UNIVERSAL PROPERTIES OF LANGUAGE

The human species developed a vocal tract flexible enough to make a wide range of
distinguishable sounds and the ability to percieve differences among those sounds. The human
species developed the ability to use these sounds in systems which could communicate
meaning. No one knows just how this happened. Perhap mental capacities that had evolved for a
variety of other adaptive purposes were "re-purposed" to support a complex symbolic and
communicative system. Language is a distinctive attributive of the human species. Although
languages differ in many ways, they are all processed by the brain in basically the same ways,
and they all share certain fundamental "design features" and structural characteristics that
enable them to work the way they do. Although different languages use different set of sounds,
their sounds are organized and combined according to just a few principles. If there were no
shared, universal features of language, we would expect the sounds of languages and their
combinations to vary randomly. Instead, the sounds of languages and their combinations are
limited and systematic. All languages follow similar constraints on how they can combine words
into phrases and sentences.

MODULARITY

Most linguists believe that language is a modular system. That is, people produce and interpret
language using a set of component subsystems (or modules) in a coordinated way. Each module
is responsible for a part of the total job. Dividing language into modules facilitates linguistic
analyses greatly. Some modules have been central to linguistics for a long time. Phonetics is
about production and interpretation of speech sounds. Phonology studies the organization of
raw phonetics in language in general and in individual languages in particular. Larger linguistics
units are the domain of morphology, the study of structure within words- and of syntax, the
study of the structure of sentences. Lexicon is the repository of linguistic elements with their
meanings and structural properties. Semantics is the detailed analysis of literal meaning.

CONSTITUENCY AND RECURSION

All languages are organized into constituents, allowing more complex units to enter structures
where simpler ones are also possible. Constituents can be replaced by other constituents, but
you can't replace a constituent with a series of words that is not a constituent. Constituents can
be moved, but you can only move a complete constituent. Being composed of constituents also
allows languages to be recursive. Recursion is the property of language which allows
grammatical processes to be applied repeatedly, combining constituents to produce an infinite
variety of sentences of indefinite length. Recursion is what allows someone to expand a short
sentence. No one can learn a language by memorizing all the sentences of that language. The
human brain is finite, but recursiveness means that it is capable of producing and understanding
an infinite number of sentences.

DISCRETENESS
The range of sounds that human beings can make is continuous, like all in one continuous glide.
But all languages divide that continuous space of sound into discrete, incremental territories.
Sounds that are discrete in one language may not be discrete in another. In English, for example,
pat and pet are different words. The same is not true in German; German speakers have trouble
hearing any difference between pet and pat. What is discrete varies from one language to
another, but all languages have the property of discreteness. Discreteness also shows itself in
other modules of language, for example, meaning. The color spectrum is a clear example. Color
variation is a continuum, although languages differ in how they divide those continua into words
related to the importance of colours in that culture.

PRODUCTIVITY

Another key feature of language is productivity. If the novel word is formed according to the
morphological and phonological rules of its language and it is understandable in context, it is a
bona fide word, even if it's not found in a dictionary. Languages can systematically combine the
minimal units of meaning, called morphemes, into novel words, whose meaning is nontheless
deductible from the interaction of its morphemic components. Spontaneous coinings -inspired
by a particular context- are not used frequently enough to ever make it into a dictionary, but
some coinings do become part of the lexicon because they meet a new need. Productivity is one
way in which languages change to meet the changing communicative needs of their speakers.

ARBITRARINESS

With few exceptions, words have no principled or systematic connection with what they mean.
Even onomatopoetic words for sounds, that are supposed to sound like the noise they name,
actually vary from language to language. For example "knock knock" in English and "toc toc" in
Spanish. People percieve these sounds through the arbitrary "sound filters" of their respective
languages. The patterns into which words and sounds are arranged are also arbitrary. Adjectives
go before nouns in English, but in Spanish nouns go before adjectives.

RELIANCE ON CONTEXT

Reliance on context is a crucial property of languages, not just in figuring out the meaning of
words, but in interpreting the meaning of entire utterances. The meaning of a sentence depends
crucially on the context in which it is uttered. Languages rely on the connection between form
(what is said) and context (when, where, by whom, and to whom it is said) to communicate
much more than is contained in a sequence of words.

VARIABILITY

Variability in language allows people to communicate far more than semantic content of the
words and sentences. People let the world know who they are by the variety of their language
that they use. They reveal their geographical and social status origins aftrer saying just a few
words. People also use language variation to communicate the situation and purpose in which
they are talking, as well as the roles they are playing in those situations. Parents speack
differently to their children that to other adults. The language used in writing typically differs
from the language used in speaking, reflecting and communicating the different conditions
under which language is produced and its various purposes.

THE DESCRIPTIVE APPROACH

Language varieties differ because over time they have adapted to the differing needs of their
speech communities. Each language is equally "functional" at meeting the communicative needs
of its ownn speech community. But sometimes when two or more speech communities come
into contact. one group will have more power, status or economic resources than the others. The
language variety of that dominant group is often percieved as having higher status as well,
especially if speaking it affords increased access to power or wealth. By comparison, the
language varieties spoken by the less powerful groups often are stigmatized as "incorrect" or
"bad language". The fact that, in most societies, some varieties of language are ercieved as
"correct" while others are considered "incorrect" is, for linguists, a social phenomenon. Their
"incorrect" language is then used to justify further discrimination -in education and
employment, for example. So powerful are the natural forces that guide how a person learns and
uses spoken language that explicit teaching on how to speack is virtually irrelevant. If someone
cannot read or write, it is likely that something went wrong with that person's schooling. But the
same is not true with spoken language. This power trumps grammar instruction in classrooms
every time. In fact, people who speak in close to the approved way did not learn to do so in
school. They are just fortunate to come from the segment of society that sets the standards for
correct speech.

DEFINING LANGUAGE

The part of the system that allows speakers to produce and interpret grammatical sentences is
called grammatical competence. Knowing the meanings signified by different sound sequences
in a language and how to combine those units of meaning into words, phrases and sentences.
Grammatical competence contributes similarly to comprehension in all human languages.
Grammatical competence is almost useless for human interaction without communicative
competence. Communicative competence -the knowledge included in grammatical competence
plus the ability to use that knowledge to accomplish a wide range of communicative jobs-
constitues language.

THE DIVERSITY OF LINGUISTICS

The field of linguistics, like the phenomenon of language which it studies, is broad and diverse,
and although linguistis share some beliefs, they differ in some of the assumptions they bring to
their analyses. Phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, assume that the forms of
language can be understood separate from their use. Today the field of linguistics studies how
language is learned, how it plays a central role in reflecting and creating the interactive and
cultural settings of talk, how computers can be designed to deal with language, and how
language is represented in our very brains.

LANGUAGE AND COMPETENCE

One of the extraordinary things about language is the way in which we take it for granted as
though it were a given fact of life like being able to breather. In a sense this is inevitable and to a
certain extent, perhaps, even desirable. Knowledge advances by makin certain processes
automathic, but in so doing it also hides from us their nature and operation, and even their very
existence. And yet language can never become so automatic as to be entirely instinctive. All the
forms of language activity (speaking/listening, writing/reading) depend on the successful
performance of certain mechanical processes. To a large extent they are automatic but on
occasions they become problematic. At a different level of linguistic analysis it is interesting how
these skills can become indicators of class, education, and even personality. People who
pronounce words in a certain way are commonly thought to have an accent. These accents are
grouped regionally. But there is no regional manner of writing. It's important to bear in mind
that mechanical skills, that is, the 'motor' skills involved in language activity, are the means by
which the higher-order skills of understanding are realised. Listening to a foreign language can
be an unsettling experience because it seems to be just a meaningless gabble with no discenrible
pattern and no natural boundaries. The problem does not lie with our hearing: it is not a motor
problem. The real difficulty is that patterns or mental shapes created by the sopunds within the
system of the particular language are not discernible to us, that is, we are unable to connect the
sounds to words. This ability of sounds to function as carriers of meaning is referred to as duality
of pattering. Boundaries between words in spoken English are in the ear of the listener. Word
recognition depends on grammatical knowledge. AS a consequence of this, the mechanical skills
of hearing becomes transformed by the mental skill of understanding. It is this mental ability
which is characteristically the concern of linguistics, and the term which I shall use from now on
to describe it is 'cognitive'. In the case of the mechanical skills we could say we are considering
the performance of language. Performance is only significant in relation to the more cognitive
activities involved in language, whether we are receiving it as listeners and readers, or producing
it as speakers and writers. This ability to discern and interpret shapes both in sound and letter
form as meaningful we could call grammatical competence. Competence and performance are
the terms which Noam Chomsky uses to distinguish two types of linguistics ability. As it's been
said, performance is concerned with the mechanical skills involved in the production and
reception of language, the ability to form letter shapes correctly when writing, or to make the
right movements with our speech organs when speaking, are aspects of performance.
Grammatical competence covers a range of abilities which are broadly structural. Two kinds of
cognitive skills: firstly, the ability to assign sounds and lñetters to word shapes distinguished from
each other by meaning (lexical knowledge), and secondly, the ability to recognise larger
structures such as phrase and clause to which individual words belong (syntactic knowledge). So
it's not enough to be grammatically competent. It's percetly possible to speak clearly and
meaningfully but fail to give the listener what she/he needs. There are problems of form
involving rhyme, rhythm, and lenght of line. These are special difficulties which are not
encountered on other uses of language. The real difficulty is in producing something original,
which uses the surface reatures of the form in a way that has not been done before. This may
involve the creation of new words or a new arrangement or combination of words in a fresh
syntactic or rhythmic patterns. Creative competence is the ability to use language in a uniquely
valuable way such that a community will want to preserve the particular form of the utterance.

THE FUNCTIONS OF LANGUAGE: MICRO FUNCTIONS

1) To release nervous/physical energy (PHYSIOLOGICAL FUNCTION)

If you are a sports fan watching your favorite sport on television you may well feel the
overwhelming urge at certain exciting moments in the match to shout instructions to the
players. The instructions are perfectly useless; they serve no communicative purpose, but they
allow us to release pent-up energy which otherwise would be quite intolerable. A great deal of
what we say when angry, the heat of the moment, is said simply to relieve the physical and
nervous enery generated by emotional distress.

2) For purposes of sociability (PHATIC FUNCTION)

Language acts as a form of social bonding, we need language at times to be imprecise and rather
vague. The phatic use of language is mainly spoken but there are some written equivalents. The
most obvious examples are the conventionalised phrases for starting and ending letters: Dear
sir/madam...Yours faithfully, sincerely, truly. Phatic language, then, fulfils important concat uses,
it helps us negotiate the start and end of exchanges whether in spoken or written form. The
phatic use of language is very important in creating and mantaining social links, it is at the same
time limited. An entire conversation made up of ritualised exchanges would be tedious.

3) To provide a record (RECORDING FUNCTION)

We are constantly using language to record things we wish to remember. It might be a short-
term record, as in a shopping list or a list of things to do, or a long-term record, as in a diary or
history of some kind. It's the most official use of language: bureaucracies thrive on exact records
and modern comercial life would be impossible wothouth up-to-date and accurate files. Indeed,
it's probably the most significant function behind the development of language from being
simply an oral medium to becoming written one. Archaeological evidence from around 4000 BC
suggests that the peoples of the Middle East were using an early writting system to record
business transactions. The point about writing is not so much that it makes it possible to recod
things, but that it enables us to do so accurately and permanently.

4) To identify and classify things (INDENTIFYING FUNCTION)

Language not only allows us to record, but also to identify, with considerable precision, an
enormous array of objects and events, without which it would be very difficult to make sense of
the world around us. Learning the names of things allows us to refer quickly and accurately to
them; it gives us power over them. Nomenclaturism is the belief that words represent the true
essences of things, and that everything has its own right and proper name. It's the system which
endows the individual word with meaning and which relates it to the real world rather than the
other way around: wornds don't exist on their own but are always part of a larger network.
That's why this function is referred to as clasifying as wll as identifying things, for we can only
identify things within a classificatory system.

5) As an instrument of thought (REASONING FUNCTION)

We are constantly talking to ourselves in a form of continuous monologue, it's automatic.

Making tour mind blank os one of the most difficult things to do because the brain is in a state of
constant activity; its principal concern is with enabling us to survive, and language is an essential
part of that survival process. A majority of our thinking is done in words. A common view of
language is that it is merely a tool of thought, in other words, that we have ideas forming in our
minds for which we need to find the appropiate words: the words are simply the expression of
the ideas. Speaking and writing are forms of thought. This is why most people feel that they have
not really understood something until they have been able to express it in language. Language
doesn't just express thought, it also creates it. Words mean different things to different people,
they are laden with connotations and subject to the influence of fashion. They are rarely neutral
in meaning. We have only to think of the debate about colour prejudice to see how difficult it is
to find a vocabulary which is truly non-discriminatory.

6) As a mens of communicating ideas and feelings (COMMUNICATIVE FUNCTION)

The relationship between language and meaning can be problematic. Communication is a two-
way process. On the one hand we need to be able to use language to express ourselves to
others, and, conversely, we need it in order to understand what they are communicating to us.
Speech act theory is based on the notion that the social use of language is primarily concerned
with the performance of certain communicative acts. The problem is to determine what those
acts might be. Speech act theory copes with this indeterminacy by distinguishing between direct
and indirect speech acts. We frequently find that people convey their wishes indirectly and it is
an important part of communicative competence to be able to decode these. Speech act theory
provides a useful framework for analysing the personal and social purposes which language
fulfils. We could say that any utterance performs two essential macro acts: a message act and a
communicative act. The message act comprises the total message made up for both direct and
indirect acts. The communicative act conveys the intention to communicate.

7) To give delight (PLEASURE FUNCTION)

There are various kinds of pleasure which we derive from language. Most poetry exploits this
function. Devices such as onomatopoeia (words representing sounds), alliteration (the repeated
sound of the first letter in a word), assonance (vowel rhyme- same vowel sounds used with
different consonants); all draw on the pleasure we find in euphony (pleasing effect to the ear), as
do rhythm and rhyme. This pleasure is important in language learning. There is considerable
evidence to suggest that children respond as much to the melody of the language as to any
other cognitive content.

FORMAL LINGUISTICS

Formal linguistics is the study of the structures and processes of language, how language words
and is organized. There are three main schools of thought in formal linguistics:

1) The traditional, or prescriptive, approach. It is what we are usually thaught in school. Such
grammars typically prescribe rules of correct or preferred usage

2) Structural linguistics. Structuralists are primarily concerned with phonology, morphology, and
syntax. They focus on the physical features of utterances with little regard for meaning or
lexicon. They divide words into form classes distinguished according to grammatical features. For
example, a noun is defined in terms of its position in a sentence and its inflections, such as the -s
for plurals.

3) The generative/transformation approach was introduced by Noam Chomsky. Here he traced

a relationship between the "deep structure" of sentences (what is in the mind) and their
"surface structure" (what is spoken or written).

Formal linguistics includes five principal areas of study:

Phonetics is the study of the sounds of language and their physical properties.

Phonology involves analyzing how sounds function in a fiven language or dialect.

Morphology is the study of the structure of words. Morphologists study minmal units of
meaning, called morphemes, and investigate the possible combinations of these units in a
language to form words.

Syntax is the study of the structure of sentences.

Semantics is the study of meaning in language.

SOCIOLINGUISTICS

Sociolinguistics is the study of language as a social and cultural phenomenon. The major
divisions withing the field of sociolinguistics are described below.

LANGUAGE VARIATIONS describes the relationship between the use of linguistic forms and
factors such as geography, social class, ethnic group, age, sex, occupation, function, or style. A
dialect, whether standard or nonstandard, includes the full range of elements used to produce
speech: pronunciation, grammar, and interactive features. In this respect, dialect should be
distinguished from accent, which usually refers only to pronunciation. All speakers of a language
speak a dialect of that language.

LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL INTERACTION. This is the province of language and its function in the
real world. Three subfields of sociolinguitics investigate this relationship:

1) Pragmatics looks at how context affects meaning. As a function of context, the intended
meaning of an utterance is often different from its literal meaning.

2) Discourse analysis examines the way in which sentences relate in larger linguistics units; such
as conversational exchanges or written texts. Matters of cohesion (the relationship between
linguistic forms and propositions) and coherence (the relationship between speech acts) are also
investigated. The links between utterances in a sequence are important topics of analysis.

3) Ethnography of communication uses the tools of anthropology to study verbal interaction in

its social setting.

Language attitudes is the attitudes that people hold toward different language varieties and the
people who speak them are important to sociolinguists. It explores how people react to
language interactions and how theyy evaluate other based on the language behaviour they
observe.

Language planning is the process of implementing decisions regarding which languages should
be used in a societal scale.

PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

It is the study of the relationship between linguistics and psychological behavior. It studies how
humans store and retrieve linguistic information.

Language acquisition is the study of how humans acquire language. some people claimed that
children learn language through imitation and repetition and positive-negartive reinforcement
(behaviorist approach). Other claimed that children have the ability to acquire language easily
and wothout formal instruction because they are born with a language acquisition device
(innatist theory)

Verbal processing involves speaking, understanding, reading and writing and therefore includes
both the production of verbal output and reception of the output of others.

AN OUTLINE OF THE HISTORY OF LINGUISTICS

The linguistics refers to a body of knowledge that is structured in ways that characterize it as
science rather than mythology of everyday beliefs. Linguistics is thus a cultural phenomenon and
it has a history. We might refer to the beliefs about language shared by members of a
community or culture as ethno-linguistics or folk-linguistics.

Fundations in antiquity. The earliest known linguistic traditions arose in antiquity, in societies
with established traditions of writings. In most cases, these traditions arose in response to
language change ad the resultiong impact in religious and legal domains.
MIDDLE AGES IN EUROPE

During the middle ages (from the 5th to the 15th century) in Europe, Latin was more important
than local/vernacular languages (it had high prestige). Then, the importance of vernacular
languages (low prestige) increased amon scholars and traditions of writing them began to
emerge. Descriptive grammars of the vernaculars were written; these generally presented the
languages in the mould of Latin.

EUROPEAN COLONIALISM

From the 15th century, colonization brought Europeans into contact with a wide variety of
languages in Africa, the Americas, Asia and the Pacific. Information about them was gathered by
explorers, travelers, missionaries, and others, and was spread within Europe in the form of word
listrs, grammars and texts. Scholars compiled word lists in many languages and them compared
them. They said that certain languages were similar or had things in common. This led to what is
now known as the comparative method andthe Neogrammarian tradition. In fact, most
European languages formed a family of related languages, all of which could be traced back to
an ancient language that over time split into daughter languages that were not intelligible.

MODERN LINGUISTICS

Modern Linguistics emerged in the late 19th and early 20th century (1890). There was a change
in the focus of the language (from diachronic to synchronic), from changes in language over time
to the idea that a language can be viewed as a self-contained system situated at a particular
point in time. The Swiss linguists Suassure is known as the founding father of modern linguistics.
He published little himself, but his students in Geneva reconstructed his ideas from their lecture
notes, and published them after Saussure died in 1916 as "Course in General Linguistics"- His
influence extended beyond linguistics into disciplines including anthropology and semiotics (it
studies and investigates signs and sign system generally). Saussure said that language was a
system of arbitrary signs. For this reason, phonetics and phonology were important in early
modenr linguistics. The International Phonetic Association (IPA) was established inn 1886 by
Europeans phoneticians.

HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS

Also called diachronic linguistics, is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:

·0 to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages

·1 to reconstruct the pre-history of languages and determine their relatedness, grouping

them into language families (comparative linguistics)

·2 to develop general theories about how and why language changes

·3 to describe the history of speech communities

 ·4 to study the history of words (etymology)

COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS

Comparative linguistics in one of the branches of historical linguistics that is concerned with
comparing languages in order to establish their historical relatedness. Languages can change and
are also able to cross-relate. Genetic relatedness implies a common origin of proto-language.
Comparative linguisctics has the goal of constructing language families, reconstructing proto-
languages, and specifying the changes that have resulted in the documented languages.

SYNCHRONIC AND DIACHRONIC

These two terms are quite common, especially in relation to history and language change.
Synchronic has to do with the analysis of linguistic phenomena at goven point in time.
Conversely, diachronic has to do with linguistic phenomena through time

DIACHRONIC LINGUISTICS

An approach to linguistics which studies how languages change over time, for example the
change in the sounds of systems of the Romance languages from their roots in Latin (and other
languages) to modern times or the study of changes between Early English to Modern British
English. The need for diachronic and synchronic descriptions to be kept apart was emphasized by
the Swiss linguist Saussure.

VERNACULAR LANGUAGE

The term 'vernacular' has bveen used since the Middle Ages, first to describe local European
languages (low prestige) in contrast to Latin (high prestige), then to characterize any non-
standard spoken version of a language used by lower-status groups. So, the vernacular is a
general expression for a kind of social dialect, typically spoken by a lower-status group, which is
treated as 'non-standard' because of marked differences from a socially prestigious variety
treated as the standar language