For instance, a man might prefer the air-conditioning thermostat to be set just about cold enough to hang raw meat, but his wife likes the temperature considerably warmer. She, being many times more polite than he is, let’s suppose, might ask, ‘Aren’t you cold?’ Or, ‘What temperature do you have the thermostat set at?’ Or even, ‘I am cold.’
The man is supposed to infer, obviously, from the mere raising of the topic of temperature that someone, his wife, is dissatisfied and that he is being asked to do something about it. There may be body language accompanying such indirect requests that make the purpose behind the words even clearer. She may wrap herself in a blanket ostentatiously. But the main principle is what has been seen over and over – people never say all they mean. Hearers must use both knowledge about language and cultural knowledge (about thermostats in this case) to respond. If the man ask his wife, ‘Do you want me to turn the thermostat up?’ she might very well reply, ‘No, I am OK.’ But woe unto him if he does not figure out quickly that what she actually means is, ‘Of course. Do I have to draw you a picture? Get a move on.’ Of course, her indirect way of getting her request across is much more effective than a direct command.
I overheard a well-known philosopher and logician at a major university explain that if one was really angry with someone they could punch their lights out without fear of legal consequences. He explained further, only half-humorously, that if there are witnesses and one wants to get away with giving someone a drubbing, they should say exactly the opposite of what they’re doing. Push someone over and say, ‘Oh, you fell! Let me help you up.’ Then one might kick them in the head while saying, ‘Oh no, I tripped.’ Then one might give them an elbow to the nose while uttering, ‘Watch out! You’re falling again. I have you! Don’t worry!’ The courts might see through this, but there is a chance that when the witnesses report what they saw the defendant’s attorney will ask them what they heard. And then the prosecution case might fall apart. Why? The answer is not hard. Court systems often assume an inadequate theory of language, a theory that ignores what is not said and focuses only on what is actually uttered. But often what is not said is still communicated forcefully and what is said is just a decoy for something else.
The lesson, perhaps with some overkill, is again that language engages the whole person and the whole culture. In fact, it is more serious than this. One can make a case that no one can fully understand what anyone else says. We understand just well enough to get by. Or, as Herbert Simon said, language is just good enough – it ‘satisfices’ our requirements, but it is by no means the perfect system of communication. Yet when working hand in glove with culture, language is incredibly complex and rich. And such complexity and depth could only result from the evolution of the body and brain in tandem with psychology, language and culture for hundreds of thousands of years.
Conversational implicatures do not exhaust the contributions of the context to the interpretation of utterances, implicit information and speech acts, however. But they allow grammar to specify less information than required, leaving it to speakers to infer the remainder of the meanings from the context and culture of their exchanges. Grammar and culture work together in modern languages and this conjunction was almost certainly vital for the development of earlier human languages into modern languages. The grammar helps the inferences and interpretations of speakers, it does not determine them.
As linguists, philosophers and psychologists thought more about Grice’s work on the cooperative principle, they discovered additional ways in which cooperation helps to structure language. In the mid-1990s Dan Sperber, a cognitive scientist at the CNRS (Centre national de recherche scientifique) in France, and Deirdre Wilson, Professor of Linguistics at University College London, collaborated to produce the theory of human interaction known as ‘relevance theory’. Relevance theory explores applications of the cooperative principle beyond conversation. Relevance theory, like Grice’s work, sees language forms and interactions as governed by a culturally based pragmatics.
All of the work in pragmatics (which is partially the study of how the context in which one is conversing determines which interpretations are appropriate), sociolinguistics (how language and society each affect the other) and additional disciplines of scientific research that look at language in use, rejects the so-called ‘conduit metaphor’ of language. This represented a tremendous advance in the formalisation of the theory of communication. And the highly respected name usually associated with its formulation is mathematician Claude Shannon. This metaphor is the idea that communication is linear, where a thought arises in the speaker’s mind. Next, the speaker selects a grammatical form for that idea. The speaker then transmits the idea-in-the-form to the hearer’s ears (or eyes, if using sign language). The hearer takes apart the grammatical form and is left with the meaning that the speaker intended. This is represented in Figure 35.
Figure 35: Shannon’s conduit metaphor of communication
In the late forties and early fifties, when Shannon was writing his most pioneering work, there was almost no research on the formalisation of communication theory (though certainly work such as that of Alan Turing on the code of Nazi Germany’s Enigma machine was foundational to thinking in the area). As a researcher at Bell Labs it was Shannon’s job to work out an understanding of communication that could be translated into mathematical models in order to help Bell make telephones ever more effective and efficient.
As Figure 35 shows, Shannon’s conceptualisation of the communication problem leaves no space for external influences on the process of communication, such as culture or context or gestures or intonation. It is almost as though all one needed to communicate was two brains, two vocal apparatuses and two auditory systems. Shannon, who knew Alan Turing and other founders of computational theory, developed his system in 1948 and it has been accepted as foundational to most other work in the fields of cognitive science, electrical engineering, linguistics, psychology, mathematics and other fields since then.
But Sperber and Wilson, following on the work of Grice, Searle, Austin and many others, said in effect, ‘The conduit metaphor has had its day, but it really doesn’t capture what happens in human communication at all. The conduit is just a set of points in a much larger set of events and processes that underlie communication.’ In the view of relevance theory, any time a story is told or a conversation is had or a sentence is uttered, there is always a context of utterance. Not only this, the set of interlocutors assumes that each member of a particular communication event – a storytelling, a speech, a conversation – knows the context as well as the relevance of the context to what is being said and is therefore able to comprehend and respond appropriately, in a relevant manner. One doesn’t say something unless it is relevant. One doesn’t imply or interpret something unless it is relevant to the context in which the discussion is taking place. Thus if someone says something to someone else, the hearer will assume that it is relevant and they will therefore make an effort to understand what was said or written.
As a concrete example, what is the relevance of a discussion of relevance theory or Grice’s cooperative principle in a book about language evolution? The reader makes the effort to process the sentences that they are reading but does so assuming that these sentences will be connected in some way to our general topic of discussion – language evolution. And indeed they are. But before turning to the evolutionary significance of these ideas, one more item on the topic of ‘language emerges from context’ should be discussed – conversation. The apex of our evolution as a species.
Conversation seems innocuous enough. I say something. You say something. We think about what the other has said, or not. Then we finish and say goodbye. Something like that. This simplistic view of conversation is not entirely wrong. It is just fundamentally incomplete. Therefore, to understand how language evolved to be ‘just good enough’ we need to look at conversation. Here is a snippet of conversation from a couple I observe regularly:
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WIFE: What time are we going to pick up Miguel on Thursday?
HUSBAND: I already told you.
WIFE: Yes, but that is when you were planning to pick him up after work. Now we are just driving directly to pick him up.
HUSBAND: The time doesn’t change as a result.
WIFE: But just give me a time that we will need to leave, so I can call the dogsitter.
HUSBAND: Whenever you want to leave in order to get to his place between ten and twelve.
WIFE: Why can’t you just tell me the time? Why are you playing these games?
HUSBAND: I gave you a range and from that there should be no problem inferring the time.
WIFE: I don’t even care if we go.
HUSBAND: Fine.
The interpretation of this depends on the literal meanings of the words, but also on the personalities involved, the cultural notions of time, the complication of the drive to pick up the person in question and the fact that both people are tired. One wants things stated clearly and precisely. The other likes to be less committed to times (in some situations – in other situations their roles are in all likelihood reversed with regard to time and precision). Moreover, when the wife says, ‘I don’t even care if we go,’ that is not intended literally. Both interlocutors are keen to spend time at the beach with the friend being discussed. This line is uttered to make a point, namely, ‘If you cannot simply answer my question with a specific time, then my feelings must not be that important to you.’ The final, petulant response, ‘Fine,’ is also not literal in this case. It is just to say, ‘If you are going to make a big deal of this, I am not going to respond as expected.’ Aside from their amusement value, such exchanges show how the interpretation, the utterances and the exchange as a whole can only be understood through extensive external knowledge of culture, local circumstances, the relationship between the interlocutors and their individual personalities. Shannon’s conduit metaphor is of very little help here.
Language, psychology and culture, again, co-evolved to produce the contextual linkage between the world, personalities, cultural understandings, current events and so on that make full interpretation of language possible. Moreover, we see a great deal of variation in how this is done across different languages. Consider a few exchanges and then a discourse on how to make arrows in Pirahã
Greeting in Pirahã:
Ti soxóá.
‘I already.’
Xigíai. Soxóá.
‘Ok. Already.’
Or this exchange:
Ti gí poogáíhiai baagábogi.
‘I give you a banana.’
Xigíai.
‘OK.’
Or another, this one to communicate that you are leaving, where English speakers might say something like, ‘I am leaving now, goodbye.’
Ti soxóá.
‘I already.’
Gíxai soxóá.
‘You already.’
Soxóá.
‘Already.’
Pirahã doesn’t have words for thanks, goodbye, hello and so on, what linguists refer to as ‘phatic’ language. They allow the context to determine the bulk of the meaning for obvious things like leave-taking and arrivals. They see no need to say thank you, in part because every gift carries an expectation of repayment. If I give you a banana today, you should give me something, such as a piece of fish, when you are able. This is not stated. It is culturally presupposed. So ‘giving’ is actually a form of exchange by and large. If a gift in the English sense is intended, that is, without expectation of repayment, I would say:
Ti gí hoagá poogáíhiaíbaagáboí.
I you contraexpectation banana give (literal translation)
‘I (against your expectations) give you a banana.’
The addition of the word hoagá, ‘contraexpectation’, renders the meaning of the entire sentence in effect: ‘Contrary to what we normally do, I am just giving you this.’ This may sound a bit circumlocutious. But it results from the Pirahãs’ assumptions being quite different from those of most Western cultures. In any case, there was no need in the course of the historical development of the Pirahã language to develop vocabulary for such purposes for exchanges, only for giving without expectation of repayment.
When Homo erectus began to communicate orally, it would have been even less necessary to develop a language that expressed everything. After all, language would have emerged from a society that was increasing in complexity and communicating with body language, perhaps vocal interjections, hand signals, maybe some representative spatial drawing with a stick in the dirt as they planned hunts. But let’s assume that a local erectus community somewhere had settled on the rudiments of some symbols. One cannot expect the inventors of a single symbol to try to pack all the meaning in the world into that symbol. In fact, one could not expect that even for a group of symbols, no matter how many symbols in that set. There is too much information in the background context, too much in our memories that we use to interpret but don’t actually say (and often don’t even know we know, or don’t know that we are using) for mere symbols, however enriched by gestures and intonation and body language, to say everything. Thus it is clear that as language evolved, speech acts, indirect speech acts, conversations and stories depended heavily on cooperation, implicit (unspoken) information, culture and context. It is the only way that language has ever worked.
Part Four
Cultural Evolution of Language
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Communities and Communication
In any situation when two people are talking, they create a cultural structure. Our task, as anthropologists, will be to determine what are the potential contents of the culture that results from these interpersonal relations in these situations.
Edward Sapir
IN THE COLONIALIST EXPANSIONS and explorations of European nations, communities very different from Europe were discovered. These newly discovered communities shocked ethnocentric Europeans. Their radically different appearances and ways of life raised the issue of whether all creatures that look like humans are indeed fully human. Do they all have souls? Many Europeans thought not. At least they believed in the inferiority of these people they had just ‘discovered’, leading to their justification for exploitation, colonialism and enslavement of them. Did they all come from the same source as us, God? Are some varieties of humans superior to others? Anthropological and comparative linguistic studies arose from such questions, questions fundamental to the understanding of language evolution culturally and biologically. And these issues continue to be questioned by some.
One prominent example of European thought about cultural and linguistic differences was Sir William Jones, who served the British Raj as legal counsel in the late eighteenth century. Jones was more than a common solicitor, however. For one thing, he was a man of radical politics, strongly supporting the efforts of his friend and one-time co-author Benjamin Franklin for American independence. Jones also studied the social systems of India. But most importantly for intellectual history, Jones was a linguistic prodigy, speaking thirteen languages fluently and another twenty-eight reasonably well, as the story goes. He put this linguistic brilliance to use not only by talking different languages, however. He also wanted to understand these languages scientifically. Most importantly for our story here, Jones also searched for evidence about the historical connections between these languages.
During Jones’s survey of data from various sources, he experienced one of history’s most important ‘Eureka’ moments. He had rediscovered a fact first noticed more than one hundred years earlier by German Andreas Jaeger in 1686 and again in 1767 by the French Jesuit missionary to India, Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux. Though the work of Jaeger and Coeurdoux was largely ignored, Jones’s independent observation of the same fact was to reverberate through the centuries as one of the most important findings in the study of human communication. This insight was that Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic (German-related languages) and Celtic all traced thei
r origin back to a common ancestor. They were sister languages. Their mother language – also the mother of many other sibling languages awaiting their turn to be discovered or otherwise enter the family tree – came to be known as Proto-Indo-European. With Jones, Jaeger and Coeurdoux the study of language origins began in earnest.
Then almost one hundred years later, near Weimar, Germany, another important tool was developed for researching language origins. In 1850 twenty-nine-year-old German philologist August Schleicher published a book in which he claimed that human languages should be studied as organisms, on a par with biological organisms, related to one another by genus, species and variety – the same sorts of relationships we now understand to hold between all flora and fauna. Schleicher made the case that the best way to represent the evolutionary relationships between languages was by ‘tree diagrams’. With this proposal he not only made an enormous contribution to the history and evolution of languages but also introduced the concept of ‘natural descent’ – nine years before Darwin published his Origin of Species.
How Language Began Page 30