Onomatopoeic words (which imitate natural sounds) are somewhat motivated ( English: rumble, crackle, bang, …. Chinese: putong, shasha, dingdang… )
Some compound words are not entirely arbitrary, e.g. type-writer, shoe-maker, airconditioner, photocopy…
Pragmatics— language in use
Applied linguistics----linguisticsபைடு நூலகம்and language teaching
Sociolinguistics---- social factors (e.g. class, education) affect language use
Arbitrariness • Productivity/Creativity • Duality • Displacement • Cultural transmission
Arbitrariness
----No logical (motivated or intrinsic) connection between sounds and meanings.
Productivity/creativity
----Peculiar to human languages，users of language can understand and produce sentences they have never heard before, e.g. we can understand sentence like “ A redeyed elephant is dancing on the hotel bed”, though it does not describe a common happening in the world.
A Chinese speaker and an English speaker are not mutually intelligible. This shows that language is culturally transmitted. That is, it is pass on from one generation to the next by teaching and learning, rather than by instinct.
Cultural transmission
----Language is culturally transmitted (through teaching and learning; rather than by instinct).
Animal call systems are genetically transmitted. All cats, gibbons and bees have systems which are almost identical to those of all other cats, gibbons and bees.
Displacement
----Language can be used to refer to things, which are not present: real or imagined matters in the past, present or future, or in far-away places.
A gibbon never utters a call about something he ate last year.
There is something special about the bee dance though. Bees communicate with other bees about the food sources they have found when they are no longer in the presence of the food. In this sense, the bee dance has a component of displacement. But this component is very insignificant. For the bees must communicate about the food immediately on returning to the hive. They do not dance about the food they discovered last month nor do they speculate about future discoveries
2. What is language?
Language can be generally defined as a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for
human communication.
The design/defining features of human language
The story of a wolf child, a pig child shows that a human being brought up in isolation simply does not acquire human language.
Functions of language
translation)
1.3 Some important distinctions in Linguistics
Prescriptive and Descriptive Synchronic and Diachronic Speech and writing Language and Parole Competence and Performance
Psycholinguistics----linguistic behavior and psychological process
Some other applications Anthropological linguistics Neurolinguistics Computational linguistics (e.g. machine
Phonetics Phonology Morphology Syntax
Semantics
Pragmatics
Applied linguistics
Sociolinguistics
Psycholinguistics
……
General Linguistics: language as a whole
A gibbon call system is not productive for gibbon draw all their calls from a fixed repertoire which is rapidly exhausted, making any novelty impossible.
Duality (double articulation)
Lower level----sounds (meaningless) Higher level----meaning (larger units of meaning) A communication system with duality is
Morphology----the form of words
Syntax----the rules governing the combination of words into sentence.
Semantics----the meaning of language (when the meaning of language is conducted in the context of language use----Pragmatics)
Chapter 1. Introduction
Joanna
1. What is linguistics?
1.1 Definition -Linguistics is the scientific study of language.
1.2 The scope of linguistics
General linguistics
considered more flexible than one without it, for a far greater number of messages can be sent. A small number of sounds can be grouped and regrouped into a large number of units of meaning (words), and the units of meaning can be arranged and rearranged into an infinite number of sentences. (we make dictionary of a language, but we cannot make a dictionary of sentences of that language.
The bee dance does have a limited productivity, as it is used to communicate about food sources in any direction. But food sources are the only kind of messages that can be sent through the bee dance; bees do not “talk” about themselves, the hives, or wind, let alone about people, animals, hopes or desires