Name- Arnav Raj
Class- B.A. Arts (hons.) 5th semester
Roll no.- 18231ENG025
Enrollment No.- 408707
Subject code- BAE-314
Subject- Linguistics and the Structure of English Language-I
Ques: Define Human Language and describe its properties ?
Language, a system of conventional spoken, manual, or written symbols by means of
which human beings, as members of a social group and participants in its culture, express
themselves .Language is species-specific to human beings. Human beings are unrestricted in
what they can communicate; no area of experience is accepted as necessarily incommunicable,
though it may be necessary to adapt one’s language in order to cope with new discoveries or new
modes of thought. The functions of language include communication, the expression
of identity, play, imaginative expression, and emotional release.
Human language is unique because it is generative, recursive, and has displacement. It is
recursive, which means that it can build upon itself without limits. It uses displacement, which
means that it can refer to things that are not directly present. The origins of human language are
disputed because there is a lack of direct evidence. Proto-Indo-European is the ancestor language
of hundreds of languages today. Human language is also the only kind that is modality-
independent; that is, it can be used across multiple channels. Verbal language is auditory, but
other forms of language—writing and sign language (visual), Braille (tactile)—are possible in
more complex human language systems.
Different Properties of Human Languages:-
DISPLACEMENT
The property of displacement allows the users of language to talk about things and events not
present in the immediate environment. It is this property that allows human beings, unlike any
other creature, to create fiction and to describe possible future worlds.
ARBITRARINESS
There is an arbitrary relationship between the linguistic signs and the objects they are used
indicate. Thus, these linguistic symbols do not in any way "fit" the objects they denote.
PRODUCTIVITY (Creativity or Open-endedness)
This is a feature of all languages that novel utternaces are continually being created. It is an
aspect of language which is linked to the fact that the potential number of utterances in any
human language is infinite.
DISCRETENESS
The sounds used in language are meaningfully distinct, i.e., each sound in the language is treated
as discrete. Human beings have a very discrete view of the sounds of language and wherever a
pronunciation falls within the physically possible range of sounds, it will be interpreted as
linguistically specific and meaningfully distinct sound.
DUALITY (Double Articulation)
Language is organized at two levels or layers simultaneously. At one level, there are distinct
sounds and at another level, there are distinct meaning. For example, we can produce individual
sounds like p, n, and i. Individually, these discrete forms does not have any intrinsic meaning.
However, if we combine them into pin then we have produced a combination of sounds which
have a different meaning than the meaning of the combination nip.
CULTURAL TRANSMISSION
Language is acquired in a culture with other speakers and not from parental genes. This property
of human is cultural transmission wherein a language is passed on from one generation to the
next within a cultural setting. Human beings are not born speaking a specific language even
though it has been argued that they are born with an innate predisposition to acquire language.
Ques: Define linguistics and its scope ?
The scientific study of human language is called linguistics. The word ‘linguistics’ is derived
from the Latin words ‘lingua’ meaning ‘tongue’ and ‘istics’ meaning ‘knowledge’. According to
the Cambridge Dictionary, linguistics refers to ‘the scientific study of the structure and
development of language in general or of particular languages’. A linguist is a scientist who
investigates human language in all its facets, its structure, its use, its history, its place in society.
They try to study the ways in which language is organized to fulfill human needs, as a system of
communication. Contrary to popular belief, linguists are not necessarily polyglots. We can say
that linguistics is learning about a language rather than learning a language. To study language,
linguists focus on two levels of description: pragmatics, the study of how context (both social
and linguistic) affects language use, and grammar, the description of how humans form linguistic
structures, from the level of sound up to the sentence.
Language is a phenomenon which is both objective and variable and it has a concrete shape and
occurrence. In linguistics we study the components of language, e.g. observing the occurrence of
speech-sounds, or the way in which words begin or end. So linguistics observes the features of
the language, classifies these features as being sound features of particular types, or words
belonging to particular classes on the basis of similarity or difference with other sounds and
words. But while linguistics shares some of the characteristics of empirical science, it is also a
social science because it studies language which is a form of a social behavior and exists
between humans beings in society. Thus, linguistics is both an empirical science and a social
science. In fact, it is a human discipline since it is concerned with human language; so it is a part
of the study of humanities as well. As Lyon puts it Linguistics has natural links with a wide
range of academic disciplines. To say that linguistics is a science is not to deny that, by virtue of
its subject matter, it is closely related to such eminently human disciplines as philosophy and
literary criticism.
Scope of Linguistics
Linguistics involves a vast, complex and systematic study, with different core areas such as
phonology, phonetics, morphology, syntax and semantics. It is also intertwined with various
other disciplines and contains fields like sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics etc. Linguistics,
unlike past ages, is being recognized as an independent discipline of study, thus paving the way
to a lot of developments and research. Linguistics is a descriptive study and not a prescriptive
one and describes language in all aspects. It is a subject that keeps changing, as languages
change.
It is a very dynamic domain of study. Although some aspects of the subject are based on
historical notes and few sets of rules, it continues to evolve out of old boundaries into new, with
developments that occur in different languages. Linguistics is applied to different fields of study,
and this makes it a very important discipline. The application of linguistics extends from
anthropology to speech therapy in modern medicine. Extensive researches and studies are
conducted on the linguistic perspectives of every language, aimed at tracing the characteristics of
the language as well as in employing the scope of linguistics into understanding the specific
characteristics of literature, including prose and poems in different languages.
