PROPERTIES OF LANGUAGE

Aristotle

Speech is the representation of the experience of the mind. According to Aristotle, language is a speech
sound produced by human beings to express their ideas, emotions, thoughts, desires, and feelings.

Sapir

The definition of Sapir expresses that language is mainly concerned with only human beings and
constitutes a system of sounds produced by them for communication.

Bloomfield

The totality of the utterances that can be made in a speech community is the language of that speech
community.

Bloch And Trager

According to Bloch and Trager, a language is a system of arbitrary vocal sounds through a social group
that cooperates.

Their definition of language points out that language is an arbitrary system, vocal sounds, way of
communication, and collectivity.

Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky says the language is the inherent capability of native speakers to understand and form
grammatical sentences.

Derbyshire

Derbyshire says the language is undoubtedly a kind of communication among human beings. It consists
primarily of vocal sounds, articulatory, systematic, symbolic, and arbitrary.

Lyons

According to Lyons, languages are the principal communication systems used by particular groups of
human beings within the specific society of which they are members.

Patanjali

Indian linguist Patanjali utters that language is a human expression produced by different speech organs
of human beings.

Through speech organs, humans produce several expressions converted to language.

COMMUNICATIVE VS. INFORMATIVE

COMMUNICATIVE – intentional

Example: I am sick today.

INFORMATIVE- not intentional/indirect

Example: I have red nose and I am sneezing.

DISPLACEMENT

 The ability to speak about things other than here and now.

 Only humans can do this.

 Refers to the tenses of the verb.

 All humans can refer to present, past and future in any real or fictitious location.

 ARBITRARINESS

 Pervasive in human languages/depends on social convention

 The absence of any necessary connection between a linguistic form and its meaning.

 No logical relationship between the speech sounds and what it represents.

PRODUCTIVITY/ CREATIVITY

 Human beings can produce and understand an infinite number of sentences using a finite
number of rules. This property of language is called recursiveness.

Reflective in our ability to:

 Combine words to form phrases, phrases to form sentences

 Produce new sentences never spoken before and understand them

DISCRETENESS

 Sounds that are used in language are meaningfully distinct.

 Each sound in the language system is treated as a linguistically specific & discrete sound.

CULTURAL TRANSMISSION

 Human language is passed down from one generation to another.