VI. Earth Life Emergence: Developmental Stages of Life, Mind & Self

1. A Cultural Linguistic Code

Jackendoff, Ray. Foundations of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. A copious synthesis of generative linguistics by the now Professor of Philosophy and Co-Director, Center for Cognitive Studies, at Tufts University. The first three chapters affirm the realms of Mentality – that language is instantiated in brains and minds, Combinatoriality – by the employ of general principles a vast array of sentence and speech is possible, and Nativism – that, per Noam Chomsky, a child brings innate resources for language learning. The treatise proceeds to discuss Generative Theory, Syntax, the Lexicon, Processing, Evolution, Reference, and so on.

Jenkins, Lyle, ed. Variation and Universals in Biolinguistics. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2004. A collection of particular and general papers which consider genetic, biological and evolutionary roots for human language from the generative viewpoint. Of especial interest is Partha Niyogi’s Phase Transitions in Language Evolution by way of dynamic systems theory and Unifications in Biolinguistics by Lyle Jenkins which finds the same patterns to recur from physical substrates to complex grammars. Isabelle Dupanloup goes on in Genetic Differences and Language Affinities to summarize the strong correlations between genes and dialects as peoples migrated across continents. A concise wrapup by Noam Chomsky is noted above.

Kay, Lily. A Book of Life?: How the Genome Became an Information System and DNA a Language. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine. 41/4, 1998. The late philosopher of science discerns intrinsic congruities between the verbal and genetic codes.

Kotov, K. and K. Kull. Semiosphere versus Biosphere. Brown, Keith, editor-in-chief. Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2006. A survey and synthesis of the visions of Yuri Lotman, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Vladimir Vernadsky, and James Lovelock of a self-organizing and regulating bioplanet most distinguished by an enveloping and enlivening realm of reflective signification.

Kretzschmar, William. The Linguistics of Speech. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Along with Larsen-Freeman and Cameron, and Namhee, et al, a University of Georgia humanities scholar independently contributes another current volume that reinvents and reinterprets our understanding of language pattern and process in terms of self-organizing dynamical systems. Indeed the properties listed in the first quote would be a good generic summary of complexity phenomena, which could equally apply to genetics, likewise under revision, and by projection to a genesis universe just learning to speak, read, and write its birth announcement.

In order for speech to be a complex system, we should be able to observe the following conditions: (a) speech is open and dynamic, thus not at equilibrium; (b) speech includes a very large number of interactive components/agents: (c) speech shows emergent order; (d) the distribution of units in speech is non-linear; (e) speech has the property of scaling. (184)

The fact that speech is a complex system tells us a good deal, and not just about language behavior. First of all, the linguistics of speech can take advantage of work in many other scientific fields that also work with complex systems, from biological systems and chemistry to economics, from climate and ecology to the human nervous system, even to physics. (216)

We can expect to observe what amounts to an unlimited series of Russian dolls in speech, in which the dolls have the same shape at different scales, but may each be painted with different motifs and colors. The property of scaling tells us, regarding both the dolls and speech, to look for the same patterns composed of different elements at different scales of observation, pattern within pattern, as closely as we might ever like to observe them. (217)

Larsen-Freeman, Diane and Lynne Cameron. Complex Systems and Applied Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Larsen-Freeman is a University of Michigan professor of education and linguistics, while Cameron teaches linguistics at the Open University, UK. “Applied” is a distinction from theories of grammar and syntax and studies the dynamics of personal and social communication. After a good review of complexity theories and principles, it is shown how well they accord with literacy and discourse, so as to bring a new degree of explanatory veracity. (For similar affirmation see Namhee, et al, herein.) But, as if a negative imprimatur, as per the page 61 quote, and so often the case, even though such properties are seen to grace walk and talk, the tacit machine model inhibits attributing any innate drive and arrow. But then compare with the words of the Harvard linguist George Zipf (1902-1950) quoted in the work on page 111.

In the pages that follow, we suggest that complex systems can be found throughout applied linguistics. The language used by a discourse community can be described as such a system, as can the interactions of learners and their teacher in a classroom, as can the functioning of the human mind. We aim to show that reconceptualizing these and other phenomena in terms of complexity opens up the possibility for new understandings and actions. (5)
In this chapter (Complex Systems in Language and its Evolution), we have made the case for conceiving of language as a complex, adaptive, dynamic system. By so doing, we have been laying the foundation for claiming that the evolution of language, language change, language diversity, language development, language learning, and language use are emergent from the dynamic processes of change that operate in all languages at all times. (112)

When complex systems self-organize and we speak of ‘order’ or ‘co-operation’ emerging from previous disorder or separation, we should not be misled by the positive connotations of these words in non-scientific language. In their technical use here, there is no assumption of an inherent drive towards improvement of the universe of any automatic direction towards better, more hopeful states. (61)
Thus we are finding for the acts of speech what physicists have long since found for the acts of inanimate nature: behind all the apparent diversity and complexity of the phenomena lies the sameness of fundamental dynamic principle. (Zipf, 111)

Lee, Ji-Hoon, et al. A DNA Assembly Model of Sentence Generation. BioSystems. Online, June, 2011. Seoul National University, Kyungpook National University, and University of Arkansas, bioinformatic scientists add to the evidence that these widely separated generative sources of life and culture share deep affinities with regard to their grammatical structures. Since the inklings of Roman Jakobson and Jean Piaget in the 1970s and earlier that genome and “languagome” (just coined) are deeply similar, this emergent evolutionary correspondence has been steadily proven, which this whole section seeks to document.

Recent results of corpus-based linguistics demonstrate that context-appropriate sentences can be generated by a stochastic constraint satisfaction process. Exploiting the similarity of constraint satisfaction and DNA self-assembly, we explore a DNA assembly model of sentence generation. The words and phrases in a language corpus are encoded as DNA molecules to build a language model of the corpus. Given a seed word, the new sentences are constructed by a parallel DNA assembly process based on the probability distribution of the word and phrase molecules. Here, we present our DNA code word design and report on successful demonstration of their feasibility in wet DNA experiments of a small scale. (Abstract)

Locke, John and Barry Bogin. Language and Life History: A New Perspective on the Development and Evolution of Human Language. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 29/529, 2006. A peer-reviewed paper which adds a novel dimension to how humans beings came to a flourishing social crosstalk. What needs to be factored in are various phases of the human life-span, from attention-getting utterances of infants and children, and to mating communications during adolescence. Throughout the article and comments runs a tacit sense of this ontogeny repeating in kind its phylogenetic occurrence.

Loreto, Vittorio and Luc Steels. Emergence of Language. Nature Physics. 3/758, 2007. A news report of a summer satellite school of STATPHYS 23, a conference held in Erice, Italy where speakers from physics and mathematics to linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and economics avowed tha “universal dynamical processes” in effect across nature equally serve to self-organize cultural and semiotic communications. By name “Statistical Physics of Social Dynamics” can be found at http://pil.phys.uniroma1.it/erice2007/index.html with some papers are online. And one may reflectively notice the beginnings of a melding and synthesis of statistical, many body, mechanics with nonlinear science and its many interactive agents.

Once you adopt the view that language is a complex adaptive system, statistical physics suddenly becomes very relevant for building a theoretical foundation for the study of language. (758-759)

Loritz, Donald. How the Brain Evolved Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. The author contends that language evolved through a scalar self-similar process which served to intensify the value of communication.

Lyon, Caroline, et al, eds. Emergence of Communication and Language. London: Springer, 2007. Co-editors are Chrystopher Nehaniv and Angelo Cangelosi. A large state of the art volume as authorities such as Alison Wray, Tecumseh Fitch, Luc Steels, Eors Szathmary, and many others seek to articulate how cerebral life learned to speak, convey, express, and remember.

Mace, Ruth and Clare Holden. A Phylogenetic Approach to Cultural Evolution. Trends in Ecology and Evolution. 20/3, 2005. The search for parallels between biological and social evolution has a long and checkered past. This article draws upon many advances in evolutionary theory, genetics, along with linguistic and cultural studies to propose that cultures and languages are analogous to species and thus form phylogenetic trees. A detailed table is then constructed with close comparisons between genetic and cultural systems. For example, “discrete units” are nucleotides, codons, genes and individual phenotypes or cultural traditions, memes, ideas, artifacts, words, grammar and syntax. By 2005, it is possible to fill in and understand an emergent development of life which as it repeats at each stage can take on the visage of a natural embryogenesis.

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