Language
- 1. (LANGUAGE) - Applied Linguistics- Yudi Rahmatullah Universtas Mathla’ul Anwar
- 2. 1. What is language? • a system of communication consisting of sounds, words and grammar, or the system of communication used by the people of a particular country or profession • According to the philosophy expressed in the myths and religions of many peoples, language is the source of human life and power. • Most everyone knows at least one language
- 3. 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. The languages of the deaf communities throughout the world are equivalent to spoken languages. Knowledge of the Sound System • knowing a language means knowing what sounds are in that language and what sounds are not. • Knowing the sound system of a language includes more than knowing the inventory of sounds. It means also knowing which sounds may start a word, end a word, and follow each other.
- 4. Knowledge of Words • Knowing a language means also knowing that certain sequences of sounds signify certain concepts or meanings. When you know a language, you know words in that language, that is, which sequences of sounds are related to specific meanings and which are not. You also know that toy and boy are words, but moy is not. the relationship between speech sounds and the meanings they represent is an arbitrary one. • Many signs were originally like miming, where the relationship between form and meaning is not arbitrary.
- 5. • sound symbolism in language—that is, words whose pronunciation suggests the meaning. Most languages contain onomatopoeic words like buzz or murmur that imitate the sounds associated with the objects or actions they refer to. cock-a-doodle-doo is an onomatopoeic word whose meaning is the crow of a rooster.
- 6. 2. The Creativity of Linguistic Knowledge • Knowledge of a language enables you to combine sounds to form words, words to form phrases, and phrases to form sentences. • Knowing a language means being able to produce new sentences never spoken before and to understand sentences never heard before. • … everybody who knows a language can and does create new sentences when speaking and understands new sentences created by others (Chomsky)
- 7. Knowledge of Sentences and Non-sentences • If sentences were formed simply by placing one word after another in any order, then a language could be defined simply as a set of words. • linguistic knowledge includes rules for forming sentences and making the kinds of judgments you made about. These rules must be finite in length and finite in number so that they can be stored in our finite brains.
- 8. Linguistic Knowledge and Performance • Our linguistic knowledge permits us to form longer and longer sentences by joining sentences and phrases together or adding modifiers to a noun. • having the knowledge to produce sentences of a language; linguistic competence and applying this knowledge in actual speech production and comprehension; linguistic performance.
- 9. What Is Grammar? • the grammar is the knowledge speakers have about the units and rules of their language. • descriptive grammar does not tell you how you should speak; it describes your basic linguistic knowledge. It explains how it is possible for you to speak and understand, and it tells what you know about the sounds, words, phrases, and sentences of your language.
- 10. • Prescriptive grammars prescribe rather than the rules of grammar. The goal is not to tell the people what rules they should follow. E.g enormity to mean “enormous” instead of “monstrously.
- 11. Teaching Grammars • teaching grammar is used to learn another language. • Teaching grammars are used in schools in foreign language classes or dialect. • This kind of grammar gives the words and their pronunciations, and explicitly states the rules of the language, especially where they differ from the language of instruction.
- 12. 1. Teaching grammars assume that the student already knows one language and compares the grammar of the target language with the grammar of the native language. 2. Sounds of the target language that do not occur in the native language are often described by reference to known sounds.
- 13. Language Universals • There are rules of particular languages, such as English, Swahili, and Zulu, that form part of the individual grammars of these languages, and then there are rules that hold in all languages. Those rules representing the universal properties that all languages share constitute a universal grammar. • Chomsky’s view that there is a Universal Grammar (UG) that is part of the biologically endowed human language faculty. We can think of UG as the basic blueprint that all languages follow.
- 14. The Development of Grammar • Linguistic theory is concerned not only with describing the knowledge that an adult speaker has of his or her language, but also with explaining how that knowledge is acquired. • children learn the language in very much the same way; babbling stage, words, simple sentences. • Chomsky said that human beings are born with an innate “blueprint” for language, referred as Universal Grammar
- 15. • Children acquire language as quickly and effortlessly as they do because they do not have to figure out all the grammatical rules, only those that are specific to their particular language. • Linguistic theory aims to uncover those principles that characterize all human languages and to reveal the innate component of language that makes language acquisition possible.
- 16. Sign Languages: • Because deaf children are unable to hear speech, they do not acquire spoken languages as hearing children do. However, deaf children who are exposed to sign languages acquire them just as hearing children acquire spoken languages. • Sign languages do not use sounds to express meanings. Instead, they are visual gestural systems that use hand, body, and facial gestures as the forms used to represent words and grammatical rules.
- 17. • Sign languages are fully developed languages, and signers create and comprehend unlimited numbers of new sentences, just as speakers of spoken languages do. • American Sign Language (ASL) is an outgrowth of the sign language used in France and brought to the United States in 1817 by the great educator Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet. • Like all languages, ASL has its own grammar with phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic rules, and a mental lexicon of signs, all of which is encoded through a system of gestures, and is otherwise equivalent to spoken languages.
- 18. • Deaf children acquire sign language much in the way that hearing children acquire a spoken language, going through the same linguistic stages including the babbling stage. • Sign languages resemble spoken languages in all major aspects, showing that there truly are universals of language despite differences in the modality in which the language is performed.
- 19. Animal “Languages” • The chirping of birds, the squeaking of dolphins, and the dancing of bees may potentially represent systems similar to human languages. • Most animals possess some kind of “signaling” communication system
- 20. • Language is a system that relates sounds or gestures to meanings. Conversely, when animals vocally imitate human utterances, it does not mean they possess language. Talking birds are capable of faithfully reproducing words and phrases of human language that they have heard, but their utterances carry no meaning.
- 21. Can Chimps Learn Human Language? • In their natural habitat, chimpanzees, gorillas, and other nonhuman primates communicate with each other through visual, auditory, olfactory, and tactile signals. Many of these signals seem to have meanings associated with the animals’ immediate environment or emotional state. • The chimps were unable to vocalize words despite the efforts of their caretakers, though they did achieve the ability to understand a number of individual words.
- 22. • One disadvantage suffered by primates is that their vocal tracts do not permit them to pronounce many different sounds. Because of their manual dexterity, primates might better be taught sign language as a test of their cognitive linguistic ability.
- 23. The Origin of Language • Despite the difficulty of finding scientific evidence, speculations on language origin have provided valuable insights that Although myths, customs, and superstitions do not tell us very much about language origin, they do tell us about the importance ascribed to language. There is no way to prove or disprove the divine origin of language, just as one cannot argue scientifically for or against the existence of deities.
- 24. Language and Thought • Many people are fascinated by the question of how language relates to thought. • language would influence how we think about or perceive the world around us. • Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is called linguistic determinism because it holds that the language we speak determines how we perceive and think about the world.
- 25. • linguistic relativism, which says that different languages encode different categories and that speakers of different languages therefore think about the world in different ways. Languages also differ in how they express locations. • That languages show linguistic distinctions in their lexicons and grammar is certain