Chapter 3

The properties of language

Human is not the only creature which is capable of communicating. All
creatures, from apes, bees, cicadas, dolphins, are capable of communicating
with other members of their species.
Communicative versus informative
We should first distinguish what are communicative signals from those which
may be unintentionally informative signals. A person listening to you may
become informed about you via a number of signals which you have not
intentionally sent, may note that you have a cold (you sneezed), that you aren't
at ease (you shifted around in your seat), that you are disorganized (nonmatching socks), and that you from some other part of the country (you have a
strange accent). However, when you use language to tell this person, "I would
like to apply for the vacant position of senior brain surgeon at the hospital," you
are normally considered to be intentionally communicating something. By the
same token, the blackbird is not normally taken to be communicating anything
having black feathers, perching on a branch and eating a warm, but is
considered to be sending a communicative signal with the loud squawking when
a cat appears on the scene.
Unique properties
There have been a number of attempts to determine the defining properties of
human language, and different lists of features can be found. We shall take six
of these features and describe how they are manifested in human language. We
shall also try to describe in what ways these features are uniquely a part of
human language and unlikely to be found in the communication systems of
other creatures.
We can now consider some the properties which the bipeds believe are unique
to their linguistic systems.
The properties which differentiate human language from all other
Languages and which make it a unique type of communication
1. Displacement
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When your pet cat comes home after spending a night in the back alleys and
stands at your feet calling meow, you are likely to understand this message as
relating to that immediate time and place. If you ask the cat where it was the
night before and what it was up to, you may get the same meow response. It
seems that animal communication is almost exclusively designed for its
moment, here and now. It can not effectively be used to relate events which are
far removed in time and place. When your dog says GRRR, it is likely, I mean
GRRR, right now because it does not appear capable of communicating
GRRR last night, over in the park. Now, human language users are capable of
producing messages equivalent to GRRR, last night, going on to say "In fact, I'll
be going back tomorrow ".They can refer to past and future time, and to other
locations. This property of human language is called displacement. It allows the
users to talk about things and events not present in the immediate moment.
Animal communication is generally considered to lack this property.
However, it has been proposed that bee communication does have the property
of displacement. For example, when a worker bee finds a source of nectar and
returns to the hive, it can perform a complex dance routine to communicate to
the other bees the location of this nectar. Depending on the type of dance (round
dance for nearby and tail-wagging dance, with variable tempo, for further away
and how far), the other bees can work out where this newly discovered feast can
be found. This ability of the bee to indicate a location some distance away must
mean that bee communication has at least some degree of displacement as a
feature. The crucial consideration involved, of course, is that of degree. Bee
communication has displacement in an extremely limited form. Certainly, the
bee can direct other bees to a food source. However, it must be the most recent
food source. It can not be that rose garden on the other side of town that we
visited last weekend, nor can it be, as far as we know, possible future nectar in
bee heaven.
The factors involved in the property of displacement, as it is manifested in
human language, are much more comprehensive than the communication of a
single location. It enables us to talk about things and places whose existence we
can not even be sure of. We can refer to mythical creatures, demons, fairies,
angels, Santa Claus, and recently invented characters such as Superman. It is the
property of displacement that allows the human, unlike any other creature, to
create fiction and to describe possible future worlds.
2. Arbitrariness

It is generally the case that there is no 'natural' connection between a linguistic

form and its meaning. Recognizing this general fact about language leads us to
conclude that a property of linguistic signs is their arbitrary relationship with the
objects they are used to indicate. The forms of human language demonstrate a
property called arbitrariness: they do not, in any way, 'fit' the objects they
denote.
However, there are some words in language which have sounds which seem to
'echo' the sounds of objects or activities. English examples might be cuckoo,
CRASH, slurp, squelch or whirr, which are onomatopoeic. In most languages,
however, these onomatopoeic words are relatively rare, and the vast majority of
linguistic expressions are arbitrary.
For the majority of animal signals, there does appear to be a clear connection
between the conveyed message and the signal used to convey it. This
impression we have of the non-arbitrariness of animal signaling may be closely
connected with the fact that, for any animal, the set of signals used in
communication is finite. That is, each variety of animal communication consists
of a fixed and limited set of (vocal or gestural) forms. Many of these forms are
used only in specific situations (e.g. establishing territory) and at particular
times (e.g. during the mating season).
3. Productivity
It is a feature of all languages that novel utterances are continually being
created. A child learning language is especially active in forming and producing
utterances which he or she has never heard before. With adults, new situations
arise or new objects have to be described, so the language-users manipulate
their linguistic resources to produce new expressions and new sentences! This
property of human language has been termed productivity (or 'creativity', or
'open-endedness'). It is an aspect of language which is linked to the fact that the
potential number of utterances in any human language is infinite.
Non-human signaling, in contrast, appears to have little flexibility. Cicadas have
four signals to choose from and vervet monkeys have about thirty-six vocal
calls (including the noises for vomiting and sneezing). Nor does it seem
possible for animals to produce 'new' signals to communicate novel experiences
or events. The worker bee, normally able to communicate the location of a
nectar source, will fail to do so if the location is really 'new'. In one experiment,
a hive of bees was placed at the foot of a radio tower and a food source at the
top. Ten bees were taken to the top, shown the food source, and sent off to tell
the rest of the hive about their find. The message was conveyed via a bee dance
and the whole gang buzzed off to get the free food. They flew around in all
directions, but couldn't locate the food. The problem may be that bee
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communication regarding location has a fixed set of signals, all of which relate
to horizontal distance. The bee can not manipulate its communication system to
create a 'new' message indicating vertical distance.
The problem seems to be that animal signals have a feature called fixed
reference. Each signal is fixed as relating to a particular object or occasion.
4. Cultural transmission
While you may inherit brown eyes and dark hair from your parents, you do not
inherit their language. You acquire language and culture with other speakers and
not from parental genes. An infant born to Korean parents who have never left
Korea and speak only Korean, which is adopted and brought up from birth by
English speakers in the United States, may have physical characteristics
inherited from its natural parents, but it will inevitably speak English.
This process whereby language is passed on from one generation to the next is
described as cultural transmission. While it has been argued that humans are
born with an innate predisposition to acquire language, it is clear that they are
not born with the ability to produce utterances in a specific language, such as
English .The general pattern of animal communication is that the signals used
are instinctive and not learned.
Human infants, growing up in isolation, produce no 'instinctive' language.
Cultural transmission of a specific language is crucial in the human acquisition
process.
5. Discreteness
The sounds used in language are meaningfully distinct. For example, the
difference between a /b/ sound and a /p/ sound is not actually very great, but
when these sounds are part of a language like English, they are used in such a
way that the occurrence of one rather than the other is meaningful. The fact that
the pronunciation of the forms pack and back leads to a distinction in meaning
can only be due to the difference between the /p/ and /b/ sounds in English .This
property of language is described as discreteness. Each sound in the language is
treated as discrete.
6. Duality
Language is organized at two levels or layers simultaneously. This property is
called duality, or 'double articulation'. In terms of speech production, we have
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the physical level at which we can produce individual sounds, like /n/, /b/ and
/i/. As individual sounds, none of these discrete forms has any intrinsic
meaning. When we produce those sounds in a particular combination, as in bin,
we have another level producing meaning which is different from the meaning
of the combination in nib. So, at one level, we have distinct sounds, and, at
another level, we have distinct meanings .This duality of levels is, in fact, one of
the most economical features of human language, since with a limited set of
distinct sounds we are capable of producing a very large number of sound
combinations (e.g. words) which are distinct in meaning.
Other properties
1. The use of the vocal-auditory channel is a feature of human speech. Human
linguistic communication is typically generated via the vocal organs and
perceived via the ears. Linguistic communication, however, can also be
transmitted without sound, via writing or via the sign languages of the deaf.
Moreover, many other species (e.g. dolphins) use the vocal-auditory channel.
Thus, this property is not a defining feature of human language.
2. Reciprocity: any speaker/sender of a linguistic signal can also be a
listener/receiver.
3. Specialization: linguistic signals do not normally serve any other type of
purpose, such as breathing or feeding.
4. Non-directionality: linguistic signals can be picked up by anyone within
hearing, even unseen.
5. Rapid fade: linguistic signals are produced and disappear quickly.
6. Prevarication: lying and deception, which appear to be particularly human
traits, may have prompted Charles Hockett (1963) to include them (in technical
terms, as prevarication) as a possible property of human language. In discussing
this property, he claimed that "linguistic messages can be false" while "lying
seems extremely rare among animals".
Most of these are properties of the spoken language, but not of the written
language. They are also not present in animal communication systems which
characteristically use the visual mode or involve frequent repetition of the same
signal.
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Chapter 4
Animals and human language
* Can Non- humans understand human language?
In fact, animals may produce particular behaviors in response to a particular
sound stimulus, but do not actually 'understand' the meaning of the word
uttered.
If it seems difficult to conceive animals 'understanding' human language, then it
appears to be even less likely that an animal would be capable of 'producing'
human language.
Chimpanzees and language
A chimpanzee does have 99% of its basic genetics in common with the human.
The idea of raising a chimpanzee and a child together may seem like a
nightmare, but this is basically what was done in an early attempt to teach a
chimpanzee to use human language.
In the 1930s, two scientists (Luella and Winthrop Kellogg) reported on their
experiences of raising an infant chimpanzee together with their infant son. The
chimpanzee, called Gua, was reported to be able to understand about a hundred
words, but did not 'say' any of them. In the 1940s, a chimpanzee named Viki
was reared by another scientist couple (Catherine and Keith Hayes) in their own
home, exactly as if she were a human child. These foster parents spent five
years attempting to get Viki to 'say' English words by trying to shape her mouth
as she produced sounds. Viki eventually managed to produce some 'words',
rather poorly articulated versions of mama, papa and cup. In retrospect, this was
a remarkable achievement since it has become clear that non-human primates
do not have a physically structured vocal tract which is suitable for producing
human speech sounds. Apes and gorillas can, like chimpanzees, communicate
with a wide range of vocal calls, but they just can not speak.