THE UNIQUENESS OF HUMAN LANGUAGE ANIMAL VS. HUMAN COMMUNICATION

Properties of lg (design features of lg)

•viewed as an attempt to define what lg is

•the idea of design features of lg was introduced by the American linguist Charles Hockett; both Hockett and others have occasionally proposed modifications to Hockett's original list of 16 features, and several versions of the list can be found

•Design features = a number of essential characteristics of human lg, language being the most remarkable and unique faculty that human beings possess

ARBITRARINESS

•the absence of any necessary connection between a linguistic form and its meaning; the actual signals used in human lg bear no resemblance at all to the things they stand for

•the relationship between a linguistic form and its meaning is a matter of social agreement: no word is intrinsically better suited to naming a particular thing than any other, though each is perfectly adequate as long as speakers agree about it

•such agreement need not be for all time: formerly swine, now pig; the decision as to which words shall have which meanings is entirely a matter of convention, and conventions can and do change;

•Arbitrariness and iconicity - iconicity as a direct correlation between form and meaning;

•examples of iconicity are provided by instances of onomatopoeia - the representation of sounds by words of similar sound, e.g. splash, clink, buzz, meow, moan, moo, quack, boom represent attempts to reproduce real-world sounds with English phonemes; but even these onomatopoeic items still exhibit a great deal of arbitrariness - examples?

OPEN ENDEDNESS (productivity or creativity)

•our ability to use lg to say anything at all, including lots of things we've never said or seen before - our ability to produce and understand new utterances virtually without limit

DUALITY (of patterning)

•every human lg makes use of 2 largely independent subsystems, one of sounds and the other of meanings

•this feature enables a small number of elements of one subsystem (the phonemes, i.e. roughly sounds) to be combined and recombined into units and patterns of meaning (the morphemes and syntax, i.e. roughly words and sentences) in the other subsystem

•duality is the use of a small number of meaningless elements in combination to produce a large number of meaningful elements

•regardless of the number of speech sounds used, every human lg is built on the principle of duality

DISPLACEMENT

•the use of lg to talk about things other than the here and now: it allows people to construct messages about the past, present and future, and also about real and imaginary worlds

•it allows the users of lg to talk about things and events not present in the immediate environment; it enables us to talk about things and places whose existence we cannot even be sure of

STIMULUS-FREEDOM

•the ability to say anything we like in any context;

•generally, there's no connection between words and the situations in which they are used such that occurrence of particular words is predictable from the situations themselves

CULTURAL (TRADITIONAL) TRANSMISSION

•lg is passed on from one generation to the next

•the specific lg a child acquires depends on the linguistic group into which that child is born; no one is genetically programmed to acquire a specific lg, although we mightbe programmed to acquire some lg

•all lgs are equally learnable as far as children are concerned

REFLEXIVENESS

•it refers to the use of language to talk about language, i.e., the system can be used to say something about the uses and characteristics of the system

•it allows us to develop a `metalanguage'

PREVARICATION

•it refers to the possible use of the system to mislead others deliberately false

ANIMAL COMMUNICATION

•can non-humans understand lg?

•can non-humans `talk'?

•an animal's particular behaviour in response to a particular sound-stimulus

EXPERIMENTS WITH CHIMPANZEES

•chimps and humans as closely related species: 99% of chimps' basic genetics in common with humans

•chimps raised with or as humans babies: Gua (raised with Donald; at the end of the experiment, Gua could understand ca. 95 words, Donald - 107); Viki (18 months could produce `mama', then `papa', `cup' and `up', however, poor articulation, some understanding of human speech;

•Washoe - taught American Sign Language (ASL)

•raised like a human child

•after 3,5 yrs, W. learned to use signs for more than 100 words, could produce sentences

•showed some creativity: her word `bib' for `water bird'

•understood more signs than could produce

•later, when living in an ape colony, taught Loulis some signs

The uniqueness of human lg - the biological evidence for innate lg capacity

•to investigate the issue of human beings' `exclusivity' for lg - necessary to look at structural and physiological adaptations of human beings related to lg; we are going to see that human lungs, teeth, lips and vocal cords have evolved in such a way as to facilitate speech

•human teeth: unusual if compared with those of other animals - even in height, upright, not slanting outwards, and the bottom and the top set meet; such regularity is certainly not necessary for eating, but for the articulation of a number of sounds, e.g. s, f, v, sh or th

•the mouth: considerably more developed muscles of lips; the mouth is relatively small and can be opened and shut rapidly . makes it simple to pronounce p and b ; the tongue - thick, muscular and mobile (as opposed to monkeys' tongues) thanks to which the size of the cavity can be varied, allowing a range of vowels to be pronounced

•the larynx: simpler in structure than that of other primates, but this is an advantage: air can move freely past and then out through the nose and mouth; but humans pay for this: a monkey can seal its mouth from its windpipe and breathe while it is eating; humans cannot do this so we often choke on food

•the lungs: nothing peculiar in the structure but our breathing seems to be adapted to speech: nobreathing problems while talking; no one has to instruct a child in the breathing adaptations required for talking

•the brain: pre-programmed for lg; lateralisation - the localisation of lg to one half of the brain- is a natural biologically-based phenomenon; animals' central nervous systems are inadequate for speech - there are fewer neural connections between the mouth and the brain

•multiplicity of processes that are taking place in speech production and comprehension; simultaneous integration of those processes essential

REFERENCES

Trask, R. L., 1995 Language: The Basics. Routledge: London & New York.

Wardhaugh, R., 1993 Investigating Language. \Blackwell: Oxford UK & Cambridge US

Yule, G. 1985. The Study of Language. CUP.

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