Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Evidently the differentiation alone would amount to no more than two categories (expressions and non-expressions); if it is, however, accomplished compositionally (i.e. if the category of a complex expression is uniquely determined by the categories of its parts), then what is brought into being are grammatical categories in the usual sense.

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.

The system of sound distinctions found in human languages is both specific to language and uniquely human (partly because of the unique anatomy of the human vocal tract).

And since other primates engage in such reasoning, it is not uniquely human (though parts of it may be).

The abstract of HCF makes the very strong proposal that the narrow language faculty “only includes recursion and is the only uniquely human component of the faculty of language.

These assertions are largely independent: there may be parts of the narrow language faculty other than recursion even if the narrow faculty is the only part that is uniquely human; and the narrow faculty might consist only of recursion even if parts of the broad faculty are uniquely human as well).

These too would be uniquely human aspects of the language faculty in its broad sense, but would be part of a system for non-linguistic reasoning about the world rather than for language itself.

The overall picture is that there is a substrate of conceptual structure in chimps, overlain by some uniquely human but not necessarily language-based subsystems, in turn overlain by subsystems that depend on the pre-existence of linguistic expression.

One is that some birds and primates produce formants (time-varying acoustic energy bands) in their vocalizations by manipulating the supralaryngeal vocal tract, a talent formerly thought to be uniquely human.

HCF try to downplay the difference between humans and primates by pointing out that vocal imitation is not uniquely human.