Displacement

Most animals can communicate about things in the immediate envi­ronment only. A bird utters its danger cry only when danger is pre­sent. It cannot give information about a peril which is removed in time and place. This type of spontaneous utterance is nearer to a human baby's emotional cries of pain, hunger or contentment than it is to fully developed language.

Human language, by contrast, can communicate about things that are absent as easily as about things that are present. This apparently rare phenomenon, known as displacement does occasionally occur in the animal world, for example, in the communication of honey bees. If a worker bee finds a new source of nectar, it returns to the hive and per­forms a complex dance in order to inform the other bees of the exact location of the nectar, which may be several miles away. But even bees are limited in this ability. They can inform each other only about nectar. Human language can cope with any subject whatever, and it does not matter how far away the topic of conversation is in time and space.

Creativity (Productivity)

Most animals have a very limited number of messages they can send or receive. The male of a certain species of grasshopper, for example, has a choice of six, which might be translated as follows:

1. I am happy, life is good.

2. I would like to make love.

3. You are trespassing on my territory.

4. She's mine.

5. Let's make love.

6. Oh how nice to have made love.

––14 ––

Not only is the number of messages fixed for the grasshopper, but so are the circumstances under which each can be communicated. All animals, as far as we know, are limited in a similar way. Bees can com­municate only about nectar. Dolphins, in spite of their intelligence and large number of clicks, whistles and squawks, seem to be restricted to communicating about the same things again and again. And even the clever vervet monkey, who is claimed to make thirty-six different vocal sounds, is obliged to repeat these over and over. This type of restriction is not found in human language, which is essentially creative (or productive). Humans can produce novel utterances whenever they want to. A person can utter a sentence which has never been said before, in the most unlikely circumstances, and still be understood. If, at a party, someone said, There is a purple platypus crawling across the ceiling', friends might think the speaker was drunk or drugged, but they would still understand the words spo­ken. Conversely, in an everyday routine situation, a person is not obliged to say the same thing every time. At breakfast, someone might say. This is good coffee' on one day, 'Is this coffee or dandelion tea?' on the next, and 'It would be cheaper to drink petrol' on the next.

Patterning

Many animal communication systems consist of a simple list of ele­ments. There is no internal organization within the system.

Human language, on the other hand, is most definitely not a hap­hazard heap of individual items. Humans do not juxtapose sounds and words in a random way. Instead, they ring the changes on a few well-defined patterns.

Take the sounds a, b, s, t. In English, there are only four possible ways in which these sounds could be arranged, bats, tabs, stab or bast 'inner bark of lime'. All other possibilities, such as *sbat, *abts, *stba, are excluded (an asterisk indicates an impossible word or sentence). The starred words are not excluded in this case because such sequences arc unpronounceable, but because the 'rules' subcon­sciously followed by people who know English do not allow these combinations, even for new words. A new washing powder called Sbat would be unlikely to catch on, since English does not permit the initial sequence sb, even though in some other languages (for example, ancient Greek) this combination is nol unusual.

Similarly, consider the word:., burglar, loudly, sneezed, the. Here

––15 ––

again, only three combinations are possible: The burglar sneezed loudly, Loudly sneezed the burglar and (perhaps) The burglar loudly sneezed. All others are impossible, such as *The loudly burglar sneezed, or * Sneezed burglar loudly the. Note also that had the four words been burglars, a, sneezes, loudly, there is no way In which these could be combined to make a well-formed sentence. *A burglars is an impossible combina­tion, and so is * burglars sneezes. In brief, English places firm restrictions on which items can occur together, and the order in which they come.

From this, it follows that there is also a fixed set of possibilities for the substitution of items. In the word bats, for example, a could be replaced by e or i, but not by h or z, which would give *bhts or *bzts. In the sentence The burglar sneezed loudly, the word burglar could be replaced by cat, butcher, robber, or even (in a children's story) by engine or shoe - but it could not be replaced by into, or amazingly, or they, which would give ill-formed sequences such as *The into sneezed loudly or *The amazingly sneezed loudly.

Every item in language, then, has its own characteristic place in the total pattern. It can combine with certain specified items, and be replaced by others (Figure 4).

Language can therefore be regarded as an intricate network of interlinked elements in which every item is held in its place and given its identity by all the other items. No item (apart from the names of some objects) has an independent validity or existence outside that pattern. The elements of language can be likened to the players in a game of soccer. A striker, or a goal-keeper, has no use or value outside the game. But placed among the other players, a striker acquires an identity and value. In the same way, linguistic items such as the, been, very, only acquire significance as part of a total language network.