I．Brainstorming

Can you list some features of language?

II. Features of language

(1)Creativity / Productivity

It is the first and foremost in importance and unique to human language.

①Language is creative / productive in that users can produce and understand what they have never spoken or heard before, and animals are quite limited in the messages they are able to send.

②Language users can create infinite sentences following finite rules. A child’s language acquisition can show that this is so.

(2)Duality

Language contains two subsystems/sets of forms/layers--the subsystem of sound and meaning. When certain speech sounds correspond to a certain meaning, a unit of language arises.

The same sounds can be grouped and regrouped to mean something else. e.g. /k/, /a:/, /p/, carp, park

The same sequence of sounds can mean different things. e.g. /k/, /a:/, /p/,  park

(3)Arbitrariness

There’s no logical or natural, or inherent, relation / connection / link between the speech sounds and the meanings they represent.

The forms of linguistic signs bear no natural relationship to their meaning. “The bond between the signifier (sound image) and the signified (referent) is arbitrary” (Saussure, 1916)

(4) Displacement

Language can be used to refer to what is present, what is absent, what happens at present, what happened in the past, and what will happen in the future or what happens in a far-away place. Human languages enable their users to symbolize objects, events and concepts which are not present (in time and space) at the moment of communication.

This property of language enables language users to overcome the barriers caused by time and place. Due to the feature of displacement of language, speakers of a language are free to talk about anything in any situation.

(5) Cultural Transmission

Language is culturally transmitted by teaching and learning rather than by instinct.

Children pick up their mother tongue in the process of socialization. In contrast, animal call systems are genetically transmitted.

(6) Interchangeability

A human being can be both a producer and a receiver of messages. There exist different types of communication between the two different sexes in some animals.

(7) Reflexivity

Human languages can be used to describe themselves.

(8) Adaptability

Language is an open system so that all social changes can be represented.Along with social progress, innovations and new products are coded by language.

Concepts that originated in other cultures may be borrowed into a natural language and new words are added.

III. Conclusion

Human languages are qualitatively different from animal communication systems.

There are eight features of human language—creativity/productivity, duality, arbitrariness, displacement, cultural transmission, interchangeability and reflexivity.