Week1-1Human language and animal communication systems

About the course

• All about the language variety
• Similarities between languages

This module

• What is language?
• Do animals have languages?
• How many languages?
• How do we count languages?
• How are languages related?
• What do linguists do?
• How do we get our data?
• What are informants?

Difference between animal communication system and human language

Three dimensions

• Discrete Infinity:
  – Discrete: limited or countable
  – Language is infinite!
  – Apes also have discrete signs, but they cannot combine to make more complicated systems -> limited number of communications
  – Although the alphabet or the element of the language is discrete, the language itself is infinite.(otherwise we would only have one mega long sentence). Instead, animals only have limited combinations.

• Displacement

  • in time
  • in space
  • abstract notions
    most animals don’t have the system to communicate about these concepts.
    Bees can have space displacement, but are very limited.

• Joint attention

  • human language expresses a shared goal, language is coherently cooperative

Summary

Human communication

• infinite messages with finite means
• talk about things not in here and now
• language is fundamentally cooperative tool