When Darwin wondered at the similarities between birdsong and human speech in the 19th century, he was simply observing their similarities in pattern. But in a newly published paper called The Emergence of Hierarchical Structure in Human Language, three MIT linguists argue that Darwin’s observation was incredibly prescient--in fact, human language may have evolved directly from the communication patterns of birds, bees, and primates.
Building on a foundation laid by the godfather of modern linguistics--Noam Chomsky--the paper’s authors argue that human language takes place on two basic levels. There’s the lexical plane, where we communicate content, and the expressive plane, where grammatical details and sentence structure occur. Fascinatingly, both of these patterns have precedents in the animal world. Birdsong is uniquely expressive, but contains almost no lexical content, while primates, bees, and other animals communicate largely on the expressive plane through simple words or visual cues. At some point, the paper’s authors posit, we humans got the bright idea to combine the two forms of communication, and voilà (sort of)--human language.
- More Here
Building on a foundation laid by the godfather of modern linguistics--Noam Chomsky--the paper’s authors argue that human language takes place on two basic levels. There’s the lexical plane, where we communicate content, and the expressive plane, where grammatical details and sentence structure occur. Fascinatingly, both of these patterns have precedents in the animal world. Birdsong is uniquely expressive, but contains almost no lexical content, while primates, bees, and other animals communicate largely on the expressive plane through simple words or visual cues. At some point, the paper’s authors posit, we humans got the bright idea to combine the two forms of communication, and voilà (sort of)--human language.
- More Here
No comments:
Post a Comment