This document discusses several key properties that distinguish human language from animal communication. It describes how human language is intentional, displaced in time and space, arbitrary in form, productive in creating new utterances, culturally transmitted across generations, discrete with distinct meaningful sounds, and dual in organizing both form and meaning. Animal communication by comparison is described as generally non-intentional, tied to the immediate context, finite in signals, and lacking displacement and productivity. The document uses various examples to illustrate these differences between human and animal communication systems.

1. Introduction to Linguistic (2)
Communicative vs informative
The properties of language

2. Communicative vs informative (1)
• A person listening to you may become informed
about you via a number of signals which you have
not intentionally sent.
• Other person may note that you have a cold (you
sneezed), that you are not at ease (you shifted around
in your seat), that you are untidy (unbrushed hair,
rumpled clothing), that you are disorganized (nonmatching socks), and that you are from some other
part of the country (you have a strange accent).

3. Communicative vs informative (2)
• However, when you use language to tell other
person, “I would like to apply for a 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 by having
black feather, perching on a branch and eating a
worm, but is considered to be sending a
communicative signal with the loud squawking to
be heard when a cat appears on the scene.

4. Communicative vs informative (3)
• We can consider the distinction between
human language and animal communication,
we are considering both in terms of their
potential as a means of intentional
communication.

5. Displacement (1)
• 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 this moment, here
and now.

6. Displacement (2)
• This property of human language is called
displacement. It allows the users of language
to talk about things and events not present in
the immediate environment. Animal
communication is generally considered to lack
this property.

7. Arbitrariness (1)
• The linguistic form of the word “dog” has no
natural or ‘iconic’ relationship with that fourlegged barking object out in the world.
• The forms of human language demonstrate a
property called arbitrariness – they do not, in
any way, ‘fit’ the objects they denote.
• There are of course, some words in language
which have sounds which seem to ‘echo’ the
sounds of objects or activities which are called
as onomatopoeic.

8. Arbitrariness (2)
• This impression we have of the nonarbitrariness of animal signaling may be
closely connected with the fact that, for any
animal, the set of signals used in
communication is finite.

9. Productivity (1)
• A child learning language is especially active
in forming and producing utterances which he
or she has never heard before.
• This property of human language has been
termed productivity (creativity or openendedness).
• It is an aspect of language which is linked to
the fact that the potential number of utterances
in any human language is infinite.

10. Productivity (2)
• 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.
• Among the monkey’s repetoire, there is one
danger signal CHUTTER which is used when
a snake is round

11. Cultural transmission
• An infant born to Chinese parents (who live in China
and speak Cantonese), which is brought up from birth
by English speakers in the United States, may have
physical characteristic inherited from its natural
parent, but it 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.

12. 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 used in a
language, they used in such a way that the
occurrence of one rather than the other is
meaningful.
• This property of language is described as
discreteness.

13. Duality
• Language is organized at two levels or layers
simultaneously. This property is called duality.
• When we produce the sounds of n, b, and i in
particular combination, as in bin, we have
another level producing a meaning which is
different from the meaning of the combination
in nib.