4 ms·

“Universal grammar” is a placeholder for the innate, domain-specific features of linguistic ability... --— After looking up “Universal Grammar,” here are my th

by kindkang2024 1y ago

“Universal grammar” is a placeholder for the innate, domain-specific features of linguistic ability... --— After looking up “Universal Grammar,” here are my thoughts: --— Until we identify these features and prove that other species lack them, the concept of Universal Grammar remains uncertain. Only if we pinpoint what’s unique to humans and fail to help other species develop it can we confidently claim Universal Grammar is correct. Personally, I think these innate features might not be entirely unique to humans. Even humans need sufficient social interaction and language exposure to truly behave like 'humans'. Feral children(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child), for example, behave much like animals. I also imagine early humans had only a few words and symbols and acted similarly. However, if feral children or ancient humans were exposed to today’s social environment, they could likely learn our complex language quite quickly, because those words, symbols, and pronunciations are well-suited to humans for expressing our wills. Perhaps, we humans are just lucky to have found effective ways to express ourselves —- symbols and words as we know them now -— and to pass them down through generations. This has allowed language and cognition to grow exponentially, giving us an edge over other species. P.S. Our failure so far to teach animals structured language is exactly why I admire projects like Google’s Dolphin Gemma. To succeed, we need to tailor teaching methods to their species-specific traits—starting by understanding how they express their intentions/wills, and then hopefully helping enrich their naming systems and overall communication. We might even adapt this to help them learn from human contexts, much like large language models do.

OkayPhysicist 1y ago
Other animals have vocabulary. Anybody with a pet can easily understand that lots of animals can associate words with objects and actions, and Koko and Alex and all the other examples of talking animals demonstrate that animals can communicate their own wants with words. The thing that makes humans nearly unique in the animal kingdom is structured language. I don't need separate words for "leopard in the bush", "snake in the bush", "leopard in the tree", and "snake in the tree", because we have grammar rules that allow me to combine the words for "leopard" and "tree" with a distinction of how the leopard relates to the tree. I say nearly unique, because there is some evidence that whale songs are structured.
- kindkang2024 1y ago
  > The thing that makes humans nearly unique in the animal kingdom is structured language. But what is “structured language”? I would argue it’s just another layer of naming—naming applied to already named names. If animals have the ability to map leopard, snake, bush, tree in reality to names in their naming system, then why can’t they apply that ability again—create a new name like ‘leopard-bush’ or ‘snake-leopard’, simply by combining the existing solid names in their system? (Similarly, words like “in” could also be added.) You might say they can’t—because they lack grammar rules. And I’d argue the issue runs even deeper: they don’t have a valid naming system to begin with, nor the ecological fitness or incentive needed to develop further naming. If they can name ‘leopard’ within a valid system, that name should be reusable. They should be able to work on those names—as objects themselves. The process is the same. It requires the same abstraction: treat a thing as a nameable unit, then name it again. And that already starts to look like compositionality—or grammar. The real difference is that humans ended up with a robust naming system. We got lucky—we gradually invented stable symbols that let us name on top of previous names. We could write them down, save them, pass them on—and then build new names on top of that naming recursively, iteratively, and divisively. And that’s likely where the fitness gain came from. It’s a lucky, genuine self-bootstrap story.
  - adrian_b 1y ago
    Making compound words is not an important difference between human language and the languages of other animals. Even in human languages the ability to make compound words seems to have appeared later. The main difference seems to be in having sentences structured into verbs and their associated nouns (which may encode various roles, e.g. patients, agents, instruments, beneficiaries, subjects of intransitive or copulative verbs, nominal predicates, results etc.). As far as we could determine until now, the language of most animals consists only of a set of nouns, which typically have an associated implicit action. For example: "Lion!" (meaning "Climb up the tree!"); "Eagle!" (meaning "Take cover under branches!"); "Children!" (meaning "Come here, to mother!"); "Bananas!" (meaning "Come here to eat good food!"); and so on. Some apes have been trained to compose very simple sentences, as complex as agent-verb-patient, but it is not known whether a similar form of communication exists between wild apes.

OkayPhysicist 1y ago

Other animals have vocabulary. Anybody with a pet can easily understand that lots of animals can associate words with objects and actions, and Koko and Alex and all the other examples of talking animals demonstrate that animals can communicate their own wants with words. The thing that makes humans nearly unique in the animal kingdom is structured language. I don't need separate words for "leopard in the bush", "snake in the bush", "leopard in the tree", and "snake in the tree", because we have grammar rules that allow me to combine the words for "leopard" and "tree" with a distinction of how the leopard relates to the tree. I say nearly unique, because there is some evidence that whale songs are structured.

kindkang2024 1y ago
> The thing that makes humans nearly unique in the animal kingdom is structured language. But what is “structured language”? I would argue it’s just another layer of naming—naming applied to already named names. If animals have the ability to map leopard, snake, bush, tree in reality to names in their naming system, then why can’t they apply that ability again—create a new name like ‘leopard-bush’ or ‘snake-leopard’, simply by combining the existing solid names in their system? (Similarly, words like “in” could also be added.) You might say they can’t—because they lack grammar rules. And I’d argue the issue runs even deeper: they don’t have a valid naming system to begin with, nor the ecological fitness or incentive needed to develop further naming. If they can name ‘leopard’ within a valid system, that name should be reusable. They should be able to work on those names—as objects themselves. The process is the same. It requires the same abstraction: treat a thing as a nameable unit, then name it again. And that already starts to look like compositionality—or grammar. The real difference is that humans ended up with a robust naming system. We got lucky—we gradually invented stable symbols that let us name on top of previous names. We could write them down, save them, pass them on—and then build new names on top of that naming recursively, iteratively, and divisively. And that’s likely where the fitness gain came from. It’s a lucky, genuine self-bootstrap story.
- adrian_b 1y ago
  Making compound words is not an important difference between human language and the languages of other animals. Even in human languages the ability to make compound words seems to have appeared later. The main difference seems to be in having sentences structured into verbs and their associated nouns (which may encode various roles, e.g. patients, agents, instruments, beneficiaries, subjects of intransitive or copulative verbs, nominal predicates, results etc.). As far as we could determine until now, the language of most animals consists only of a set of nouns, which typically have an associated implicit action. For example: "Lion!" (meaning "Climb up the tree!"); "Eagle!" (meaning "Take cover under branches!"); "Children!" (meaning "Come here, to mother!"); "Bananas!" (meaning "Come here to eat good food!"); and so on. Some apes have been trained to compose very simple sentences, as complex as agent-verb-patient, but it is not known whether a similar form of communication exists between wild apes.