How Can You Recognize Language?

Coach signals a play. Is that language or something else? This is a blog about the origins of speech, but what began? How can we tell it when we see it? Parents usually say their children have started talking when they have a couple of words. Linguists tend to look for some hint of grammar. Some experts look for a favorite generative procedure. So there is room for argument even before we come up with a single fact about the beginnings. I have always taken a functional approach. When I started this blog I could not have said precisely what I was looking for, but now I know what I want. I call it language when a speaker and a listener exchange news about a topic. The closest thing in the animal kingdom to this kind of behavior is the waggle dance of the bee. At one time that would have bothered me and I might have looked for some way to fiddle with the definition, but now I don't much care. Bee dances show that cooperative societies can share knowledge. We do it. If bees do it, and if tomorrow elephants do it too, that's the way it is. But there is a long list of "design features" that characterize human language. In the 1950s and 60s the linguist Charles Hockett worked out a list of properties that, taken as a whole, were supposedly unique to language, and the list has become one of the commonsense tests of language origins. If your theory ends up with something that includes Hockett's properties, you may be onto something; if not, not. Since Hockett's day some of these pr...
Source: Babel's Dawn - Category: Medical Scientists Authors: Source Type: blogs