Discourse and gibbons

[Daniel Everett]

I find myself in substantial agreement with Celso in his points and
rebuttals. But, once again, the issue is not whether chimps and their
ilk have social interactions involving communication. No one could
possibly deny this. The question is what these have to do with human
language. Aside from Hockett's design features, hard to improve on,
already mentioned in these discussions, the issue of 'grammar' is vital
and it is not being seriously addressed.

What is grammar? What do people know when they know the grammar of
their language? If there are things like the projection principle, the
trace filter, derivations by phases, spell-out, information-structuring
and prosodic marking, among others, are their even remote parallels in
non-human primates? I remember enjoying the primate-studying portions
of my physical and cultural anthropology courses as an undergrad, and
visits to the San Diego zoo to watch the gorillas and their kin. But
that kind of activity, however enjoyable, seems rather orthogonal to
the issue of whether other primates have grammar. How much of human
grammar is determined by communicative constraints and how much by
particular, arbitrary features of syntax (but an arbitrariness spread
throughout Homo sapiens sapiens, if it is to be interesting)?  Of the
components of grammar, can any be identified that are qualitatively
unlike anything found in chimp communication?

I am convinced that chimps, etc have intentions, can communicate, and
think in some sense of that word. (Doing fieldwork with Amazonian
Indians, I nonetheless eat primates, parrots, macaws, and other
potential talking animals in order to learn Amazonian languages and
cultures, so I suppose I do see a qualitative difference between the
species). But the question is whether they have grammar. Notice that it
does not require a commitment to innatism to reject the idea that other
primates have grammar. That is a separate issue.

In any case, I am not seeing enough attention given to the non-social,
technical aspects of grammatical structure - how these arise, their
uniqueness, their significance for this debate, etc.

-- Dan Everett

********************
Dan Everett
Professor of Phonetics and Phonology
Department of Linguistics
University of Manchester
Oxford Road
Manchester, UK
M13 9PL
Phone: 44-161-275-3158
Department Fax: 44-161-275-3187
http://lings.ln.man.ac.uk/

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