The Evolution of Language: Towards Gestural Hypotheses

Cover
Copyright information
Contents
Introduction to the Translation
Introduction
Structure of the book
Chapter 1 The Beginnings of Language and Language Origins
	1.1 Religious beginnings
		1.1.1 On the divinity of language, the forbidden experiment, and the Adamic language
		1.1.2 Language as the object of investigation
			Jewish tradition
		1.1.3 Reflections on language in Indian philosophy
		1.1.4 Summary
	1.2 Glottogenetic thought: A naturalistic concept of language emergence
		1.2.1 How to recover from the state of nature?
			Vico
			The beginnings of comparative research
			Monboddo
			Mandeville
			Condillac
			Rousseau
			Herder
			Parisian ideologists
			Comparative philology
		1.2.2 Darwin: The beginnings of the science on the evolutionary origin of language
			Early Darwinism and the glottogenetic problem
			Empirical advances
			Anthropology and psychology on the beginnings of language
	1.3 Conclusion
Chapter 2 Evolution, Evolutionism, Evolutionary Thinking
	2.1 Evolution and natural selection
		2.1.1 Adaptation
		2.1.2 Gene’s eye view and inclusive fitness
	2.2 Universal Darwinism and cultural evolution
	2.3 Evolutionary psychology
	2.4 Popular reception and the sins of evolutionism
	2.5 Evolution: Myths and misconceptions
		2.5.1 Simplification: Evolution = natural selection
		2.5.2 Misconception: Panadaptationism (naïve selectionism)
		2.5.3 Misconception: Survival of the fittest
		2.5.4 Misconception: Preservation of the species/The good of the species
		2.5.5 Misconception: Lamarckism
		2.5.6 Misconception: Macromutation and saltationism
		2.5.7 Misconception: Evolution has a purpose (teleology)
		2.5.8 Misconception: Evolution means progress or going up in the great chain of beings
		2.5.9 Misconception: Recapitulationism (“ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”)
		2.5.10 Misconception: Confusing explanatory levels
	2.6 Summary
Chapter 3 The Evolution of Language:
	3.1  Road to the science of language evolution
		3.1.1 Renewed interest
		3.1.2 Chomsky, internalism and the biological foundations of language
		3.1.3 Advances in the neurosciences
			Research on primates
			Genetics
			Palaeontology and archaeology
			Neuroscience
		3.1.4 Evolutionism
	3.2 Contemporary evolution of language
		3.2.1 The evolution of language: A new research programme
		3.2.2 New research trends in the evolution of language
	3.3 Evolution – of what? The taxonomy of “language”
		3.3.1 Syntactic parser and the narrow sense of “language”
		3.3.2 Language in the broad sense
			Language: Not only syntax
			Language: Not only speech
			Language: Not only innateness
	3.4 Stages
		3.4.1 Baseline
		3.4.2 Preadaptations
		3.4.3 Prelinguistic communication
		3.4.4 Protolanguage45
		3.4.5 From protolanguage to language
	3.5 Conclusions
Chapter 4 Preadaptations for Language
	4.1 Speech
	4.2 Speech reception
	4.3 The brain
	4.4 Cognitive preadaptations
		4.4.1 Mimesis
		4.4.2 Theory of Mind
		4.4.3 Metarepresentation
		4.4.4 Memory
		4.4.5 Executive functions
	4.5 Summary
Chapter 5 Cooperative Foundations: An Essential Requirement for Language
	5.1 Signalling theory52
	5.2 The evolutionary stability of communication
	5.3 How to ensure the honesty of communication?
	5.4 The sources of human cooperativeness
	5.5 Summary
Chapter 6 The Problem of Modality Transition in Gestural Primacy Hypothesis
	6.1 Gestural primacy hypotheses in language evolution
	6.2 Defining gestures
		6.2.1 Gestures in interpersonal communication
		6.2.2 Gestures in nonhuman primates’ communication
	6.3 Arguments in favour of the gestural primacy hypotheses
		6.3.1 Gesture and language origin – a brief historical background
		6.3.2 Hewes’s position and the revival of concern with gesture in language evolution
		6.3.3 Contemporary gestural hypotheses
			Iconicity of gestures
			Handedness and lateralisation
			Broca’s area and mirror neurons
			Mimesis and pantomime
			Further arguments
	6.4 The problem of transition to speech
		6.4.1 Homo sapiens’s adaptations to speech
		6.4.2 Sign languages as fully-fledged languages
	6.5 Solutions
		6.5.1 Traditional arguments
		6.5.2 Information duality
		6.5.3 Acquisition of sign and spoken languages in children
		6.5.4 Natural connections between the hand and the mouth
		6.5.5 Articulatory movements as a type of gesture
			Orofacial gestures
	6.6 Conclusion – Towards multimodal hypotheses?
Epilogue
References
List of Figures
Glossary
Index of Names
Subject Index