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Essential Features of Language

I asked you to think about what some of the defining features of a natural human language are. Here are some of your thoughts (a few of these are probably the same point, expressed from a diverse perspective):

• Can refer to the past and future; use of tense
• Con communicate emotions without having to act on or display in other kinds of (non-linguistic) behavior those emotions
• Convey knowledge
• Creation of new words (presumably by one individual, or frequently)
• Creation of new combinations of elements (presumably by one individual, or frequently)
• Variation in languages (that can be learned)
• Productivity: system to generating new utterances
• Syntax for combining elements of a language (presumably, complex syntactic systems based upon rules -- such as a recursive grammar)
• Has elements (words) that can be put into many different (and novel) combinations
• Stimulus independence (e.g., discussing things not directly elicited by the present environment)
• Intertranslatable diverse languages
• Relevant language elements are learned (not "innate")
• Vocabulary: a large set of words, or basic meaningful utterances that can be combined and used

Three of you said that writing distinguishes human language. I think that this is clever because it very clearly is sufficient to distinguish human language from any communication system used by any known non-human animal. I did have the worry though that many human languages were not written, at least not until recently. Thus, the criterion is a good one, but we might want a weaker criterion because we might still think that, say, Najavo or Greek before they were written was still distinctly human.

Some also said something like, reference to abstract things. I like this, but think we'd need to say a lot about what it is to be "abstract" before this was a practical distinction. Why, for example, are the things referred to by a beaver tail slap not abstract?