For the past few weeks, I have been discussing the design features of language, and how we can use them to compare our communication systems to those of animals. So far, we have discussed features that are present in both human and animal communication. Today, we will start talking about a final feature that is present in humans and animals before discussing some features that are only present in human communication or have very limited examples in animal communication.

The first feature to discuss today is the idea of tradition and cultural transmission. This feature states that communication is passed down from the elder generations of a species. This is not widely spread in animal communication, but it does exist in primates and birds. The alarm calls that we have discussed previously in primates like capuchin monkeys are often specific to a specific troop and not the species as a whole. This means that the way the calls were formed needed to be passed down from the elders of the troop to the younger generation. These predator calls fit the definition of cultural transmission because we do not have any evidence of a primate raised in isolation developing it’s own system of calls.

In birds, the songs that they produce have a cultural transmission aspect to them. Each individual bird does have its own unique voice, but the songs that are produced by birds raised in isolation will often be vastly different from other birds of the same species. This means that similar to our language, it needs to be passed down from generation to generation in these birds. This does not quite completely fit the definition of this design feature though because even birds raised in isolation will still develop some sort of birdsong for mating purposes. In humans, it is impossible to learn language without interacting with other humans and having it passed down in some way.

We know that cultural transmission is necessary in humans because if you remove an infant from interactions with all humans, that infant will have an extremely difficult time learning language at a later date. Ethically, we are not able to prove this in an experimental setting, but we do have some evidence that this is true in some extreme cases. The most famous example of this that is widely discussed in psychology and linguistics literature is the case of Genie.

Genie is the pseudonym of a child discovered in 1970 at the age of 13 who suffered from extreme neglect and abuse. At the time of her discovery, Genie had little to no language skills, which made Genie a highly sought-after case study by linguists and psychologists at the time. After time and training, Genie was able to learn limited language and social skills, but was never able to fully acquire a first language in the same way that most children do.

Cases like Genie, while tragic and extremely horrible, have done a lot to inform language acquisition research. The case of Genie provides evidence of the importance of transferring language from one generation to the next because without it, humans are incapable of acquiring a first language when left to their own devices. Compare this to cases of animals that are raised in isolation away from other members of their species who are able to fully develop a complete vocal range that is indistinguishable from a member of that species raised around others.

The next feature we will talk about today is learnability. Learnability means that the learner of a communication variant can learn to communicate using other variants. In the case of us humans, this consists of our ability to learn another language. As a speaker of English, I am able to learn a language like German or Mandarin with little difficulty and eventually I would be able communicate to native speakers of those language with no problem.

This does not mean it is easy to learn another language, but it is possible for humans. Compare this to the animal kingdom where we have no evidence of an animal learning to communicate with another species using a communication system that is not their own. You could try to make an argument for gorillas learning sign language in certain cases, but as we will see in some of these other features, they are not truly learning the system. The most famous example of this is Koko the gorilla who knew more than 1000 unique signs and was able to combine them in novel ways to communicate. The biggest thing that prevents us from saying that Koko fully learned the system is the fact that there was an upper limit to her knowledge.

Although Koko knew over 1000 signs, that is only a tenth of the estimated total amount of signs in American Sign Language. In addition to this, there is also the ability to finger spell words which do not have their own unique sign yet, meaning that there is an infinite number of ways that ASL users are able to communicate ideas. This is not to diminish the impressive knowledge that Koko had, but it is inaccurate to claim that she was a full and fluent user of sign language as we know it.

Another design feature that sets us apart from animals is known as recursion. Recursion is the ability to use a communication system to make infinitely large utterances through a process known as self embedding. This is the feature that allows us to craft infinitely long sentences and ideas by embedding clauses within clauses within clauses.

Human ideas are not limited by anything other than our own mortality and lung capacity. The best way to see this is add onto a sentence to make it infinitely long. Take the worlds longest sentence recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records, a sentence that is 1287 words long in William Faulkner’s novel ‘Absalom, Absalom!’ This sentence is excessive, but we can make it a bit longer by simply saying something like “Faulkner wrote” and then quoting the entire sentence. And now you could imagine infinite iterations of adding on a word here and there to extend this sentence out until the end of time.

The final feature we will discuss today is reflexiveness. Reflexiveness is the ability that we have as humans to use our communication to talk about our communication system. This one is a little bit heady and meta, but it is the core design feature that allows a field like linguistics to exist!

The fact that we are able to use the English language to make observations about the English language and then communicate those observations to another person using the English language is quite amazing once you take a step back and look at it from the outside. No animals are able to use their own communication system to talk about their communication system (or at least we don’t have evidence of it). It is unlikely that we are simply missing something in animals because it does require a sophisticated level of intelligence.

So it is plain to see that these features definitely set us apart from other animals. There are still four more to talk about though, so come back next week when we finally conclude this series on the design features of language!

Thank you for reading folks! I hope this was informative and interesting to you. Be sure to come back next week when we start to talk about the uniquely human design features. If you have any topics that you want to know more about, please reach out and I will do my best to write about them. In the meantime, remember to speak up and give linguists more data.

Last week I started talking about some of the design features of language, and how they do or do not apply to various types of animal communication. Today, we will talk about a few more of these features that are present in both human and animal communication.

As you may recall, these design features are what set apart human communication from the communication of other animals. If you haven’t already, I suggest you go and read the first part of this series as I give a much better explanation there. For now, let’s dive back into some more design features.

The design feature known as arbitrariness means that there is no logical or intrinsic connection between a sound or word and the thing that it refers to. Now it’s important to note that a language doesn’t need ALL of the words to be arbitrary, but the vast majority of them should be. Some sounds and words that we have in English are closely related to, or attempted imitations of sounds, like onomatopoeias. Onomatopoeias like “meow” or “bark” are our attempts to develop words that sound like the sounds that cats and dogs produce. This is not to say that onomatopoeias are not valid words or not actually a part of our language (because they are), I am just trying to provide an example of non-arbitrary things.

Sign language also has a large amount of non-arbitrary signs. For instance, the sign for “house” in American Sign Language is a moving sign where the hands make a shape that resembles what we imagine a simple house to look like. Again, this design feature does not say that we cannot have iconic or logically connected words or signs, simply that there is a large amount of them that have no such connection.

Take the word “chair” for instance. A chair is typically a four-legged piece of furniture with a flat seat to sit on and a back to rest against. There is nothing about the word “chair” that contains any sort of information which may indicate anything I just told you about a chair. Because of this, we can say that this word is arbitrary.

There are concepts and ideas that have been studied within linguistics that seem to challenge parts of this design feature. Let’s run through a quick example. Look at the two shapes in the picture below and tell me which one is called “kiki” and which one is called “bouba”.

You probably guessed the one on the left was called a kiki and the one on the right was called bouba. This touches on the idea of sound symbolism. I won’t go too deep on this concept (I need something for when this series is over), but essentially it boils down to the fact that sounds that are rounder like an “o” or noisy like a “b” are associated with rounded shapes. Conversely, sounds that are sharp like an “I” or a “k” are often associated with pointy objects.

This idea of sound symbolism turns out to inform the design of some things in our world, but that’s a story for another week. The larger point is that this doesn’t mean that words that use sound symbolism are not arbitrary still, there just might be things we can predict based on how a word sounds sometimes.

Another design feature is known as prevarication. Prevarication is the ability for someone to lie or deceive another using their communication system. As humans, we are certainly aware of our ability to lie or to tell stories about things that do not exist. This should not come as a surprise unless you are stuck in the world of Ricky Gervais’s 2009 film “The Invention of Lying” where the ability to lie has not been invented yet.

Lying and deception is something that exists in the animal kingdom, although it is not as widespread as it is in humans. We can look at the behaviour of capuchin monkeys to see a good example of this.

Capuchin monkeys are small, nimble monkeys that use alarm calls to alert members of their troupe to predators that they may not be able to see. This is a common thing in smaller primates, but a study published in 2009 found some interesting behaviour in capuchin monkeys.

The study found that capuchin monkeys who are weaker or lower in the dominance hierarchy will use false alarm calls to make their stronger counterparts run away and drop high quality food sources rather than fight them for it. This behaviour is a good example of prevarication because they are knowingly using their communication system to deceive others. Obviously, this is not as broad as a humans ability to lie or tell a false story, but it is lying none the less.

The final feature we will talk about today is displacement. Displacement is the ability that we have as humans to talk about things that are not physically present, or event to talk about things that do not exist at all. This is one of the key features that can separate us from primate species that can only communicate about things that are within their eyesight.

There are some animals that can communicate about things that they cannot see. If you check out part one of this series, I talked about the honey bee and how the foragers are able to perform dances to let others know where the food is. This is a very good example of displacement because it is clearly a communication system that the other forager bees can understand, and it deals with a food source that is not visible from where the bees are (which is why they need this dance in the first place).

The three design features discussed today are all present in both human and animal communication systems, but next week we will start to talk about features that are only present in human communication. Being able to draw these parallels between animals and humans can help us understand the intelligence and capabilities of these animals, while also helping us understand what sets us apart from them.

Thank you for reading folks! I hope this was informative and interesting to you. Be sure to come back next week when we start to talk about the uniquely human design features. If you have any topics that you want to know more about, please reach out and I will do my best to write about them. In the meantime, remember to speak up and give linguists more data.

Now that I am over two months into this blog about linguistics and language, I suppose it would be nice to define what exactly a language is. Even more specifically, what makes a natural human language, and what can we learn about the complexity of our own languages by looking at the language of animals.

I will start like most average university papers do; Websters dictionary defines language as “the words, their pronunciation, and the methods of combining them used and understood by a community” as in “I studied the French language”. This definition is entirely serviceable, but we can break down the concept of what makes a language even further by introducing some more terminology and definitions. Specifically, what characteristics of human language can differentiate them from non-human language.

These characteristics I am alluding to are known as ‘language design features’. These design features were first defined in the 1960’s by a linguist named Charles F. Hockett and are what set apart human communication from animal communication. There are a total of 13 design features that he initially proposed, which is far too many to talk about in one post, so this will be split up into at least three parts (this is what we call milking for content).

It is worth noting that these are not necessarily all characteristics that are unique to human language. Many forms of animal communication posses some of these features, but as we will see over the next few weeks, there is no form of animal communication that possesses ALL of these features. So, let’s begin with some of the shared characteristics, and in later weeks we will talk about what makes human language unique.

The first feature we will talk about is specialization. Specialization means that the communication system is only used for communication and nothing else. In other words, we do not use our speech for any other biological purposes than for communication. This is not something that is unique to humans though. Many animals such as dogs also communicate with specialized systems. When a dog barks or howls, this serves the purpose of communicating their location to other animals or to communicate that something is in their territory.

While it may seem like many small dogs will bark just for the fun of it, they are still communicating in some way. For a counter example of specialization in dogs though, we can look at an action like panting. When you see a dog panting on a hot day, you know that the dog is hot, but this action of panting is not only a way of communicating that they are hot. It also serves as a method of sweating and trying to cool themselves off. Because it also serves some biological function to the animal, we can say that this is not a specialized system.

In humans, speech is simply speech. We only use it communicate a message to others. We do not get any biological benefit or other functions from speech so we can say that this is indeed a specialized system for us.

The next feature is that of interchangeability. Interchangeability means that all members of a species are capable of both sending and receiving messages. This is certainly something that we as humans have. It is not just restricted to spoken languages. Sign language is also a natural human language, so even people who are unable to hear or speak can satisfy this feature by communicating in sign language.

As you can imagine, many animals who communicate in some way also meet this feature. In the majority of animals, all members of the species will be capable of roaring, meowing, or hooting to their hearts content. There are cases where this feature does not show up for all members of a species though.

An often studied and fascinating communication method (which will come up a few times in this series) is the bee dance performed by forager bees which serves to communicate the location of food to others in the hive. This particular phenomenon (also known as the waggle dance) is a complex figure eight like pattern that these forager bees will move in to share with others what the angle and distance of a particular food source is located in relative to the sun. It is a complex, multistage form of communication that we will be returning to when discussing other design features, but for the sake of this one it is important to simply note that it is only performed by the forager bees for other foragers.

Forager bees make up a subset of the honeybee species and serve a different function in the bee ecosystem from other subsets like drones. Both drones and foragers are members of the honeybee species though, and since the drones are incapable of performing or understanding the waggle dance, we can say that this particular communication system lacks interchangeability.

The final feature that we will talk about today is feedback. Feedback is defined as the fact that users of a system are aware of the signal they are transmitting. This means that we as humans can understand the speech that we are saying and if there are any errors, we are able to correct them.

This is yet another obvious one to see in human language. When you say something, but it doesn’t quite come out right because your voice cracks or you have a slip of the tongue or something, you are able to recognize the error and correct yourself to make sure you are understood.

This is a tough one to analyze in animal communication because we simply don’t understand their communication systems. We don’t have evidence of a cat saying something like “meow. Pardon me, I meant MEOW!” so we can’t confidently say that this is a feature that these animals have.

We can infer that at least some animals have this feature in their communication system though. Take the warning calls of vervet monkeys as an example. Vervet monkeys have three specific calls that they use to signal to other that there are predators nearby. Depending on the call that they use, it could signal that the predator is in the sky, or that a leopard is in the trees with them, or even that a snake is on the ground. The fact that these three specific calls exist and are shared by members of a tribe means that they would need to be learned by the young primates.

Part of learning any speech sounds in this instance is a trial an error period. It’s not as if there is an automatic system in the vervet monkeys to produce these particular calls that they are all born with innately. If we then assume that these primates are having to learn how to make these sounds, we can assume that there are instances where they get them wrong and they would need to be able to recognize that somehow. Because primates are our closest biological analogue, we can give them a little bit of the doubt on this one.

This covers the first three design features of language. These are all commonly shared features with many animal species, but they are certainly not universal features. Come back next week for and we will talk about semanticity, symbolism and displacement. Hopefully everything that I said here is clear and interesting. If you can think of any other examples of communication that fits these features, let me know in the comments.

Thank you for reading folks! I hope this was informative and interesting to you. Be sure to come back next week for more interesting linguistic insights. If you have any topics that you want to know more about, please reach out and I will do my best to write about them. In the meantime, remember to speak up and give linguists more data.

A few weeks ago, I talked about part of my tattoo, but I neglected the blue bird looking thing in the middle of it. Well, gather round and let me tell you the story of how this simple thing became the mascot of linguists around the world.

Now if there were two of them, you would have two _____.

No this is not a trick question, the answer is “wugs”, but think about the sound that you use at the end of it when you say it out loud. The word “wugs” has a “z” sound at the end of it.

Now what if this were called a “heaf” instead. Then it would be an “s” sound at the end of it, right?

What if it was called a gutch? Then we would have a different spelling by inserting a short unstressed vowel (hey, didn’t we talk about those recently?) and calling them gutches.

Now keep in mind that these are all made up words that you have likely never seen before, but somehow you knew exactly what to do with them. Now you might be saying “okay, so we have plural rules… What’s the big deal?” Well, discovering this back in the 1960’s was a big deal because there was debate among many linguists and psychologists whether we used rules to pluralize nouns, or whether we simply memorized all of the words and their plurals individually.

Think about this in simpler terms. Imagine that your brain has a library of all the words it knows stored on file cards, and we can call it a lexicon. Researchers at the time were unsure whether people had two separate file cards for things like “dog” and “dogs”, or whether we just have the file card for the word “dog” and there is some universal rule we can apply to this that lets us know what sound to make when we pluralize it.

From an organizational standpoint, it is much cleaner to imagine the latter scenario here, but this test (known as “the wug test”) now gave us a unique way to prove it by asking children what they would do.

In 1958, an article published by Dr. Jean Berko Gleason introduced the world to these loveable little wugs. Like I described above, she had presented this test to children and asked them to pluralize words like “wug”, “heaf”, and “gutch”.

The children in this study were divided into two groups, pre-school children and first-grade children. What she found was that first-grade students were significantly more likely to produce the correct forms “wugs”, and while performing highly on words like “heafs” it was not significantly better than the pre-school children. Irregular words like “gutches” had very low performance, but the children will still be able to produce a word like “glasses” which implies that they had not quite learned that rule yet and likely just memorized that particular word.

So, from this test, we can formalize a pattern in English for how we pluralize words. Words that end in a “voiced sound” like dog or mug will get a “z” sound for their plural. Words that end with an “unvoiced sound” like cat or map get an “s” sound. Words that end in a “ch” like sound, like glitch, will have the unstressed vowel inserted as well and have an “es” ending.

Now let’s back up a bit. I introduced a concept in that last paragraph that probably caused some confusion. In any spoken language, the consonant sounds can vary in their voice property making them either voiced or voiceless. Voiced sounds are consonant sounds where your vocal folds are pressed closed together so when the air passes by them, they vibrate. In contrast to this, voiceless sounds are produced with your vocal folds spread apart so the air does not cause them to vibrate.

You can feel this difference when you are speaking by placing your fingers on your esophagus as you say the words “sit” and “zit”. You can feel that when you start the word “sit” that there is no vibration in your throat, but when you say “zit” the “z” sound causes your throat to vibrate a bit.

These properties of the sounds end up affecting the type of plural suffix that gets added to a word, and this just becomes a process that we do automatically without thinking about it. In fact, if you do think really hard about it, and try to produce to word “dogs” with an “s” sound at the end of it, it is actually quite difficult to do.

A word like ‘glitch’ ends up getting the extra vowel added on because it would be a very large cluster of consonant sounds at the end of a word without it. This is the same reason that you may have heard people in your life pronounce the plural of “text” as “textes”. It’s just easier to insert an extra unstressed schwa than it is to try and produce a large sequence of similar consonants in a row.

So there you have it. Because of this simple test done way back in the 1960’s, we now have a cute little bird like thing that we can use to identify ourselves as language nerds by getting it inked into our skin. There are other things that were covered in Dr. Berko’s test related to verb tense, but we will save the past tense work for the future.

Thank you for reading folks! I hope this was informative and interesting to you. Be sure to come back next week for more interesting linguistic insights. If you have any topics that you want to know more about, please reach out and I will do my best to write about them. In the meantime, remember to speak up and give linguists more data.

Quite often people will ask me if there is a particular reason why adjectives go in a particular order. Unfortunately, the answer isn’t super deep and complex, but there are some interesting things we can learn about native intuition because of it.

According to the Cambridge dictionary website there are a total of ten categories of adjectives in English and they go in the following order:

1. Opinion – unusual
2. Size – big
3. Physical quality – thin
4. Shape – round
5. Age – old
6. Colour – blue
7. Origin – Dutch
8. Material – metal
9. Type – U-shaped
10. Purpose – cooking

So based on this order, you can have an unusual big thin round old blue Dutch metal general-purpose cooking utensil, but you wouldn’t dare call it a metal unusual cooking round blue Dutch old metal general-purpose thin utensil.

But this order is not mandated by any sort of laws. Just because this is coming from the Cambridge dictionary does not mean that we are obliged to follow it. We do it because breaking this order just feels wrong most of the time. After all, you probably didn’t need me to tell you that it is much more natural to say thin metal rod than it is to say metal thin rod.

Like I mentioned though, we only follow these rules most of the time. I’m sure you have all heard of the big bad wolf, right? Well, this is a perfect example of being able to break the order of these adjectives and have it be totally fine. Big is a size adjective, while bad is an opinion adjective. Based on the order provided above it should be bad big wolf, but that just doesn’t seem to fit the story at all!

We can also get around this restriction by creating a compound word with an adjective and a noun. Having something like a blue prison referred to as the blue big-house is fine as well.

These are just two examples of ways that English can, once again, break the rules of it’s own language. So like I sad, this is not the most interesting or satisfying answer in the world. This is just something we all universally agree upon because it feels better this way.

While we are on the topic of adjectives and weirdness though, I’d like to talk about a classic sentence in linguistic research that comes up again and again:

Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.

This sentence is weird, right? But not because it is breaking any of the adjective rules that I mentioned above. How can something be green and colourless? How can an idea be green? Can ideas sleep? And if they can sleep, how do they sleep furiously?

This sentence follows all of the word ordering constraints of English, but is still incredibly uncomfortable to parse because it just doesn’t make any sense.

This sentence first appeared in a book by Noam Chomsky in 1957 and was used as evidence that no division of linguistics can stand on its own. Division of linguistics refers to all of the areas of language that make up sentences when we are creating them. The divisions of linguistics that we care about in this instance are syntax, which determines the order that words go in, and semantics, which cares about the meaning of the individual words and how they combine to form a meaning for a sentence.

In other words, just because the word order of the sentence is correct, that does not make it a good sentence. For this same reason, we would be able to make sense of something like metal unusual cooking round blue Dutch old metal U-shaped thin utensil at the end of the day, but it would still not make a good sentence.

This emphasizes the fact that all the areas of linguistics need to be involved in the generation of a sentence in order to be sure that we are creating grammatically sound sentences.

Thank you for reading folks! I hope this was informative and interesting to you. Be sure to come back next week for more interesting linguistic insights. If you have any topics that you want to know more about, please reach out and I will do my best to write about them. In the meantime, remember to speak up and give linguists more data.