POIMOU GINFV IEA DESIGN FEATURES OF HUMAN LANGUAGE Reality>experience>five senses>conceptualisation>linguistic categorization Imagery - What are your five senses? Sight (58%), Hearing (41%), Touch (25%), Taste(31%), and Smell (49%) What is language? Language, the principal means used by human beings to communicate with one another. Language can be spoken oF written . A language is a system for encoding and decoding information. Chomsky: Language is a special faculty apart from other higher faculties, genetically inherited (innate ability) as a special species-specific endowment within the species. the term refers to the forms of communication considered peculiar to humankind. In linguistics the term is extended to refer to the human cognitive facility of creating and using language. = Linguistic- related areas + Phonetics and phonology are concerned with the study of speech sounds. + Morphology is the study of word structures, especially the relationships between related words (such as dog and dogs) and the formation of words based on rules (such as plural formation). + Syntax is the study of the pattems which dietate how words are combined together to form sentences. + Semantics deals with the meaning of words and sentences. + Pragmatics is concerned with the role of context in the interpretation of meaning. * Psycholinguisties or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, usc, comprehend and produce language. Traditional areas of research include language production, language comprehension, language acquisition, language disorders, language and thought, and neurocognition. + Psycholinguisties covers the cognitive processes that make it possible to generate a grammatical and meaningful sentence out of vocabulary and grammatical structures, as well as the processes that make it possible to understand utterances, words, text, etc. Developmental psycholinguistics studies children's ability to learn language.is: Any means by which two (or more) individuals exchange information ~ hand signals, facial expressions, body language, nods, smiles, = that do involve vocalization e.g. Grunts, groans, snorts, ‘sighs, whimpers, etc. Not all produced sounds are intended to convey messages, so they aren't communication e.g., snoring ‘The linguistic sign: de Saussure Language is made up of signs, which have little to do with the referent, the actuas! objects in the world. “The signs are composed of two parts: the signifier and the signified (form/content) « ‘What does knowing a language mean? — Sound and no sound; = word and non-word; — well-formed sentences and ill-formed sentences = Sense and nonsense Design features of human language: Ability to produce and understand a virtually infinite set of messages. = In all other animal communication systems, the number of messages is fixed (ie., is finite). 2. Arbitrariness: No resemblance between the language signal and the thing that it represents (dog, hund, cane, pas) MULTI-DIMENSIONALITY - Fuman language consists of several levels or dimensions of knowledge (competences). 1. Phonological knowledge, 2. Lexical knowledge 3. Syntactic knowledge 4, Semantic/conceptual knowledge1. Wherever human exists, language exists. 2, All languages are equally complex and equally capable of expressing any idea in the universe. 3, Similar grammatical categories are found in all languages, nouns, verbs, gender, time, etc. 4. Any normal child, bor 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 can’t be due to biological reasons. Universals & specifies / x If all cultures share certain features of social organization and behaviour it will not be surprising that all languages have terms referring to Kinships, posession, war, ete>cultural universals Other yniversals may arise from technological transmission or from common features of the patural environment (biological, topographical terms)>technological universals and the universals of natural environment ‘Specifics: Language reflects cultural, social, political attitudes. + The Janguage of different cultures do not have the same vocabulary referring to the same referent, reality, e.g, red wine > co vino, brown bread >erni kruh. + Bven within one language speakers have different options to refer to the same reality: Languages differ in the way they classify experience. Languages have a tendency to impose structure upon the real world by treating some distintions as erueial, and ignoring thers. Sometimes the motivation is supplied by cultural norms, rather than by extemal reality. ‘Thenature of human language Philosophers were the first to ponder the roots of human language. Jean-acques Rousseau, says that use of words for communication stems from a desire to express our emotions. _J.G. von Herder writes two essays arguing that human rationality is the basis for language.Pierre Paul Brova, identifies Broca’s Area in the brain's left hemisphere, a region, he says, controls human grammar and speech. Damage to Broca's Area impairs the ability to use words and construct grammatically correct sentences. Later, Karl Wernicke, a German doctor, discovers another area related to language in the left hemisphere. Patients with injuries to Wernicke's Area speak fluently and grammatically, but make little or no sense. Charles Darwin, writes about a human “instinet for language” in his book, Descent of Man. He suggests that language evolved from more primal communication abilities in other animals. Noam Chomsky, a linguist, says humans are bom with an innate, or hardwired, knowledge of universal grammar. He observes that all languages share certain rules. Steve Pinker tries to combine the ideas of Noam Chomsky and Charles Darwin in his book, The Language Instinct, He offers an explanation for how natural selection might have shaped the evolution of human's "innate grammar." LANGUAGE AND THE BRAIN ‘The human brain is the center of the human nervous system and is a highly complex organ. It has the same general structure as the braing of other mammals, but is over three times as large as the brain of a typical mammal. Especially expanded are the frontal lobes, which are involved in executive fimetions such as self-control, planning, reasoning, and abstract thought. The portion of the brain devoted to vision is also greatly enlarged in human beings. ‘The human brain has been estimated to contain 50-100 billion neurons, of which about 10 billion are cells. These cells pass signals to each other via approximately 100 trillion synaptic ‘connections. ‘What does the brain do? It receives and transmits messages to other parts of our body. It accepts a filod of information about the world around your various senses (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching). ‘Neuron structure: Millions of sensory receptors detect changes, called stimuli, which occur inside and outside the body. They monitor such things as temperature, light, and sound from the external environment. Sensory input is converted into electrical signals called nerve impulses that are transmitted to the brain. There the signals are brought together to create sensations, to produce thoughts, or to add to memory. Each neuron has three basic parts: cell body (soma), one or more dendrites, and a single axon.‘Neurons transmit nerve messages. Brain message travel between neurons in just one thousandth of a second. Each time you have ‘anew thought or memory, a new brain connection is made between two or more brain cells. Long-term memory is either achieved by changes on the synapses (more strength connections) or by changes of functional units (new cell assemblies). ‘A connection can become stronger when the same path is used often, the other way round a connection that is rarely used will weaken the ability of humans to speak and to understand speech requires an enormous amount of brain resources. These resources have to manage information about many thousands of words and many syntactic constructions and their interconnections.This complex combination of brain stricture can be called the brain’s linguistie system We use language to talk about an enormous range of different kinds and aspects of human ‘experience, all of which also have representations in the brain. ‘The linguistic system must therefore occupy a central position in mental structure, connected to the cognitive systems that register all those other experiences. The human brain is split into two hemispheres. The left hemisphere controls any ‘muscular activity on the right side of the human body and the right hemisphere operates vice versa. We know that there are small differences in the sizes of some regions in the two hemispheres. These differences may form the basis for the first major brain specialization for language — lateralization of language to the left hemisphere The two hemispheres are thought to contribute to the processing and understanding of language: the left hemisphere: rapid language processing, lexical, syntactic processing, phonemic processing the right hemisphere: higher level processing, discourse processing, prosodic information The first language area within the left hemisphere to be discovered is Broce’ area, named afier Paul Broca, who discovered the area while studying patients with aphasia, a language disorder. Deficits associates with brain damage: Disturbance of speech production, Agrammatic speech Individuals with Wemicke's aphasia may speak in long sentences that have no meaning, add unnecessary words, and even create new "words" (neologisms). Individuals with Wernicke's aphasia usually have great difficulty understanding the speech of both themselves and others and are therefore often unaware of their mistakes. 5FUZZY CONCEPT about what is a language: From Egyptian and Sumerian depictions of the ideal human form, Greek and Roman balanced and symmetrical human body, ‘medievalist’s images of the body functioning as a confinement to the soul renaissance body ‘modern body In pre-modern societies, the body, both male and female, was an important site on which cultural and social values were inscribed through painting, scarification, piercing and tattooing, These bodily markings carried a wide range of different meanings referring to social status, gender, identity, etc. ‘As soon as we are born, we are designated as male or female. This dualism has been reflected in different treatment of men and women, in cultural practices and in metaphorical projections. ‘women’s identity= sinful, mortal, irrational body; ‘men’s identity = mind, immortality and reason. Concepts that were considered masculine, such as light, straight, good, reason, mind, spirit, power, and the public sphere, Concepts associated with femmininity: darkness, left, bad, irrationality, body, emotion, passivity, inferiority, and the private sphere. ‘The human body is universally perceived as a composite of the physical body and the mind/soul. “The body was conceived as a ‘prison of the soul” and mind. This concept can be traced back in Plato, Aristotle and in the Christian tradition On the contrary, the Eastem perception of the body, as expressed in Taoism and Zen Buddhism, advocates the non-dualistie nature of the human body - this concept makes human being a union of body and mind working together.‘Renaissance body: By the late fifteenth and carly sixteenth century, more naturalistic images of the human body resulted from the growing interest in the human form > Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti. Until the end of the eighteenth century, the human body was mainly perceived as an ungendered, universal, generic body. The male body/man was considered the norm, and female characteristics have been conceptualized on the basis of masculine parameters. During the nineteenth century, a revolutionary reconceptwalization of sexual difference emerged. The discourse on the body shifts from the man-made language to the neutral naming e.g. postal worker>post officer>postwoman. In modem society, the form of the human body changes through practices such as bodybuilding, cross-dressing, cosmetic surgery, etc. here is also an emerging vocabulary referring to new identities: gay, lesbian, bisexual, heterosexual, etc. Virtual reality and its vocabulary disseminate the image of a new body: robois, android, cyborgs, cyber terrorists, computer nerds, netizens, ete ‘New technologies have changed categories: birth mother, sperm donor, egg donor, etc. The conceptualization of the human body changes in visible ways with changes in society and ‘in sexual awareness. *** pogledat metafore!ANIMAL LANGUAGE A language is a system for encoding and decoding information. the term refers to the forms of communication considered peculiar to humankind, In linguistics the term is extended to refer to the human cognitive facility of creating and using language. The evolution of modem human language required both the development of the anatomical apparatus for speech and also neurological changes in the brain to support language itself, but other species have some of these capabilities without full language ability.( It seems that we have a ‘language organ’ which other species do not possess) ‘The frontal lobes are where ideas are created; plans constructed; thoughts joined with their associations to form new memories. This brain region is the home of consciousness. ‘There are four areas, which endow human with fuentions are not available in other animal: Belief in divine creation. Many societies throughout history believed that language is the gift of the gods to humans (Genesis) Invention hypotheses. the invention of language and its gradual refinement served as a continuous impetus to additional human mental development ‘Warning hypothesis. Language may have evolved from waming signals such as those used ‘by animals (look, run, help) ‘Gestural theory siates that human language developed from gestures that were used. for Simple communication. ‘There are three distinct views of how language evolved: SOCIAL > Language arose through increased socialisation in early settled communities and ‘the need for a communication system to support hunting and farming PHYSIOLOGICAL: the human articulators appear to be specially adapted to language. NEUROLOGICAL: holds that human beings are able to master the complexities of language Because they have developed a higher intelligence or a larger brain Language began as a cognitive adaptation and genetic assimilation. Cognitive effort and {genetic assimilation interacted as language and brain co-evolved. ‘There are about 5,000 languages spoken on Earth today. We know that there were even more spoken in the past, when most people lived in small bands or tribes rather than in large states.‘Mionogenesis: The oldest belief is that there was a single, original language. Polygenesis, Each of the original languages then would then have diverged into numerous, forms (language families) ‘Transmission of information from one animal to another by means of sound, visible sign or behavoiur, taste or odour, electrical impulse, touch ~ these are called signals in animal communication ‘The number of signals in a species’ repertoire can range from 5 or 6 in the simplest non-social animals to 10-20 in social insects, such as bees and ants, or to 30-40 in social vertebrates, such as wolves and primates ‘The following properties of human language have been argued to separate it from animal communication: Arbifrariness Cultural transmission: Language is passed from one language user to the next, consciously or unconsciously. Discreteness: Language is composed of discrete units that are used in combination to create meaning Displacement: Languages can be used to communicate ideas about things that are not in the immediate vicinity either spatially or temporally. ‘Duality: Language works on two levels at once, a surface level and a semantic (meaningful) level. Metalinguistics: Ability to discuss language itself. Productivity: A finite number of units can be used to create an infinite number of utterances ‘Animals and language? Parrots - can memorize chunks of human speech Bird use songs to serve territorial and courtship functions Honey bees dance to indicate where a source of nectar is. People talk - we use language Research with apes, like that of Francine Patterson with Koko or Herbert Terrace with Nix Chimpsky, suggested that apes are capable of using some properties of human lang. However, no experiment has shown a non-human being to be proficient in all of these areas.METAPHOR AND ITS ROLE IN CATEGORIZATION AND CONCEPTUALIZATION IN LANGUAGE ‘Metaphors are very powerful and natural cognitive processes, which help us to understand the complex issues in nature and society. Metaphors can be described as mediators between the human mind and culture. New metaphors change both the ordinary language we use and the ways in which we perceive and understand the world. Metaphors cause the audience to see things. ina mew light, In politics, the explanatory function of metaphors is often subjected to the goal of manipulation, which means that metaphors are often primarily selected for theit emotional and strategic effect. ‘Metaphor can be used as “filter” for our perceptions. If inaccurately used, they may distort information or cause false generalizations Every word evokes a frame. A frame is a conceptual structure used in thinking. The word elephant evokes a frame with an image of an elephant and certain knowledge: an elephant is a large animal (a mammal) with large floppy ears... The essence of metaphor is understanding one kind of thing in terms of another. It has been described in terms of transfer from one cognitive domain (donor) to another (recipient) domain. Metaphors are mappings across conceptual domains. Each mapping is a fixed set of correspondences between entities in a source domain and entities in a target domain. Mappings are not arbitrary, but grounded in the body and in everyday experience and knowledge. . Metaphor is the main mechanism through which we comprehend abstract concepts and perform abstract reasoning ***There is quite an extensive expansion of the human-body domain which is used to describe new tecnical devices. Computers have memory, brains, intelligence, languages, viruses, keys, windows, architecture, etc. They are intelligent, smart; they can be infected by vires. ‘Computers become human beings and human beings act like computers. ‘When the body is mentioned in literature, philosophy or similar disciplines, it is often ‘conceptualized as a plani, an animal, a cage or confinement of the soul, a machine, a ‘container of emotions, a computer, a communication network, 10the body parts have individual functions. They can become symbolic models of stable ‘meanings in different parts of one’s experience, ¢.g. head> the seat of the intellect; director, leaders. heart >the scat of emotion (sadness, fear, and love) and the center of bravery Body parts have been widely used to conceptualize inanimate world.e.g. leg of a table, arm of a chair, foot of the bed, head of the salad, heart of the lettuce ‘The view of the body as a physical object presupposes its 3-dimensional form (container, box) in space and time. A container schema has its structure: an inside, a boundary, and an outside. ‘This spatial conception of the body as physical object, generates many metaphors based on the form of the following image schemata: LEFT-RIGHt, IN-OUT, FRONT-BACK, UP- DOWN ‘Symmetry and_balance ; The human body is perfectly symmetrical and balanced. It can be folded over in the middle into left and right halves (vertical axis). Vitruvian man is a symbol of the ideal and symmetrical human body Interior-exterior: In the majority of metaphorical projections, the body functions as a container box. It consists of many entities: mind, soul, words, emotions, thoughts, etc. In proverbial speech, people reach their inner part through their eyes Up-down : The posture we regard as typical of the human body is upright. Accordingly, activities viewed positively are expressed as up. Metaphorically, if someone is down it means a weak, desperate position Eontback: The posture of the human body is such that its senses are dominantly directed forward (eyes, nose, and mouth). This experience generates the view that front part is equal to progress, dignity, knowledge Evidently, the structure of the human body does not necesserily produce universal metaphors. (different cultures) Linguistic categorization of the body reveals that all human beings have a common set of conceptual metaphors (universal/generic level metaphors) that are based on the following: common body structure basic sensory experiences common features of social organization and behaviour>common cultural environment common features of the natural environment Globalization uuPS HOLIweUIST CA ‘Language Acquisition Language acquisition is the study of the processes through which humans acquire language By itself, language acquisition refers to first language acquisition, which studies infants’ acquisition of their native language, whereas second language acquisition deals with acquisition of additional languages in both children and adults, One of the complexities of acquiring language is that it is leamed by infants from what appears to be very little input. This has led to the long-standing debate between the two different groups of scholars: Nativist theories - Chomsky is the preeminent name here—place the distinctiveness of language in specific genetic endowment for a specifically genetically instructed language module. Under that view, there is minimal learning involved in acquiring a language. Enmpiricists like Hobbes and Locke argued that knowledge emerge ultimately from abstracted sense impressions. The precise form of language must be acquired through exposure to a speech community. Words are definitely not inbron, but the capacity to acquire language and use it creatively seems to be inborn. N. Chomsky calls this ability the LAD (Language Acquisition Device), There are also goevolutionary proposals: Language is not an instinct and there is no genetically installed linguistic black box in our brains. Language arose slowly through cognitive and cultural inventiveness. Human language is made possible by special adaptations of the human mind and body that occurred in the course of human evolution, and which are put to use by children in acquiring their mother tongue Critical Period Hypothesis: Exposure to language before puberty is necessary for language acquisition. Children with delayed exposure to language: "The Wild Bpy of Aveyron”. Genie Pre-Verbal Language Development: Crving: Non-linguistic Though some language specific elements. Cooing: Non-linguistic. Exercising the articulatory apparatus. Imitation and the beginning of tum-taking. Babbling; here infants are clearly producing syllable like sounds Shortly before their first birthday, babies begin to understand words, and around that birthday, they start to produce them. Words are usually produced in isolation; this one-word stage can 12Jast from two months to a year. (Words are used holophrastically: A word stands for an entire sentence) Children's first words are similar all over the planet. About half the words are for objects: food (juice, cookie), body parts (eye, nose), clothing (diaper, sock) By 24 months they have an expressive vocabulary of between 50 to 600 words. Experience matters for vocabulary growth. Privileged children hear about 2,100 words/hour. Disadvantaged children hear only about 600 words/hour. 24-48 Months: Complexity and length of utterances increase rapidly. > “normal” conversation. Despite the obvious impact the environment has on the choice and general direction of mother-tongue leaming, children are prone to come up with alll kinds of words and expressions which they have never heard in their environment. Language Production and Conversation In linguistics, language produetion is the production of spoken or written language. monitoring Conceptwalization: a conceptual representation of what to say Encode message into linguistic form. Select words to express concepts Organize words syntactically to convey a message Articulation: generate auditory/written/signed sequence. Sound goes from speaker's mouth to hearer’s ear Speech is decoded into linguistic form Linguistic form is decoded into meaning ‘Message is a conceptual representiaion independent of particular words; we sholud take into account: level of politeness, speech acts (question, command, etc.), Register (slang vs. Formal), Reference and Listener knowledge 13‘We organize the words by applying syntactic and discourse rules e.g. The glass is filled with water. vs. Water fills the glass.( Function words, Inflectional morphemes and agreement) Production is not a one-way transmission of messages. Speakers and writers are quickly capable of readjusting a message at the stages of conceptualization, formulation, or articulation The fact that native speakers can monitor and quickly correct mistakes in linguistic output proves Chomsky’s claim that there is a distinction between performance and competence, ‘There are two main types of research into speech production: one type focuses on using the analysis of speech errors and the other looks at reaction-time data from picture-naming latencies, Analysis of speech errors has found that not all are random, but rather systematic and fall into several categories: Anticipation; The word is in the speaker's mind and ready to be spoken, but the speaker says it too quickly. This could be because the speaker is planning and holding words in their mind. Reading list>leading list = Preservation; The word retains characteristics of a word said previously in a sentence: Tadile Tennis instead of Paddle Tennis Blending: More than one word is being considered and the two intended items "blend” into a single item e.g. The child is looking to be spaddled instead of spanked or paddled Addition; adding of linguistics material, resulting in words like implossible, blue bug>blue blug ‘Substitution: a whole word of related meaning is replacing another. ‘Malapropism; a lay term referring to the incorrect substitution of words. It is a reference to a character Mrs Malaprop from Sheridan's The Rivals ‘Spoonerism: switching the letters from words. For example, the phrase slips of the tongue could become tips of the slung Freudian theory of production errors: Errors represent unconscious beliefs or desires: repressed thoughts of some kind. Last night my grandmother (died ') lied. Psycholinguistic Perspective: Speech errors provide insights into the workings of the language system. Disflucnces include fillers: um, er, uh, etc. Amd phoneme, word and phrase repetition. 14‘Syntactic level errors are slips involving whole words (from the same lexical category) Morphemic level errors involve an incorrect association between a stem and an inflection. Closed-class items tend to get stranded, whereas open-class items tend to get moved. Features of Conversation; Personnel: Participants in a conversation Speaker(s) and addressee(s) Common Ground: Knowledge and beliefs shared by the personnel Assumptions about what the other(s) know (s)/believe(s) ‘Three Phases of the Writing Process: - Planning: Setting goals, formulating and organizing ideas. - Translating: Sentence generation. - Reviewing: Evaluating and revising the text 15