Hockett’s questionPeople have been announcing for centuries that some single thing separates human speech from animal signalling. Hockett’s contribution was to stop asserting and start listing — to break “language” into properties that could be checked one at a time, against real animals, by experiment. Once you do that, the tidy line between us and everything else stops being a line and becomes a pattern of overlaps. Pick a feature and a system to start filling the grid in.
No single feature is the answer. Honeybees have displacement. White-crowned sparrows have dialects learned from a tutor. Bonobos handle hundreds of arbitrary symbols. Every individual feature on this grid turns up somewhere outside our species. What turns up nowhere else is the combination: unrestricted displacement, genuine productivity and duality of patterning, all running on a signal set that is learned from a community and can therefore have a history. Ask which feature is uniquely human and the honest answer is: none of them — and all of them at once.
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