Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

A third question is which aspects of the language capacity are uniquely human, and which are shared with other groups of animals, either homologously, by inheritance from a common ancestor, or analogously, by adaptation to a common function.

Answers to this question have clear implications for the evolution of language.

The HCF paper presents us with an opportunity to reexamine the question of what is special about language.

HCF contrast this idea with their recursion-only hypothesis, which “has the interesting effect of nullifying the argument from design, and thus rendering the status of FLN as an adaptation open to question” (p. 1573).

But this is irrelevant to the question of whether vocal imitation evolved for language in the human lineage.

We do not know of other human capacities that have been shown to re?ect this formal organization, though it is it an interesting open question. Is phonology uniquely human?

A final important device is long-distance dependency, which can relate a question word or relative pronoun to a distant verb, as in Which theory did you expect Fred to think Melvin had disproven last week?, where which theory is understood as the object of disprove.

Syntax: Case, agreement, pronouns, predicate-argument structure, topic, focus, auxiliaries, question markers, and so on, are not discussed by HCF.

Returning to our main question of what is special about language: Behind HCF’s claim that the only aspect of language that is special is recursion lies a presumption that the Minimalist Program is ultimately going to be vindicated.

Language is badly designed for communication The operative quote from HCF is this: The question is whether particular components of the functioning of FLN are adaptations for language, specifically acted upon by natural selection—or, even more broadly, whether FLN evolved for reasons other than communication (1574).