Linguistics

First year

Lesson2

Unique properties of human language

We often hear and read stories whose characters are animals and which are made to talk just like
human beings do. But do animals talk? And if they ever do, is their language similar to that of
human beings?

Animals do, indeed, communicate as part of their instinctive behaviour and for the sake of
surviving .Researchers have dealt with and described the language of many species of animals
among which have been dolphins ,European robins, and bees .Indeed, this species have perhaps,
the most complex animal system of communication. However, human language has many
characteristics which distinguish it from all other systems possessed by animals. As a matter of
fact, these characteristics make of human language a unique pattern of behaviour that no other
living creature can ever perform. Among these characteristics are:

1-Displacement

When your cat comes home after spending a night in the yard 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 , you may get the same response. It seems
that animal communication is almost exclusively designed at this moment, here and now. It
cannot effectively be used to relate events which are removed in time and place .However,
humans are perfectly capable of producing messages equivalent to Meow , last night ,at the
moment and even in the future. This property of human language is called displacement. It
allows the users of language to talk about things and events whose existence we cannot be sure
of. We can refer to mythical creatures, demons, fairies, superman .......etc. It is the property that
allows the humans, unlike any other creature, to create and to describe possible future worlds.

It has been proposed that the bee communication does have the property of displacement.
e.g: when a worker bee finds many sources of nectar and turns to the hive, it can perform a
complex dance routine to communicate to the other bees the location of this nectar. Scientists
found that the rest of the bees go to the most recent source..Consequently, bee communication
has displacement in an extremely limited form.

2-Arbitrariness

It is generally the case that there is no natural connection between the linguistic form and
meaning. The connection is quite arbitrary. There are some words in language with sounds that
seem to reflect the sound of objects and activities, such as: crash, boom, slurp, squelch .
However, these onomatopoeic words are relatively rare in human language.

3-Productivity

Humans are continually creating new expressions and novel utterances by manipulating
their linguistic resources to describe new objects and situations. This property is described as
productivity or creativity or open-endedness. Researchers prove that bees can communicate the
nectar source but they 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 was placed at the top (vertical
position).Ten bees were taken to the top, shown them the food source and sent to tell the rest of
the hive about the food. They flew around in all directions (horizontally),but couldn't locate the
food. The bee cannot manipulate it's system of communication to create a new message
indicating vertical distance. According to Karl Boo Frisch, who conducted the experiment, «the
bees have no word for "up" in their language «and they cannot create one.

4-Cultural transmission

While humans may inherit physical features like brown eyes and dark hair from our parents,
we do not inherit their language. We acquire language in a culture with other speakers and not
from parental genes. An infant born to Korean parents in Korea , but adopted and brought up
from birth by English speakers in the United States, will have physical characteristics inherited
from his/her natural parents, but will inevitably speak English. A kitten given comparable early
experiences will produce meow regardless. This process whereby language is passed on from
one generation to the next is described as cultural transmission.

5-Talking to Animals

If these four properties of human language make it such a unique communication system,
quite different from the other communication systems of other creatures, then it would seem
extremely unlikely that other creatures would be able to understand it. Some humans, however,
do not behave as if this is the case. There is, after all, a lot of spoken language directed by
humans to animals under the impression that the animal follows what is being said, example:
riders can say "whoa" and "roll down" in response to spoken commands. Can we say, according
to these examples, that non humans understand the human language? Probably not. The standard
explanation is that the animal produces a particular behaviour in response to a particular sound
-stimulus or "noise", but does not understand what the words mean.

6-Duality

The human language is organised into two levels:

 A/higher level (primary articulation) in which language is conceived as a sequence of
meaningful units such as words , phrases , clauses , sentences....etc. this level is limitless and
infinite.

B/ a lower level (secondary articulation) in which language is conceived as a sequence of

meaningless units of language such as sounds , letters, ...etc. This level is limited.

7-Discreteness

The sounds used in language are meaningfully distinct, for example the difference
between / b /sound and /p / sound is not actually very great , but when these sounds are used in
a language, they are used in a way that the occurrence of one rather than the other is meaningful.
The usage of /p/ and /b/ in pack and back leads to a distinction in meaning can only be due to
the difference between the / p /and the/ b /sounds in English. Each sound in a language is treated
as discrete.

8- learnability

Any normal child when exposed to any language learns it. The ability of learning is innate.

9-Change

The human language is not static it changes through time and space. The process of change
is inevitable.