Skip to main content

Social Versus Biological Language: The Emergence of Grammar and Meaning

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Emergence of Communication in Socio-Biological Networks

Part of the book series: Computational Social Sciences ((CSS))

  • 536 Accesses

Abstract

As mentioned in the beginning of the book, economics and language are very closely intertwined. While we don’t know too much about the origins of language in humans, we know a lot about the origins of writing. Writing arguably was the first artifactual innovation in human communication and it arose as an efficient mean of accounting and recording crops and animals [8]. Writing is a first form of symbolic storage of information outside of the brain and outside of the oral history retained inside individuals. It also shows how the means of storing information and the possibility of reinterpreting it is so crucially important.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. A. Berea, Trade as a premise for social complexity. J. Wash. Acad. Sci. 102, 17–38 (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  2. J.W. Bradbury, S.L. Vehrencamp, Economic models of animal communication. Anim. Behav. 59(2), 259–268 (2000)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. J. Bro-Jørgensen, Dynamics of multiple signalling systems: animal communication in a world in flux. Trends Ecol. Evol. 25(5), 292–300 (2010)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. N. Chomsky, J. Piaget, Language and Learning: The Debate Between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1980)

    Google Scholar 

  5. The Economist, Animals think, therefore…. The Economist, November 2016

    Google Scholar 

  6. R. Ferrer i Cancho, R.V. Solé, Least effort and the origins of scaling in human language. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 100(3), 788–791 (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  7. G. Gong, P. Rosa-Neto, F. Carbonell, Z.J. Chen, Y. He, A.C. Evans, Age- and gender-related differences in the cortical anatomical network. J. Neurosci. 29(50), 15684–15693 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. C. Guven, E. Rericha, E. Ott, W. Losert, Modeling and measuring signal relay in noisy directed migration of cell groups. PLoS Comput. Biol. 9(5), e1003041 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Johnson, You tell me that it’s evolution? Scientists have reached no consensus on the origins of language. The Economist, 26 November 2016. https://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21710783-scientists-have-reached-no-consensus-origins-language-you-tell-me-its

  10. K.A. Pollard, D.T. Blumstein, Evolving communicative complexity: insights from rodents and beyond. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 367(1597), 1869–1878 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. T.C. Scott-Phillips, On the correct application of animal signalling theory to human communication, in Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on the Evolution of Language, pp. 275–282 (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  12. R.D. Smith, Distinct word length frequencies: distributions and symbol entropies. arXiv preprint arXiv:1207.2334 (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  13. R.V. Solé, B. Corominas-Murtra, S. Valverde, L. Steels, Language networks: their structure, function, and evolution. Complexity 15(6), 20–26 (2010)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. H. Whitehead, L. Rendell, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2014)

    Book  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Berea, A. (2018). Social Versus Biological Language: The Emergence of Grammar and Meaning. In: Emergence of Communication in Socio-Biological Networks. Computational Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64565-0_6

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics