Compositionality

What is it about the part of the brain that handles language that makes it different from any other part of the brain? And what exactly is ‘language’? An excerpt from Talking Hands:

“What is it, in short, that the left hemisphere is so astonishingly good at? It isn’t speech or sign, but something more abstract that is a common denominator of both. It may have to do with what David Corina and his colleagues call “compositionality”. In a compositional system, a finite number of building blocks, meaningless in themselves, combine to yield units packed with meaning. The building blocks can be consonants and vowels or, as scholars now know, hand-shapes, locations and movements. These elements recombine according to a set of rules to create the words of human language. These words in turn are ordered by still more rules to make phrases and sentences. So few ingredients, so many possibilities.”

Maybe one thing thats makes us ‘artists’ is our ability to apply this mental capacity to forms. Hm, Language of Form?

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