DESIGN FEATURES OF LANGUAGE
Semanticity -- meaning, often very complex
Charles Francis Hockett (January 17, 1916 -
November 3, 2000)
Design Features of human language, from
Charles Hockett (1960) The Origin of Speech.
1.Vocal-auditory channel -- language is vocal;
writing is a secondary form of language; sign
languages
• a mode of communication:  all forms
of communication have a means by
which the communication is
transmitted:  vocal, gestural, tactile
(bees), chemical (moths)
2. Broadcast transmission and directional
reception -- language signal is sent out in all
directions, while it is perceived in a limited
direction
3.Rapid fading (transitoriness) -- language
signal does not persist over time, although
writing and audio-recordings can be used to
record human language so that it can be
recreated at a later time.
4.Interchangeability -- speaker can both
receive and broadcast ; send and receive
messages:  wall; location of food is given by the
• humans: can both talk and listen;
• silkworm moth:  chemical
communication system where some
individuals are senders and others are
receivers:  when the female is ready
to mate, she secretes a chemical that
males can trace back to her, but the
males can only be receivers, they -
can't secrete the chemical back
5.Total feedback -- speaker can hear himself
speak and can monitor performance
6.Specialization -- specialized organs: lips,
tongue, throat, etc.
7.
meanings;  signals in any communication
system have meaning
8.Arbitrariness -- no necessary connection
between the form of the signal and the thing
being referred to; meaning is not predictable
from form and form is not predictable from
meaning; opposite of arbitrariness is
nonarbitrariness or iconic.
• a) many animal systems use iconic
signals which in some way directly
represent their meaning:  example of
communication that involves iconic
signals:  the dance of an Italian honey
bee: forager bees return to the hive
and tell other bees where a source of
food is located by dancing in one of
three patterns on the wall of the hive:
• round dance:  indicates that the food
is located within 20ft of hive; bee
moves around in a circle; quality of
food indicated by the number of
repetitions and vivacity of dance
• sickle dance: indicates that the food is
located 20-60ft of the hive; bee traces
out a sickle-shaped figure eight on the
angle made by the direction of the
open end of the sickle with the
vertical--corresponds to the same
angle as the food source is from the
sun; quality of food indicated by the
number of repetitions and vivacity of
the dance
• tail-wagging dance: indicates that
the food is located over 60ft from the
hive; location of food is given by angle
of dance with vertical--corresponds to
same angle as food source is from the
sun; the number of times per minute
that the bee dances a complete
pattern indicates the distance of the
 food source (the slower the repetition
rate, the longer the distance); quality
of food indicated by the vivacity of
the dance
• b) language is arbitrary:  meaning is
not predictable from form and form is
not predictable from meaning;
compare with iconic signs of bee
dance, or iconic signs we use, like a
cigarette with an X through it to
denote "no smoking";
• meaning is not predictable from form
because the same concept is
expressed with different sounds in
different languages:  “water” is water
in English, agua in Spanish, eau in
French, Wasser in German, shui in
Mandarin, and jalam in Tamil; no
reason that we don’t say milk instead
of water to denote “water” in English;
• In addition, form is not predictable
from meaning :  same sound can
mean different things in different
languages:  the sound /lee/ means
three things in English: ‘meadow’,
‘side sheltered from the wind’, and a
proper name; /lee/ also means ‘bed’
in French and marks questions in
Russian:  use of language is not just a response
9.Discreteness -- sounds have bounds;
property of having “internal structure”:  qualitatively different purposes than
complex messages that are built up out of
smaller parts;
• human languages:  sentences are -
composed of independent words; the
words are composed of individual
sounds which can be recombined to
form new words which can form new
sentences;
• animal communication systems:  each
message is an indivisible unit;
• birdsong:  made up of an elaborate
pattern of notes, but the song cannot
be segmented into independently
meaningful parts;bee dances:  same;
• parrots:  can imitate humans, but are
memorizing a whole sequence and
cannot break it down into parts:  a
parrot trained to say "Polly wants a
cracker" and "Don't go in there" can’t
break the two sentences down and -
say "Polly don't want a cracker"
10.Displacement -- speaker can talk about
things which are not present, either spatially
or temporally; human language allows
speakers to talk about the past and the
future, as well as the present.
• the ability to communicate about
things that are not present in space or
time; we can talk about a person
who’s not in front of us, about a
movie we saw last week or want to
see over the weekend, what we did
over the break, etc.; no form of
animal communication appears to be
able to do this:  animal calls are
stimulus-response driven:  animals
call when there's danger or food,
when they want to mate, etc.; human
to external or even internal emotional
stimuli; we use language for
animals do
11.Productivity -- speakers create novel,
never-before-heard utterances that
others can understand  
• ability to produce and understand any
number of messages that have never
been expressed before and that may -
express novel ideas;
 • human language:  "open-ended", our
knowledge of language allows us to
constantly produce new sentences
never spoken before and to
understand new sentences we’ve
never heard before
13. Learnability: A speaker of a language can
learn another language.
14.Duality of patterning -- parts of a language
can be recombined in a systematic way to
create new forms

 "colorless green ideas sleep • Utterances are a series of words or

morphemes.
furiously"

a)      This is the house. • Words or morphemes are a series of

consonant and vowel sounds
• This is the house that Jack built.
15 Prevarication – lying; linguistic messages
• This is the malt that lay in the house can be false, deceptive, or meaningless.
that Jack built.
16.Metalanguage/Reflexiveness-- using
• This is the dog that chased the cat language to talk about language
that killed the rat that ate the malt
that lay in the house that Jack built.

b)      The old man came.

• The old, old, old, old, old man came.

• all animal communication systems: 

the number of signals is fixed, finite; -
even if some of the signals are
complex, there is no mechanism for
systematically combining discrete
units to create new signals; animals
do not combine their calls and
gestures in new ways to communicate
new ideas; bees cannot come up with
new dance patterns to communicate
new information like danger, or the
type of food available--the absence of
creativity makes bee dance
qualitatively different from human
language

12. Traditional Transmission --  humans are

probably born with an ability for language.

o Linguistic conventions are

passed on from generation to
generation.