ABSTRACT
Linguists’ interest in animal communication systems has been largely fuelled by a desire to compare such systems with human language in order to show the differences between the two, and often, by implication, to show the superiority of human language over the communication systems of animals. One of the most famous attempts at setting up a system for carrying out such comparisons is that of Charles Hockett (1960; also Hockett and Altmann, 1968). For the purpose of the comparison, Hockett employs the notion of the design feature: a design feature is a property which is present in some communication systems and not in others; communication systems can then be classified into those that have a particular design feature and those that do not. Hockett lists sixteen such design features of human language, namely:
DF1 Vocal-Auditory Channel: it is in a sense coincidental that human language is realized through this channel; there are non-vocal sign systems for use by the deaf (see SIGN LANGUAGE), and if we found that apes, for instance, could use non-vocal sounds to engage in what we could conclusively show to be linguistic behaviour (see below), we would not disqualify this kind of communication on the grounds that it was not vocalauditory.
