What are the characteristics of language?

Linguistically speaking, the design features of language are embodied in the following five aspects.

1, arbitrary. Language is arbitrary, which means that there is basically no necessary or logical relationship between the form of language and its meaning, but it is arbitrary and established. However, language phenomena such as onomatopoeia, pictographs and compound words are non-arbitrary. Once the referential relationship between language form and meaning is determined, people should follow this agreement. The grammar of language is also arbitrary.

2. Duality. The duality of language means that language is a structural system, a system with two structures: phonetic system and grammatical system. In other words, language can be divided into meaning units (morphological units) and phonetic units (phonemes). The duality of language is unique to human language, and it is this duality that enables a small number of limited sounds to be combined and reorganized to form an almost infinite vocabulary to express the meaning of wireless quantity; When a word and another phrase are combined into a higher-level structure, it will also produce almost infinite larger structures.

3. Productivity. Productive or generative means that people can understand or say words they have never heard or seen before. The understanding and generation of these new words are caused by the language mechanism of the brain. Productivity is also a unique attribute of human language. Animal languages are not productive, and their sounds and meanings only correspond to each other and cannot be generated.

4. Displacement. The shift feature of language means that language can be used to express different space and time, and the degree of information transplantation refers to the degree of separation between the basic features of its cause and effect and the time and place of transmitting information. For example, we can talk about "now", "past" or "future", things around us and things that happen in distant places. This feature is also unique to human language.

5. Cultural communication habits. Human language is intentionally passed down from generation to generation through culture or customs and traditions, not through biological inheritance. This is the cultural communication habit of language. A remarkable feature of cultural communication is imitation, and the imitation ability or trend of human beings exceeds that of all other species.