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ANIMAL & HUMAN LANGUAGE - Coggle Diagram
ANIMAL & HUMAN LANGUAGE
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PROPERTIES OF LANGUAGE
ANIMALS
- Displacement
- Designed for the immediate place and time (here & now)
- Arbitrariness
- There is a connection between the conveyed message and the signal used to convey it
- Consists of a fixed and limited set of vocal or gestural forms.
- Productivity
- Have limited sets of signals to choose from (fixed references)
- They cannot produce any new signals to describe novel experiences
- Cultural Transmission
- Born with a set of specific signals that are produced instinctively
- Duality (double-articulation)
- Animal's coommunicative signals are fixed and cannot be broken down into separate parts (meow as in m+e+o+w)
HUMANS
- Productivity
- Continually create new expressions and utterances to describe new objects and situations
- The number of utterance in any human language is infinite
- Arbitrariness
- The relation between linguistic forms and the objects they refer.
- There are some words (onomatopeia) in language with sounds that seems to 'echo' the sounds of objects or actions (less arbitrary) ['hiss' or 'boom']
- Displacement:
- humans can use language to refer to the past, present and future
- humans can talk about things and places whose existence we cannot be sure of (angels, demons, hell, heaven, superman, fairies)
[animals lack this property]
- Cultural Transmission
- Humans inherit physical features from their parents but not language.
- We acquire a lnguage in a culture with other speakers (not from parental genes)
- Language is passed on from one generation to the next.
- We are born with a predisposition to acquire language (but not with ability to produce utterances in a specifi language)
- Duality (double-articulation)
- Human language is organized at 2 levels or layers simultaneously: (distinct sounds & distinct meanings)
- One of the most economical features of human language