Language (contd.

Properties of Language
 Humanity & Language
• Although we talk to one another every day, we seldom
consider how remarkable it is that we can do so.
– Yet the ability to speak and comprehend the messages of
language requires knowledge of an enormous number of
linguistic elements and rules.
• Language and culture together are critical to the
development of human individuals.
• Language and culture provide our minds with most of the
concepts and terms for thought itself.
• Thus, the workings of the human mind depend crucially on
the knowledge of some language.
• In addition to socially learning their culture,
during socialization children master the
sounds, words, meanings, and grammatical
rules they need to send and receive complex
messages.
– Language is the shared knowledge of these
elements and rules.
• Along with humanity’s dependence on
culture, our ability to communicate complex,
precise information is the main mental
capability that distinguishes humans from
other animals.
• Let’s begin by discussing a few of many
reasons language is so remarkable.
Several points reveal the importance of language for human life.
1. First, Homo sapiens is the only animal capable of speech and
the only animal biologically evolved to speak and understand
true language.
– Other animals—including honeybees, social species of ants and
termites, some whales and dolphins, gorillas, and chimpanzees—
are capable of impressive feats of communication, but only humans
have language in a fully developed form.
– With the aid of intensive training from humans, chimpanzees and
gorillas can learn to use sign language or to manipulate symbols
standing for words and concepts into sentences.
• With no human interference, one chimp taught sign language to another
and later they used it to communicate with one another.
– Despite these feats, no great ape is capable of responding to this
simple request: “What are you going to do tomorrow?”
• In fact, language is so critical to humanity that
it helped shape our biological evolution.
• This includes, of course, the speech regions of
our brain, but it also includes our vocal tract.
• The human vocal tract consists of the lungs,
trachea (including vocal cords), mouth, and
nasal passages.
– The vocal tract is biologically evolved for speech.
– It is a remarkable resonating chamber.
Following are a few examples:
• Changing the position of the tongue modifies
the shape of the mouth and produces sounds
of different wavelengths which human ears
recognize as different sounds:
– Compare where your tongue is for the vowels in
sit and set, in far and fur, and in teeth and tooth.
• You produce most consonants by interrupting
the flow of air through the mouth.
– The initial sound of the word tip is formed by
bringing the tip of the tongue into contact with
the alveolar ridge just behind the teeth and then
releasing the contact suddenly.
– You change tip to sip by blowing air through your
mouth while almost, but not quite, touching the
tip of your tongue to your alveolar ridge, thus
making the initial sound a brief hissing noise.
• Your vocal cords interact with other parts of
your vocal tract.
– Either they vibrate and produce a buzzy sound (as
in “mmmm”),
– or they remain open and allow air to flow into
your mouth freely
• contrast the sound h in how with the first w in wow.
2. Language makes it possible for people to
communicate and think about abstract
concepts as well as about concrete persons,
places, things, actions, and events.
• Among these abstractions are truth, evil,
God, masculinity, wealth, values, humanity,
zero, law, jihad, universal, space, and hatred.
• Without the ability to conceptualize such
abstractions, culture as we experience it
could not exist.
– Our everyday behavior is greatly affected by
abstract contrasts such as friend and enemy, food
and poison, beautiful and ugly, play and work.
3. Social learning by which children acquire
culture would be impossible without language.
– Language makes it possible for the knowledge in
one person’s mind to be transmitted into the mind
of another person.
– During enculturation, not only do we learn “facts”
and “lessons” about the world, but we also hear
(or read) stories and myths, whose lessons are only
implicit.
• The worldview of a culture is communicated
and shaped by language.
4. Language allows humanity to enjoy the benefits of
the most complete and precise form of
communication in any animal.
• We can communicate incredibly detailed
information about past, present, and future events.
– In fact, we can learn about events that happened far
away and long ago and speculate about events that
could possibly happen tomorrow but probably won’t.
– We can tell lies, discuss plans, contingencies, and
possible courses of action, based on our expectations
about what might happen in the future.
• All these are things humans do so routinely that we
consider them ordinary.
 story so far
Language is powerful.
• It makes abstract thought possible.
• It allows the relatively quick and easy
transmission of information from one
individual, and generation, to another.
• It allows the communication of complex and
precise messages, including speculations and
lies.
 Properties of Language
• Of the 13 properties identifies by Charles
Hockett in 1960, five are important for our
purposes.
1. Discreteness.
2. Arbitrariness.
3. Productivity.
4. Displacement.
5. Multimedia Potential.
 1. Discreteness
• Discreteness means that when we speak we combine
units (sounds and words) according to shared and
conventional rules.
• Knowing a language means knowing both the units
and the rules for combining them.
• Words are composed of discrete units of sound (e.g., j,
u, m, p) that are combined to communicate a meaning
(jump).
• Similarly, we apply rules to combine units of meanings
(words) to form sentences.
• Discrete sounds are the metaphorical building blocks of language.
– Discreteness makes alphabets possible.
• In alphabetic writing, people combine the letters of their alphabet
to form printed words.
– Originally, each sound of the English alphabet was pronounced in a
similar way in all the words in which it appeared.
• For example, the letter (sound) t appears in student, textbook, eat, and today.
– But most letters no longer represent a single sound.
• The letter a, for example, is pronounced differently in the words act, father,
warden, assume, and nature.
– Some single sounds in English are rendered in spelling as two letters, such
as th, ng, and the gh in rough.
• Its because changes in how words are spelled have lagged behind
changes in pronunciation since the invention of the printing press.
• By themselves, most sounds carry no meaning: the three sounds in cat, for
example, are meaningless when pronounced by themselves.
– But by combining this limited number of sounds in different ways, we form
meaningful words.
• Thus, the three sounds in cat can be put together in different sequences to form the words act
and tack.
• Words, then, are composed of sound combinations that a speech
community recognizes as conveying standardized meanings.
• Just as all languages use a small number of sounds to make a large number
of words, words are combined according to the grammatical rules of the
language to convey the complex messages carried by sentences.
• By mastering their language’s words and meanings, and the rules for
combining words into sentences, speakers and listeners can send and
receive messages of great complexity with amazing precision
– e.g., “From the basket of apples on your left, hand me the reddest one on the
bottom.”
 2. Arbitrariness
The relationship between the sound combinations that make up words
and the meanings these words communicate is arbitrary, so words are
symbols.
• As we learn to speak, we learn the combinations of sounds that are
permissible according to the rules of their language.
– For instance, in English, nt (absent, accent), mp (amp, blimp, camp), and ld (old, hold,
field) are all possible combinations,
– but pm, tn, and dl are not (although used by other languages).
• We also learn to match certain sound combinations (words) with
their meanings.
– By the age of 1 or 2, most children have learned the meanings of dozens of
words. They have mastered many words that refer to objects (ball), animals
(cattie), people (baba), sensory experiences (hot), qualities (blue, hard),
actions (eat, run), commands (no, come here), emotions (love), and so forth.
 – The child learns to associate meanings with words, even
though the specific sound combinations that convey
these various meanings have no inherent relationship to
the things themselves.
• Because the relationship between meanings and
words or sentences is arbitrary, our ability to
communicate linguistic messages is based on
conventions shared by the sender and receiver of a
message.
– “Keeping it real” in response to how’s life going?
• When we learn a language, we master these
conventions about meanings, just as we master
pronunciations and other things.
 3. Productivity
• Productivity refers to a speaker’s ability to create totally novel
sentences and to a listener’s ability to comprehend them.
• Productivity means that a language’s finite number of words can
be combined into an infinite number of meaningful sentences.
– The sentences are meaningful because the speaker and listener know
what each word means individually and the rules by which they may be
combined to convey messages.
• The amazing thing is that individuals are not consciously aware
of their knowledge of these rules, although they routinely apply
them each time they speak and hear.
– For example, unless you have linguistic training, you probably do not
know that you form an English plural by adding one of two sounds
(either –z or –s) to the end of a noun.
• contrast the last sounds of beans and beats.
 4. Displacement
Displacement refers to our ability to talk about objects, people, things, and
events that are remote in time and space.
• Language has this property because it uses symbols (words and
sentences) to transmit meanings, so things and people do not have to be
immediately visible for us to communicate about them.
• We can discuss someone who is out of sight because the symbols of
language (a name) call that person to mind, allowing us to think about
him or her.
– We can speculate about the future because, although its events may never
happen, our language has symbols that stand for future time, and more symbols
that allow us to form a mental image of possible events.
– We can learn about events that happened before we were born, such as wars in
1965 and 1971.
– People can learn of events and things far away in space, such as fighting in
Afghanistan and Iraq, explorations of the moon and Mars, factories in China and
India, and oil spills in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico.
• The displacement property also makes it possible
to describe things (like ghosts) and places (like
Avatar) that do not even exist.
• We tell one another stories about events that
might not have really happened, and thus create
myths, fiction, legends, fairy tales, and folklore.
• Political leaders can mislead citizens, and be misled
themselves, about mysterious energy crisis.
• Much that is familiar in human life depends on this
important property—including the ability to lie.
 5. Multimedia Potential
• Messages use some medium for their transmission from
sender to recipient.
– For example, writing is the medium in which the messages on this
slide are transmitted.
– When you speak, the medium for your message is speech,
transmitted to the ears of your listeners by sound waves.
– Gestures and bodily movements are communications media that
are received by the sense of sight rather than hearing.
• Language has multimedia potential, meaning that linguistic
messages can be transmitted through a variety of media.
• The original medium for language was speech.
• Beginning around 5000 years ago, the ancient Sumerians,
Egyptians, Chinese, and the ancient Mesoamerican peoples
known as Zapotecs and Mayans developed writing.
– This new medium of communication began as a way to keep
records of taxes, labor, oracles, the passage of time (calendars), and
military conquests.
• Over several centuries, writing techniques spread to other
regions such as the Greek islands, southern Asia, Japan,
Korea, and western Europe.
• We take writing so much for granted that it is hard to
imagine life without books and magazines, computers and
the Internet, street signs and billboards, and other “media.”
• Hand gestures and movements are mediums for the hearing
impaired.
• Even touching and the resulting nerve signals can be a
medium for language.
– Helen Keller, both blind and deaf, communicated and received
linguistic messages by touch.
• Together, discreteness, arbitrariness, productivity,
displacement, and multimedia potential make language the
most precise and complete system of communication
known among living things.
– Because of them, you understand the following lie perfectly
although you’ve never read or heard it before: “Last Tuesday at
7:02 P.M., I saw you chase my neighbor’s dog around the street
and bite its ear.”
– Furthermore, you are completely sure I’m lying.
All 13 properties of Language
 Review
Property Description

Discreteness Minimal units of sounds and meanings may be combined in

Arbitrariness Meanings of words cannot be understood or deduced by people

Productivity Finite numbers of words can be combined into an infinite number

Displacement People can discuss objects, persons, and events that are not
immediately present or that are imaginary, or in future.

Multimedia Messages can be transmitted through many media, e.g., sound,

• WORD COUNT: 750-1000.