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The Evolution of Inclusive Folk-Biological Labels and the Cultural Maintenance of Meaning

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Abstract

How is word meaning established, and how do individuals acquire it? What ensures the uniform understanding of word meaning in a linguistic community? In this paper I draw from cultural attraction theory and use folk biology as an example domain and address these questions by treating meaning acquisition as an inferential process. I show that significant variation exists in how individuals understand the meaning of inclusive biological labels such as “plant” and “animal” due to variation in their salience in contemporary ethnic minority groups in southwest China, and I present historical textual evidence that the meaning of inclusive terms is often unstable but can be sustained by such cultural institutions as religion and education, which provide situations in which the meaning of linguistic labels can be unambiguously inferred.

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Data Availability

All data are available at https://github.com/kevintoy/language_evolution.

Notes

  1. The focus of this paper is on lexical acquisition rather than concept acquisition. Although my thesis is most compatible with the nativist view of concepts, it does not depend on radical concept nativism in the style of Fodor (1975, 1983) as long as there is substantial uniformity in understanding of biological concepts. Such uniformity in the possession of concepts could be due either to their innateness or that they are acquired through some learning mechanism in a shared environment.

  2. Throughout this paper, stability will be used to refer to uniform understanding of the meaning of a given linguistic label.

  3. Curiously, Berlin et al. (1973) do not explicitly state that the scientific concepts of plant and animal are the only unique beginners. In principle, any category that is immediately above life-form should qualify (Urban, 2010); however, to my knowledge, no other unique beginners have been proposed.

  4. Atran seems to suggest that plant and animal are the only possible unique beginners.

  5. Whether folk biology deserves its own ontological category is a subject of debate. Susan Carey, for example, suggests that folk-biological cognition is embedded in a more general explanatory framework of folk psychology, and that a proper understanding of the living world requires some conceptual change (Carey, 1985; Carey & Spelke, 1994). See Vapnarsky et al. (2001) for a response.

  6. Coley et al. (1997) suggest that the shift in basic rank for American undergraduates is due to a lack of specific knowledge about the biological world.

  7. Informants were asked the following question “Is X people’s dialect the same as Y people’s?” and were forced to give a yes/no answer.

  8. As will be seen, most linguistic communities do not have unique beginner terms, in which case we tried to elicit the terms that are more inclusive than the life-form level. These more inclusive terms may contain one or more life-forms.

  9. The term wug here follows from Brown’s (1984) proposed classification scheme and is not related to “wug test” in psycholinguistics (Berko, 1958).

  10. Traditional Chinese characters will be used throughout this paper.

  11. Strictly speaking, most ethnic groups in this area use local versions of southwestern Mandarin (西南官话), which is phonetically distinct from standard Mandarin (普通话) but is generally intelligible to standard Mandarin speakers.

  12. In the Chinese provincial system, “county” (县) is a larger geopolitical unit (in both size and population) than “zhen” (镇).

  13. The Lisu Bible has other expressions for the inclusive concept animal, such as “huazabieza.” Another term for all sentient beings is “sashisazhi.”

  14. In fact, polysemy itself has been suggested to be a by-product of semantic change by historical semanticists (Bréal, 1904), with the implication that polysemy may be a sign of meaning instability.

  15. The main disagreements at the life-form level are whether “hawk” belongs to the inclusive category “bird.”

  16. Due to logistic constraints and the fact that some of the indigenous languages are no longer spoken by younger individuals, we often asked local people to “recommend” individuals who are knowledgeable in the local language.

  17. As a result of the region’s complex migration and relocation histories, ethnolinguistic groups that are geographically close together (or even officially designated the same group) often speak quite different languages. For example, the four Tibetan groups in Danba (the northernmost groups in Fig. 2) all speak their own dialects (which have little to do with the standard “Tibetan” spoken in Tibet) and are mutually unintelligible.

  18. Kongzi Jiayu 孔子家语 (Family Sayings of Confucius). Zhongguo Wenshi Press. Accessed March 2023 via https://ctext.org/kongzi-jiayu/zhi-pei. Scholars debate the authenticity of this text. Many Chinese scholars think the texts were a forgery by Wang Su (AD 195–256) (Kramers, 1950). Whether the texts were really Confucius’ sayings does not matter for our purposes.

  19. Fenghuang (凤凰), a mythological creature in Chinese culture. Frequently translated as “phoenix,” fenghuang only has a superficial resemblance to the Western counterpart.

  20. Qilin (麒麟), a mythical hooved chimerical creature known in Chinese and other East Asian cultures.

  21. Original text: 羽蟲三百有六十, 而凤为之长; 毛蟲三百有六十, 而鳞为之长; 甲蟲三百有六十, 而龟为之长; 鳞蟲三百有六十, 而龙为之长; 倮蟲三百有六十, 而人为之长.

  22. The Chinese Text Project comprises an extremely wide range of texts, with thousands of books digitized using optical character recognition. Its original focus was pre-Han philosophical texts, and over time other subjects were added, such as official historical records, medicine, poetry, and fiction.

  23. During the 1870s, more than fifty works of science and technology were translated from European languages to Japanese (Meade, 2015).

  24. The one exception is 政治動物 (political animal).

  25. “心本是个動物, 怎教它不动”, A Collection of Conversations of Master Zhu (Zhu, 1986).

  26. “腓亦是動物, 故止之”, A Collection of Conversations of Master Zhu (Zhu, 1986).

  27. “日月星辰积气, 皆動物也”, A Collection of Conversations of Master Zhu (Zhu, 1986).

  28. Original text: 问: “動物有知,植物无知,何也?” 曰: “動物有血气,故能知. 植物虽不可言知, 然一般生意亦可默见.”

  29. Original texts: “以土会之法辨五地之物生:一曰山林, 其動物宜毛物… 二曰川泽, 其動物宜鳞物… 三曰丘陵, 其動物宜羽物… 四曰坟衍, 其動物宜介物… 五曰原隰, 其動物宜祼物…”

  30. Dongwu’s counterpart, zhiwu 植物, which in modern Chinese refers to the inclusive concept plant, was used to translate “real property.”

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Acknowledgements

I thank Joseph Henrich for his continued support for this project, and Manvir Singh, Ivan Kroupin, Cammie Curtin and two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments and feedback on earlier drafts of this manuscript.

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  1. Department of Sociology, Zhejiang University, Yuhangtang Road 866, Hangzhou, 310058, China

    Ze Hong

  2. Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, 11 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA

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Hong, Z. The Evolution of Inclusive Folk-Biological Labels and the Cultural Maintenance of Meaning. Hum Nat 34, 177–201 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-023-09446-2

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