By Stephen R. Anderson
Can animals study a human language and use it to speak? Or is human language specific to people, simply as many advanced behaviors of alternative species are uniquely theirs? This engrossing e-book explores conversation and cognition in animals and people from a linguistic standpoint and asserts that animals will not be able to buying or utilizing human language.Stephen R. Anderson explains what's intended by way of communique, the variation among verbal exchange and language, and the basic features of language. subsequent he examines numerous animal verbal exchange platforms, together with bee dances, frog vocalizations, chook songs, and alarm calls and different vocal, gestural, and olfactory communique between primates. Anderson then compares those to human language, together with signed languages utilized by the deaf. Arguing that makes an attempt to educate human languages or their equivalents to the good apes haven't succeeded in demonstrating linguistic talents in nonhuman species, he concludes that animal verbal exchange systems—intriguing and sundry notwithstanding they might be—do no longer comprise all of the crucial houses of human language. Animals can converse, yet they can’t speak.
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Additional resources for Doctor Dolittle's Delusion: Animals and the Uniqueness of Human Language
Sample text
It turns out, though, that this task is harder than it appears. One well-known attempt to specify just what properties define a ‘‘language’’ in the human sense was made by the linguist Charles Hockett in the 1950s. Some of Hockett’s Design Features of Language may also be found in nonhuman communication systems, but he argued that the whole set is found together only in human languages. Ultimately, the effort to define language in this way poses more problems than it solves, but at least it provides a basis for discussion.
In understanding the workings of language, we want to distinguish semantic signals (which refer to events and objects in the world outside of the signaler) from expressive ones (which simply reflect to the outside world some aspect of the internal state of the subject). 10 08:38 It is conventional to observe that the linguistic signal has no necessary relation to what it denotes. Speech signals, that is, are not in general iconic. 10 08:38 Language and Communication perceived resemblance between the sound of the word and some aspect of a real cat, but merely because that is the English word for it.
Individuals may attune their choice from within such a range to the usage of those around them, even though the basic system develops in them without reference to the behavior of others. The claim of innateness in many communicative systems is thus subject to the qualification that the ways in which such behavior is used may be modified somewhat over the life span of the individual. ’’ Charitably, we can interpret this statement as emphasizing that language can describe things that are not literally realized or true.