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At first glance, the chestnut-crowned babbler’s capacity for communication may seem comparable to the way humans form meaningful words from meaningless phonemes. Should this line of thought be taken seriously, or is this one for the birds? Theoretical linguist Riny Huybregts critically dissects claims that the babbler’s capacity for vocal calls provides an evolutionary basis for human speech.

Studies on animal combinatoriality, particularly in birds, have evoked heated discussion among linguists. Some researchers doubt whether animal communication is comparable to human linguistic structures.

In a great many languages, subjects of sentences are associated with a fixed set of different properties: they are assigned Nominative Case, show Person, Number and Gender Agreement with the inflected verb, and, finally, cooccur with finite verbs only. French and Dutch may be viewed as paradigm cases that exemplify these features for SVO and SOV languages respectively. However, this clustering of properties constitutes only a contingent, not a necessary, truth about some languages. In fact, these properties do not in general covary in UG but are mutually independent, at least partially. Rouveret (1980) and Raposo (1987) discuss inflected infinitives in European Portuguese with Subject-Verb Agreement independent of Tense. Conversely, George and Kornfilt (1981) argue that complement clauses in Turkish may have Tense independent of Subject-Verb Agreement. In all these languages Nominative Case and Subject-Verb Agreement show covariation. The one constant property, which does not vary across languages, seems to be that Subject-Verb Agreement occurs if and only if Subject receives Nominative Case. The correlation will be explained if we hypothesize that Nominative Case is assigned under Specifier-Head Agreement (SHAGR). 1 In the next sections, however, it will be shown that Subject-Verb Agreement in VSO-languages, in particular Standard Arabic, disturbs the present picture. In particular, we will see that Nominative Case assignment and Agreement do not always covary. Moreover, we will point out an apparent asymmetry in the properties of operator bound variables of Standard Arabic and Celtic.

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