(LANGUAGE)

- Applied Linguistics-

Yudi Rahmatullah
Universtas Mathlaul Anwar

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

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.

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.

 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.

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)

Knowledge of Sentences and Nonsentences

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.

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.

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.

 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.

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

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.

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.
Chomskys 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.

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

 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.

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.

 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.

 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.

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

 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.

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.

 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.

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.

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.

 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