8. Hockett's "design features" of language and other animal communication systems Bee dancing Western meadowlark song Gibbon calls Signing apes Alex, a Grey parrot Human sign languages Spoken language Vocal-auditory channel No Yes Yes No Yes No Yes Interchangeability Limited ? Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Total feedback ? Yes Yes No Yes No Yes Specialization ? Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Semanticity Yes In part Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Arbitrariness No If semantic, yes Yes Largely yes Yes Largely yes Yes Discreteness No ? Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Displacement Yes, always ? No Yes No Yes, often Yes, often Productivity Yes ? No Debatable Limited Yes Yes Traditional transmission Probably not ? ? Limited Limited Yes Yes
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Editor's Notes
Words were created because they sound like the things to which they refer It evolved as a adaptation shaped by natural selection. arose as a side effect of something else (i.e. increase in brain size, increase in general intelligence, etc.).
Primates use visual, auditory, tactile, & olfactory signals to communicate. Vervet monkey: chutter to warn others about a snake.
Language is a discrete combinatorial system. Well-ordered sentences depend on ordering syntactic categories of words in correct sequences. Sentences are built around verbs. We can distinguish words that do the semantic work of the language from words that assist in the syntactic work of the language. Recursion, phrases containing examples of themselves, enables us to construct an infinite number of sentences from a finite number of rules.
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