For more than sixty years, Charles Hockett’s ‘design features’ have been widely used as a framework for defining what distinguishes human language from other forms of communication. These features were long treated as a checklist of properties that set language apart.
However, a new study published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences argues that this traditional view is no longer sufficient. The researchers contend that language cannot be captured by a fixed inventory of traits, but is better understood as a flexible system shaped by social interaction, situational context, and human creativity.
In a new reassessment of Hockett’s classic “design features” of language—ideas such as arbitrariness, duality of patterning, and displacement—an international team of linguists and cognitive scientists argues that current research requires a fundamental rethink of what language is and how it evolved.
Their central claim is clear: language is not merely a spoken code. Instead, it is a dynamic, multimodal, socially grounded system shaped through interaction, culture, and shared meaning
The title is a bit click-baity, but yeah, Hockett’s design features are being criticised since their conception. Here’s a list of them, but to keep it short: they’re oversimplistic.
Ideally a good framework should allow you to disregard “fluff” and concentrate on the topic. But for that the framework needs to encompass the topic properly, without too many arbitrary boundaries — because stuff arbitrarily left out might be necessary to take meaningful conclusions about the topic.
This might sound too abstract so here’s an example. Take the first feature from Hockett’s list, “vocal-auditory channel”. By that framework, you don’t deal with sign languages, period. And as you notice a bunch of features in language — such as blocks building blocks blocks building blocks recursively — you might be tempted to associate it with speech production. “It’s how we speak”: we group articulations into sounds, sounds into phonemes, phonemes into morphemes, morphemes into words, words into phrases, phrases into sentences, sentences into utterances.
…well, but once you lift that arbitrary barrier, and deal with the sign languages, you notice the exact same pattern. Sub “sound” with “gesture” and “phoneme” with “gesteme” and the same structure is there. This means this recursive structure is not dependent on speech production at all, it’s something with how we humans organise information.
“This isn’t about discarding Hockett,” says Dr. Michael Pleyer, lead author and researcher at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. “It’s about updating him. His framework was revolutionary in 1960 – but science has moved on.
A good analogy IMO would be Newtonian mechanics being replaced with relativistic ones. The later is built upon the former, and should be able to explain the same things the former explains, plus more. Same deal here - any new framework replacing Hockett’s should be able to explain the same things the older framework explains, plus more.
“The end of language as we know it”? That’s a lot too dramatic for me given the content but then I’m not hugely fond of wordplay
They aren’t challenging language, they are challenging a historical-artifact, a doesn’t-match-the-evidence model, an arbitrary framework.
They’re right.
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