ANIMALS AND HUMAN LANGUAGE

1\There are a lot of stories about creatures that can talk.

2\Those stories are about imaginary creatures or dogs, birds, …etc. That imitate
something said by humans.
3\Creatures are capable of communicating with other members of their species.
- Can animals learn human language?
- What makes human language special and unlearnable to other animals?
Special properties of the human language:
• There are two types of signals:
1- communicative signals:
They are intentional signals that are used to communicate
information to others. e.g. I’m student and I came from Qatar.
• 2- informative signals:
• They are unintentional signals that tell others about you (e.g. you
have cold “you sneeze”, you are disorganized “wear non-matching
socks”, you are foreigner “ you have strange accent”.
 PROPERTIES OF HUMAN LANGUAGE:
Communication is a primary function of language, but all creatures communicate.
Human language have some distinctive properties:
A\ reflexivity:
1-We can use language to think and to talk about language.
2-Humans can reflect about their language and its uses (e.g.your words hurt
me…nouns are words that name things)
3-We think that animals do not think about the way they make their
communicative messages.
e.g. One barking dog is not offering advice to another.
-clearly they are not barking about barking (e.g. you should
lower your barking).
B\ Displacement:
1\Displacement is the ability of humans to refer to events in the future and in
the past.
2\Displacement enables us to talk about things and events not present in the
immediate environment. e.g. history of people or a place….plans for the future.
3\It allows us to talk about imaginary things like superman, monsters, and fairies.
4\Animals communicate about things that are related to the
immediate time and place.
5\Animal communication is designed to tell about here and now.
e.g. barking of dogs may be understood as a warning, cat’s meowing
as that it is hungry, but they can not tell about their plans for tomorrow
or what happened yesterday.