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Do They Speak Language?

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Abstract

The question: are humans the only animals endowed with language? must be preceded by the question: what makes language a unique communication system? The American linguist Charles F. Hockett answers the second question by listing what he considers the criteria that differentiate language from other communication systems. His ‘design-feature’ approach, first presented in 1958, has become a popular tool by which the communication systems of non-human animals are guaranteed a priori exclusion from the notion of language. However, the results of interspecific communication research and the discovery of language–like qualities in the natural communication systems of non-human animals (as opposed to the artificial systems devised to further language research) demonstrate that language capabilities have evolved in parallel in many species. Thus Hockett’s approach is thoroughly undermined, and in need of revision. The more fundamental question that must be faced by the design-feature approach is: are its features essential for language as a distinct and vivid phenomenon, or merely applied to language as an object of linguistic investigation? This paper offers a detailed overview of Hockett’s design-features and emphasizes the problematic nature of certain characteristics. Following Slobodchikoff and Segerdahl et al., the paper shows that language cannot be defined as an exclusive quality of a single species.

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Notes

  1. However, the very first public mention of those seven design-features emerged the previous year, in his ’A Course in Modern Linguistic.’

  2. “The meaningful elements in any language – ‘words’ in everyday parlance, ‘morphemes’ to the linguist – constitute an enormous stock.” (Hockett 1982:6) Nevertheless, words and morphemes are not synonymous. For example, the word animals has two morphemes animal (base morpheme = morpheme giving a meaning to the word) and s (suffix = a morpheme that comes after a base morpheme).

  3. DF 1 = Design-Feature 1; and so forth.

  4. Abstract symbols representing words

  5. LRC—Language Research Center – (Segerdahl et al. 2005).

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  1. Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Charles University in Prague, Viničná 7, 128 43, Praha 2, Czech Republic

    Lucie Čadková

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Čadková, L. Do They Speak Language?. Biosemiotics 8, 9–27 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-014-9225-9

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