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Ch. 1 Introduction

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Ch. 1 Introduction

Uploaded by

Derki Noureddine
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Language files: Materials for an introduction to language and linguistics

Chapter 1: Introduction
What Is Language?

Language touches every part of our lives: it gives words to our thoughts, voice to our ideas,
and expression to our feelings. Linguists have found it to be complex yet systematic and
describable. Language, thus, is a system of conventional spoken, manual (signed), or written
symbols using which human beings, as members of a social group and participants in its
culture, express themselves. The functions of language include communication, the
expression of identity, play, imaginative expression, and emotional release.

Introducing the Study of Language

Why Study Language?

No other species is comparable to humans concerning the creativity and complexity of the
systems that humans use to express thoughts and communicate. All (systems) languages vary,
and they reflect a speaker’s identity as well as social and cultural aspects of a society (rural vs.
urban areas; rich and poor). This makes studying languages an important element in
understanding the nature of human beings (old literature) in addition to other aspects like
developing better teaching tools for language instruction and designing computers capable of
better communication with humans (chat GPT).

Underlying Themes of Linguistic Study

Human language is an enormously complex phenomenon. The task of a linguist is to tease


apart the patterns of various aspects of human language to discover how language works.
Studying language arrived at the following assumptions:

1. Despite being complex, language is systematic (different levels),


2. Despite being diverse there are universalities,
3. Children acquire language without being taught; language acquisition is (at least
partly) innate.
4. All languages change over time, whether speakers desire change or not.

What You Know When You Know a Language

Linguistic Competence and Linguistic Performance

Competence describes the mental knowledge of a language, like the speaker's intrinsic
understanding of sound-meaning relations as established by linguistic rules. Performance –
that is the actual observed use of language. You may sometimes make performance errors
Language files: Materials for an introduction to language and linguistics
Chapter 1: Introduction
when you use language, such as being unable to remember a word, mispronouncing
something, or disordering the words in a sentence. This means that your performance failed to
match your competence. Since competence can’t be observed directly, linguists must use
linguistic performance as a basis for making hypotheses and drawing conclusions about what
linguistic competence must be like.

The Speech Communication Chain

The key elements in any communication system (as outlined by Claude Shannon and Warren
Weaver in 1949) are an information source (transmitter), a signal, and a receiver (destination).
This system considers phonetics, vocabulary, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics
(each will be dealt with later). In sum, your linguistic competence is stored in a lexicon and a
mental grammar, which you access to both produce and comprehend utterances. Though you
may not be actively aware of all the linguistic knowledge that you have stored away, you
nonetheless use it all the time; it forms the backbone of the communication chain.

1.2.5Uncovering and Describing What You Know

To discover the internal structure of language—that is, the lexicon and the mental rules—
linguists must first describe language as it is used. This involves listening to spoken language,
finding generalizations, and then making descriptive statements about what has been observed
(manner of articulation, consonant clusters, adjective before noun).

Other aspects of languages

Speaking and signing on the one hand, and writing, on the other, are two different forms of
communication that serve different functions, though both are related to language. While
speech and writing are both expressions of linguistic competence, speech is a more immediate
(and typically the primary) manifestation of language. There are several additional reasons
why speech is considered a more basic form of language than writing:

1. Writing must be taught, whereas spoken language is acquired naturally.


2. Writing does not exist everywhere that spoken language does (illiterate people)
3. Neurolinguistic evidence (studies of the brain “in action” during language use)
demonstrates that the processing and production of written language is overlaid on the
spoken language.
4. Writing can be edited before it is shared with others in most cases, while speech is
usually much more spontaneous.
Language files: Materials for an introduction to language and linguistics
Chapter 1: Introduction
5. Archeological evidence indicates that writing is a later historical development than
spoken language.

What makes a language what it is

Design features

Hockett’s descriptive characteristics of language are known as the design features of


language. All communication systems have the first three design features, while human
language alone has the final two.

 Mode of communication: The term mode of communication refers to how these


messages are transmitted and received.
 Semanticity: Semanticity is the property requiring that all signals in a communication
system have a meaning or a function.
 Pragmatic function: the use of language in different contexts.
 Interchangeability: refers to the ability of individuals to both transmit and receive
messages.
 cultural transmission: language is culturally transmitted.
 arbitrariness: there is no logical relationship between the sign and the meaning.
 discreetness: The property of language (among other communication systems) that
allows us to combine discrete units to create larger communicative units is called
discreteness.,
 displacement: is used to speak about things that are not present in the immediate
context.
 productivity: create an infinite number of sentences.

All natural languages exhibit all nine design features: any communication system that does
not is therefore not a language. There are formal (constructed) languages, such as the formal
logic used to write mathematical proofs and various computer languages (c++) but we can't
call them languages because they can't be acquired by young children unconsciously as
his/her native tongue!
Language files: Materials for an introduction to language and linguistics
Chapter 1: Introduction
Language Modality

A language’s modality tells us two things: how it is produced, and how it is perceived. It is
likely that most of the languages with which you are familiar are auditory-vocal (sometimes
also called aural-oral), which means that they are perceived via hearing and produced via
speech. Gestural (signed) languages, however, are those that are perceived visually and
produced via hand and arm movements, facial expressions, and head movements. In terms of
linguistic research more generally, considering languages with different modalities is of the
utmost importance. By observing the sorts of effects that different modalities do and do not
have on languages, we can come to learn profound truths about language itself.

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