Tool Intelligence As An Explanation Of Cross-Linguistic Variation And Family Resemblance: An Evolutionary And Typological Investigation

Martian perspectives aside, human languages are extremely diverse and do not share universal structural categories. Moreover, human language is intentional and arbitrary and thus different from biological systems like echolocation in bats, spatial navigation in honeybees or human vision. What then are the evolutionary foundations of language? Where does it come from and how did it evolve? These are still major issues in the modern language sciences. This book offers a new insight into the evolution of language by drawing the analogy to material cultures in nonhuman primates. Tool intelligence describes an extended problem awareness and the ability to invent instrumental means in order to manipulate the environment. Tools are invented by nonhuman primates under natural conditions of living. They are subject to group-specific lines of cultural descent and cross-group variation. The psychological infrastructure of this behavior consists of general cognitive abilities and the ability to invent complex solutions intentionally. The resulting tool categories are abstract and distinct from primary perceptions of the environment. Language rests on the same psychological infrastructure. It is a tool for communication. Unlike material tool use, it is aimed at the complex mental world of social others. Speakers rely on verbal means to manipulate the universe of attitudes in others, pursuing same or different goals in nonverbal activities. Language thereby adds a new dimension along which the tool intelligence unfolds and sustains the manipulation of the environment under intentional goal orientations. The resulting linguistic categories are again categories suis generis. Yet the cross-linguistic patterns of variation and family resemblance remain identical and true to the general predictions of the tool hypothesis as derived from prelinguistic cognition and behavior.

• | Author: Anneliese Kuhle
• | Publisher: Lexington Books
• | Publication Date: Nov 28, 2018
• | Number of Pages: 268 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Hardcover
• | ISBN-10: 1498561217
• | ISBN-13: 9781498561211