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1、Chapter One Invitations to Linguistics,2,1.What is language?,Possible answers: a. Language is a tool for human communication. b. Language is a set of rules.,3,A tentative definition: Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication.,4,“Language is a means of verbal commun
2、ication.” It is instrumental in that communicating by speaking or writing is a purposeful act. It is social and conventional in that language is a social semiotic and communication can only take place effectively if all the users share a broad understanding of human interaction including such associ
3、ated factors as nonverbal cues, motivation, and socio-cultural roles. - Our textbook (2006),5,2. Design Features of Language,Design features refer to the defining properities of human language that distinguish it from any animal system of communication.,6,Human language is unique,Arbitrariness,Duali
4、ty,Creativity,Displacement,Cultural transmission,Interchangeablity,7,2.1 Arbitrariness,Saussure: the forms of linguistic signs bear no natural relationship to their meaning (1)Arbitrary relationship between the sound of a morpheme and its meaning, even with onomatopoeic words: The dog barks wow wow
5、in English but “汪汪汪” in Chinese.,8,(2)Arbitrariness at the syntactic level: language is not arbitrary at the syntactic level. He came in and sat down. He sat down and came in. He sat down after he came in.(3)The link between a linguistic sign and its meaning is a matter of convention.,9,2.2 Duality,
6、The property of having two levels of structures, such that units of the primary level are composed of elements of the secondary level and each of the two levels has its own principles of organization: Primary units words (meaningful) consist of secondary units sounds (meaningless).,10,Hierarchy of l
7、anguage: stratification as the infinite use of finite means. Sounds syllables morphemes words phrases clauses sentences/utterances texts/discourses,11,2.3 Creativity,Language is resourceful because of its duality and its recursiveness. We can use it to create new meanings. Words can be used in new w
8、ays to mean new things, and can be instantly understood by people who have never come across that usage before.,12,Birds, bees, crabs, spiders, and most other creatures communicate in some way, but the information imparted is severely limited and confined to a small set of messages. Because of duali
9、ty the human speaker is able to combine the basic linguistic units to form an infinite set of sentences, most of which are never before produced or heard.,13,The recursive nature of language provides a potential to create an infinite number of sentences. For instance: He bought a book which was writ
10、ten by a teacher who taught in a school which was known for its graduates who .,14,2.4 Displacement,Human languages enable their users to symbolize objects, events and concepts which are not present (in time and space) at the moment of communication. Thus, we can refer to Confucius, or the North Pol
11、e, even though the first has been dead for over 2550 years and the second is situated far away from us.,15,Animal communication is normally under “immediate stimulus control”. For instance, a warning cry of a bird instantly announces danger. Human language is stimulus-free. What we are talking about
12、 need not be triggered by any external stimulus in the world or any internal state.,16,The honeybees dance exhibits displacement a little bit: he can refer to a source of food, which is remote in time and space when he reports on it. A dog cannot tell people that its master will be home in a few day
13、s. Our language enables us to communicate about things that do not exist or do not yet exist.,17,Displacement benefits human beings by giving us the power to handle generalizations and abstractions. Once we can talk about physically distant thing, we acquire the ability to understand concepts which
14、denote “non-things”, such as truth and beauty.,18,2.5 Cultural transmission,Animal call systems are genetically transmitted. That is animals are born with the capacity to produce the set of calls peculiar to their specis. But human language is culturally transmitted. It is passed on from generation
15、to the next by teaching and learning, rather than by instinct.,19,2.6 Interchangeability,Interchangeability means that any human being can be both a producer and a receiver of messages. The communication systems of gibbons and bees have this feature, but those of certain animals do not. For example
16、some male birds possess calls which female do not have, and other kinds of animal also have similiar sex-restricted types of communication.,20,3. Functions of language,Linguists talk about the functions of language in an abstract sense, that is, not in terms of using language to chat, to think, to buy and sell, to read and write, to greet, praise and condemn people, etc. They summarize these practical functions and attempt some broad classifications of the basic functions of language.,
