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Compositionality

Parts which can be put together in organised, ordered ways, like bits of a face.

Other than the special case of greetings, swearing and cursing, gestures made with the mouth like tut tut, and expressions like shh, argh, wow, exclusively part of discourse, the words, the sounds they are built from, their meanings, are all put together into three-dimensional structures. The ordering in time between the elements is just one of the dimensions. The way the elements of meaning are put together in speech is what is known as syntax.

Crucially, the syntax of human language involves recurring contrasts between ‘content words’ like mother and house and ‘functors’ like there, where, is and the. These contrasts between different sorts of words make it possible to contrast sentences like “There is the house” and “Where is the house?” differing by only the first sound, but very different in their effective force. There are corresponding physical and semantic features in the sign languages of the deaf.

Cats, dogs, other animals, and people

Human language is quite different from the barks of dogs, the miaows of cats, the songs, squawks, and tweets of birds, the clicks of dolphins and whales, the hoots of chimpanzees. Dogs have different barks and cats have different miaows. but they can’t mix their messages.

Some chimpanzees, bonobo apes, and gorillas, have learnt to process one or more aspects of human language, as signs. The most remarkable of these was a chimpanzee called Washoe who died in 2007. She had been taught over 200 signs in American Sign Language. One of her carers had a baby and then disappeared for a while. When the carer came back, Washoe reacted badly. The carer decided to tell Washoe the truth – that the baby had in fact died. Washoe made the sign for tears. This may have been the only real discussion of grief and condolence that has ever taken place between a human and a non-human.

But in no case did Washoe ever show any evidence in her signing of words doing what the little word that does in “I’m sorry that your baby is dead” or of the same structure without that. Nor does her signing reflect any equivalent of the grammatical structures of typical three year old language with sentences like “I want to see what you can see” with what introducing an embedded clause.

As shown in The framework, the point applies across the whole range of grammatical categories that apply to English and their equivalents in other languages.

By this logic, by the new direction known as ‘biolinguistics‘, there is no evidence of the structure allowing discrete infinity in signing by apes. Chimpanzees’ gestures are not remotely on a pathway to what we know as language.

The notion of human uniqueness here, broadly accepted by linguists over the past 200 years, is disputed by some. For instance, on the strength of observations, Con Slobodchikoff claims that prairie dogs cross-multiply numerous categories of what they correctly see as their main predator, humans, and even create new terms based on these cross-multiplications. So they are said to categorise people by their size, the colour of their clothes, whether they are carrying guns, and even their individuality. It is a huge and astonishing claim. Prairie rats are in the same group of animals as rats and squirrels, both highly intelligent as those who have cared for them know. What Slobodchikoff claims is a significant step towards compositionality in a non-human species. But this does not seem to me a serious challenge to the notion of human exceptionality in speech and language. For one thing, Slobodchikoff has not carried out all the necessary tests, varying all the elements systematically, one by one. But more importantly, Slobodchikoff’s observations all relate to categorisations of potential threat, in an obvious way important to many non-human species, but quite unlike the free compositionality of human language.

Agreeing about what things mean

For any language, of which English is just one example, native speakers can agree about what things mean, or don’t mean, or if there is more than one meaning, and in ways that brook no argument.

Consider these two sentences, the first ambiguous, the second not:

  • I wonder who she wants to see her (she and her may refer to the same person, but not necessarily)
  • She wants to see her (she and her cannot refer to the same person)

In the biolinguistic framework assumed here and developed in my proposal, in order for speakers come to these contrasting judgements, there has to be a universal grammar UG, defined in the human genome. This UG is a point of potential vulnerability in human development.