Notes on Nature of Language

What is Language?

Language is a system of symbols and rules that is used for meaningful communication. A system of communication has to meet certain criteria in order to be considered a language. A language uses symbols, which are sounds, gestures, or written characters that represent objects, actions, events, and ideas. Symbols enable people to refer to objects that are in another place or events that occurred at a different time. 

A language is generative, which means that the symbols of a language can be combined to produce an infinite number of messages.

A language has rules that govern how symbols can be arranged. These rules allow people to understand messages in that language even if they have never encountered those messages before.

Language is a powerful tool to clarify thinking, for social communication and to influence people.

Language is a particular kind of system for encoding and decoding information. And communication happens when the decoder receives, decodes and understands the message of encoder. We must realize that language is primarily something that is spoken not written and language is evolutionary not static which keeps on changing.

Definitions and Meaning of Language

• Language is the expression of ideas by means of speech sounds combined into words. Words are combined into phrases and sentences.
• Language is the system of communication which consists of a set of sound and written symbol which are used by the people of a particular country or region for the purpose of talking and writing. It is a system used by human to express their feelings and thoughts.
• Language is a tool, a vehicle for expression, a means through which interaction between human being take places.
• ‘Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of voluntarily produced symbols.’ ~ E. Sapir.,1921
• ‘Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by means of which the members of a society interact in terms of their social culture.’ ~ G. Trager, 1949 (socio-linguist)
• ‘A Language is a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out of a finite set of elements.’ ~ N. Chomsky, 1957 (Grammarian)
• ‘The totality of the utterances that can be made in a speech community in the language of that speech community.’ ~ Bloomfield
• ‘Language is the representation of the experience of the mind.’ ~ Aristotle
• ‘System of sounds, words, patterns, etc by human’s to communicate thoughts and feelings. System of signs, symbols, gestures, etc used for conveying information.’ ~O.A.L.D.

Human languages            

Some of the areas of the brain involved in language processing: Broca's area (Blue), Wernicke's area (Green), Supramarginal gyrus (Yellow), Angular gyrus (Orange), Primary Auditory Cortex (Pink)

Human languages are usually referred to as natural languages, and the science of studying them falls under the purview of linguistics. A common progression for natural languages is that they are considered to be first spoken, and then written, and then an understanding and explanation of their grammar is attempted.

Languages live, die, move from place to place, and change with time. Any language that ceases to change or develop is categorized as a dead language. Conversely, any language that is in a continuous state of change is known as a living language or modern language.

Sound is the basic units of human language. They acquire meaning when they organize themselves in intelligible combinations and forms.

Sounds, forms and meanings give us an intelligible, sensible structure to understand the word around us. Sounds, forms and meanings are the three fundamental levels of human language.

Three level of analysis of language are

1. Phonological level: Sound and their organization.
2. Syntactic level: various forms of language and their organization.
3. Semantic level: Meaning as manifested at the phonological and syntactic level.

Animal communication

The term "animal languages" is often used for non-human systems of communication. Linguists do not consider these to be "language", but describe them as animal communication, because the interaction between animals in such communication is fundamentally different in its underlying principles from human language.

However, animals communicate vocally and by gesture, they are restricted to a particular set of messages, genetically given, which cannot be creatively varied. Animal’s speech fails to talk about the past and the future; where as human language can talk about past as well as future.

Characteristics/properties of human language

1. Open-ended system: The sounds, words and sentences in a language may be limited, but the combinations and constructions are unlimited. This creative or reproductive potential of the language enable its user to manipulate and make an indefinite variety of constructions to express himself or herself.
2. Duality of structure: human language has two levels of structure. Distinct sounds – consonant and vowel organized in multiple ways to produce infinite meaning combinations. Consonant and vowel alone have no meaning in themselves. This meaning comes from a combination to produce word.
3. Displacement: Human language can be used to refer dimension of space and time we can use language or refer to the past, the present and the future. It can also be used to refer to any place here or elsewhere. In both the cases, the language user does not have to move from his/her place to refer to time or place.
4. Cultural Transmission: Human being May be born with innate predisposition to acquire language, but they are not born with the ability to produce utterance in a specific language. Language is not genetically transmitted. It is culturally transmitted and has to be consciously learned.
5. Language as an individual and social Phenomenon:  Language serves to express individual needs and urges, it also brings an individual relationship with the external world.
6. Human language is species specific and species uniform: Language is specific to the human of the species and all human beings are capable of learning the language in which they are born.
7. Meta-Linguistic System. Human language can be used to talk about itself, its features, functions, varieties and levels of sophistications.
8. Arbitrariness. Human language is an arbitrary phenomenon. There is no natural connection or relationship between a word and its meaning. The signifier and signified are brought together arbitrarily.

Some basic facts about human language

1. Wherever humans exist, languages exist.
2. There are no ‘primitive’ languages – all languages are equally complex and equally capable of expressing any idea in the universe. The vocabulary of any language can be expanded to include new words for new concepts.
3. All languages change through time.
4. All grammars contain rules for formation of words and sentences of a similar kind.
5. Every spoken language has a class of vowels and a class of consonants.
6. Similar grammatical categories (for e.g. nouns, verbs, etc.) are found in all languages.
7. There are semantic universals, such as ‘male’ or ‘female’, ‘animate’ of ‘inanimate’, found in every single language in the world.
8. Every language has a way of referring to three elements of past, present, and future, negating, forming questions, issuing commands, and so on.
9. Any normal child, born anywhere in the world of any racial, geographical, social or economic heritage, is capable of learning any language to which he/she is exposed. The differences we find among languages cannot be due to biological reasons.
10. The relationships between the sounds and meanings of spoken languages and between the gestures (signs) and meanings of sign languages are, for the most part, arbitrary.
11. All human languages use s finite set of discrete sounds that are combined to form meaningful elements or words, which themselves form an infinite set of possible sentences.

The origin of language

1.      The Divine Source

Some believe that language was provided to humankind by a god or goddess Saraswati (God of Education), wife of Brahma (the God who created the universe, as per the Hindu belief) who created human language. Likewise in Christian tradition, people believe that Adam (the first man on Earth created by God) created the name of everything.

2.      The Natural-sound Source.

Human beings produce different kinds of original sounds in different situations. The original sounds of different language came from natural cries of emotions (pain, anger, joy, excitement etc) and physical efforts made by men.

3.      The Oral-gesture Source.

The language of early men was also based on the tie between body gestures and the sound produced by men orally.

What is Etymology?

From Latin, etymology means “to report” and “to carry back.” And the etymology of a word refers to its origin and the historical roots.

Etymology, in general is the theory and the study of the origin and the history of linguistic form.

A dictionary etymology tells us what is known of an English word before it became the word entered in the dictionary.

If a word was created in English etymology shows, to whatever extent is not already obvious from the shape of word, what material were used to form it. If the word was borrowed in English etymology traces the borrowing processes backward form the point at which the word entered in English to the earliest records of the ancestral language.

Where it is relevant, etymology notes words from other languages that are related to the word in the dictionary entry, but that are not in the direct line of borrowing. 

Where do new words come from? How do you figure out their histories?

a)      Borrowing: This process is one of the most common sources of new words. It is the taking over of words from other languages.

    For example:-

°         boss, luck, wagon, hope (Dutch)

°         tycoon, tsunami (Japanese)

°         avatar, bungalow, jungle, karma, pajamas, verandah, sentry, shampoo, yoga, pundit, bangle, cheetah, jungle, chit, sahib (Indian)

°         banana (Portuguese)

°         zinc (German)

°         alcohol (Russian)

°         crops, picnic, canteen, dragon (French)

°         fungus, circus, ego (Latin)

°         irony, pneumonia, panorama, psychoanalysis, psychology, python, dilemma, pathos, chorus (Greek)

°         zero, sofa, sultan (Arabic)

°         tea, sum, Mandarin (Chinese).

b)      Shortening or clipping: When a word of more than one syllable is reduced to a shorter form is called as clipping.

    For example:-

°         Fax (facsimile)

°         Ad (advertisement)

°         Phone (telephone)

°         Fan (fanatic)

°         Gas (gasoline)

°         Flu (influenza)

°         Condo (condominium)

°         Gym (gymnasium)

°         Lab (laboratory)

°         Exam (examination)

°         Math (mathematics)

c)      Back-Formation: It usually occurs when a noun is reduced to a verb.

    For example:-

°         ‘television’ becomes ‘televise’

°         ‘donation’ becomes ‘donate’

°         ‘option’ becomes ‘opt’

°         ‘emotion’ becomes ‘emote’

°         ‘enthusiasm’ becomes ‘enthuse’

°         ‘editor’ as ‘edit’.

d)      Blending: Formation of a new word by combining two separate words. It is done by taking only the beginnings of one word and joining it to the end of the other word.

    For example:-

°         Smoke + Fog = Smog

°         Breakfast + Lunch = Brunch

°         Television +Broadcast = Telecast.

e)      Transfer of personal or place names: Over time, names of places, places, or things may become generalized vocabulary words.

    For example:-

°         ‘forsythia’ develop from the names of botanist William Forsyth

°         ‘silhouette’ from the names of Etienne de silhouette

°         ‘denim’ from Serge De Nimes (a fabric made in mines, France)

°         ‘Zimdra juice’ from Zimdra Company

°         ‘Tata car’ from Tata Company

f)       Onomatopoeia: creating words from the sounds they represent.

    For example:-

°         buzz

°         hiss

°         sizzle

°         cuckoo

°         crash

°         bang

°         hush

°         ticktack

°         guffaw

°         wiz

°         pop

g)      Compounding: combining two words to create a single word. It compounds independent words that can occur by themselves.

    For example:-

°         handbag

°         wallpaper

°         fingerprint

°         sunburn

°         photograph

°         buzzword

°         bookcase

h)      Acronyms: are formed from the initial letters of a set of other words.

For example:-

°         VCR (video cassette recorder)

°         ATM (Automatic Teller Machine)

°         WFP (World Food Program me)

i)        Affixation: When the prefixes and suffixes are added to the root words we get a new word.

    For example: - by adding prefixes

°         un-usual

°         mis-pronounce

°         pre-departure

°         dis-respect

    And by adding suffixes

°         care-less

°         child-ish

°         faith-ful

°         red-ness

j)        Coinage: is an invention of new terms or words. It happens in rapidly changing cultures.

    For example:-

°         ‘jeans’ from Genoa, Italy where the cloth was first made Genoa

°         ‘Bata’ from Bata companies

°         ‘Sony’ from Sony companies

Theory of Language Acquisition

The nature (biological) versus nurture (environment) debate extends to the topic of language acquisition. Today, most researchers acknowledge that both nature and nurture play a role in language acquisition. However, some researchers emphasize the influences of learning on language acquisition, while others emphasize the biological influences.

1. Behavioristic Theory

(Environmental Influences)

A major proponent of the idea that language depends largely on environment was the behaviorist B.F. Skinner. He believed that language is acquired through principles of conditioning, including association, imitation, and reinforcement.

According to this view, children learn words associating sounds with objects, action and events. They also learn words and syntax by imitating their adults. In short, Behaviorist believes that language is learnt through constant reinforcement. The child is born with an empty slate and language items are written on that mental slate as the child grows and experiences the word to which it is exposed.

Parents too play an important role in the children’s acquisition of language. Operant behaviour and operant conditioning, Skinner’s most widely acclaimed work, is based on a system of both positive and negative reinforcement. Human behaviour can be controlled by positive and negative reinforcement. Most educated parents chose to control the behaviour of their children by using negative reinforcement, that is, misbehavior or disregarding house rules resulted in punishments. Today, many educated parents (school systems) are inclined to provide positive reinforcement to encourage good behaviour, reserving negative reinforcement techniques only as a last resort. For instance, if a child can tell a sentence correctly, and if he/she is rewarded for the correct sentence, then the child learns faster and willingly.

Operant Behaviour and Conditioning

While it is commonly known that behaviour is affected by its consequences, Skinner's theory of operant conditioning further states that the process does not require repeated efforts, but is instead an immediate reaction to a familiar stimulus. In an experiment with a rat using food as a reward, the rat was placed in a box and over the course of a few days, food was occasionally delivered through an automatic dispenser. Before long, the rat approached the food tray as soon as the sound of the dispenser was heard, clearly anticipating the arrival of more food. In the next step of the experiment, researchers raised a small lever on the wall of the box and when the rat touched it, the food dispenser provided a snack. After the first self-induced meal, the rat repeatedly touched the lever in order to get more food. To the hungry rat, the sound of the dispenser became a reinforcer when it was first associated with feedings and continued to be so until after a while, researchers stopped providing food when the lever was pressed. Soon after that, the rat stopped touching the lever.

2. Rationalistic Theory

(Biological or Hereditary Influences)

The main proponent of the view that Biological influences brings about language development is the well-known linguist Noam Chomsky. Noam Chomsky is an American linguist and philosopher. He is responsible for the theory of transformational grammar and he is a rationalist.

Chomsky says children have a prior knowledge of language. We only learn the surface structure of language (grammar, spelling, style, phonetics). He says intellect grows as the child grows, not learned. He believes that some aspects of knowledge and understanding are inherited just as the use of arms and legs are.

In addition, Chomsky argues that human brain have language acquisition device (LAD), an innate mechanism or process that allows to develop language skills. Child’s brain naturally contains a considerable amount of specific information about language.

According to Chomsky, all children are born with universal grammar. This knowledge is not ready the moment child is born, but takes time to mature. When time is right, the innate knowledge requires little exposure to language for the knowledge to emerge. This makes them receptive to the common feature of all language.  Because of this hard-wired background in grammar, Children easily pick up a language when they are exposed to its particular grammar. In brief, rationalist argues that language learning is a much-sophisticated process. The child is born with all the facilities to learn the language. The linguistic ability is inherent in the minds of the child. All that the child does is discover and test.

Evidences:

1. The stage of language development occurs at about some ages in most children even though different children experience very different environments.
2. Children’s language development follows as a similar pattern across cultures.
3. Children generally acquire language skills quickly and effortlessly.
4. Deaf children who have not been exposed to the language may make up their own language. These new language resemble each other in sentence structure, even when they are created in different culture.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language, encompassing a number of sub-fields. At the core of theoretical linguistics are the study of language structure (grammar) and the study of meaning (semantics). The first of these encompasses morphology (the formation and composition of words), syntax (the rules that determine how words combine into phrases and sentences) and phonology (the study of sound systems and abstract sound units). Phonetics is a related branch of linguistics concerned with the actual properties of speech sounds (phones), non-speech sounds, and how they are produced and perceived.

Terms and definitions:

1.      Linguistics:

It is the scientific study of language. It does not study any particular language but identifies and establishes the principles, rules, features and processes that are universal, and can be applied for understanding all languages.

2.      Phonetics:

Phonetics has been defined as the science of speech sound. It is a branch of linguistics and deals with the sound produced by human beings in their speech behavior. It is the study of speech sound and their production.

3.      Phonology:

It is study of speech sounds especially in a particular language.

4.      Phonemes:

Are the smallest distinguishable units in a language. In the English language, many consonants and vowels, such as t, p, m, e, i, … are there. But combined phonemes are potentially meaningful sound.

5.      Etymology:

It is the study of the origin and history of words and their meanings.

6.      Morphology:

It is the scientific study of the structure of words.

The smallest meaningful element in a language is called a morpheme. Eg: refill- ‘re’ and ‘fill’ are both morphemes.

7.      Syntax:

A system of rules governs how words can be meaningfully arranged to form phrases and sentences.

Example: One rule of syntax is that an article such as “the” must come before a noun, not after: “Read the book,” not “Read book the.”

8.      Semantics:

It is the philosophical or linguistic study of meaning in language.

9.      Stress:

It means the relative emphasis given in pronunciation to a syllable, in loudness, pitch or duration.

10. Antonym:

 An antonym is a word that means the opposite of another word.

For example:

·         wet – dry

·         hot – cold

·         correct - incorrect

·         able – unable

·         regular – irregular

·         please – displease

11. Synonym:

A synonym is a word that has nearly the same meaning as another word.

For example:

·         walk, hike, stroll, roam, march, tramp…

·         happy, gay, joy and merry.

12. Homophones:

Homophones are those words that have the same pronunciation as another word, but have different meanings and different spellings.

For example:

·         sum – some

·         bred – bread

·         knew – new

·         but – butt

13. Homographs:

Homographs are those words that have the same spellings as another word, but have a different meaning and a different pronunciation.

For example:

• Bow - To bend the head or body as a respect
• Sow - To put seed in the ground or a female pig.

14. Homonyms:

Homonyms are the words that have spelling and pronunciation like   another word but have a different meaning.

For example:

·         See – using eyes
·         See – It also means to meet people
·         Delta – It means the fourth letter of Greek alphabet.
·         Delta – It also means as area of land at a river’s mouth.

15. Pragmatics:

The study of language use that deals with the use of language to communicate with other people not concerning the way it is concerned.

SAMPLE QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Nature of Language

1. The encoder and the decoder are called

• commuters.
• interlocutors.
• intarlocutors.
• communicators.

Answer: interlocutors

2. Select the most appropriate sequence of components to create a sensible structure.

• Sound >> forms >> meaning
• Forms >> sound >> meaning
• Meaning >> sound >> forms
• Meaning >> forms >> sounds

Answer: Sound >> forms >> meaning

3. Which of the following is an important feature of human language?

• cultural transmission
• genetic transmission
• limited transmission
• un-dimensional

Answer: cultural transmission

4. The basic unit of language is

• word
• sound
• speech
• thought

Answer: sound

5. The process whereby language is passed down from generation to generation is known as

• language transmission.
• cultural transmission.
• sound transmission.
• vocal transmission.

Answer: cultural transmission

6. Of the following, the most complex form of communication is

• adult language.
• infant language.
• human language.
• animal language.

Answer: human language

7. The best model of human language is

• Encoding>>Transmission>>Decoding>>Reception
• Encoding>>Transmission>>Reception>>Decoding
• Decoding>>Reception>>Transmission>>Encoding
• Encoding>>Decoding>>Transmission>>Reception

Answer: Encoding>>Transmission>>Reception>>Decoding

8. Language acquisition is

• the direct conscious process of acquiring  vocabulary and grammatical language followed by rules.
• the gradual subconscious process of acquiring language without the presence of grammatical rules.
• the direct imitation of language from the natural sound.
• the language inherited from parents.

Answer: the gradual subconscious process of acquiring language without the presence of grammatical rules.

9. What is the system of rules that governs how words can be meaningfully arranged to form phrases and sentences?

• Language
• Syntax
• Morpheme
• Phoneme

Answer: Syntax

10. Which is an observation that supports Noam Chomsky’s ideas about language acquisition?

• Children’s language development follows a similar pattern across cultures
• Children acquire language quickly and effortlessly
• The stages of language development occur at about the same ages in most children
• All of the above

Answer: All of the above

Answer the following questions.

1. “Human language has duality of structure.” Explain the given statement.

• Human language has duality of structure, because the individual sounds like b, k, t, p, i…does not have any meaning when they stand-alone. Their meaning comes from the meaningful combination to produce words.

2. Language can be used in spoken as well as written form for communication. Which form do you feel is more effective? Give at least two reasons to explain why.

• Spoken language is more effective because the speaker can express his/her opinion through gesture, body language and facial expression. And spoken language is more convincing and powerful language which can influence the people. It is faster compared to written language. And spoken language can be understood by all age groups.

or

• Written language is more effective because it remains forever and can be recorded for life time. It is more formal way of expressing one self. Written language shapes our thoughts and emotions. Through written language we come to know about the culture and history of other nations.

3. When does communication take place?

• When the decoder receives, decodes and understands the message of the encoder.
• When the encoder sends, decoder receives, decodes and understands the message.

4. Compare Behaviourist and Rationalist theories of language acquisition.

• Behaviourist believes that language is learnt through constant reinforcement. The child is born with an empty slate and language items are written on the mental slate as the child grows and experiences the world which it is exposed.     
• Rationalists argue that language learning is much more sophisticated process. The child is born with all the facilities to learn language. The linguist ability is inherent in the mind of the child. All that the child does is discover and test.