WHAT IS LANGUAGE

Well, good afternoon.

The title of this little talk is "What is language?" and of course it's a
question that linguists and philosophers and so on often spend time on.

Well. I'll just sketch a strategy towards trying to answer the question. So, by way
of introduction, first of all, let me just suggest that language, whatever it is,
is certainly a word, the word "language". Well, how do we explain it? How
do we explain this particular word, or perhaps any word? But let's stick to "language".

Well here are three possible ways we might go about it. Let's call them A, B & C.

A. They might try to establish the true meaning, or essence, of the word.
And, in effect, that is to try to give a single definition.

Or B. we might offer a set of definitions. And this, of course, is what

a monolingual dictionary does.

And finally here C, let's call it. We might try to give examples of the word in a variety
of its uses.

So let's have a look at these now in a little more detail. And the first of these three
ways of explaining the term is, as I say, to offer a single definition to cover
the whole meaning of the term. Now in the case of the word language, we have a
definition, from R. H. Hall, this one, in 1964. Here we go: "language is", I quote, "the
institution whereby humans communicate and interact with each other." I repeat, "the
institution whereby humans communicate and interact with each other." And
he goes on: "by means of habitually used oral, auditory, arbitrary symbols." I'll just
repeat the whole thing: "the institution whereby humans communicate and interact
with each other by means of habitually used oral, auditory, arbitrary symbols." Well,
end of quote.

Well now, the trouble is with the single definition, as we can perhaps see
from that example, that either the definition must be very long indeed, or it
cannot indicate many of the aspects of language. for example, the rich range of
the functions of language. Well, what are these functions? What are examples of these
functions? There's certainly a rich range. Let's have these examples. Call them, from
A to E.

A. What I call the propositional use. To state, state facts. For example, the exciting
statement, "We are now in Hatfield." That's a propositional use of language.

But B. A very different example, to express feelings. Now, sometimes

language is quite dramatic if you say "damn" or "ooooh", or something like this,
you're expressing a feeling. And you all know the context. If you see a horror film in
the cinema, you can hear people expressing their feelings sometimes in these ways.
Well, it's very different from the propositional use quite clearly. It's almost
a different sort thing, but it's included in the language. So exclamations of love,
hate, other feelings then would be the second example.

A third example, we might try to give pleasure by exploiting the sounds of words. For
example, this is what we do in children's nursery rhymes, isn't it? Nursery rhyme, you
know, a little, a little bit of verse which children like to hear. For example,
"Ding dong bell, pussy's in the well." Well, little children like to hear the
repetition of the "ell" sound here, the rhyming. So that's a sort of primitive
aesthetic pleasure, the repetition of the sound.

another example, of course, again very different, would be the use of language
to record data, to record facts. A historical example of this would be the
Domesday book in England in the year 1086. You'll remember William the Conqueror
from Normandy came in 1066. Twenty years later he set about making a sort of
inventory of all the wealth in the country he had conquered. So in every
village, people came and counted the number of cattle and this sort of thing
and wrote it all down in a book, the Domesday book, it's called. So to record data is
another use of language.

the final example would be, very important I think, to express one's regional, it may
be, identity, certainly to express one's identity. There was a recent
controversy in Leeds, in Yorkshire, where there's quite a strong regional accent, and
indeed to some extent a dialect. Now in Yorkshire, and other parts of the north
of England too, people often say "love, love, love". So, people, especially women,
would call anybody "love", it's just a friendly thing. And in the town hall at
Leeds, there was a woman who answered the phone, the telephone receptionist. When
people rang up to ask about car disks, or whatever it was, she'd say, "Hello
love, what do you want? How can I help you, love?" And some politically
correct counsellor said, "Well we mustn't have this. It sounds like sexist language" so
she was ordered not to say "love" anymore. Well, this could be seen as an attack on
regional differences and a person's own sense of self and community.

where did we get to? Let's get away from "love".

Right, we are talking about three ways of explaining the term then. The first was to
offer a single definition.

Now the second, as I said, is to offer a set of alternative definitions as the

monolingual dictionary does. OK. What can we say for that? Well, the advantage over
the single definition is that the range of definition allows for a wider range
of meanings than the single definition does. Allows for a wider range of meanings
and uses. We'll, that's an advantage. But, the disadvantage would be that even a
long set of definitions may be far too restrictive to give a full understanding
of the uses of the term, even the long set may be too restrictive.

so, there's a second way of going about it. One might offer a set of alternative
definitions.

A third way now of going about it would be to give examples of the word in use in a
language in order to exemplify the richness of the concept, the variety of related uses
that it encompass. So you might, for example, take yourself to a dictionary of
quotations or something like this and look up the word "language". And see, in the
case of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, you could look up the word "language"
and you'll find quotations there from people such as Shakespeare or the more recent
poet Auden and so on in relation to language.

Now, let's come thirdly to another general approach here, to use what i'm calling
defining criteria to indicate what a language is. This is a scientific approach. We might
wish to have a set of defining criteria in order to distinguish human language from,
other forms of communication. Now, let's have an example of that. A scholar called C.
F. Hockett in 1960 offered 13 different design features, as he called it, of
communication. Now the first of these was the so-called vocal-auditory channel, in
other words, in plain English, using the voice and the ears. Now bees, for example,
dance, as we are told, to show where the honey is, but that is not vocal-auditory,
so bees don't count here.

The other, i'll just run through these other so-called design features. They've all got, a
lot of them have rather, technical sounding terms. the second would be broadcast
transmission and direct reception. Third, rapid fading. Fourth,
interchangeability. Fifth, total feedback. Sixth, specialisation. Seven,
semanticity. Eight arbitrariness. Nine discreteness. Ten displacement.
Eleven productivity. Twelve, traditional transmission. And thirteen,
duality of patterning. Now, whatever those things are when they are spelled out from
their technical terms, whatever those things are, they are lists of thirteen different
defining criteria. now, only human language satisfies all of these thirteen features; no
other form of communication does.

So now, what's the point? Using a system such as Hockett's, we can take a set of
criteria as necessary conditions for human language. Necessary conditions, that is,
they must be met if we are to call the language human language. And we can call
them jointly sufficient conditions.

Now, in order to mark off human language from other sorts of communication then.
Conditions which mark off human language from other forms of communication.
Other forms, well, computers' language, bees' language, birds' language.

So we come finally to a conclusion. We can attempt to answer the question, "what is

language?" we could use here the philosophical idea of the paradigm or central case
of the concept. That is to say in order to understand or to define a concept, we must
understand first of all this central case of the concept. One might say that if any form
of communication satisfies all of the chosen criteria, all of the design feature, then
it is human language. And if it doesn't, then it is not human language. In other words
human language is the central case of language, or the paradigm case of language.

Now other forms of communication, such as those of bees, are less central cases than
language. They may share some, but not all of our design features. They may indeed
give rise to analogous uses of the term "language", but that shows no more than
that those other forms of communication are like human language in certain ways, but
not in others. They are not, to repeat, central cases of language. In short,
human language is the central case of what we normally think of as language.
We should not be misled by some similarities then between human language and other
forms of communication into calling those other forms of communication language as
though they were on a par with human language. As Bishop Butler said, so long ago,
"everything is what it is and not another thing."

Now, there's one approach to what language is. Now, I hope I've set some ideas
running. I know you've been writing away but do you have any questions or
comments on language and this approach to it.