Hockett's design features

In the 1960s, linguistic anthropologist Charles F. Hockett defined a set of features that characterize human language and set it apart from animal communication. He called these characteristics the design features of language. Hockett originally believed there to be 13 design features. While primate communication utilizes the first 9 features, the final 4 features (displacement, productivity, cultural transmission, and duality) are reserved for humans. Hockett later added prevarication, reflexiveness, and learnability to the list as uniquely human characteristics. He asserted that even the most basic human languages possess these 16 features.

Charles Hockett was an American linguist and anthropologist, who lived from 1916 to 2000. Hockett graduated from Yale in 1939, and later taught at both Cornell and Rice. Hockett made significant contributions to structural linguistics, as well as the study of Native American, Chinese, and Fijian languages. His work focused on detailed linguistic analysis, particularly morphology and phonology, and on the concepts and tools that facilitated such analysis. Up until the 1950s, language was largely viewed as a social-behavioral phenomenon. Hockett was challenged in this belief by Noam Chomsky, who suggested that language is biologically-based and innately learned. He believed that humans share a universal grammar that ties all languages together. Hockett staunchly opposed this "Chomskyan" concept of the nature of language. However, Hockett is most famous for defining what he called the design features of language, which demonstrate his beliefs about the commonalities between human languages.

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