Linguistics

Creativity

Human language is creative allowing us to develop and produce new words. New words are known as neologisms.

5 aspects of grammar

Generality, Parity, Universality, Mutability and Inaccessibility

Generality

All languages have grammar, for something to be grammatically correct it would be produced by many native speakers.

Parity

All grammars have equal status. There is no “good” grammar and no “bad” grammar.

Universality

All grammes are alike in basic ways, shared principles and properties:

• All languages have ways of forming words (morphology)

• All spoken languages employ egressive airstream

• All languages have distinct consonants and vowels

• All languages group words together systematically

• All languages have symbols paired with meaning

Mutability

All grammars change over time.

Inaccessability

Knowledge of grammar is subconscious. Speakers of a language can say what sounds right and what doesn’t, but are not sure how they know.

Prescriptive Grammar

Tells people how they should speak. The “correct” form of a language, taught in schools.

Descriptive Grammar

How people actually do speak in descriptive grammars. If you find a rule about a “wrong” form in prescriptive grammar book, then it’s a good bet that there are fluent speakers using that form.

A linguist Grammar

• Do not start words with rk

• Do not start any sentences with two question words (i.e. what who?)

• Do not place “every” and “the” before the nouns (i.e. in every the dog)

Linguistics

The systematic/scientific study of language.

Language

A system of knowledge used for human communication, a biological phenomenon.

Humans specialized for Speech

Our lungs, vocal cords, tongue, teeth, lips, nose are all involved in the production of speech. Our ears and brain are designed to perceive speech. Our minds are wired to build and interpret speech.

A linguists Competence

The implicit knowledge we have about our language and the structures and meaning in it. Concerns word formation, sentence formation, the possible and impossible combinations of sounds.