According to Chris Golston, California State University Fresno, who will present this topic at Friday’s colloquium talk in room E-0105 starting at 14.15.
His abstract:
I show that thirty common grammatical categories are used in animal cognition and are in no way limited to humans or to communication. Based on this, I hypothesize that the semantics behind grammatical categories—including person, number, gender, tense and aspect—were fixed by the time of the human-chimpanzee split; that many go back as far as vertebrates; and that some are shared with plants.