#hockett

Again, I wrote this for the CamLangSci blog …

            A few weeks ago there was a two-part programme on BBC entitled Talk to the Animals presented by Lucy Cooke. As you might imagine, it was about ‘cracking the animal code’ – finding out what animals are communicating with each other and how they are doing so. It was a great programme and got me thinking again about the differences between humans and other animals in terms of the way we communicate.

            Our most stand-out method of communication is, of course, language. And our language is used to communicate just about anything and everything we can think of. Whilst animal communication typically concerns food, danger and mating, human communication goes way beyond these things. The more interesting question for me, however, is not so much what we are communicating, but how we are communicating it. How do we package the information we wish to convey and how do we structure it? How is language designed such that it allows us to do these things in the first place?

            This question is huge and, surprise, surprise, unanswered. Therefore, I’m simply going to muse on one of the most significant design features of language that has been identified – duality of patterning.

            Every human language has a system by which meaningless sounds are combined to make meaningful units (these can be thought of as words), and every human language has a separate system which combines these meaningful units into phrases and sentences (the same applies to Sign Languages). This means that a language can have a reasonably small number of meaningless elements from which it can generate a very large number of distinct words. Furthermore, this very large number of distinct words can be combined to form an even larger number of distinct sentences (in fact, an infinite number of sentences). The capacity of human language to take discrete elements from one level and combine them to make discrete units at another level is what Charles F. Hockett called duality of patterning (Hockett 1960).

            It is an immensely efficient way of doing things. Imagine what language would be like if this were not the case. To be meaningful at all, the elements of language would have to be meaningful in and of themselves. Since there would be no way of combining them, we could only express as many things as we have words for. The shapes of these words would be chaotic as well since there would be no way of combining smaller meaningless elements into words.

            A number of authors have suggested that a system for combining meaningless elements into meaningful words does exist in other animals, e.g. humpback whales and chaffinches (see Hurford 2007), but a system for combining meaningful words into phrases and sentences appears to be much rarer and possibly unique to humans. Why should humans have two combinatorial systems at their disposal? Or could it be that the two systems are fundamentally the same but appear different purely because of the nature of the elements they manipulate? This suggests that studying the similarities and differences between phonology and syntax will shed light on the underpinnings of our combinatorial abilities (see Nevins (2010) who argues that the operation Agree is found in both syntax and phonology). Comparing these with the abilities of other animals may then shed light on the evolution of language itself.

References

Hockett, C. F. (1960). The Origin of Speech. Scientific American,203(3), 89–96.

Hurford, J. R. (2007). The Origins of Meaning: Language in the Light of Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nevins, A. (2010). Locality in Vowel Harmony. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.