Charles Hockett

Charles Hockett was an American linguist and anthropologist known for proposing a set of design features intended to characterize what distinguishes human language from animal communication systems, first laid out in the 1950s and refined over subsequent papers. Hockett's design features included properties such as displacement, the ability to communicate about things not present in space or time, productivity, the ability to create and understand entirely new utterances never spoken before, and arbitrariness, the lack of any necessary physical resemblance between a word and its meaning, and the framework became a standard reference point for later research comparing human language to the communication systems of other animals. A leading figure of mid-twentieth-century American structural linguistics, Hockett also made significant contributions to phonology and morphology and wrote A Course in Modern Linguistics, published in 1958, a widely used textbook that introduced a generation of students to structural linguistic methods. His broader anthropological linguistics work examined language as one part of human culture and communication more generally, situating linguistic structure within the wider context of how humans transmit and share information.