[Xmca-l] Re: language and simply communication

[James Ma]

Andy, formal linguists would use the so-called "design features" of
language to refer to properties marking off human beings from other
creatures on earth. For example, when someone says something to you, you're
free to give an answer in the way you like. Should you choose not to do so,
that is in itself an answer. This is called the "stimulus-free" property in
linguistics, but it doesn't rule out taking into consideration the social
relationship you may have with the interlocutor. However, non-human
creature communication is confined to signalling, inherently different from
human language and still perhaps incomprehensible (or even astonishing) in
many ways. For example, the mother turkey's protective instinct is only
triggered by their baby turkey's "cheep-cheep" sound. When a mother turkey
sees a polecat (their natural predator), she immediately goes into attack
mode, even at the sight of a stuffed polecat. What's more, if you make the
stuffed polecat produce the same "cheep-cheep" sound, the mother turkey
turns out to be a protector of that polecat!



James

*_______________________________________________________*

*James Ma  Independent Scholar **https://oxford.academia.edu/JamesMa
<https://oxford.academia.edu/JamesMa>   *



On Fri, 21 Dec 2018 at 02:54, Andy Blunden <andyb@marxists.org> wrote:

> James, interesting that you use the term "simply communication" to
> distinguish the natural use of signs in the animal kingdom from the
> exclusively human use of language. I am interested though in getting to
> what exactly that difference is, which cannot easily be captured in words
> like "communication" versus "language".
>
> I don't think the distinction can be captured in terms of language
> structure, either. For example, it may be the case that only and all human
> language is recursive, where as systems of animal calls are not, but this
> is a purely *external* differentiation. It is not the *essential*
> difference, the "difference which  makes a difference," so to speak.
>
> Vygotsky gives us the clue when he shows how children acquire words in the
> process of learning to "command themselves," and how as a result, the
> entire perceptual field of a human being is structured (as Hegel believed)
> by signs, mainly words, not just colour and movement. So the difference
> which makes a difference is the *conscious control* of sign-use, which is
> gradually acquired in cultural development (both ontological and
> phylogenetic).
>
> So even a single-word sentence like "Mine!" can be language, whereas the
> 50-odd distinctive calls used by gorillas do *not* constitute language.
>
> What do you think?
>
> Andy
> ------------------------------
> Andy Blunden
> http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
> On 21/12/2018 7:56 am, James Ma wrote:
> ...
>
> Second, animal utterances, however eloquently produced or approximated
> like human ones, are simply communication.  It would be rather absurd for
> formal linguists to think of animal utterances as language, given that in a
> strict sense no animals are in effect as able to sustain a conversation as
> humans do!
>
>
>
>
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