“What
is Language”
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
Whatever else people do
when they come together - whether they play, fight, make love, or make
automobiles - they talk. We live in a world of language. We talk to our
friends, our associates, our wives and husbands, our lovers, our teachers, our
parents, our rivals, and even our enemies. We talk to bus drivers and total
strangers. We talk face-to-face and over the telephone, and everyone responds
with more talk. Television and radio further swell this torrent of words.
Hardly a moment of our waking lives is free from words, and even in our dreams
we talk and are talked to. We also talk when there is no one to answer. Some of
us talk aloud in our sleep. We talk to our pets and sometimes to ourselves.
The
possession of language, perhaps more than any other attribute, distinguishes humans
from other animals. To understand our humanity, one must understand the nature of
language that makes. us human. According to the philosophy expressed in the myths
and religions of many peoples, language is the source of human life and power. To
some people of Africa, a newborn child is a kintu, a "thing,"
not yet a muntu, a "person." Only by the act of learning
language does the child become a human being. According to this tradition,
then, we all become "human" because we all know at least one language.
But what does it mean to "know" a language
Linguistic Knowledge
When you know a language, you can speak
and be understood by others who know the 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 referrin: to normal-hearing individuals.
Deaf persons produce and understand sign language just as hearing persons
produce and understand spoken languages. The languages of the deaf communities
throughout the world are, except for their modality of expression equivalent to
spoken languages.
Knowledge of the Sound System
Knowing
the sound system of alanguage includes more than knowing the inventory of
sounds. It includes knowing which sounds may start a word, end a word, and
follow each other. The name of ~ former president of Ghana was Nkrumah,
pronounced with an initial sound like the sound
ending the English word sink. While this is an English sound,
no word in English begins with the nk sound. Speakers of English who
have occasion to pronounce this name, often mispronounce it (by Ghanaian
standards) by inserting a short vowel sound, like Nekrumah
or Enkrumah. Children who learn English recognize that nk
does not begin a word, just as Ghanaian children learn that words in their
language may begin with the nk sound.
Knowing
the sounds and sound patterns in our language constitutes only one part of our linguistic
knowledge. Knowing a language is also to know 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 or pterodactyl. When
you know a language,
you know words
in that language, that is, the sound units that are related to specific
meanings.
Arbitrary Relation of
Form and Meaning
If
you do not know a language, the words (and sentences) will be mainly
incomprehensible, because the relationship between speech sounds and the
meanings they
represent in the
languages of the world is, for the most part, an arbitrary one. You have
to learn, when
you are acquiring the language, 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 :JdaIJ; if you know
Russian, by dom; if you know Spanish, by casa. Similarly, is
represented by hand in English, main in French, nsa in
Twi, and ruka in Russian.
The
Creativity of Linguistic Knowledge
Knowledge
of a language enables you to combine words to form phrases, and phrases
to form
sentences. You cannot buy a dictionary of any language with all its sentences,
because rio
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. Not every speaker of a language can create great
literature, but you, and all persons who know a language, can and do
create new sentences when you speak, and understand new sentences
created by others.
Knowledge of Sentences and Nonsentences
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. 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 putting one word after another in any order always
formed sentences, then language could simply be a set of words.
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. Whether you stop
at three, five,
or eighteen adjectives, it is impossible to limit the number you could add
if desired. Very
long sentences are theoretically possible, but they are highly improbable.
Evidently, there
is a difference between having the knowledge necessary to produce
sentences of a
language, and applying this knowledge. It is a difference between what
you know, which
is your linguistic competence, and how you use this knowledge in actual
speech production
and comprehension, which is your linguistic performance.
What
Is Grammar?
Descriptive Grammars
The
grammar of a language consists of the sounds and sound patterns, the
basic units
of meaning such
as words, and the rules to combine all of these to form sentences with
the desired
meaning. The grammar, then, is what we know. It represents our linguistic
competence. To
understand the nature of language we must understand the nature of
grammar, and in
particular, the internalized, unconscious set of rules that is part of every
grammar of every
language.
Every
human being who speaks a language knows its grammar. When linguists
wish to describe
a language, they attempt to describe the grammar of the language that
exists in the
minds of its speakers. There will be some differences among speakers'
knowledge, but
there must be shared knowledge too. The shared knowledge --the common
parts of the
grammar - makes it possible to communicate through language. To the
extent that the
linguist's description is a true model of the speakers' linguistic capacity,
it is a
successful description of the grammar and of the language itself. Such a model
is
called a descriptive
grammar. It 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.
Prescriptive Crammars
The
views expressed in the preceding section are not those of all grammarians now
or
in the past.
From ancient times until the present, "purists" have believed that
language
change is
corruption, and that there are certain "correct" forms that all
educated people
should use in
speaking and writing. The Greek Alexandrians in the first century, the
Arabic scholars
at Basra in the eighth century, and numerous English grammarians of
the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries held this view. They wished to prescribe rather
than describe
the rules of grammar, which gave rise to the writing of prescriptive
grammars.
Teaching Grammars
The
descriptive grammar of a language attempts to describe everything speakers know
about their
language. It is different from a teaching grammar, which is used to learn
another language
or dialect. Teaching grammars are used in school to fulfill language
requirements.
They can be
helpful to persons who do not speak the standard or prestige dialect,
but find it
would be advantageous socially and economically to do so. Teaching
grammars state
explicitly the rules of the language, list the words and their pronunciations,
and aid in
learning a new language or dialect.
It
is often difficult for adults to learn a second language without being
instructed,
even when living
for an extended period in a country where the language is spoken.
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. The meaning
of a word is
given by providing a gloss - the parallel word in the student's native
language, such
as maison, "house" in French. It is assumed that the student
knows the
meaning of the gloss
"house," and so the meaning of the word maison.
Language
Universals
The
way we are using the word grammar differs from most common usages. In our
sense, the grammar includes everything speakers know about their language – the sound system, called phonology;
the system of meanings, called semantics; the rules word formation,
called morphology; and the rules of sentence formation, called syntax It also, of course, includes
the vocabulary of words - the dictionary or lexicon. Man) people think of the grammar of a language as referring
largely to morphological rule: like
"add -s to third-person singular verbs," or syntactic rules such as
"a sentence con sists of
a subject and a predicate." This is often what students mean when they
talk about their class in "English grammar."
Our
aim is more in keeping with that stated in 1784 by the grammarian John Fell it Essay
towards an English Grammar: "It is certainly the business of a
grammarian (find out, and not to make, the laws of a language." This
business is just what the linguis attempts
- to find out the "laws" of a language, and the laws that pertain to
all Ianguages. Those laws representing the universal properties of all
languages constitute, universal
grammar.
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.
All normal
children acquire (at least one) language in a relatively short period
with apparent
ease. They do this despite the fact that parents and other caregivers do not
provide them
with any specific language instruction. Indeed, it is often remarked that
children seem to
"pick up" language just from hearing it spoken around them. Children
are language
learners par excellence - whether a child is male or female, from a rich
family or a
disadvantaged one, whether she grows up on a farm or in the city, attends day
care or is
home?11 day - none of these factors fundamentally affect the way language
develops. A
child can acquire any language he is exposed to with comparable easeEnglish,
Dutch, French,
Swahili, Japanese -and even though each of these languages
has its own
peculiar characteristics, children learn them all in very much the same way.
For example, all
children start out by using one word at a time.
They
then combine words into simple sentences. When they first begin to combine
words into sentences, certain parts of the sentence may be missing. For
example, the English-speaking twoyear-
old might say Cathy
build house instead of Cathy is building the house. On the
other side of
the world, a Swahili-speaking child will say mbuzi kula majani, which
translates as
"goat eat grass," and which also lacks many required elements. They
pass
through other
linguistic stages on their way to adultlike competence, but by about age
five children
speak a language that is almost indistinguishable from the language of the
adults around
them.
Sign
Languages : Evidence for Language Universals
The
sign languages of deaf communities provide some of the best evidence to suppor!
the notion that
humans are born with the ability to acquire language, and that these languages
are governed by the same universal properties.
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 language
learn it in
stages parallel to those of hearing children learning oral languages. Sigr
ianguages are
human languages that do not use sounds to express meanings. Instead
sign languages
are visual-gestural systems that use hand, body, and facial gestures a~
the forms used
to represent words. Sign languages are fully developed languages, ane
those who know
sign language are capable of creating and comprehending unlimitee numbers of
new sentences, just like speakers of spoken languages.
American
Sign Language
The
major language used by deaf people in the United States is American Sign
Language
(ASL). ASL is a
fully developed language that historically is an outgrowth of the
sign language
used in France and broughtto the United States in 1817 by the great educator
Thomas Hopkins
Gallaudet.
Like
all human languages, ASL has its own grammar. That grammar encompasses
knowledge of the
system of gestures, equivalent to the phonology of spoken languages,8
as well as the
morphological, syntactic, and semantic systems, and a mental lexicon
of signs.
In
the United States there are several signing systems that educators have created
in
an attempt to
represent spoken and/or written English. These artificial languages consist
essentially in
the replacement of each spoken English word (and grammatical elements
such as the s
ending for plurals and the ed endin~ for past tense) by a sign. The syntax
and semantics of
these manual codes for English are thus approximately the same as
those of
ordinary English. The result is unnatural in that it is similar to trying to
speak
French by
translating every English word or ending into its French counterpart. Problems
result because
there are not always corresponding forms in the two languages.
Animal
"Languages”
Is
language the exclusive property of the human species? The idea of talking
animals is
as old and as
widespread among human societies as language itself. All cultures have
legends in which
some animal plays a speaking role. All over West Africa, children listen
to folktales in
whictl a "spider-man" is the hero. "Coyote" is a favorite
figure in
many Native
American tales, and many an animal takes the stage in Aesop's famous fables.
The fictional Doctor
Doolittle's forte was communicating with all manner of animals,
from giant
snails to tiny sparrows.
If
language is viewed only as a system of communication, then many species
communicate.
Humans also use
systems other than language to relate to each other and to
send and receive
"messages," like so-called "body language." The question is
whether
the
communication systems used by other species are at all like human linguistic
knowledge,
which is
acquired by children with no external instruction, and which is used creatively
rather than in
response to internal or external stimuli.
“Talking”
Parrots
Most
humans who acquire language use speech sounds to express meanings, but such
sounds are not a
necessary aspect of language, as evidenced by the sign languages. The
use of speech
sounds is therefore not abasic part of what we have been calling language.
The chirping of
birds, the squeaking of dolphins, and the dancing of bees may potentially
represent
systems similar to human languages. If animal communication systems
are not like
human language, it will not be due to a lack of speech.
Conversely,
when animals vocally imitate human utterances, it does not mean they
possess
language. Language is a system that relates sounds or gestures to meanings.
Talking birds
such as parrots and mynah birds are capable of faithfully reproducing
words and
phrases of human language that they have heard, but their utterances carry no
meaning. They
are speaking neither English nor their own language when they sound
like us.
Talking
hirds do not dissect the sounds of their imitations into discrete units. Polly
and Molly do
not rhyme for a parrot. They are as different as hello and good-bye. One
property of all
human languages (which will be discussed further in chapter 6) is the
discreteness
of the speech or
gestural units, which are ordered and reordered, combined
and split apart.
Generally, a parrot says what it is taught, or what it hears, and no more.
If Polly learns
"Polly wants a cracker" and "Polly wants a doughnut" and
also learns to
imitate the
single words whiskey and bagel, she will not spontaneously
produce, as chil-
.dren do,
"Polly wants whiskey" or "Polly wants a bagel" or
"Polly wants whiskey and
a bagel."
If she learns cat and cats, and dog and dogs, and
then learns the word parrot,
she will be
unable to form the plural parrots as children do by the age of three;
nor can
a parrot form an
unlimited set of utterances from a finite set of units, nor understand
utterances never heard before. Recent reports of an African gray parrot named
Alex
studied by Dr.
Irene M. Pepperberg suggest that new methods of training animals may
result in more
learning than was previously believed possible. When the trainer uses
words in
context, Alex seems to relate some soun~s with their meanings. This is more
than simple
imitation, but it is not how children ac~uire the complexities of the grammar
of any language.
It is more like a dog learning to a~sociate certain sounds with meanings,
such as heel,
sit, fetch, and so on. Alex's ability may go somewhat beyond that. How::;';
er, the ability
to produce sounds similar to those used in human language, even if
meanings are
related to these sounds, cannot be equated with the ability to acquire the
complex grammar
of a human language.
The Birds and
the Bees
Most
animals possess some kind of "signaling" communication system. Among
certain
species of
spiders there is a complex system for courtship. The male spider, before he
approaches his
ladylove, goes through an elaborate series of gestures to inform her that
he is indeed a
spider and a suitable mate, and not a crumb or a fly to be eaten. These
gestures
are invariant.
One never finds a creative spider changing or adding to the courtship
ritual of his
species.
Asimilar
kind of gestural language is found among the fiddler crabs. There are forty
species, and
each uses its own claw-waving movement to signal to another member of
its
"clan." The timing, movement, and posture of the body never change
from one time
to another or
from one crab to another within the particular variety. Whatever the signal
means, it is
fixed. Only one meaning can be conveyed.
The
imitative sounds of talking birds have little in common with human language,
but the calls
and songs of many species of birds do have a communicative function, and
they resemble
human languages in that there may be "dialects" within the same
species.
Birdcalls (consisting
of one or more short notes) convey messages associated with the
immediate
environment, such as danger, feeding, nesting, flocking, and so on. Bird
songs (more
complex patterns of notes) are used to stake out territory and to attract
mates. There is
no evidence of any internal structure to these songs, nor can they be segmented
into
independently meaningful parts as words of human language can be. In a
study of the
territorial song of the European robin,1O it was discovered that the rival
robins paid
attention only to the alternation between high-pitched and low-pitched notes,
and which came
first did not matter. The message varies only to the extent of how
strongly the
robin feels about his possession and to what extent he is prepared to defend
it and start a
family in that territory. The diffClent alternations therefore express
intensity
and nothing
more. The robin is creative in his ability to sing the same thing in many
ways, but not
creative in his ability to use the same units of the system to express many
different
messages with different meanings.
What
We Know About Language
Much
is unknown about the nature of human languages, their grammars and use. The
science of
linguistics is concerned with these questions. Investigations of linguists and
the analyses of
spoken languages date back at least to 1600 B.C.E. in Mesopotamia. We
have learned a
great deal since that time. Anumber of facts pertaining to all languages
can be stated.
1. Wherever
humans exist, language exists.
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. The
relationships between the sounds and meanings of spoken languages and
between the gestures
and meanings of sign languages are for the most part
arbitrary.
5. All
human languages use a finite set of discrete sounds or gestures that are
combined to form
meaningful elements or words, which themselves may be
combined to form
an infinite set of possible sentences.
6. All
grammars contain rules of a similar kind for the formation of words and
sentences.
7. Every
spoken language includes discrete sound segments, like p, n, or a, that
can all be
defined by a finite set of sound properties or features. Every spoken
language has a
class of vowels and a class of consonants.
8. Similar
grammatical categories (for example, noun, verb) are found in all
languages.
9. There
are universal semantic properties like "male" or "female,"
"animate" or
"human,"
found in every language in the world.
10. Every
language has a way of negating, forming questions, issuing commands,
referring to
past or future time, and so on.
11. Speakers
of all languages are capable of producing and comprehending an infinite
set of sentences.
Syntactic universals reveal that every language has a
way of forming
sentences such as:
Linguistics is
an interesting subject.
I know that
linguistics is an interesting subject.
You know that I
know that linguistics is an interesting subject.
Cecelia knows
that you know that I know that linguistics is an interesting
subject.
Is it a fact
that Cecelia knows that you know that I know that linguistics is
an interesting
subject?
12. 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 or
she is exposed.
The differences we find among languages cannot be due to biological
reasons.
It seems that
Alsted and Du Marsais (and we could add many other universalists
from all ages)
were not spinning idle thoughts. We all possess human language.
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