Begleitseminar Student Reports: What is Language?

Based on: Fromkin & Rodman (1993): Chapter 1

Slides used for the reports have been sent to the lecturer by email

What is Language?

Linguistic Knowledge

• knowing a language: to have the capacity to produce sounds which signify certain meanings, to understand and to be understood
• knowledge of the sound system: to know which sounds are in that language and which are not, which sounds start and finish a word, shapes do not determine objects' pronunciation -> arbitrary relationship between form and meaning, except for sound symbolism, knowing all the words from a dictionary does not mean speaking the language
• creativity of linguistic knowledge: to be able to combine words to phrases and sentences, to produce new, never heard sentences and to understand new, never spoken sentences ("creative aspect", Chomsky), it's impossible to memorize all possible sentences
• knowledge of sentences and non-sentences: you learn language by learning a certain amount of vocabulary, it's impossible to put words together in any kind of order, you got to know rules to form sentences to understand and to be understood
• linguistic knowledge and performance: difference between knowledge to produce sentences and applying this knowledge, physiological reasons limit length of sentence, messages can't get garbled, linguistic knowledge = unconscious knowledge, linguistic systems are learned unconsciously
• universal characteristics of language: children don't have the same ability to express themselves as their parents, speakers can use certain grammatical forms without knowing what they actually are, you never speak in isolated words, all human languages allow to form indefinitely long sentences, all speakers of any laguage have knowledge to understand or produce sentences of any length

Grammar

• each language has an internalised, unconscious set of rules which is essential to understand and use language -> GRAMMAR
• Descriptive Grammar: it describes the speakers' linguistic capacity, it describes how language is actually used (in concern of sounds, words, phrases and sentences)
• no qualitative ranking of different dialects
• "Purists": certain "correct" forms, especially in the 18^th and 19^th century very popular -> Prescriptive Grammar (they tell people how to talk, which rules they should know)
• Teaching Grammars explicitly state rules, list words, explain sounds in order for people to learn with them to speak the language, they are in so far different from prescriptive grammars that they are not intended to change rules already learned
• Universal Grammar: laws that pertain to all human languages constitute a universal grammar
• Chomsky: universal grammar can be described "as a system of principles which characterizes the class of possible grammars by specifying how particular grammars are organised (what are the components and their relations), how the different rules of these components are constructed, how they interact, and so on."

Animal Languages

• most animals possess a communication system, but their messages are stimulus controlled and in so far different from human language
• even Descartes thought of this: human language is not just a response to external or emotional stimulus

The Origin of Language

• suggestions of: divine origin, evolutionary development, an invention of humans
• widespread idea: language is monogenetic