Spontaneity and Displacement
Spontaneity#card
Humans have the ability to initiate speech. Unlike animals that need a stimulus such a biscuit or a treat to be forced to speak, humans speak by themselves and start conversations themselves.
Displacement#card
Humans also have the ability to talk about things that are not in the present moment. This means that they can talk about something that happened lats week, or something that is happening somewhere else right now. This is similar to object perminance, having the ability to communicate beyond the here and now.
Arbitrariness#card
In general, human language is quite arbitrary. There is nothing about language that neccessarily symbolises something. There is nothing about the sound “tree” that links to the thing outside which is brown and green; it is all random. Though there are exceptions, the most common of which being onomatopoeic words such as whoosh, slurp, pop and so on, most words in general are arbitrary.
Structure and Creativity#card
Human language is an open system that can be added to and combined and recombined in many ways to create new forms. Random units of sound which don’t have meaning in of themselves combine to form meaningful morphemes or words. Animals generally don’t have this ability, where one sound means one action, and cannot be split up into individual pieces to be reconstructed. Male grasshoppers have the ability to say one of 6 messgages; humans have the ability to talk about literally anything we want. We can even talk about things that don’t exist!
Cultural Transmission#card
Human language depends on cultural transmission. It is not genetic and instinctual like a dog barking, who will bark the same wherever they go, but is rather learnt from the environment. A cantonese born child growing up in an English speaking house will speak English, it is not something defined inherantly but by the people around the child. Similarly, a bird isolated from any contact will still sing songs, but humans isolated from any society will not be able to speak any languages until they start learning from contact with people around them.