04.10.2022 - Stuart Watson, Nicole Tamer, Nikola Falk

A critical feature of language is that the form of words need not bear any perceptual similarity to their function – these relationships can be ‘arbitrary’. The capacity to process these arbitrary form–function associations facilitates the enormous expressive power of language. However, the evolutionary roots of our capacity for arbitrariness has gone largely unexamined. Our research group will present recent and ongoing work trying to resolve this. This session will be comprised of two short talks:

Stuart Watson will present the group’s work exploring arbitrariness from a deep evolutionary perspective, in which we devised a new theoretical framework capable of identifying a fundamental feature of arbitrariness (‘optionality’) across human and non-human species. We apply this framework to a broad survey of findings from animal communication studies, and identify five key dimensions of communicative optionality: signal production, signal adjustment, signal usage, signal combinatoriality and signal perception. This approach provides a necessary first step in bringing the comparative approach to bear on the problem of how linguistic arbitrariness evolved.

Nicole Tamer will then present ongoing work exploring examining the role that systematicity, a form of non-arbitrariness, plays in 30 modern and ancient Indo-European languages. Specifically, we examined phonological cues towards grammatical categories of the first phoneme to capture the initial word recognition advantages provided by systematicity. Our findings demonstrate the critical and hitherto underestimated role that systematicity plays in the development and stability of certain grammatical macro-categories. Nicole will also present her plans for future work applying this approach to the communication systems of non-human animals.