语言学中语言的区别性特征

【考试咨询】浙江教师招聘交流群：287234887｜微信公众号：浙江招教｜

浙江教师招考公告｜浙江教师历年真题｜32学院免费课程｜面授班级

Design features-refers to the defining properties of human language that distinguish it from any animal system of communication. They are arbitrariness, duality, creativity/ productivity, displacement, cultural transmission and interchangeability.

1.Arbitrariness

Arbitrariness: one design feature of human language, which refers to the fact that the forms of linguistic signs bear no natural relationship to their meaning. It was discussed by Saussure first. The link between them is a matter of convention.

E.g. “house”    uchi(Japanese)    Maison(French)     房子（Chinese）

2.Duality

Duality: one design feature of human language, which refers to the property of having two levels of structures, such as units of the primary level are composed of elements of the secondary level and each of the two levels has its own principles of organization.

The higher level--- words which are meaningful.

The lower or the basic level--- sounds which are meaningless, but can be grouped and regrouped into words. In other words, language is hierarchical.

3.Creativity

Creativity: language is productive. It makes possible the construction and interpretation of new signals by its users(novel utterances are continually being created). creativity is unique to human language. In another sentence, language is creative because of its duality and its recursiveness. It can generate an infinite one sentence with infinite length.

E.g. She bought a book which was written by a teacher who taught in a school which was known for its graduates who...

4.Displacement

Displacement:one design feature of human language, which means human language enable their users to symbolize objects, events and concepts which are not present in time and space, at the moment of communication. Displacement refers to the fact that one can talk about things that are not present, as easily as he does things present. In other words, one can refer to real or unreal things, things of the past, of the present, of the future.

E.g. When dog is in danger or threat, they will roar, but once the danger past, the dog won’t have the same reaction.

5. Cultural transmission

Cultural transmission:means you can acquire a language in a culture with other speakers and not from parental genes. This means that language is not biologically transmitted from generation, but that the details of the linguistic system must be learned anew by each speaker. It is true that the capacity for language in human beings(N. Chomsky called it “language acquisition device”, or LAD)has a genetic basis, but the particular language a person learns to speak is a cultural one other than a genetic one like the dog’s barking system. Language is the carrier of culture.

6.Interchangeability

Interchangeability:means that any human being can be both a producer and a receiver of massages.