Culture or mind? Thoughts on the coevolution of culture and cognition through the lens of lexical evolution

Over time, the meaning of words change, and the principles according to which this happens is one of the large mysteries in historical and evolutionary linguistics. From historical linguistic studies we know, that semantic change to a large degree depend on socio-cultural changes in speech communities. When we are in need for a word for a (computer) mouse, we expand the meaning of the word mouse (small rodent) to cover this new item. Since historical changes are difficult to predict, these changes are also unpredictable. However, semantic change is also related to speakers’ cognitive and communicative preferences, and the question then remains: can we predict aspects of semantic change from knowledge about cognitive preferences? Alternatively, can we reconstruct fundamental aspects of our cognitive preferences by studying semantic change? The lecture will present results from large-scale quantitative studies on the evolution of lexical semantics. By focusing on various parts of the vocabulary, from basic domains of high cognitive salience (kinship terms, verbs for bodily functions) to important cultural items (tools, weapons, animals), the presentation will consider whether semantic evolution is mainly cognitive or cultural – or both. In addition, the presentation will discuss whether semantic evolution can tell us something about the evolution of culture and cognition in early language.

References

Allassonnière-Tang, Marc, Olof Lundgren, Maja Robbers, Sandra Cronhamn, Filip Larsson, One-Soon Her, Harald Hammarström, and Gerd Carling. 2021. "Expansion by migration and diffusion by contact is a source to the global diversity of linguistic nominal categorization systems." Nature Humanities & Social Science - Communications 8:331.

Carling, Gerd. 2016. "Language: the role of culture and environment in proto-vocabularies. ." In Human Lifeworlds: The Cognitive Semiotics of Cultural Evolution, edited by Göran Sonesson and David Dunér, 83-96. Peter Lang.

Carling, Gerd. 2019. Mouton Atlas of Languages and Cultures. Vol. 1: Europe and West, Central and South Asia. Berlin - Boston: Mouton de Gruyter.

Carling, Gerd, Chundra Cathcart, and Erich Round. 2021. "Reconstructing the origins of language families and variation." In Oxford Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution, edited by A. Lock, C. Sinha and N. Gontier, 31.

Carling, Gerd, Sandra Cronhamn, Olof Lundgren, Victor Bogren Svensson, and Johan Frid. 2023. "The evolution of lexical semantics: dynamics, directionality, and drift." Frontiers in Communication 8. doi: https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2023.1126249.