What separates us from the animals? Why have humans been able to conquer the planet whereas no other animal hasn't? The answer is of course language! "But hold on!" I hear you say, "We're not the only animals with language, whales sing to each other, dogs bark, hyenas laugh and they all appear to understand one another." That is true, but these methods of communication are heavily simplified. An animal call may mean 'There is food here' or 'Danger!' but what they lack is the ability to put these sounds together to form complicated meanings.
Even if animals were able to do this, we would encounter another problem as to how to interpret these new complicated meanings. What would the sounds for 'food here' and 'danger' together mean? Dangerous food? Food is here but there is also a leopard in the bushes? This is where syntax comes in.
Syntax essentially categorises words, fills in the gaps and makes a group of words make sense. Every human in the world uses the same syntactic structure to communicate with other humans, the only difference is the sounds that are produced. This isn't to be confused with the order of where words appears such as Subject-Verb-Object compared to Subject-Object-Verb in Japanese for example, as all languages contain nouns, verbs, prepositions, inflections etc. no matter where they come in the sentence, they are still present. So there is clearly an underlying system that all humans can understand and acquire.
What separates us from the animals? Why have humans been able to conquer the planet whereas no other animal hasn't? The answer is of course language! "But hold on!" I hear you say, "We're not the only animals with language, whales sing to each other, dogs bark, hyenas laugh and they all appear to understand one another." That is true, but these methods of communication are heavily simplified. An animal call may mean 'There is food here' or 'Danger!' but what they lack is the ability to put these sounds together to form complicated meanings.
Even if animals were able to do this, we would encounter another problem as to how to interpret these new complicated meanings. What would the sounds for 'food here' and 'danger' together mean? Dangerous food? Food is here but there is also a leopard in the bushes? This is where syntax comes in.
Syntax essentially categorises words, fills in the gaps and makes a group of words make sense. Every human in the world uses the same syntactic structure to communicate with other humans, the only difference is the sounds that are produced. This isn't to be confused with the order of where words appears such as Subject-Verb-Object compared to Subject-Object-Verb in Japanese for example, as all languages contain nouns, verbs, prepositions, inflections etc. no matter where they come in the sentence, they are still present. So there is clearly an underlying system that all humans can understand and acquire.
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