Lecture 1

Lecture 1

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What is language?
How is Urdu different from English?

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 Language is very important in human society.

The Urdu language is different from the English

language. Your language is familiar to me. This is not the language of working-class people.

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Definition of Language
Sapir (1921:7) in Language:
Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of voluntarily produced symbols.

Mario Pei and Frank Gaynor (1954) in A Dictionary of Linguistics:

Language is a system of communication by sound, i.e., through the organs of speech and hearing, among human beings of a certain group or community, using vocal symbols possessing arbitrary conventional meanings.
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Definition of Language
Jack et al.(1985) in Longman Dictionary of Applied Linguistics:
Language is the system of human communication by means of a structured arrangement of sounds (or their written representation) to form larger units, e.g. morphemes, words, sentences.

Hadumod Bussmann (1996) in Routledge Dictionary of

Language and Linguistics:

Language is a vehicle for the expression or exchange of thoughts, concepts, knowledge, and information as well as the fixing and transmission of experience and knowledge. It is based on cognitive processes, subject to societal factors and subject to historical change and development.

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Features
Language Is Systematic Language Is Symbolic Arbitrariness Language Is Primarily Vocal Language Is Human Specific Language Is Used for Communication

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Language is Systematic
In natural verbal communication, people can learn and use a

language consistently. This shows that language is systematic. Each human language is organized into two basic systems: a system of sounds and a system of meanings. Sounds are units which combine to make words or parts of words, like bed, reason, un- and -tion. These units will enter in systematic ways into various combinations to form larger meaningful sequences, like complex words, phrases, or sentences. Different sequences of sounds have difference in meaning. Human language operates on two levels of structure.

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 In a language we can find agreed-upon sound-

meaning relations and agreed-upon sequences. This means that there is a set of organizing principles that control any system of language. These principles can be called rules. I saw the bank/I bank saw the. slid and snid as possible words, but not znid or sntd.

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Language is Symbolic
Signs are ubiquitous in human society. To study

language, we need to find out the location of language in sign systems and understand, among other things, the relationship between an object and the sign that stands for the object. Signs can be categorized into three major types. Icon Index symbol
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 Icon: an object and its sign are

related to each other by a physical resemblance. Index: an object and its sign are associated to each other by physical proximity. Symbol: a sign and the object it signifies are associated by social convention. The icon and index, and the objects they stand for have concrete reality. In contrast, the concrete symbol can be used to represent things that are real or imaginary.

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Language is Symbolic
We say language is a symbolic system in the sense that

there is no or little connection between the sounds that people use and the objects to which these sounds refer. Words are associated with objects, actions and ideas by social convention. Without the symbolic signs of language, we can not talk about anything as we like.

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Arbitrariness
Arbitrariness does not mean that everything about

language is unpredictable but that human languages use neutral symbols. The forms of linguistic signs bear no natural resemblance to their meaning. The link between them is a matter of convention, and conventions differ radically across languages.

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Arbitrariness
The fact that there is no natural connection between the

form of words and their meanings makes it possible for different communities to use language to organize and categorize their experience of the world.

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Language is Primarily Vocal

The primary medium of language is sound. No matter how well developed are their writing systems, all languages

use sounds. Our knowledge of the continued existence of preliterate societies, language acquisition by children, and historical records tells us that writing is based on speaking. Writing systems are attempts to capture sounds and meanings on paper. Moreover, writing can influence speaking.

Which is the more important, speech or writing? Verbal communication can involve various forms.

There are speech, writing, sign language, and so on. Why are speech and writing the most common?
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 Generally speaking, there are five major reasons for

claiming that language is primarily vocal. a. Children learn to speak before they learn to read and write. b. Children automatically learn a language as they grow up. c. The spoken form came earlier than the written in human history. d. Writing is based on speech. e. People use spoken language more often than writing.
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 As we all know, the English written by Shakespeare and

Milton is more worthy of preservation than is a verbal argument in a bar. Furthermore, writing serves a useful function in extending language beyond the limitation of time and space. Most written language is more highly polished than speech. In some countries the spoken and written forms of the language may show great differences, such as classical Latin and the language actually spoken during the Roman Empire.
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Language is human specific

The claim that language is human specific implies that

there are certain characteristics of human language that are not found in the communication systems of any other species. Although birds, bees, wolves, dolphins and most other animals communicate in some way, they convey limited information and only emit emotions such as fear, and warnings. Animal communication is stimulus-bound while human language is not. Experiments to teach animals more complicated systems have a history of failure.
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 The first experiment was

made in the 1930s by Prof and Mrs. Kellogg, who raised their infant son together with an infant chimpanzee named Gua. Gua was brought up as if she was a human baby, and was continuously exposed to speech. Finally Gua eventually managed to understand the meaning of over seventy single words, but never spoke.
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 Gua understood about 100 words at sixteen months,

more words than their son at that age. But she never went beyond that. When their son could understand the difference between I say what I mean and I mean what I say, Gua could not understand what either sentence meant. Gua showed clearly that it was not just lack of opportunity which prevents a chimp from learning language. The Kelloggs' son Donald, who was brought up alongside Gua and was approximately the same age, grew up speaking normally.
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 "Talking" birds such as parrots are capable

of faithfully reproducing words and phrases of human language. Some time ago, a grey parrot could apparently say "Good morning" and "Good evening" at the right times, and "Goodbye" when guests left. In the 1970s, a grey parrot named Alex, after careful training, could label more than thirty objects, such as grape, chair, key, carrot; even colours such as blue, yellow, purple; and five shapes such as triangle, square. He could also respond to questions asking whether colours and shapes are the same or different. However, a parrot says what it is taught, or what is hears, and no more.
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 Human language is generally said to be different from

animal communication in the following aspects. First, one of the most important characteristics of language is the ability to refer to things far removed in time and space. However, most animals have a fixed number of signals which convey a set number of messages and sent in clearly definable circumstances. Second, humans have the ability to produce and understand an indefinite number of novel utterances. Observations of animal communication have shown that the kind of creativity is lacking in animals.

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 Third, learning is much more important as a factor in human

language than in animal communication. When learning English, a native speaker of Chinese has to learn all the details that distinguish English from Chinese. The communication dance of bees, by way of contrast, is innately specified in its entirety.
Fourth, language is complex in its structure. In fact, a bee's dance or

a chimpanzee's cry has no internal structure. Whatever animals express through sounds seems to reflect not a logical sequence of thoughts but a sequence accompanying a series of emotional states.

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 Fifth, animal communication systems are closed,

whereas human languages are open-ended. Words and fixed phrases are continually being coined and borrowed from other languages to meet the changing communicative needs of speakers. There is no counterpart to this in animal communication. Finally, humans can perform acts with language just as they can with objects of different kinds.

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Language is used for communication

Through language we can do things animals cannot.

Language allows us to talk about anything to each other within their realm of knowledge and express our communicative purposes. We can use language to live, work, and play together. We can also use language to tell the truth or to tell a lie. Moreover, language enables us to communicate our general attitudes toward life and others, and create what the anthropologist Malinowski called "a phatic communion".

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Functions of Language
Language is not a self-contained system, but as entirely

dependent on the society in which it is used. We must study meaning with reference to an analysis of the functions of language in any given culture. Three major functions of language are: 1. the pragmatic function: language as a form of action; 2. the magical function: language as a means of control over environment; 3. the phatic function: language as a means to help establish and maintain social relations.
What can language do for you?

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 Language enables humans to do many things, thus

serving different functions in the society. Finch (1998) lists seven general (micro) functions: Physiological function Phatic function Recording function Identifying function Reasoning function Communicating function Pleasure function
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 Physiological Function
Language can help get rid of nervous or physical energy. This function is also known as the "emotive" or "expressive" function of language. There are many emotive utterances in our daily life, such as our expression of fear and affection, our involuntary verbal reactions to beautiful things.

Phatic Function
Language can serve the function of creating or maintaining social relationship between speakers.
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 Recording Function

Language allows us 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. Identifying Function Language also allows us to identify, with considerable precision, an enormous array of objects and events. Without language, it would be very difficult to make sense of the world around us.
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 Reasoning Function
This function refers to the fact that much of our thinking is done with words or, to be more precise, in words. So, language is commonly regarded as a tool of thought.

Communicating Function
Language is a means of communicating ideas and facts. In human society, people need to understand and be understood, to have their feelings and ideas recognized and acknowledged.

Pleasure Function
Language allows us to derive pleasure from it. A large part of the pleasure we derive from language comes from the successful exploitation of linguistic novelty at different levels of the language. Advertisers exploit this capacity just much as poets and novelists.
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The Origin of Language Biologists, anthropologists,

psychologists, neurologists, and linguists have done a wide range of studies in the origin of language. Some have looked at the problem of whether primitive man had the physiological capacity to speak. The reports show that the human vocal tract evolved from a non-human primate form to facilitate efficient communication.

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 Some hold that learning to use tools and learning language are interrelated

skills. With the development of the human society, man learned to use tools by hand and tools promoted the development of speech, because learning involved language.

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 All religions and mythologies contain stories of

language origin. Scholarly works have been written on the subject. Various theories have been suggested with regards to the origin of language. The majority of these theories can be grouped under three broad categories. creation (or divine origin) evolutionary development invention

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creation (or divine origin)

Almost every religion has stories about how man received

language from God. The divine origin theorists propose that in the beginning there was one language from one source, which later became corrupted into many languages. In the book of Genesis, the Lord God created many things and brought them to the man; and what so ever the man called every living creature, that was the name thereof According to Judeo-Christian beliefs, God endowed Adam with the ability to name all the animals. According to this tradition everyone spoke the same language until the destruction of the Tower of Babel, after which there was a diffusion of different tongues.
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 Similar beliefs can be found throughout the world.

According to the Egyptians, the creator of speech was the god Thoth. For the Babylonians, the language giver was the god Nabu. According to the Hindus, we owe our unique language ability to a female god; Brahama was the creator of the universe, but language was given to us by his wife, Sarasvati. However, it is impossible for man to name things without acquiring language. The belief in the divine origin of language and its magical properties is also manifested by the fact that in many religions only special language may be used in prayers and rituals.
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evolution
Those who believe in evolutionary theory tend to

believe that man evolved from lower forms of life. Language, too, evolved, as an adjunct to early communication (pointing, gesturing, grunting, imitation of animal sounds, etc.). Various languages have been proposed as that first spoken by man. The evolutionists contend that there were in the beginning many concurrent developed languages which over time merged so that language show some similarities.
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invention
Invention theory sees the origin of language in the

imitation of natural sounds and seeks to explain the correspondence between sound and meaning. Proponents of invention theory believe that there is a natural connection between the forms of language and the essence of things. They believe that somehow there was a council meeting at which people gave the "correct" and natural names to everything on earth. They pointed to onomatopoetic words and suggested that these form the basis of language, or at least the core of the basic vocabulary.
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 A similar view states that language at first consisted of

emotional ejaculations of pain, fear, surprise, pleasure, anger, and so on. The earliest manifestations of language were "cries of nature" that man shared with animals. Both emotive cries and gestures were used by man, but gestures proved to be too inefficient for communication, and so man invented language. It was out of the natural cries that man constructed words. The rather simple-minded nature of such a theory earned its names such as "bow-wow" and "ding-dong." If such a theory were correct, one would ask, why speakers of different languages do not use similar sounds (words) to describe identical objects or emotions.
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Language Families
The term the language family is used to account for the historical

relationships between languages. Since the end of the 18th century, scholars have been comparing groups of languages in a systematic and detailed way, to see whether there were any relationships between them. The comparison came from the assumption that languages developed from a common source. By the beginning of the 19th century, there was convincing evidence that there was once a language from which many of the languages of Eurasia have derived. This proto-language came to be called Proto-Indo-European. Soon the techniques were used to examine other groups of languages.

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Language Families
Yet, it is difficult for linguists to tell you the exact number

of languages that are spoken in the world today, though the reasonable estimate would be around 4000.

First, linguistic study is insufficiently given to many

parts of the world. Second, it is very difficult in many cases to decide whether two related linguistic varieties should be considered different languages or merely different dialects of the same language. Third, many languages are on the verge of extinction.
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Language Families
Why have some languages in the world disappear?
Does Japanese and Chinese belong to the same

language family?

Usually, there are two main ways of classifying

languages: Genetic Classification Typological Classification

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Genetic Classification
This is a historical classification, based on the

assumption that languages have diverged from a common ancestor. To anyone who knows several languages, some languages are closer to one another than are others. A specific hypothesis was proposed that where language share some set of features in common, these features are to be attributed to their common ancestor.

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Typological Classification
This is based on a comparison of the formal

similarities which exist between languages. It is an attempt to group languages into structural types, on the basis of phonology, grammar, or vocabulary, rather than in terms of any real or assumed historical relationship.

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Language Families
However, many achievements have been made in the

classification of languages. According to Crystal (1987), Afro-Asiatic Algonquian Altaic Andean-in the world. Australian there are at least 29 languages families
Equatorial AustroAsiatic Eskimo-Aleut Japanese Austronesian Ge-Pano-Carib Khoisan Aztec-Tanoan Hokan Korean Caucasian Indo-European Macro-Chibchan Aboriginal Dravidian Indo-Pacific Macro-Siouan

Na-Den
Penutian

Niger-Congo
Sino-Tibetan

Nilo-Saharan
Thai

Oto-Manguean
Uralic

Palaeosiberian

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 Indo-European is the largest family that covers most of

Europe and North India, and as a result of the European expansion by land and overseas in the modern world Indo-European languages predominate in North and South America (English, Spanish and Portuguese), and in Australasia (English). The Sino-Tibetan family includes Chinese and its numerous dialects, Burmese, and some Southeast Asian languages. Thanks to the billion or so Chinese speakers, this family actually has more speakers than Indo-European.
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 Korean is spoken by about

60 million people in North and South Korea, China, Japan and Russia. The earliest records of Korean date back to the 12th century, written in Chinese characters. Japanese is mainly spoken by about 120 million people on the islands of Japan. The first written records of Japanese date back to the early 8th century, using Chinese characters.
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Linguistics
Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching & Applied

Linguistics defines linguistics as the study of language as a system of human communication. Chomsky defines linguistics as principally concerned with the universals of the human mind. He considers linguistics as a branch of cognitive psychology. However, Chomsky's definition takes the forms of languages as evidence of language universals without considering how these forms function in communication and the conduct of social life in different communities.

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Linguistics
The study of language in the Western world is not at all new; it goes back many centuries to Greek and Roman antiquity and biblical times. Linguistics as an independent field of study, a university discipline with different specializations within in and areas of application, with its own professional organizations, journals, and scholarly meetings, is a creation of the twentieth century, and more specially a phenomenon of the period after World War II.
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Linguistics
In the past twentieth century, the scientific emphasis has

gradually shifted from the study of speech sounds (phonetics and phonology) to grammar (morphology and syntax) then to meaning (semantics) and the study of texts (discourse analysis). Linguists have of course always been aware of the fact that in language all aspects are involved, namely, psychology, society, cognition.

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Langue and Parole

Langue the abstract system, a collective body of knowledge, a kind of common reference manual, acquired by all members of a community of speakers. Parole the particular actualities of individual utterance, the contingent executive side of things, the relatively superficial behavioural reflexes of knowledge, the use of language in utterances.

It has long been taken for granted by some linguists that the object of linguistic study is not principally the mass of individual utterances, parole, but the underlying system, langue, shared by all the speakers of the language as a first language or of the variety of the language under investigation.

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Prescriptive and descriptive

Linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive. However, prescriptivism

prefers one variety of language to the others. It prescribes rules of that is correct. To prescriptivists, the duty of grammarians, schoolmasters and dictionary makers is to maintain some absolute standard of correctness. Any deviations from the rules are said to be incorrect or nonstandard. So, the prescriptive approach relies heavily on rules of grammar.

It is quite wrong to carelessly split infinitives.

And you should never begin a sentence with a

conjunction. But who (else) begins sentences with conjunctions?

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Prescriptive and descriptive

On the contrary, descriptivism claims that the linguist's

first task is to describe the way people actually speak and write their language, not to prescribe how they ought to speak and write. Linguistics describes data observed. Linguists are interested in what is said, not what they think ought to be said. They are observers and recorders, not judges. As we know, with the passage of time, all languages are subject to change. All living languages are there to serve the different social needs of the communities that use them. As these needs change, languages will tend to change to meet the new situations.
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Speech and Writing

Linguists regard the spoken language as primary, not the

written. In the past, because it was difficult to cope with fleeting utterances before the sound recording, grammarians and the traditional classical education overstressed the importance of the written word. The belief in the superiority of the written word has continued for over two millennia. It was assumed that spoken language was inferior to and in some sense dependent upon the standard written language. People insisted on following language used by the best authors of classical times. Spoken language was regarded as formless and featureless. The sentences are brief and contain many mistakes, hesitations and silences.
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Synchronic and diachronic

In linguistic study, we can either look at a grammar at one

particular point of time, or we can study its development over a number of years. The diachronic study refers to the description of the historical development of a language. For instance, a diachronic study of the Chinese language might look at its development from the time of our earliest records to the present day. The synchronic study refers to the description of a particular state of a language at a single point of time. It is impossible to have a clear understanding of language changes without the analysis of language at a single point in time and the knowledge of how a system works at any one time.
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Syntagmatic and paradigmatic

In doing linguistic inquiry the linguist is concerned

with two major types of relationship. One is paradigmatic relation, which refers to oppositions which produce distinct and alternative terms (foot as opposed to feet). The other is syntagmatic relation, which refers to the relations between units which combine to form sequences. At the level of word structure we also find both relationship. For example, in such contexts as a of milk, the word pint contracts paradigmatic relations with such other words as bottle, cup, gallon, etc., and syntagmatic relations with paradigmatic with a, of and milk.
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Competence and performance

The concepts of competence and performance were proposed by Chomsky.
Competence refers to the knowledge that native

speakers have of their language as system of abstract formal relations. Performance refers to what we do when we speak or listen, that is, the infinite varied individual acts of verbal behaviour with their irregularities, inconsistencies and errors.
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Form and Function

The functional approach centers on linguistic explanation

based on language's function in a larger context. The formalist approach insists on a sharp division between a synchrony and diachrony and between competence and performance. It values maximally general analyses with minimal number of types of primitives and places a higher value on formal syntactic analysis over semantic, pragmatic, discourse explanation. It also relies heavily on introspective data. To the classic formalist, language is a synchronically closed system which must be explained from within.
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Linguistic Inquiry
The expansion of knowledge in so many directions has led,

since the 1930s down to the present, to several attempts to make synthesis and to develop a unified theory of language. Several schools of thought have emerged round a few prominent linguists such as Firth, Halliday, Hjelmslev and Chomsky, major centers of linguistic study like Prague School, Geneva School, Copenhagen School, and leading concepts such as structuralism, functionalism, tagmemics, systemic functional grammar, transformational generative grammar, speech act theory.

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Thank you

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