How much grammar does it take to sail a boat?

Gil, David

doi:10.1093/oso/9780199545216.003.0002

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How much grammar does it take to sail a boat?

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Gil, David
Department of Linguistics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Max Planck Society;

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Citation

Gil, D. (2009). How much grammar does it take to sail a boat? In ed. by Geoffrey Sampson, David Gil and Peter Trudgill (Ed.), Language complexity as an evolving variable (pp. 19-33). Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780199545216.003.0002.

Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-000F-2987-B

Abstract

Human languages are of much greater complexity than the communicative systems of great apes, dolphins, bees, and other animals.1 Similarly, human culture, technology, and civilization are also immensely more complicated than anything observed in other species, such as the ways in which chimpanzees fashion tools to crack nuts or fish for termites. Clearly, these two facts are related: comparing humans to other species leads inexorably to the conclusion that linguistic complexity is correlated with complexity in other, non-linguistic domains. But what exactly is the nature of this correlation?