Midterm

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Laney College *

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Linguistics

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Oct 30, 2023

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docx

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Uploaded by MinisterRiver3551

All animals communicate or transmit information by the use of different kinds of signs, and yet most people, including most linguists, feel that there is something distinct about human language. In this essay, outline some of the design features that have been used to distinguish human language from other forms of animal communication, and, based on what you learned in class, address whether or not this is a valid or valuable distinction to make. In your response, you must use the Anderson and Milatz articles, as well as information provided in lecture. According to Stephen R. Anderson, although animals have unique and complicated ways of communicating, they do not possess the capacity for language. Anderson writes, “What gives human language its power and centrality in our lives is its capacity to articulate a range of expressions, thoughts, and ideas, bounded only by imagination” (2). For Anderson, this manifests in our ability to discuss an unlimited number of topics, perhaps in ways never previously generated in the history of humanity. The Study of Language , which Aubrey Milatz cites in “Influences of Human Exceptionalism,” specifically describes the characteristics that allow communication to be described as language. They include displacement, or the ability to discuss things “not present in the immediate environment”; arbitrariness, or the idea that a linguistic sign does not have an inherent relationship to what it describes; productivity, or the idea that language can be used to discuss a limitless number of things; cultural transmission, or the idea that language is intergenerationally learned and transmitted; and duality, or the idea that sound and meaning constitute two different levels of language. Aubrey Milatz is critical of the idea that language is exceptional to humans. She writes, “If we constructed the definition of the word specifically around the parameters of our own form of communication, then of course we will be the only species who will meet the qualifications for having ‘language’” (87). As an anthrozoologist, Milatz is concerned with the construction of the animal-human divide and believes that highlighting the similarities will increase our moral commitment to animal lives. Stephen Anderson, however, takes a different perspective. Refuting the idea that the definition of language is crafted to specifically fit human capabilities, he argues that she shifting definition of language evolves out of necessity. He writes, “Any specific set of characteristics is liable to need constant revision, because as linguists learn more about language, its characteristics change” (1). He argues that although some animals have shown the ability to accomplish complex forms of communication, they fail to meet the threshold of language. To prove his point, he analyzes several studies in communication involving primates. Although many demonstrated impressive outcomes, all fell short of the symbolic and syntactical ability that constitutes language. Anderson concludes, “Nonhuman animals lack the kind of system that linguists are still hard at work trying to understand, and without such capacity, animals can communicate only in much more restricted ways.

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