WHY STUDY

LANGUAGE?
By DR. BIRINGER
BECAUSE……………….
◦1. LANGUAGE MAKES US
UNIQUELY HUMAN.
◦2. LANGUAGE REFLECTS ONE´S
SELF IDENTITY.
Misconceptions
◦ People who say Nobody ain´t done nothin aren´t thinking logically.
◦ Many animals have languages like human languages.
◦ Writing is more perfect than speech.
◦ The more time parents spend teaching their child a language, the better the child
will speak it.
◦ You can almost always recognize someone´s background by the way they speak.
◦ The rules in gramar books are guidelines for correct language use and should be
followed.
◦ Women tend to talk more than men.
◦ People from the East Coast talk nasally
◦ Some people can pick up a language in a couple weeks.
Misconceptions continued…
◦ There are “primitive” languages that cannot express complex ideas effectively.
◦ It´s easier to learn Chinese if your ancestry is Chinese
◦ Native Americans all speak dialects of teh same language
◦ Every language has a way to mark verbs for teh past tense.
◦ Correct spelling preserves language.

◦ As stated ………….. MISCONCEPTIONS!!!!!!!

Truths about Language
◦ Grammar is a complex phenomenon tan anything that could ever be taught in
school, yet every human masters gramar of some language.
◦ There are languages that dont have words for right or left, but have words for
cardinal directions (north and south) instead.
◦ There are more tan 7,000 languages spoken in the world. 90% of teh population
only speaks 10% of them.
◦ Some languages, such as Turkish, have special verb forms for gossip and hearsay.
◦ Many of the sentences you hear and utter are novel, they have never been uttered
before.
◦ Some languages structure sentences by putting the object first and the subject last.
◦ There are specific structures in your brain that process language.
Truths continued……
◦ No language is more or less logical tan any other.
◦ The same words in the same order don´t always mean the same thing.
◦ The language you speak affects whether or not you distinguish between certain
sounds.
◦ Rules like “don´t Split infoinitives” were propagated by people in the 18th century
who believed English should be more like Latin.
Principles of the Linguist
◦ The task of the linguist is to discover how language works.
◦ Principles:
◦ Language is systematic despite being complex, and can be studied scientifically.
◦ It is systematicon many levels, from the system of individual sounds to the
organization of entire discourses.
◦ The systematic rules allow us to express an infinit enumber of ideas in a numbe rof
ways.
◦ Language varies from person to person, región to región, situation to situation.
Variation at every level of structure.
◦ Languages are diverse.
◦ There are characteristics shared by all languages as well as those that no language
has.
Principles continued…
◦ Many properties are arbitray, in the sense they cannot be predicted from properties
or from general principles.
◦ Children acquire language without being taught. Language acquisition is partially
innate.
◦ All languages change over time, whether speakers wish it or not.
Key Terms
◦ Hidden knowledge is referred to as lingustic competence.
◦ Linguistic competence is the unseen potential to speak a language.
◦ Lingustic performance is the observable realization of that potential.
◦ Performance errors: Errors committed when speaking a language. Still have
competence as speaker.
◦ Communication Chain: Shannon and Weaver (1949)- The chain of communication is
made up of the information source, transmitter, signal, receiver, and destination.
◦ Phonetics: the study of speech sounds and their physiological production and
acoustic qualities. It deals with the configurations of the vocal tract used to produce
speech sounds (articulatory phonetics), the acoustic properties of speech sounds
(acoustic phonetics), and the manner of combining sounds so as to make syllables,
words, and sentences (linguistic phonetics).
Key Terms…….
◦ Phonology: is the study of the patterns of sounds in a language and across
languages. Put more formally, phonology is the study of the categorical
organisation of speech sounds in languages; how speech sounds are organised in
the mind and used to convey meaning.
◦ Morphology: is the study of the internal structure of words and forms a core part of
linguistic study today.
◦ Syntax: the arrangement of words and phrases in a specific order. If you change the
position of even one word, it’s possible to change the meaning of the entire
sentence. All languages have specific rules about which words go where, and skilled
writers can manipulate these rules to make sentences sound more poignant or
poetic.
◦ Semantics: the philosophical and scientific study of meaning in natural and artificial
languages.
Key Terms:
◦ Pragmatics: the study of the use of natural language in communication; more
generally, the study of the relations between languages and their users.
◦ Lexicon: is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge (such as nautical
or medical). In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes.
◦ Mental Grammar: Rules you know about your language, which are stored in you.
◦ Grammar: Language system.
◦ Language acquisition: is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to
perceive and comprehend language. In other words, it is how human beings gain
the ability to be aware of language, to understand it, and to produce and use words
and sentences to communicate.
◦ Descriptive grammar: analyzation of collections of generalizations.
Writing
◦ Writing is the representation of language
◦ Must be taught
◦ Does not exist everywhere a spoken language does.
◦ Neurolinguistic evidence evidence shows that processing an dproduction of written
language is overlaid on spoken language centers of teh brain.
◦ Writing can be edited before shared, and speech cannot.
◦ Archaeology shows us that writing is a later histórica development.
◦ Writing can be taught and is intimately associated with education and educated
speech.
◦ Writing is more physically stable than speech.
Descriptive Grammar vs.
Prescriptive Grammar
◦ Descriptive Grammar: the linguist´s description of the rules of a language as
spoken.
◦ Prescriptive Grammar: the social embedded notion of proper or correct ways to use
a language.

◦ Descriptive Example:
◦ Some English Speakers may end sentences with prepositions
◦ Some speakers may split infinitives
◦ Some English speakers may use double negatives.
Examples cont.
◦ Where do you come from?
◦ From where do you come?

◦ To boldy go where no one has gone before

◦ To go boldly where no one has gone before

◦ I dont have nothing.

◦ I dont have anything. I dont have nothing.
Remember……………..
◦ Prescriptive rules tell you how you should “read” or “write” according to someone´s
opinión of what is good or bad. Prescribed just like a doctor.
◦ Descriptive rules are those of the language as spoken.
Charles Hockett (1916-2000)
◦ American Linguist
◦ Taught at Cornell and Rice Universities
◦ Director of Chinese Department at Cornell.
◦ Ideas are prominent in structural lingustics.
◦ Structural linguistics: The linguist is a player in the game of languages and has the
freedom to experiment on all utterances of a language to ensure that all ofthem of
the corpus must be taken into account. Anti- Noam Chomsky.
◦ Believed that linguistics was a branch of anthropology. Several articles in the field
of anthropology.
◦ Key contribution: Design features of language
Design Features of Language
◦ 1959 article in Scientific American “The Origin of Speech”
◦ Initially developed 7 features.
◦ After many revisions he concluded that there are 13 features. These differentiate
human spoken communication from animal communication, and other human
communication systems such as written language.
◦ The 13 features are: Vocal Auditoru Channel, Broadcast transmission and directional
reception, Rapid Fading, Interchangeability, Total Feedback, Specialization,
Semanticity, Arbitrariness, Discreteness, Displacement, Productivity, Traditional
Transmission, and Duality of patterning.
◦ Hockett believed that human and animal shared many of these features, but only
humans had all 13.
◦ Traditional transmission and duality of patterning are key to human language
Vocal-auditory channel
◦ Communicator speaks; receiving individual hears.
Broadcast transmission and
directional reception
◦ Message goes out in all directions; receiver can tell what direction message comes
from. (Sign language uses line-of-sight transmission instead.)
Rapid fading
◦ Message is transitory and does not persist.
Interchangeability
◦ Transmitters can become receivers, and vice versa; we can each repeat any
message.
Total feedback
◦ We hear all that we say.
Specialization
◦ We communicate just for the purpose of communicating (not incidentally to some
other primary function). Direct energy consequences are unimportant.
Semanticity
◦ Symbols used (phonemes, morphemes) have particular meanings.
Arbitrariness
◦ Symbols are arbitrary: the work "loud" can be spoken softly; "whale" is a smaller
word than "microorganism"; "dog", "perro", "chien", "hund", "canis" all mean the
same.
Discreteness
◦ Symbols are made by combining smaller symbols that differ discontinuously (e.g.,
"bin", "pin").
Duality of patterning
◦ The smaller symbols ("p", "t") have no meaning of their own, and can be combined
in various ways ("pit", "tip").
Productivity
◦ Novel utterances can be made and understood.
◦ Hockett believed this was exclusively human
Displacement
◦ You can talk about something not immediately present (at a distance, or in the
past).
◦ Exclusively human
Traditional transmission
(culturally)
◦ Languages are socially learned (not genetic), and are passed down through
generations.
◦ Exclusively human
Hockett Exercises
◦ Read the original article in Contenido de clase
◦ Do Discussion Questions on Hockett article.