What is Language?
- It distinguishes humans
from animals
- It's a system made up of
sets of knowledge & rules
- A system that relates sounds
or gestures to meanings
Linguistic Knowledge
-
the inventory of sounds (what sounds are possible within the language)
-
where those sounds may occur (position in word, position relative
to each other; Could you greet President Nkrumah?)
- Arbitrary relation between form & meaning
- Sign language - association of a symbolic gesture with a meaning
is conventionalized
- Sound symbolism (pronunciation suggests meaning)
- Onomatopoetic words -examples in other languages; pera pera, zha
zha, koro koro
- Infinite number of possible utterances (How? See p. 10)
- "Finite set of rules" (p 11) allow us to create infinite
set of new sentences (the big question is, what are those rules in
our brains?)
- What does the comic on p 9 demonstrate?
How
do you recognize the 'funny' sentences? (p. 11)
(Posited
by Chomsky)
- Competence, or knowledge one has (not necessarily conscious)
- Performance: what one does with linguistic knowledge
But..
(sample
chapter on Sociolinguistics: Models & Methods)
Second, the distinction between competence and performance, first
expounded by Chomsky in 1965, remains problematic to all sociolinguists.
A speaker’s competence is the underlying ability to produce and interpret
well-formed sentences in a given language and to distinguish well-formed
from ill-formed strings. The specifics of such competence are generally
established by eliciting intuitions (or using the analyst’s own
intuitions) of grammaticality. Performance, on the other hand, covers
not only the manifestation of competence on actual occasions of language
use, but the effects of memory, perception, and attention on language
behavior. In 1986, Chomsky revised the competence/performance dichotomy,
preferring a distinction between I(nternal) and (E)xternal language.
As Sidnell (2000) points out, this change in terminology involved no
significant alteration in the underlying abstraction except a slight
change of focus on what constitutes E-language. While generativists are
interested exclusively in competence/ I-language and have not elaborated
any coherent theory of performance/ E-language, the distinction is problematic
to sociolinguists, most obviously because it treats language as intrinsically
asocial...
Comment: Get used to this...many do not revise their
linguistic truisms even long after they have been abandoned by the original
theorist. This happens a lot with Chomsky in particular.
What is Grammar?
Mental grammar- Rules that exist in the brain of the speaker and
permit use of the language
Descriptive: telling what people say
Grammatical: an utterance
that conforms to the mental grammar's rules as well as the linguist's descriptive
rules
Ungrammatical: deviates from a speaker's
intuitions; this might mean the utterance is part of a different dialect
or register. (i.e., British English: at the weekend;
AAE I be waiting; double negatives
are permitted in Ind-European language
Prescriptive: telling people what they should say;
- 1762 Bishop Robert Lowth's "A Short Introduction to English Grammar" was
based on Latin grammatical rules
- Edwin Newman's "Strictly Speaking"
Dialect varieties- standard, prestige
Teaching grammar - used to learn a second / foreign language
Grammar refers
to everything a speaker knows about their language:
- Phonology: the
sound system
- Semantics: the
system of meanings
- Morphology: the
rules of word formation
- Syntax: the
rules of sentence formation
- Lexicon: the
words used
Universal grammar: laws
representing the universal properties of all language
Important quote: (p. 19) "To discover the nature of this universal
grammar whose principles characterize all human languages is the major
aim of linguistic theory."
How close are we?
 Noam Chomsky: founder of
modern linguistics, proposed that the human brain is wired with a 'deep
structure' that gives children
the ability to learn any language they are exposed to as an infant.
Wikipedia has a discussion
of alternative theories about language acquisition.
Most
current researchers in language acquisition question Chomsky's proposed
language acquisition device (LAD) and the existence of an underlying structure
to children's utterances.
- Not
universally intelligible
- Show
that sound is not needed for language
Summary -what we know about language (p.27)
Choose one of the questions (from 1,2,3,4,6,10) on pp. 30
- 32 to discuss with a partner. Then share your conclusions with the
class.
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