction between
content words and function words. This was followed by the brilliant observation of a
Yuan dynasty scholar on function words having evolved from content words through the
process of grammatization, 虚化8。Unfortunately these early insights did not grow into a
research paradigm, and grammatical study in China did not begin systematically until the
20th century.
陆九渊：字之指归又有虚实，虚字当论字义，实字当论所指之实。
“On the other hand, the meanings of words can be either grammatical or
substantive. A grammatical word of course refers to the meaning of the word, but
a substantive word to the concrete senses it implied.”
周伯琦：今之虚字皆古之实字。
“present-day grammatical words were all substantive words in ancient times.”
Systematic study of sounds, especially of the riming words of the Shijing, began
toward the end of the Ming dynasty, when Chen Di 陈第 (1541-1617) recognized that
words evolved in both space and time in these famous lines:
盖时有古今，地有南北，字有更革，音有转移，亦势所必至。
In contrast with grammatical studies, Chen’s insight did grow into a paradigm of
research in the hands of the brilliant Qing dynasty philologists, who provided the
foundation for our modern understanding of three thousand years of sound change in
Chinese. Although the Chinese tradition started earlier than Indo-European studies,
dating from William Jones (1746 – 94), it was limited by the fact that the focus was
primarily on just one language, compared with the much wider scope of western
linguistics, especially with the later advent of anthropology and its emphasis on fieldwork
with unwritten languages.
7
Wang, W. S.-Y. (1989). "Language in China: a chapter in the history of linguistics." Journal of Chinese
Linguistics 17(2): 183-222. Yu, A. (2009). Cratylus and the Xunzi on Names. Comparative Journals:
Essays on Literature and Religion East and West. Columbia University Press.
8
Quotations from p.95 of 古汉语语法学资料汇编, 郑奠, 麦梅翘合编. 香港: 中华, 1972. English
translations taken from Sun, C. (1996). Word-Order Change and Grammaticalization in the History of
Chinese., Stanford University Press, p.11.
3
The century that followed Jones was the heyday of Indo-European studies, when
most of the discoveries about language relationships and historical reconstructions were
made, primarily with the help of the comparative method. This method is used in many
sciences, notably anatomy and zoology. It is based on the fundamental insight that by
comparing corresponding traits in modern organisms, we may infer what the ancestral
organism was like, and the processes which operated between the ancestor and its modern
descendents.
2. Language Transmission: Vertical and Horizontal.
Of course, languages are not organisms, even though some aspects of evolution
are shared between the two domains of inquiry; so the parallels are more than mere
metaphor. One obvious example is that of the family tree, used with great profit both in
biology and in linguistics to denote vertical transmission of traits. On the other hand, a
crucial difference between the two domains of inquiry is that linguistic traits are
importantly transmitted horizontally as well.
August Schleicher (1821-68) was probably the first linguist to draw such a tree to
show the relations among Indo-European languages; see Figure 1. Furthermore, he may
have been the first theorist to remark that the branches on such trees may be used to
represent elapsed time, so that the degree of separation between a pair of languages in
time may be expressed quantitatively simply as the total length of the minimal set of
branches which connect them. Implicit in his thinking here is the notion of what
biologists now call ‘molecular clock’, and the assumption that the rate of change is
largely uniform across evolutionary time. He may not have realized, however, that the
computation for such branch lengths is actually very labor intensive. The development of
methods for computation had to wait another century, when statistics theory and
computer science converged in the new discipline of numerical taxonomy.9
Fig. 1
9
Cavalli-Sforza, L.; A. Piazza (1975). "Analysis of Evolution: Evolutionary Rates, Independence and
Treeness". Theoretical Population Biology 8: 127–165.
4
In his landmark book on the origin of species, Charles Darwin (1809–82)
suggested, perhaps a bit too strongly, that the family tree of human populations should be
the same as the family tree of human languages. In this his remarks were tempered by
the more considered opinion of his colleague, Thomas Huxley (1825-95),10 who took into
account the numerous cases where a population may replace its own language by another.
In addition to the trees which portray vertical transmission, Huxley was alluding to the
extensive horizontal transmissions when languages come into contact.
“It seems to me obvious that, though in the absence of any evidence to the
contrary, unity of languages may afford a certain presumption in favor of the
unity of stock of peoples speaking those languages, it cannot be held to prove that
unity of stock, unless philologers are prepared to demonstrate that no nation can
lose its language and acquire that of a distinct nation without a change of blood
corresponding with the change of language.”
Cavalli-Sforza et al (1988) published a famous diagram of the populations of the world,
showing how a tree based on genes compares with a tree based on languages; see Figure
2.11
Fig. 2
When languages come into contact, there may indeed be wholesale replacement.
This has happened numerous times in Chinese history. Repeatedly in the past two
millennia, ethnic minorities have adopted the language of the Han majority. A clear
example is the assimilation of the Manchus into the mainstream Chinese culture; there
are very few Manchus left in China who still speak Manchu, even though they ruled the
country for almost three hundred years, i.e., the Qing, the last dynasty. However, the
situation is much more complex when the adoption is not wholesale but partial. It is now
clear that ‘pure’ languages do not exist; all languages are ‘mixed’ languages to varying
extents due to contact. Some contacts are well attested in history books, such as the
10
Huxley, T. H. (1865). On the methods and results of ethnology. Fortnightly Review 1: 257-277.
Cavalli-Sforza, L. L., A. Piazza, et al. (1988). "Reconstruction of human evolution: bringing together
genetic, archeological and linguistic data." PNAS 85: 6002-6.
11
5
influence of French on English, marked by the Norman Conquest, and of Chinese on
Japanese, many centuries earlier than William the Conqueror. Typically the influence is
bi-directional, though often not symmetrical.
If the contacts are long and intense, as with conquests and colonizations, the
linguistic influences are correspondingly more extensive. The items adopted are not just
words, but structural elements as well, in phonology, morphology, as well as in syntax.
There are numerous words in English, for instance, where the roots are Germanic while
the surrounding affixes came from French. For recent studies of Chinese dialects, LIEN
Chinfa’s discussion of bidirectional diffusion in Southern Min is particularly informative,
where a single syllable may trace back to different chronological strata in history12;
WANG Feng’s stratal report on Bai of Yunnan13 interacting with Southwestern Mandarin,
raises basic issues of language classification; ACUO’s interpretation of the Daohua of the
QingZang Plateau as a mixture of Hanyu and Zangyu14 is of special interest from a
typological viewpoint.
LI Jingzhong’s analyses of the extensive Zhuang influence on Yue15 remind us
that numerous words in the southern dialects come from ethnic minorities. Of the Yue
dialects, the speech of Hong Kong is most obviously influenced by 150 years of English
colonization. Code switching between sentences as well as code mixing within sentences
are a commonplace. The hybrid forms typically preserve the linguistic structure of
Chinese, with English lexical material inserted. Two examples that I recently heard are:
[1] Ga-m-guarantee-ga? The English word guarantee is split to accommodate
the Chinese A-not-A question construction. The ‘ga’ is a contraction of the two final
particles ‘ge’ and ‘a’. The Putonghua counterpart of this question would be 保不保证的
啊. Note that only the first syllable of 保证 ‘baozheng’ is kept before the Putonghua
negative 不, just as only the first syllable of guarantee is kept before the Cantonese
negative ‘m’.16
[2] So-mat.je-rry-a? Here the English word sorry is split to accommodate the
Chinese construction X-what-X-a. The hybrid form means something like ‘why are you
sorry?’ Sorry, Bye-bye, and OK are three English words that have been all but
universally adopted in the world these days. The Putonghua counterpart here would be
12
Wang, W. S.-Y. and C. F. Lien (1993). Bidirectional diffusion in sound change. Historical Linguistics:
Problems and Perspectives. C. Jones, Longman: 345-400. Lien, C. (1993). "Bidirectional diffussion in
sound change revisited." Journal of Chinese Linguistics 21(2): 255-76.
13
Wang, F. (2006). Comparison of Languages in Contact: the Distillation Method and the Case of Bai.
Nangang, Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica.
14
意西微萨•阿错（Yeshes Vodgsal Atshogs）(2005). "语言深度接触机制与藏汉语言类型差异问题."
Journal of Chinese Linguistics 33(1): 1-33.
15
李敬忠 (1994). 语言演变论, 广州出版社.
16
Wang, W. S.-Y. (1967). "Conjoining and deletion in Mandarin syntax." Monumenta Serica 26: 224-36.
6
道什么歉啊, where 道歉means ‘to apologize’, and the 什么 corresponds to Cantonese
‘mat.je’, usually written as乜嘢, which may also contract into ‘me’, written with咩.17
These are clear examples of horizontal transmission due to language contact.
Whereas transmission in biology is primarily vertical via genes from parents to offspring,
languages transmit their traits horizontally as well. This dual mode of transmission was
well recognized by Schleicher’s student, Johannes Schmidt (1843–1901), who proposed
the complementary ‘wave’ theory, which stressed the influence of the spatial aspect on
language change and the resulting language relationships. Neighboring populations are
in greater contact, and hence their languages would tend to mix more. Cavalli-Sforza and
I applied a model from population genetics, the so-called ‘stepping-stone’ model, to the
lexicons of a chain of islands in Micronesia, and were able to extract a lawful relationship
between the spatial distance and lexical replacement among these islands.18
A central problem to solve in evolutionary linguistics, therefore, is how to
separate the traits which have been vertically transmitted (inherited) from those which
have been horizontally transmitted (borrowed). Some progress has been made here in
recent years19, reasoning probabilistically and building on the methods of numerical
taxonomy. But much work lies ahead if we are to ever understand the true prehistory of
languages and how they are shaped by the interplay between these two forces.
3. Origins of Human Language.
The question of the origin of language surfaced before William Jones
hypothesized on language relations and launched the systematic study of Indo-European
languages. Two prominent thinkers of European Romanticism, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
(1712-78) and Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), have each offered an essay on this
question.20 Interestingly, Rousseau began his essay with the observation that
“Speech distinguishes man among the animals …”,
while Herder began his essay with an opposite premise,
“While still an animal, man already has language.”
It is clear from such opposite views that what was lacking was an adequate
definition of terms such as ‘language’ and ‘speech’ within the larger perspective of
17
Cheung, K.-h. and R. Bauer (2002). The representation of Cantonese with Chinese characters, Journal of
Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series.
18
Cavalli-Sforza, L. L. and W. S.-Y. Wang (1986). "Spatial distance and lexical replacement." Language
62: 38-55.
19
Minett, J. W. and W. S.-Y. Wang (2003). "On detecting borrowing: distance-based and character-based
approaches." Diachronica 20.2: 289-330. Wang, W. S.-Y. and J. W. Minett (2005). "Vertical and
horizontal transmission in language evolution." Transactions of the Philological Society 103.2: 121-46.
20
Moran, J. H. and A. Gode (1966). On the Origin of Language: Two Essays by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
and Johann Gottfried Herder. New York, Frederick Ungar.
7
animal communication. In order not to waste time in the absence of such knowledge, the
Linguistic Society of Paris, founded in 1866, infamously banned such reports in their bylaws in these words:
« ART 2 - La société n’admet aucune communication concernant, soit l’origine
du langage, soit la creation d’une langue universelle. »
The requisite knowledge had to wait several centuries until more systematic
knowledge was accumulated about other species, and a set of ‘design features’ was
initially proposed by Charles Hockett21 to distinguish various forms of communication;
see Figure 3. This initial impetus was followed by series of interdisciplinary conferences,
most notably one sponsored in 1975 by the New York Academy of Sciences22, and a
series called EVOLANG which James Hurford initiated at Edinburgh. Now this once
banned topic is the focal point of much interdisciplinary research. A brief review of these
developments is Wang (2008).23
Fig. 3
Currently, there is still much debate concerning what language is, i.e., what
necessary and sufficient conditions a system must meet to be called language. While
much linguistic research over recent decades has centered on the issue of language
universals, many of these universals have been contested.24 Particularly controversial is
the question whether all languages have embedding as a syntactic device; Hixkaryana and
21
Hockett, C. F. (1960). "The origin of speech." Scientific American 203: 88-96.
Harnad, S. R., H. D. Steklis, et al. (1976). Origins and evolution of language and speech, New York,
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.
23
Wang, W. S.-Y. (2008). Recent Advances in Evolutionary Linguistics. Interfaces in Chinese Phonology:
Festschrift in Honor of Matthew Chen. Y. E. Hsiao, H.-c. Hsu and L.-H. Wee, Journal monograph,
Language and Linguistics, Academia Sinica, Taiwan.: 279-294.
24
Evans, N. and S. Levinson (2009). "The Myth of Language Universals: Language diversity and its
importance for cognitive science." Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32, 429-48.
22
8
Pirahã are two languages in Brazil which are reported not to use embedding, with Pirahã
at the center of many debates25.
The issue of embedding is lucidly discussed in the wider context of recursion and
infinitude in language by Pullum and Scholtz26. It is important to remember that the
6000+ languages for which we currently have data, vital as these data are, represent but a
small percentages of the languages that humans have used – much like the biological
species we can observe on earth now represent but a small percentage of life forms that
have existed. More solid answers on what language is must eventually come from
neurocognitive research, which has only begun recently.
There are two interweaving trajectories of development in evolutionary linguistics,
one phylogenetic, concerned with our species, and one ontogenetic, concerned with
developments within individual lifetimes, both beginning in the early part of the 20th
century. Both trajectories have received a tremendous boost in advancement in recent
decades from breakthroughs in yet another area, cognitive neuroscience, i.e., in our
understanding of the brain.
Some dates for these three developments may be useful for orientation purposes.
For phylogeny, in 1973 the Dutch biologist Nikolaas Tinbergen and Austrian biologists
Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch were joint winners of the Nobel Prize in Physiology
or Medicine. This award publicized the achievements of the new science of ethology,
which studies animal behavior. The discovery of various forms of imprinting in young
animals, and the decipherment of bee dance as a form of communication were important
guideposts for the study of language evolution.
4. Language Ontogeny and the Brain.
Interest in language ontogeny has a long tradition, from the early language
deprivation experiment by an Egyptian Pharoah recorded in Herodotus's Histories, to
Charles Darwin, who kept careful diaries of the language development of his children.
Most extensive treatises on language regard the language acquisition problem as a key
element in language evolution, though not all these studies place the problem in a larger
cognitive context. A notable exception is the work of Michael Tomasello, who studies
language acquisition comparatively in human infants and in nonhuman apes.27
Language acquisition became a much more coherent and effective body of
research with the construction of the CHILDES database spearheaded by Brian
MacWhinney in 1984 – Child Language Data Exchange System. The field has harnessed
25
Everett, D. L. (2005). "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Piraha: Another Look at the
Design Features of Human Language." Current Anthropology 46(4): 621-646.
26
Pullum, G. K. and B. C. Scholz (To appear). Recursion and the infinitude claim. Recursion and Human
Language. H. v. d. Hulst. Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter. 111-38.
27
Tomasello, M. (2008). Origins of Human Communication, M.I.T.Press。蔡雅菁译。人类沟通的起
源。台北：文鹤出版社。
9
the advances in computer technology, and moved forward impressively from pencil
scribbles on paper to multi-media sharing on the internet. In this respect CHILDES is
leading the field of linguistics at large.28
Research in the third area, neuroscience as it impacts our understanding of
language, has resulted in many Nobel Prizes, starting with the classic contributions of
Pavlov on conditioning (1904) and Cajal on the neuron theory (1906), and including the
recent discoveries of how memory is formed in the hippocampus (Kandel, 2000), and the
physiological bases of MRI – magnetic resonance imaging (Lauterbur and Mansfield,
2003). Also noteworthy here is the Proclamation by President George Bush, naming
1990-1999 as the “Decade of the Brain.”
More than anything else, the human brain is what makes language possible, even
though many bodily changes have also taken place to favor the use of language. These
changes include greater respiratory control to provide a better regulated airstream to
support speech production, a lowered larynx for more diverse phonetic distinctions, as
well as numerous adjustments in neural circuits, as are made for learning anything new.
To understand these bodily changes in perspective, it is not helpful to invent facile terms
like language ‘organ’, ‘instinct’, or ‘bioprogram’, suggesting a major discontinuity for the
evolution of language. Rather, it is more productive to keep in mind the metaphor of
François Jacob (Nobel Prize 1965), of evolution as a tinkerer, who
“…often without knowing what he is going to produce, … uses whatever he finds
around him, old cardboards, pieces of strings, fragments of wood or metal, to
make some kind of workable object.”29
Such a scenario is what I had in mind as well in Wang (1982), and updated in
(2006) and (2007).30 I used the word ‘mosaic’ in line with Jacob’s image of evolution
piecing together various components in different ways at different times in the service of
supporting a new cognitive function, i.e., language. Specifically addressing the brain,
28
Two research groups at the Chinese University of Hong Kong have contributed Chinese data to the
CHILDES database; they are the Language Acquisition Laboratory, directed by Thomas H-T. Lee, and the
recently established Childhood Bilingualism Research Center, directed by Virginia Yip and Stephen
Matthews.
A similar goal motivated the construction of a database of Chinese dialects, though the project has not
attracted wide-spread collaboration as has CHILDES. See Cheng, C.-C. (1994). DOC: lts Birth and Life.
In Honor of William S-Y. Wang: Interdiciplinary Studies on Language and Language Change. M. Y. Chen
and O. J. L. Tzeng, eds. Taibei: Pyramid Press.
29
Jacob, F. (1977). "Evolution and tinkering." Science 196: 1161-1166. “… 通常不知道他要作出什么成
品 ... 只是拿他身旁有的东西，旧纸板也好，绳子也好，木头金属碎片也好，有什么就用什么，拼
拼凑凑地做成要用的东西。”
30
Wang, W. S.-Y. (1982). Explorations in Language Evolution. . Hyderabad, India, Osmania University
Press. 王士元 (2006). 語言演化的探索. 門内日與月: 鄭錦全先生七秩壽慶論文集. 劉显亲. 鍾榮富, 胥
嘉陵, 何大安編輯, Taipei: Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica: 9-32. Wang, W. S.-Y. (2007). "The
language mosaic and its biological bases." Journal of Bio-Education 2(1): 8-16. Chinese translation: 2008.
語言馬賽克及其生物基礎. 陳永禹譯. 輔仁外語學報5.1-22.
10
Bruce Wexler31 gives a concrete interpretation of what happens to its neural circuits in
the following words:
"… the special functional properties of the human brain come from an increase in
the number of basic components already present in the brains of lower mammals,
and from increases in connectivity and changes in organization among these
components." p.32
The human infant is unique in the animal kingdom in coming into the world with
a brain that is about one fourth of its eventual size – from some 300 grams it will grow
explosively in the first two years to some 1,000 grams, eventually stabilizing around a
mean of 1,400 grams in adulthood. The possibility for the brain to acquire new neurons,
form new connections, and myelinate neural processes for better communication is called
neuroplasticity. Many of the neural circuits have the potential for a variety of uses. For
instance circuits which normally develop for audition may be experimentally rewired for
vision. If circuits which normally develop for language functions in the left hemisphere
are deprived in some way in the infant’s brain, the corresponding regions in the right
hemisphere can take over these functions. In the words of Wilder Penfield32, the young
human brain remains ‘uncommitted’ for a long time.
From the early years of complete helplessness, through a protected childhood that
often lasts till sexual maturity in the early teens, the brain hungrily soaks up a tremendous
amount of information about the physical as well as social environment. This is in
marked contrast with all other species, including the nonhuman primates, where the
young become largely independent shortly after birth. While milk from the mother’s
breast is known to have many biochemical benefits, the long hours of suckling and
intimate skin contact are also a vital experience for the infant’s healthy initiation to
socialization. Deprivation of such experiences can lead to psychological pathologies, as
dramatically demonstrated in Harry Harlow’s experiments with monkeys and ‘wire
mothers’ in mid 20th century.
Evolutionarily our brain may be divided into three components that correspond
approximately to major stages of growth in phylogeny, successively piled on top of and
around earlier parts33. First there is the collection of neural circuits at the base of the
brain that we share with all vertebrates, including reptiles. Second is the set of cortical
structures which we share with mammals only. These include the limbic system, named
by Paul Broca, which include the amygdala which processes emotions, the hippocampus
for storing memories, the thalamus which serves as a central relay station for numerous
sensori-motor signals shuttling between the neocortex and the rest of the body.
31
Wexler, B. E. (2006). Brain and Culture. M.I.T.Press. See also Anderson, M. L. (2010). "Neural re-use
as a fundamental organizational principle of the brain." Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
32
Penfield, Wilder. 1965. Conditioning the uncommitted cortex for language learning. Brain 88.787-98.
33
MacLean, P. D. (1990). The triune brain in evolution: role in paleocerebral functions. New York, Plenum.
Lieberman, P. (2000). Human Language and our Reptilian Brain, Harvard University Press.
11
The most distinctive aspect of the human cortex is its tremendous increase in size,
especially in the parietal and frontal lobes. The increase is largely due to expansion in
the surface area of the neocortex34 as numerous new neurons are added to the population.
The large neocortical mantle repeatedly folds itself within the cranium, resulting in many
deep sulci, giving it a corrugated appearance which is a hallmark of our brain. In surface
area, the human neocortex is from three to nine times larger than corresponding parts in
the other great apes. The prefrontal cortex, roughly the anterior half of the frontal lobe is
especially dominant; this area performs what psychologists call ‘executive functions’,
which largely determine individual personalities. This is also the region of the brain
which has the longest period of development, as Bruce Wexler remarks:
"Neurobiological research indicates that the human frontal lobes continue to
actively develop until a person is 20-25 years old, and these are regions of the
brain thought to be closely associated with values, morality, emotion, and other
personality traits." p.242.
5. Imitation, Statistical Learning, and Memory.
The infant’s brain, starting at 300+ grams is an incredible learning machine,
equipped with a variety of domain general skills35; see Figure 4. The learning can be
evidenced as young as several hours after birth, as reported early in 1977,36 when the
infant will attempt to imitate facial expressions, even when it has no idea as yet of the
effects of such imitation. Meltzoff and colleagues have furthered this line of research
with studies of infants as they follow an experimenter’s direction of gaze37. An infant of
nine months will turn his head to look in the same direction as the experimenter’s head is
facing, even when the experimenter’s eyes are closed. However, starting at ten months,
the infant will only follow when the experimenter’s eyes are open, indicating an
awareness of the experimenter’s intention.
34
Schoenemann, P. T. (2005). Conceptual complexity and the brain: understanding language origins.
Language acquisition, change and emergence : essays in evolutionary linguistics. J. W. Minett and W. S. Y.
Wang, City University of Hong Kong Press.: 47-94.Schoenemann, P. T. (2009). "Evolution of Brain and
Language." Language Learning 59(Suppl. 1): 162-186.
35
Lenneberg, E. (1967). Biological Foundations of Language, Wiley.
36
Meltzoff, A. N. and M. K. Moore (1977). "Imitation of facial and manual gestures by human neonates."
Science 198: 75-78.
37
Meltzoff, A. N. and R. Brooks (2009). Social cognition and language: the role of gaze following in early
word learning. Infant Pathways to Language: Methods, Models, and Research Directions. J. Colombo, P.
McCardle and L.Freund, Psychology Press: 169-194.
12
Fig. 4
Imitation is a strong instinct that plays a crucial role in learning many cultural
behaviors, especially language. The newly discovered mirror neuron systems38, first in
monkey brains, may be the physiological basis for imitation, and have stimulated much
recent research. Step by step, the infant’s growing brain increasingly commits itself to
the sights, smells, and sounds of its environment, tuning to the distinctive features of this
environment for recognizing faces and objects, as well as speech sounds. As these
commitments are made to the native environment, the infant’s ability to attend to
nonnative sounds deteriorates, even before he reaches one year old.
Another remarkable discovery recently made is that the infant is able to keep
track of the occurrence frequencies in the environmental stimuli, such as in a continuous
stream of speech. An eight month old infant is able to detect recurrent patterns after
hearing only several minutes’ worth of repeating nonsense syllables.39 Such ability to
extract recurrent partials and to keep track of them is called statistical learning. While it
clearly applies across various domains as a tool for learning generally, it is particularly
useful for the infant to divide the stream into small chunks to serve as candidates for
words.
Only with such small chunks available as potential names, the infant is able to
associate sounds with the faces and the objects that are fluid patterns shifting in and out
of his attention like in a kaleidoscope that is constantly turning. The cues for association
may take any of numerous forms, from pointing with a gaze or a finger to presentation of
a food or a toy. The naming begins with the most salient faces close by in time and space,
and extends to eventually to the full scope of language. Language is an immense and
intricate filing system for an endless stream of segmentable experiences, and these small
chunks extracted by statistical learning are the first filing folders to hold these segments
of experience, or meanings.
38
Rizzolatti, G. and G. Buccino (2005). The Mirror Neuron System and Its Role in Imitation and Language.
From Monkey Brain to Human Brain. S. Dehaene, J.-R. Duhamel, M.D.Hauser and G.Rizzolatti, MIT
Press. 曾志朗 (2006). "牵动你我神经 - 镜像神经为什么重要？." 科学人 58: 72-75.
39
Saffran, J. R., R. N. Aslin, et al. (1996). "Statistical Learning by 8-Month-Old Infants." Science
274(5294): 1926-1928. Saffran, J., M. Hauser, et al. (2008). "Grammatical pattern learning by human
infants and cotton-top tamarin monkeys." Cognition 107(2): 479-500. Aslin, R. N. and E.L.Newport (2009).
What statistical learning can and can't tell us about language acquisition. Infant Pathways to Language:
Methods, Models, and Research Directions. J. Colombo, P. McCardle and L.Freund, Psychology Press: 1529.
13
Once the infant realizes that syllables can hold meanings, her cognitive
development makes a quantum leap, that is sometimes referred to as the ‘lexical
explosion’; see Figure 5. As the following quote40 illustrates, Meri spoke primarily in
single words until the age of one year and six months (MLU = Mean Length of
Utterance). The explosion took place in the following month, when her vocabulary more
than doubled, from 30 words to 70 words. Directly following this explosion, she started
putting the words together and began exploring syntax as her MLU increased.
Interestingly, for a while after the explosion, lexical acquisition stays dormant, as though
the infant is shifting most of her energies to organize her newly discovered syntax.
"… Meri's MLU stayed around 1.0 during five testing sessions over a 3 1/2
month period, from 1;3 to 1;6. In the session that took place at 1;6, Meri's
vocabulary leaped to 70 words from the 30 in the previous session only 3 weeks
earlier. Her MLU started rising in the session, at 1;7, that followed the
vocabulary explosion, and continued to rise in the next and final session, at 1;8.
During this period of rapid syntactic development, in which Meri's MLU rose
from 1.0 to 1.6, her vocabulary did not advance at all, staying at the 70-word
mark." p.109.
Fig. 5
These two abilities, imitation and statistical learning, are among the many that
evolution has endowed the infant for learning about the social environment. Another
crucial ability has to do with memorial tasks - not only having numerous words and
linguistic constructions in long term store, but also the ability to remember a stream of
speech or sets of objects by parsing (or chunking), i.e., grouping the objects presented in
time or in space in terms of available concepts in order to give it some hierarchical
structure. As an example, given a string of binary digits, such as
111110101100011010001000,
40
Anisfeld, M. (1984). Language development from birth to three, Erlbaum. Data based on McCuneNicolich, L. (1981). "The cognitive bases of relational words in the single word period." J of Child
Language 8: 15-34.
14
most of us would have difficulty memorizing it without many rehearsals. However, for
those familiar with code conversion into decimals (base 10) or hexadecimals (base 16),
the string can be parsed for easier memorization. Understanding long sentences, either
spoken or written, requires essentially variations on the same skill in parsing.
111,110,101,100,011,010,001,000
=
76543210
1111,1010,1100,0110,1000,1000
=
FAC688
Such parsing ability has been demonstrated by Feigenson and Halberda in infants
as young as 14 months.41 When a set of objects can be grouped into familiar subsets,
such as cars and cats, or spatially grouped into smaller subsets, the 14-month-olds find it
easier to keep track of how many objects there are. The task is more difficult for them
either when the objects are not familiar, or when the objects are not spatially grouped. Of
further interest is that these researchers note “that 14-month-old infants can use
hierarchical reorganization to expand memory, whereas much older preschool-aged
children often need explicit instruction to do so.” They thus suggest that “voluntary
control of memory reorganization likely undergoes significant developmental change.”
p.9929.
It is not unreasonable that some skills used in infancy can get reorganized when
the user learns more and more about his environment. Another clear example in the
recent literature has to do with 8-month-old infants who can use absolute pitch in a tonesequence statistical learning experiment42. Most of us can recognize all four of the
following three note sequences as do re mi, as these notes differ in relative pitch:
(1) C D E
(2) DEF#
(3) EF#G#
(4) FGA
Only someone with the skill of absolute pitch can recognize which of the four sequences
he hears, without reference to any known note. It turns out that such people are quite rare,
even among professional musicians. For the general population in Europe and North
America, it is estimated to be less than 1 in 10,000.43
For by far the majority of situations where pitch is involved, it is relative pitch
that is more useful. Musically, it is often more important to identify a tune, whether it is
sung by a male voice or a female voice. Similarly in speech perception, it is often more
important to know whether the two voices said cóntract or contráct, or má or mà. From
increased acculturation to his environment, the infant comes to realize the difference
between the two skills, and at some point relinquishes absolute pitch in favor of relative
pitch, as reported in Saffran and Griepentrog (2001).
41
Feigenson, L. and J. Halberda (2008). "Conceptual knowledge increases infants’ memory capacity."
PNAS 105(29): 9926-9930.
42
Saffran, J. R. and G. J. Griepentrog (2001). "Absolute Pitch in Infant Auditory Learning: Evidence for
Developmental Reorganization." Developmental Psychology 37(1): 74-85.
43
Deutsch, D., K. Dooley, et al. (2009). "Absolute pitch among students in an American music
conservatory: Association with tone language fluency." J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 125(4): 2398-2403.
15
The situation becomes even more interesting when we consider the situation of
tone languages, where voice pitch plays a critical role in distinguishing words, as
explored by Deutsch et al.44 We have recently raised this question experimentally with a
larger pool of subjects within the context of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which I will
discuss a little later.45
6. Sapir-Whorf Hypotheis.
We typically take for granted that there is a ‘real world’ out there that all of us
share, regardless of the language we speak. However, as early as 1929, Edward Sapir
called this to question when he wrote:
The fact of the matter is that the 'real world' is to a large extent unconsciously
built upon the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever
sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The
worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same
world with different labels attached... We see and hear and otherwise experience
very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose
certain choices of interpretation.
This idea was elaborated upon by his student, Benjamin Lee Whorf, whose anthology of
essays is widely cited in discussions of this famous hypothesis in anthropology and
linguistics.46
Quite independently, essentially the same idea can be seen in the reflections from
another discipline, written by François Jacob, who won a Nobel in 1965 for his research
in genetics:
The quality of language that makes it unique does not seem to be so much its role
in communicating directives for action as its role in symbolizing, in evoking
cognitive images. We mold our ‘reality’ with our words and our sentences in
the same way as we mold it with our vision and our hearing. And the versatility
of human language also makes it a unique tool for the development of the
imagination. p.58.
In other words, the language that we inherit from our community plays a crucial role in
shaping what we understand the “real world” to be; different languages in different
cultures shape different real worlds. The words in different languages, for instance, can
44
Deutsch, D., T. Henthorn, et al. (1999). "Absolute pitch is demonstrated in speakers of tone languages." J
Acoust Soc Am. 106: 2267.
45
Peng, G. et al. Language experience influences non-linguistic pitch perception: evidence for Sapir-Whorf
Hypothesis in auditory modality. Under preparation.
46
Whorf, B. L. (1956). Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf., MIT
Press. Kay, P. and W. Kempton (1984). "What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?" American Anthropologist
86: 65-79.
16
lead us to see and hear the world differently. Casting the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis in such
a sensory framework allows us to take steps toward verifying it.
Let us step back from language for a moment and consider the general question.
This was phrased by a German physician over 200 years ago thus47:
"Does use and exertion of mental power gradually change the material structure
of the brain, just as we see, for example, that much used muscles become stronger?
It is not improbable, although the scalpel cannot easily demonstrate this.”
Samuel Thomas Soemmering, 1791, quoted in Restak (2010) .
Instead of using the scalpel on the brain, we can now achieve similar results with the
technology of brain imaging. Studies are emerging which show that the brain of the
musician is discernibly different from that of the non-musician. Would not constant
immersion in one language, since even before birth, shape a brain differently from one
immersed in another language?
We are borne into a culture distinguished by its language. Massive use of this
language, particularly since even before birth, will shape the brain in specific ways
according to this language. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis predicts that we will perceive
and act upon the world with our language-specific brain in distinctive ways. Within this
perspective, the hypothesis becomes researchable with the technology that has become
available only in recent decades.
The recent series of research reports by Paul Kay and his colleagues48 are
important steps in this direction. They presented subjects with color patches positioned
in a circle, and asked them to indicate whether a single oddball patch is in the left semicircle or right semi-circle by silently pressing a key. The major finding is that when the
color of the oddball patch is named differently than that of the surrounding standard
patches, for example blue versus green for English, the left hemisphere responds more
quickly than the right hemisphere, that is, when the oddball patch is in the right visual
field; see Figure 6. This finding has been replicated for other color words in Korean49
and for Russian.50
47
Restak, R. (2003). The New Brain: How the Modern Age is Rewiring your Brain. London, Rodale.
Gilbert, A. L., T. Regier, et al. (2006). "Whorf hypothesis is supported in the right visual field but not the
left." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 103(2): 489-494.
Franklin, A., G. V. Drivonikou, et al. (2008). "Lateralization of categorical perception of color changes
with color term acquisition." PNAS 105(November 25): 18221-18225. Kay, P., T. Regier, et al. (2009).
Lateralized Whorf: Language influences perceptual decision in the right visual field. Language, Evolution,
and the Brain. J. W. Minett and W. S.-Y. Wang, City University of Hong Kong Press.
49
Roberson, D., H. Pak, et al. (2008). "Categorical perception of colour in the left and right visual field is
verbally mediated: Evidence from Korean." Cognition 107(2): 752-762.
50
Winawer, J., N. Witthoft, et al. (2007). "Russian blues reveal effects of language on color
discrimination." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104(19): 7780-7785.
48
17
Fig. 6
Following the line of reasoning of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, we may infer that
the left hemisphere advantage is due to the fact that the names of the colors are more
easily accessed there, and that this lexical access facilitates identifying the oddball patch.
This inference is supported by subsequent fMRI studies, in a report entitled “language
regions of the brain are operative in color perception.”51 This series of research on
visual perception has been called “Lateralized Whorf” in a recent review of the results.52
7. Tone Languages and the Sinogram.
Returning to the discussion of absolute pitch and tone languages, it seems we now
may have another source of support for the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, this time from
auditory perception. Following the earlier studies by Deutsch and colleagues, Peng et al
tested the performance of musicians on absolute pitch whose native language is tonal, in
this case, Putonghua, and compared it with the performance of musicians whose native
language is nontonal, in this case, English.
For these two groups of subjects, we also took note of the age at which they
started their musical training. Figure 7 shows the average performance of these
musicians in terms of percentage correct in their absolute pitch judgments plotted against
the age of onset. We can see clearly that Putonghua speaking subjects consistently
outperform the English speaking subjects by a significant margin. Just as interestingly,
the performance of the nontone language speakers shows a significant decline beginning
at age 5, while the corresponding decline does not occur for tone language speakers until
age 8. This means that an environment of tone language extended the ability to retain
absolute pitch for approximately 3 years; see Figure 7.
51
Siok, W. T., P. Kay, et al. (2009). "Language regions of brain are operative in color perception."
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106(20): 8140-5.
52
Kay, P., T. Regier, et al. (2009). Lateralized Whorf: Language influences perceptual decision in the right
visual field. Language, Evolution, and the Brain. J. W. Minett and W. S.-Y. Wang, City University of Hong
Kong Press.
18
Percentage Correct
60
Tone
Nontone
Chance
40
20
0
<=4
5
6
7
8
9
Age of Onset of Music Training
>=10
Fig. 7
This finding of the effect of tone language on pitch perception is paralleled by
another experimental result from the laboratory. Putonghua speakers again served as one
group of subjects while German speakers served as the other group for nontone language.
They were presented a series of pure tones synthesized on a computer, numbered from #1
which has the steepest rising slope, to #11 which is level, as shown in Figure 853. For
each tone they hear, the subjects were asked to label it as either rising or level, such as
shown in Figure 8.
Fig. 8
100
75
50
25
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Stimulus number
Fig. 9
53
8
9
10
11
Boundary Width
% sco re o f resp o nse
These labelings by the subjects can be drawn as two curves intersecting at the
50% line, which is the boundary between the two sets of stimuli. The large ‘X’ figure
seen in Figure 9 thus formed for each experimental trial may be measured to indicate its
boundary width. Again the two groups of subjects performed quite differently to these
unfamiliar laboratory stimuli. As clearly shown in Figure 10, the boundary widths of the
tone language speakers are significantly narrower than those of the nontone language
speakers.
3.5
2.5
1.5
0.5
Fig. 10
Wang, W. S.-Y. (1976). "Language change." Annals of the N.Y. Academy of Science 280: 61-72.
19
Thus in both cases, naming familiar musical notes and labeling unfamiliar pure
tones, native speakers of a tone language perform differently from speakers of nontone
languages in the perception of pitch. This provides auditory evidence in support of the
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, much as the findings of Lateralized Whorf provides visual
evidence, our two major sensory modalities in constructing the real world. The pitch
perception case shows how speaking and hearing lexical tones influences how pitch is
perceived outside language. The color perception case shows how the words a language
uses to divide and label the color spectrum influence responses to color judgments. Of
course, the words for color change across the centuries, and a language may change its
tonality with time as well.
Now I would like to discuss one more case of how culture influences our
perception. This has to do with written Chinese54, using an experimental method from
EEG called ERP (Event-Related Potential) that has been quite productive over the last
several decades.55 As is well known, the major writing systems of the world derive
essentially from two traditions56, the alphabet and the sinogram, even though there are
numerous variations on these two themes. Writing in sinograms dates back at least 3,500
years, with several major reforms over these millennia. Beginning in the 1950s, a system
of Simplified characters was created from the Traditional ones, sponsored by the
government, primarily with the goal of promoting literacy.
While Simplified characters are used on the Mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan
continue to use Traditional characters. In addition, regional characters are often created
and used in the local literature. In Hong Kong, for instance, over 1,000 of these have
been compiled and analyzed.57
There is also an interesting difference in how reading is taught in these
communities. Hanyu Pinyin, based on the Latin alphabet and adopted in the 1950s, is
used extensively on the Mainland in early education to facilitate the teaching of reading.
Taiwan uses Zhuyin Fuhao for this purpose, which is a system of phonetic notation
introduced around 1930, based on the tripartite division of the Chinese syllable used in
traditional philology. In contrast to these two communities, no auxiliary notation is used
in Hong Kong for learning how to read sinograms in early education.
54
PENG, G., J. W. MINETT, et al. (2010). "Cultural Background Influences the Liminal Perception of
Chinese Characters: An ERP Study." Journal of Neurolinguistics.23.416-26.
55
Sutton, S., Braren, M., Zubin, J., & John, E. R. (1965). Evoked-potential correlates of stimulus
uncertainty. Science, 150 (3700), 1187–1188. Kutas, M., K. D. Federmeier, et al. (2007). Language.
Handbook of Psychophysiology, 3rd ed. J. T. Cacioppo, L. G. Tassinary and G. G. Berntson. New York,
Cambridge University Press.
56
Daniels, P. T. and W. Bright, Eds. (1996). The World's Writing Systems. New York, Oxford University
Press. Wang, F., Y. Tsai, et al. (2009). Chinese literacy. Cambridge Handbook on Literacy. D. Olson and N.
Torrance, Cambridge University Press: 386-417. Wang, W. S.-Y. and Y. Tsai (2010). The Alphabet and
the Sinogram. Dyslexia Across Cultures. P. McCardle, J. R. Lee, B. Miller and O. Tzeng., Brookes
Publishing.
57
Cheung, K.-h. and R. Bauer (2002). The representation of Cantonese with Chinese characters, Journal of
Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series.
20
Our goal is to investigate the unconscious brain responses of Mainland subjects
and Hong Kong subjects to a set of sinograms used both in Simplified Characters and
Traditional Characters. From this common set, we created two additional sets of nonsinograms by either adding a stroke or removing a stroke; see Figure 11. The subjects
were asked to perform an unrelated task of monitoring x’s and o’s, pressing a different
key for each when they are presented on the computer screen. While they are performing
this unrelated counting task, sinograms and non-sinograms were flashed on the screen for
a very brief duration – 50 ms. This duration was long enough for the patterns to be
glimpsed, but not recognized. No subject reported that he could identify any of the
sinograms, but most were aware that there were some sinograms. Furthermore, only a
few subjects noticed that some stimuli (other than the x’s and o’s) were non-sinograms.
In sensory terms, the stimuli are neither subliminal nor supraliminal. Consequently we
used the adjective ‘liminal’ in our title for the experiment, since the duration is just at the
threshold of visual perception.
Fig. 11
The ERPs of two electrodes we obtained from the two groups of subjects are
shown in Figure 12, and presented schematically in Figure 13. It can be clearly seen
from column (b) that Mainland subjects showed a significantly greater positivity in their
brain response to the sinograms than to the non-sinograms. This positivity starts at
around 300 ms after the onset of the stimulus, and continues past 600 ms. In contrast,
column (c) shows no such difference for the Hong Kong subjects. Their positivity
declines at around 475 ms. and continues downward. Thus the cultural effect of the
written language on unconscious perception here is very real. But a convincing
explanation of this finding must await deeper explorations.
21
Fig. 12
The type of brain response observed here has been extensively discussed in the
neurolinguistic literature as P300. It is known that this ERP has complex sources, and
has at least two distinct components, P3a and P3b, each involved in a different cognitive
function in a separate neural circuit.58 The greater positivity as well as the more
prolonged positivity could be due to the greater ease59 with which Mainland subjects
retrieve sinograms subconsciously. Other possible cultural factors may relate to the more
concentrated exposure that Mainlanders experience to the sinogram, whereas Hong Kong
society is also saturated with texts in English. While a conclusive explanation awaits
further research, the ERP difference between the two cultural communities is nonetheless
a robust one.
Estimated Marginal Means (μV)
7.2
7.0
6.8
characters
6.6
*
6.4
6.2
6.0
ns
non-characters
5.8
Putonghua
Cantonese
Fig. 13
8. Brief Synopsis.
To recapitulate this outline, our earliest understanding of the evolution of
language came when the ancient philosophers, in particular Xunzi and Plato, recognized
that language emerged from processes of social interaction and conventionalization. By
the time of the Song and Yuan dynasties about a thousand years ago, there was explicit
recognition of the articulatory bases of the syllable in the rime charts 韵图, as well as
58
Polich, J. (2007). "Updating P300: An integrative theory of P3a and P3b." Clinical Neurophysiology 118:
2128-2148.
59
Donchin, E. and M. G. H. Coles (1988). " Is the P300 component a manifestation of context updating? ."
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 11(3): 357-374.
22
discussion of processes such as grammatization 虚化. Chen Di based his study of Old
Chinese on the observations of spatial and temporal variation in language.
William Jones first recognized genetic relations among languages, and laid the
foundation for the systematic study of evolutionary linguistics. Since that time, the study
of evolution has been successively enriched by landmark advances in Darwinian
selection, Mendel’s gene, Cajal’s neuron, discovery of the double helix, and brain
imaging by monitoring blood flow and changes in electric potential, most of which
achieved with the indispensable support by the methods of statistics and computer
science.
In the meantime, linguists have gathered a tremendous amount of basic
information on thousands of languages from many parts of the world. Much of this
information, including data on language acquisition from many languages, is becoming
more generally available online in the form of data-bases. If we could selectively harness
the fruits of the advances in all these disciplines for research on language evolution, we
can certainly expect major breakthroughs in linguistics as well.
23
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