What is language, why do we use it, and how did it evolve? These are questions that language researchers are still working to answer. From a basic standpoint, a language is a shared system of symbols ...

Human communication is powered by rules for combining words to generate novel meanings. Such syntactical rules have long been assumed to be unique humans. A new study, published in Nature ...

And this demonstrates that "compositional syntax is not unique to human language but may have evolved independently in animals as one of the basic mechanisms of information transmission," he says.