Hockett's Design Features

Hockett (1966) proposes that there are 13 (or 14 or 15, depending on who you ask) design features common to all human languages and that at least one of these features is missing from all known animal communication systems, other than human language.  This week, we'll be talking about those features.  For our purposes and for ease of discussion, we will combine some of those features, resulting in a list of six.  For those who are curious and who would like more information about Hockett's original proposals, here's a pretty good powerpoint on the subject:

http://www.slideshare.net/Rtoes/hockett

As a preview of the week to come, we'll start by looking at the design features and making sure we've got a pretty good handle on what they mean.  We'll then compare them with some complex communication systems elsewhere in the animal world.  We'll see if the features of these languages validate Hockett's viewpoint or not.

Moving on from there, we'll have a look at a couple of case studies.  Two chimpanzees, Washoe and Nim Chimpsky, were involved in research in the 60s and 70s designed to see if chimpanzees could acquire human language if raised as human children.  We'll look at the results of these experiments and see how they were flawed.

Toward the end of the week, we'll revisit what we mean by Grammar - both prescriptive and descriptive,  and we'll lay the groundwork for a discussion about Universal Grammar next week.  Should be fun!

It's been a fantastic start to this course, and I'm really thrilled with the results we've had this week.  I'm proud of all of you - keep it up!