Chris Sinha

The turn of the century witnessed key developments in biological sciences with profound implications both for biological theory and for the sciences of language. The decoding of the human genome showed that humans share with their closest living relatives, chimpanzees, and bonobos, between 95% and 98% of their genes, depending on the methodology for establishing similarity. This finding threw doubt on the plausibility of the claim that the human language capacity is a consequence of a species-unique, genetically determined neurobiological innovation. Around the same time, it was shown that cultural variation is not unique to the human species; this was initially demonstrated with reference to chimpanzees, but it has since been shown that cultural variation and cultural transmission occurs in a variety of mammalian and avian species. In theoretical biology, the ‘Central Dogma’ of Neo-Darwinism was challenged by the (re-)emergence of ‘Evo-Devo’ and niche construction approaches to evolutionary processes. These developments have led to an increasing acceptance of an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis that goes beyond, and in some crucial respects contradicts, the Neo-Darwinian modern synthesis of the mid-twentieth century. This recasting of evolutionary theory cannot fail to impact the foundations of biolinguistics. Over a roughly contemporaneous period, in the language sciences, the autonomy both of language as a “faculty”, and of grammar from meaning, has been challenged by cognitive linguistics and its more recent companion, cultural linguistics. Together, these developments of recent decades compel the recognition that biology and culture cannot be seen, as they largely were in the last century, as competing ‘causes’ of language and human cognition. A 21st century biolinguistics needs to accommodate the new findings in biology, language sciences (and related disciplines such as archaeology) through the elaboration of a biocultural linguistics that is fundamentally interdisciplinary and is situated in contemporary accounts of both human evolution and linguistic diversity. This chapter will outline the main features of a biocultural science of language and address the complex and dynamical relationship between what all human languages have in common, in what ways they display variation, and how language variation is (and is not) situated in differences between cultures and societies.

The present account explains which elements of the act of nonverbal reference are intersubjective, which major effects intersubjectivity has on the development of intentional communication and at what stages, and how intersubjectivity contributes to trigger the general capacity for nonverbal reference in the second year. First, intersubjectivity is analysed in terms of a mutual or individual, dyadic or triadic, sharing of experiences. It is then shown that nonverbal reference presupposes intersubjectivity relative to communicative-intent indicating and referential behaviour, and the modification of previous behaviour in response to communication failure. It is argued that different forms of intersubjectivity entail different types of communicative skills. A comprehensive analysis of data on various gaze-related intersubjective behaviour in young infants shows that interaffectivity and interattentionality enable referential skills early in development and together allow for complex behaviour, but also that early referential skills arise by other mechanisms than in nonverbal reference and their functions do not overlap. Reliable and consistent use of nonverbal reference occurs when interaffectivity and interattentionality coalesce with interintentionality, which affords general cognitive skills, and these capacities together permit a decontextualisation of communicative behaviour.

There exists broad agreement that participatory, intersubjective engagements in infancy and early childhood, particularly triadic engagements, pave the way for the folk psychological capacities that emerge in middle childhood. There is little agreement, however, about the extent to which early participatory engagements are cognitively prerequisite to the later capacities; and there remain serious questions about exactly how narrative and other language practices can be shown to bridge the gap between early engagements and later abilities, without presupposing the very abilities that they are supposed to account for. A key issue here is the normativity inherent in requesting, proferring and inferring reasons. I point out that normativity is not a property only of linguistic interactions. Normativity and conventionality are also materially instantiated in the artefactual objects that are most frequently implicated in early triadic engagements. The conventional, canonical functions of artefacts may, however, be overlaid in symbolic play by significations rooted in children's experience of blended actual and virtual worlds. Artefactual objects are amplifiers, as well as objects of consciousness. Interwoven with the symbolic forms of language, they co-constitute a specifically human biocultural niche, within and in virtue of which developing human beings become competent folk psychologists

We present a new road map for research on “How the Brain Got Language” that adopts an EvoDevoSocio perspective and highlights comparative neuroprimatology – the comparative study of brain, behavior and communication in extant monkeys and great apes – as providing a key grounding for hypotheses on the last common ancestor of humans and monkeys and chimpanzees and the processes which guided the evolution LCA-m → LCA-c → protohumans → H. sapiens. Such research constrains and is constrained by analysis of the subsequent, primarily cultural, evolution of H. sapiens which yielded cultures involving the rich use of language.

Arbib hypothesizes that evolutionary modern language significantly postdates human speciation. Why should this be so? I propose an account based on niche construction theory, in which Arbib's language-ready brain is primarily a consequence of epigenetically-driven adaptation to the biocultural niche of protolanguage and (subsequently) early language. The evolutionary adaptations grounding language evolution were initially to proto-linguistic sociocommunicative and symbolic processes, later capturing and re-canalizing behavioural adaptations (such as serial and hierarchical constructive praxis) initially “targeted” to other developmental and cognitive domains. The intimate link between praxic action and symbolic action is present not only in the human brain, but also in the human biocultural complex. The confluence of praxis and symbolization has, in the time scale of sociogenesis, potentiated the invention of domain- constituting and cognition-altering symbolic cognitive artefacts that continue to transform human socio-cultural ecologies. I cite in support of this account, which differs only in some emphases from Arbib's account, my colleagues' and my research on cultural and linguistic conceptions of time in an indigenous Amazonian community.

The biological and neurological capacity to symbolize, and the products of behavioral, cognitive, sociocultural, linguistic, and technological uses of symbols (symbolism), are fundamental to every aspect of human life. The Oxford Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution explores the origins of our characteristically human abilities - our ability to speak, create images, play music, and read and write. The book investigates how symbolization evolved in human evolution and how symbolism is expressed across the various areas of human life. The field is intrinsically interdisciplinary - considering findings from fossil studies, scientific research from primatology, developmental psychology, and of course linguistics. Written by world leading experts, thirty-eight topical chapters are grouped into six thematic parts that respectively focus on epistemological, psychological, anthropological, ethological, linguistic, and social-technological aspects of human symbolic evolution. The handbook presents an in-depth but comprehensive and interdisciplinary overview of the of the state of the art in the science of human symbolic evolution. This work will be of interest to academics and students active in all fields contributing to the study of human evolution.

This article focuses on the interweaving of constructive praxis with communication inontogenesis, inphylogenesisand in biocultural niche evolution (ecogenesis), within anEvoDevoSocioframework. I begin by discussing the nature of symbolization, its evolution from communicative signaling and its elaboration into semantic systems. I distinguish between thesymbol-readyand thelanguage-readybrain, leading to a discussion of linguistic conceptualization and itsdual groundingin organism and language system. There follows an outline account of the interpenetration in the human biocultural niche-complex ofsemiosphereandtechnosphere,mediated by the evolution of the niche of infancy. Symbolization (the foundation of the semiosphere) is by definition normative; the normative character of the technosphere is demonstrated by the interrelations in human development between affordance, action schema and canonical functional object schema. A model of the neuro-computational implementation of dual grounding is proposed.

We present a new road map for research on “How the Brain Got Language” that adopts an EvoDevoSocio perspective and highlights comparative neuroprimatology – the comparative study of brain, behavior and communication in extant monkeys and great apes – as providing a key grounding for hypotheses on the last common ancestor of humans and monkeys and chimpanzees and the processes which guided the evolution LCA-m → LCA-c → protohumans → H. sapiens. Such research constrains and is constrained by analysis of the subsequent, primarily cultural, evolution of H. sapiens which yielded cultures involving the rich use of language.