scholarly journals Persuasive conversation as a new form of communication in Homo sapiens

2021 ◽  
Vol 376 (1824) ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco Ferretti ◽  
Ines Adornetti
Keyword(s):  
Distinctive Feature ◽  
Selective Pressure ◽  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Theme Issue ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
Evolution Of Speech ◽  
New Form ◽  
Complex Forms

The aim of this paper is twofold: to propose that conversation is the distinctive feature of Homo sapiens ' communication; and to show that the emergence of modern language is tied to the transition from pantomime to verbal and grammatically complex forms of narrative. It is suggested that (animal and human) communication is a form of persuasion and that storytelling was the best tool developed by humans to convince others. In the early stage of communication, archaic hominins used forms of pantomimic storytelling to persuade others. Although pantomime is a powerful tool for persuasive communication , it is proposed that it is not an effective tool for persuasive conversation : conversation is characterized by a form of reciprocal persuasion among peers; instead, pantomime has a mainly asymmetrical character. The selective pressure towards persuasive reciprocity of the conversational level is the evolutionary reason that allowed the transition from pantomime to grammatically complex codes in H. sapiens , which favoured the evolution of speech. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Reconstructing prehistoric languages’.

scholarly journals Introduction to redundancy rules: the continuous wavelet transform comes of age

2018 ◽  
Vol 376 (2126) ◽  
pp. 20170258 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul S. Addison
Keyword(s):  
Wavelet Transform ◽  
Continuous Wavelet Transform ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Structural Characteristics ◽  
Continuous Wavelet ◽  
Theme Issue ◽  
Current State ◽  
Analysis Methods ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
New Form

Redundancy: it is a word heavy with connotations of lacking usefulness. I often hear that the rationale for not using the continuous wavelet transform (CWT)—even when it appears most appropriate for the problem at hand—is that it is ‘redundant’. Sometimes the conversation ends there, as if self-explanatory. However, in the context of the CWT, ‘redundant’ is not a pejorative term, it simply refers to a less compact form used to represent the information within the signal. The benefit of this new form—the CWT—is that it allows for intricate structural characteristics of the signal information to be made manifest within the transform space, where it can be more amenable to study: resolution over redundancy. Once the signal information is in CWT form, a range of powerful analysis methods can then be employed for its extraction, interpretation and/or manipulation. This theme issue is intended to provide the reader with an overview of the current state of the art of CWT analysis methods from across a wide range of numerate disciplines, including fluid dynamics, structural mechanics, geophysics, medicine, astronomy and finance. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Redundancy rules: the continuous wavelet transform comes of age’.

scholarly journals Pantomimic fossils in modern human communication

2021 ◽  
Vol 376 (1824) ◽  
Author(s):  
Przemysław Żywiczyński ◽  
Sławomir Wacewicz ◽  
Casey Lister
Keyword(s):  
Modern Human ◽  
The Body ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Theme Issue ◽  
Core Component ◽  
Early Humans ◽  
Ape Communication ◽  
Iconic Signs ◽  
Human Specific ◽  
Key Innovations

Bodily mimesis, the capacity to use the body representationally, was one of the key innovations that allowed early humans to go beyond the ‘baseline’ of generalized ape communication and cognition. We argue that the original human-specific communication afforded by bodily mimesis was based on signs that involve three entities: an expression that represents an object (i.e. communicated content) for an interpreter . We further propose that the core component of this communication, pantomime, was able to transmit referential information that was not limited to select semantic domains or the ‘here-and-now’, by means of motivated—most importantly iconic—signs. Pressures for expressivity and economy then led to conventionalization of signs and a growth of linguistic characteristics: semiotic systematicity and combinatorial expression. Despite these developments, both naturalistic and experimental data suggest that the system of pantomime did not disappear and is actively used by modern humans. Its contemporary manifestations, or pantomimic fossils , emerge when language cannot be used, for instance when people do not share a common language, or in situations where the use of (spoken) language is difficult, impossible or forbidden. Under such circumstances, people bootstrap communication by means of pantomime and, when these circumstances persist, newly emergent pantomimic communication becomes increasingly language-like. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Reconstructing prehistoric languages’.

scholarly journals From holism to compositionality: memes and the evolution of segmentation, syntax, and signification in music and language

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 463-500 ◽  
Author(s):  
STEVEN JAN
Keyword(s):  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Logical Form ◽  
Semantic Content ◽  
Information Encoding ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
Conceptual Structures ◽  
Music And Language ◽  
Initial Support ◽  
The One ◽  
Universal Darwinism

abstractSteven Mithen argues that language evolved from an antecedent he terms “Hmmmmm, [meaning it was] Holistic, manipulative, multi-modal, musical and mimetic”. Owing to certain innate and learned factors, a capacity for segmentation and cross-stream mapping in early Homo sapiens broke the continuous line of Hmmmmm, creating discrete replicated units which, with the initial support of Hmmmmm, eventually became the semantically freighted words of modern language. That which remained after what was a bifurcation of Hmmmmm arguably survived as music, existing as a sound stream segmented into discrete units, although one without the explicit and relatively fixed semantic content of language. All three types of utterance – the parent Hmmmmm, language, and music – are amenable to a memetic interpretation which applies Universal Darwinism to what are understood as language and musical memes. On the basis of Peter Carruthers’ distinction between ‘cognitivism’ and ‘communicativism’ in language, and William Calvin’s theories of cortical information encoding, a framework is hypothesized for the semantic and syntactic associations between, on the one hand, the sonic patterns of language memes (‘lexemes’) and of musical memes (‘musemes’) and, on the other hand, ‘mentalese’ conceptual structures, in Chomsky’s ‘Logical Form’ (LF).

scholarly journals Proactive strategies to avoid infectious disease

2011 ◽  
Vol 366 (1583) ◽  
pp. 3361-3363 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard J. Stevenson ◽  
Trevor I. Case ◽  
Megan J. Oaten
Keyword(s):  
Infectious Disease ◽  
Immune Responses ◽  
Mate Selection ◽  
Selective Pressure ◽  
Healthy Individuals ◽  
Disease Avoidance ◽  
Theme Issue ◽  
Shaping Process ◽  
Treatment Of Infection ◽  
Selection Of

Infectious disease exerts a large selective pressure on all organisms. One response to this has been for animals to evolve energetically costly immune systems to counter infection, while another—the focus of this theme issue—has been the evolution of proactive strategies primarily to avoid infection. These strategies can be grouped into three types, all of which demonstrate varying levels of interaction with the immune system. The first concerns maternal strategies that function to promote the immunocompetence of their offspring. The second type of strategy influences mate selection, guiding the selection of a healthy mate and one who differs maximally from the self in their complement of antigen-coding genes. The third strategy involves two classes of behaviour. One relates to the capacity of the organisms to learn associations between cues indicative of pathogen threat and immune responses. The other relates to prevention and even treatment of infection through behaviours such as avoidance, grooming, quarantine, medicine and care of the sick. In humans, disease avoidance is based upon cognition and especially the emotion of disgust. Human disease avoidance is not without its costs. There is a propensity to reject healthy individuals who just appear sick—stigmatization—and the system may malfunction, resulting in various forms of psychopathology. Pathogen threat also appears to have been a highly significant and unrecognized force in shaping human culture so as to minimize infection threats. This cultural shaping process—moralization—can be co-opted to promote human health.

scholarly journals “To Build Out of a New Material with a New Form”. The Arrival of Concrete in Icelandic Architecture and the Rhetoric of Guðmundur Hannesson

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sofia Nannini
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Medical Doctor ◽  
Trial And Error ◽  
Common People ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Material ◽  
New Form ◽  
Definition Of

The quick modernisation of Iceland, that rapidly took place from the first decades of the 20th century onwards, did not only bring fishing trawlers and cars into the country. Among all the techniques of modernity, concrete [steinsteypa] was to become the key material that changed the built landscape of the island and was soon adopted by the first Icelandic architects, such as Rögnvaldur Ólafsson (1874–1914) and Guðjón Samúelsson (1887–1950). Interestingly, the main supporter of this material was Guðmundur Hannesson (1866–1946), a medical doctor and town planner who wrote several articles and even a guidebook published in 1921 and titled Steinsteypa. Leiðarvísir fyrir alþýðu og viðvaninga [Concrete. Guidebook for Common People and Beginners]. In a country that was seeking an architectural self-representation, he understood the technical and formal possibilities that concrete could offer: he claimed, “people [...] were trying to change, to build out of a new material with a new form” (Guðmundur Hannesson 1926, 14). This essay aims thus to retrace the rhetoric of Guðmundur Hannesson and his role in writing an Icelandic chapter of the history of concrete, from its early stage of unmodern trial-and-error to the definition of a modern Icelandic architecture.

scholarly journals Revisiting the configurationality issue in Old Icelandic

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Booth
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Functional Grammar ◽  
Old Icelandic ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
Lexical Functional Grammar ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Status ◽  
Corpus Data

The status of Old Icelandic with respect to (argument) configurationality was subject to debate in the early 1990s (e.g. Faarlund 1990; Rögnvaldsson 1995) and remains unresolved. Since this work, further research on a wide range of languages has enhanced our understanding of configurationality, in particular within Lexical Functional Grammar (e.g. Austin & Bresnan 1996; Nordlinger 1998) and syntactically annotated Old Icelandic data are now available (Wallenberg et al. 2011). It is thus fitting to revisit the matter. In this paper, I show that allowing for argument configurationality as a gradient property, and also taking into account discourse configurationality (Kiss 1995) as a further gradient property, can neatly account for word order patterns in this early stage of Icelandic. Specifically, I show that corpus data supports part of the original claim in Faarlund (1990), that Old Icelandic lacks a VP-constituent, thus being somewhat less argument-configurational than the modern language. Furthermore, the observed word order patterns indicate a designated topic position in the postfinite domain, thus reflecting some degree of discourse configurationality at this early stage of the language.

After Wings

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Renker
Keyword(s):  
Early Stage ◽  
High Point ◽  
Sarah Piatt ◽  
Poetic Practice ◽  
Complex Forms

This chapter focuses on selected poems that Sarah Piatt published between 1866 and the mid-seventies. This period was simultaneous to the evolving debates about reality categories traced in Chapter 2 but prior to the oft-construed advent or high point of realism in the eighties and nineties. Even at this relatively early stage of her career, Piatt articulated a consistent realist counterpoetics that challenged the conventions of romantic idealism from the inside—that is, from within the culture in which she was simultaneously pursuing her career. These poems reproduce conventions of genteel poetry in complex forms of reiteration that function as replication or indictment. This poetic practice is also one of the keys to Piatt’s realism.

scholarly journals Animal cognition and the evolution of human language: why we cannot focus solely on communication

2019 ◽  
Vol 375 (1789) ◽  
pp. 20190046 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. Tecumseh Fitch
Keyword(s):  
Communication Systems ◽  
Animal Communication ◽  
Language Evolution ◽  
Animal Cognition ◽  
Small Subset ◽  
Human Language ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Theme Issue ◽  
Royal Road ◽  
Communicative Signals

Studies of animal communication are often assumed to provide the ‘royal road’ to understanding the evolution of human language. After all, language is the pre-eminent system of human communication: doesn't it make sense to search for its precursors in animal communication systems? From this viewpoint, if some characteristic feature of human language is lacking in systems of animal communication, it represents a crucial gap in evolution, and evidence for an evolutionary discontinuity. Here I argue that we should reverse this logic: because a defining feature of human language is its ability to flexibly represent and recombine concepts, precursors for many important components of language should be sought in animal cognition rather than animal communication. Animal communication systems typically only permit expression of a small subset of the concepts that can be represented and manipulated by that species. Thus, if a particular concept is not expressed in a species' communication system this is not evidence that it lacks that concept. I conclude that if we focus exclusively on communicative signals, we sell the comparative analysis of language evolution short. Therefore, animal cognition provides a crucial (and often neglected) source of evidence regarding the biology and evolution of human language. This article is part of the theme issue ‘What can animal communication teach us about human language?’

Language and human ecology in the changing society

Neophilology ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 217-225
Author(s):  
Victor I. Shakhovskiy
Keyword(s):  
Human Ecology ◽  
Technological Progress ◽  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Information Environment ◽  
Communication Styles ◽  
Digital Television ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Digital World ◽  
New Information

We analyze the signs of the changed world in which a modern, changing human lives. We list some of the most significant types of changes associated with scientific and technological progress and its impact on human life and the functioning of his language. Particular attention is paid to the new information environment in which speaking human is immersed, and its impact on the human himself and his language, on altered communication styles. All types and forms of altered human communication are described in detail under the influence of a communicative environment altered in dynamics: accelerated communication, clip-like consciousness, expressiveness, emotionality, deverbalization, transition to communication with meanings, transformation and deformation of human, as homo sapiens. The main conclusion is the deecologization of both the changing world and the communicants in it, as well as their language. We reveal the main characteristics of the altered communication, in which many aspects of the language are reflected: intonation, orthoepy, accentology, spelling, punctuation, vocabulary, syntax. We emphasize the dominance of negative emotions in all sorts and types of communication and the positivity of a changing era, where the digital world holds a huge place: digital transformations, digital economy, digital television, artificial intelligence, cybernetics, robotology.

scholarly journals A step forward in understanding pas: the post-verbal negator in Old Occitan from the perspective of communication and rhetorical strategizing

2020 ◽  
Vol 136 (4) ◽  
pp. 1018-1048
Author(s):  
Sandra Paoli
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Cognitive Linguistics ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Scholarly Research ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
Old Occitan ◽  
Rhetorical Questions ◽  
Human Categorization

AbstractIn recent years, within the cognitive linguistics approach there has been a trend of scholarly research committed to exploring the motivation for language change. The way in which people use language in communication, together with principles of human categorization, are the locus where language change and innovations are to be found. Interactional contexts in particular, seen as playing a crucial role in bringing about syntactic change (Traugott 2010b), have figured prominently in recent contributions on diachronic micro-changes, bringing to the fore the role played by dialogue as both the manifestation of the participants’ own voices and the realization of the constant negotiation that characterizes human communication. Against this background, this contribution focuses on a particular use of the Occitan post-verbal negator pas in negative rhetorical questions, which was very productive in fifteenth-century collections of religious theatrical texts. It is claimed that these dialogic contexts allowed a polyphonic use of pas, crucially restricted to this post-verbal negator, which is key to identifying the reasons behind the eventual establishment of pas as the generalized sentential negator in the modern language.

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