The Foundations of Human Language and Communication

Origins of Human Language

Tool-making source: About two million years ago, evidence suggests that humans developed preferential right-handedness and the ability to create stone tools. These functions control the motor movements involved in complex vocalization (speaking) and object manipulation.

Genetic source: Humans are born with an innate, special capacity for language.

Linguistic Competence vs. Performance

• Competence: The internal knowledge that resides in our mind.
• Performance: The way we produce and comprehend language, revealed through speech.

Linguistics must use linguistic performance as a basis for making hypotheses and drawing conclusions about what linguistic competence must be like.

The Speech Communication Chain

The communication system consists of an information source, a transmitter, a signal, a receiver, and a destination.

1. Thought: Conceptualize the message.
2. Semantics: Select words to express the idea.
3. Syntax and Morphology: Arrange words following grammatical rules.
4. Phonology: Determine the pronunciation of words.
5. Articulatory Phonetics: Send instructions to the vocal anatomy.
6. Speech: Transmit sounds through the air.
7. Perception: The listener hears the sounds.
8. Decoding: The listener interprets sounds as language.
9. Connection: The listener receives the communicated idea.

Noise: Any interference within the communication chain.

Core Linguistic Concepts

• Speech sounds: The fundamental knowledge required to know a language.
• Lexicon: The collection of all words known to a speaker.
• Mental grammar: The rules used to produce and comprehend utterances.
• Descriptive grammar: Rules deduced by observing a speaker's linguistic performance.
• Communicative signals: Intentional communication.
• Informative signals: Unintentional communication.

Properties of Human Language

• Reflexivity: The ability to use language to think and talk about language itself.
• Displacement: The capacity to refer to the past and future.
• Arbitrariness: No natural connection between a linguistic form and its meaning.
• Productivity: The potential number of utterances in any human language is infinite.
• Fixed reference: A limiting feature of animal communication.
• Cultural transmission: Language is acquired within a culture, not through parental genes.
• Duality: Language is organized in two levels: individual sounds (e.g., b-i-n) and distinct meanings (e.g., bin).

Animal Communication Limitations

Animals do not understand human language because they produce specific behaviors only in response to particular sound-stimuli or noise. Furthermore, chimpanzees lack a physically structured vocal tract suitable for articulating the sounds used in human speech.