تسجيل الدخول

تسجيل

Conclusion Some cognitive abilities of animals

المؤلف:  Bernd Heine and Tania Kuteva

المصدر:  The Genesis of Grammar

الجزء والصفحة:  P164-C3

2026-03-09

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Conclusion Some cognitive abilities of animals

The observations made above are largely in accordance with what has been argued for by a number of authors (e.g. Bickerton 1990: 23; Pinker and Bloom 1990: 726; Jackendoff 1990: 27; Newmeyer 1991: 10; Wilkins and Wakefield 1995: 179), namely that the structural features of human languages primarily concern apes’ cognitive abilities rather than their communicative abilities (Fritz Newmeyer, p.c.). The main goal was to determine how the scenario of grammaticalization can be related to the behavior of non-human animals. On the basis of the animal abilities listed in (2), and in spite of the problems discussed in “Problems”, it would seem that the two are not entirely mutually incompatible since there is clearly an overlap area: These abilities correspond at least to layer II of human language evolution as postulated in Figure 2.1 of “A scenario of evolution”, in some respects even to more advanced layers. We will return to this issue when we have looked at a number of other phenomena that have a bearing on this issue.

Animal behavior is one of the phenomena that have been taken in many works to provide a window on language genesis; we will deal with another possible window, namely pidgin languages, and we will relate animal communication to restricted linguistic systems created by humans.