From New York City, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language.

I'm John McWater, and you know where we're going to go this time?

We're going to go to the heart of language we're going down into the real deal.

What language really is?

Which as you know is in so many ways different from what we naturally think of it as being

partly because of the artificiality of what it looks like in its written form.

What's the heart of language?

What distinguishes human language from the ways that animals communicate?

Well for one thing we have words.

We have symbols for something like a rose, and I'm just going to bypass that because

that's fairly obvious.

We all think of our language primarily as being a collection of words, but what else?

Because the words alone, you know, just a dictionary in your head wouldn't allow you

to be a person.

There's more.

Well, one thing that's the heart of human communication is shared attention.

The sheer fact that we actually pay attention to one another waiting for communication to

take place.

If you think about it, as sophisticated as a cat can seem because of superficialities.

You ever noticed that they don't look at one another waiting for communication other

than for certain basic primitives like get away from me or let's have sex.

Other than that, they're not waiting for a message and that's also true of dogs.

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