Languages tend to encode events from the perspective of agents, placing them first and in simpler forms than patients. This agent bias is mirrored by cognition: Agents are more quickly recognized than patients and generally attract more attention. This leads to the hypothesis that key aspects of language structure are fundamentally rooted in a cognition that decomposes events into agents, actions, and patients, privileging agents. Although this type of event representation is almost certainly universal across languages, it remains unclear whether the underlying cognition is uniquely human or more widespread in animals. Here, we review a range of evidence from primates and other animals, which suggests that agent-based event decomposition is phylogenetically older than humans. We propose a research program to test this hypothesis in great apes and human infants, with the goal to resolve one of the major questions in the evolution of language, the origins of syntax.

中文翻译：

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句法的进化起源：非人类灵长类动物的事件认知


语言倾向于从主体的角度对事件进行编码，将它们放在第一位，并且以比患者更简单的形式。这种代理人偏见反映在认知上：代理人比患者更快地被识别，并且通常会吸引更多的注意力。这导致了这样的假设：语言结构的关键方面从根本上植根于将事件分解为主体、动作和患者、特权主体的认知。尽管这种类型的事件表示几乎肯定是跨语言普遍存在的，但目前尚不清楚其潜在认知是人类独有的还是在动物中更为普遍。在这里，我们回顾了来自灵长类动物和其他动物的一系列证据，这表明基于主体的事件分解在系统发育上比人类更古老。我们提出了一项研究计划，在类人猿和人类婴儿身上检验这一假设，目的是解决语言进化中的主要问题之一，即句法的起源。