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1.1 Communication: introduction

The elements of communication

In this unit, you'll study some of the most basic properties of human language and will gain some experience with the problems faced by a human infant learning a language. If you continue with the units on Words, Phonology, and Grammar, you'll look at all of these things in more detail there.

Before we think about language, we need to think about communication more generally. Communication allows a group of animals (including people) belonging to the same species or the same community to cooperate with one another through the use of signals or messages. Let's consider what is required for communication. In all cases there is some sort of communication system. This has three components to it, a set of forms, a set of meanings, and a set of associations between the forms and meanings. The forms are the sounds or movements that are produced when one communicator sends a signal to another. The meanings are the situations in the world that the forms refer to or the behaviors that the receivers of the signals are expected to perform. Particular forms are associated with particular meanings. For example, prairie dogs (a kind of rodent native to the Great Plains of North America) produce a particular kind of barking sound (the form) to signal that a hawk has been seen nearby or to signal that the other members of its colony should take cover (the meaning).

The forms, meanings, and form-meaning associations are used in two directions in communication. In understanding, a receiver starts with a given form and has to figure out a possible meaning for it. In production, a producer starts with a particular meaning in mind and has to figure out a form for it.

To be a successful communicator, it is necessary to know the communication system for your group — the forms, the meanings, the form-meaning associations — and how to use these to perform both understanding and production. In other words, all of this knowledge has to reside in the brain of the communicator. There are two ways it could get in there: it could simply be inherited, that is, somehow encoded in the genes of the animal, or it could be learned through exposure to examples. In fact, in most, if not all systems, both heredity and experience seem to play a role. It is clear that in the case of humans a lot must be learned since human languages. We know this because we know that all normal human infants are capable of learning any human languages, and we also know that these languages differ considerably from one another.

In the rest of this unit, you'll learn about some of the general properties of forms, meanings, understanding, and production in human language, first by looking at some artificial languages using the MiniLing program and then by considering how real human languages resemble and differ from these.

Before you start the next section, you should become familiar with how to download and run the program that you will use for the exercises in the course. So go to Program help appendix.