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 (non-matching 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

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 connec­-
tion 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 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 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