What exactly do we mean by this?
When you were born, you were not able to communicate with the adults around you using their language. But by the time you were five or six, you were able to produce sentences, understand jokes, make rhymes, and so on.
2) People speak their mother tongue correctly, fluently and appropriately. An illiterate woman in Guangzhou, for example, speaks Cantonese correctly, fluently and appropriately. Do you think she knows Cantonese grammar? Why or why not? How do you explain this phenomenon?
3) Is there anything wrong with the sentence “My father is a worker”? Why?
4) Is there anything wrong with the sentence “Let’s go to eat rice”? Why?
1. Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific or systemic study of language (p.1).
At the heart of linguistics is the search for the unconscious knowledge that humans have about language(s), an understanding of the structure of language, and knowledge about how languages differ from each other.
01 Introduction 汪2256232
Specific expressions
快, for example, is used in Chinese when people are coming to your house: 快请进, 快 请坐, 快喝杯水, 快喝杯茶, 快吃个苹果. In this way we Chinese express our welcome and warmth to the visitors.
And慢is used when people are to say goodbye: 慢走, 慢慢吃, 慢慢喝, 慢慢聊, 慢慢倾 (Cantonese), 慢慢压(Cantonese).
Such expressions are specific to Chinese. That is why in English we cannot say “*Come in quickly”, “*Sit down quickly”, or “*Walk slowly.”
Grammatical rules
In English, for example, “I” is followed by “am”, and “you” by “are”, and “he” by “is”.
Now try to answer the following questions:
1) Are the rules in language formed gradually through everyday use or prescribed by linguists?
1.1 Definition
You may find it hard to answer people who ask you, "What exactly is linguistics, and what do linguists do?" They might assume that it means that you are multilingual. And you may, in fact, be a polyglot, but that's not what linguistics major is about.
In short, you became a fluent native speaker. All of this happened before you entered first grade! (If you studied a foreign language in high school, you know that learning a language later in life did not go nearly as smoothly or as quickly.) During those first few years of your life, you accumulated a wide range of knowledge about language. Majoring in linguistics means that you will learn about many aspects of human language, including the physical properties and structure of sounds (phonetics and phonology), words (morphology), sentences (syntax), and meaning (semantics).