PROPERTIES OF HUMAN LANGUAGE
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All creatures communicate in some
way. However, we suspect that
other creatures are not reflecting
on the way they create their
communicative messages or
reviewing how they work (or not)
Humans are clearly able to
reflect on language and its uses
(e.g. “I wish he wouldn’t use so
many technical terms”). This is
reflexivity.
The property of reflexivity (or
“reflexiveness”) accounts for the fact
that we can use language to think
and talk about language itself,
making it one of the distinguishing
features of human language