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Notes on video lecture:
Discrete Infinity, Displacement, and Joint Attention
Notes taken by Edward Tanguay on March 31, 2015 (go to class or lectures)
Choose from these words to fill the blanks below:
signs, conversation, team, bees, count, honey, combine, aware, linguists, diversity, related, complicated, infinity, goals, limited, abstract, animals, add, also
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human language is about                   
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but many things are similar
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basic questions of human languages and linguistics
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what is language?
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do                have language?
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how many languages are there?
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how do we            languages?
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how are they                to each other?
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what do                    do?
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how do they get their data?
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what are informants?
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do animals have a language as well
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they do communicate
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differences between animal and human communication
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lack of                         -level communication
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humans clearly have more            than apes or cats
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three dimensions in which human and animal communication are different
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1. discrete                 
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discrete means in this sense               
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English alphabet has 26 letters
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with these letters you can make an infinite number of sentences
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this is provable since you can always        to the longest sentence
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apes          have a discrete set of calls
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but they cannot                them to make more and more complicated systems
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they only have a limited number of combinations
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2. displacement
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we can talk about our here and now, but also about the past, future, places far away, and                  notions which we could never see
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animals don't have this
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although          can communicate about space through a kind of dance, but it is very limited
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they can only talk about            they have actually experienced, not abstract honey
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3. joint attention
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shared intentionality
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humans work together as a         
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we have to read each others minds in order to know our           , so that we can help that person achieve that goal
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animals do not do this very well
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apes can look at the same thing and even be            that they are looking at the same thing
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but they don't work together in a                        way in which humans can
Discrete Infinity, Displacement, and Joint Attention