Introduction to Language

Semester 3
LE Anglais ENS UAE
2024-2025
A general introduction
The following questions come to mind as to what the present course
will be concerned with.

- Are we going to be concerned with the universal properties/

knowledge that people possess that enable them to use language?
- Are we going to be concerned with our knowledge of a particular
language?
- Are we going to talk about the characteristics of language, the nature
of language?
- Are we going to focus more on the functions that it fulfills?
The omnipresence of language
• Language is omnipresent in our daily lives. It is present in virtually every aspect of
our living existence.
• Whatever else people do when they come together (family gatherings, meetings
with friends, associates, colleagues, even total strangers), they talk.
• When people engage in different types of activities, such working, playing
fighting, they use language.
• People talk to their pets.
• Sometimes, even when individuals are on their own, they talk (Self-talk, journal
writing, poetry). (See the following interesting 5 minute video on self-talk)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNyUmbmQQZg
• While sleeping, people sometimes talk in their dreams and are talked to.
We live in a world of language.

• We talk face to face and over the telephone, we text people or

send them audio recordings and everyone responds with more
talk.

• Television and radio, Social media further swell this torrent of

words.

• Hardly a moment of our waking lives is free from words.

Language is a phenomenon that plays an essential role in our
lives as individuals and as communities.
Activity 1

• Write your own short definition of language.

• What would you include under the word ‘language’?
What is Language?

Language is a broad term that can have a variety of definitions

depending on the perspective from which you look at it.

Most people, when asked about what language is, they would
probably tell you that it is easy to define.
One of the possible definitions that people might come up
with is the following:

Language consists of the words we produce to communicate

with one another in a variety of situations. It can be spoken or
written, and it is mainly used to inform and get informed
about a variety of issues. People, in other words, use language
to communicate with one another. It is a means that enable us
to get across our ideas and thoughts to others and vice versa.
Other forms of communication
- Deaf people use sign language, which is different from spoken language.

- There are road signs that communicate important information to drivers about what
they should do when driving.

- When People speak, they do not use words only, they also make use of paralinguistic
features…etc.

- There are images/ visuals that are used to communicate a variety of meanings? Aren’t
they a means of communication that serves…. The question is would these be included
in the definition of what language is.

- How about animal language (bees, birds..etc)? How is it different from human
language?
• Although one might think that providing a clear and
definitive answer to that question definition of language is
an easy task to do, it is a concept that is in fact difficult to pin
down.

• The difficulty stems mainly from the fact that the concept
can be looked at from different perspectives.
Some dictionary definitions of language
• The words, their pronunciation, and the methods of combining them
used and understood by a considerable community and established by
long usage.
• Audible, articulate, meaningful sound as produced by the action of the
on vocal organs.
• A systematic means of communicating ideas or feelings by the use of
conventionalized signs, sounds, gestures, or marks having understood
meanings.
• An artificially constructed primarily formal system of signs and symbols
including rules for the formation of admissible expressions and for their
transformation.
• The means by which animals communicate or are thought to
communicate with each other.
• language, a system of conventional spoken, manual (signed),
or written symbols by means of which human beings, as
members of a social group and participants in its culture,
express themselves. The functions of language include
communication, the expression of identity, play, imaginative
expression, and emotional release.

(Encyclopedia Britannica)
Language definitions by prominent scholars
• 'Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating
ideas, emotions and desires by means of voluntarily produced symbols.' (E.
Sapir, 1921.)

• 'A language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by means of which the

members of a society interact in terms of their total culture.' (G. Trager, 1949.)

• A language is 'a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and
constructed out of a finite set of elements'. (A. N. Chomsky, 1957.)

• Language is 'the institution whereby humans communicate and interact with

each other by means of habitually used oral-auditory arbitrary symbols’. (R. A.
Hall, 1964.)
• “Language is the expression of ideas by means of speech-
sounds combined into words. Words are combined into
sentences, this combination answering to that of ideas into
thoughts.” Henry Sweet, an English phonetician and
language scholar

• “A language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by means

of which a social group cooperates.” (Bernard Bloch and
George L. Trager; American linguists)
• Some scholars focus on the general concept of 'language’, some on the more specific
notion of 'a language’.

• Some draw attention to the formal features of phonology, grammar, and semantics such
as the phonological sounds, the morphology of words, the structure of sentence.

• Some emphasize the range of functions that language performs.

• Some stress the differences between language and other forms of human, animal, or
machine communication . Some point to the similarities.

At one extreme, there are definitions that are highly technical in character; at the other,
there are extremely general statements, reflecting the way in which the notion has been
applied figuratively to all forms of human behaviour, such as the 'language' of music,
cookery, or the cinema.
‘When we study human language, we are approaching what
some might call the "human essence," the distinctive qualities
of mind that are, so far as we know, unique to man.’

Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind

The possession of language, more than any other attribute,
distinguishes humans from other animals.

To understand our humanity we must understand the language

that makes us human.

• What does it mean to "know" a given language?

• What do linguists focus on when they want to find out more

about language?
Linguistic Knowledge

• Knowing how to use a language in daily situations presupposes

that human beings have linguistic knowledge. What is then
linguistic knowledge?

• When you know a language, you can speak and be understood by

others who know that language.

• This means you have the capacity to produce sounds that signify
certain meanings and to understand or interpret the sounds
produced by others.
• We are referring here to normal-hearing individuals. Deaf
persons produce and understand sign languages just as hearing
persons produce and understand spoken languages.

• Everyone knows a language. It is part of human nature to be able

to use language. A child as young as a five-year-old is almost as
proficient at speaking and understanding as his/ her parents are.

• Why then this interest in language? Scholars, especially ones

working within the field of linguistics, have devoted entire books
to what looks like a simple phenomenon.
• This interest mainly stems from the fact the ability to carry
out the simplest conversation requires profound knowledge
of which speakers are unaware.

• This fact is as true for speakers of Japanese as for English

speakers, for Eskimos as for Navajos.
A speaker of English can produce a sentence with two relative
clauses, like:

- My goddaughter who was born in Sweden and who

now lives in Vermont is named Disa, after a Viking
queen.

Native speakers do this without knowing what a relative

clause is.
• The fact that we know something unconsciously is not
unique to language.

• A child for example can walk without understanding or being

able to explain the principles of balance, support, and
sequence that permit one to walk.

• What, then, do speakers of English or Quechua or French or

Mohawk or Arabic know?
Knowledge of the Sound System

• Knowing a language means knowing what sounds are in that

language and what sounds are not.

• This unconscious knowledge is revealed by the way speakers of

one language pronounce words from another language.

• If you speak only English, for example, you may substitute an

English sound for a non-English sound when pronouncing "foreign
words’.
Examples
• Most English speakers pronounce the name Bach with a final k sound
because the sound represented by the letters ch in German is not an English
sound.

• If An native speaker of English pronounces it as the Germans do, they

would be using a sound outside the English sound system.

• French people speaking English often pronounce words like this and that as
if they were spelled zis and zat.

• The English sound represented by the initial letters th is not part of the
French sound system, and the French mispronunciation reveals the
speakers' unconscious knowledge of this fact.
• Even some involuntary cries (Interjections, some gap fillers) are
constrained by our own language system, and the filled pauses
that are sprinkled through conversational speech-like er or uh or
you know in English —contain only the sounds found in the
language.

• French speakers, for example, often fill their pauses with the
vowel sound that starts their word for egg, oeuf—a sound that
does not occur in English.
Knowledge of the inventory of sounds

Knowing the sound system of a language includes more than

knowing the inventory of sounds.

It includes knowing which sounds may start a word, end a

word, and follow each other.
Example
• The name of a former president of Ghana was Nkrumah, pronounced
with an initial sound identical to the sound ending the English word
sing (for most Americans). Most speakers of English mispronounce it
(by Ghanaian standards) by inserting a short vowel before or after the n
sound.

• Similarly, the first name of the Australian mystery writer Ngaio Marsh
is usually mispronounced in this way. The reason for these "errors" is
that no word in English begins with the ng sound.
Knowledge of the Meaning of Words
• Knowing the sounds and sound patterns in our language
constitutes only one part of our linguistic knowledge.

• Knowing a language is also about knowing that certain sound

sequences signify certain concepts or meanings.

• Speakers of English know what ‘boy’ means and that it means

something different from toy or girl.

• Knowing a language is therefore knowing how to relate sounds

and meanings.
Arbitrariness
• You will not be able to make sense of the sounds spoken to
you by someone if you do not know the language that they
are speaking.

• For those combinations of spoken sounds to be

comprehensible, one must learn the language.

• You have to learn that the sounds represented by the

letters ‘house’ signify the concept
If you know French, this same meaning is represented by
Maison.

If you know Twi, it is represented by sday.

If you know Russian, by dom.

If you know Spanish, by casa.

• Similarly, the concept is represented by ‘hand’ in
English, ‘main’ in French, ‘nsa’ in Twi, and ‘ruka’ in Russian.

The following are words in some different languages. How

many of them can you understand?

a. kyinii d. asa g. wartawan

b. doakam e. toowq h. inaminatu
c. odun f. bolna i. yawwa
Speakers of the languages from which these words are taken know that they have the following
meanings:
kyinii a. a large parasol (in a Ghanaian language, Twi)
doakam b. living creature (in the native American language, Papago)
odun c. wood (in Turkish)
asa d. morning (in Japanese)
toowq e. is seeing (in a California Indian language, Luiseño)
wartawan g. reporter (in Indonesian)
bolna f. to speak (in a Pakistani language, Urdu); ache (in Russian)
inaminatu h. teacher (in a Venezuelan Indian language, Warao)
yawwa i. right on! (in a Nigerian language, Hausa)
• These examples show that the sounds of words are only
given meaning by the language in which they occur.

• They are, in other words, conventionalized.

• Neither the shape nor the other physical attributes of

objects determine their pronunciation in any language.
Pterodactyl
Arbitrariness in sign language
• This arbitrary relationship between the form (the sequence
of sounds/ letters) and meaning (concept) of a word in
spoken/ written language is also true of the sign languages
used by the deaf.

• If you see someone using a sign language you do not know, it

is doubtful that you will understand the message from the
signs alone.
• A person who knows Chinese Sign Language would find it
difficult to understand American Sign Language.
• Signs that may have originally been mimetic (similar to
miming) or iconic (with a nonarbitrary relationship between
form and meaning) change historically as do words, and the
iconicity is lost.
• These signs become conventional, (Arbitrary) so knowing the
shape or movement of the hands does not reveal the meaning
of the gestures in sign languages.
Onomatopoeia
• There is, however, some "sound symbolism" in language—
that is, words whose pronunciation suggests the meaning.
• A few words in most languages are onomatopoeic-the
sounds of the words supposedly imitate the sounds of nature.
• The sounds, however, differ from one language to another,
reflecting the particular sound system of the language.
• In English we say cockadoodledoo to represent the rooster's
crow, but in Russian they say kukuriku.
• Sometimes particular sound sequences seem to relate to a particular
concept.

• In English many words beginning with gl relate to sight, such as glare,

glint, gleam, glitter, glossy, glaze, glance, glimmer, glimpse, and glisten.

• However, such words are a very small part of any language, and gl may
have nothing to do with "sight" in another language, or even in other
words in English, such as gladiator, glucose, glory, glycerine, globe, and so
on.

• English speakers know the gl words that relate to sight and those that do
not.
• There are no speakers of English who know all 450,000
words listed in Webster's Third New International
Dictionary.

• Even if there were and that were all they knew, would
they be able to speak and understand the language?

• Even if you learn all the words in a given language by

heart, it would not be enough to speak or form the
simplest phrases or sentences in the language and
understand the speakers of that language.
• No one speaks in isolated words.
• In a foreign country for example, you could search in your
traveler's dictionary for individual words to find out how to
say something like "car—gas—where?"
• A native might understand this question and then point in
the direction of a gas station.
• If you were answered with a sentence, however, you
probably would not understand what was said, because you
would not know where one word ended and another began.
The Creativity of Linguistic Knowledge
• Knowledge of a language enables you to combine words to
form phrases, and phrases to form clauses and sentences.

• No dictionary can list all the possible sentences.

• Knowing a language means being able to produce new

sentences never spoken before and to understand
sentences never heard before.
• The linguist Noam Chomsky refers to this ability as part of
the "creative aspect" of language use.

• On the one hand, any individual speaker who knows a given

language can and do create new sentences in their native
language.

• On the other hand, he can understand new sentences

‘created’/ produced by other speakers.
Contextual knowledge
• Knowing a language includes knowing what sentences are
appropriate in various situations.

• Saying "Hamburger costs $2.00 a pound" after someone has

just stepped on your toe would hardly be an appropriate
response, although it would be possible.
• Knowledge of a language, then, makes it possible to understand and
produce new sentences.

• Few sentences are stored in your brain, to be "pulled out" to fit some
situation or matched with some sentence that you hear.

• Novel sentences never spoken or heard before cannot be in your

memory. Simple memorization of all the possible sentences in a
language is impossible in principle.
If for every sentence in the language a longer sentence can be formed, then there is no
limit to the length of any sentence and therefore no limit to the number of sentences.

In English you can say:

This is the house.

This is the house that Jack built.
This is the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the dog that chased the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt that lay in
the house that Jack built.

It is true that the longer these sentences become, the less likely we would be to hear or
to say them.
• All human languages permit their speakers to form indefinitely
long sentences.

• “Creativity" is a universal property of human language.

• To memorize and store an infinite set of sentences would require

an infinite storage capacity.

• However, the brain is finite, and even if it were not, we could not
store novel sentences.
Knowledge of Sentences and non-sentences
• When you learn a language, you must learn something finite.

• Your vocabulary is finite (however large it may be), and that

can be stored.

• If sentences in a language were formed by putting one word

after another in any order, then knowledge of a language
could simply be a set of words.
You can see that words are not enough by examining the following strings of words:
(1) a. John kissed the little old lady who owned the shaggy dog.
b. Who owned the shaggy dog John kissed the little old lady.
c. John is difficult to love.
d. It is difficult to love John.
e. John is anxious to go.
f. It is anxious to go John.
g. John, who was a student, flunked his exams.
h. Exams his flunked student a was who John.
(2) a. What he did was climb a tree.
b. *What he thought was want a sports car.
c. Drink your beer and go home!
d. *What are drinking and go home?
e. I expect them to arrive a week from next Thursday.
f. *I expect a week from next Thursday to arrive them.
g. Linus lost his security blanket.
h. *Lost Linus security blanket his.
If you choose the same starred sentences as being incorrect/
not allowable, that means that you agree that:

• not all strings of words constitute sentences in a language.

• knowledge of a language determines which are and which

are not.
• In addition to knowing the words of the language, linguistic
knowledge must include "rules" for forming sentences and
making judgments like those you made about the examples
in (1) and (2).

• These rules must be finite in length and finite in number so

that they can be stored in our finite brains.

• Yet they must permit us to form and understand an infinite

set of new sentences.
Linguistic Knowledge and Performance
• Speakers' linguistic knowledge permits them to form longer
and longer sentences by joining sentences and phrases
together or adding modifiers to a noun.

• Very long sentences are theoretically possible, but they are

highly improbable.

• There is a difference between having the knowledge

necessary to produce sentences of a language (competence)
and applying this knowledge (performance).
There is a difference between:

• what you know, which is your linguistic competence

• how you use this knowledge in actual speech production

and comprehension, which is your linguistic
performance.
 When speakers use that knowledge while performing linguistically,
a number of factor can affect this performance:

• there are physiological and psychological reasons that limit the

number of adjectives, adverbs, clauses, and so on.
• They may run out of breath.
• They may lose track of what they have said;
• Errors like slips of the tongue might happen while organizing
our thoughts into strings of words.
These errors are generally involuntary deviations from what
speakers wish to say.
Example
• Dr. Spooner (after whom the word "spoonerism' was coined) once said
to his class:

"You have hissed my mystery lecture and have tasted the whole
worm,"

• His intended meaning is:

"You have missed my history lecture and have wasted the whole
term."

• His slip illustrates the difference between linguistic knowledge and the
way we use that knowledge in performance.
• Linguistic knowledge, for the most part, is not conscious
knowledge.
• The linguistic system-the sounds, structures, meanings,
words, and rules for putting them all together—is learned
subconsciously, with no awareness that rules are being
learned.
• These rules are similar to the physical rules that allow us to
stand, walk, or crawl on all fours, to jump, etc.,
• Knowledge of these rules represents a complex cognitive
system.