From Signals to Symbols: Grounding Language Origins in Communication Games

This chapter brings together the fields of economics and linguistics on the topic of language origins. It concerns properties of human language, particularly how linguistic signs or symbols have inherited design features present in linguistic communication. I will show how some features of language can be adequately understood as a result of coordination games. I will argue that modern language originated as a consequence of trade relationships and the division of labor involved by early humans around 40.000 years ago. As an economic activity, both trade ( or exchange) relationships and division of labor call for coordination. The outcome is that games and economic behavior have a significant causal relationship to some general properties of the linguistic symbol. 4.1 Adam Smith=s dog Language and economics have been related since at least Adam Smith=s reflections on the origin of the division of labor. Smith attributes the division of labor to language or the faculty of reason. In his Wealth of Nations of 1776. Smith writes: The division of labour, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom,..., it is the necessary consequence of a certain propensity in human nature: the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another... This propensity... seems to be the necessary consequence of the faculties of reason and speech. (Smith, 1776, p. 25) Smith goes on to assert that this propensity is unique to man, thus writing these famous words: No body ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for