A critical feature of language is that the form of words need not bear any perceptual similarity to their function -these relationships can be 'arbitrary'. The capacity to process these arbitrary formfunction associations facilitates the enormous expressive power of language. However, the evolutionary roots of our capacity for arbitrariness, i.e. the extent to which related abilities may be shared with animals, is largely unexamined. We argue this is due to the challenges of applying such an intrinsically linguistic concept to animal communication, and address this by proposing a novel conceptual framework highlighting a key underpinning of linguistic arbitrariness, which is nevertheless applicable to non-human species. Specifically, we focus on the capacity to associate alternative functions with a signal, or alternative signals with a function, a feature we refer to as optionality. We apply this framework to a broad survey of findings from animal communication studies and identify five key dimensions of communicative optionality: signal production, signal adjustment, signal usage, signal combinatoriality and signal perception. We find that optionality is widespread in non-human animals across each of these dimensions, although only humans demonstrate it in all five. Finally, we discuss the relevance of optionality to behavioural and cognitive domains outside of communication. This investigation provides a powerful new conceptual framework for the cross-species investigation of the origins of arbitrariness, and promises to generate original insights into animal communication and language evolution more generally.
According to the perceptual view of language comprehension, listeners typically recover high-level linguistic properties such as utterance meaning without inferential work. The perceptual view is subject to the Objection from Context: since utterance meaning is massively context-sensitive, and context-sensitivity requires cognitive inference, the perceptual view is false. In recent work, Berit Brogaard provides a challenging reply to this objection. She argues that in language comprehension context-sensitivity is typically exercised not through inferences, but rather through top-down perceptual modulations or perceptual learning. This paper provides a complete formulation of the Objection from Context and evaluates Brogaard's reply to it. Drawing on conceptual considerations and empirical examples, we argue that the exercise of context-sensitivity in language comprehension does, in fact, typically involve inference.
According to Originalism, word types are non-eternal continuants which are individuated by their causal-historical lineage and have a unique possible time of origination. This view collides with the intuition that individual words can be added to the lexicon of a language at different times, and generates other problematic consequences. The paper shows that such undesired results can be accommodated without abandoning Originalism. Keywords originalism; words; types; individuation; identity; events DOI:10.1002/tht3.202 According to Originalism (ORG) (Sainsbury and Tye 2012, pp. 58-63;Sainsbury 2015), word types are non-eternal continuants individuated by their causal-historical origin. Rather than on the basis of their intrinsic features, words should be typed by considering the baptism-like circumstances in which they originated, and the chain of linguistic transmission responsible for their propagation through the community of their users. Structural-functional attributes such as spelling, phonological form, syntactic category, or semantic features fail to individuate word types. Since words evolve, they may change in any of these respects while preserving their type-identity. For ORG, the correct view is that a collection C of word tokens clusters under a type W if the spatiotemporal distribution of C makes up a consistent lineage of deference-based W-reproducing events which lead back to the singular event in which the first token of W was produced. Importantly, word types stand in a one-to-one correspondence with originating event tokens: each word type is paired with a unique originating event token, and no two distinct event tokens can originate the same word type.As a restricted thesis about the individuation of names, ORG appears plausible, since it offers a nice way to track the well-established distinction between generic and specific names popularized by Kaplan (1990). As an unrestricted thesis about word individuation, however, ORG looks much more contentious. One crucial problem is the following. Suppose, with ORG, that if W is a word type of a language L, there is an originating event token E, occurring at a time t E , which introduces W in L. Suppose also, in line with ORG's requirement that word types stand in a one-to-one correspondence with originating event tokens, that no individual word type other than W can be introduced in L through E, and that no event token other than E can yield the origination of W. Then assume that the
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