What Is Language?

Our Language Expertise

For instance, every speaker of english usually knows that the following sentences are not
“normal” sentences in english.

(Sentences that are not “ normal” or possible in a language are marked with an asterisk, *.)

- Destroyed the city the hurricane. *

- Sick Lionel seems. *
- Chicago a large city in the Midwest is. *

Any english speaker also knows how to rearrange the words in the impossible sentences to
make them fully acceptable english sentences.

- The hurricane destroyed the city.

- Lionel seems sick.
- Chicago is a large city in the Midwest.

We know rules of english word order, even if we can’t define these rules any more speciically
than to say that we just know them.

Acquiring versus Learning a Language

The process of language acquisition is diferent from the process of language learning.

Acquisition takes place unconsciously, without direct instruction.

Our ability to acquire our native language, on the other hand, is similar to a bird’s ability to fly.

Children who are exposed to language acquire it regardless of race, class, or culture.

These rules of language also form part of our linguistic system, but they are consciously
learned rather than unconsciously acquired.

• Language acquisition: natural, unconscious process of language development in

humans that occurs without instruction.
• Language learning: process of gaining conscious knowledge of language through
instruction.

Human Language and Animal Communication

Linguist charles hockett proposed a list of design features that characterize human language
and distinguish it from other communication systems (other animal systems, traic signals,
etc.).
hockett's design features of languages:

• Semanticity: Specific signals can be matched with specific meanings. In short, words
have meanings.
• Arbitrariness: there is no logical connection between the form of the signal and the
thing it refers to. For example, dog in english is Hund in German and perro in
Spanish.
• Descreteness: Messages in the system are made up of smaller, repeatable parts
rather than indivisible units. a word, for example, can be broken down into units of
sound.
• Displacement: the language user can talk about things that are not present-the
messages can refer to things in remote time (past and future) or space (here or
elsewhere).
• Productivity: Language users can understand and create never-before-heard
utterances.
• Duality of Pattering: a large number of meaningful utterances can be recombined in a
systematic way from a small number of discrete parts of language. For example,
sufixes can be attached to many roots, and words can be combined to create novel
sentences.

Many animals have complex communicative interactions that do not share hockett’s design
features of human language.

for example:

The communication system of the african vervet monkey, there are three types of predators
(leopard, eagle, and snake), and there is a distinct call for
each.

• A loud bark signals a leopard.

• A coughing sound signals an eagle.
• A chutter sound signals a snake.

Universal Grammar

Grammar involves the complex interplay of prescriptive grammar and descriptive grammar
and that there is some overlap between the two.

All tackle language acquisition with the same basic cognitive hardwiring to accomplish that
task.

Grammatical rules must have similar properties across languages, forming a kind of basic
grammatical “blueprint.”

These core properties make up what linguists refer to as Universal Grammar (UG).
 • Universal Grammar (UG): the set of linguistic rules common to all languages;
hypothesized to be part of human cognition

A principle of Universal Grammar that clauses in all languages have subjects, though
languages may difer in how the subject is expressed.

Parameters

Linguists have found evidence that basic universal principles can be defined more accurately
as linguistic parameters.

We can think of a parameter as a metaphorical on–off switch.

We can account for certain facts about the differences between languages by proposing that
in one language a parameter might be set “on” and in the other, “of.”

• Linguistic parameters: binary (on–off) settings of universal grammatical

principles proposed to account for differences among languages.

All languages also appear to share these universal principles:

• They all have subjects and predicates.

• They all have nouns and verbs.
• They all use a subset of sounds from a much wider possible group of
sounds humans make that could be used for language.
• They all have similar ways of categorizing meaning distinctions.

The study of which aspects of languages are universal principles and which are
parameterized variations is the topic of a great deal of current research.

The Scientiic Study of Language

Facts about language:

• We all have unconscious knowledge of a linguistic rule system.

• Languages exist independent of writing systems.
• All languages have grammar (morphology, syntax, semantics, phonetics, and
phonology).
• All languages have the same expressive power.
• All children acquire language if exposed to it, without instruction.
• All languages change over time, no matter how hard we try to stop that change.
• A language is really a continuum of language varieties.
• All languages have a common set of basic grammatical properties (Universal
Grammar), and some may be parameterized.
The properties of language listed here are relatively recent discoveries and are the result of
subjecting language, like other natural phenomena, to rigorous scientific analysis, or the
scientific method.

As in physics or chemistry, language scientists examine data, form hypotheses about the
data, test those hypotheses against additional data, and formulate theories, or collections of
hypotheses, that can be tested against competing theories.

Linguistics, the scientific study of language, is informed by a long history of the study of
grammar, and many of the ideas central to current linguistic theory go back to ancient times.

• scientific method: formation of hypotheses that explain data and the testing of those
hypotheses against further data.
• linguistics: the scientiic study of language.

Noam Chomsky and Generative Grammar

In 1957, a short book called Syntactic Structures introduced generative grammar, now the
most visible linguistic theory in the world.

chomsky’s theory of grammar is called generative because it is designed to describe a

precise and infite set of rules that generates (or has as its out put) the possible sentences in
a language.

• generative grammar: system of grammatical rules that allow speakers to create

possible sentences in a language

Inluences on Modern Linguistics

the study of language has a rich intellectual history that helped set the stage for the
chomskyan revolution.

Linguistics Today

Now, linguistics is firmly situated as its own field. Linguistics departments have emerged in
universities around the world, increasing in size and number
nearly every year.

Linguistics is also found in other areas of study, including philosophy,

anthropology, computer science, psychology, and speech pathology.

Linguistics is becoming more and more central to the study of language and
literature in english departments and to the study of language acquisition,
learning, and teaching in modern languages departments

Subfields of Linguistics
• Grammar: The study of phonetics, phonology, semantics, syntax, and morphology
• Pragmatics: The study of language use in context, including rules of conversation and
politeness conventions
• Sociolinguistics: The study of how social factors—including class, race, and ethnicity
— inluence language
• Sociolinguistics: The study of language and the brain, how brain damage (aphasia)
affects language, and the location of language centers in the brain
• Psycholinguistics: The study of how we acquire our first language, how we acquire
second languages, and how we produce and understand sentences
• Computational linguistics: The study of artificial languages, computer programming,
and modeling of natural language by computers, including
voice production and recognition
• Historical linguistics: The study of language change over time, including the study of
language families and relationships among the world’s languages
• Anthropological linguistics: The study of language and culture, including the study of
kinship terms and how language shapes cultural identity.