Common activities and the structure of language

How much of the structure of language can be observed when a dog buries a bone, in the form of the succession of actions he performs in order to accomplish the goal? Or how much is it present when he elaborates (and executes) the succession of actions needed to get the bone from where he buried it? An important remark to be made here is that although the dog performs a succession of actions which, taken individually, he might also perform in other occasions, the entire succession of actions can be seen as a goal-oriented activity which only has a meaning as a whole.

  • note: when we talk about the execution of an action, said action may itself consist of a succession of "sub-actions", such that a task that accomplishes a goal will ultimately consist of a serialization of a hierarchy of lower-level actions.
Our question can also be rephrased as follows: is there any "qualitative" distinction between articulating a sentence and the kind of activities described above? Isn't it maybe that the mechanism of language production is just a very evolved way of serializing concepts, very similar to the way the intention of hiding a bone is serialized into a coherent activity? In this case, the concept serialization mechanism being 'very evolved' would refer to a complex set of constraints that the process of serializing a concept into language must obey (i.e. an entire hierarchy of syntactical and grammar rules).

It is important at this point to stress that not all messaging protocols require the use of language: specifically, chaining a set of individual actions into an activity that has a meaning (e.g. a purpose) as a whole is considered to be a characteristic that differentiates linguistic production from other forms of messaging. Some rudimentary, non-linguistic forms of messaging between individuals by means of gestures (possibly including inarticulate sounds, or even articulate sounds) can be observed in many living creatures; however, in these cases one gesture (which may consists of a succession of movements) is dedicated to sending one specific message, while a succession of several gestures taken together does not send a new distinct message as compared to the individual gestures. In other words, in this case we cannot talk about a true "sign language" because chaining several signs (i.e. gestures) together does not bring any new meaning to the gesture combination as a whole (i.e. neither "sign words" nor "sign sentences" are formed).
  • note: in some situations, a message that is transmitted via one single gesture can be parameterized in vary complex ways, e.g. the case of bee dancing: the bee "dance" is a pattern of movement performed by bees inside their beehive upon returning from a food search flight, and it transmits information about the location of found food by means of several parameters of the movement pattern involved in the "dance" (e.g. the orientation of the "dance" conveys information about the direction where the food was found, the speed of the "dance" is related to the distance to the food, etc). However, this messaging method does not involve a sequence of signs, nor does it contain any hierarchy among the "dance" parameters, and thus does not exhibit some of the fundamental properties of language. If we were to look for a similarity between the bee dance and an element of natural language, we might compare it with the "nuances" of an interjection, e.g. the various ways in which "ooooh" can be pronounced, with each of these pronunciations conveying a different message (such as being surprised, disappointed, etc).

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