English Literature And Theory This blog contains the explanation of various critical theories that provide a new insight to view literature and interpretation of various literary texts.

Recent experiments with chimpanzees suggests that certain animals cannot only learn individual symbols(in this case manual rather than vocal signs), but can also learn to combine them in ways reminiscent of sentences like Give me key. However, as far as we know, they cannot do certain things that all human beings can- they do not appear to be able to learn sign language without specific instruction, they cannot, on the basis of small number of elements and relations between them, create an infinite number of messages.

When linguists speak of the"creativity" of human language they are usually referring to these two characteristics. Anyone who knows a language is able, without specific instruction, to produce and understand utterances which have been heard before but which are possible within the system. You are using this ability wight now to read this blog, and you rely on it nearly every time you talk. Certainly, language does not include some fixed routines like greetings, farewells, and a wide variety of other relatively fixed utterances which function in society as gestures of group solidarity somewhat like mutual grooming of monkeys. But obviously human beings are not limited to such routines. The number of sentences possible in a human language is infinite in principle, for there is no limit on how long a sentence can be.

The creativity of language consists in this fact: The number of rules and elements in the system is finite, while the number and length of utterances the system can produce is infinite. In this respect, linguistic systems are somewhat like the number system. Given any number, one can always construct a larger number by addition or multiplication. In practice we are limited, of course, by space, time, memory, interest and many different factors, so that no actual sentence will ever be infinitely long. But what is important is that system has this potential.