A Fourth Component of Language

If there is one thing Chomsky has taught us about sentences, it is that they are unbounded. A clever person can always write a longer sentence. So I was interested when I read British anthropologist Robin Dunbar's latest paper on language origins (here) and found this sentence, "it may be no coincidence that the levels of intentionality that adults can cope with is the same as the level of embedding that we can cope with in sentences." [p. 56] With this concept of coping, Dunbar seems to be hinting that he believes sentences are bounded after all—maybe not by syntactic rules, but by psychological ones. Chewing over Dunbar's remark has brought together many themes of this blog. In particular, I've been thinking about Dunbar in the context of a presentation James Hurford gave 4 ½ years ago in Poland (see: The Word-Sentence Continuum). The presentation was on the evolution of predicates. In it he argued that it is pragmatics— the study of language in its social context—that makes syntax interesting and not the other way around. I was in complete agreement with Hurford and have since adopted much of the terminology he used in that talk. However, syntax can explain things in terms of rules, while pragmatics has seemed ad hoc. A second critical theme on this blog is the speech triangle: the speaker and listener pay joint attention to a topic. I've gone on endlessly about these interactions. Mostly I have focused on the evolution of speakers and listeners, but implicit i...
Source: Babel's Dawn - Category: Medical Scientists Authors: Source Type: blogs