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What Is Human Language? The modern study of language is rooted in questions first asked millennia ago. As old as speculation on any subject, inquiry into the nature of language occupied Plato and Aris- totle, as well as other Greek and Indian philosophers. In some areas of grammatical analysis, the ancients made contributions that have remained useful for 2000 years and established some of the analytical categories still used today. In the nineteenth and twen- tieth centuries, the field of linguistics emerged to address certain age-old questions, among them these: What is the nature of the relationship between signs and what they signify? What are the elements of a language, and how are they organized within words, sentences, and discourse? What enables us to produce and understand sentences we have never heard before? How do languages achieve their communicative goals? What is the origin of language? In what ways do languages change and develop? What does it mean to say that two languages are related? How are languages and dialects related? What enables a young child to learn a language so well and efficiently? What makes it so challenging for an adult to learn a language? Are there right and wrong ways to express things, and, if so, who decides? This book provides a modern context for asking and addressing those questions. Three Faces of a Language System The fundamental function of every language system is to link meaning and expression- to provide verbal expression for thought and feeling. A grammar can be viewed as a coin whose two sides are expression and meaning and whose task is to systematically link the two. But language has a third face, so important in producing and interpreting utterances that it can override all else. That face is context, and only in a particular context can an expression convey a speaker's intended meaning and be interpreted correctly by a hearer. Imagine a dinner-table conversation about the cost of living in which a guest asks the host, "Is there a state income tax in Connecticut?" Among the replies this question could elicit are "Yes," "No," and "I don't know," because in this context the question is likely to be taken as a request for information. Now consider an equally straightforward inquiry made on the same occasion: "Is there any salt on the table?" In this instance, a host who earnestly replied "Yes," "No," or "I don't know". and let the matter rest there would seem insensitive at best. Is there a state income tax in Connecticut? Is there any salt on the table? The form of the salt question resembles the form of the income tax question, but the point of the questions-their intended meaning-and the expected responses could scarcely be more different. At a dinner table, a guest inquiring about salt naturally expects a host to recognize it's salt that's wanted, not information! By contrast, in a related context, say, with the host in the kitchen, pepper mill in hand, and asking a guestwho's just come from the dining room, "Is there any salt on the table?" the host is likely to be understood as seeking information even though the form of the question is exactly the same as the one asked by the guest at the table. In answer to the question asked in the dining room, a reply of "Yes" or "No" would seem bizarre. In the kitchen, it would be altogether appropriate. You can see, then, that conversationalists can't interpret an utterance from expression alone. To grasp the intended meaning of an expression, hearers must consider it in light of its context. At the same time, when uttering an expression, speakers routinely rely on a hearer's ability to grapple with and recognize their intentions in uttering the expression in a specific context. Besides meaning and expression, then, the base of language use is context, and lan- guage can be best viewed as a three-sided figure of expression, meaning, and context, as shown in Figure 1-1. FIGURE 1-1 Three Faces of Language MEANING EXPRESSION CONTEXT Expression encompasses words, phrases, and sentences, including intonation and stress. Meaning refers to the senses and referents of these elements of expression. Con- text refers to the social situation in which expression is uttered and includes whatever has been expressed earlier in that situation. It also relies on generally shared knowledge between speaker and hearer. What links expression and meaning is grammar. What links grammar and interpretation is context. Without attention to both grammar and context, we cannot understand how language works. Language: Mental and Social Language is often viewed as a vehicle of thought, a system of expression that mediates the transfer of thought from one person to another. In everyday life, language also serves equally important social and emotional functions. Linguists are interested in models of how language is organized in the mind and how the social structures of human communities shape language, reflecting those structures in expression and interpretation.Signs: Arbitrary and Nonarbitrary In everyday conversation, we talk about signs of trouble with the economy, no sign of a train arriving at a railway station, a person's vital signs, and so forth. Signs are indicators of something else. In the examples mentioned, the indicator is inherently related to the thing indicated. Nonarbitrary signs have a direct, usually causal relationship to the things they indicate. Smoke is a nonarbitrary sign of fire, clouds a nonarbitrary sign of impending rain. Arbitrary Signs Nonarbitrary signs such as clouds and smoke differ crucially from partly or wholly arbi- trary signs. Arbitrary signs include traffic lights, railroad crossing indicators, wedding rings, and national flags. There is no causal or inherent connection between arbitrary signs and what they signify or indicate. Arbitrary indicators can be present even when the thing indicated is absent (as with a bachelor wearing a wedding ring). Because they are conventional representations, arbitrary signs can be changed. If a national transporta- tion department decided to use the color blue as the signal to stop traffic, it could do so. The relationship is generally arbitrary between words and what they represent, and we say that language is a system of arbitrary signs. Representational Signs Some essentially arbitrary signs are not entirely arbitrary and may suggest their meaning Poison may be suggested by a skull and crossbones &, while an icon such as { may suggest the sun, and the Roman numerals II and III represent the numbers two and three. Because these signs suggest what they indicate, they are partly iconic. Still, there is no inherent connection: The sign can be present without the signified, and the signified with- out the sign. Signs that are basically arbitrary but partly iconic are called representa- tional. Linguistic examples in English include meow and trickle, insofar as those words suggest what they signify. Iconic expression can also appear spontaneously in ordinary speech. I once telephoned the home of a friend, and her four-year-old son answered. He reported that his mother was showering, and when I said I'd call back in a few minutes he indicated that calling back soon would do no good. His explanation was this: My mother is taking a long, loong, looong shower. By stretching out his pronunciation of the vowel sound in long, the boy demonstrated the potential for spontaneous iconicity in human language. By making his vowels longer, he directly signaled length of time and thus iconically emphasized the salient part of his meaning. Representational (or iconic) language is linguistic expression that in any fash- ion mimics or directly suggests its content. Try It Yourself: Besides stretching out the vowel in long to represent length of time, the boy's utterance was iconic in a second way. Identify this second way. Then, identify another very, very common example in English in which this second way conveys a meaning different from extended length. (Hint: Examine the preceding sentence attentively.)Iconicity can also be expressed in grammar. Consider that English has two ways of organizing conditional sentences. The condition (the "if part) can precede the conse- quence or follow it. If you behave, I'll give you some M&Ms. (condition precedes consequence) I'll give you some M&Ms if you behave. (condition follows consequence) English permits placing the condition (if you behave) before or after the consequence (I'll give you some M&Ms). Although contextual factors can influence the choice, speak- ers and writers show a strong preference for the condition to precede the consequence, a preference also found in many other languages. The reason has to do with the order of occurrence of real-world events described by conditional sentences. In our example, the addressee must first behave, and then the speaker will provide the M&Ms. These real- world events are ordered in time with the condition preceding the consequence, and this real-world order is reflected in the preferred linguistic order. There is thus an iconic explanation for preferring the condition-preceding-consequence order over the reverse order. With condition preceding consequence, the expression iconically mimics the sequencing of real-world events. Some languages allow only the condition-preceding- consequence pattern; others permit both; but no language appears to limit conditional sentences to the noniconic order, consequence before condition. Language-A System of Arbitrary Signs Despite occasional iconic characteristics, human language is essentially arbitrary. The form of an expression is generally independent of its meaning except for the associations established by convention. Imagine a parent trying to catch a few minutes of the tele- vised evening news while cooking dinner. Suddenly a strong aroma of burning rice wafts into the TV room. This nonarbitrary sign will send the parent scurrying to salvage din- ner. The aroma is caused by the burning rice and will convey its message to speakers of any language. There is nothing conventionalized about it. Now contrast the aroma with the words of a youngster who sees the smoke in the kitchen and shouts, "The rice is burning!" That utterance is also likely to send the parent scurrying, but the words are arbitrary. It is a set of facts about English (not about burning rice) that enables the utter- ance to alert the parent. The utterance is thus an arbitrary sign. Other languages express the same meaning differently: Korean by the utterance pap thanda, Swahili by wali inaunguwu, Arabic by yahtariqu alruzzu, and so on. The forms of these utterances have nothing to do with rice or the manner in which it is cooking; they are not iconic. Instead, they have to do solely with the language systems of Korean, Swahili, and Arabic. Because the relationship between linguistic signs and what they represent is arbitrary, the meaning of a given sign may differ from culture to culture Even words that mimic natural noises are cross-linguistically distinct. For example, cats don't meow in all languages; in Korean the word is yaong. As you see, a central characteristic of human language is that the connection between words and what they mean-between signifier and signified is largely arbitrary. In England, bakers bake bread; in France, pain; in Russia, xleb; in China, mianbao, in Fiji madrai. Not only are things signified differently in different languages, even a single lan- guage may use multiple signs to represent a simple notion. We purchase a dozen or twelve bagels for the same price, and we write 12, XII, TWELVE, twelve, or Twelve. For more complex content, the variety of possible expressions can be limitless.Languages as Patterned Structures Given the arbitrary relationship between linguistic signs and what they represent, lan- guages must be highly organized systems in order to function as reliable vehicles of communication. The observable patterns that languages follow we call \"rules.\" They are not imposed from the outside (like traffic regulations) and do not specify how something should be done. Instead, the rules described in this book are based on the observed regularities of language behavior and the underlying linguistic systems that can be inferred from that behavior. They are the rules that even children have unconsciously acquired and use when they display mastery of their native tongue. A language is a set of elements and a system for combining them into patterned expres- sions that can be used to accomplish specific tasks in specific contexts. Utterances report _news, greet relatives, invite friends to lunch, request the time of day from strangers; with language, we make wisecracks, poke fun, argue for a course of action, express admiration, propose marriage, create fictional worlds, and so on. And a language accomplishes its work with a finite system that a child masters in a few years. The mental capacity that enables ~ speakers to form grammatical sentences such as My mother is taking a long shower rather 'than \"A taking long my shower is mother\" (or thousands of other possible ill-formed strings of exactly the same words) is grammatical competence. It enables speakers to pro- duce and understand an infinite number of sentences they haven't heard before. Besides arbitrariness, then, four other hallmarks of human language systems deserve highlighting. Speakers can identify the sound segments in the words of their language. English speakers can identify the sounds in car as the three represented by the letters , a, and . Likewise for the sounds in spill, which are recognized as four: the initial consonant cluster repre- sented by s and p, the final consonant sound represented by /I, and the vowel sound in between. It is a structural feature of language that words are made up of elemental sounds. Human languages can be analyzed on two levels. At one level, they can be viewed as having meaningful units; thus, tabletop has the two meaningful parts table and top. At a lower level the elements contained in the meaningful parts do not themselves carry meaning. The three sounds of rop don't individually have meaning; they form a mean- ingful unit only when combined as in fop. And it's precisely because the mgli d'!@a;fv sounds in top don't carry independent meaning that they can be formed into o binations with other meanings, such as pot, opt, topped, and popped. R 9 Human languages are capable of are spatially or temporally distan and now. Instead, we can tal even of events that have istic of human language representing things and events that are not present, but t. We are not confined to discussing events of the here talk of faraway places and the events of yesterday or yesteryear, Yet to occur or will never happen. This is an important character- 80 important that when asked whether tool use or language had e L |