The language phenomenon
Human language is a structured communication system based on grammar and vocabulary. Although other animals can incorporate some form of communication, human language has a distinctive feature; it is compositional. We can combine or recombine sets of words and create new sentences with little effort. With the odd exception of the waggle dance of honeybees for sharing information about the direction and distance to patches of flowers, no other animal communication system puts messages together like this. Human language is also referential in that we can refer to people, objects, or situations that occurred in the past or could occur in the future. Language’s ability to transmit information about things that aren’t physically or temporally present is unique. Another fascinating characteristic is that it is modality-independent. A spoken language, for instance, uses the auditive modality for communication, while the Braille system used by visually...