Was Jean Aitchison Calling Bird-Song Doubly Articulated?

An Ambiguous Term, "Language Development" · Is Gradualism Really That Impossible? · Was Jean Aitchison Calling Bird-Song Doubly Articulated?

I suppose she knew better, but from this paragraph*, some of her readers might not know better:

In birdsong, each individual note is meaningless: the sequence of notes is all-important. Similarily, in humans, a single segment of sound, such as b or l does not normally have a meaning. The output makes sense only if sounds are strung together. So this double-layering - known as duality or double articulation - is a further parallel. And in both birds and humans, sound segments are fitted into an overall rhythm or intonation pattern.

Human language is triple-layered, thanks to double articulation. Birdsong is - if at all - double-layered, thanks to one articulation, which is not double.

It might make sense to not consider individual notes as sound segments comparable to phonemes. The interval (with its rhythm and being itself an intonation) would be comparable to the phoneme. There are phonemes that include more than one sound in pure phonetics (which is not the same as phonematics). For instance the phoneme [ts] in some languages includes the sounds [t] and [s] or very close, but is itself a third phoneme beside [t] and [s], not a sequence of them. If we make this observation, I'm not sure there is even one articulation in the sense we talk about, I'm not sure there are even two layers, in bird song. It's just that bird beaks have so little room for differentiating vocalic sounds (owls perhaps excepted, with ooee and eeyoo) and nearly none for consonants, except as cutting off the individual note, that the tones need to take over, and as birds don't have more absolute ear than man, this means the "speech sound" is the interval.

But, apart from this observation, bird-song is at most double-layered, one articulation, notes set in a pattern that is meaningful.

Man has three layers : phonemes, that are meaningless each in itself, usually, are strung together (one articulation) into morphemes, that have some notional or sometimes meta-notional meaning. But morphemes themselves make only incomplete meaning, telling only what notion is evoked, not why it is so, and so there is a second stringing together of morphemes (with meta-morphemes) to form a phrase or sentence having complete meaning. The layers are therefore phrase, morpheme, phoneme, and the levels are kept apart by two different articulations.

But obviously, Jean Aitchison may have meant that in men, the triple layering is known as double articulation. Only, she didn't say it./HGL

* See link in previous PS.