51 min listen
Thom Scott-Phillips, “Speaking Our Minds” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)
Thom Scott-Phillips, “Speaking Our Minds” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)
ratings:
Length:
56 minutes
Released:
Dec 13, 2014
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
I hope I’m not being species-centric when I say that the emergence of human language is a big deal. John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary rate it as one of the “major transitions in evolution”, placing it in exalted company alongside the evolution of multicellularity, sociality, sexual reproduction, and various other preoccupations of ours. But the nature of the transition is hotly disputed: is there a sudden shift involving the emergence of complex syntax, or is the process more gradual and socially driven?
In his entertaining and approachable volume Speaking Our Minds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Thom Scott-Phillips argues for a different approach. On his view, there is a categorical difference between human language and its precursors, but the critical ingredient is ostensive-inferential communication – that is, the ability to express and recognize intentions – and this underlies the expressive power of language. His view calls for a reappraisal of the role of pragmatics in linguistics, from being a communicatively useful add-on to being much nearer the heart of the enterprise.
In this interview, we discuss the motivations and implications of this idea, for both evolutionary and more traditional approaches to linguistics, and we look at how comparative studies of other species – not only great apes, but even bacteria – might tell us something useful about the nature of human communication.
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In his entertaining and approachable volume Speaking Our Minds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Thom Scott-Phillips argues for a different approach. On his view, there is a categorical difference between human language and its precursors, but the critical ingredient is ostensive-inferential communication – that is, the ability to express and recognize intentions – and this underlies the expressive power of language. His view calls for a reappraisal of the role of pragmatics in linguistics, from being a communicatively useful add-on to being much nearer the heart of the enterprise.
In this interview, we discuss the motivations and implications of this idea, for both evolutionary and more traditional approaches to linguistics, and we look at how comparative studies of other species – not only great apes, but even bacteria – might tell us something useful about the nature of human communication.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language
Released:
Dec 13, 2014
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
James R. Hurford, “The Origins of Meaning (Language in Light of Evolution, Vol. 1)” (Oxford UP, 2007): Evolutionary approaches to linguistics have notoriously had a rather chequered history, being associated with vague and unfalsifiable claims about the motivations for the origins of language. It seems as though the subject has only recently come in fro... by New Books in Language