Wittgenstein’s crucial insight. Although he had it seventy years ago, it’s hard to find a better account for the many different ways in which we deploy words: “The meaning of a word is its use in the language.”

none of our animal examples—from bees to sticklebacks and monkeys—exhibit all of the properties we see in human language: the vocal medium, interchangeability, arbitrariness and displacement.

Chomsky puts it, “a finite computational system yielding an infinity of expressions.”

Michael Tomasello, we don’t need to resort to UG to explain that. Instead, there’s a process of “entrenchment”—gradually, the more often they hear a verb used in a certain way, children will opt for that use, and assume that something they haven’t heard isn’t permissible—the no-negative-evidence problem isn’t really a problem at all.

Augustine thought that words stood for things in the world: point to the thing, and you get the meaning of the word. This is a code-like view: there is a one-to-one correspondence between the symbol and the object or idea,

is the extraordinary complexity of language a product of learning and interaction, or is it an inherited trait?

Productivity is the ability to renew and change the medium of expression, to adapt it, incredibly swiftly, to altered circumstances.

Recursion is, as we have now seen, the engine of one particular form of productivity. And productivity is one of the key attributes of human language

“Dilemma” sometimes means a difficult choice between two things, as per its etymology, but mostly it doesn’t. It means what people use it to mean: a tricky decision.