AND PROSODY IN IRISH*

One of the stranger properties of human language is the way in which it creates a bridge between two worlds which ought not be linked, and which seem not to be linked in any other species—a bridge linking the world of concepts, ideas and propositions with the world of muscular gestures whose outputs are perceivable. Because this link is made in us we can do what no other creature can do: we can externalize our internal and subjective mental states in ways that expose them to scrutiny by others and by ourselves. The existence of this bridge depends in turn on a system or systems which can take the complex structures used in cognition (hierarchical and recursive) and translate them step by step into the kinds of representations that our motor system knows how to deal with. In the largest sense, our goal in the research reported on here is to help better understand those systems and in particular the processes of serialization and flattening that make it possible to span the divide between the two worlds. In doing this, we study something which is of central importance to the question of what language is and how it might have emerged in our species. Establishing sequential order is, obviously, a key part of the process of serialization. And given the overall perspective just suggested, it is