Hockett's Features of Human Language

Hockett's "design features" of language

As you have seen from the different definitions of language on previous pages and the audio clip on the right, language cannot be described or defined by one single feature; it is a polymorphus concept. On the page directly before this you saw how Hockett (1960) isolated 13 features that characterise language and which distinguish it from communication.

After working through the design features of Hockett please tick the appropriate boxes below of what you think can or cannot be found in animal communication.

	DESIGN FEATURES	CAN IT BE FOUND IN ANIMALS?
1.	Vocal auditory channel	yes no
2.	Broadcast transmission and directional reception	yes no
3.	Rapid fading (transitoriness)	yes no
4.	Interchangeability: a speaker can reproduce any linguistic message she/he can understand	yes no
5.	Total feedback: the speaker of a language hears everything of linguistic relevance in what they themselves say	yes no
6.	Specialisation: sound waves of speech serve only as signals	yes no
7.	Semanticity	yes no
8.	Arbitrariness	yes no
9.	Discreteness	yes no
10.	Displacement (ability to evoke things remote in space and time)	yes no
11.	Productivity ("say things that have never been said before and yet to be understood by other speakers of the language" Hockett, 1960, p.90)	yes no
12.	Traditional transmission	yes no
13.	Duality of patterning (meaningful words are built from meaningless sounds)	yes no
Name(s):

You might like to print out a hard-copy of your classification above. You can do this by selecting "Print" from the web browsers "File" menu.

Please keep these features in mind when you go on and examine the language experiments. You will find some examples where the researchers claim that the animals actually demonstrated their ability for the features 9 to 13 which are usually claimed to be typical and unique to humans.