NATURE OF LANGUAGE, THE SYMBOL SYSTEM OF VERBAL COMMUNICATION

Definition of Language

Language is very important; without it, we would not be able to think and thinking is
talking silently to ourselves. To communicate our thinking to a listener, we need to select
words that are clear and appropriate not only to us, but also to our listeners. To better choose
and use words with maximum effectiveness, we have to learn the definition of language, its
features, and its characteristics.

Language is a system of sounds and symbols used to communicate ideas and feelings.

Feature of Language

1. Language is a system. Language is a vehicle by which the individual is able to receive

messages from inside (himself) or outside (others). The individual processes the
information inside him and responds by sending messages through language outside.
2. Language is symbolic. Language is a collection of symbols which possess certain
properties. It contains elements which consist of letters of the alphabet along with
punctuation marks such as commas, periods, and so on. In mathematics, elements are
integers zero to nine plus other symbols like plus, minus, multiplication, and division
signs. The elements by themselves have no meanings. In order to have meaning, they
have to be arranged in their proper sequence.
3. Language is conventional. Language is the means accepted by a large number of
people. It is one of the important means by which a group or culture identifies itself
(self-identity or a cultural group).
4. Language changes. Language is one of the ways by which groups identify themselves.
Unique expressions, new words, and distinct language patterns are formed from
language.

What is language? This is a more comprehensive definition. Language is a complex

system of symbols shared and used for communication by members of the same
community, the same geographical area or the same cultural tradition such as English,
Spanish, Finnish, Tagalog, Ilocano, Ibanag, Cebuano, and Waray. People who use a language
in communicating with one another constitute a society – a language community – like the
English language community, the Spanish language community, and so on. Within that
community, there are differences in the way different people use the language, primarily
the result of geographical and/or social differences. When people of the same native
language can understand one another but notice differences in each other’s speech, we say
they speak dialects of that language. Dialect differences can be recognized by means of
intonation, vocabulary differences like petrol versus gasoline, lift versus elevator, flat versus
 apartment. Petrol, lift, and flat are British English while gasoline, lift, and apartment are
American English. Or alternative ways of forming certain questions: Have you a dictionary?
versus Do you have a dictionary? versus Have you got a dictionary? All of them are correct
and acceptable in the study of grammar.

Characteristics of Language

The definition of language implies several characteristics inherent in the symbol system
of verbal communication.

1. Language has symbols. Each language contains elements which can create meaning
when put together in certain ways. For instance, the elements of written English
language are letters of the alphabet and punctuation marks. Those of the spoken
language are sounds, pauses, pitch, accent or stress, and intonation.

Usually, the elements of a language are meaningless not only by themselves, but also in
many combinations; however, they can be put together meaningfully to represent
objects, ideas, or activities. For example, the letters r, m, and a are meaningless, but
when combined in different ways, they create the symbols arm, ram, and mar. In
written and spoken languages, most symbols are words, but there are other kinds of
linguistic symbols like the use of hands, body, face, eyes, time, space, among others, in
nonverbal language.

2. Language is rule-governed. It is a system and is, therefore, governed by rules. There

are at least four rules:
a. Phonological rules govern the formation of sounds into words. For example,
consonant clusters such as str- in stream and –wth in growth possible in English,
but not in Filipino; ng, on the other hand, can occur in initial, medial, and final
positions in Filipino – ngipin, pangako, and kulang, respectively but only medially
and finally in English – think, singing.
b. Syntactic rules govern the arrangement of words into sentences. The utterance
“Anecdotes are brief, often amusing stories,” for example, is a correct English
sentence, but not “Are brief, often amusing stories anecdotes.” On the other
hand, “Tahimik na kumakain sa sulok ang mga bata” is a correct Filipino
sentence, not “Ang mga bata tahimik sa kumakain na sulok.”
c. Semantic rules govern the way in which the speakers of a language interpret or
attach meaning to a particular symbol. Because of semantic rules, for example,
English speakers agree the “horses” are animals that neigh and “vegetables” are
edible plants and Filipino speakers use walis for sweeping and pinggan for eating
and not vice versa.
 d. Regulative rules govern the appropriate interpretation of a message in a given
context. For example, the semantic meaning of the words in the sentence “Let’s
get together this afternoon” is very clear, but it can also be interpreted in various
ways” as a request – “I hope we can get together;” as a polite command – “I
want to see you;” or as an empty cliché – “I don’t really mean it.”

3. Language is a creative act. We are not born with a language; we must learn it. Each
generation in one language community learns the language from old members, but they
may not learn all the words and meanings. Language changes. So, some words and
meanings cease to be useful and younger generations invent new words and attach to
meanings to existing ones. For instance, the word “happening” meant “fun-filled night”
to most of our parents, but in these times, the young say “gimmick” instead of
“happening.”

4. Meanings are in people, not words. When words are transmitted between
communicators, only sound and light waves reach them. Meaning cannot be delivered
like a bouquet of flowers or a box of chocolates. Hence, when you say the “Filipino way
of life,” four listeners can interpret it in four different ways depending on their social,
cultural, individual orientations, and schemata or interpretations. To a Filipino who lives
in a plush subdivision in Metro Manila, it means “a life of ease and abundance.” To
someone who lives in a shanty in a squatters’ area, it is a “hand-to-mouth kind of
existence;” to a farmer, it is “as day-to-day toil in the field;” and to a hinterland dweller
who protests the establishment, it is “a life of discontent and struggle for equality.”
Even the words “beauty,” “honor,” “liberal” and “democratic” do not elicit the same
interpretations from your listeners. Words don’t mean, people do – and often in widely
different ways. (All meaning is elicited through symbols, or is arrived at through
personal interpretation. The meaning does not go with the word, it emerges by the
person hearing it, thinking about it and ultimately arriving at meaning.)

5. Language is culture-bound. Words do not have meanings, but are conveying meanings
to people of the same culture – people who can perceive, identify, and interpret them.
For instance, native speakers of English belong to the so-called Western culture which
developed from the Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans of the ancient world. Among
hundreds of this culture’s major and minor customs and beliefs are: eating with a fork,
wearing neckties, knowing at least some of the proverbs, using at least some of the
same gestures for the same purposes, celebrating the arrival of a new year, and
believing in law and democracy. The point is that communication takes place among
people with a large common background.
 To be able to understand what somebody says, we must first perceive the
utterance. This means that we have to hear it spoken or see it written. A number of
things can create difficulty in perceiving a spoken message, and these are too much
noise in the environment, too great a distance between a speaker and a listener,
insufficient volume in the speaker’s delivery, a poor connection if the message is
conveyed by telephone static in a radio message, or insufficient attention on the part of
the listeners. On the other hand, problems can be avoided in perceiving a written
message if it is clear and sufficiently lighted and if it has the reader’s attention.

However, mere perception (hearing or seeing) is not enough to get the message
of the utterance. We must also identify its elements and this is possible only if we, the
speakers and the listeners, belong to the same culture and language community. This
means that we have similar pronunciations, we use the same vocabulary, attach the
same meanings to the same words and sentences, and have the same ways of putting
words together in sentences.

Suppose we have succeeded in perceiving the utterance and identifying it, we

still need to interpret it. We are capable of doing this if the following conditions are
present: we have information about what has previously been said, we know the
speaker, and we are familiar with the context of the utterance.

6. Language develops attitudes. The words we use actualize the way we look at the things
around us; hence, they affect the way we behave. For instance, the power of language
extend to the following:
 Personal names, which are more than means of identification as they shape the
way others think of us, the way we view ourselves, and the way we act; hence,
more common names are better than unusual ones. For example, take note of
the following names and comment about them: Mario, Tiburcio, Jenny, Tecla,
Darling, Baby, Honeylet, Shulammite, Vaboom.
 Style of speaking/writing, so that scholarly speaking and academic writing of
high-level professional jargon are usually judged as more credible and
competent than those spoken or written in more readable English with shorter
words and clearer sentences. For instance, writers and speakers who use figures
of speech are judged to be more credible and competent.
 Speaker’ fluency in the language and their style of speech, making listeners
regard as more intelligent, employable, professionally capable and socially
acceptable speakers who communicate flawlessly in standard English.
 Names of people’s positions, roles or functions, so that a stenographer or a
clerk is happier if they are called a “secretary,” a garbage collector’s morale is
 raised if he becomes a “sanitation engineer,” a repairman becomes a
“maintenance expert,” a press agent a “press relation officer,” a housewife a
“homemaker,” a criminal child a “juvenile delinquent,” the poor the
“economically challenged,” and executives are not fired, but they “resign” or
“take an extended leave.”
 Sexist and/or racist words, which result in offensive connotations, so that the
word “mankind” has been replaced by “humanity/human race/people,” “man-
made” by “artificial/manufactured/synthetic,” “manpower” by “work force,”
“congressmen” by “members of the Congress,” “policeman” by “police officer,”
“stewardess” by “flight attendant.”
 Labels, with other damaging potentials to the “labeled” – “dumb,” “lazy,” ugly,”
“pig,” “elephant,” “snake,” “crocodile.”

7. Language mirrors attitudes. The way we use words show our feelings of control,
attraction, responsibility, and the like. The following statements simplify powerful and
powerless language:
 “I won’t be able to submit my report on time. I had to bring my mother to the
hospital, and it was impossible to finish it by today. I’ll have it on your table on
Friday.”
 Excuse me, ma’am. I don’t want to say this, but I… uh… I don’t think I will be
able to … uh … submit my report on time. You see … uh … I had to bring … my
mother to the hospital … and … well … it … uh … was impossible to finish it by
today. I’ll … uh … have it on your table … uh … on Friday.”

On the other hand, the language we use can suggest liking and disliking, as well
as the degree of our interest and attraction toward a person, object or idea such as
“these” employees (more positive) versus “those” employees, “that’s good” (more
positive) versus “that’s not bad,” and “Mary and Anne” (Mary’s more important) versus
“Anne and Mary” (Anne is more important).

In the same way, language can give away our willingness to accept responsibility.
For example, “I didn’t finish it” is more responsible than “It’s not finished;” “Sometimes,
I wonder if he’s honest” (more responsible) versus “Sometimes, you wonder if he’s
honest.”

8. Effective oral language is clear and appropriate. Our language is clear when it is
grammatically correct and when it uses exact, simple, and easy-to-understand words.
For instance, we commonly hear the following incorrectly-used sentences. Try to
correct them.
  He did it hisself.
 I can guess when is he coming.
 It’s real exciting.
 One of the student came.
 The data is being questioned.
 The man that done it died.
 They told Bill and I about it.
 Myra don’t care.
 We feel badly.
- He did it himself.
- I can guess when he is coming.
- It’s really exciting.
- One of the students came.
- The data are being questioned.
- The man that did it died.
- They told Bill and me about it.
- Myra doesn’t care.
- We feel bad.

Besides being clear, the oral language we use must be appropriate not only to
our listeners, but also to the occasion, to our purpose of speaking and to us, speakers.
Our language is appropriate to our listeners if it meets their needs and expectations –
their age, education, breeding, education, and sex. Therefore, the words and sentences
we use with a five-year-old child who is in kindergarten are much simpler than those we
utter to a teenager who is in college.

For it to be appropriate to the occasion, the nature of the occasion should be

considered. For example the kind of language expected during a religious service is
different from that during a rally.

It is appropriate to our purpose of speaking – to inform, to instruct, to

entertain, to argue or to persuade – if we choose suitable words, phrases and
sentences. For instance, to inform, we have to use accurate and objective words; to
persuade, we may utilize sweeping conclusions, loaded words, familiar slogans and
forceful statements so that we can convince our listeners to believe in what we are
saying and ultimately, make them do what we want them to do.

To make it appropriate to us, speakers, it must fit our calling and our relation
with our listeners – as a student to your professor, as a friend to another friend, as a
manager to a subordinate, as a son/daughter to his/her mother, as a salesperson to a
customer.

THE ROLE OF PHONEMES AND MORPHEMES

The words in our spoken languages can be broken down into smaller components
known as phonemes (units of sound) and morphemes (units of meaning). These are more
formally defined in the following: (a) phonemes are the smallest unit of sound to make a
meaningful difference to a word; for example, the word cat contains three phonemes
/k/-/a/-/t/; (b) morphemes are the basic units of meaning within words; for example, a free
morpheme like cat is a word in its own right but bound morphemes like affixes (e.g. -er, -ing,
un-) occur only in combination with a base (e.g. cooker).
Awareness of each of these units is a more specific form of general meta-linguistic
awareness, which is the ability to reflect on language in contrast to the more direct usage of
language for everyday communication and understanding. Even preschoolers with typical
language development can still require time before demonstrating meta-linguistic awareness,
possibly due to its dependence on the development of more domain-general skills such as
decentration or executive functions (e.g. cognitive flexibility). The other important factor is
educational input about literacy itself, since illiterate adults show little awareness of linguistic
units such as phonemes.
One theory of meta-linguistic development to have formalized these observations
proposes the following developmental sequence. Linguistic information is initially
represented implicitly. This is described as an obligatory phase in typical spoken language
development, which is sufficient to produce accurate behavioral performance but has limited
flexibility to generalize to other situations. As children become more explicitly or consciously
aware of linguistic information, meta-linguistic control is evident in their ability to manipulate
this information in a variety of linguistic awareness tasks. Nevertheless, this is an optional
phase, which requires the presence of a demand for this type of conscious control from the
external environment such as might be provided by exposure to written language in the context
of learning to read.
The sequence appears to play out at different points for different aspects of language
(e.g. phonemes, morphemes, syllables, rimes, words), with what is known about the
development of phoneme and morpheme awareness reviewed below. For the most part,
studies of the English language will be reviewed initially and then the critical issue of cross-
linguistic variation will be addressed separately.

Phoneme Awareness

A phoneme is any of the abstract units of the phonetic system of a language that

correspond to a set of similar speech sounds (such as the velar \k\ of cool and the palatal \k\ of
keel) which are perceived to be a single distinctive sound in the language.

Development of Phoneme Awareness

Language development is thought to depend on implicit representations of the phonology or
sound of words, initially stored as unanalyzed wholes at the lexical level. This information is
successively restructured during childhood to incorporate the increasing level of sub-lexical
detail necessary to discriminate among a growing vocabulary of phonologically similar words.
Several authors have suggested that this speech perception system underpins early sensitivity
to speech sound before displaying sensitivity to phonemes after lexical representations have
been organized segmentally.
Influential work in the 1960s and 1970s demonstrated that preschool children were indeed
unable to perform explicit phoneme segmentation tasks such as deleting or tapping out the
phonemes within simple monosyllabic words (e.g. mat), although performance was observed to
improve by school age. This contrasted with a more developed ability to tap out the syllables in
multi-syllabic words (e.g. cucumber), evident even during the preschool phase. The
inaccessibility of phonemes to conscious control prior to school age has subsequently been
replicated widely across a number of awareness tasks requiring phoneme manipulation.
In an attempt to assess more implicit levels of sensitivity to phonemes during the preschool
period, speech perception tasks that do not require meta-linguistic control have been
employed. These tasks have uncovered some sensitivity to phonemes among preschool
children, although performance falls below the level of responses to larger sounds and may be
best for phonemes located initially in words. For example, in judging whether spoken word-
pairs sounded similar, all 5-year-old preschoolers tested achieved six consecutive correct
responses with shared syllables (e.g. hammer-hammock) but only 25% of the group achieved
this criterion with shared phonemes (e.g. steak-sponge). Kindergartners were found to use
global similarity rather than phonemic similarity to categorize syllables in this type of syllable
similarity task, in contrast to adults who rely on phonemic similarity.
Therefore, an established literature supports a pattern of increasing awareness of phonemes
during the preschool to early school period. Phoneme awareness is initially rather implicit and
uncovered using tasks that assess sound similarity but, after school entry, children display a
growing ability to manipulate and reflect on the phonemic sounds in spoken language.

Morpheme Awareness

A morpheme is the smallest linguistic part of a word that can have a meaning. In other
words, it is the smallest meaningful part of a word. Examples of morphemes would be the parts
"un-", "break", and "-able" in the word "unbreakable".

Development of Morpheme Awareness

Early in language development, children join morphemes together spontaneously to
create new words to fill gaps in their vocabulary. The formation of words arises from three
main linguistic systems of combining morphemes: (a) inflectional morphology, which changes
the grammatical function of a word to encode information such as tense and number without
altering the word class; (b) derivational morphology, which alters the meaning of a word and
may change the word class; and (c) compounding, which creates new meaning by combining
free morphemes. Compounding appears to be the most accessible word formation process for
young children due to its simple structure and semantic transparency, with affix usage
appearing later in development under the influence of type frequency and productivity.
In studies which have investigated this ability more formally using morpheme awareness
tasks, the same questions about implicit and explicit processing arise as were discussed in
relation to phoneme awareness. An additional issue is that studies of morpheme awareness
sometimes use written tasks rather than the purely oral tasks typically of the phoneme
awareness literature. This is a critical factor to consider in reviewing this literature and, to
distinguish morpheme awareness from reading skill, only studies using oral tasks will be
reviewed in this section.
The formative study in this field assessed English-speaking preschoolers aged 4.5 years
on their ability to use inflected and derived forms to complete sentences. Better performance
was observed for inflected than derived items, especially for the progressive tense and for
plurals (e.g. This is a man who knows how to zib. What is he doing? He is (zibbing). This task
required production of inflections and derivations to order and was seen as more demanding of
conscious control than the spontaneous productions by children to fill lexical gaps in everyday
communication. This question of conscious control was studied directly in a comparison of the
explicit type of production required by sentence completion tasks with performance in a more
implicit judgement task (e.g. A person who teaches is a teacher? (yes/no). Results confirmed
that 6.5-year-old first graders found inflectional morphology easier to manipulate than
derivational morphology in the explicit task. Further derivational items with phonologically
transparent relationships between the root and derived form (i.e. quick-quickly) were easier to
produce than those with opaque relationships (i.e. long-length). When performance in the
implicit and explicit tasks was contrasted using the transparent derivational items, higher scores
emerged in the more implicit judgement task, although this task only assessed the very familiar
agentive and instrumental forms of the suffix -er.
Non-lexical items can also be used to form new derivations in production tasks (e.g.
Someone who lums is a ? (lummer)), which creates a higher demand for abstract knowledge
about the rules governing morpheme combination since lexical knowledge alone cannot
provide the answer. This increases the difficulty of the explicit task further with accuracy
developing gradually across early schooling. Similar developmental trajectories have been
reported using other explicit tasks.
In this literature, there has been a tendency for more implicit tasks, inflectional
morphology and a small number of frequent suffixes to be studied with younger children,
whereas more explicit tasks, derivational morphology and a wider range of suffixes have been
used with older children. These methodological differences have hampered comparison of
morphological development across age levels and suffix types. However, the growing number
of published findings appear to be converging on the following points: (a) differing levels of
morpheme awareness can be distinguished using implicit and explicit tasks, (b) awareness of
inflectional morphology emerges prior to awareness of derivational morphology, (c) explicit
morpheme awareness develops gradually during schooling rather than being coincident with
the onset of reading instruction, and (d) morpheme productivity, frequency and phonological
transparency influence the acquisition process.