# Entry 8
Communication
We must distinguish between specifically communicative signals, when you use the language to intentionally communicate something, and unintentionally informative signals, when somebody infers the way you are or feel due to a number of signals that you have unintentionally sent.
Properties of Human Language
All creatures communicate, but only humans have the property of REFLEXIVITY or REFLEXIVENESS. This means that we can use language to think and talk about language itself. The Theory of reflexivity allows us to identify other properties of language: DISPLACEMENT, ARBITRARINESS, PRODUCTIVITY, CULTURAL TRANSMISSION and DUALITY.
DISPLACEMENT:
This property allows us to talk about things and events that are not present in the immediate environment.Humans are the only creatures that can refer to present past and future events or actions
.Animals lack this property. It seems that animal communication is designed exclusively for this moment.
ARBITRARINESS
It is the aspect of the relationship between linguistic signs and objects in the world..Although there are some ONOMATOPOEIC WORDS that seem to have a less arbitrary connection, they are relatively rare.
PRODUCTIVITY ( creativity /”open-endedness”)
it means that the potential number of utterances in any human language is infinite. Humans have the ability of describing new things or events. Animals lack this feature because thy have a fixed reference., each signal in the system is fixed.
CULTURAL TRANSMISSION
It is the process by which a language is passed on from one generation to the next generation.Cultural transmission is essential in the human language acquisition process, because humans acquire their first language as children in a culture.
Animals are born with a set of specific signals that are produced instinctively, even though they are not raised within their species.
DUALITY
Human language is organized in two levels simultaneously.At one level, we have distinct sounds, like p,t,f, which do not have any intrinsic meaning.on their own,At another level, we have distinct meanings.that are those sounds combined in different ways to produce meaning.We have a limited amount of sounds, but we combine them to form a great variety of sound combination called “words”
Among other creatures, each communicative signal appears to be a single fixed form that cannot be broken down into separate parts.
Chimpanzees and Language
Several experiments have been carried out trying to teach chimpanzees to communicate with human language or an arbitrary system of signs.
After training, a chimpanzee was able to understand a set of words but it was not able to produce any. The first founding was that they were not physically prepared to articulate the sounds of human language.Since they are not physically prepared to speak, another scientist tried to teach a chimp called WASHOE to use American Sign Language. Washoe was able to use signs for more than words and she was even able to combine them in “sentences”. This showed that she had the potential for productivity. She was able to hold rudimentary “conversations” in the form of question-answer sequence,
Another chimp , called SARAH, was taught to use an arbitrary set of plastic shapes for the purpose of communication with humans.She was capable of producing sentences and she was given a reward if she was able to manipulate the signs correctly.
Lena was another chimp who was taught an artificial language: YERKISH. This language consisted of symbols on a keyboard linked to a computer.
There was a lot of controversy as to whether they were able to use language or not. Some experts said that they were just reproducing things without understanding the meaning of it.
We can say that they were able to use a set of signs so as to take part in interaction with humans, but clearly they did not go on to perform linguistically on a level comparable to a human child.
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