The Nature of Language
All animals have some system for communicating with other members of their species, but only humans have a language which allows them to produce and understand ever-new messages and to do so without any outside stimulus. Bees, birds, dolphins and chimpanzees, among other animals, transmit and interpret a fixed number of messages that signal friendliness or hostility, the presence of food or of danger, or have to do with mating and care of offspring. But human language differs from these animal communication systems in two crucial ways (Hockett 1957:574–85; Bickerton 1990: 10–16). First, animals can communicate only in response to some particular stimulus. Bees, when they have located a source of nectar in some group of plants, fly back to their hive and report this discovery by doing a dance that indicates the approximate direction and distance to the site, but in general non-human communication takes place on the spot, and is concerned with what is immediately present. No animal can tell another one about past experiences, and still less are they able to communicate their plans for the future. Humans alone are able to talk about vast numbers of things which come from accumulated knowledge, memory and imagination. Human language is stimulus-free. Second, while animals have only a fixed repertoire of messages, human language is creative: we are always producing new utterances which others understand; we comprehend new sentences which others have produced (as you understand this sentence, though it is not likely you have read it before).
The importance of stimulus-freedom and creativity is often overlooked. Throughout history various thinkers have tried to describe and explain language as if language is only related to the phenomenal world, the objects and events that we can observe through our senses. The simple fact is that the human mind deals easily and frequently with what does not exist, or what does not yet exist. Nobody can explain just how people are able to abstract elements from their sensory world and put these elements together in ways that are partly familiar, partly new. Yet that is just what happens when the architect envisions a building not yet erected, the composer puts together a concerto that is still to be played, a writer devises a story about imaginary people doing imaginary things, or when all of us take delight in nonsense and concoct names for things that might exist or might not. The productivity of language is due to another feature which distinguishes our communication from that of other animals. While some bird songs are different arrangements of a repertory of elements, generally each signal emitted by a dog or donkey or dolphin is an indivisible unit, different from any other signal that the animal may utter. Human utterances, on the other hand, are composed of interchangeable units on two levels. An utterance consists of words in a particular sequence (at least one word and usually more than one), and a word consists of sound-units, or phonemes, in a particular order. A fairly small number of phonemes, which are meaningless, combine to make a vast number of meaningful words; for example, the English words pat, tap and apt consist of the same three phonemes, differently arranged, and these three phonemes occur over and over in combinations with a relatively small number of other phonemes to make up thousands of combinations that we call words. This freedom from context is possible only because language is conventional, or has the feature of arbitrariness. There is no natural relation between the word goat, for instance, and what that word designates. Since ancient times people have been arguing about whether language is ‘natural’ or not. We can only conclude that it is natural for humans to have language—that a human child has a natural propensity to acquire the language which is used by the members of its family. But the ways in which meanings are communicated through language are not natural, nor is one language more natural
than another. All human societies have language and—contrary to some popular but unfounded opinions—every known language is complex and subtle, capable of expressing whatever its speakers need to express and capable of changing to meet the changing needs of the speakers.
The importance of stimulus-freedom and creativity is often overlooked. Throughout history various thinkers have tried to describe and explain language as if language is only related to the phenomenal world, the objects and events that we can observe through our senses. The simple fact is that the human mind deals easily and frequently with what does not exist, or what does not yet exist. Nobody can explain just how people are able to abstract elements from their sensory world and put these elements together in ways that are partly familiar, partly new. Yet that is just what happens when the architect envisions a building not yet erected, the composer puts together a concerto that is still to be played, a writer devises a story about imaginary people doing imaginary things, or when all of us take delight in nonsense and concoct names for things that might exist or might not. The productivity of language is due to another feature which distinguishes our communication from that of other animals. While some bird songs are different arrangements of a repertory of elements, generally each signal emitted by a dog or donkey or dolphin is an indivisible unit, different from any other signal that the animal may utter. Human utterances, on the other hand, are composed of interchangeable units on two levels. An utterance consists of words in a particular sequence (at least one word and usually more than one), and a word consists of sound-units, or phonemes, in a particular order. A fairly small number of phonemes, which are meaningless, combine to make a vast number of meaningful words; for example, the English words pat, tap and apt consist of the same three phonemes, differently arranged, and these three phonemes occur over and over in combinations with a relatively small number of other phonemes to make up thousands of combinations that we call words. This freedom from context is possible only because language is conventional, or has the feature of arbitrariness. There is no natural relation between the word goat, for instance, and what that word designates. Since ancient times people have been arguing about whether language is ‘natural’ or not. We can only conclude that it is natural for humans to have language—that a human child has a natural propensity to acquire the language which is used by the members of its family. But the ways in which meanings are communicated through language are not natural, nor is one language more natural
than another. All human societies have language and—contrary to some popular but unfounded opinions—every known language is complex and subtle, capable of expressing whatever its speakers need to express and capable of changing to meet the changing needs of the speakers.
0 Responses on "The Nature of Language"
Post a Comment