the definition of language?

1. (LANGUAGE)
- Applied Linguistics-
Yudi Rahmatullah
Universtas Mathla’ul Anwar

2. 1. What is language?
• a system of communication consisting of
sounds, words and grammar, or the system of
communication used by the people of a
particular country or profession
• According to the philosophy expressed in the
myths and religions of many peoples,
language is the source of human life and
power.
• Most everyone knows at least one language

3. Linguistic Knowledge
• When you know a language, you can speak and
be understood by others who know that
language. This means you have the capacity to produce sounds
that signify certain meanings and to understand or interpret the
sounds produced by others. The languages of the deaf communities
throughout the world are equivalent to spoken languages.
Knowledge of the Sound System
• knowing a language means knowing what sounds
are in that language and what sounds are not.
• Knowing the sound system of a language includes
more than knowing the inventory of sounds. It
means also knowing which sounds may start a
word, end a word, and follow each other.

4. Knowledge of Words
• Knowing a language means also knowing that
certain sequences of sounds signify certain
concepts or meanings. When you know a
language, you know words in that language, that
is, which sequences of sounds are related to
specific meanings and which are not. You also know
that toy and boy are words, but moy is not. the
relationship between speech sounds and the meanings
they represent is an arbitrary one.
• Many signs were originally like miming, where the
relationship between form and meaning is not
arbitrary.

5. • sound symbolism in language—that is, words
whose pronunciation suggests the meaning.
Most languages contain onomatopoeic words
like buzz or murmur that imitate the sounds
associated with the objects or actions they
refer to. cock-a-doodle-doo is an onomatopoeic
word whose meaning is the crow of a rooster.

6. 2. The Creativity of Linguistic
Knowledge
• Knowledge of a language enables you to combine
sounds to form words, words to form phrases,
and phrases to form sentences.
• Knowing a language means being able to produce
new sentences never spoken before and to
understand sentences never heard before.
• … everybody who knows a language can and does
create new sentences when speaking and
understands new sentences created by others
(Chomsky)

7. Knowledge of Sentences and Non-sentences
• If sentences were formed simply by placing
one word after another in any order, then a
language could be defined simply as a set of
words.
• linguistic knowledge includes rules for forming
sentences and making the kinds of judgments
you made about. These rules must be finite in
length and finite in number so that they can
be stored in our finite brains.

8. Linguistic Knowledge and Performance
• Our linguistic knowledge permits us to form
longer and longer sentences by joining
sentences and phrases together or adding
modifiers to a noun.
• having the knowledge to produce sentences of
a language; linguistic competence and
applying this knowledge in actual speech
production and comprehension; linguistic
performance.

9. What Is Grammar?
• the grammar is the knowledge speakers have
about the units and rules of their language.
• descriptive grammar does not tell you how you
should speak; it describes your basic linguistic
knowledge. It explains how it is possible for you
to speak and understand, and it tells what you
know about the sounds, words, phrases, and
sentences of your language.

10. • Prescriptive grammars prescribe rather than
the rules of grammar. The goal is not to tell
the people what rules they should follow. E.g
enormity to mean “enormous” instead of
“monstrously.

11. Teaching Grammars
• teaching grammar is used to learn another
language.
• Teaching grammars are used in schools in
foreign language classes or dialect.
• This kind of grammar gives the words and
their pronunciations, and explicitly states the
rules of the language, especially where they
differ from the language of instruction.

12. 1. Teaching grammars assume that the student
already knows one language and compares
the grammar of the target language with the
grammar of the native language.
2. Sounds of the target language that do not
occur in the native language are often
described by reference to known sounds.

13. Language Universals
• There are rules of particular languages, such as
English, Swahili, and Zulu, that form part of the
individual grammars of these languages, and then
there are rules that hold in all languages. Those
rules representing the universal properties that
all languages share constitute a universal
grammar.
• Chomsky’s view that there is a Universal
Grammar (UG) that is part of the biologically
endowed human language faculty. We can think
of UG as the basic blueprint that all languages
follow.

14. The Development of Grammar
• Linguistic theory is concerned not only with
describing the knowledge that an adult speaker
has of his or her language, but also with
explaining how that knowledge is acquired.
• children learn the language in very much the
same way; babbling stage, words, simple
sentences.
• Chomsky said that human beings are born with
an innate “blueprint” for language, referred as
Universal Grammar

15. • Children acquire language as quickly and
effortlessly as they do because they do not
have to figure out all the grammatical rules,
only those that are specific to their particular
language.
• Linguistic theory aims to uncover those
principles that characterize all human
languages and to reveal the innate component
of language that makes language acquisition
possible.

16. Sign Languages:
• Because deaf children are unable to hear speech,
they do not acquire spoken languages as hearing
children do. However, deaf children who are
exposed to sign languages acquire them just as
hearing children acquire spoken languages.
• Sign languages do not use sounds to express
meanings. Instead, they are visual gestural
systems that use hand, body, and facial gestures
as the forms used to represent words and
grammatical rules.

17. • Sign languages are fully developed languages,
and signers create and comprehend unlimited
numbers of new sentences, just as speakers of
spoken languages do.
• American Sign Language (ASL) is an outgrowth of
the sign language used in France and brought to
the United States in 1817 by the great educator
Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet.
• Like all languages, ASL has its own grammar with
phonological, morphological, syntactic, and
semantic rules, and a mental lexicon of signs, all
of which is encoded through a system of
gestures, and is otherwise equivalent to spoken
languages.

18. • Deaf children acquire sign language much in
the way that hearing children acquire a
spoken language, going through the same
linguistic stages including the babbling stage.
• Sign languages resemble spoken languages in
all major aspects, showing that there truly are
universals of language despite differences in
the modality in which the language is
performed.

19. Animal “Languages”
• The chirping of birds, the squeaking of
dolphins, and the dancing of bees may
potentially represent systems similar to
human languages.
• Most animals possess some kind of “signaling”
communication system

20. • Language is a system that relates sounds or
gestures to meanings. Conversely, when
animals vocally imitate human utterances, it
does not mean they possess language. Talking
birds are capable of faithfully reproducing
words and phrases of human language that
they have heard, but their utterances carry no
meaning.

21. Can Chimps Learn Human Language?
• In their natural habitat, chimpanzees, gorillas,
and other nonhuman primates communicate
with each other through visual, auditory,
olfactory, and tactile signals. Many of these
signals seem to have meanings associated with
the animals’ immediate environment or
emotional state.
• The chimps were unable to vocalize words
despite the efforts of their caretakers, though
they did achieve the ability to understand a
number of individual words.

22. • One disadvantage suffered by primates is that
their vocal tracts do not permit them to
pronounce many different sounds. Because of
their manual dexterity, primates might better
be taught sign language as a test of their
cognitive linguistic ability.

23. The Origin of Language
• Despite the difficulty of finding scientific
evidence, speculations on language origin
have provided valuable insights that Although
myths, customs, and superstitions do not tell
us very much about language origin, they do
tell us about the importance ascribed to
language. There is no way to prove or disprove
the divine origin of language, just as one
cannot argue scientifically for or against the
existence of deities.

24. Language and Thought
• Many people are fascinated by the question of
how language relates to thought.
• language would influence how we think about
or perceive the world around us.
• Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is called linguistic
determinism because it holds that the
language we speak determines how we
perceive and think about the world.

25. • linguistic relativism, which says that different
languages encode different categories and
that speakers of different languages therefore
think about the world in different ways.
Languages also differ in how they express
locations.
• That languages show linguistic distinctions in
their lexicons and grammar is certain