The fundamentals

All human languages seem to categorise experience according to a distinction between reference to things or events and denoting states and actions, using nouns for the former and verbs for the latter. The distinction is clear in the child’s first words. It is clearly fundamental.

Reference picks out an entity or the lack of some entity in the world.

All of the mental categories here seem clearly to be human-specific. There is no evidence of any of them in any non-human system. Neither the naming and indidividualising of the dolphins in a pod nor the separation of different sorts of threat among vervet monkeys involve reference in the human sense. The meaning of such calls is just within a narrowly defined sphere – of individual identity or immediate threat to life – non-trivial matters, to be sure, but not general across the whole range of experience.

Dolphin calls of group or individual identity may be meaningful only in the presence of another group-member, although there is implicit reference by a recognition of identity in an act of welcome. Such non-human calls are not compositional. They cannot be freely combined with other calls to some infinite degree, known as ‘discrete infinity’. Nor can they be ‘decomposed’ into separate articulatory / perceptual and semantic / pragmatic elements, as in games like the French Verlan, wittily reversing the order of the syllables in l’envers, the French for backwards.

Nouns and verbs are commonly organised by the ‘morphology’ in different ways – in ways more obvious in languages other than English. But even English, which is quite defective in this respect, uses –S in opposite ways in nouns and verbs, to mark singularity in verbs, as in “He eats too much” and plurality in nouns, as in “Not enough nations”. Words which are commonly used as nouns can be coerced into use as verbs, as in “sentencing a prisoner” or “soldiering on” and the other way round in “having a talk” or “giving it a go.”

In a way that will not be obvious for a long time after the first words, both nouns and verbs can denote both singularities and instances of a general type. But the distinction here is critical to the proposal here.