Reacción a "The language of bonobos has characteristics that were previously thought to be exclusive to human beings, according to a study"

The study is unique and highly valuable because of its unusual combination of applying theoretical concepts from linguistics on behaviour data from one of humans’ closest living relatives, the bonobos.

In addition, all this was done with data collected in real-life situations and under very difficult field conditions in the apes’ natural habitat, the Congolese forest.

Berthet et al. adopt a position proposed by an eminent linguist, Philippe Schlenker, who distinguishes between ‘trivial’ and ‘nontrivial’ compositionality. The study then argues that nontrivial compositionality has never been shown in animal communication, suggesting that this is a first demonstration of an early precursor of a core component of language.

Compositionality is usually defined in terms of operations of meanings. For instance, ‘strawberry’ and ‘cake’ can be bound into a single referent ‘strawberry cake’, with its own meaning, derived from the two constituent meanings.

Not everyone agrees that the distinction between trivial vs nontrivial compositionality is useful, although there seem to be indeed different flavours of compositionality, some involving true binding, others mere lists of meanings. 

However, most people agree that compositionality is a generative machine that takes meanings as input and outputs new meanings. But Berthet et al do not have any direct information on the meaning of the calls they have recorded; instead they make inferences about the meaning from the context of call production. 

In the end, it will be necessary to ask the bonobos themselves whether they agree with the proposed dictionary and the meaning compositions identified by the authors.