Animal vs Human Communication: Communicative vs Informative Signals

Study Notes

Ways of Forming New Words

Borrowing: adopting words from other languages, e.g., tofu, brainwash, tattoo
Compounding: combining two separate words to form a new word, e.g., classroom, well-known
Clipping: reducing a word to a shorter form, e.g., telephone → phone
Conversion: changing the functional category of a word, e.g., noun as verb (water the plants), verb as noun (good shot)
Coinage: inventing new terms, e.g., airpod
Derivational: forming new words by adding affixes (prefix, infix, suffix), e.g., mis-understanding, un-conscious, use-ful, child-ish

Blending and Other Forms

Blending: combining parts of two words to form a new word, e.g., breakfast + lunch = brunch
Backformation: forming a new word by removing a prefix or suffix from an existing word, e.g., teacher → teach
Derivational reduction: forming a new word by reducing an existing word, e.g., transmitter → transmit
Hypocorism: a type of word reduction, typically in Australian and British English, e.g., television → telly
Acronyms: forming new words from the initial letters of a set of words, e.g., MC = master of ceremonies
Analogy: forming new words to be similar to existing words, e.g., yippy, yuppy, yappy

Morphemes and Basic Word Order

Morphemes: the minimal unit of meaning, consisting of free morphemes (able to stand alone) and bound morphemes (cannot stand alone)
Basic word order tree diagram: a visual representation of the structure of a sentence
Lexical categories: categories of words based on their meaning and function

Ambiguity and Semantics

Ambiguity: multiple possible meanings of a word or phrase, e.g., she ate the cookies (lexical ambiguity), the computer has a 'bug' (syntactic ambiguity)
Semantics: the study of the meaning of words
Conceptual meaning: the dictionary meaning of a word
Associative meaning: the associations attached to a word, e.g., fire → red → hot
Contextual meaning: the intended and subjective meaning of a word in a particular context

Semantic Roles

Agent/Actor: the one who performs the action
Patient/Theme: the one affected by the action
Instrument: the thing used to perform an action
Experiencer: the one who has a feeling, perception, or state
Location: the place of the event
Source: the place where the action originates
Goal: the place where the action ends

Animal vs Human Communication

Communicative signals: intentionally sent out for communication, e.g., human language, animal vocalizations
Informative signals: signals that convey information, e.g., dressing, hairstyle, gesture, facial expressions
Innateness hypothesis: humans are born with a special capacity for language
Six properties of human language:
- Reflexivity: humans can talk about language
- Displacement: humans can talk about things not present in the immediate context
- Arbitrariness: no natural connection between linguistic form and meaning
- Productivity: humans can create new expressions
- Cultural transmission: language is passed on from one generation to another
- Duality: different forms or meanings of words, e.g., Yah vs Hay

Description

Explore the differences between communicative signals (like speech and animal vocalizations) and informative signals (such as dressing and facial expressions) in animal and human communication. Learn about the Innateness hypothesis and how humans possess an innate language faculty for acquiring language.