CHAPTER 2: WHAT IS A LANGUAGE?

It is a specialized sound signalling system which seems to be genetically

programmed to develop in humans.
Use of sound signals: humans’ use of sounds is not unique. Many other species
also communicate with sounds.
Arbitrariness: ln human lg, in the majority of cases, there is no link between the
signal and the message that wants to be conveyed. The symbols used are arbitrary.
This is different from animals, there is a close connection between the signal and the
message (they show it with body movement and sounds).
The need for learning: On the one hand, many animals know how to communicate
without learning- their systems of communication are genetically inbuilt. On the other
hand, humans are born with some type of innate predisposition towards lg...but this
latent potentiality can be activated only by long exposure to lg. It means that lg is
culturally transmitted.
Duality: In human lg, each lg has a stock of sounds (phonemes) that are (normally)
meaningless in isolation but that become meaningful when combined with
others.This organization of lg is known as duality (first there’s a layer of sounds and
secondly, they are combined into a second layer of larger units). Animals also have a
stock of basic sounds but the number of messages they can send is restricted to
these sounds… Most of the time they can use each sound only once and they can’t
combine them.
Displacement: It refers to the human ability of communicating about things that are
absent as well as about things that are present. On the other hand, animals can only
communicate about things in the immediate environment.
Creativity (productivity): Most animals have a very limited number of messages
they can send or receive. On the other hand, humans’ lg is essentially creative as
they can produce novel utterances whenever they want to.
Patterning: Many animal communication systems consist of a simple list of
elements without internal organization. On the other hand, human language is
organized in very well-defined patterns, it is not individual items organized randomly.
Lg therefore can be regarded as an intricate network of interlinked elements in which
every item is held in its place and given its identity by all the other items.
Structure dependence: language operations are structure dependent; this means
that they depend on an understanding of the internal structure of the sentence rather
than on the number of elements involved. It is impossible for anybody to form
sentences and understand them unless they realize that each one has an invisible
structure which cannot be discovered by mechanical means.