Chapter 1: Introduction

Introducing the Study of Language

Surprising but true facts about language

 1. Grammar is a more complex phenomenon than anything that could be taught in school, yet every human masters the grammar of some language  2. Some languages do not have words for right and left, but use words for cardinal directions like north and south  3. Some aspects of language appear to be innate  4. There are more than 7,000 languages spoken in the world, but 90% of the population speaks only 10% of them  5. Some languages have special verb forms used for gossip and hearsay  6. Many of the sentences that you hear and speak are novel; they have never been uttered before.  7. Some languages structure sentences by putting the object first and the subject last  8. In some communities, all or most members of the community can use a signed language  9. There is nothing inherent about most words that gives them their meaning; any group of speech sounds could have any meaning

10. There are specific structures in your brain that process language
11. The language you speak affects whether or not you distinguish between certain sounds
12. Rules like “don’t split infinitives” were propagated by people in the eighteenth century who believed that English should be more like Latin
13. The same words in the same order don’t always mean the same thing
14. No language is more or less logical than any other

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Common misconceptions about language

 1. People who say Nobody ain’t done nothin’ aren’t thinking logically  2. Swearing degrades a language  3. Many animals have languages that are much like human languages  4. Writing is more perfect than speech  5. The more time parents spend teaching their children a language, the better their children will speak  6. You can almost always recognize someone’s background by the way he talks  7. The rules in grammar textbooks are guidelines for correct language use and should be followed whenever possible  8. Women tend to talk more than men  9. There are “primitive” languages that cannot express complex ideas effectively

10. People from the East Coast talk nasally
11. Some people can pick up a language in a couple of weeks
12. It’s easier to learn Chinese if your ancestry is Chinese
13. Native Americans all speak dialects of the same language
14. Every language has a way to mark verbs for the past tense
15. Correct spelling preserves a language

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• Linguist- responsible for teasing apart the patterns of various aspects of human language in order to discover how language works

General principles of Human Language

 1. $Language is systematic$ in spite of its enormous complexity, and can therefore be studied scientifically  2. Not only is language systematic, but it is systematic on many levels, from the system of individual sounds to the organization of entire discourses  3. These systematic rules allow us to express an $infinite number of ideas in an infinite number of ways$  4. Language varies systematically from person to person, region to region, and situation to situation. There is variation at every level of structure.  5. Languages are diverse  6. Despite this diversity, there are $many universal properties of languages$. That is, there are characteristics shared by all languages as well as characteristics that no language has  7. $Many properties of language are arbitrary$, in the sense that they cannot be predicted from other properties or from general principles  8. Although a great many complex rules govern our speech, we are no more aware of them than we are of the principles that govern walking or picking up an object  9. Children acquire language without being taught; $language acquisition is$ (at least partially) $innate$

10. $All languages change over time$, whether speakers desire change or not

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What You Know When You Know a Language

• Linguistic competence- the underlying “hidden” knowledge of language that speakers innately understand but are usually not consciously aware of
• Linguistic performance- the way that people produce and comprehend language   * what speakers do with linguistic competence
• Performance errors- impaired linguistic performance that does not reflect linguistic competence
• Communication chain- outlines the various methods of exchanging information through signals between an information source and transmitter, and a receiver and destination   * Noise- interference in the communication chain
• Known Aspects of Language   * What is and is not a speech sound     * A person speaking vs. a door slamming   * Which speech sounds are a part of your own language   * How to produce speech sounds of your own language   * How speech sounds work together in a language   * How to break individual words down into smaller parts that have a particular meaning or function   * How to create words by combining these smaller parts   * How words combine to form phrases and sentences   * How to determine the meaning of sentences   * How the context of utterances influences their meaning
• $Linguistic competence is stored in a lexicon and a mental grammar$, which you access in order to both produce and comprehend utterances.

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Other (Non-Essential) Aspects of Knowing a Language

• Goal: see that $not all aspects of language are fundamental or necessary to knowing a language$
• Speech is the primary object of linguistic study
• Writing- the representation of language in a physical medium different from sound   * The “physically preservable” form of language   * Writing must be taught, whereas spoken language is acquired naturally   * Writing does not exist anywhere that spoken language does   * Neurolinguistic evidence demonstrates that the processing and production of written language is overlaid on the spoken language centers of the brain   * Writing can be edited before it is shared with others in most cases, while speech is usually more spontaneous   * Archeological evidence indicates that writing is a later historical development than spoken language
• Prescriptive grammar- the socially embedded notion of the “correct” or “proper” ways to use a language
• Prescriptive grammar is @@not@@ an inherent part of language   * all dialects are equally good and equally valid from a linguistic standpoint   * all living languages are constantly changing

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Design Features of Language

• Mode of communication- the means by which messages are transmitted and received
• Semanticity- the property requiring that all signals in a communication system have a meaning or function
• Pragmatic Function- the useful purpose of a communication system
• Interchangeability- the ability of individuals to both transmit and receive messages
• Cultural transmission- specific signals of language that can only be acquired through interaction with users of the same system
• Linguistic sign- the combination of a form and a meaning
• Arbitrary- the fact that the meaning is not always predictable from the form, nor is the form dictated by the meaning
• Discreteness- the property of language that allows us to combine together discrete units in order to create larger communicative units
• Displacement- the ability of a language to communicate about things, actions, and ideas that are not present on space or time while speakers are communicating
• Productivity- a language’s capacity for novel messages to be built up out of discrete units   * Rules at all levels of linguistic structures are productive, meaning they allow creation of new forms, tell us which new forms are allowed, and tell us how they can be used
• Natural languages- those languages that have evolved naturally in a speech community
• Constructed language- a language that has been specifically invented by a human and that may or may not imitate all the properties of a natural language

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Language Modality

• A language’s modality tells us:   * $How it is produced$   * $How it is perceived$
• Auditory-vocal- languages that are perceived via hearing and speech   * also referred to as spoken languages
• Visual-gestural- languages that are perceived visually and produced via hand and arm movements, facial expressions, head movements, etc.   * also referred to as signed languages   * signed languages do not always derive from spoken languages   * signed languages are not about drawing pictures or pantomime, as the signers would have their communication restricted to concrete objects and events
• Code- an artificially constructed system for representing a natural language   * a code has no structure of its own but instead borrows its structure from the natural language that it represents

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