Human Language Uniqueness in Contemporary Introductory Linguistics Textbooks: A Comparative Analysis of Yule, Hockett, and Fromkin et al.

This study investigates whether human language remains qualitatively unique compared to animal communication systems, as presented in the most widely used introductory linguistics textbooks. Through a systematic, exclusively book-based comparative analysis of three authoritative sources - George Yule's The Study of Language (۸th ed., ۲۰۲۰), Charles F. Hockett's classical design-feature framework (as canonically reproduced), and Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, and Nina Hyams' An Introduction to Language (۱۱th ed., ۲۰۱۸) — the research extracts, compares, and synthesises the properties each author identifies as distinctive of human language. Employing a qualitative, deductive, and strictly textual method involving close reading, manual feature extraction, and cross-text comparison without recourse to journal articles or external sources, the study identifies a strong core of converging properties: arbitrariness, displacement, productivity (open-endedness/infinite use of finite means), duality of patterning, full cultural transmission, prevarication, and reflexiveness. These properties are consistently described across all three textbooks as either absent or present only in severely restricted form in natural and artificially taught animal systems. While later editions briefly acknowledge impressive animal abilities (e.g., bee dances, parrot vocal learning, bonobo symbol use), none of the sources retreats from the traditional position that no animal communication system combines the full set of these properties or exhibits true syntactic recursion and unlimited semantic creativity. The analysis therefore confirms that, within the internal discourse of mainstream pedagogical linguistics, that human language continues to be regarded as unique in kind rather than merely in degree. The study provides a clear baseline of the current textbook consensus against which more specialised claims from animal cognition research can be measured.

Keywords:

Human language uniqueness , Animal communication , Design features , Comparative linguistics