Chapter 1 Invitations to Linguistics

1.1 Why study language?

1. Language is very essential to human beings.

2. In language there are many things we should know.

3. For further understanding, we need to study language scientifically.

1.2 What is language?

1.3 Design features of language

The features that define our human languages can be called design features which can distinguish human language from any animal system of communication.

1.3.1 Arbitrariness

1.3.2 Duality

1.3.3 Creativity

Creativity means that language is resourceful because of its duality and its recursiveness. Recursiveness refers to the rule which can be applied repeatedly without any definite limit. The recursive nature of language provides a theoretical basis for the possibility of creating endless sentences.

1.3.4 Displacement

1.4 Origin of language

1. The bow-wow theory

In primitive times people imitated the sounds of the animal calls in the wild environment they lived and speech developed from that.

2. The pooh-pooh theory

In the hard life of our primitive ancestors, they utter instinctive sounds of pains, anger and joy which gradually developed into language.

3. The “yo-he-ho” theory

As primitive people worked together, they produced some rhythmic grunts which gradually developed into chants and then into language.

1.5 Functions of language

As is proposed by Jacobson, language has six functions:

1. Referential: to convey message and information;

2. Poetic: to indulge in language for its own sake;

3. Emotive: to express attitudes, feelings and emotions;

4. Conative: to persuade and influence others through commands and entreaties;

5. Phatic: to establish communion with others;

6. Metalingual: to clear up intentions, words and meanings.

What is contextualism?

“Contextualism” is based on the presumption that one can derive meaning from, or reduce it to, observable context: the “situational context” and the “linguistic context”. Every utterance occurs in a particular spatial-temporal situation, as the following factors are related to the situational context: (1) the speaker and the hearer; (2) the actions they are performing at the time; (3) various external objects and events; (4) deictic features. The “linguistic context” is another aspect of contextualism. It considers the probability of one word’s co-occurrence or collocation with another, which forms part of the meaning, and an important factor in communication.