The End of Language As We Know It? Scientists Challenge 60 Years of Linguistic Research

An international team proposes replacing Hockett’s feature checklist with a model of language as a dynamic, multimodal, and socially evolving system. For more than sixty years, Charles Hockett’s ‘design features’ have been widely used as a framework for defining what distinguishes human language from other forms of communication. These features were long treated as a [...]