New perspectives on duality of patterning: Introduction to the special issue

According to Hockett (1960), duality of patterning is a design feature of human language (meaning that all human languages have it) while it is also unique to human language. He argued that it evolves when a growing number of meanings need to be expressed, so that combinatorial structure helps to keep signals distinct. More recently similar arguments have been made on the basis of mathematical and computational models (e. g. Nowak et al., 1999; Zuidema & de Boer, 2009). Although it seems to be uncontroversial that recombination of meaningful elements (i.e. compositional structure) is needed for an unlimited system, the relation between an unlimited set of signals and recombination of meaningless elements (i.e. combinatorial structure) is less clear.
This special issue assembles a number of papers that present recent work on the nature and the emergence of duality of patterning. Duality 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. We will refer to recombination at the first level as combinatorial structure, while recombination at the second level will be called compositional structure.

Jaar van publicatie:2012

Trefwoorden:duality of patterning, evolution of language, Evolution of Speech, combinatorial structure