Ddvwfsa胡壮麟语言学笔记无私分享(5)

Ddvwfsa胡壮麟语言学笔记无私分享

When a dog is barking, however, you can decide it is barking for something or at someone that exists now and there. It cou ldn’t be bow-wowing sorrowfully for dome lost love or a bone to be lost. The bee’s system, nonetheless, has a small share of “displacement”, but it is an unspeakable tiny share.

1.7.What is cultural transmission?

This means that language is not biologically transmitted from generation to generation, but that the details of the linguistic system must be learned anew by each speaker. It is true that the capacity for language in human beings(N. Chomsky called it “language acquisition device”, or LAD) has a genetic basis, but the particular language a person learns to speak is a cultural one other than a genetic one like the dog’s barking system. If a human being is brought up in isolation he cannot acquire language. The Wolf Child reared by the pack of wolves turned out to speak the wolf’s roaring “tongue” when he was saved. He learned thereafter, with no small difficulty, the ABC of a certain human language.

1.8.What is interchangeability?

Interchangeability means that any human being can be both a producer and a receiver of messages. We can say, and on other occasions can receive and understand, for example, “Please do something to make me happy.” Though some people (including me) suggest that there is sex differentiation in the actual language use, in other words, men and women may say different things, yet in principle there is no sound, or word or sentence that a man can utter and a woman cannot, or vice versa. On the other hand, a person can be the speaker while the other person is the listener and as the turn moves on to the listener, he can be the speaker and the first speaker is to listen. It is turn-taking that makes social communication possible and

acceptable.

Some male birds, however, utter some calls which females do not (or cannot?) , and certain kinds of fish have similar haps mentionable. When a dog barks, all the neighbouring dogs bark. Then people around can hardly tell which dog (dogs) is (are0

“speaking” and which listening.

1.9.Why do linguists say language is human specific?

First of all, human language has six “design features” which animal communication systems do not have, at least not in the true sense of them(see I .2-8). Let’s borrow C. F. Hocket’s Chart that compares human language with some animals’ systems, from

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