Language and Human Behavior

Language as a Central Part of Human Behavior

• Many human actions, like planning trips, teaching, and socializing, rely heavily on language.
• Language functions similarly to other species' communication systems.

What is Language?

• Language is a communication system that shares functions with animal signaling systems.
• Animal communication serves purposes like mate attraction, threat displays, and warning kin.
• Human language has similar functions, used for attracting mates, threatening rivals, and alerting kin to danger.

Hockett's Design Features

• Duality of Patterning: Human language uses meaningless sounds (phonemes) that combine to create infinite meanings. Animal languages have fixed, meaningful sounds.
• Openness: Human language can create new words and express new meanings. Animal languages are closed systems.

Symbolic Systems

• Animal signals primarily manipulate animal behavior.
• Human utterances not only affect behavior but also evoke concepts in others' minds.

Combinatorial Systems

• Sentence structure, not just word order, carries meaning.

Compositionality

• Sentence meaning arises from its component parts and their combination.
• This can sometimes involve multi-word units.

Words

• The connection between words and their meanings is arbitrary (conventional).
• We learn arbitrary word-meaning associations.

Rules

• Rules dictate how words combine into more complex meanings.
• Rules are independent of meaning.
• Sentences can be grammatically correct but nonsensical.
• Sentences can be grammatically incorrect but comprehensible.

Infinite Generativity

• There are many possible words to follow any given word in an English sentence (average of 10).
• English sentences can grow ever longer by embedding them within others.

Language Evolution

• Chomsky (1988): Complex grammar likely arose as a byproduct of brain size increase.
• Corballis (1992): Language evolved to free hands for tool use and gesture, allowing simultaneous communication and tool manipulation.
• Pinker & Bloom (1990): Language enabled more efficient communication of complex thoughts. Grammar became an advantage once we could think complex thoughts.

Language Invention

• Pidgin: Simple language for communication between groups without a common language.
• Creole: A pidgin that develops into a native language for subsequent generations.

Animal Language

• Arbitrary Associations: Dogs learn new words faster than other animals.
• Compositionality: Some animals (like Alex the parrot) understand compound words like "red ball."
• “Kanzi”: Can understand sentence structures and follow novel instructions.
• Symbolic Use?: While some animals can use complex combinations of signs, there's open debate about whether animal language is truly symbolic.

How Language Works

• To express ideas, language constructs words from sounds and sentences from words following rules.
• Linguistic rules govern sequence construction (e.g., "cat," "tack").

Phonology

• Phonology studies the sounds in a language.
• Phonemes are speech sounds that distinguish words.
• Minimal pairs (e.g., "bat" and "pat") illustrate this.
• Phonemes are language-specific.

Morphology

• Morphology deals with meaningful units (morphemes).
• Example: "dogs" involves the morphemes "dog" and "s" (plural).
• Inflectional morphology changes grammatical aspects without altering word class or meaning.
• Derivational morphology alters word class or meaning (e.g., "uncover").

English Past Tense Acquisition

• Regular past tense involves adding "-ed" (walk → walked).
• Irregular past tense has unique forms (go → went).
• Children initially use irregulars correctly, then overgeneralize the regular "-ed" rule, and later use both correctly.

Syntax

• Syntax governs word order, creating constituents (e.g., noun phrases).
• Rules specify how constituents combine into sentences.
• Recursion allows rules to call themselves, resulting in infinite sentence generation.

Semantics

• Semantics studies meaning (concepts) in words and sentences.
• Children learn word meaning through context.

Pragmatics

• Pragmatics analyzes language use in context.
• Gricean Maxims (quantity, quality, relation, manner) guide effective communication.

Linguistic Representations

• Language encompasses levels like sounds, meaning units, grammatical rules, concepts, and contextual use.

Explore the intricate relationship between language and human behavior. This quiz delves into how language functions in social contexts, its similarities with animal communication, and unique features that define human language. Test your understanding of concepts like Hockett's design features and the symbolic nature of human utterances.