LINGUISTICS AND

COMMUNICATION
AN EXAMINATION OF THE SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE
• Language is a set of organized complex sounds that is
meaningful and attributed only to the human species used
for communicative purposes.
• Humans communicate to express ideas, feelings and
thoughts to others.
• It is an important tool to unravel our social life, when the
language used in the context of communication, blends
with its culture.
• That human language is organized means that it is made
up of a patterned system of sound signals. It came into
existence because of the needs of people to interact with
one another for survival purposes in social groups.
Understanding the words of a language and how they are
used is essential in order to establish effective
communication. Oral communication is primary to language
use because all written languages existed in the spoken
form before the development of its orthography (writing
pattern).
Noam Chomsky (1928), an American linguist, one of the
founders of cognitive science states that the ability to use
language is innately endowed on humans at birth. He
proposes that a child when born and exposed to any living
language has the ability to acquire that language because
he/she possesses the cognitive ability whereby the brain is
wired at birth with the Language Acquisition Device (LAD).
Bertrand Russell (Logical Atomism)
• His theory of language posits that the primary function of
language is to represent facts. Thus, a proposition will be
true if it corresponds to a fact and false if not.
• Logical Atomism is his conviction that the logical analysis
of language would show it consisted of a relatively small
number of irreducible, ‘atomistic’ linguistic units that
would, of necessity, correspond to the basic entities
within the world.
• He believes that many confusions we encounter in
reasoning and expressions are as a result of confusions
about our ordinary language.
• The task we all have therefore is to do a reformulation of
our ordinary language statements in terms of an ideal
• The ideal language has two purposes; ‘First, to prevent
inferences from the nature of language to the nature of the
world, which are fallacious because they depend upon logical
defects of language; secondly, to suggest, by inquiring what
logic requires of a language which is to avoid contradiction,
what sort of structure we may reasonably suppose the world
to have.’
• 1a) There is a fire in my kitchen
• 2a) My kitchen is in my house
• 3a) Therefore, there is a fire in my house

• 1b) There is a pain in my foot

• 2b) My foot is in my shoe
Ludwig Wittgenstein (picture theory of
language)
• His picture theory of language says, just as Bertrand
Russell, that the function of a language is to represent
states of affairs in the world.
• A proposition has a sense if it describes a specific,
possible situation within the world; otherwise, it is
meaningless.
• However, he differs from Russell because of his belief in
mysticism.
• He believes there is something that transcends the limits
of language and that he calls the mystical. He believes
certain things cannot be put into words for they make
themselves manifest especially the realm of ethical and
spiritual values.
Characteristics of human language
• Social tool: Language as a set of conventional
communicative signals is used by humans for
communication in any speech community. That is why we
said that it exists in social groups. Therefore, language
exists in society as a tool for nourishing and developing
culture and establishing human relations.
• Productivity/creativity: Human beings have a creative
linguistic capacity, as a result they are able to understand,
create and renew utterances. People have the ability to
produce an endless number of sentences and expressions
that have never been heard before. Language changes
according to the needs of society and with that the
vocabulary is enlarged as new words are introduced into
the languages.
• Displacement: With the use of words and expressions
humans can discuss objects which are not located within their
immediate vicinity. Activities that have passed or those that
are still to hold in the future can be expressed with the use of
human language. Language pattern and structure is tailored to
suit whatever circumstance humans want to describe.
• Duality: The human language cannot be interpreted based on
the component sound of that language. This implies that the
sounds and the words they represent do not have any direct
relationship. The property of being dual means that the
individual units of sounds are combined together to derive
meaningful words in human languages. For instance, /t/, /ᴂ/,
/ɪ/, /b/, /e/, /l/, /ɲ/, are individual sounds which when combined
can yield different meaningful words such as /teɪbl/ ‘table’,
/tᴂblet/ ‘tablet’, /ᴂɲɪ/ anyị Igbo ‘we’ (first person plural).
• Arbitrary: Language is arbitrary in the sense that there is no
inherent relation between the words of a language and their
meanings or the ideas conveyed by them. There is no reason
why a female adult human being is called a woman in English,
aurat in Urdu, zen in Persian, nǚ in Chinese, nwányì in Igbo and
femme in French. The choice of a word selected to mean a
particular thing or idea is purely arbitrary but once a word is
selected for a particular referent, it comes to stay as such. It may
be noted that had language not been arbitrary, there would have
been only one language in the world.
• Vocal: Language symbols are vocalized. This is the primary form
of language while the secondary form is the written orthography.
• Language changes: We live in a changing world and so with this
comes a change in the language of use. We cannot possibly think
in terms of a static state of affairs in language or anything else.
How does human language differ
from animals’ modes of
communication?
creative linguistic capacity which is lacking in animals. With
this human beings are able to understand, create and
renew utterances they come across in daily activities. This
cannot be attributed to animals.
Humans use sounds that can be represented with
systematic symbols which are otherwise for the animals.
Humans’ sound systems are arbitrary in nature.
Language is not genetically transmitted, therefore one is
not restricted to the use of only his/her mother tongue but
animals cannot operate with such level of operational
diversity.
Duality and displacement are extremely rare in the animal
world.
Functions of language
• Language is communicative: Primarily the function of language is for
communication from which other secondary functions are branched out. Through the
communicative mode people can relay their thoughts, feelings, and perceptions from
their inward and outward state to others in the form of pain, sorrows, joy, distress,
prosperity, hardship and so on. Therefore, language serves the expressive function
for communicative purposes.
• The interpretive function: Communication is a dual channel activity. It has a
sender (speaker) and the receiver (hearer) and this passes through a medium.
Before a message goes out to the receiver, it passes through a mental processing
stage which happens in the brain of the speaker. Here, the speaker being the
initiator of the speech process ensures that the information is properly coded with
the right words with which to express his idea to the hearer. On getting the message,
the receiver (hearer) prepares himself to respond to the information, which he has to
interpret firstly before acting on the message by generating his/her ideas, then these
ideas - after formulating and reconstructing them - turn into reactions, or into
another message where the speaker turns into a listener, and the listener becomes a
speaker, and the message rotates between the speaker and the listener until the
dialogue ends. If at any point, the receiver fails to interpret and understand the
message, the interpretive function loses its value, the communication link between
the speaker and the receiver becomes truncated, thereby rendering the message
• Language is expressive: This function alone is not
sufficient for the functioning of the communication process,
so the interpretive function must be synergistic with it in
order for the process to be carried out without any form of
interruption. This is paramount so that the message will be
meaningful to the listener. If the listener is unable to
interpret and understand the message, the interpretive
function loses its value, the communication link between the
speaker and the listener is cut off, and the message
becomes meaningless.
• Language can be personalized: Through language, the
individual can express his unique visions, feelings and
attitudes towards many topics. Through his use of language,
he can present his ideas to others, and prove his identity
Some Merits of learning a second
language
• Mastering a second language improves the cognitive ability of the
human brain, because one tends to reason in the culture of the
people whose language he/she is speaking thereby enlarging his/her
horizon.
• Improvement on career or workplace development, this is because
many institutions and companies want to be international in business
which appears to require multilingual employees
• Learning a second language improves people's understanding of the
world because they learn about various cultures, be more attractive
to people, make new friends and see the world from a different
perspective
• Second language learning creates in a person a broader intellectual
capacity, and it also enables a person to develop his thinking and
move it from simple and naive ideas to more complex and deep
ideas.
Linguistics

• It simply means the scientific study of language, which

include the study of language structure as well as its
history and use.
• Branches of Linguistics: Core areas for the study of
language as a science are phonology, morphology, syntax
and semantics. These branches of linguistics are associated
with sounds and sound patterns, word patterns, sentence
structure as well as the meaning associated with them.
• Phonology: It is the study of more complex and abstract
sound patterns and structures that make up the language.
In other words, it studies how sounds are organized in a
given language, including the rules guiding such
organization.
• Morphology: At the level of morphology, the structure of
words (the level of grammar that handles words) are
studied. It also involves the study of morphemes and how
they are combined for the formation of words. Morphemes
are the smallest utterances with meaning. Not all
morphemes are words. Many languages use affixes, which
carry specific grammatical meanings and are therefore
morphemes, but are not words. For example, English-
speakers do not think of the suffix “-ing” as a word, but it is
a morpheme.
• Semantics: It is the area of linguistics that studies
meaning. It can be at the word level (lexical semantics) or
the sentence level (sentential semantics). Meaning in
linguistics also involves the context, situation, and usage
• Syntax: This is the level that studies the arrangement and
order of words (lexical items) into phrases and the phrases
into sentences. Languages have sentences with different
word orders, this concerns which lexical item comes first in
the sentence. For instance, if the sentence order is
Subject, Verb, Object (SVO) it implies that the subject of
the sentence precedes the verb then followed by the
object. This is very common with languages such as
English, Igbo, Yoruba and others. Other sentence patterns
are OSV, VSO, VOS, VSO. Syntax is the study of rules and
principles for constructing sentences in natural languages.
Global application of linguistics
• Computational linguistics – It is an area in linguistics that involves
designing and developing programs with the computer to carry out
linguistic tasks. These programs are based mainly on methods
developed by computer scientists, but they use linguistic knowledge
developed by linguists. So computational linguistics integrates ideas
from linguistics and computer science. Pushing the envelope of
linguistic theory, applications of computational linguistics have yielded
practical tools that can benefit society tremendously. Most people who
use computers are familiar with tools such as spelling and grammar
checkers, as well as Web search engines such as Google, without
realizing that they involve aspects of computational linguistics (Mani &
Mackey: 2006).
• Applied linguistics: This entails applying linguistics theories
to real-life situations as are obtainable in fields such as
language education, translation, or language policy. For
example, an applied linguist may also carry out research in
first and second language acquisition in order to figure out
effective and efficient ways to teach language in a school
setting.

• Clinical linguistics: It blends the knowledge of linguistics

theories, concepts and methods towards solving speech
related disorders. Here the disorder can be as a result of
breakdown from one or more of the language components.
Hence there is a breakdown in communication.
Further Readings

• Chomsky, N. (1986). Knowledge of language: its nature, origin and

use. New York: Praeger.
• Mani, I & Mackey, A. (2006). An introduction to language and
linguistics. Fasold, R. W. & Connor-Linton, J (eds.). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
• Rabiah, Sitti (2012). Language as a tool for communication and
cultural reality discloser https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1690-0025
• Chaman L. B. & Jyonica S. (2015). Role of language in human life,
International Journal of English Language, Literature and Humanities.
ISSN 2321 7065, 180 – 195
• Language Vs. Communication: They are not the Same Thing.

https://www.ilstranslations.com/blog/language-vs-communication-theyre
-not-the-same-thing/