NATURE &

FUNCTION OF LANGUAGE
Definition of Language
Purpose & Use of Language
Properties of Language
What is language used for?
 Ceremonial
Purposes
Phatic
Communication. An
Ex: 'Elevator instrument
Talk' & 'Street- of action
corner
Conversations

To embody PURPOSE
AND USE To keep
or enable OF records
thought LANGUAGE

To enable To convey
self- order &
expression information
To influence
people
 Properties of Language
1) Arbitrariness
2) Duality
3) Displacement
4) Cultural Transmission
5) Interchangeability
6) A code
7) Specifically human
8) Creative (productive)
 1. Arbitrariness
• the connection between the signifier
(form) and the signified (meaning) is
arbitrary (no natural connection between
linguistic form & its meaning) signified

• these arbitrary relationships are agreed

upon by speakers, i.e. a matter of
convention (consensus)
• Arbitrariness of the Sign - Sounds of moon
words bear no relationship to meaning
(except for onomatopoeia).
signifier
• even interjections and onomatopoetic
signs are arbitrary
– Ding dong, choo choo, meow -Oh! ouch! Yahoo!
 2. Duality

• Linguistic units have a dual nature:

1. They are observable physical events
 ‘noise’ or ‘image’
2. They are more than simple physical events
• They are produced in order to communicate
meaning
• They are connected to a concept
Ogranised in two levels:
• The Physical level and
• the meaning level
For example:
• Physical level where individual sounds are
produced, for example: ‘n’, ‘t’, ‘a’
• Meaning level when sounds are combined
‘tan’, ‘ant’
3. Displacement
– We can communicate beyond the here and now
– We are not ‘stimulus bound’
4. Cultural Transmission
– Grammars are transmitted from one generation to the
next
– Acquiring ‘a language’ requires involvement in a culture
– COMPARE  Genetic Transmission of big-L ‘Language’
• Each human is born with Language; it’s a biological
instinct.
5. Interchangeability
All members of the community are physically capable of
transmitting and receiving messages
 6) Language is a Code

• Language can be regarded as a code for

conveying a great variety of information.
• The linguistic code uses symbols – signals
which mean or convey something other than
themselves.
• A language also has a set of symbols.
• Each word of a language is a symbol, a
sequence of sounds or letters, or hand
and face signs in the case of deaf
alphabets, which is related by convention
to a particular meaning.
7) Language is Specifically Human
Imagine that you are an anthropologist
entering a remote area of South America to
study the language of a tribe of people whose
existence has only recently been discovered.
Assuming that the people are friendly and co-
operative, how might you go about cracking
the code that is their language?
• The task is easier than your task with dolphins
because the language these people use will be
organised in certain ways.
• You are dealing with humans thus, you can assume
that their language and yours will have some
common properties.
• If you hold up a leaf and say ‘leaf’ in English, your
new companions respond with ‘rogan’, you may
suspect this is the word for ‘leaf’ in their language.
• Here you can assume that the language you are
studying uses sound to encode meaning, and that
meaning is attached to something like the sound
sequences that we call words.
• Furthermore, you can assume that the words
you hear will belong to grammatical classes,
such as nouns and verbs, phrases, sentences,
making statements etc.
• All these properties are true of every human
language, a fact that will help you enormously
in cracking the code of your new language.
 8) Language Use is Creative

Make up sentences you have never said before.

a) Was it difficult?
b) Did you feel creative?
c) Were you, in fact, being creative?
Answers:
a) No.
b) Probably not.
c) Undoubtedly.

• The reason you can perform this task so easily is that

there are many words in English, and the rules of
English permit these words to be combined in many
different ways.
• Rule Governed Creativity - An infinite number of
utterances can be created by a limited number of rules
/ patterns
 How many times a day do you say the same
sentence? How many times in a year/lifetime?

• There are a few sentences that we repeat

often. But by and large we do not repeat
sentences. Most of the sentences we utter are
put together on the spot.
Interesting Facts About Language
• The number of sentences is infinite.
• We are able to distinguish grammatical from
ungrammatical sentences.
• We are able to recognise truncated sentences
(‘Stop it’) that are missing nouns.
• We are able to recognise ambiguous sentences
(‘David saw the girl with binoculars’)
• We can create sentences that paraphrase each
other.
 Noam Chomsky
Focused on the vast and unconscious set of
rules he hypothesised must exist in the minds
of speakers and hearers in order for them to
produce and understand their native language.
 

1957 – Syntactic Structures

1965 – Aspects of the Theory of Syntax
 Chomsky’s Views
• He abandons the idea that children produce languages
only by imitation (abandon behaviorism)

• He rejects the idea that direct teaching and correcting

of grammar could account for children’s utterances
because the rules children were unconsciously
acquiring are buried in the unconscious of the adults.

• He claims that there are generative rules (explicit

algorithms that characterise the structures of a
particular language).
 Chomsky’s Views
Hypothesis – The inborn linguistic capacity of
humans is sensitive to just those rules that occur in
human languages. Language development occurs if
the environment provides exposure to language.
Similar to the capacity to walk.
 
Universal Grammar - Despite superficial
differences all human languages share a fundamental
structure. This structure is a universal grammar. We
have an innate ability to apply this universal grammar
to whatever language we are faced with at birth.
 Support for Chomsky (1)
That the number of grammatical
sentences is infinite supports the
idea that we have to appeal to
grammatical rules.
 Support for Chomsky (2)
Claim that children can’t be taught
grammatical rules because they are not
explicitly known. Rather, they absorb these
rules unconsciously, as their language is
spoken around them.
Group work:
Prepare a 3-minute mime (non
verbal communication) of a
situation of your choice for next
week’s tutorial session.