What's language ?

(1)Definition &Nature

Language in its narrowest sense is, for most linguists, a uniquely human cognitive system used to produce and
understand precise meaningful utterance. (Rowe and Levine,2018)

The possession of language, perhaps more than any other attribute, distinguishes humans from
other animals. To understand our humanity, one must understand the nature of language that makes us
human. According to the philosophy expressed in the myths and religions of many peoples, language is the
source of human life and power. To some people of Africa, a newborn child is a kintu, a „thing‟, not yet
a muntu, a „person‟. Only by the act of learning language does the child become a human being. According
to this tradition, then, we all become human because we all know at least one language. (Fromkin et-al.
,2022)

When we study human language ,we are approaching what some might call ' human essence ' ,the distinctive
qualities of mind that are , so far as we know ,unique to [humankind ] .( Chomsky ,1972)

what does it mean to know a language ?

When you know a language, you can speak and be understood by others who know that
language. This means you are able to produce strings of sounds that signify certain meanings
and to understand or interpret the sounds produced by others. But language is more than
speech. Deaf people produce and understand sign languages just as hearing people produce
and understand spoken languages. The languages of the deaf communities throughout the
world are equivalent to spoken languages, differing only in their modality of expression.
Almost everyone knows at least one language. Five-year-old children are nearly as proficient
at speaking and understanding speech as their parents. Yet the ability to carry out the simplest
conversation requires profound knowledge that most speakers are unaware of . In a parallel
fashion, a child can walk without understanding or being able to explain the principles of
balance and support or the neurophysiological control mechanisms that permit one to do so.
The fact that we may know something unconsciously is not unique to language.( Fromkin ,et-
al. 2022)
Linguistic knowledge includes the following :
A)Knowledge of the sound system
Part of knowing a language means knowing what sounds (or signs)1 are in that language
and what sounds are not. One way this unconscious knowledge is revealed is by the way
speakers of one language pronounce words from another language. Knowing the sound system
of a language includes more than knowing the inventory of sounds. It means also knowing which
sounds may start a word, end a word and follow each other.( Ibid: 3)
B) knowledge of words
Knowing the sounds and sound patterns in our language constitutes only one part of our linguistic
knowledge. Knowing a language means also knowing that certain sequences of sounds signify certain
concepts or meanings. Speakers of English know what boy means, and that it means something different
from toy or girl or pterodactyl. When you know a language, you know words in that language; that is, which
sequences of sounds are related to specific meanings and which are not.

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Arbitrary relation of form and meaning
If you do not know a language, the words (and sentences) of that language will be mainly incompre-
hensible because the relationship between speech sounds and the meanings they represent in the lang-
uages of the world is, for the most part, an arbitrary one. When you are acquiring a language, you have to
learn that the sounds represented by the letters house signify the concept ; if you know French, this
same meaning is represented by maison.

There is some sound symbolism in language; that is, words whose pronunciation suggests their mean-
ing. Most languages contain onomatopoeic words, such as buzz or murmur, that imitate the sounds
associated with the objects or actions they refer to. But even here the sounds differ from language to
language, reflecting the particular sound system of the language. In English cock-a-doodle-doo is an
onomatopoeic word whose meaning is „the crow of a rooster‟, whereas in Finnish the rooster‟s crow is
kukkokiekuu.(ibid :4)

D)The creativity of linguistic knowledge

Knowledge of a language enables you to combine sounds to form words, words to form phrases and phrases to
form sentences. You cannot buy a dictionary of any language with all its sentences because no dictionary can list all
the possible sentences. Knowing a language means being able to produce and understand new sentences never
spoken before. This is the creative aspect, or creativity of language. Not every speaker of a language can create great
literature, but everybody who knows a language can create and understand new sentences.

In pointing out the creative aspect of language, Chomsky made a powerful argument against the behaviourist
view of language that prevailed in the first half of the twentieth century, which held that language is a set
of learnt responses to stimuli. While it is true that if someone steps on our toes we may automatically respond
with a scream or a grunt, these sounds are not part of language. They are involuntary reactions to stimuli.
After we automatically cry out, we can then go on to say, ‘Thank you very much for stepping on my toe
because I was afraid I had elephantiasis, but because I could feel it hurt I know I don’t’, or any one of an infinite
number of sentences, because the particular sentence we produce is not controlled by a stimulus.

Our creative ability is not only reflected in what we say, but also includes our understanding of new or novel
sentences.

Simple memorisation of all the possible sentences in a language is impossible in principle. If for every sentence
in the language a longer sentence can be formed, then there is no limit to the length of any sentence and
therefore no limit to the number of sentences.

E) knowing of sentences and non – sentences

Chomsky in 1972 in his book Language and Mind said that "A person who knows a language has mastered a
system of rules that assigns sound and meaning in a definite way for an infinite class of possible sentences".

Our knowledge of language not only allows us to produce and understand an infinite number of well-formed
(even if silly and illogical) sentences. It also permits us to distinguish well- formed (grammatical) from ill-formed
(ungrammatical) sentences. This is further evidence of our linguistic creativity because ungrammatical
sentences are typically novel, not sentences we have previously heard or produced, precisely because they are
ungrammatical! (Fromkin,2022:7)

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2)The properties of the language

Scholars such as Hauser,Chomsky and Finch believe that there are characteristics of language that are
unique to human language. They call the unique characteristics of language the faculty of language in the
narrow sense (FLN).and the features (properties ) of human language are:

A)Recursion

The primary feature of FLN is recursion. Recursion is the process whereby any linguistic unit can be
made longer by embedding another unit in it. I can say, “I am going to the store.” Or I can say, “My wife
and I are going to the store.” Or I could say, “My wife, children, and I are going to the store.” In fact, I
can add to the first sentence endlessly. Notice that I can also add to the end of the sentence: “My wife,
children, and I are going to the store and then we are going to a movie.” The recursiveness of language
allows people to compare, analyze, and combine thoughts in a limitless way. To Hauser, Chomsky, and
Fitch, the recursive property of language is the main thing that makes language unique to humans.(Rowe
and Levine ,2018:3)

B)Productivity

If you are a native speaker of English, you were not taught this in a formal manner. You acquired
knowledge of the syntactic rules involved in this sentence by listening to other people speak. As you
listened to and experimented with language, you built up a subconscious inventory of rules. These rules
let you do an amazing thing: create a virtually unlimited number of utterances from a limited number of
words. You have never before spoken most of the sentences that you will speak today. This creative
aspect of language is productivity. It allows us to express and understand ideas that have never before
been expressed.(ibid,4)

C) Discreteness

An essential property of human language not shared by the communication systems of spiders, crabs and
other animals is its discreteness. Human languages are not simply made up of a fixed set of invariant
signs. They are composed of discrete units – sounds, words, phrases – that are combined according to the
rules of the grammar of the language. The word top in English has a particular meaning, but it also has
individual parts that can be rearranged to produce other meaningful sequences – pot or opt. Similarly, the
phrase the cat on the mat means something different from the mat on the cat. We can arrange and
rearrange the units of our language to form an infinite number of expressions. The creativity of human
language depends on discreteness.(Fromkin,2022:16)

D) Displacement

the capacity to talk (or sign) messages that are unrelated to here and now. Displacement and
discreteness are two fundamental properties that distinguish human language from the communicat-ion
systems of birds and other animals.(ibid.,16-17).
The ability to communicate about things at times other than the present and to communicate about
things not directly in front of the sender and/or receiver is called displacement. The communicative sy-
stems of many animals allow for some displacement. Like other elements of nonhuman communica- tion,
the ability for displacement is strictly limited. This is not so for humans.

Humans can communicate about any past event or about any potential future happening. When we
discuss a future night on the town, give our ideas on some historical event, or express our anxiety over the
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grade we expect to receive on an exam, we are displaying displacement.(Rowe and Levine ,2018:11)
E) Arbitrariness
Linguistic forms, such as words or sentences, have an arbitrary relationship to their mean- ing. The
word fire, in spoken, written, or signed form, has no direct relationship to the concept of fire. This is why
different languages will have different words for this concept. Are the various elements of the bee‟s dance
and the bird‟s calls arbitrary? The element of the bee‟s dance that indicates direction has a nonarbitrary
(direct) relationship to what it indicates. The direction of the bee‟s run is the same direction as the nectar
source when the bee is dancing outside the hive on the landing platform. On the other hand, bird songs
and calls are arbitrary because the form of a specific call or song has no direct relationship to what these
sounds indicate.

"Arbitrary, in relationship to language, means that features of language, such as words, have no direct relationship to their
meaning".(ibid. ,11)

F) Prevarication

in the linguistic sense, refers to the ability to communicate about things that are not verifiable, things for which
there is no empirical proof.
Prevarication is generally absent from the communicative systems of other animals. Exceptions might be
that some animals fake conditions, like death, to confuse a predator. Some animals mimic the sounds of
other species. This “playing dead” and mimicking other species is similar to lying. The main difference
is that nonhuman animals “lie” because of genetic preprogramming, whereas humans learn to lie.
3) Other Languages

In addition to natural languages ,there are other languages and communication systems ,as following

1)Sign language

sign languages do not use sounds to express meanings. Instead, they are visual–gestural systems that use
hand, body and facial gestures as the forms used to create vocabulary and to express grammatical rules. Sign
languages are fully developed languages, and signers create and comprehend unlimited numbers of new
sentences, just as speakers of spoken languages do. Signed languages have their own grammatical rules
and a mental lexicon of signs, all encoded through a system of gestures, and are otherwise equivalent
to spoken languages. Signers are affected by performance factors just as speakers are; slips of the hand
occur similar to slips of the tongue. Finger fumblers amuse signers just as tongue twisters amuse
speakers. These and other language games play on properties of the phonological (that is, „sound‟)
systems of the spoken and signed languages.

Deaf children who are exposed to signed languages acquire them just as hearing children acquire
spoken languages, going through the same linguistic stages, including the babbling stage. Deaf children
babble with their hands, just as hearing children babble with their vocal tracts. signed languages resemble
spoken languages in all major aspects. ( Fromkin,2018:15)

Language is the lexicon and grammar that exists in your head. Speech, sign lan- guage, and writing are
the ways that linguistic (verbal) knowledge gets out of your head and into the heads of others; that is ,
these are systems to deliver linguistic information.(Rowe and Levine ,2022:4)
2) Nonverbal ( non linguistic) communication
Humans also communicate in nonverbal ways. Nonverbal means nonlinguistic—that is, not through speech,
sign language, or writing. Humans, as well as other animals, communicate with gestures, by changing the
spatial arrangement between individuals in a group, by their physical appearance, facial expressions, touching
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behavior, and other means. As people talk, their bodies move to punctuate what they are saying, and
sometimes to contradict what they are saying. Their words are reinforced with the emotions conveyed
through facial expressions and even pupil dilations and contractions. They touch each other to express
concern, rein- forcement, and affection. They take turns. In fact, if you watch people communicate “with the
sound off,” that is, from a distance, they appear to be involved in an elaborate dance.(ibid. ,5)

3)Nonhuman communication ( bees & birds)

Birds do not sing for our pleasure, however. Their songs and calls communicate important
information to other members of the species and sometimes to other animals. Bird calls (consisting
of one or more short notes) convey danger, feeding, nesting, flocking and so on. Birdsongs (more
complex patterns of notes) are used to stake out territory and to attract mates. Like the messages of
crabs and spiders, however, there is no evidence of any internal structure to these songs; they cannot be
segmented into discrete meaningful parts and rearranged to encode different messages as can the words,
phrases and sentences of human language.

Honey bees have a particularly interesting signalling system. When a forager bee returns to the hive,
it communicates to other bees where a source of food is located by performing a dance on a wall of
the hive to reveal the location and quality of the food source.

The number of repetitions and the intensity with which the bee dances the round dance indicates the
richness of the food source – the more repetitions and the livelier the bee dance, the more food to be
had.

Bee dances are discrete in some sense, consisting of separate parts, and in principle they can
communicate infinitely many different messages, like human language; but unlike human language the
topic is always the same – namely, food. They lack the displacement property. As experiments have
shown, when a bee is forced to walk to a food source rather than fly, it will communicate a distance
many times farther away than the food source actually is. The bee has no way of communicating the
special circumstances of its trip. This absence of creativity makes the bee‟s dance qualitatively different
from human language.(Fromkin,2022:16-17)

4)Computer Language

Computers are prolific. If you are reading this book, there is a high likelihood that you use a comp-uter, be it
as large as a desktop or as small as an Apple Watch. You may also be able to speak to your computer and it may
speak back. Your computer may take dictation, translate between languages, read an electronic newspaper out
loud and give you the definition of eleemosynary. These are the trappings of human language, but does your
computer, or any computer, have human language competence?

No computer has come close to passing this ‘Turing test’, fictional computers and robots to the contrary
notwithstanding. Indeed, the test has never been seriously administered. Moreover, if in an
unforeseeable future a computer was programmed to pass this test, it would be the ingenuity and
linguistic competence of the programmers on display, not the computer nor its software. Despite the
intelligence of animals and machines, none has achieved the linguistic competence of any healthy
human being. (Fromkin,2022:20)

Computer scientists have laboured for decades to program computers with the linguistic competence of
a human. While the results are impressive, and computers appear to be able to talk, listen, and under-

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stand, there is little evidence that human linguistic competence has been achieved.(ibid.,21)

(2) What's Linguistics ?

1)Definition
"Linguistics is the scientific study of any aspect of language. Since language is a human universal, all
academic fields that study humans have an interest in language".(Rowe and Levine,2018:1)
David Crystal in 2010 explained that Linguistics shares with other sciences a concern to be
objective, systematic, consistent and explicit in its account of language. Like other sciences, it aims to
collect data, test hypotheses, devise models and construct theories. Its subject matter, however, is
unique: at one extreme it overlaps with such „hard‟ sciences as physics and anatomy; at the other, it
involves such traditional „arts‟ subjects as philosophy and literary criticism . The field of linguistics
includes both science and humanities ,and offers a breadth of coverage that,for many aspiring students
of the subject ,is the primary source of its appeal.

2) Linguistic knowledge and Performance

Our linguistic knowledge permits us to form longer and longer sentences by joining sentences and
phrases or adding modifiers to a noun. Whether we stop at three, five or eighteen adjectives, it is
impossible to limit the number we could add if desired. Very long sentences are theoretically possible, but
they are highly improbable. Evidently, there is a difference between having the knowledge necessary to
produce sentences of a language and applying this knowledge. It is a difference between what we know –
our linguistic competence – and how we use this knowledge in actual speech production and
comprehension – our linguistic performance.

Speakers of all languages have the knowledge to understand or produce sentences of any length.
However, there are physiological and psychological reasons that limit the number of adjectives, adverbs,
clauses and so on that we actually produce and understand. Speakers may run out of breath, lose
track of what they have said or die of old age before they are finished. Listeners may become confused,
tired, bored or disgusted.

(4) What is Grammar ?

According to Chomsky and Morris Halle in 1968 We use the term 'grammar 'with a systemic ambiguity .

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