Compositionality in animals and humans
Simon William Townsenda b✉, Sabrina Engessera, Sabine Stollc, Klaus Zuberbühlerd e, Balthasar Bickela✉
- aDepartment of Comparative Linguistics, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
- bDepartment of Psychology, University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom
- cPsycholinguistics Laboratory, Department of Comparative Linguistics, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
- dInstitute of Biology, University of Neuchatel, Neuchatel, Switzerland
- eSchool of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, United Kingdom
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Abstract
A key step in understanding the evolution of human language involves unravelling the origins of language's syntactic structure.One approach seeks to reduce the core of syntax in humans to a single principle of recursive combination, MERGE, for which there is no evidence in other species.We argue for an alternative approach.We review evidence that beneath the staggering complexity of human syntax, there is an extensive layer of nonproductive, nonhierarchical syntax that can be fruitfully compared to animal call combinations.This is the essential groundwork that must be explored and integrated before we can elucidate, with sufficient precision, what exactly made it possible for human language to explode its syntactic capacity, transitioning from simple nonproductive combinations to the unrivalled complexity that we now have.A growing body of evidence suggests that animals are capable of combining independently meaningful vocalizations together into larger structures with a derived or transparent meaning [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10].In a recent critique, Bolhuis and colleagues [11] challenge these findings, primarily the idea that these data are comparable with compositional syntactic structures in human language and their potential relevance for understanding the evolution of language.Specifically, the authors assert that, in comparison to animal communication systems, syntax in language is based on fundamentally different organisational principles, which severely limits the prospects of successful comparisons across species.Here, we address the concern raised by Bolhuis and colleagues and outline why we think it is not only possible to directly compare human and animal call combinations but also why it is important to do so.Human language is no doubt unique in the complexity of its expressions.One of the most striking aspects of this is that we command a great variety of syntactic configurations, such as modification (a true biologist), coordination (biologists and linguists), or predication (the linguist objected), and that these configurations can stack in a way that creates exceedingly complex dependencies (as in neither 1 [did the linguist 2 [we consulted] object 2 ] nor 1 [was she 3 interested 3 ], in which dependencies are indicated by subscripts).How did the capacity for this
TL;DREvidence that beneath the staggering complexity of human syntax, there is an extensive layer of nonproductive, nonhierarchical syntax that can be fruitfully compared to animal call combinations is reviewed. (Semantic Scholar)