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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Biolinguistics | 8/9 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biolinguistics | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T15:12:54.694527+00:00 | kb-cron |
It becomes more clear that neither of these two systems can exist alone with regards to human language when we look at the phenomenon of 'labeling'. This phenomenon refers to how we classify the grammatical category of phrases, where the grammatical category of the phrase is dependent on the grammatical category of one of the words within the phrase, called the head. For example, in the phrase "buy the books", the verb "buy" is the head, and we call the entire phrase a verb-phrase. There is also a smaller phrase within this verb-phrase, a determiner phrase, "the books" because of the determiner "the". What makes this phenomenon interesting is that it allows for hierarchical structure within phrases. This has implications on how we combine words to form phrases and eventually sentences.
This labelling phenomenon has limitations however. Some labels can combine and others cannot. For example, two lexical structure labels cannot directly combine. The two nouns, "Lucy" and "dress" cannot directly be combined. Likewise, neither can the noun "pencil" be merged with the adjective "short", nor can the verbs, "want" and "drink" cannot be merged without anything in between. As represented by the schematic below, all of these examples are impossible lexical structures. This shows that there is a limitation where lexical categories can only be one layer deep. However, these limitations can be overcome with the insertion of an expression layer in between. For example, to combine "John" and "book", adding a determiner such as "-'s" makes this a possible combination. Another limitation regards the recursive nature of the expressive layer. While it is true that CP and TP can come together to form hierarchical structure, this CP TP structure cannot repeat on top of itself: it is only a single layer deep. This restriction is common to both the expressive layer in humans, but also in birdsong. This similarity strengthens the tie between the pre-existing E system posited to have originated in birdsong and the E layers found in human language.
Due to these limitations in each system, where both lexical and expressive categories can only be one layer deep, the recursive and unbounded hierarchical structure of human language is surprising. The Integration hypothesis posits that it is the combination of these two types of layers that results in such a rich hierarchical structure. The alternation between L layers and E layers is what allows human language to reach an arbitrary depth of layers. For example, in the phrase "Eat the cake that Mary baked", the tree structure shows an alternation between L and E layers. This can easily be described by two phrase rules: (i) LP → L EP and (ii) EP → E LP. The recursion that is possible is plainly seen by transforming these phrase rules into bracket notation. The LP in (i) can be written as [L EP]. Then, adding an E layer to this LP to create an EP would result in [E [L EP]]. After, a more complex LP could be obtained by adding an L layer to the EP, resulting in [L [E [L EP]]]. This can continue forever and would result in the recognizable deep structures found in human language.
==== The operation of E and L components in the syntax of sentences ==== The E and L components can be used to explain the syntactic structures that make up sentences in human languages. The first component, the L component, contains content words. This component is responsible for carrying the lexical information that relays the underlying meaning behind a sentence. However, combinations consisting solely of L component content words do not result in grammatical sentences. This issue is resolved through the interaction of the L component with the E component. The E component is made up of function words: words that are responsible for inserting syntactic information about the syntactic categories of L component words, as well as morphosyntactic information about clause-typing, question, number, case and focus. Since these added elements complement the content words in the L component, the E component can be thought of as being applied to the L component. Considering that the L component is solely composed of lexical information and the E component is solely composed of syntactic information, they do exist as two independent systems. However, for the rise of such a complex system as human language, the two systems are necessarily reliant on each other. This aligns with Chomsky's proposal of duality of semantics which suggests that human language is composed of these two distinct components. In this way, it is logical as to why the convergence of these two components was necessary in order to enable the functionality of human language as we know it today. Looking at the following example taken from the article The integration hypothesis of human language evolution and the nature of contemporary languages by Miyagawa et al., each word can be identified as either being either an L component or an E component in the sentence: Did John eat pizza?