Construction Grammar for Monkeys? Animal communication and its implications for language evolution in the light of usage-based linguistic theory

Abstract

In recent years, multiple researchers working on the evolution of language have put forward the idea that the theoretical framework of usage-based approaches and Construction Grammar is highly suitable for modelling the emergence of human language from pre-linguistic or proto-linguistic communication systems. This also raises the question of whether usage-based and constructionist approaches can be integrated with the analysis of animal communication systems. In this paper, we review possible avenues where usage-based, constructionist approaches can make contact with animal communication research, which in turn also has implications for theories of language evolution. To this end, we first give an overview of key assumptions of usage-based and constructionist approaches before reviewing some key issues in animal communication research through the lens of usage-based, constructionist approaches. Specifically, we will discuss how research on alarm calls, gestural communication and symbol-trained animals can be brought into contact with usage-based, constructionist theorizing. We argue that a constructionist view of animal communication can yield new perspectives on its relation to human language, which in turn has important implications regarding the evolution of language. Importantly, this theoretical approach also generates hypotheses that have the potential of complementing and extending results from the more formalist approaches that often underlie current animal communication research.

The role of interactional and cognitive mechanisms in the evolution of (proto)language(s)

“…These processes have wide-ranging implications for usage-based research on language evolution (Pleyer & Hartmann 2020), language learning (Pickering and Garrod, 2005;Schmid, 2016), language change (Hilpert, 2017;Neels, 2020b), and the conventionalisation of entrenched units in (proto)linguistic communities (Hartmann & Pleyer, in press).…”

“…The former type of interactants then increasingly and gradually moved towards the modern language pole of the continuum by incrementally adding more abstract generalisations. While doing so, they still retained a significant number of specific constructions such as fixed and semi-fixed multiword expressions, idioms, prefabricated chunks as well as low-level schemas, which still characterise a significant part of modern languages today (Stefanowitsch and Flach, 2017;Pleyer & Hartmann 2020) What follows from this perspective is that at the same point in time, there were interactants with protolinguistic/linguistic systems that were similar and overlapped in terms of their token and surface production, but that differed in the underlying cognitive mechanisms of how these surface tokens were produced and interpreted and that differed in the degree of abstraction at which these surface tokens were represented.…”

Constructing a protolanguage: reconstructing prehistoric languages in a usage-based construction grammar framework

“…The central unit of explanation from a constructionist perspective for both PL1 and PL2, then, is the emergence of form-meaning pairs with differing degrees of schematicity and complexity. While there are several quite different approaches to the analysis of linguistic constructions in this sense [20], we will focus exclusively on usage-based CxG, which is closely related to other frameworks such as Emergent Grammar or several strands of Cognitive Linguistics [21]. Usage-based CxG adopts an emergentist framework of seeing language as a complex adaptive system emerging out of dynamic interactions of factors on multiple timescales [22,23].…”

“…The second capacity is the ability to organise items in a structured, hierarchical, connected network structure with different links, which is the key foundation of the constructicon [56]. Although there seem to be beginnings of the capacity to acquire simple structured networks in non-human primates [38], especially in the social domain [119], the human capacity for the "massive storage" [14] of constructions in a structured network is likely a specifically human evolutionary development that represents the evolutionary platform for the emergence of the human constructicon [21].…”

Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution

“…In this Element, we offer a brief review of pertinent research on language evolution from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, and we discuss what a cognitive-linguistic perspective can add to the study of language evolution. In doing so, we follow up on previous work, including our own, that has argued that cognitive linguistics, and particularly Construction Grammar as arguably the most influential approach under the broad umbrella of 'cognitive linguistics', provides a suitable framework for studying the evolution of language (e.g., Arbib 2012;Hurford 2012;Pleyer & Winters 2014;Sinha 2017;Pleyer & Hartmann 2020;Verhagen 2021). We will also discuss how findings from language evolution research can, in turn, inform cognitive-linguistic theorising.…”