International audienceLanguage's intentional nature has been highlighted as a crucial feature distinguishing it from other communication systems. Specifically, language is often thought to depend on highly structured intentional action and mutual mindreading by a communicator and recipient. Whilst similar abilities in animals can shed light on the evolution of intentionality, they remain challenging to detect unambiguously. We revisit animal intentional communication and suggest that progress in identifying analogous capacities has been complicated by (i) the assumption that intentional (that is, voluntary) production of communicative acts requires mental-state attribution, and (ii) variation in approaches investigating communication across sensory modalities. To move forward, we argue that a framework fusing research across modalities and species is required. We structure intentional communication into a series of requirements, each of which can be operationalised, investigated empirically, and must be met for purposive, intentionally communicative acts to be demonstrated. Our unified approach helps elucidate the distribution of animal intentional communication and subsequently serves to clarify what is meant by attributions of intentional communication in animals and humans

Linguistic diversity, now and in the past, is widely regarded to be independent of biological changes that took place after the emergence ofHomo sapiens. We show converging evidence from paleoanthropology, speech biomechanics, ethnography, and historical linguistics that labiodental sounds (such as “f” and “v”) were innovated after the Neolithic. Changes in diet attributable to food-processing technologies modified the human bite from an edge-to-edge configuration to one that preserves adolescent overbite and overjet into adulthood. This change favored the emergence and maintenance of labiodentals. Our findings suggest that language is shaped not only by the contingencies of its history, but also by culturally induced changes in human biology.

The prosodic word is not universal, but emergent In Prosodic Phonology, domains for the application of phonological patterns are commonly modeled as a Prosodic Hierarchy. The theory predicts, among other things, that (i) prosodic domains cluster on a single universal set of domains ('Clustering '), and (ii) no level of prosodic structure is skipped in the building of prosodic structure unless this is required by independently motivated higher ranking principles or constraints ('Strict Succession '). In this paper, we demonstrate that if, as is standardly done, evidence is limited to lexically general phonological processes, some languages systematically violate the Strict Succession Prediction, evidencing no prosodic word domain, and some languages systematically violate the Clustering Prediction, evidencing more than one domain between the phonological phrase and the foot. We substantiate these claims by in-depth studies of phonological rule domains in Vietnamese (Austroasiatic) and Limbu (Sino-Tibetan). As an alternative to the Prosodic Hierarchy framework, we advocate a heuristic for cross-linguistic comparison in which prosodic domains are conceived of as language-particular, intrinsic and highly specific properties of individual phonological rules or constraints. This allows us to explore empirically the actual degree of variation to be encountered across prosodic systems. It turns out that the ' word ' has no privileged or universal status in phonology, but only emerges through frequent reference of sound patterns to a given construction type in a given language.[1] This research was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Grant No. BI 799/ 2-3). We are indebted to Juliette Blevins, Tracy A. Hall, Larry Hyman, Sharon Inkelas, Jochen Trommer and three anonymous JL referees for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. For ancillary material, including summary reports of individual languages and a downloadable database, see www.uni-leipzig.de/yautotyp.

A key step in understanding the evolution of human language involves unravelling the origins of language’s syntactic structure. One approach seeks to reduce the core of syntax in humans to a single principle of recursive combination, merge, for which there is no evidence in other species. We argue for an alternative approach. We review evidence that beneath the staggering complexity of human syntax, there is an extensive layer of nonproductive, nonhierarchical syntax that can be fruitfully compared to animal call combinations. This is the essential groundwork that must be explored and integrated before we can elucidate, with sufficient precision, what exactly made it possible for human language to explode its syntactic capacity, transitioning from simple nonproductive combinations to the unrivalled complexity that we now have.

Phonology and syntax represent two layers of sound combination central to language's expressive power. Comparative animal studies represent one approach to understand the origins of these combinatorial layers. Traditionally, phonology, where meaningless sounds form words, has been considered a simpler combination than syntax, and thus should be more common in animals. A linguistically informed review of animal call sequences demonstrates that phonology in animal vocal systems is rare, whereas syntax is more widespread. In the light of this and the absence of phonology in some languages, we hypothesize that syntax, present in all languages, evolved before phonology.