Lecture Notes of Introduction to Linguistics 1

Features of Human Languages (based on Language Files and Essential Introductory Linguistics)

1. Semanticity: The signals in any communication system have meaning.

2. Cultural transmission: This is the need for some aspect of a communication system to be learned through communicative interaction with other users of the system.

3. Arbitrariness: This property refers to a form not logically related to its meaning. (In contrast to arbitrariness, iconicity refers to the natural and logical relationship between a form and its meaning, e.g. onomatopoetic words like cuckoo.)

4. Discreteness: This is the property of having complex messages built up from smaller parts.

5. Productivity: This refers to the ability to produce and understand any number of messages that have not been express before and that may express novel ideas.

6. Displacement: This refers to the ability to communicate about things that are not present in space or time.

7. Creativity: Creativity is the characteristic of languages that they readily and regularly permit the expression of new meanings.

8. Recursiveness: Recursiveness allows phrases to expand by the expansion of phrases within themselves, e.g. friend of a friend of mine.

9. Duality: Duality is the characteristic of linguistic sign that these have a two-part or dual structure, in which the meaningful whole is made up of meaningless parts. For example, [p], [t], and [a] are meaningless in separation. But when they combine as [pat] ‘pot’, they become meaningful.

10. Openness (or open-endedness): Openness is the characteristic of languages that they are always able to come up with new words to express new ideas and new things in the world.

11. Grammaticality: Grammaticality is the characteristic of languages that they have rather strict rules about how things may be said.