Questions About Language

What Everyone Should Know About Language in the 21st Century

Laurie Bauer, Andreea S. Calude, Laurie Bauer, Andreea S. Calude

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000043372
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Idiomas

Questions About Language sets out to answer, in a readable yet insightful format, a series of vital questions about language, some of which language specialists are regularly asked, and some of which are so surprising that only the specialists think about them.

In this handy guide, sixteen language experts answer challenging questions about language, from What makes a language a language? to Do people swear because they don't know enough words? Illustrating the complexity of human language, and the way in which we use it, the twelve chapters each end with a section on further reading for anyone interested in following up on the topic.

Covering core questions about language, this is essential reading for both students new to language and linguistics and the interested general reader.

1 Do animals communicate using a language?

Stephen R. Anderson

Introduction

How we take this question clearly depends on how we define its terms. If communication is a matter of one organism emitting some indicator (behavioural or otherwise) from which another organism derives information, then it is evident that animals do this, even bacteria, some of which are sensitive to chemical signals produced by others, and whose activity is regulated in part by this (Miller and Bassler 2001). Everything from there on up “communicates” in this general sense.

Indeed, genes themselves communicate with one another: the inappropriately described “Language gene” FOXP2 codes for a protein that does not build structure but is rather a transcription factor that regulates the expression of a variety of other genes (Fisher and Vernes 2015). Everything turns on what we want to think of as a “language”.

The word is sometimes used in a way that includes essentially any collection of indicators with reasonably consistent interpretations in some context: thus, one finds mention of the “language” of traffic lights, the “language of the cinema”, etc. If that is what we mean by a language, there is no question that animals of all sorts do indeed “communicate using a language”, and the question becomes essentially trivial. If, on the other hand, we mean by language “the method of human communication, either spoken or written, consisting of the use of words in a structured and conventional way”, as my online dictionary (https://lexico.com/en/definition/language) puts it, the question becomes an interesting one: do the communication systems of animals have the essential properties of human language or not?

Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle (Lofting 1920 et seq.) certainly believed animal communication systems have the same character and expressive capacity as human languages, though perhaps sometimes conveyed in different modalities. That made for a series of good stories, but the scientific issue of the relation between animal and human “languages” remains (see Anderson [2004] for discussion). The current chapter, then, approaches the matter by attempting to outline the central properties of specifically human language, asking how known animal communication systems line up in this regard.

Some essential properties of human language

Over the years, numerous efforts have been made to characterize human language in its relation to the communication systems of other organisms, and to identify important differences. Undoubtedly, the best known in this regard is the effort of Charles Hockett to identify the “Design Features” of human language, a framework that evolved somewhat over time and whose last formulation is in Hockett (1960). This effort, however, like many that preceded it, suffers somewhat from its purely external and descriptive nature: that is, Hockett tries to identify the character of communicative systems (including language) in terms of their communicative function. In contrast, the focus of the present chapter is on the cognitive capacities that underlie the possibilities of communication, a perspective that provides a somewhat more categorical delineation of human language as opposed to other systems, while also drawing out some previously under-emphasized parallels.

We can take as a starting point a widely noted feature of human language that seems to provide a unique strength, its richness and flexibility of expression: the essentially unbounded range of things that sentences in a language can express, including the ability to refer to things and situations arbitrarily distant from the speech situation in time and space, to things and situations that may not or do not exist, to logical relations between states of affairs as well as to those states themselves, etc. Descriptively, this aspect of human languages is inescapable, but we must ask what sort of capacity supports it, and how this capacity is grounded in the nature of our species. We approach this in terms of the organization of linguistic knowledge as this is characterized in modern theories of language.

Syntax and semantics

Glossing over a great many matters of detail, it is fair to say that students of language agree that our knowledge of a language includes several distinguishable components. Among these, obviously, is our knowledge of a range of lexical items, the words of the language. Each of these is a direct association between an externalizable expression and the meaning of that expression.

While some of these meanings are tied to a specific situation – pronouns, such as I, we, you, they and demonstratives such as this, that, there, then – most are independent of a particular context. The word cat designates a particular kind of animal, regardless of whether we are talking about the one on the mat, one that we used to have or might plan to look for at the animal shelter, or the fact that some object looks like a small bear and not like a cat. The meanings of words include not only objects, actions and properties, but also relations (on, around, if … then) and logical operators such as not, all, any. The properties of the lexical items of our language, the diversity and range of the meanings they can convey directly, obviously begins to account for the richness of human linguistic expression referred to above.

The notion of a word is a notoriously difficult one and may differ somewhat from one language to another. Some of the lexical elements of a language, in the sense of expressions that have a direct relation to meaning, may consist of more than one “word” in another sense: thus, when something does not cut the mustard we mean it does not meet our expectations, where no part of cut the mustard corresponds to some part of ‘meet expectations’, but rather the whole expression has this sense irreducibly. Idioms of this sort are part of our lexical knowledge along with simple words.

If you ask the proverbial person on the street what is involved in learning another language, the answer might often be the need to learn the words of that language, but obviously there is more involved than that. In particular, our knowledge of a language also includes knowledge of a system of syntax, principles by which the words of the language are combined with one another to form larger structural units: phrases, clauses, sentences. Languages differ from one another in the ways in which these units are constructed: in Turkish, the verb in a simple declarative sentence comes at the end, while in Irish it comes at the beginning and in English after the subject but before the object. The extent to which these apparent differences actually follow in some way from some more general principles is a matter of dispute among theories, but our point here is that there is always some system to syntactic combination. In no language are words simply strung together at random, although some languages allow considerable freedom of word order, in association with ways of marking individual words to allow their structural relations to be recovered.

By itself, the richness of lexical meaning does not adequately account for the fact that humans have an unbounded range of things that can be expressed in language. Syntactic combination expands the possibilities of lexical expression by means of what Steven Pinker (1994) has called a “discrete combinatorial system”: new messages are formed as new combinations of members of a set of basic elements, rather than as novel signals or as modulations of intensity or some other continuous variable in an existing message. This system is based on recursive, hierarchical combination, where “recursion” refers to the fact that structural units can include other instances of the same sort as components. As a result, there is no limit to the number of different structures that can be accommodated by a small, fixed number of structural regularities.

Given the principles for constructing a few basic phrase types, these can be re-used to produce and understand an unbounded range of novel expressions. For instance, a sentence like (1) below is built up from a comparatively small vocabulary, together with a few principles governing the structure of prepositional phrases, noun phrases and verb phrases. Since a prepositional phrase, for example, can contain a noun phase as a constituent, and a noun phrase in its turn can contain a prepositional phrase, it is easy to see that this small set of structures can be used to construct novel messages of arbitrary length.

1. (1) [s [np [np The cat] [pp in [np [np the picture] [pp on [np my phone]]]]] [vp resembles [np the one [s that you [vp lost]]]]]
   (In this representation, the subscripted labels identify the category of the phrase composed of the material enclosed in the corresponding brackets, where S = ‘Sentence’, NP = ‘Noun Phrase’, VP = ‘Verb Phrase’ and PP = ‘Prepositional Phrase’.)

Our lexical knowledge, then, together with the principles of the syntax, underlies our knowledge of a potentially unlimited collection of distinct (and distinguishable) symbolic expressions. This knowledge, in turn, is completed by our knowledge of the ways in which these expressions have their meaning, as a function of the meanings of their parts and the manner of their combination. We know that (in informal if traditional terms) when the verb phrase feed the cat is formed from the verb feed and the noun phrase the cat (itself formed from the determiner the and the noun cat), the cat is to be interpreted as the direct object of feed. The resultant combined meaning can then be further combined with the meaning of another noun phrase, interpreted as its subject, to yield the overall interpretation of a sentence like The cat-sitter will feed the cat (incorporating also the future sense contributed by will). This kind of knowledge of the semantics of linguistic expressions is another component of our overall knowledge of our language.

Phonology and morphology

Discussion of the cognitive underpinnings of the rich expressivity of human language often stop at a discussion of words, their syntax and recursivity, but these are not the only structural dimensions that deserve discussion in this regard. One of Hockett’s (1960) “design features” for language was what he called “duality of patterning”. Languages are built on the basis of not just one combinatory system, the syntax, but also rely on another: phonology. The syntactic system combines meaningful words into larger meaningful units (phrases, clauses, etc.) while the phonological system combines individually meaningless elements (sounds, or in their linguistic function phonemes) into meaningful words. A relatively small number of sound units (44 in English, according to one widespread account, with a few more or less in any particular dialect) combine according to strict rules to form all of the thousands and thousands of words in the language.

It is tempting to see the presence of phonology as simply an ornament, an inessential elaboration of the way basic meaningful units are formed. This would be a mistake, however: it is phonology that makes it possible for speakers of a language to expand its vocabulary at will and without effective limit. If every new word had to be constructed in such a way as to make it holistically distinct from all others, our capacity to remember, deploy and recognize an inventory of such signs would be severely limited, probably to something like a few hundred. As it is, however, a new word is constructed simply as a new combination of the inventory of familiar basic sound types, built up according to the regularities of the language’s phonology. This is what enables us to extend the language’s lexicon freely as new concepts and conditions require.

It is necessary to note in this regard that speech is not the only possible medium for a human language. In particular, as research over the past half century or so has demonstrated, the visually transmitted signed languages that emerge and become current in communities with large numbers of deaf members develop all of the richness of expression and all of the basic structural characteristics of spoken languages, apart from modality (see Chapter 9 of the present volume for some discussion). And in that connection, it is important that the individual meaningful signs of such a language also have an internal organization based on the rule-governed combination of limited numbers of separately meaningless formative elements (handshape, location, movement, etc.). In signed as in spoken language, this combinatory system, quite separate from syntax, makes possible the arbitrary expansion of the language’s lexicon to express many more ideas than if signs had to be separate but unanalysable wholes.

Knowledge of a language’s phonology, then, is another aspect of a speaker’s cognitive organization that allows for the communicative deployment of the language. In fact, there is arguably yet a third combinatory system, knowledge of which is essential to the functioning of language. This is morphology, the system by which meaningful indicators combine within a single lexical word. Cat, on the one hand, has no particular structure beyond the combination of the sounds [k], [æ] and [t], but undescribable is a combination not only of sounds, but also of meaningful parts (un-, -able and describe, which may itself be seen as a combination of de- and a root scribe, according to yet another system of regularities).

Some linguists wish to see morphology as simply a special case of syntax, internal to whatever a given language may treat as its words, while others emphasize the ways in which the internal organization of words may be quite different from ways in which these are organized by the syntax. We can ignore this theoretical dispute here, however, and simply recognize that knowledge of the internal organization of words as well as that of larger structures constitutes a substantive part of what makes it possible for languages to be as expressive as they are. Indeed, in some languages the resources of word-internal organization may be much more important to this than is ev...