Traditional transmission is a design feature of language that the anthropologist Charles F. Hockett developed to distinguish the features of human language from those of animal communication. He discovered thirteen features that all human languages have. Animals might communicate with some of the thirteen basic design features of language but never with all of them. Traditional transmission is exemplified by the fact that language is learned in social groups. Although there is disagreement about how much linguistic capability humans are born with the only way that humans learn language and refine its use as they grow is in social settings.
Famous quotes containing the word traditional:
“The developments in the North were those loosely embraced in the term modernization and included urbanization, industrialization, and mechanization. While those changes went forward apace, the antebellum South changed comparatively little, clinging to its rural, agricultural, labor-intensive economy and its traditional folk culture.”
—C. Vann Woodward (b. 1908)