SCOPE-KNOWLEDGE AND LANGUAGE

Scope

What is language?

Linguist Charles Hockett, in a Scientific American article called ‘The Origin of Speech’,
published in 1960, described a constellation (i.e. metaphor for a group of things that can
go together) of features which he proposed as the defining characteristics of language.

This list of 13 separate features has had a long-lasting influence in the field of linguistics
– the study of language – particularly in terms of describing what language is.

Although Hockett listed 13 separate features, we will consider 6 here:

1. Semanticity
2. Arbitrariness
3. Displacement
4. Duality
5. Productivity
6. Traditional transmission

Semanticity- Specific sound signals are directly tied to certain meanings.

This feature of language refers to the fact that language is made up of units of meaning,
or words. In written language, words are made up of letters, while in spoken language
words are made up of sounds. Another feature of the semanticity of language is that the
words – whether written or spoken – have stable meanings (Hockett 6). A cat is always a
cat; it is never a rat or a hat or a bat, regardless of the fact that all of those words have
similar sounds and similar letters. The English word ‘cat’ has stood for the domestic feline
that we are used to since its appearance in Old English around about the year 700 (‘Cat

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(n)’).

Arbitrariness
This feature of language refers to the fact that the words do not have any kind of essential
connection to the things that they stand for. A cat is not like the word ‘cat’. It isn’t a short
sort of squished object made of three parts. It doesn’t make a noise like ‘cat’. It isn’t
shaped like something that is partly semi-circular, partly triangular and partly cross-like.
Hockett used the examples of the word ‘whale’, which is a pretty small word for a very
large animal contrasted with the word ‘micro-organism’ which is just the opposite – a very
large word for a very small creature (Hockett 6).

These are all examples of the arbitrariness of language, and the implication of this feature
is that language is symbolic. The words and sounds of language stand for things other

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than themselves. If language was not arbitrary, then all languages would be identical.
Words would have to be the same because there would be some indivisible relationship
between the word and the thing it stood for. Instead, the word for the animal known in
English as ‘cat’ is different in French (chat), Spanish (gato), Russian (кошка – pronounced
‘koshka’), Swahili (paka) and so on.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS

Can all knowledge be expressed in words or symbols? Is it possible to think

or know without language?

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DEEPER THINKING
Language and ambiguity

One important aspect of the semanticity of words is that words have meaning. That may
seem a very obvious point to make, but one of the common barriers to communication is
the failure to say what one means precisely. People sometimes resort to ambiguities,
intentionally or not, and sometimes they just use words incorrectly. Sentences might be
ungrammatical. One very common problem that results in lack of clarity is the failure to
actually state assumptions. It is easy to assume that what you mean will be clear in
context, but very often the context is not enough for your listener or reader. An important
part of your job as a speaker or writer is to ensure that you are clear enough for your
audience to understand what you mean.

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Consider the examples given in the table below.

Ambiguous sentences

Unclear sentence Nature of the problem

That suggests that this won’t work.
Two pronouns which ought to be followed
by explanatory nouns but are not. Contrast
this with this sentence: ‘That obstacle
suggests that this plan won’t work.’ Better
still: ‘Your mother’s objection to our plan
suggests that the plan will not work.’ Each
of these sentences is more precise than
the previous one, and the more precise the
sentence, the less likely it is to be
misunderstood.

‘Ahmed wanted me to explain myself, but ‘Reticent’ is the wrong word in this

I was reticent to repeat the mean situation. ‘Reticent’ means that I am a

statement that I overhead.’ person who doesn’t speak much, but it is a

more general term than ‘reluctant’, in that
‘reticent’ describes someone who
generally doesn’t like to speak up. We can
say, for example, ‘My friend Asha is a
reticent person. It is hard to get to know
her’. ‘Reluctant’ is what is wanted here. ‘I
was reluctant to repeat the mean
statement that I overheard’ is a clear and
proper sentence.

The car stopped at the rest stop for a soda. This sentence is ambiguous, because it is
ungrammatical. The car did not stop for a

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soda – the car cannot drink a soda. The

car didn’t actually stop itself, either. The
grammatical problem is that the subject of
the sentence, the car, cannot do the
actions assigned to it. One way to fix the
problem would be to say: ‘We stopped at
the rest stop so we could all get sodas.’ We
have to remove ‘the car’ as the subject.

Everything is terrible. This is a gross overgeneralization. It is

never true that ‘everything’ is terrible.
Somewhere in the world, someone is
laughing and happy, someone is giving a
gift to someone else, or helping someone
solve a problem. Some discovery is being
made. Someone who was very ill is now
getting better. The word ‘everything’ is just
way too general. It would be much better
to say: ‘The family dinner turned out to be
a disaster. The dinner was overcooked,
the cat got into the dessert and ruined it,
there was a malfunction with the alarm
system and the fire department came and
blasted the house with their hoses before
they realized there was no fire. And Great
Aunt Matilda showed up and insulted
everybody present, one after the other.’
Obviously, this description of what
happened is much longer, but it is much
more precise, and it is more likely to
generate genuine sympathy than the

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generalization is.

Displacement
This feature of language refers to the fact that language allows us to recall,
describe and share information about events, people, objects and ideas
which are removed from us in time and space. We can talk about the time
that Kevin Martin’s rink won the Olympic Gold Medal in Curling in Vancouver,
Canada, in 2010, even if we are sitting in Christchurch, New Zealand, in
2020. We can talk about how the word ‘cat’ arose in Old English (as catt) in
about 700, even though Old English shifted into Middle English in about 1100
and then modern English arose in about 1500, so none of us have any direct
experience with Old English. We can use language to discuss the beginning
of the Raj in India in 1858 and the end of the Raj in 1947 (Kaul), as well as
the fact that the Raj was the colonial rule of India by Britain, and we can talk
about these things today, from wherever we are reading and thinking about
or discussing this paragraph. The concept of displacement shows us, in other
words, that language allows us to know about things that we have had no
opportunity to experience – and which we can never have any opportunity to
experience any other way.

Duality
Duality, as by word is clear. it means human language is dual in nature. At one level we
produce distinct or single sounds such as /b/, /m/, /k/, /i/, /n/, /u/, etc. We produce these
sounds for example a baby at early stage produce only sounds but after sometime he/she
starts to produce words with these sounds and sometimes those words are produced
which even do not exist in language. With these few sounds given above we can make
several words such as "bin, nib, mum, etc."

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Thus, at one level we produce distinct sounds and at another level we produce distinct
words with distinct meanings.

Productivity
This feature of language is related to the idea of duality. Languages are made up of a
relatively small number of symbols – letters, words or other characters, such as the kanji
in Japanese. Despite the small number, however, we can combine these symbols to
create a virtually unlimited number of utterances or sentences (Hockett 6). ‘Productivity’
also describes the fact that you can create a sentence which no one has ever created
before, but which will be perfectly understandable by fluent users of the language.

Consider this sentence, for example:

What is geocaching?
https://youtu.be/vuFiLhhCNww

After finding the geocache called ‘The Bard’ in Dallas, Texas, my brother and I were so
excited that we decided that we would take on the challenge of designing a comparable
challenge for geocachers in Virginia, and that we would include, as part of the caching
challenge, a specially-built puzzle using a wood block and some dowels.

Perhaps you need to know a little something about geocaching in order to fully understand
that sentence, but it is a perfectly grammatical sentence which describes a perfectly
plausible real-world situation, and the odds/likelihood that anyone else has written or said
exactly this sentence are extremely small. Productivity also describes the fact that we can
create perfectly good sentences which describe events or people that do not exist in the
real world.

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Here’s an example:

ACTIVITY
Try productivity for yourself:

1 Write three sentences which you feel confident have never been written
or uttered before. If you speak more than one language, try it in each
language.

2 How difficult was it to do this?

3 Do you think any other speakers of that language or those languages

would have any difficulty understanding your sentences?

4 What does the concept of productivity reveal about the scope of language
in terms of its relation to knowledge?

The productivity of a language is increased by the fact that often words can mean entirely
different things in different contexts. The word ‘quark’, which we saw on the previous page
is the name of a subatomic particle and is also the name of a soft white cheese related to
cottage cheese and which originated in eastern Europe (‘Quark’). When a word can have
different meanings, we know the meaning by how it is used in context. If we were talking
about cheeses from Poland and happened to mention quark, no one would be confused
and think that we were talking about the subatomic particle, and if we were talking about
how, in physics, there are particles which are smaller than atoms, no one would think we
were talking about cheese.

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A final feature which contributes to the productivity of language is the fact that we can use
a word to describe something that we have never seen before because we recognize the
features of the object. Consider all of these pictures of cats, for example:

We recognize them all as cats, even though they look quite different from each other in
some ways. We can also recognize the following animals as cats, even though they are
very different from the cats above:

The word ‘cat’ consists of only three letters, but it can be used to name a huge variety of
animals. We would not be confused about what animal was being referred to because the
context would let us know. This capacity of a symbol to stand for many things also
contributes to the productivity of languages.

Traditional transmission
This final feature of language refers to the fact that language is passed from one
generation to the next. We are undoubtedly born with some innate capacity to learn
language, but the specifics of the language that we learn are acquired from exposure to
the culture around us. Babies born to English-speaking parents in Australia learn

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Australian English. Those same babies, however, had they been born to Japanese-
speaking parents in Japan, would have been native speakers of Japanese. Some children
are born to bilingual families and so learn to speak two languages natively. Perhaps you
are friends with students whose parents immigrated from another country and who were
born into households where the parents speak one language because they were raised
entirely in a country where another language is spoken. Those children might be native
speakers of your country and may speak their parents’ language only a little or not at all.
Language is learned. What language you speak depends on the language that was
transmitted to you by the people around you.

KNOWLEDGE QUESTION
Does the transmission of knowledge from one person or
generation to another depend on language?

A final implication of the fact that language is traditionally transmitted is the fact that it
allows us to preserve knowledge and pass it down from one generation to the next, so
that, over time, human understanding of the world increases. Technological development
is a direct result of the fact that language is transmitted rather than inborn. We create
more and more complicated technologies by building (literally and figuratively) on the
knowledge that came before.

Apart from spoken and written language there are other familiar forms of language that
share these characteristics:

sign language and braille, for example, exhibit all of these features and can be
understood, therefore, as fully developed languages. ‘Body language’, on the
other hand, although it is called language, does not have most of these features.
Certainly, we can communicate with our bodies – we are particularly good at conveying
emotions through gestures and facial expressions – but ‘body language’ does not have
any of the six features that we named.

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Discuss:

Examples of knowledge questions- Scope

• Can all knowledge be expressed in words or symbols?
• Is it possible to think or know without language?
• Is being able to speak a language an example of “knowing how” to do
something?
• What role does language play in allowing knowledge to be shared with future
generations?
• Are there differences in how knowledge itself is conceived of, or presented, in
different languages?
• Is it the case that if we cannot express something, we don’t know it?
• To what extent does language allow us to make our private experiences public?
• How does language allow humans to pool resources and share knowledge?

(Taken from Subject Guide)

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