Human language: origins, structure, and cognitive aspects

¶ … properties of human language (displacement, arbitrariness, productivity, cultural, transmission, discreteness, duality) discuss how human language differs from animal communication.

Unlike animal language, human language can possess the property of displacement. Displacement "allows the users of language to talk about things and events not present in the immediate environment." (21) A human need not cry out in pain in the moment, but one can describe the silent pain one felt later on, displacing the experience into the future rather than when it was actually experienced. 'Let me tell you what a day I had,' is a very human, displaced expression. There is also a less arbitrary nature to human language, because human language is contextual. For instance, for although same beast would be a dog in England or a perro in Spain, yet the same dog would still give the same barking sound in both lands, if it were the same breed, and both the English and the Spanish words are part of a specific linguistic structure. But in animal language, figurative or "onomatopoeic words are relatively rare, and the vast majority of linguistic expressions are in fact," totally arbitrary. "For the majority of animal signals, there does appear to be a clear connection between" the production of one sound and another sound.

This means that, for "any animal, the set of signals used in communication is finite." That is, each variety of animal communication consists of a fixed and limited set of vocal or gestured referents and non-symbolic motions or physical structures that have no intrinsic relationship to one another, and thus are not generative of new meanings (22) In contrast, humans can transmit different words across diifferent geographic and cultural locations even though such locations have different languages and means of expressing themselves. Even the structure of language shifts upon exposure to other peoples as the ancient Greeks once had more words for their pluralistic notions of love, which Modern Greek lacks. Also, some Eskimo people famously have different words for snow of a different packing type and appearance, must as this may seem irrelevant to home dwellers in areas where it does not snow very much, an Eskimo brought up in another land would not feel similarly inclined to expand upon notions of snow. Human language can also be subtle, as in poetry, and have dual and even multiple levels and significances of meaning. It can also be transmitted after the fact of the speaker's demise, as a reader can read about the joy of someone who is fictional and imagined, by an author died a long time ago.

Question 2: (Chapter 17) How does the process of acquiring a native language and the process of learning a foreign language differ?

Acquiring a language naturally from one's loved ones is done in a non-structured fashion, and in dialogue usually with a caregivers. Rather than stressing tenses, which children often misuse, communication of nouns and simple ideas rather than grammatical structure is stressed. (184) Because one usually learns one's first, native language a child, there is also an initial tendency to learn this language in a less distinctive fashion, referring to flowers rather than a rose, for example. (186) This may reflect, although it is a cross-cultural phenomena, the way that adults speak to children, although some scholars have also suggested it reflects the biological state of the human mind in early stages of development, and also is one reason why it is easier to acquire a language earlier in life. Children are also apt to call a bow-wow a dog, and to overextend their first animal names to other animals. (185)