 |
| Phonetics --> 6th Lecture The (Properties of The Language) |
The Properties of The Language
These properties are:
Displacement
Human language-users are
capable of producing messages that refer to past and future time,
and to other locations. That is , it allows the users of language to talk about
things and events not present in the immediate environment. Also ,
it enables us to talk about things and places
whose existence we cannot
be sure of such as mythical creatures, demons , fairies , angels ,
Santa Claus, and recently invented characters like Superman.
Thus, it is the property of displacement
which allows the human , unlike any other creature to create fiction and to describe
possible future worlds.
Examples
1-When your pet cat
comes home after spending a night in the back alleys and stands at your feet calling
meow. You are likely to understand this message
as relating to that
immediate time and place. If you ask the cat where it was the night before and
what it was up to , you may get
the same meow response. It seems that animal communication is almost exclusively
designed for this moment.
2-When a
worker bee finds a source of nectar and
returns to the hive , it can perform a dance to
communicate to the other bees the location of this nectar. Depending on the
type of dance, the other bees can work out where this newly discovered source can
be found.
Arbitrariness :
It is generally the case
that there is no 'natural' connection between a linguistic form and
its meaning. You cannot look at the Arabic
word
Kalb and from its shape , for
example, determine that it has a natural meaning, any more than you can with
its English translation form-dog. The linguistic form has no natural or'
iconic' relationship with that four-legged
barking object out in the world.
The forms of human language demonstrate a property called arbitrariness . There are, of course, some words in language which have sounds which seem to 'echo' the
sounds of objects
or activities. English examples might be cuckoo, crash which are onomatopoeic.
For the majority of animal signals,
however, there appears to be a clear
connection between the conveyed message and the signal used to convey it.
Productivity:
Productivity (or 'creativity',
or 'open-endedness') is an aspect
of language which is linked to the fact that the potential number
of utterances in any human language is infinite. It is a feature of all
languages that new utterances are continually being created. A child learning language
is active in forming and producing utterances which he or she has
never heard before. With adults , new situations arise or objects have to be
described. So the language-users manipulate
their linguistic resources to
produce new expressions and new sentences.
Cultural transmission
This process whereby
language is passed on from one generation to the next .
Examples
1-While you
may inherit brown eyes and dark hair from your parents you do not inherit their
language. you acquire a language in a culture with other speakers and not from
parental genes. An infant born to Chinese parents (who live in China and speak Cantonese), which is brought up
from birth by English speakers in the United States
2- humans
are born with an innate predisposition to acquire language. it is clear that
they are not born with the ability to produce utterances in a specific
language. Human infants growing up in isolation produce no instinctive language
cultural transmission of a specific language is crucial in the human
acquisition process.
3-The general pattern of
animal communication is that the signals used are instinctive and not learned.
4-There is however some
experimental evidence which suggests that some birds do actively 'learn' the
distinctive calls used by their species. If those birds are reared in isolation
they will instinctively produce abnormal songs or calls.
Duality
Language is organized at
two levels simultaneously. In terms of speech production,
there is the physical level
at which individual sounds can be produced, like n, b and i.
when we produce those sounds
in a particular combination as in bin, we have another level producing a meaning
which is different from the meaning of the combination as in bin, this duality of
levels is in fact one of the most economical features of human language since with
a limited set of distinct sounds we are capable of producing a very large
number of sound combinations or words which are distinct in meaning.
***********************
***********************
No comments: