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