Final Paper: Language in Dolphins? Why can't I start my field research now!

As I was writing my rough draft for the final paper, I came across some very interesting pieces of information. First of all, I defined what language was as told by Noam Chomsky, a man who knows more about linguistics than anyone else. In his opinion, there is no way that animals possess a language because animals do not have grammar, and alphabet, or words, to put it on basic terms. He goes on to describe in immense detail that language means having thought process and the ability to understand and create sentences never heard of or thought of before.

After I defined language by Noam Chomsky's terms, I then created my own definition of language. For me, language is basically a means of communication between beings that relays a message, and then is understood by the receiving party. Therefore, my argument is that intelligent social animals such as chimpanzees and dolphins do in fact possess a unique type of language for their species. I briefly talked about how scientists had already taught some chimpanzees to understand sign language, and how they obviously have the capabilities and intellectual capacity for language. In more extensive detail, I began to talk about dolphins. The main problem I ran into was that there were actually few extensive research projects done on the communication of dolphins that resulted in answers. What I'm trying to say is that I had a very difficult time attempting to find out what dolphins' whistles and clicks mean, because few people have actually determined anything about the communication systems of dolphins.

The fact that few people had done extensive research on the communication of dolphins completely sparked my interest. Being that a marine biologist is my ultimate dream career, I was fascinated that this is still a huge area of the unknown, and therefore, if only I had the opportunity, it would be a prime research excursion that I would love to be a part of. As I was writing my rough draft for my final paper, I couldn't help but be overcome with jealousy that I'm stuck in land-locked Iowa as an undergraduate student without the connections to take part in a research project like that. This situation made it hard for me to write a "research" paper because isn't the overall point of research to discover something completely new and unknown? Instead of simply researching other's ideas that have already been published?

Overall, basically what I'm trying to get at is that this research project helped me realize that marine biology is definitly a field that sparks my interest. I would love to be able to research dolphins in the field and be able to interpret what their whistles and clicks mean to see how their communication and language systems work. It is obvious that thay have some type of language because they are very intelligent. I just hope that some day I will have the opportunity to do research that I truly love.