Something unique to humans

Putting different sorts of words and parts of words together – ‘compositionality’

We humans have capacities which no other species has. Humans can do experiments, write and play music, draw or paint a likeness, throw or kick a ball at a target or hit it with a stick or a bat, carry out successive operations with numbers, and more. Despite attempts by circus masters and entertainers, non-humans do not seem to be capable of any of these things. Some individual animals have learnt what may seem like the first steps to some of these skills. This can then be put on show, to be admired or unfairly mocked. But non-human levels in these skills would never be mistaken for human skills. What about language? Some people believe that their dogs understand everything they say, but only the rarest of dogs, specially trained over a long period, learn to understand some word combinations, such as “Put the ball in the bowl” or “Get the paper from the door”. This is compositionality, But the nature of this understanding seems to be quite different from that of small humans who learn very early that there are special classes of words, like what and where, and elements of the sound structure which are understood in relation to some position in the structure other than where they are pronounced. By the proposal here, the essentials of this understanding normally develop between the ages of one and three. This is commonly known as ‘Universal Grammar’ – what human beings share – although see Modesty and Caution for a variety of quite different views.

Compositionality – the use of parts which can be put together in organised, ordered ways, like the parts 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 way they are put together in what is known as syntax, the sounds they are built from with an ordering in time between the gestures, their meanings, are all structured. 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. This makes the faculty of human language quite different from the barks of dogs and the miaows of cats, or the songs, squawks, and tweets of birds, or the clicks and songs of dolphins and whales, or even the elaborate systems of chimpanzees.

Cats, dogs, other animals, and people

Dogs have different barks and cats have different miaows. but they can’t be meaningfully brought together into a composition.

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 clearly identifiable subjects, verbs and objects, marked in English by the characteristic ordering of “I love her” and “She loves me” and by the form of the verb in loves.

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.

Discrete infinity

The structure of language allows humans to use a finite number of symbols, the sounds or ‘phonemes‘ of the language or the signs of a signed language, to say an infinite number of things and be understand by any other native speaker or signer. This is known as ‘discrete infinity’.

No non-human has ever shown evidence of anything like discrete infinity. To this extent, humans are both unique and exceptional in the animal kingdom. But for some reason, the exceptionality of human language is strongly resisted by some. But to me, the onus is on those who deny any sort of genomic explanation to provide a more plausible explanation of discrete infinity.

This is not to suggest that children are born knowing how to talk, a self-evidently absurd aunt sally sometimes peddled by those opposed to any idea of human exceptionality or specific genetic endowment. The claim here, is just that children come to the task of learning language as though expecting to find structures which make discrete infinity possible.  Exactly how this happens has been at the centre of linguistic research for the past 70 years by a project which originates in the work of Noam Chomsky. It is the main focus of the proposal here.

The linguist, Stephen Anderson, sets out the issues here in his justly famous 2006 book, Doctor Dolittle’s delusion. It is scholarly, but completely accessible and non-technical.

When the apparatus here is fully  developed, normally around ten, this allows an infinite number of structures, known as sentences, to be built from a finite number of elements, the speech sounds of the language. The ccompositionality is based on words and parts of words not just in order, but in a structure ensuring that the words have a meaning that goes beyond their meanings other than by the structure.

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.

Babble

When babies babble, they sometimes seem to be experimenting with the phonotactics and phonetic features of a given target language, but with no evidence of meaning.