Taylor Haney Blog 3

What makes it so difficult for animals and humans to communicate with one another? Or what is the reason why we can not communicate with each other through speech or a particular language? In Yules book he describes all the reasons and meanings behind it why we as humans and animals can not communicate through a language as I said before. He list five properties in his article that differentiate between human and animal communication: Displacement- When humans can refer to past and future time. Arbitrariness- No “natural” connection between a linguistic form and its meaning. Productivity- When you create new expressions and novel utterances by manipulating their linguistic resources to describe new objects and situations. Cultural Transmissions- Process whereby a language is passed on from one generation to the next. Duality- When human language is organized at two levels or layers simultaneously. I believe that displacement and arbitrariness both are the main reasons why we can not communicate with animals. But if I were to chose one it would have to be arbitrariness simply because neither humans or animals have a natural connection with each other. For example, the video we watched of Koko the gorilla, Penny and Koko could communicate but it was by their own sign language if you will. So that means there is still a language barrier there between us humans and animals. Even though there is a language barrier there we can still communicate but not as well as we would like. Also another example would be with a dog. When we say “sit” or any other type of command they will obey most likely just by the way or tone you say it in. I do not think dogs can fully understand us when we say something but just by the way we say it they will do anything. They also do whatever you do by making hand gestures. Back to the conversation on Koko, well see she could let you know when she was mad or sad for example when her cat died because she learned the hand gestures for sad and mad. It shows that while there is still this language barrier that animals have such as Koko, can still communicate.