why Human language is different from animal language ?

1. Duality of patterning (Duality of structure)

Language displays two levels of patterning. It is made up of sounds and smaller formalunits called phonemes, morpheme and words. A stretch of speech in any human language can be analyzed into smaller units and larger number of meaning can be expressed by means of limited number of signals. For instance a sentence such as “Our teachers like all the students” can be analyzed into words: Out/teacher/like/all/the/students/. Some of these

words may further be broken into smaller units: teach/er/s; student/s. Each word in the

sentence is made up of speech sounds called phonemes. For example the word ‘like’ is made up of an initial consonant /l/, a medial diphthong /ai/and a final consonant /k/. The same words can be rearranged in order to construct another sentence “All the students like our teachers”. Thus in human language two levels of structure are found: a primary level which consists of compounding of words

and a secondary level which consists of compounding of sounds.

Animal communication on the other hand, consists of meaningful cries which cannot

be analyzed into constituent elements such as phonemes, morphemes or words. The cry of animals denotes approaching danger, mating instinct, anger etc. The chirping of birds and the buzzing of bees are means of communication. But they serve only a limited number of purposes. The bees for example, have only two modes of body movements called bee dance- one to signify distance and the other to denote the direction of forage. Unlike animal language, human language is articulate as it has got a structure. Human language can be analyzed into a number of smaller constituent elements like words, phonemes and

morphemes. That is why human language is said to be a “system of systems”. The cry of animals or the body movement of the bees cannot be analyzed into smaller units. Human language is structured at different levels- at the level of phonemes and morphemes and at the level of words. Charles Hockett calls this property of language as the duality of

structure

2. Recursiveness (Creativity)

Since there are various ways of combining the units of language, there is

considerable scope for creativity within it. Using a few basic rules of construction, human beings can produce and understand a large number of utterances. There is no limit to the length or number of sentences a speaker can produce. Using a finite number of rules which are repeatedly used, a speaker can produce grammatical sentences never uttered before.

This property of language is called recursiveness. We can add new words and sentences to the already existing ones or even form sentences inside sentences. This property of

language is referred to as creativity. Languages always remain open-ended. The signals in human language can be combined in a variety of ways. Human language may therefore be called an open -ended system.

Animal language, on the other hand, exhibits only a very little creativity or recursiveness. It does not have any variety of combination or organization of constituent

elements.

3. Arbitrariness. Generally speaking, there is no one-to-one correspondence between the vocal sounds

and the concepts or ideas they stand for. The relationship between a word and its referent is purely arbitrary. In other words there is no positive relationship between a speech sound and the object. This property of language is referred to as arbitrariness. There are a few exceptions to this feature of language. A few words are representational in nature. In English, for example , words like ‘buzz’, ‘hiss’, ‘rattle’, ‘bang’, ‘thud’ etc. actually

represent the sounds of their referents. Such words are called Onomatopoeic words. With the exception of such words, the relationship between the signifier and the signified (i.e. the word and its referent) is generally arbitrary.

4. Displacement.

Animal communication is context bound but human communication can be context

free. Human beings can talk about others experiences. They can talk of objects and events which are not present at the time and the place of speaking because the use of human language is not directly controlled by stimulus. This property of language is called displacement. In the case of animals, there is a direct relationship between stimulus and they can respond only to their immediate environment.

5. Transferability.

Human language has two basic manifestations: One is speech and the other is

writing. It is possible to write down spoken language and read aloud the written material. This property of language is referred to as transferability. These differences between human language and animal language are primarily due to the fact that the human brain has an innate capacity for learning language creatively.