- Displacement (linguistics)
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In linguistics, displacement is the capability of human language to communicate about things that are not immediately present.
In 1960, Charles F. Hockett proposed displacement as one of 13 "design-features" that distinguish human language from animal language:
Man is apparently almost unique in being able to talk about things that are remote in space or time (or both) from where the talking goes on. This feature—"displacement"—seems to be definitely lacking in the vocal signaling of man's closest relatives, though it does occur in bee-dancing.[1]Honeybees use the waggle dance to communicate the location of a source of nectar. The degree of displacement in this example remains limited when compared to human language. A bee can only communicate the location of the most recent food source it has visited. It cannot communicate an idea about a food source at a specific point in the past, nor can it speculate about food sources in the future.[2] In addition, displacement in the waggle dance is restricted by the language's lack of creativity and productivity. The bees can express direction and distance, but it has been experimentally determined that they lack a sign for "above". It is also doubtful that bees can communicate about non-existent nectar for the purpose of deception.[3]
See also
References
- ^ Hockett, Charles F., "The origin of speech", Scientific American 203: 88–96, http://www.isrl.illinois.edu/~amag/langev/paper/charles60theOrigin.html, retrieved 19 February 2011
- ^ Yule, George (2010), The Study of Language (4th ed.), New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 11–12, ISBN 978-0-521-76527-5
- ^ Meyer, Paul Georg (2005), Synchronic English Linguistics: An Introduction (3rd ed.), Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, p. 265, ISBN 3-8233-6191-0
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