Human vs. Animal Communication: Key Differences
1. Semiotics
Semiotics studies signs, their generation, transmission, reception, and interpretation. It’s linked to communication, meaning, and human action. Saussure used semiology for the study of signs within social life.
2. Human vs. Animal Languages
Communication is not unique to humans. Animals also communicate, but patterns differ. Bees use two dances: A) Circle dance for food within 50 meters, and B) Tail-wagging dance for food over 100 meters, indicating distance and direction relative to the sun.
3. Specific Properties of Human Language
Hockett described fifteen features distinguishing human language from animal languages:
- Voice-Auditory Channel: Sound signals produced and received through hearing.
- Broadcast Transmission and Directional Reception: Signals spread and can be located.
- Rapid Fading: Signals are temporary.
- Interchangeability: Humans can both send and receive messages.
- Total Feedback: Speakers hear themselves and can adjust.
- Specialization: Communication serves a purpose beyond biological functions.
- Semantics: Signals have meaning.
- Arbitrariness: No inherent connection between a word and its meaning (except iconicity).
- Discrete Character: Language units are distinct.
- Displacement: Language can refer to past, future, or distant things.
- Duality of Patterning: Meaningless units combine to form meaningful units (phonemes to morphemes).
- Productivity: New messages can be created.
- Cultural Transmission: Language is learned from others.
- Prevarication: Language can be used to lie or deceive.
- Reflexivity: Language can describe itself.
4. Elements of Communication Process
Communication involves a transmitter, message, content, receiver, and code. Steps include content selection, encoding, transmission, decoding, and apprehension.
5. Linguistic Communication Process
Language is a system of linguistic signs, each with a signifier (sound image) and a signified (meaning).
6. Features of the Linguistic Sign
Saussure highlighted the arbitrariness of the sign, the linearity of the signifier, and the immutability and mutability of language over time.