COGS 2160 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Ray Jackendoff, Animal Communication
24 Jan 2017
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Document Summary
In the middle of 20th century, there was some changes to languages. Picture is ambiguous, while languages have precision while pictures don"t. Cannot use question marks because it is cheating since it"s a linguistic symbol. Jackendoff said that language has an expressive power that images do not have. But images are more expressive in some ways. This expressive power derives in part from the combinatorial structure of language. A finite number of elements can be combined in various ways to convey different meanings. There is no animal communication system have this property. Example: a study of attempts to teach the closest relatives (chimpanzees) shows that human languages have not been successful although there is extremely rare cases but it is extremely small success rate. A closely related property of human language use linguistic productivity: we can produce and understand an indefinitely large number of new sentences.
