Language as a system of signs
Language is a system of signs combining form (speech sounds or letters) and content (meaning). In his Course in General Linguistics (1916), Saussure described the linguistic sign as the union of a signifier (sound image) and a signified (concept). Most of the properties below follow from this.
Arbitrariness
Arbitrariness means there is no necessary connection between a sound and its meaning; Saussure called it the first principle of the linguistic sign.
- The same animal is gae in Korean, dog in English and inu in Japanese.
- Homonyms give one sound several meanings (Korean bae: pear, belly, boat), and synonyms give one meaning several sounds.
- Sounds and meanings can drift over time (Korean eorida moved from "foolish" to "young") without breaking the language.
- Onomatopoeia partly mirrors meaning, yet a rooster says kkokkio in Korean and cock-a-doodle-doo in English, so it is not a full exception.
Social nature
The social nature of language means it is a convention among members of a community, so no individual can change or invent it at will (sometimes called immutability). Even an arbitrary pairing of sound and meaning must be kept once it is fixed, or communication fails: if one person alone calls a desk a "chair," no one understands. A new word becomes part of the language only when many people adopt it.
Historicity
Historicity means words and rules arise, change and disappear over time (mutability).
- Creation: new words such as computer or netizen appear.
- Change: Middle Korean eoyeopeuda "pitiable" became eoyeoppeuda "pretty."
- Loss: old native numerals such as on (100) and jeumeun (1,000) have fallen out of use.
Social nature means language cannot be changed at will at a given moment, while historicity means the whole community changes it over long periods, so the two do not conflict.
Rules and creativity
- Rule-governedness: every language has rules (grammar) for building sounds, words and sentences; "I ate rice" is natural but "rice ate I" in the wrong order is not. Sapir stressed that every language has its own formal system.
- Creativity (openness): from finite sounds and rules, speakers can produce and understand an unlimited number of sentences never heard before; Chomsky saw this as central to human linguistic competence.
- Discreteness: language divides a continuous world and continuous sound into discrete units; the spectrum of a rainbow is continuous, but language names separate colors.
Hockett's design features
Hockett (1960) proposed 13 design features for comparing human language with animal communication. Arbitrariness, discreteness, displacement (talking about things not here and now), productivity (creating new messages), cultural transmission (learned, not inherited) and duality of patterning (meaningless sounds combine into meaningful units) stand out. Some animals show a few, as the honeybee dance shows displacement by signaling the direction and distance of food, but only human language has them all. How children acquire language is covered in language development theories.
References
- Saussure, F. de (1916). Cours de linguistique générale (C. Bally & A. Sechehaye, Eds.). Lausanne & Paris: Payot.
- Sapir, E. (1921). Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace.
- Hockett, C. F. (1960). The origin of speech. Scientific American, 203(3), 88–96.