"The evolution of hierarchically structured communication" by Ronald J. Planer
Human language sentences are standardly understood as exhibiting considerable hierarchical structure: they can and typically do contain parts that in turn contain parts, etc. In other words, sentences are thought to generally exhibit significant nested part-whole structure. As far as we can tell, this is not a feature of the gestural or vocal communication systems of our great ape relatives. So, one of the many challenges we face in providing a theory of human language evolution is to explain the evolution of hierarchically structured communication in our line. This article takes up that chall...
Source: uow.edu.au