Human languages are assembled from small sets of meaningless forms that can be combined to produce an infinite number of meanings. This property-which we will refer to as combinatoriality-has long been identified as a core design feature of language (Hockett, 1960). However, while combinatoriality is well attested throughout the world's languages, it is not universal. In their study of a recently emerged language, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL), Sandler et al. (2011) found very little evidence for combinatorial structure. The authors associated this absence with a strong tendency for iconicity-for signs to be intuitively motivated by what they refer to (517). This observation has implications for our understanding of the origins of combinatoriality. When the capacity for iconic representation is very limited (as in speech) combinatoriality should emerge early as an efficient solution to the problem of transmitting signals through a noisy channel (Nowak, Krakauer, & Dress, 1999; Hockett, 1960, 421). Iconicity, however, offers an efficient solution to a different problem: that of establishing new signs (Fay, Arbib, & Garrod, 2013). And, as the structure of a iconic system depends on the structure of the meaning space, it is likely to lack meaningless combinatorial structure, at least until the system's signs become conventionalised, a process that has only just started to occur in ABSL (Sandler et al., 2011, 526-536). In other words, the emergence of combinatoriality may require relatively low levels of iconicity, suggesting that-since speech has a far lesser capacity for iconicity than sign language (Taub, 2001)-we should take modality into account in explaining where combinatoriality comes from (cf. Goldin-Meadow & McNeill, 1999, 155).
展开▼
