University of Babylon

College of human sciences

Department of English

General Linguistics

By
Masar Amer AbdulKareem

Supervised by
Ass.Proff.Hussein Hameed Mayouf

2021-2022
Tabel of content

1- Introduction
2-Linguistic knowledge
2.1-Knowledge of the sound system
2.2-Knowledge of words
2.3-Knowledge of sentences and non-sentences
3-The creativity of linguistic knowledge
4-Competence
5-Performance
6-Langue and Parole
7-Conclusion
8-References
1-Introduction

Whatever else people do when they come together—whether they play,

fight, or work they talk. We live in a world of language. We talk to our
friends, our associates, families, our teachers, our parents, our rivals, and
even our enemies. We talk face-to-face and over all manner of electronic
media, and everyone responds with more talk. Hardly a moment of our
waking lives is free from words, and even in our dreams we talk and are
talked to. We also talk when there is no one to answer. Some of us talk
aloud in our sleep. We talk to our pets and sometimes to ourselves. The
possession of language, perhaps more than any other attribute,
distinguishes humans from other animals. According to the philosophy
expressed in the myths and religions of many peoples, language is the
source of human life and power. To understand our humanity, we must
understand the nature of language that makes us human.
Anyone who knows a language must be able to speak and understand in
order to communicate with others. This means that one must have the
capacity to produce sounds (which carry a certain meaning) and to
understand and interpret the linguistic codes in the sounds produced by
others. However, Knowing a language goes beyond that, for even the
simplest conversation requires a profound knowledge of how language
rules functions, and how words are related to one another as they form
meanings.
2-Linguistic knowledge
A term used in linguistic theory and especially in generative grammar, refer
to the speakers’ knowledge of their language, the system of rules which
they have mastered so that they are able to produce and understand an
indefinite number of sentences (Crystal,2008).
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 much more than speech. Deaf
people produce and understand sign languages just as hearing persons
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. Most everyone knows at least
one language. Five-year-old children are nearly as proficient at speaking
and understanding as their parents. Yet the ability to carry out the simplest
conversation requires profound knowledge that most speakers are
unaware of this is true for speakers of all languages, 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 (Victoria ,Nina &Robert,1974).
Linguistic knowledge is represented as a system of constraints, a grammar,
which defines all and only the possible sentences of the language
(Emonds 1980, Ross 1967, Perlmutter 1971). An adequate grammar of a
specific language must not generate ungrammatical sentences which are
not acceptable to the native speakers of that language linguistic knowledge
permits people to form longer and longer sentences by joining sentences
and phrases together or adding modifiers to a noun. Whether you stop at
three, five or eighteen adjectives, it is impossible, 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. When we speak, we usually wish to convey some message. At
some stage in the act of producing speech, we must organize our thoughts
into strings of words.
2.1- Knowledge of the sound system
Part of knowing a language means knowing what sounds (or signs) 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. If you speak only English, for example, you
may substitute an English sound for a non-English sound when pronouncing
“foreign” words like French. If you pronounce it as the French do, you are
using sounds outside the English sound system. French people speaking
English often pronounce words like this and that as if they were spelled zis
and zat. The English sound represented by the initial letters th in these
words is not part of the French sound system, and the mispronunciation
reveals the French speaker’s unconscious knowledge of this fact. 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. Children develop the sound patterns of their
language very rapidly. A one-year-old learning English knows that nk cannot
begin a word, just as a Ghanaian child of the same age knows that it can in
his language (Victoria ,Nina &Robert,1974).

2.2- Knowledge of Words

Sounds and sound patterns of our language constitute only one part of our
linguistic knowledge. Beyond that we know that certain sequences of
sounds signify certain concepts or meanings. Speakers of English
understand what boy means, and that it means something different from
toy or girl or pterodactyl. We also know that toy and boy are words, but
moy is not. When you know a language, you know words in that language;
that is, you know which sequences of sounds relate to specific meanings
and which do not.If you do not know a language, the words (and sentences)
of that language will be mainly incomprehensible, because of the
relationship between speech sounds and the meanings they represent it,
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; if you know Russian, by dom; if you know Spanish, by casa.
Similarly🤚🏻 , is represented by hand in English, main in French, nsa in Twi,
and ruka in Russian.

2.3- Knowledge of Sentences and Nonsentences

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!
Consider the following sentences:
A. John is anxious to go.
*B. It is anxious to go John.
g. John, who was a student, flunked his exams.
*h. Exams his flunked student a was who John.
e. I expect them to arrive a week from next Thursday.
*f. I expect a week from next Thursday to arrive them.
The starred sentences unacceptable these sentences also illustrate that not
every string of words constitutes a well-formed sentence in a language.
Sentences are not formed simply by placing one word after another in any
order, but by organizing the words according to the rules of sentence
formation of the language. These rules are finite in length and finite in
number so that they can be stored in our finite brains.
Yet, they permit us to form and understand an infinite set of new
sentences. They also enable us to judge whether a sequence of words is a
well-formed sentence of our language or not. These rules are not
determined by a judge or a legislature, or even taught in a grammar class.
They are unconscious rules that we acquire as young children as we
develop language and they are responsible for our linguistic creativity.
Linguists refer to this set of rules as the grammar of the language. It means
knowing the sounds and meanings of many, if not all, of the words of the
language, and the rules for their combination—the grammar, which
generates infinitely many possible sentences.

3-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 or phrase book of any language with all the sentences of the
language. No dictionary can list all the possible sentences, because the
number of sentences in a language is infinite. Knowing a language means
being able to produce and understand new sentences never spoken before.
This is the creative aspect of language. Not every speaker can create great
literature, but everybody who knows a language can create and understand
new sentences. This creative aspect of language is quite easy to illustrate. If
for every sentence in the language a longer sentence can be formed, then
there is no limit to the number of sentences.
In English you can say:
This is the house.
or This is the house that Jack built.
or This is the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.
or This is the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat that ate the
malt that lay in the house that Jack built.
And you need not stop there. How long, then, is the longest sentence? A
speaker of English can say:
The old man came. or The old, old, old, old, old man came.
How many “olds” are too many? Seven? Twenty-three? It is true that the
longer these sentences become, the less likely we would be to hear or to
say them. A sentence with 276 occurrences of “old” would be highly
unusual in either speech or writing, even to describe Methuselah. But such
a sentence is theoretically possible. If you know English, you have the
knowledge to add any number of adjectives as modifiers to a noun and to
form sentences with indefinite numbers of clauses, as in “the house that
Jack built.” All human languages permit their speakers to increase the
length and complexity of sentences in these ways; creativity is universal
property of human language. Our creative ability is reflected not only in
what we say but also in our understanding of new or novel sentences.
Consider the following sentence: “Daniel Boone decided to become a
pioneer because he dreamed of pigeon-toed giraffes and crosseyed
elephants dancing in pink skirts and green berets on the wind-swept plains
of the Midwest.” You may not believe the sentence; you may question its
logic; but you can understand it, although you probably never heard or read
it before now. In pointing out the creative aspect of language, Noam
Chomsky, who many regard as the father of modern linguistics, argued
persuasively against the view that language is a set of learned responses to
stimuli. True, if someone steps on your toes you may automatically respond
with a scream or a grunt, but these sounds are not part of language. They
are involuntary reactions to stimuli. After we reflexively 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 and now that I can feel the pain I know I
don’t,” or any one of an infinite number of sentences, because the
particular sentences we produce are not controlled by any stimulus. Even
some involuntary cries like “ouch” change according to the language we
speak. Step on an Italian speaker’s toes and he will cry “ahi.” French
speakers often fill their pauses with the vowel sound that starts their word
for ‘egg’—oeuf— a sound that does not occur in English. Even
conversational fillers such as er, uh, and you know in English are
constrained by the language in which they occur. The fact of human
linguistic creativity was well expressed more than 400 years ago by Huarte
de San Juan (1530–1592): “Normal human minds are such that . . . without
the help of anybody, they will produce 1,000 (sentences) they never heard
spoke of . . . inventing and saying such things as they never heard from
their masters, nor any mouth” (Victoria ,Nina &Robert,1974).

4-Competence
It is the system of linguistic knowledge possessed by native speakers of a
language,. The term established by the American linguist Noam Chomsky to
denote that unconscious store of linguistic knowledge which enables
people to speak and understand the language properly without having to
think about it, it refers to the innate linguistic knowledge that allow us to
match sounds and meanings permitting us to utter and comprehend
sentences that we may never have heard before. According to Chomsky,
competence is the ideal language system that enables speakers to produce
and understand an infinite number of sentences in their language, and to
distinguish grammatical sentences from ungrammatical sentences. This is
unaffected by "grammatically irrelevant conditions" such as speech errors.
In Chomsky's view, competence can be studied independently of language
use so competence is what we know about the language we speak (without
having to know that we know it) , it is the mental knowledge that a speaker
or listener has of language. competence comes from speech errors: despite
having a perfect understanding of the correct forms, a speaker of a
language may unintentionally produce incorrect forms. This is because
performance occurs in real situations, and so is subject to many non-
linguistic influences. For example, distractions or memory limitations can
affect lexical retrieval (Chomsky 1965) and give rise to errors in both
production and perception or distractions. Such non-linguistic factors are
completely independent of the actual knowledge of language, and establish
that speakers' knowledge of language (their competence) is distinct from
their actual use of language (their performance).
5-Performance
The term linguistic performance was used by Noam Chomsky in 1960 to
describe “the actual use of language in concrete situations.”
It is the way a language system used in production, communication and
comprehension the utterance , it is the actual language behavior (the use
of language in daily life). Any instance of linguistic performance naturally
requires that the speaker or hearer involved possess of knowledge of the
language but performance involves other nonlinguistic factors as well.
A person health, emotional state ,memory and attention span, the topic
and the context, the unconscious linguistic competence or linguistic
knowledge of the speaker-listener, the nature and limitations of the
speaker-listener’s speech production and perception mechanisms of
speech, the nature and limitations of memory, concentration, attention and
other mental capacities of the speaker-listener and the social environment
and state of the speaker-listener all of these factors, as will as many others
will affect that person’s use of language .
competence and performance are key concepts that need to be taken into
consideration in order to develop an understanding of the extent to which
one is fully capable of living the language. Competence is the knowledge
one has about the language (grammar, lexis, syntax, etc), and performance
is the actual production of language ( chomsky 1965).
One might say something that is grammatically inappropriate while
possessing the knowledge to utter it correctly, and this does not mean that
one lacks skills in terms of competence. Since linguistic knowledge cannot
be simply and superficially observed and appreciated in one’s utterances,
deciding so is complicated. Otherwise, how could mistakes committed by
educated native speakers be explained?
Speakers of all language have the knowledge to understand or produce
sentences of any length. When they attempt to use that knowledge, though
- when they perform linguistically - there are physiological and
psychological reasons that limit the number of adjectives, adverb, clauses
and so on they may run out of breath, or they lose track of what they have
said.

6-Langue and Parole

Published in 1916, Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics
describes language as “a system of signs that express ideas.” de Saussure
describes two components of language: langue and parole. The French
term langue encompasses the abstract, systematic rules and conventions of
a signifying system, it is independent of, and pre-exists, the individual user.
It involves the principles of language, without meaningful utterance,
or parole, would be possible. In contrast, parole (speech) refers to the
concrete instances of the use of langue, including texts which provide the
ordinary research material for linguistics. In Noam Chomsky's theory, our
linguistic competence is our unconscious knowledge of languages and is
similar in some ways to Ferdinand de Saussure's concept of langue, the
organizing principles of a language. What we actually produce as utterances
is similar to Saussure's parole, and is called linguistic performance.
Langue refers to the abstract knowledge of language (the totality of
language). It represents the generalized system of rules and word images
stored in the minds of individuals or native speakers.
Parole refers to the actual physical utterance. It is the realization of langue
in speech. It refers to the actual and concrete act of speaking on the part of
a person (a dynamic social activity) in a particular time and place (Yasmin
Hikmet, 1998).
7-Conclusion
Language is a mental phenomenon, a body of knowledge about sounds ,
meanings and syntax which resides in the mind. This knowledge can be put
to use, but the speech or writing that results is merely a representation of
the language it is not the language itself. Linguists are determining the
knowledge of the speakers of a language, the knowledge that enable them
to produce and comprehend all off the actual utterances possible in their
language. (Falk,1978)
Language is the body of knowledge that resides in the minds of human
beings . We are all intimately familiar with at least one language, our own.
Yet few of us ever stop to consider what we know when we know a
language. No book contains, or could possibly contain, the English or
Russian or any language. The words of a language can be listed in a
dictionary, but not all the sentences can be. Speakers use a finite set of
rules to produce and understand an infinite set of possible sentences.
These rules are part of the grammar of a language, which develops when
you acquire the language and includes the sound system (the phonology),
the structure and properties of words (the morphology and lexicon), how
words may be combined into phrases and sentences (the syntax), and the
ways in which sounds and meanings are related (the semantics). The
sounds and meanings of individual words are related in an arbitrary
fashion. If you had never heard the word syntax you would not know what
it meant by its sounds. When you know a language, you know this system.
This knowledge (linguistic competence) is different from behavior (linguistic
performance). Maybe you have the competence to produce a million-word
sentence but performance limitations such as memory and endurance keep
this from occurring. (Victoria ,Nina &Robert,1974).The possession of
language, perhaps more than any other attribute ,distinguishes humans
from other animals. (Fromkin,2003)
8-References

David Crystal (2008) A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics.

Victoria ,Nina &Robert(1974) An introduction to language.
Chomsky( 1965) Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.
Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1916) Course in general linguistics.
Yasmin Hikmet (1998) An introduction course in general linguistics.
Falk (1978) Linguistics and Language: A Survey of Basic Concepts and
Implications.
David Crystal. (2006), How Language Works. Overlook
https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-linguistic-competence-1691123
https://iep.utm.edu/knowlang/
http://semanticsenglish.blogspot.com/2014/04/knowledge-of-sound-
system.html