294 • CHAPTER 11 Language

How do we understand

individual words, and

how are words combined

to create sentences? (297)

How can we

understand sentences

that have more than one

meaning? (304)

How do we understand

stories? (309)

Does language affect

the way a person

perceives colors? (316)

Some Questions We Will Consider

L

eaving the Chinese restaurant, I opened my fortune cookie and pulled

out a thin slip of paper. On one side it said “Learn Chinese,” followed by a phrase

and its translation; on the other side it said:

Everything you add to the truth

Subtracts from the truth

As I pondered this statement, it occurred to me how amazing language is and how, like

every cognitive capacity we have described so far, it involves knowledge that we bring

to a situation. Understanding the saying I pulled out of my fortune cookie requires, for

example, an understanding of the concept of “truth,” but what makes it interesting is

the question it poses: How can adding something to a true statement make it less true?

One answer to this question is based on the classic “fi sh story.” A fi sherman boasts that

he caught a big fi sh (which may be true) but then adds to the truth by exaggerating the

fi sh’s length (which makes his account less true). If we have the knowledge of the “fi sh

story” idea that “adding to the truth” generally implies adding something false to the

truth, then the initially puzzling statement from my fortune cookie makes perfect sense.

There is no question that knowledge is an integral part of language. For one thing,

we come into the world without it, and have to learn it. Anyone who has observed

infants for any length of time realizes that they understand language before they can

produce it. Then when they begin talking, the process begins with single words, pro-

gresses to short phrases, and culminates in sentences that increase in complexity as the

infant, then child, learns more on the path to adulthood.

What Is Language?

Long before individuals have acquired the knowledge needed to determine the mean-

ing of my fortune cookie, they will have acquired the ability to create sentences and

string them together into paragraphs that express their thoughts in either written or

spoken form. This ability to understand words and then string them together to express

thoughts makes possible the remarkable feat of transmitting thoughts from one person

to another. This ability is captured in the following defi nition of language: a system

of communication using sounds or symbols that enables us to express our feelings,

thoughts, ideas, and experiences.

But this defi nition doesn’t go far enough, because it conceivably could include some

forms of animal communication. Cats “meow” when their food dish is empty; monkeys

have a repertoire of “calls” that stand for things such as “danger” or “greeting”; bees

perform a “waggle dance” at the hive to indicate the location of fl owers. Although there

is some evidence that monkeys may be able to use language in a way similar to humans

(see “If You Want to Know More: Animal Language,” page 321), most animal com-

munication lacks the properties of human language. Let’s expand on our defi nition by

considering some of the properties that make human language unique.

Copyright 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.