3rd April : Language
Evolutionary Psychology
Politics, violence and gender: we have a stone age emotional system speaking about
this stuff in the future
Ted talks: entry fees are about 5000 dollars, - even though all are available online they
still get enough out of the 1%
Language:
- In the SSSM, language may be solely based on culture and environment and
this posses a problem because there are major universals and the development
of speaking
- Languages: ect) there is a huge variety of languages and differences all are
pre-illiterate there is a great case of it being very similar among all beings
- Homo-sapiens are the only ones who can do this and be as complex, and there
is no other group of animals that even come close to the way we have
developed our language abilities
- Uses of a single English words: Shit
o There are a ton of different meaning and uses of the word shit, and
people still seem to understand it
o The flexibility and the image can tell us about language as a
psychological skill
The inflection is used among conversations being fluent is
even better because you tend to know what seems to follow
Pinker: 2007 the stuff of thought and language as a window
into human thinking the stuff of thought
Multiple definitions
o Pinker 2007 Book The Stuff of Thought
Semantics (emotional frames)
Things that tend to create emotional reactions and ways
that evoke feelings beyond linguistics
Things that we put around the words that add different
meanings
Picking the right word makes the difference
Cannot be taken apart by studying the language:
o Ex) invading Iraq vs. liberating Iraq, killing an
unborn child vs. ending a pregnancy, pink slime
We respond to these emotionally beyond their semantic
reasoning
Metaphors
Argument is war, love is a journey, big is important,
visual field is a container
Argument is war: ex) shot down, sparring, beating me
over the head, winning losing, kill me
o We almost cannot talk with out them and it is a
common cultural idea
o Athletics, love, child development, and they
might learn to start making metaphors.
o We drop out sounds we do not need and this is
what might
Chapter 7: The words seven you cant say on TV
Swearing is universal: exact content varies
o What do we know about swearing, and what
does it suggest about evolution and its uses
It is universal and it is present
throughout cultures
Swearing works on a different level than
other language functioning
o Under stress they just come out without being
able to control it, they are emergence words that
when you need to have an atomic words
adaptive at lowering stress levels and
expressions
We might use watered down atomic words that are
expressed and hidden the other words (darn, gosh)
TV sensors they know how to tip two around the
literal meanings and still allow everyone to get it
In English and western words used to be mainly religious this
might be attributed to a historic event of the protestant
revolution henry 8th and the roman catholic church was
replaced
In England: these words shifted to sex and scatological after
the protestant reformation:
Pinkers argument: the words can change and they
o Exposing children to swear words they will pick them up extremely
fast from 1.5 4 years old especially if they are said with the
emotional component
Receptive speech (the vocab that kids can recognize what it
represents) 1 and 2 years old vs. expressive speech (being able
to talk)
Sign language consistency among all make the bridges of
language
Kids will make up a language if they dont have one because
people made up these ways of communicating.
o Characteristics:
Intervention (between internal and external)
Conscious control (non-automatic process)
Generativity (small umber of elements can be rearranged in
infinite new groups)
Skinner verbal behavior
Arbitrariness (symbols have no inherent meaning) most
words are not
Discreteness (particulate principle)
Syntax (laws for thought)
Referential and refer to objects or events
o Can natural selection explain language deveolpment?
o Survival advantage to language
Pidgin : simple structure, slave languages, and a few words
could be used, when one group and another are used to
communicate combining kitchen Spanish (English and
Spanish) creol when the people first come together.