Language Files
Material for an Introduction to Language and Linguistics
1.0 - 1.4
2.0 – 2.3
3.0 – 3.3
3.5
Chapter 1: Introduction
File 1.1 Introducing the Study of Language
- Human language is an enormously complex phenomenon. The task of a
linguist is to tease apart the patterns of various aspects of human language
in order to discover how language works
File 1.2 What You Know When You Know a Language
- Linguistic competence: our ‘hidden’ knowledge of language. You modulate
it without thinking about it
- Linguistic performance: the way that people produce and comprehend
language
o Our performance is what we do with our linguistic competence
- Performance errors: when using language you may make mistakes;
mispronounce something, jumbling words in a sentence etc. This does not
mean you lost your competence, but your performance was impaired
- Since competence can’t be observed directly, linguists must use linguistic
performance as a basis for making hypotheses and drawing conclusions about
what linguistic competence must be like. They focus on consistent patterns in
their study
- Communication chain: numerous steps must be carried out in order for an
idea to be communicated from one person to another
o Noise: interference in the chain
- Lexicon: consists of the collection of all the words that you know: what
function they serve, what they refer to, how they are pronounced, and how
they are related to other words
- Mental grammar: all the rules you know about your language
o (for a linguists) a grammar is a language system. The set of all the
elements and rules that make up a language
- Your linguistic competence is stored in a lexicon and a mental grammar, which
you access in order to both produce and comprehend utterances
File 1.3 What You Don’t (Necessarily) Know When You Know a Language
- While speech and writing are both expressions of linguistic competence,
speech is a more immediate manifestation of language. Therefore, speech is
the primary object of linguistic study
- 3 distinct things called ‘grammar’
o Mental grammar: what the linguist is actually trying to understand
, o Descriptive grammar: the linguist’s description of the rules of a
language as it is spoken
o prescriptive grammar: the socially embedded notion of the ‘correct’
or ‘proper’ ways to use a language
- rules that don’t reflect actual language use survive mostly because such rules
are associated with a particular social status
- prescriptive rules are used as an aid in social identity marking and mobility
- linguists do not make use of prescriptive grammars, but rather only
descriptive grammars, which are used as a tool for discovering mental
grammars
File 1.4 Design Features of Language
- the design features of language: Hockett’s descriptive characteristics of
language (listed below)
1. mode of communication: the means by which messages are
transmitted and received
2. semanticity: the property requiring that all signals in a communication
system have a meaning or function. (universal aspect of language across
all communication systems)
3. pragmatic function of language: they must serve some useful purpose
4. interchangeability refers to the ability of individuals to both transmit and
receive messages
5. cultural transmission: there are aspects of language that we can only
acquire through communicative interaction with other users of the system
6. arbitrariness in language: the meaning is not in any way predictable
from the form: nor is the form dictated by the meaning
o there are some nonarbitrary aspects of language
such as onomatopoetic words; words that are imitative of
natural sounds or have meanings that are associated with such
sounds of nature. (still different languages have different
onomatopoetic words for the same sounds, so it is not entirely
nonarbitrary
sound symbolism: certain sounds in words not by virtue of
being directly imitative of some sound but rather simply by being
evocative of a particular meaning
7. discreteness: the property of language that allows us to combine
together discrete units in order to create larger communicative units
8. displacement: the ability of a language to communicate about things,
actions, and ideas that are not present in space or time while speakers are
communicating
9. productivity: refers to a language’s capacity for novel messages to be
built up out of discrete units. People have the ability to produce and
understand any number of novel sentences that they have never heard
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