In this example, the building blocks which make C, A and B, are arguably meaningful because they act as signals in their own right, therefore, if C had a meaning which was a combination of the meanings of A and B, this system (using de Boer, Sandler and Kirby’s definition) would be compositional (this isn’t represented in the figure above). Combinatorial communication is rare in nature: many systems have a signal C = A + B with an effect Z = X + Y very few have a signal C = A + B with an effect Z ≠ X + Y. Applied to the putty-nosed monkey system, the symbols in this figure are: a, presence of eagles b, presence of leopards c, absence of food A, ‘pyow’ B, ‘hack’ call C = A + B ‘pyow–hack’ X, climb down Y, climb up Z ≠ X + Y, move to a new location. This figure illustrates the simplest combinatorial communication system possible. In a combinatorial communication system, two (or more) holistic signals ( A and B in this figure) are combined to form a third, composite signal ( A + B), which has a different effect ( Z) to the sum of the two individual signals ( X + Y). Obviously, in order to do this they need to define what they mean by combinatorial communication and present this figure by way of explanation: You will notice that they initially call both levels of structure “combinatorial”, and they both arguably are, and my point in this blog post isn’t necessarily that only structure on the first level should be called combinatorial, but that work talking about combinatorial structure should establish what their terminology means.Ī recent paper by Scott-Philips and Blythe (2013), which is entitled “Why is combinatorial communication rare in the natural world, and why is language an exception to this trend?” presents an agent based model to show how limited the conditions are from which combinatorial communication can emerge. We will refer to recombination at the first level as combinatorial structure, while recombination at the second level will be called compositional structure. In the introduction to a recent special issue in Language and Cognition on new perspectives on duality of patterning, Bart de Boer, Wendy Sandler and Simon Kirby helpfully outline their preferred use of terminology:ĭuality of patterning (Hockett, 1960) is the property of human language that enables combinatorial structure on two distinct levels: meaningless sounds can be combined into meaningful morphemes and words, which themselves could be combined further. Instead, terms such as “combinatorial” and “compositional” structure are used, occasionally contrastively, or sometimes they get conflated to mean the same thing. However, in recent years these contrasting levels of structure have started to be talked about in the context of language evolution, either in reference to artificial language learning experiments or experimental semiotics, where a proxy for language is used so it doesn’t make sense to talk about phonological or morphosyntactic structure, or when talking about animal communication where it also doesn’t make sense to talk about terms which pertain to human language. This was identified way back in the 1960s as one of Hockett’s design features for language know as “duality of patterning”, and in most of linguistics people refer to these different levels of structure as “phonology” and “(morpho)syntax”. The level on which small meaningless building blocks (phonemes) make up bigger meaningful building blocks (morphemes), and the level of structure at which these meaningful building blocks make up even bigger meaningful structures (words, sentences, utterances).
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