Lec 4: Design Features

Charles Hockett

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 Defining language

• Is remarkably difficult
• An alternative would be to provide a set of features/
characteristics that would identify/describe language
• Only systems that display these features can be called
language
• Features proceed from the most universal to the most
particular

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Mode of Communication

• Means by which message are sent and received.

• Speech
• Signing
• Primary language mode, oral-aural and visual-manual
• Morse code – light, sound, touch
• Braille – touch
• Fingerspelling - manual

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1. Semanticity

• Property that requires all signals in a system to have a

meaning or a function
• Necessary for communication to happen
• Assumed to be a property by users
• Jabberwock with eyes of flame came whiffling through
the wood

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 2. Pragmatic Function

• Serve a purpose
• Seeking help and giving help
• Seeking information
• Modifying behaviour
• Achieve certain outcomes
• Social give and take, social bonding, establishing
relationships, understanding the social environment

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3. Interchangeability
• Ability to switch from sender to receiver
• Speak (sender)
• Listen (receiver)

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4. Cultural Transmission
• Aspects of the system that can be learnt only through
interaction with members in the community
• Cuckoo’s call and crow’s cawing
• Zebra Finch’s song
• Marathi, Hindi or Russian

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5. Arbitrariness
• Connection between form [kæt] , cat and
• Sound-meaning pairs are arbitrary and
conventionalized (product names, Xerox, Accenture,
Vodafone, Garmin, Haagen-Das)
• When such meaning is transparent or there, is a clear
connection then we see non-arbitrariness

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 Evidence for arbitrariness
• Single meaning but many words/forms within and across
languages
• Within a language
• Pit, stone, seed (peach)
• िव ालय, पाठशाला, ू ल(school)
• Across languages
• Water (English), Wasser (German), Eau (French), पानी
(Hindi), søy (Cantonese)
• Tree (English) , arbre (French), derevo (Rusiian), ki
(Japanese), namu (Korean), Baum (German), पे ड़(Hindi)
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Evidence for arbitrariness
• Single form mapped to many meanings within and
across languages
• Within a language:
• Pit (seed or hole in the ground)
• Not, naught, knot [nɔt]
• Across languages:
• [li] – Lee (English), ‘bed’ (French), borrowed
(German), this (Cantonese), participle of take
(Hindi)
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 Non-arbitrariness
• Sound-meaning transparency
• Onomatopoeia – splat, burble, cock-a-doodle-doo; croon-
hum-moan-murmur
The moan of doves in immemorial elms
And murmuring of innumerable bees (Tennyson)
• Sound symbolism
• teeny, petite, wee, mikros (Greek, small), perrito
(Spanish, little dog)
• Large, vast; splish vs splash; plink and plonk; squeak and
squawk
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• Glow, glimmer, glisten, gleam, glitter, glad; smash, crash,
bash, slash, dash, lash
• Iconicity –
• small
•tall
• Fat

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 6. Discreteness
• Meaningless sounds to words; words pattern into sentences.
And vice-versa
• Blending systems vs. Discrete Combinatorial systems
• A finite number of discrete elements are sampled,
combined and permuted to create larger structures with
properties that are quite distinct from those of their
elements. – Steven Pinker
• Geology, paint mixing, cooking, sound, light, weather

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Another such system in nature
• In genetics, an unlimited number of different genes can
be strung based on only sixty-four codons (3 nucleotide
sequence), which are formed from only four nucleotides
(A,T,C,G) that make up the DNA molecule

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Discreteness
• Sounds – some 10-100
• Vocabulary, about 50,000 words
• Rules of combination

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7. Productivity
• The capacity to build novel messages out of the discrete
units
• Finite means, infinite productions
• All rules of a language allow for productivity
Allows us to produce and understand any number of novel
utterances previously unheard and propositions previously
unexpressed

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8. Displacement
9. Reflexiveness
10. Learnability

• To be able to communicate about things, actions and

ideas that are not present in the communication
context – spatially or temporally
• Humans can use language to talk about language.
• Language is teachable and learnable.

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