LANGUAGE

What Is Language?

Language is a "human system of communication that uses arbitrary signals, such as voice sounds, gestures, or written symbols." But frankly, language is far too complicated, intriguing, and mysterious to be adequately explained by a simple definition.

OTHER DEFINITIONS:

“Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions, and desires by means of a system of voluntarily produced symbols. These symbols are, in the first instance, auditory and they are produced by the so-called ‘organs of speech’.” (Edward Sapir 1921: 8)

“Language is an arbitrary system of articulated sounds made use of by a group of humans as a means of carrying on the affairs of their society.” (Nelson W. Francis – The Structure of American English)

“A language is a system of conventional signals used for communication by a whole community.” (A.C. Gimson – An Introduction to the Pronunciation of English; 1962, 1994)

“Language — A human system of communication which uses structured vocal sounds and can be embodied in other media such as writing, print, and physical signs.” (The Oxford Companion to the English Language, edited by Tom McArthur, 1992)

ANALYSIS:

Lg as a SYSTEM: it is organized, so that the meaning of the whole is something more than the sum of the meanings of the individual elements.

Lg as ARBITRARY: the relationship between the sounds and the meanings is purely conventional; there is no way of predicting what a word means just from hearing it.

ONOMATOPOEIA (wyrazy dźwiękonaśladowcze): the formation of words whose sound is imitative of the sound of the noise or action designated, such as hiss, buzz, and bang; note that, for instance, in Polish dogs bark in a slightly different way than they do in English, French, or Japanese. What is “cock-a-doodle-doo” to an Englishman is cocorico to a Frenchman and chicchirichi to an Italian.

SOUND-SYMBOLISM: sometimes, individual sounds are thought to reflect, or symbolize, properties of the world, and thus to 'have meaning'; e.g. words beginning with /sl-/ are said to convey unpleasant associations (slime, slither, slug, slut, sloppy) – but think of words like sleep. Another positive example: the final consonant in smash, crash, crush, rush, splash, slash, lash, swish. Another example: fl- unsteady light: flame, flare, flash, flicker, flimmer; gl- steady light: glare, gleam, glint, glow, glisten (Ginter 2003: 28).

Lg as ARTICULATED, VOCAL: language is primarily speech; [1] speech is many thousands of years older than writing (in fact, some languages have never been written down); [2] speech develops naturally in children, whereas writing has to be artificially taught (and some people never learn it — illiteracy); [3] writing systems are derivative, and a faithful portraying of the sounds of speech is extremely difficult if not totally impossible.

On the other hand, writing is also important and should not be excluded from linguistic considerations. Writing and speech are now seen as alternative, 'equal' systems of linguistic expression.

Lg as COMMUNICATION: Functions of language:

1. Informative / Interrogative: conveys linguistic information (or

misinformation);

2. Phatic: used to establish social contact and to express sociability rather than

specific meaning;

*** Phatic communion: "Speech in which ties of union are created by mere

exchange of words."

(Bronisław Malinowski)

3. Directive: used to get things done; the means of controlling activities;

4. Expressive: conveys personal information (attitudinal, emotional);

5. Evocative: conveys aesthetic experience;

6. Performatory: saying equals doing; by saying the words we perform an act [I

promise! I confess … ]; sometimes ritual [I pronounce you man and wife, I

name this ship Titanic].

7. Interactional vs. transactional

The former has to do with how humans use language to interact with each other, socially or emotionally; how they indicate friendliness, co-operation, or hostility, or annoyance, pain, or pleasure. The latter — humans use their linguistic abilities to communicate knowledge, skills and information.

The following observations on language, drawn from the works of various writers and scholars, take us beyond definitions. Approaching the subject from different metaphorical perspectives, these quotations may serve as points of departure for your own exploration of the mysteries--and the limitations--of language. Choose the one which appeals to you the most:

The Armory of the Human Mind"Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests."(Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

An Art"Language is an anonymous, collective and unconscious art; the result of the creativity of thousands of generations."(Edward Sapir)

The Instrument of Science"I am not yet so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth and that things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things which they denote."(Samuel Johnson, Preface, A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755)

A Process of Free Creation"Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation."(Noam Chomsky)

A Finite System"Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are 'prefabricated' in the sense that we don’t coin new ones every time we speak."(David Lodge, "Where It’s At," The State of the Language, 1980)

A Sheet of Paper"Language can also be compared with a sheet of paper: thought is the front and the sound the back; one cannot cut the front without cutting the back at the same time; likewise in language, one can neither divide sound from thought nor thought from sound."(Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 1916)

The Shaper of Thought"Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about."(Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality, 1964)

Intrinsically Approximate"Language is intrinsically approximate, since words mean different things to different people, and there is no material retaining ground for the imagery that words conjure in one brain or another."(John Updike, The New Yorker, December 15, 1997)

A Barrier to Progress"Language is the biggest barrier to human progress because language is an encyclopedia of ignorance. Old perceptions are frozen into language and force us to look at the world in an old fashioned way."(Edward de Bono)

GRAMMAR

(Etymology: From the Greek, "the craft of letters")

The Greeks and the Romans

In the first century BCE the Greeks started to write the first grammar books (ex. Dionysius Thrax using the works of Homer (Iliad and Odyssey) as his standards, wrote The Art of Grammar to aid in the study of literature and to preserve the purity of the language. He wanted to preserve the Greek language, to keep it from change.

The Romans adopted and adapted the Greek grammar to their own language, Latin . Roman grammarians used the works of Cicero and Virgil, who wrote in Latin as their basis. Throughout the Middle Ages the works of Latin grammarians, based on the Greek analyses of language, were used to teach Latin in the schools. During the middle Ages and into the Renaissance, education to a great extent meant learning Latin and Latin grammar.

The Latin Influence on English Grammar

In the 11th century, Aelfric, abbot of Eynsham Monastery, wrote a Latin grammar and proposed that this work serve as basis for a grammar of English (Anglo-Saxon) with Aelfric, the long tradition of basing English grammar on that of Latin began. The form of the noun changes with the different functions in sentences and this change in word forms according to function allows Latin to be more flexible in its syntax canis hominem mordet and hominem canis mordet mean dog bites man but in English, dog bites man and man bites dog are exact opposites. Latin showed the function of nouns by changing their forms; English shows the function of nouns by their positions in the sentence. In the 18th century the English grammarians like Robert Lowth believed that Latin was superior to English and put a lot of energy into purifying and preserving the language condemning usages like It’s me. They also wanted to stop the language from changing. The essayist Swift wrote that “it is better that a Language should not be wholly perfect than that it should be perpetually changing” One method of standardizing English was to make it systematic and to borrow the rules for the system from Latin. The problem was that English grammarians (like Greek and Roman before) focused only on

the writings of established authors and the speech of educated classes whereas a grammar should analyze and describe all levels of usage.

Noah Webster: Grammar as a Description of Language

While he was teaching school in Goshen, New York, Webster (1758-1843) became dissatisfied with available textbooks on language; he wanted instruction to reflect both the American version of English and American values. Thus , he set out to write A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, the three parts of which were a spelling book, a grammar book, and a collection of readings. Webster is most famous for his dictionary, in which he enunciated the then revolutionary principle that “grammar is formed on language, and not language on grammar”. In other words, Webster was saying that a grammar should describe the language used, not dictate what should be used.

Structuralism

In 1916 Ferdinand de Saussure (a Swiss scholar) published Course in General Linguistics, in which he made the important distinction between the language itself (langue) as a system and the individual use of that system (parole) (You and your friends speak la langue; but each of you has his or her own version, that is parole) Beethoven’s Ninth symphony is a complete “system” with its own unvarying structure. Performances of the symphony differ, however, according to the interpretations of various conductors. The task of the structural linguist was to describe la langue.

Behaviorism

Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949) incorporated behavioural (stimulus-response) psychology into his theory of language. Trying for empirical rigour, he excluded mental and conceptual categories from his work, considering only language phenomena that could be observed, thus eliminating from grammar the science of meaning, or semantics. Behavioral psychology had several limitations as an explanation for human motives and actions, and the same limitations made the behavioural study of language less than satisfactory. According to the behavioural model children learn through imitation. Little Jane hears mama say, “Eat your spinach”, and Jane tries to imitate that sentence But Jane is not only imitating; she is developing a “grammar” in her brain and is using it to make sense of language and to begin to work with it. Mama says, “Eat your spinach”, and Jane responds, “I eated my spinach”. Jane has never heard Mama or anyone else use eated as the past form of eat, so something other than imitation is clearly going on in Jane’s development of language. It is obvious that humans have a

genetically endowed “grammar” in their brains, just as they have a genetically endowed sense of sight.

Transformational or Universal Grammar

A momentous revolution in the study of grammar came in 1957, when Noam Chomsky published Syntactic Structures – the beginning of transformational grammar, which was a reaction against the structuralism represented by Bloomfield. Chomsky’ goal was to study linguistic competence, not individual performance. Competence is the grammar that you and I have in our heads. We are able to produce and understand language; therefore, we must have some kind of mental system for that language ability. We humans have a built-in and inborn set of “rules” that allow us to use language. Discovering these rules is the ultimate goal of transformational grammar. Chomsky and his followers are attempting to explain and describe human language ability. Currently, linguists are working on “universal grammar”, writing rules that represent language “principles” that seem to be innate and universal. For example, it would seem to be a principle that all languages have verbs. Linguists are also working on writing grammar rules that describe the

“parameters” or particular rules for specific human languages such as English. Word order in sentences is an example of a parameter because word order differs from one language to another.

Three Views of Grammar

1. Until about the mid-nineteenth century, the main concern of most grammarians was preserving and purifying the language („traditional grammar”)

2. During the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, linguists ( scholars of grammar and other aspects of language) began to provide descriptions of languages as people used them (The result was descriptive grammar or, to use the jargon of the trade, “structural linguistics”)

3. By the mid-20th century, linguists had begun to focus on the mind’s ability to produce language. (Several terms denote the grammatical revolution begun by Chomsky: transformational grammar, generative grammar, transformational-generative grammar, and universal grammar)

DESCRIPTIVE VS PRESCRIPTIVE GRAMMAR

The systematic study and description of a language.

A set of rules and examples dealing with the syntax and

word structures of a language, usually intended as an aid

to the learning of that language.

Descriptive grammar (definition #1) refers to the structure of

a language as it is actually used by speakers and writers.

Prescriptive grammar (definition #2) refers to the structure

of a language as certain people think it should be used.

1. descriptive grammar: the systematic study and

description of a language. Descriptive grammar refers to

the structure of a language as it is actually used by

speakers and writers.

2. Prescriptive grammar: a set of rules and examples

dealing with the syntax and word structures of a

language, usually intended as an aid to the learning of

that language. Prescriptive grammar refers to the

structure of a language as certain people think it should

be used.

Both kinds of grammar are concerned with rules--but in

different ways. Specialists in descriptive grammar (called

linguists) study the rules or patterns that underlie our use of

words, phrases, clauses, and sentences. On the other hand,

prescriptive grammarians (such as most editors and teachers)

lay out rules about what they believe to be the “correct” or

“incorrect” use of language

Descriptive grammarians generally advise us not to be overly

concerned with matters of correctness: language, they say,

isn't good or bad; it simply is., the English language is a living

system of communication, a continually evolving affair.

Within a generation or two, words and phrases come into

fashion and fall out again. Over centuries, word endings and

entire sentence structures can change or disappear.

Prescriptive grammarians prefer giving practical advice

about using language: straightforward rules to help us avoid

making errors. The rules may be over-simplified at times, but

they are meant to keep us out of trouble--the kind of trouble

that may distract or even confuse our readers

Eve and Adam not Adam and Eve Intellectual not egghead snowperson not snowman

What is GRAMMAR? – the branch of linguistics (językoznawstwo) that deals with syntax and morphology, sometimes also phonology and semantics; – the abstract system of rules in terms of which a person's mastery of his native language can be explained; – a systematic description of the grammatical facts of a language; – a book containing an account of the grammatical facts of a language or recommendations as to rules for the proper use of a language; – the use of language with regard to its correctness or social propriety, esp. in syntax: the teacher told him to watch his grammar.

Competence vs. description Descriptive vs. prescriptive [prescribing & proscribing] vs.

Pedagogical

Sources of prescriptivism: Latin (It is I), writing (whom did you speak to?), logic (I haven’t done nothing!).

Sources of descriptivism: 1833 – grammarians should discover rules and not invent them; they should describe language without making value judgements. But a sense of

linguistic values constitutes or reflects part of our view of social structure.

Language functions on certain levels:

sounds — phonemes (it seems that we are concerned

with two kinds of reality: the concrete measurable reality of

the sounds uttered, and an abstraction made in our minds,

which appears to reduce this infinite number of different

sounds to a ‘manageable’ number of categories; in the first

approach, we are dealing with sounds in relation to speech;

at the second level, our concern is the behaviour of sounds

in a particular language = phonemes; a phoneme is the

smallest contrastive unit whose change brings about a

change of meaning); graphemes: the counterpart of

phonemes in writing

morphemes — the smallest meaningful units

words; phrases; clauses; sentences / utterances; text

The phonetics of a language concerns the concrete

characteristics (articulatory, acoustic, auditory) of the

sounds used in languages, while phonology concerns how

sounds function in a systemic way in a particular language.

The lexicon — the words of the language.

The morphology — the structure of words, in particular

their inflexion; morphophonemics – the phonemic

structure of morphemes.

The syntax — the description of categories like noun and

verb, and the system of rules governing the structure of

phrases, clauses, and sentences in terms of order and

constituency.

The semantics — the meaning of words and the

relationship between word meanings, and the way such

meanings are combined to give the meanings of sentences.

The pragmatics — the influence of situation on the

interpretation of utterances.

Stylistics concerns the variations involved in different

situations and in different styles of speech.

LINGUISTICS AND RELATED DISCIPLINES: anthropology,

philosophy, psychology [psycholinguistics], sociology

[sociolinguistics], pedagogy (teaching).

Language is a human system of communication that uses arbitrary signals, such as voice sounds, gestures, or written symbols.