UNIVERSIDAD AUTONOMA DE NUEVO LEON

Facultad de Filosofía y letras

Lingüistica aplicada en la enseñanza y traducción del Ingles

Historia y cultura de la lengua inglesa

2. Resumen o cuadro sinoptico:

Language and the English Language Chapter 1

Hernan Mario Gonzalez Hernandez Eimy Lizeth Aguilar Sanchez

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Cd. Monterrey Nuevo León, México a 24 de agosto de 2022

 Language and the English Language

A language is a system of conventional vocal signs by means of which human beings

communicate, this definition has several important terms, each of which is examined in
some detail in the following sections. Those terms are system, signs, vocal,
conventional, human, and communicate.

The lexis or vocabulary of a language is its least systematic aspect. Grammar is

sometimes defined as everything in a language that can be stated in general rules, and
lexis as everything that is unpredictable. But that is not quite true. Certain combinations
of words, called collocations, are more or less predictable. Mild and gentle are words of
very similar meaning, but they go with different nouns: “mild weather” and “gentle
breeze” are somewhat more likely than the opposite combi-nations.

The grammatical system of any language has various techniques for relating words
to one another within the structure of a sentence. The following kinds of signals are
especially important.

Parts of speech are grammatical categories into which we can classify words. The four
major ones are noun, verb, adjective, and adverb.

Affixes are one or more added sounds or letters that change a word’s meaning and
sometimes alter its part of speech. When an affix comes at the front of award, it is a
prefix, such as the Eni encipher, enrage, enthrone, entomb, entwine, and enwrap, which
marks those words as verbs.

Concord or agreement, is an interconnection between words, especially marked by

their inflections.

Word order is a grammatical signal in all languages, though some languages, like
English, depend more heavily on it than others do.

Function words are minor parts of speech (for example, articles, auxiliaries,
conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns, and certain adverbial particles) that serves
grammatical signals used with word order to serve some of the same functions as
inflections.
Prosodic signals, such as pitch, stress, and tempo, can indicate grammatical meaning.

A sign something that stands for something else—for example, a word like apple, which
stands for the familiar fruit. But linguistic signs are not words alone; they may also be
either smaller or larger than whole words.

Morphemes that can be used alone as words (such as apple and jack) are called
free morphemes.

he signs of language—its words and morphemes—are basically vocal, or oral-aural,

being sounds produced by the mouth and received by the ear. If human communication
had developed primarily as a system of gestures (like the sign language of the deaf), it
would have been quite different from what it is.

Writing is obviously conventional because we can represent the same language by

more than one writing system.

Change is normal in language. Every language is constantly turning into something

different, and when we hear a new word or a new pronunciation or use of an old word,
we may be catching the early stages of a change. Change is natural because a
language system is culturally transmitted.

Historical, or diachronic, variation is matched by contemporary, or synchronic, variation.

The latter is of two kinds: dialects and registers.

To talk about “correctness” In language implies that there is some abstract, absolute
standard by which words and grammar can be judged; something is either “correct” or
“incorrect”—and that’s all there is to that. But the facts of language are not so clean-cut.
Instead, many students of usage today prefer to talk about acceptability, that is, the
degree to which users of a language will judge an expression as OK or will let its use
pass without noticing anything out of the ordinary. An acceptable expression is one that
people do not object to, indeed do not even notice unless it is called to their attention.

The characteristic of displacement means that human beings can abstract, lie, and talk
about talk itself