Gramatyka Opisowa 1 Rok FAN

Productivity
-> The honeybee, normally able to communicate the location of a nectar source
to other bees, will fail to do so if the location is really “new”. In one
experiment, a hive of bees was placed at the foot of a radio tower and a food
source placed at the top. Ten bees were taken to the top, given a taste of the
delicious food, and sent off to tell the rest of the hive about their find. The
message was conveyed via a bee dance and the whole gang buzzed off to get the
free food. They flew around in all directions, but couldn’t locate the food. (It’s
probably one way to make bees really mad.) The problem seems to be that bee
communication gas a fixed set of signals for communicating location and they
all relate to horizontal distance.
-> This limiting feature of animal communication is described in terms of fixed

reference. Each signal in the system is fixed ar relating to a particular object or
occasion. Among the vervet monkey's reportoire, there is one danger signal
CHUTTER, which is used when a snake is around, and another RRAUP, used
when an eagle is spotted nearby.
These signals are fixed in terms of their reference and cannot be manipulated.
What might count as evidence of productivity in the monkey's comm Arial
Nova unication system would be an utterance of something like CHUTT-
RRAUP when a flying creature that looked like a snake came by.
Despite a lot of research involving snakes suddenly appearing in the air above
them (among other unusual and terrifying experiences), the vervet monkeys
didn't produce a new danger signal.
Productivity
-> Humans are continually creating new expressions and novel utterances by
manipulating their linguistic resources to describe new objects and situations.
This property is described as productivity (or "creativity" or "open-endedness")
and essentially means that the potential number of utterances in any human
language is infinite.
-> The communication systems of other creatures are not like that. Cicadas
(cykady, tropikalne pluskwiaki) have four signals to choose from and vervet
monkeys (koczkodany) have thirty-six vocal calls.
Arbitrariness
-> It is generally the case that there is no "natural" connection between a
linguistic form and its meaning. The connection is quite arbitrary.
We can't just look at the Arabic word ‫ كلب‬and from its shape, for example,
determine that is has a natural and obvious meaning any more than we can with
its English translation form dog.
-> Of course you can play a game with words to make them appear to “fit” the
idea or activity they indicate, as shown in these words from a child’s game.
However this type of game only emphasizes the arbitrariness of the connection
that normally exists between a word and its meaning.
-> There are some words in language with sounds that seems to "echo" the
sounds of objects or activities and hence seem to have a less arbitrary
connection. English examples are cuckoo, crash, slurp (siorbać), squelch
(mlaskać) or whirr (warkotać). However, these onomatopoeic words are
relatively rare in human language.
Displacement
-> Humans can refer to past and future time. This property of human language
is called displacement.
-> It allows language users to talk about things and events not present in the
immediate environment.
Indeed, displacement allows us to talk about things and places (e.g. angels
fairies, Santa Claus, Superman heaven, hell) whose existence we cannot even be
sure of.
Animal communication is generally considered to lack this property.
-> Humans can refer to past and future time. This property of human language
is called displacement.
-> When your pet cats comes home and stands at your feet calling moew, you
are likely to understand this message as relating to that immediate time and
place.
If you ask your cat where it has been and what it was up to, you'll probably get
the same meow response.
-> Animal communication seems to be designed exclusively for this moment,
here and now. It cannot effectively be used to relate events that are far removed
in time and place.
Properties of human language
-> All creatures communicate in some way. However, we suspect that other
creatures are not reflecting on the way they create their communicative
messages or reviewing how they work (or not). That is, one barking dog is
probably not offering advice to another barking dog along the lines of "Hey you
should lower your bark to make it sound more menacing." They're not barking
about barking.
-> This is reflexivity. The property of reflexivity (or"reflexiveness") accounts

for the fact that we can use language to think and talk about language itself,
making it one of the distinguishing features of human language.
-> We'll look in detail at another five of them: displacement, arbitrariness,

productivity, cultural transmission and duality.
Cultural transmission
-> While we may inherit physical features such as brown eyes and dark hair
from pur parents, we do not inherit their language. We acquire a language in a
culture with other speakers and not from parental genes. An infant born to
Korean parents in Korea, but adopted and brought up from birth by English
speakers in the United States, will have physical characteristic inherited from
his or her natural parents, but will inevitably speak English. A kitten, given
comparable early experiences, will produce meow regardless.
-> This process whereby a language is passed on from one generation to the
next is described as cultural transmission. It is clear that humans are born with
some kind of predisposition to acquire language in a general sense. However,
we are not born with the ability to produce utterances in a specific language
such as English. We acquire our first language as children in a culture.

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Productivity

-> This limiting feature of animal communication is described in terms of fixed

Properties of human language

-> This is reflexivity. The property of reflexivity (or"reflexiveness") accounts

-> We'll look in detail at another five of them: displacement, arbitrariness,

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