Introduction to

Language and
Lingusitics
Presented by: Ghada Mohamed
Course instructor: Dr. Adel Aiblo
 Content
• What is Language?

• Linguistic Knowledge

• Linguistic Knowledge
and Performance

• What is Grammar?

• Language Universals
• Animal Languages
 What is
language?
According to Sapir (1921:8) : “Language is purely
human and non-instinctive method of communicating
ideas, emotions and desires by means of voluntarily
produced symbols. "

Delahunty and Garvey (2010) define it as “Language

is a set of rules, unconsciously present in the mind ,
which enables human beings to represent and
communicate meanings by producing audible, visible,
tactile symbols that these rules systematically relate
to those meanings. "
 Linguistic Knowledge
Linguistic knowledge is defined as the acquisition of knowledge that takes
place naturally and without conscious attention. (Alipour, 2014)

It is the unconscious process of learning a language by one’s

surroundings; therefore, gaining the ability to speak and communicate.

Language is not only specific for those who produce sounds, for example,
deaf people communicate through signs.

The language of deaf people is considered to be equivalent to that of

spoken languages. It only differs in the way it is expressed.
Knowledge of the Sound System
• It also means which sound
• Knowing a language starts a word, ends a word or
means knowing what follows it.
sounds or signs are in that • For example, the word
language. “mkalimana“ in Swahili

• Each language has its own • A language’s sound system is

made up of a set of phonemes
sound system that may be
which are used according to
similar or different to phonological rules.
another language.
• Some languages have a larger number of phonemes while
others less.

E.g. English has 44 phonemes; whereas, Spanish has 50

phonemes.

• Some languages have phonemes that do not exist in

another.

E.g. Arabs may pronounce the word “park“ as “bark“

replacing the phoneme ‘p’ with ‘b’ as it does not exist in
Arabic.
 Knowledge of Words
Knowing a language means identifying certain sequence of
sounds as meaningful words.

For example, the word boy means different from the word joy
or girl and that they are all words, but moy is not a word.

Speakers of a language, as a group, can associate any

sounds freely with any meaning. It does not matter which
sound is assosicated with which word.
Arbitrary Relation of form and meaning
• Words are abitrary as they have no principled or systematic
connection with their meaning.

E.g. the word car signify the concept

wheras, in French, voiture and‫سيار‬ in Arabic.
• ‫ة‬
Even speech sounds are arbitrary. E.g. girl and gem
• The patterns into which sounds and words are ordered is also
arbitrary.
For example, the word tax and xat.
Adjectives in English go before noun : small girl
Whereas in Arabic :‫فتاة صغيرة‬
 The Creativity of Linguistic
knowldge
Linguistic creativity is a versatile phenomenon that
includes factors such as thinking , imagination, and
speed of thinking.

It can also be defined as as the ability to produce and

understand new sentences never spoken or written
before.

There is no limit to the number of sentences created or

the length and complexity of sentences.

For instance, we can say: This is the cat. Or

This is the cat Sara brought. Or
This is the stray cat Sara brought from the park.
Metaphors are also an example of linguistic
creativity.

For instance, the following sentence: The mind is

a garden.

A speaker has the ability to combine sounds to

form words, words to form phrases, and phrases
to form sentences.

Not every speaker can create great literature, but

everybody who knows a language can create and
understand new sentences.
Knowledge of Sentences and Nonsentences
Language is more than a set of words because words must be ordered in
certain ways to create sentences.

Our knowledge of language allows us to separate possible sentences

from non sentences. For example:
• The boy lost his school bag.
• Lost bag boy his school.

Therefore linguistic knowledge includes rules for forming sentences and

making a kind of judgment.
 Linguistic Knowledge and
Performance
• Linguistic Knowledge (Competence) is the
unconscious knowledge of the rules that constitute
the language (sounds, words, meanings, structures,
rules for combining linguistic elements.)

• Performance is the use or the actual production

and comprehension of this knowledge.
Performance provides evidence for competence.
For example:
 The blocking the entrance protestor was arrested. Or
 Angela told Molly about herself. (ambiguous)
 What is grammar?
Grammar is the process of describing the structure of
phrases and sentences in a way that lays down the
grammatical sequences and rule out all the
ungrammatical sequences in a language.

Grammar is used to refer to different things. It can refer

to the descriptions of language structure
(descriptive grammar), or refer to the knowledge that a
native speaker has of his language (prescriptive
grammar).
 Prescriptive
Descriptive Grammar Grammar
Any attempt to describe the It attempts to define how a
linguistic knowledge and behaviour language should be used. It is
of individuals or communities concerned with established
without judging or evaluating norms of correct usage of
whether the sentence is correct or language or grammar.
incorrect. An example:
 Jake and me are coming to
For example, school.
• I ain’t gonna do it. In prescriptive grammar, this
The point of view of a descriptive sentence should be:
grammarian is that grammars from  Jake and I are coming to the
every language and dialects are school.
equal.
Teaching Grammar
Teaching grammar explicitly states the
rules of a language and is used to learn
another language or dialect.

It is usually difficult for adults to learn a

foreign/second language without formal
instruction, even if they lived in a country
where the target language is spoken.
Azar (2007) highlights the importance of
teaching grammar. That it is a significant
aspect that shows the nature of language.

An example, English nouns aren’t

classified by gender; whereas, in French
they are.

La fentre (Feminine), Le jardin (Masculine)

 Language
universals
It can be defined as the characteristics of language believed
to be common in all languages.

The concept of language universals originates from Noam

Chomsky’s proposal of Universal Grammar, which suggests
that the mind was pre-equipped with a set of linguistic
constraints , and that there was a common basis of structure
for all languages.
 Language
universals
Then this concept was pioneered by Joseph Greenberg, where
through sampling of a substantial number of languages revealed
that all languages are at least in some part share a pattern.

For example, he stated that in declarative sentence, the subject

precedes the object.
The girl read a book. ‫ الفتاة قرأت كتاب‬La fille a lu un livre
 The Development of Grammar
In first language acquisition, a child acquires the language
with relative ease and with no need of specific language
instructions given.

For example, all children go though the first stage

“babbling“.
Then they begin to utter a word. Following that, they begin
to combine words e.g. Me eat, Emily play dolls.
Then they will go through other linguistic stages, by the age
of 5 children may speak in a way almost identical to an
adult.
 Sign Language
"Sign language is defined as any means of
communication through bodily movements,
especially of the hands and arms, used when
spoken communication is impossible or not
desirable.“ – Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Sign languages are considered fully developed

languages. An individual can use signs to
create and understand unlimited number of
sentences.
 Sign Language

Just as a spoken language can be acquired, the same goes

to sign languages.
Language acquisition and use is not depended on the ability
to produce sounds and hear them, but are based on a more
abstract cognitive capacity that shows the similarities
between a spoken and sign language. It can be the evidence
of the innateness of languages.
 Types of Sign language

There are two general types:

1. An alternate sign language.
George Yule (2006) defines it as “a
system of hand signals developed by
speakers for limited communication in a
specific context where speech cannot
be used.“
For example:
A referee in a match
Prayers
A Traffic police
2. Primary sign language

“It is the first language of a group who do

not use a spoken language with each other.”

Each sign language has its own grammar

with phonological, morphological, syntactic
and semantic rules, and a mental lexicon of
signs that are all set through a system of
gestures.
Examples of primary sign language

British Sign Language (BSL) is used for

everyday communication among people who
are deaf in Britain.

American Sign language (ASL) is used by

the deaf community in the united states.
When signers need to represent a word or
concept that has no signs, ASL provides a
series of hand movements and shapes to
represent the letters of the English Alphabet.
 Animal Language
Animal languages are forms of non-human
communication that shows similarity to human
language.

Animals communicate through a variety of signs, such

as sounds and movements.

When animals communicate, they refer to that

immediate time and place. For example, they cannot
communicate to relate to past and future time or place.

Whereas, humans can, this property of human language

is called displacement. It allows language users to talk
about things or events that happened or may occur in
the future.
Humans use sounds to express
meanings, but sounds does not
necessary mean language.
On the contrary, when animals imitate
humans by uttering vocal sounds, it
does not mean they have a language.

Talking birds such as parrots, can

reproduce words of the human
language that they have heard, but
their utterance conveys no meaning.
Bees communicate through movment, Birds communicate through sounds.
which may be considered as some For example, birdcalls convey messages of
verison of displacement. For example, immediate situations, such as danger,
performing dance routine to communicate feeding, nesting etc.
where a source of food is located. Birdsongs used to establish territory etc.
 Animals using
language
• There have been several studies and experiments
with chimpanzees to see whether an animal can
learn the human language.

• Researchers raised chimpanzees in their own homes

to see if they can acquire a language, however, the
chimps were not able to produce words but could
understand a number of individual words.

• A scientist couple (Beatrix and Allen Gardner) taught

a female chimpanzee called Washoe, she was able
to use over 100 signs and linked two signs together,
but still had a limit and could not achieve the
qualitative linguistic ability of a human child.
• It can be said that unlike human language, animal
language is nonarbitrary. That each animal communication
consists of a finite and limited set of vocal and gestural
forms. Many of these forms are used in particular
situations (e.g. declare a territory), or at particular times
(e.g. feeding.)

• Even if animals could use sounds, movements to

communicate, they are unable to develop a complex
system of sounds and stuctures that allows to produce an
inifite number of utternaces.
 References
● Delahunty, Gerald & Garvey, James. (2012). The English
Language: From sound to sense. South Carolina: Parlor Press.
● Lyons, J. (1981). Language and Linguistics. Cambridge University
Press.
● Yule, G. (2014). The Study of Language. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
● Fromkin, V., Rodman, R., Hyams, N. (2010) An Introduction to
Language. Canada: Cengage Learning
● Alipour, Sepideh. (2014). Metalinguistic and Linguistic
Knowledge in Foreign Language Learners. Theory and Practice in
Language Studies. Vol.4 No.12, pp.2640-2645, December 2014.
● Haspelmath, Martin. (2017). Explanation in research on
grammar. Tylex course “Explaining language universal,“
Voronovo (Moscow), 1-17.
Thank you for your
attention!