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Overview. In this chapter you’ll learn about the complex relationship between language and identity. Language reflects both the individual characteristics of a person, as well as the beliefs and practices of his or her community.
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What is language? This book is an introduction to the study of human language across the planet. It is concerned with the immense variety among the languages of the world, as well as the common traits that cut across the differences.
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- Learning Goals
- What is Language?
- Linguistic Knowledge
- Cant help but use language
- Knowledge of the Sound System
- Knowledge of sound system
- Knowledge of Words
- History of words
- Ancestral Protolanguages
- Knowledge of Words
- Creativity of Linguistic Knowledge
- Knowledge of Sentences and Nonsentences
- Linguistic Knowledge and Performance
- What Is Grammar?
- Descriptive Grammar
- Dialects
- The “Standard”
- Dialect - Lexical Differences
- Dialect- Phonological Differences
- Dialect - Syntactic Differences
- Teaching Grammar
- Language Universals
- The Development of Grammar
- Sign Languages: Evidence for language universals
- What Is Not (Human) Language
- Can Animals Learn Human Language?
- Language and Thought
What do we know when we know a language Creavity in language Competence/Performance What is Grammar Language Universals Language Development Language and Thought
The ability to use language, perhaps more than any other attribute, distinguishes humans from other animals But what does it mean to know a language?
When you know a language, you can speak (or sign) and be understood by others who know that language Five-year-olds already know their first language(s) The ability to use a language requires profound knowledge that most speakers don’t know that they know
Try to not understand what I am saying Just as impossible as trying not to be fooled by opcal illusions You cannot stop blinking or having peripheral vision For example: Rotang Snakes – the circular snakes appear to rotate spontaneously in your peripheral vision as a result of the peripheral driM i...
When we know a language, we know what sounds (or signs) are used in the language and which sounds (or signs) are not This also includes knowing how the sounds of the language can be combined Which sounds may start a word Which sounds may end a word Which sounds may follow each other within a word
Knowing the sounds of your language also involves knowing how your face looks ahwen you produce them Mcgurk effect hear da da, but what is pronounced is ba ba, but lips move to ga ga
Knowing a language also means identifying certain strings of sounds as meaningful words Most words in all languages are arbitrary connections of sound to meaning hand main nsa ruka (English) (French) (Twi) (Russian)
Knowing a language does not mean we know its history or the etymology of words. Many words of English have a common ancestor with similar words in other languages Languages changes so there will always be proto-‐languages The structure of protolanguages ‘dies’ with its speakers.
One way we can tell if languages are genetically related is if they have a large number of sound correspondences Where an English word begins with an f, the corresponding word in French and Spanish begins with a p: English /f/ French /p/ Spanish /p/ father fish père poisson padre pescado From these correspondences, we can hypothesize that Indo-Euro...
• The conventional and arbitrary relationship between form and meaning is also true in sign languages Knowledge of Words Sound symbolism: there are some words whose pronunciation seems to reflect the meaning Onomatopoeia: English cock-a-doodle-doo and Finnish kukkokiekuu English gobble gobble and Turkish glu-glu English gl and the concept of...
Every language has an infinite number of possible sentences Knowing a language enables you to: Create a sentence that has never been uttered before Understand a sentence that has never been uttered before Most sentences we use are new; very few sentences are stored in our brains
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 nonsentences What he did was climb a tree *What he thought was want a sports car
Knowledge: what we know about a language (linguistic competence) Mostly unconscious knowledge about sounds, structures, meanings, words, and rules for combining linguistic elements Performance: how we use this knowledge in actual speech production and comprehension We can theoretically create an infinitely long sentence, but physical constraints ma...
Grammar = the knowledge speakers have about the units and rules of their language Rules for combining sounds into words, word formation, making sentences, assigning meaning When a sentence is ungrammatical in a linguistic sense, it means that it breaks the rules of the shared mental grammar of the language
Descriptive grammar: a true model of the mental grammar of language speakers In other words, a descriptive grammar describes the linguistic rules that people use when they speak their language The point of view of a descriptive grammarian is that grammars from every language and dialect are equal
Prescripve Grammars usually argue for a standardized dialect. Regional forms or forms restricted to group class are frowned upon Dialects have grammars Rules are systemac
Standard American English (SAE) is the dominant (or prestige) dialect in America Nobody actually speaks SAE (it’s an idealization), and it is not defined precisely When a standard is the dialect of the wealthy and powerful, people may be required to speak that dialect in order to get ahead Ross (1954) noticed differences in the speech of British...
Regional dialects may also differ lexically British: lift American: elevator British: pants American: underpants Boston: tonic Los Angeles: soda Los Angeles: freeway New York: thruway New Jersey: parkway England: motorway
There are systematic pronunciation differences between American and British English For example, Americans put stress on the first syllable of a polysyllabic word, and British speakers put the stress on the second syllable in words like cigarette, applicable, formidable, laboratory Americans may pronounce the first vowel in data as [e] or [ei] but ...
Appalachian English has several syntactic differences from Standard English Double modals You might should go home. He might could do it. Double objects I caught me a fish. Progressives He came a-runnin’.
A teaching grammar explicitly states the rules of a language and is used to learn another language or dialect. Teaching grammars assume the student already knows one language and then compares the grammar of the new language to the one they already know
Universal Grammar (UG) refers to the universal properties that all languages share Part of a biologically endowed human language faculty The basic blueprint that all languages follow It is a major goal of the nature of UG
All normal children acquire language relatively quickly and easily and without instruction Children learn the world’s languages in the same way and pass through the same stages of acquisition If children are born with UG, then they can acquire language so quickly and easily because they already know the universal properties of language and only nee...
Deaf children exposed to sign languages go through the same stages of language acquisition as hearing babies Deaf children babble with their hands Signed languages are organized in the brain just like spoken languages are
Some features of human language: Discreteness: the ability to combine linguistic units to make larger units of meaning Creativity: the ability to create and understand never-before-uttered sentences Displacement: the ability to talk about things that are not physically present Allows for discussion of past events, abstract ideas, lying, etc. W...
Nonhuman primates have communication systems in the wild to convey information about the immediate environment and emotional state (stimulus-response) Humans have attempted to teach human language to other primates These nonhuman primates were taught sign languages because their vocal tracts cannot produce the sounds of human language Can Animals L...
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: the theory that the structure of language influences how its speakers perceive the world around them Linguistic determinism: the strongest form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which claims that the language we speak determines how we perceive the world Whorf claimed that the Hopi people do not perceive time in the same way as ...
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Language a cultural, not a biologically inherited, function. Futility of interjectional and sound-imitative theories of the origin of speech. Definition of language. The psycho-physical basis of speech. Concepts and language. Is thought possible without language? Abbreviations and transfers of the speech process. The universality of language. 2.
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Language is a means to communicate, it is a semiotic system. By that we simply mean that it is a set of signs. Its A sign is a pair consisting—in the words of Ferdinand de Saussure—of a signifier and a signified. We prefer to call the signifier the exponent and the signified the meaning. For example, in English the
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definition might be something like the following: 'Language is a form of human communication by means of a system of symbols principally transmitted by vocal sounds.'
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Mar 1, 2019 · It is a process of creating, exchanging, sharing ideas, information, opinions, facts, feelings and experiences between a sender and a receiver. Language is the most powerful tool of communication.
