What is Language

1
What is Language?

• Chapter 1
• Fromkin, Rodman, Hyams. 2003
• Introduction to language

2
Linguistic Knowledge

• Language Gift only to human
• We talk all the time, even in sleep.
• Language makes humans human.
• But what does it mean to know a language?
• Knowledge of the sound system
• Knowledge of words
• The creativity
• Knowledge of sentences nonsentences

3
Knowledge of the Sound System

• Knowing unconsciously what sounds are in that
  language what sounds are not.
• Knowledge of sounds is language specific
• Eg) French people pronounce this that as zis
  zat
• Eg) English speakers pronounce Nkrumah (the name
  of a former president of Ghana) as Nekrumah or
  Enkrumah

4
Knowledge of Words

• Knowing that certain sound sequences signify
  certain concepts or meanings
• The sound units that are related to specific
  meanings ? WORDS
• The arbitrary relationship between form (sounds)
  meaning (concept)
• The relationship between speech sounds the
  meanings they represent is, mostly, arbitrary.
• Eg) house (Eng), maison (French)
• dom (Russian), casa (Spanish)

5
Knowledge of Words (cntd)

• But pronunciation sometimes suggests meaning ?
  sound symbolism
• Most onomatopoeic words
• buzz, murmur
• Representations of animal sounds
• But they are quite different in different
  languages
• Sometimes particular sound sequences seem to
  relate to a particular concept
• English gl glare, glint, gleam, glitter,
  glossy, glaze, glance, glimmer, glimpse
• However gladiator, glucose, glory, globe

6
The Creativity of Linguistic Knowledge

• Creative aspect of language use being able to
  produce new sentences never spoken before and to
  understand sentences never heard before.
• The sentence
• Daniel Boone decided to become a pioneer because
  he dreamed of pigeon-toed giraffes and cross-eyed
  elephants dancing in skirts and green berets on
  the sand-swept plains of the Midwest.
• You probably never heard or read it before.
• You may not believe the sentence
• You may question its logic.
• But you can understand it.

7
The Creativity of Linguistic Knowledge (cntd)

• There is no longest sentence.
• A language permit their speakers to form
  indefinitely long sentences
• Examples
• This is the house.
• This is the house that Jack built.
• This is the malt that lay in the house that Jack
  built.
• This is the dog that worried the cat that killed
  the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house
  that Jack built.
• The old man came.
• The old, old, old, old, man came.
• Creativity is a universal property of human
  language all languages are like that.

8
Knowledge of Sentences Nonsentences

• To memorize and store an infinite set of
  sentences is not possible
• The brain is finite.
• Putting one word after another in any order does
  not form sentences.
• Linguistic knowledge includes determining which
  strings of words are and which are not sentences.
• See P11(2).

9
Linguistic competence vs. performance

• Distinction by Chomsky (1965)
• Competence
• The native speakers idealized knowledge to
  produce sentences of a language
• Language universal (independent)
• Innate, not conscious
• Performance
• The actual use of that language in concrete
  situations
• Language specific (dependent)
• acquired

10
Grammar

• The sounds and sound patterns, the basic units of
  meaning such as words, and the rules to combine
  all of these to form sentences with the desired
  meaning.
• Two concepts of grammar
• The mental grammar speakers have in their brains
• The model or description of that internalized
  grammar
• Two models of grammar
• Descriptive grammar
• Prescriptive grammar

11
Descriptive Grammars

• What native speakers know about their language in
  order to make use of it.
• Every human being who speaks a language knows its
  grammar.
• Linguists describe the grammar of the language
  that exists in the minds of its speakers.
• Grammaticality
• Grammatical (depending on dialect, style, etc)
• She doesnt know,
• She dont know.
• Ungrammatical (regardless of style)
• She not know.
• She knownt.

12
Descriptive Grammars (cntd)

• No language or dialect is superior to any other
  in a linguistic sense.
• No grammar, therefore no language, is either
  superior or inferior to any other.
• Every grammar is equally complex, logical, and
  capable of producing an infinite set of sentences
  to express any thought.

13
Prescriptive Grammars

• Rules of proper usage that distinguish "good"
  grammar from "bad" grammar
• He dont know ? Bad
• An attempt to tell the users of the language how
  to use it in order to speak correctly
• Grammarians wish to prescribe rather than
  describe the rules of grammar.
• They believed that language change is corruption,
  and that there are certain forms that all
  educated people should use in speaking and
  writing.? Language Purists

14
Whos right?

• Prescriptivists are bound to fail.
• Language is vigorous, dynamic, and constantly
  changing.
• All languages and dialects are expressive,
  complete, and logical.
• From a linguistic point of view, prestige and
  standard dialects do not have superior grammars.

15
Teaching grammars

• Grammars used in school to fulfill language
  requirements.
• State explicitly the rules of the language, list
  the words and their pronunciations, and aid in
  learning a new language or dialect.
• Assumes that the student already knows one
  language and compares the grammar of the target
  language with that of the native language.
• The meaning of a word is given by providing a
  glossthe parallel word in the students native
  language, (eg. house in English as compared to
  maison in French)

16
Language universals

• Laws representing the universal properties of all
  languages constitute a universal grammar
• Noam Chomsky
• There is a universal grammar that is part of the
  human biologically endowed language faculty.
  (Chomsky)
• Human beings are born with an innate blueprint
  for language ? Universal Grammar
• The linguists goal is to discover the lows of
  human language

17
What we know about

• Facts pertaining to all languages
• See P27