Human language is a signaling system which uses sounds and this is a characteristic shared by a large number of animal systems. Animals that use vocal signals have a stock of basic sounds which vary according to their species. A cow has fewer than ten, a chicken has around twenty, dolphins and apes have between twenty and thirty and the impressive vervet monkey has thirty-six. In animal communication, there is frequently a connection, arguably semantic, between the signal and the message sent. Whilst most animals can use each basic sound only once or in very few simple combinations, human language works differently. Each language has a stock of phonemes which are similar in number to the basic sounds possessed by animals; usually between thirty and forty. The difference is that normally these phonemes are meaningless in isolation and only gain meaning when they are combined with other phonemes.

So, whilst Chomsky's concept of creativity, the ability to produce novel utterances, seems not to be present in any natural communication system possessed by animals, all systems of communication, human or otherwise, appear to be innately guided. That is, a frog will inevitably croak, cows will inevitably moo and humans will inevitably talk. The important thing to realize is that, whilst there are many species for which vocalizations seem to have no solid semantic properties - a cat will purr to express happiness, there are some animal systems of communication, such as that of vervet monkeys, which arguably share with human the arbitrary nature of the connection between the signified and the signifier, developed by Saussure, and thus can be argued to have semantic properties.