1.2 Communication: forms

Kinds of forms

Within a communication system, forms can be acoustic and auditory or spatial and visual. An acoustic/auditory form consists of a sequence of sounds that must be heard by the receiver in order to be understood. Such forms are used in spoken human languages, as well as in the communication systems of many other animals, including primates, rodents, and some birds.

A spatial/visual form consists of a configuration in space or a movement through space that must be seen by the receiver in order to be understood. Such forms are used in written and signed human languages, as well as in the gestures and the facial expressions of humans and other primates.

Forms in MiniLing

In the MiniLing program, forms are much simpler than they are for human languages. Forms will be presented in two different formats, both of them spatial/visual rather than acoustic/auditory. The simpler format will be used whenever we want to focus on the level of words of sentences rather than on the individual units of form. The more complicated format will allow you to see how words are built up out of smaller units that have no meaning in their own right. For the time being, you'll see only the simpler format. In this format, word forms will consist of sequences of characters, much as they do in the written form of a human language such as English or Japanese. As in written Japanese and Chinese, there will be no spaces between the words when a form consists of an entire sentence. This makes the mini-languages more like spoken human languages, in which there may be no obvious gaps between words within a sentence.

Exercise 1.2

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