I know I’ve blathered about Chomsky before in the forums, but here it’s relevant again – a lot of the difficulty here comes from questions about what language consists of.
A “Chomskian” linguist will give a particular answer to that question, one that will almost by definition exclude animal language. To a Chomskian (to vastly oversimplify) there is a little language machine in our heads, which produces complex syntaxes, and these complex syntaxes are a distinct phenomenon in and of themselves and are the defining characteristic of human language.
Ronald Langacker, say, who advocates what is called “cognitive grammar,” is more interested in understanding language as involving a complex and specialized combination of mental abilities which exist independently of and prior to language; grammar to him would be epiphenomenal – the basic rule of language is “combination of phonological structures encodes combinations of semantic structures.” There is no “syntax” that does not somehow arise as an epiphenomenon to that rule. “Syntax” is not a thing in and of itself with its own little machine in the brain to process it, it’s just a description of how we happen to use very complicated symbol systems. That is something that Chomsky would disagree with vehemently.
Under a “Langackerian” approach to grammar (many other linguists, such as Charles Fillmore, and Adele Goldberg [of Smalltalk fame] would also tend to share this), it would be quite conceiveable for animals putting together very simple symbols to be doing essentialy the same thing (within the much narrower limits of their abilities) that humans are doing with our language use. They’re still using the basic rule – combining expressive forms encodes combining of meanings – and that’s enough.
Not disagreeing with Cecil’s answer, just explaining why the majority of linguists, who are Chomskians of one sort or another, would tend to bristle at the notion of animals “really using language” – their very definition of what languge is makes such a proposition seem laughable. But they’re not the only game in town.
There’s an article in the March 31st issue of The New Yorker that’s as close as an article in the non-academic press has ever come to admitting what I think is true, which is that all of Chomsky’s arguments are worthless. It quotes Paul Postal, a linguist who was once one of his biggest disciples, as saying that Chomsky is a dishonest arguer who lies for the fun of it. A lot of the standard reporting on Chomsky is by people who know his political theories but not his linguistic theories. Even when they point out the problems in his political theories, they rely on second-hand accounts of his linguistic theories. They don’t seem to realize that a lot of linguists think that Chomsky can’t argue his way out of a paper bag.
Chomsky seems to have revamped his ideas on this issue. In the Nov. 2002 issue of Science Magazine, Chomsky co-authored an article called “The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?” with Marc D. Hauser and W. Tecumseh Fitch claiming that all that may be unique (and innate?) to humans is the ability to build recursive structures.
My language ack prof was one of the people who worked on the Nim Chimpsky project- she was one of the ones who lived with him. Dear lord, the chimp stories that woman has…
Has any significant research been done with cetaceans (dolphins, whales etc)? It has been suggested that their linguistic abilities may well outstrip those of all non-hominid primates, and may even rival ours.
It can be difficult for humans even to learn another human language (same species, guys). Perhaps it’s a little unfair to judge non-humans on their ability to manipulate symbols that are foreign to their species. Has anyone considered the possibility that apes may have developed rather complex languages - that would be entirely tribal, and consist of ape symbols rather than human ones?
Sorry, but I have to take issue with Cecil on domestic canines not using, or at least understanding, human language. Stanley Coren’s popular books, The Intelligence of Dogs and its sequel, detailing tens of thousands of years of human-canine experience ought to lay the ghost of that argument. Recent scientific studies have shown that domestic canines are actually better able than nonhuman primates to interpret and act on nonverbal cues from humans. Maybe it’s all about what one means by “language,” but don’t tell that to our English Springer Spaniel.
Recognizing commands is not the same as understanding language. It’s not language until the critter can reliably create new sentences that are at least semi-grammatical out of the words it knows, or at a minimum, analyze newly encountered sentences in a way that demonstrates the ability to pick out words in new contexts. (Linguists should replace “sentences” with “utterances” and “words” with “morphemes”.)
With a degree of apology for the ellipsis, I refer to Coren’s example of the dog who reacted to an exasperated owner’s command to “Come on, sit down!” by lowering its body and sliding across the floor toward the owner on its haunches. Coren’s interpretation, which I think reasonable, is that the animal was simultaneously trying to respond to the three commands it heard in the human sentence: come, sit and down. Ergo, picking out words in new contexts; ergo, language, QED.
That still isn’t the same thing. An example of the desideratum would be to train a dog to:
“Fetch the ball” (catch a thrown ball and return it)
“Find the shoe” (from a good many boxes with things in them, only one a shoe, point to the correct box and bark)
and then have it respond, without further training, to
“Find the ball” (from a good many boxes)
Of course, you can also explain that behaviour by supposing that the dog had pinworms and its butt was itchy, so it was trying to scratch it on the floor. The fact that the human had just issued those commands would then have been coincidental.
Mind you, I do personally suspect that dogs have a decent grasp of human language, but it takes more evidence than that.
Because we humans try so hard to read meaning into signs, it’s very tempting for us to construct an interpretation when an animal does something that seems like a deliberate ‘sign’.
I think that’s why so many people buy into the ‘signing ape’ research – especially Dr. Patterson.
When I read the transcript from the Koko/AOL chat, I see the same approach that I see from “psychics” like John Edwards et al: when there’s a miss, treat it like a hit, and keep going.
Regarding dolphins, I saw something on TV about them a couple years ago. What I saw indicated just the type of ability to understand grammar that John W. Kennedy mentions. They could give new commands that had not been specifically trained and the dolphins would react properly. There was a sentence structure where word order was important, so telling the dolphin “me, ball, you” would be different than “ball, you, me”. I don’t recall the specifics of the grammar. They also involved things like demonstration tricks. Teach the dolphins to do aerobatics, etc. They would know a variety of tricks, from simple flips, to doubles and triples, to spirals. Then they would give a pair of dolphins a command to “do anything together” and the dolphins would go and simultaneously pull off a random trick from the list, differing each time they were told the command “do anything”. Fairly suggestive that not only do dolphins understand humans, but that they communicate to each other.
However, fontor’s description of the Koko chat seems appropriate from the description Cecil gave. Nipple = people? Hey, look at all the nipples! I really like people.
It’s possible that early definitions or requirements may be too broad or basic, and that as further research is done, the requirements get tougher. For example, people used to say that a chess playing computer would show real intelligence, but now we realize that there’s more to intelligence than playing chess.
There is something substantially different between a highly trained gorilla or dog that happens to put two separate commands together and comes up with the right response (sometimes) and what my two year old can do with language (use recursive structures, modify words to apply them to various objects, and so on). When he says something like “Daddy, don’t throw the ball to me; throw it to my sister”, he’s using grammar and syntax far more complicated than anything I’ve heard of monkeys or dogs doing.
There may be more complexity in how dolphins communicate, but I don’t have any references.
Tom – There’s no question that humans put together new sentences and grammatical structures “without further training”. Just read your own post – did you put together your arguments and sentences directly from other sentences you’ve already been “trained on”? Or, did you take your knowledge of vocabulary, grammar, and syntax and put together completely new sentences? I would think you did the latter.
I agree with Tom Arctus. There’s clearly a spectrum of things that can be described as language. Koko and other “talking” apes can certainly do things lower on that spectrum, as can Alex the African grey parrot, who’s been taught to do some amazing things. Check out the website about him at
Clearly nearly all human beings can do things on that language spectrum that are much higher on the spectrum. Now if you want to set up a dividing line on that spectrum and say that only behavior above that line is language, I can understand that, but it still seems to me that you’re being somewhat arbitrary.
