The Origins of Music: Preface - Preface

displays.So some animal calls are indeed symbolically meaningful,

even though those that are entirely emotionally based probably

predominate.

Do Animals Speak in Sentences?

A primary source of the power of speech is its two-level temporal struc-

ture,what Charles Hockett (1960) called the duality of patterning.The

three most basic requirements of all for speechlike behavior are,first,

one must be able to arrange words into different sentences,second,a

lexicon of words must be available from which sentences are assembled,

and third,one needs a way to construct these words.One efficient way

to generate large numbers of words is to have a small repertoire of dis-

tinct articulatory gestures or phonemes and sequence them in many dif-

ferent ways,as we do in speech.The phoneme repertoire can average up

to forty or so in the speech patterns of a given language,drawn from a

universal pool of sixty or so.The two key points I want to emphasize now

are that these phonemes and arbitrary sequences of them are meaning-

less in themselves,and they can be sequenced in many,many different

ways.Only when meanings are attached to them are they transformed

from nonsense into words.When words are properly sequenced,the

result is a sentence.So words and sentences are the essence of spoken

language.

Several different levels of syntactical organization apply in construct-

ing a sentence,and we need terms for them if we are to make compar-

isons between animal communication and language (figure 3.2).The

higher level,with semantically meaningful words and sentences,is appro-

36 Peter Marler

Figure 3.2

Definitions of phonocoding (phonological syntax) and lexicoding (lexical syntax).

Fig.3.2

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