What is Language

1
What is Language?

• components of communication

2
Design Features

• C.F. Hocketts features of communication systems
• All Systems have
• mode of transmission.
• Semanticity.
• Pragmatic Function.

3

• Some systems have
• interchangability.
• organism can both send and receive messages.
• learnability.
• the system is, at least partly, learned.
• arbitrariness.
• there is no inherent (pre-linguistic) relation
  between the signal and its content.

4
arbitrariness in human language

• The relationship between a word and its meaning
  is arbitrary (mostly)

English Cock-a-doodle-doo Spanish Ki-ki-ri-ki
5
Human Language has

• Descreteness (Compositionality).
• larger units are formed from smaller ones.
• Productivity.
• the ability to produce understand novel
  meanings.
• Displacement.
• the ability to talk about things distant in
  place or time.