One important difference between existing accounts of protolanguage lies in their assumptions on the semantic complexity of protolinguistic utterances. I bring evidence about the nature of linguistic communication to bear on the plausibility of these assumptions, and show that communication is fundamentally inferential and characterised by semantic uncertainty. This not only allows individuals to maintain variation in linguistic representation, but also imposes a selection pressure that meanings be reconstructible from context. I argue that protolanguage utterances had varying degrees of semantic complexity, and developed into complex language gradually, through the same processes of re-analysis and analogy which still underpin continual change in modern languages.
2012. Protolanguage and the “God particle”. Lingua 122:12 ► pp. 1308 ff.
Gong, Tao & Lan Shuai
2012. Modelling the coevolution of joint attention and language. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 279:1747 ► pp. 4643 ff.
Gong, Tao, Lan Shuai & Bernard Comrie
2014. Evolutionary linguistics: theory of language in an interdisciplinary space. Language Sciences 41 ► pp. 243 ff.
Martens, Betsy Van der Veer
2023. Representation, Reference, Relevance, and Retention. In Keywords In and Out of Context [Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services, ], ► pp. 1 ff.
2016. Speaking Our Minds: Why human communication is different, and how language evolved to make it special, by Thom Scott-Phillips. Journal of Language Evolution 1:1 ► pp. 88 ff.
Smith, Andrew D. M.
2016. Dynamic Models of Language Evolution: The Linguistic Perspective. In The Palgrave Handbook of Economics and Language, ► pp. 61 ff.
Smith, Andrew D.M.
2014. Models of language evolution and change. WIREs Cognitive Science 5:3 ► pp. 281 ff.
2017. The evolution of (proto-)language: Focus on mechanisms. Language Sciences 63 ► pp. 1 ff.
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