Hockett’s 16 feature design

        There are lots of features that distinguish human languagefrom animals communication. Hockett is an American linguist who provided us with his design of 16 features specialized in this field. 

Starting with the first feature which is Semanticity:

Some illustrative examples of it: 

• When we say the word “chair” we refer to any object which is a chair. Any object we sit on. But, when a parrot says the word “chair” it doesn’t refer to an object (it’s not said for a purpose or to convey a meaning, but rather it could be a reaction to some stimulus or just imitation of someone else’s utterance.  

Moving to Prevarication: 

• A very common example of it is when someone’s parents ask him/her where they spent their money, and so they don’t want to tell the truth, so they could make any false and nonexistent justifications. 

As for Reflexiveness: 

• When humans have the knowledge of any language, and so they are able to talk about it. An illustrative example of it is when any teacher, professor, or linguist talks about some features of language, the literature of that language including its history. 

Displacement: 

• We use this feature almost every day without realizing it. For example, when in History classes talking about the World War l. we’re simply talking about things happened along time ago and don’t exist nowadays. 

•  

Lastly, moving to Interchangeability: 

• Which means that humans can send and receive identical linguistic signals; they are not restricted to certain types of messages of what they say or even hear. So for example when someone wants to describe a beautiful scene, they can use more than the word “beautiful” to convey  their message, as so they could say or use other words, such as “fantastic”, “magnificent”, “wonderful” and so on..

Bailasan Zainah