Human communication is powered by rules for combining words to generate novel meanings. Such syntactical rules have long been assumed to be unique humans. A new study, published in Nature ...

And this demonstrates that "compositional syntax is not unique to human language but may have evolved independently in animals as one of the basic mechanisms of information transmission," he says.

Syntax rules determine whether a sentence is grammatically correct, and in linguistic analysis (parsing), understanding sentences involves breaking them into parts.