Language characteristics

Semanticity refers to the idea that language can communicate meaning.

Arbitrariness refers to the fact that there is no relationship between actual objects or events in the wolrd and the symbol the language uses to represent those objects or events. For example the word that goes with an object need not resemble the real object in any way.

Discreteness refers to the idea that components of the language are organized into a set of distinct categories. For example, every speech sound in English is perceived as belonging to one of about 40 phoneme categories.

Displacement refers to a language’s ability to convey information about events happening outside of the sight of the speaker (spatial displacement), events that happened before the moment when the person speaks, and events that have not yet taken place as the person is speaking (temporal displacement). Displacement is a ubiquitous feature of human languages (…), but it is largely or completely absent in animal communication systems.

Duality of patterning refers to the fact that we simultaneously perceive language stimuli in different ways; for example as a collection of phonemes and as a set of words.

Finally generativity refers to the fact that languages have a fixed number of symbols, but a very large and potentially infinite number of messages that can be created by combining those symbols in different patterns. The average high school graduate knows the meanings of about 50.000 different words, but can combine those words in new patterns to produce an unlimited number of meanings.

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The vast majority of language scientists are not interested in prescriptive grammar. The kind of grammar we are interested in is descriptive grammar, which is the set of rules or principles that governs the way people use language “in the wild”. That is, how people naturally and normally think and behave. Descriptive grammars explain why language takes the form that it does.

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Chomsky and his colleagues have proposed that recursion is a core property of the grammars of all languages (fitch, Hauser & chomsky 2005; Hauser et al 2002) Proposed that recursion is the only property that is specific to human language. Recursion is defined as “the ability to place one component inside another component of the same type”. So, where language is concerned, recursion could happen if you place one phrase inside another phrase of the same type.

Example: Tom likes beans. Susan thinks (x) (where x is a sentence). Susan thinks Tom likes beans. The degree to which this sort of recursion can go on is essentially infinite, and is limited only by the speaker’s ability to continue:

John knows Dave believes Jenny hopes Carol recognizes Bob realizes… Susan thinks Tom likes beans

Thus, recursion is one of the characteristics that gives language the property of discrete infinity, the ability to generate infinite messages (even infinitely long messages) from finite means.

Most of the languages that have been studied to have recursion, but there does appear to be at least one exception: Pirahã (Everett, 2005, 2008).

To express the same meaning that goes with “hand me nails that Dan bought”, a Pirahã speaker would say the equivalent of:

Give me the nails. Dan bought those very nails. They are the same.

Stack of bowls → string of pearls.

That means recursion is not a. necessary characteristic of human languages, despite the fact that most of them have it anyway.