Keywords In and Out of Context

Charles (“Chas”) Hockett of Cornell University was a towering figure in linguistics during the 1950s and 1960s, primarily as a leading proponent of Leonard Bloomfield’s approach to structural linguistics, which purported to offer a systematic, scientific approach to the study of languages, but which has suffered a dramatic decline in popularity in America during the past 50 years, largely due to the influence of transformational generative grammar within linguistics.

The transition is entertainingly described by Gregory Radick in his 2016 article, “The Unmaking of A Modern Synthesis: Noam Chomsky, Charles Hockett, and the Politics of Behaviorism, 1955-1965.” A more extensive effort is the 2022 book by Frederick Newmeyer, American Linguistics in Transition: From Bloomfieldian Structuralism to Generative Grammar, an updated version of his earlier history of the field, which he now admits was a bit biased against the structuralists such as Hockett. Hockett himself could be rather caustic to critics, as shown in his 1990 “A Comment on Design Features.”

Beyond linguistics, Hockett had eclectic interests, including anthropology, mathematics, and music. The Hockett Family Recital Hall at Ithaca College was endowed in his memory. His wife Shirley, a mathematics professor at Ithaca College, once commented fondly that he typed all the manuscripts for the textbooks she published, a striking reversal of gender roles in academe at the time.

Hockett is probably best known today for his list of design features of primate language systems inspired by the Shannon-Weaver model of information theory, and applied to animal communication. This list originally appeared as a list of 13 design features in his 1960 “The Origin of Speech” (Scientific American, 203(3): 88-97) and was expanded to 16 in “A Note on Design Features,” the chapter he co-authored in 1968 with field biologist Stewart Altmann in Thomas Sebeok’s edited collection of essays on Animal Communication: Techniques of Study and Results of Research.

Although I comment in Chapter 2 that this too has undergone significant criticism, there is still value in considering this list, which states that all known primate communication systems include at least some of the following features: (1) a vocal-auditory channel; (2) broadcast transmission and directional reception of sound; (3) rapid fading of sound; (3) interchangeability of signals (members of the speech community can both transmit and receive linguistic signals); (4) complete feedback (the speaker can hear what is said); (6) specialization (the triggering consequences of signals are biologically important; the energy costs of transmitting them are not; (7) semanticity (linguistic signals have denotations that tie them to perceptions in and of the world); (8) arbitrariness (the relation between a meaningful element in a language and its denotation is independent of any other resemblance between the two); (9) discreteness (possible messages in any language constitute a discrete repertoire rather than a continuous one); (10) displacement (things that are remote in time, space, or both from the site of the communicative transaction can be referenced); (11) openness (new linguistic messages are easily created and, in context, are usually understood); (12) tradition (language conventions are passed down by teaching and learning, not through heredity); (13) duality of patterning (arbitrary but stable meaningless signal-elements and also patterning in terms of minimum meaningful arrangements of those elements ); (14) prevarication (signals can be sent that are intentionally false or without meaning); (15) reflexiveness (communication about the communication system itself is possible); (16) learnability (outsiders to the speech community can learn the language). Here is an interesting but somewhat limited chart comparing Hockett’s design features to various animal communication forms from Dr. John Coleman of the Phonetics Research Laboratory at Oxford University. It would be fascinating to see a more comprehensive version of this.

Hockett’s ongoing interest in communication as a driver of human evolution is shown in his 1964 article “The Human Revolution” in Current Anthropology in which he and his co-author (Cornell anthropologist Robert Ascher) incorporate various assumptions on the steps and stages in the evolution of human language from prot0-hominoids to the earliest Homo sapiens and which attracted considerable scholarly comment and interest in the issue at the time.

Hockett was also clearly a bit of a popularizer: his 1953 piece “How to Learn Martian” in Astounding Science Fiction attempts to introduce the lay reader to the concept of the phoneme by assuming that his Martian speaker has a similar articulatory apparatus as his human interlocutor but ends abruptly with the realization that this approach won’t work if “the Martians communicate with a system just as complex as human language and with much the same essential structure, but that [if] instead of modulating sound they modulate a carrier at frequencies above the reach of human ears— or radio waves, or a light beam, or odors, or electrical flows, or some kind of energy… There are still certain fundamental design-features which any such language-like communications system is bound to include, but the problem of observation and analysis is tremendously harder.”

Hockett also worked with another great Cornell popularizer, astronomer Carl Sagan, who acknowledges Hockett’s help with his own book on the evolution of human intelligence, The Dragons of Eden, which won the 1977 Pulitzer Prize, and it is not unlikely that Sagan’s work on the “Golden Records” carried on the Voyager spacecrafts launched by NASA in 1977 was at least somewhat informed by his contact with Hockett at Cornell, though Sagan was of course a highly creative thinker himself. (And I could add something about Sagan’s novel Contact here and ways in which it was distorted by the film version, but it is perhaps more important to realize that actual “contact” with other intelligences on Earth is most likely to happen with the non-human species that intrigued both Hockett and Sagan.)