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Charles Hockett’s Design Features of Language

Hockett's Design Features of Language
Hockett's Design Features of Language were defined by an American linguist
Charles Francis Hockett in the 1960s
...

Design features of language
1
...
Broadcast transmission and directional reception
3
...
Interchangeability
5
...
Specialization
7
...
Arbitrariness
9
...
Displacement
11
...
Cultural Transmission/ Traditional transmission
13
...
Prevarication
15
...
Learnability

Charles Hockett’s Design Features of Language

1
...
Writing is a secondary and somewhat marginal form of language while
sign languages are limited in their use
...
Broadcast transmission and directional reception
When humans speak, sounds are transmitted in all directions; however, listeners perceive
the direction on the basis of the sources from where the sounds are produced
...
Transitoriness and rapid fading
Transitoriness refers to the temporary quality of language
...
Sound waves quickly
disappear once a speaker stops speaking (unless recorded by advanced technological
tools)
...

4
...

5
...

6
...
Besides, human brain plays a vital role while
expressing, perceiving and understanding speech
...
Semanticity
Language is fundamentally used to convey meanings
...
Meanings can be directly as well as indirectly conveyed in a
speech context
...
Arbitrariness
There is an arbitrary relationship between a signal and its meaning
...

Human language is completely arbitrary with only few exceptions like onomatopoeic
words
...

Examples of onomatopoeic words: Clap, slap, spray, gulp, clatter, thud, rustle, etc
...
Discreteness
Linguistic representations can be broken down into small discrete units which combine
with each other in rule-governed ways
...


Charles Hockett’s Design Features of Language

10
...
Speakers can talk about the past and the future; they
can also express abstract ideas
...

11
...
Humans are able to produce unlimited utterances
...
New expressions are created all the time and the meaning of
signals can vary depending on the context and situation
...
Cultural Transmission/ Traditional transmission
Traditional transmission is the idea that, while humans are born with innate language
capabilities, language itself is learned after birth in a social setting
...

13
...
As made up of meaningless sounds (i
...
phonemes / syllables in isolation)
2
...
e
...
Prevarication Language is used to convey information about states of affairs and
states of mind
...
Language can just as
easily be used to withhold information, or to give false information – to prevaricate – and
deception is as universal as language itself
...
When using language, humans can make false or meaningless statements,
depending upon contextual requirements
...
Reflexiveness
Humans use language to talk about language/ to describe the nature and purpose of
language
...

16
...
In the same way, as the speakers learn their first
language, they are able to learn other languages as well
...

The early history of England is marked by:






the Roman invasion
the Anglo-Saxon invasions
the Christianization of Britain
the Viking invasions
the Norman French invasion

The Roman Invasion
At the time of the earliest written records, the British islands were inhabited by Celtic
people known as the Britons
...
C
...
D
...
The Celtic people resisted but were unable to fend off the invading Roman
troops
...

Unlike their Roman counterparts, Celtic societies allotted women rights often equal to
those of men
...
Boudicca led her people in revolt and for some time managed
to hold back the mighty Roman legions
...
D
...
As they did in many parts of the
world, the Romans built villas with beautiful mosaics, a series of roads which were used
for centuries, and great Roman baths
...


Roman lighthouse at Dover
...
420), the Roman troops were called back to
the continent, and Britain was left undefended
...
e
...
For over
100 years, the Anglo-Saxons continued to raid and settle in Britain, pushing the Celtic
people into the remote parts of Britain—into what are today the countries of Wales,
Scotland, and Ireland
...
The number of loanwords known
for certain to have entered Old English from Celtic language is very small
...

The scop, the tribal poet/singer, entertained and commemorated significant events by
composing and performing tales such as Beowulf
...

Nevertheless, about half of the most commonly used words in Modern English have Old
English roots
...
D
...
Four dialects of the
Old English language are known: Northumbrian, Mercian , Kentish and West Saxon
...
(Many words with Latin roots
found their way into the English language with the assimilation of Christianity into the
culture, most of the words revolved around religious concepts which the Anglo-Saxons
had no terms, such as angel, priest, martyr, bishop, etc
...
It was not until the time when a papal mission
was sent by Gregory the Great that the conversion of England began again
...
Arguably, it was the work of
missionaries that eventually ended Germanic paganism amongst the general populations
of these Anglo-Saxon kingdoms
...
The
Vikings were from the area now known as Scandinavia
...
Alfred the Great negotiated a peaceful settlement with
the Vikings by partitioning Britain in what was known as the Danelaw, establishing a
period of relatively peaceful coexistence in which the language and the culture mingled
...
The new conquerors (called the Normans) brought
with them a kind of French, which became the language of the Royal Court, and the ruling
and business classes
...
During the 14th century,

English became dominant in Britain again, but with many French words added
...
It was the language of the great poet Geoffrey
Chaucer (c1340-1400), but it would still be difficult for native English speakers to
understand today
...
The Great Vowel Shift (GVS) was a series of systemic
changes in the pronunciation of English vowels that occurred in southern England during
the late Middle English period (roughly the period from Chaucer to Shakespeare)
...
In phonetic terms, the GVS involved the raising and
fronting of the long, stressed monophthongs
...

Prior to mechanized printing, each particular scribe wanted to spell the words according
to his own dialect
...

This, and the Renaissance of Classical learning, meant that many new words and
phrases entered the language
...
Books became cheaper and more people learned to read
...
Spelling and grammar became fixed,
and the dialect of London, where most publishing houses were, became the standard
...
e
...


Late Modern English (1800-Present)

The main difference between Early Modern English and Late Modern English is
vocabulary
...

Today, American English is particularly influential, due to the USA's dominance of
cinema, television, popular music, trade and technology (including the Internet)
...


English
words of
Celtic origin

English
words of
Latin origin

English words
of Scandinavian
origin

English words of French origin

Beak, bard,
budget, clan,
clutter, down,
lawn, piece,
slogan, town,
vassal…

Triumph, circus,
ante meridiem,
alter, amiable,
auditory,
aviation, aviary,
dictionary,
dictate, doctrine,
disciple,
discipline, elate,
emperor, error,
feminine,
fugitive, gem,
hostile, hour,
herb, invincible,
judicial, legal,
legacy, library,
lunar, magic,
magistrate,
memory,
miracle,
mundane,
mortal,
negotiate,
penalty, rational,
radius, tactile,
vulnerable…

Are, awe, awkward,
bag, bark, birth, bug,
bull, both, blunder,
call, cake, crawl, die,
dirt, egg, fellow,
freckle, guest, give,
gift, gun, hail, hit,
husband, haunt, ill,
kid, knife, kindle,
lad, leg, law, loan,
low, mistake, mug,
odd, race, root,
same, scale, scarf,
skill, their, they,
thwart, tiding, troll,
ugly, until, Viking,
wand, weak, whirl,
wing, window,
wrong…

Homage, peasant, seigniorage, suzerain,
vassal, villain,
chancellor, council, government, mayor,
minister, parliament, lion, eagle,
money, treasury, exchequer, commerce,
finance, tax, liberalism, capitalism,
materialism, nationalism, plebiscite,
coup d'état, regime, sovereignty, state,
administration, federal, bureaucracy,
jurisdiction, district, diplomacy,
art, music, dance, theatre, author, stage,
paint, canvas, perform, harmony…

A Brief Chronology of English
55 BC

Roman invasion of Britain by Julius Caesar

AD 43

Roman invasion and occupation
...
English is used in
Parliament for the first time

c1388

Chaucer starts writing The Canterbury Tales

c1400

The Great Vowel Shift begins

1476

William Caxton establishes the first English printing press

1564

Shakespeare is born

Local
inhabitants
speak
Celtic

Old
English

Middle
English

Early
Modern
English

A Brief Chronology of English
1604

Table Alphabeticall, the first English dictionary, is published

1607

The first permanent English settlement in the New World
(Jamestown) is established

1616

Shakespeare dies

1623

Shakespeare's First Folio is published

1702

The first daily English-language newspaper, The Daily Courant, is
published in London

1755

Samuel Johnson publishes his English dictionary

1776

Thomas Jefferson writes the American Declaration of
Independence

1782

Britain abandons its colonies in what is later to become the USA

1828

Webster publishes his American English dictionary

1922

The British Broadcasting Corporation is founded

1928

The Oxford English Dictionary is published

Late
Modern
English

Further Readings:
Albert C Baugh & Thomas Cable
...
A History of the English Language (Fifth Edition)
...

Corballis, Michael
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From Hand to Mouth: The Origins of Language
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Greenberg, Joseph H
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On the Morpological Typology of Languages
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On Language: Selected writings of Joseph H
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Stanford: Stanford University
Press
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(1966)
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(Janua Linguarum series minor 59) The Hague: Mouton
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(1979)
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Language 55(4), pp
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W
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Elcock
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The Romance Languages
...


1

THE INDO-EUROPEAN FAMILY OF LANGUAGES
The languages brought into relationship by descent or progressive differentiation from a parent speech are
conveniently called a family of languages
...
In books
written a century ago, the term Aryan was commonly employed
...
A more common term is Indo-Germanic, which is the most usual designation among
German philologists, but it is open to the objection of giving undue emphasis to the Germanic languages
...
The parent tongue from which the Indo-European languages have sprung had already become divided
and scattered before the dawn of history
...
Consequently we have no written record
of the common Indo-European language
...
The surviving languages
show various degrees of similarity to one another (i
...
the similarity bearing a more or less direct relationship
to their geographical distribution)
...

1
...
The most important of these are Hindi, Urdu (the official language of Pakistan), Bengali (the official
language of Bangladesh), Punjabi, and Marathi
...

2
...

3
...
There is a considerable Armenian literature, chiefly historical and theological
...
Numerous contacts with Semitic languages, with Greek,
and with Turkish, have contributed further to give the vocabulary a rich character
...
Hellenic
This branch of the Indo-European language family comprises classical and modern Greek
...
Albanian
Albanian is the language of Albania, with about 6 million speakers
...
It was formerly classed with the
Hellenic group, but since the beginning of the present century, it has been recognized as an
independent member of the family
...
Italic
The principal language of the Italic group is Latin, originally the speech of the city of Rome and
the ancestor of the modern Romance languages: Italian, Romanian, Spanish, Portuguese, French,
and so on
...

7
...
It falls into two groups,
the Baltic and the Slavic, which, in spite of differences, have sufficient features in common to
justify their being classed together
...

8
...
Their expansions and migrations from the 2nd century BCE onward are largely
recorded in history
...
Other languages include English, German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian,
and Icelandic
...
Celtic
Celtic languages were spoken in the last centuries before the Common Era (also called the
Christian Era) over a wide area of Europe, from Spain and Britain to the Balkans, with one group
(the Galatians) even in Asia Minor
...

Modern
Celtic
languages
include Welsh, Cornish, Breton, Scots
Gaelic, Irish, and Manx
...
Hittite
Hittite, the language of the Hittites is regarded the oldest attested Indo-European language
...

11
...
D
...


SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT IN LINGUISTICS
Linguistics is the scientific study of language
...

The field of linguistics may be divided in terms of three dichotomies: synchronic versus diachronic,
theoretical versus applied, and microlinguistics versus macrolinguistics
...
The goal of theoretical linguistics is the construction of a general theory of the structure of
language or of a general theoretical framework for the description of languages; the aim of applied
linguistics is the application of the findings and techniques of the scientific study of language to
practical tasks, especially to the elaboration of improved methods of language teaching
...
The former refers to a narrower and the latter to a much broader view of the
scope of linguistics
...
In contrast,
macrolinguistics embraces all of these aspects of language
...
Macrolinguistics should not be
identified with applied linguistics
...
But there is, in
principle, a theoretical aspect to every part of macrolinguistics, no less than to microlinguistics
...
Historical linguistics had its roots in the etymological
speculations of classical and medieval times, in the comparative study of Greek and Latin developed
during the Renaissance and in the speculations of scholars as to the language from which the other
languages of the world were descended
...


The theories of the Neogrammarians, a group of German historical linguists and classical scholars
who first gained prominence in the 1870s, were especially important because of the rigorous manner
in which they formulated sound correspondences in the Indo-European languages
...

Historical linguistics, when contrasted with synchronic linguistics, the study of a language at a
particular point in time, is often called diachronic linguistics
...
The comparative method was
developed in the course of the 19th century for the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European and was
subsequently applied to the study of other language families
...

Changes in the phonological systems of languages through time were accounted for in terms of
sound laws (e
...
Grimm’s Law)
...
Critics of the comparative method have pointed out that
this situation does not generally hold
...

Consequently, there will be no sharp distinction between contiguous dialects, but, in general, the
further apart two speech communities are, the more linguistic features there will be that distinguish
them
...
It is derived from the work of Swiss
linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and is part of the overall approach of structuralism
...
Saussure is also known for introducing
several basic dimensions of semiotic analysis that are still important today
...

Structural linguistics was actually developed by Ferdinand de Saussure between 1913 and 1915,
although his work wasn’t translated into English and popularized until the late 1950s
...
Saussure realized that we need to understand language, not as a collection of
individual words with individual histories but as a structural system of relationships among words
as they are used at a given point in time, or synchronically
...

Structuralism doesn’t look for the causes or origins of language (or of any other phenomenon)
...


In order to differentiate between the structure that governs language and the millions of individual
utterances that are its surface phenomena, Saussure called the structure of language langue (the
French word for language), and he called the individual utterances that occur when we
speak parole (the French word for speech)
...
They interact and we are able to perceive those
components, as Saussure noted in terms of the structure of language, only because we perceive their
difference from one another
...
For example, if we believed that all objects were the same color, we wouldn’t need the word
red (or blue or green) at all
...
According to structuralism, the human mind perceives difference most readily in terms of
opposites, which structuralists call binary oppositions: two ideas, directly opposed, each of
which we understand by means of its opposition to the other
...

Furthermore, unlike his predecessors, Saussure argued that words do not simply refer to objects in
the world for which they stand
...
A signifier is a “sound-image” (a mental
imprint of a linguistic sound); the signified is the concept to which the signifier refers
...
A sound image
becomes a word only when it is linked with a concept
...

The relationship between signifier and signified is merely a matter of social convention: it is
whatever the community using it says it is
...

Functionalism
Functionalism, in linguistics refers to the approach to language study that is concerned with the
functions performed by language, primarily in terms of cognition (relating information), expression
(indicating mood), and conation (exerting influence)
...
Some linguists have
applied the findings to work on stylistics and literary criticism
...
It revolves around the instrumentality of language with respect to what people do and
achieve with it in social interaction
...

Prague school of linguistics
Prague school refers to a school of linguistic thought and analysis established in Prague in the 1920s
by Vilém Mathesius
...
Linguists of the Prague school stress the function of elements
within language, the contrast of language elements to one another, and the total pattern or system
formed by these contrasts
...


The concept of distinctive-feature analysis in studying the sound systems of languages has been
incorporated within the standard model of transformational grammar (Britannica
...

Generativism
Generativism with regard to the realm of linguistics refers to the theory or application of generative
grammar
...
It is based on his nativist theory/
nativism; it claims that all humans have an innate language capacity
...
This "universal
grammar," according to the forenamed linguist, comes from our innate language faculty
...
Generativists use poverty of the stimulus argument as evidence to elucidate the
fundamental themes of generativism
...
F
...

Poverty of stimulus revolves around the claim that children are not exposed to rich enough data
within their linguistic environments to acquire every feature of their language
...
The
claim is that the sentences children hear while learning a language do not contain the information
needed to develop a thorough understanding of the grammar of the language
...
They believe this is
why children can learn a native language quickly
...
Influential behaviourist
theorists, such as Burrhus Frederic Skinner and John Broadus Watson , argue that
language (verbal behaviour, as they call it) is learned through exposure to language, say, at home or
at school
...
Nativists,
on the other hand, believe that children are 'wired' to learn a language, almost regardless of their
environment
...
However, all that changed with the arrival
of Noam Chomsky
...

During the 1960s, Chomsky questioned the idea that the human mind begins as a tabula rasa/
blank slate and rejected the behaviourist theory because children receive 'impoverished language
input' (baby talk) when growing up
...
He suggested that
the human brain must have evolved to contain certain linguistic information from birth which helps
children figure out the basic structures of language
...
For example, children growing up in England would hear English and
therefore learn English
...
According to Chomsky, this innate ability to easily learn
a native language is due to the role played by: the language acquisition device
(LAD) and Universal grammar
...
Chomsky proposed the LAD to help
explain how children are able to comprehend the basic structures of language from such a young
age
...
Chomsky stated that
this part of the brain is a uniquely human trait and cannot be found in other animals, which helps
explain why it is only humans who can communicate through language
...
Let's take a closer
look at Universal Grammar
...
Chomsky does not believe that a child born in England has an innate ability to speak
English or that a child born in China can miraculously speak Chinese
...

For example, most languages:





Differentiate between verbs and nouns
Have a way of talking about the past and present
Have a way of asking questions
Have a counting system

This sharing of common grammar principles is what Chomsky refers to as Universal
Grammar
...
It is a child's environment that will determine
which language they will learn
...
Whereas he used to believe the
LAD contained specific knowledge about language, he now believes that it works more like a
mechanism for working out the rules of language
...

Learning a language is instinctive
...

The LAD is a tool in the brain that facilitates the learning of language and grammar
...

Grammar is a necessary skill needed for learning any language
...

In 1712, the English language, according to the satirist Jonathan Swift, was in chaos
...
The model was to be based
on that of the Académie Française, which had been regulating the French language since
1634
...
To this day no official
regulation of the English language exists
...

 RP (Received Pronunciation)
The abbreviation RP (Received Pronunciation) denotes what is traditionally considered the
standard accent of people living in London and the southeast of England and of other people
elsewhere who speak in this way
...
Though it is traditionally considered a
“prestige” accent, RP is not intrinsically superior to other varieties of English; it is itself only
one particular accent that has, through the accidents of history, achieved a higher status than
others
...
Other varieties of English are well preserved in
spite of the leveling influences of film, television, and radio
...

 Germanic
(Germanic is a branch of the Indo-European family to which English belongs
...
The other two
divisions are North Germanic (e
...
, Danish, Norwegian) and East Germanic (Gothic))
...

 Philology
(Philology refers to the study of language in its cultural and social contexts
...


 Protolanguage
(Protolanguage refers to an unrecorded or unattested language from which a group of
historically attested languages have presumably derived
...
Likewise, Proto-Germanic
is the presumed ancestor of all Germanic languages)
...

Non-rhotic varieties pronounce /r/ before vowels (e
...
, red) but not after vowels (e
...
, car,
third)

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