Understanding the Nuances of Language

• Language is a rich and varied human ability that gives words to thoughts and voices to ideas.
• It is effortlessly used, acquired automatically by children, and studied by linguists as a complex and describable system.

Uniqueness of Language

• Language makes humans uniquely human with its creativity, and complexity.
• Humans manipulate elements in language to express complex thoughts and understand unfamiliar words/sentences.
• This capacity is shared by hearing and deaf people and develops early in children, because of the human language faculty.
• It provides a unique window into the human mind, which allows for investigation into what it is to be human.
• Language also reflects self-identity and is indispensable for social interactions and varying interactions.
• Studying language has practical applications, such as developing better teaching tools and treating speech disorders.

Communication

• Language is used to communicate ideas from one mind to another, but alternatives like honking, drawing, or semaphore flags exist.
• Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver outlined key elements in any communication system; information source, transmitter, signal, receiver, and destination.
• During communication using language, one person acts as the information source/transmitter, sending a signal to another.
• The other person acts as receiver/destination and must understand the speaker's language to fulfill either role.

Communication Steps

• Idea is thought of to be communicated
• Idea is put into words
• Listener interprets the signal as a language
• Idea is communicated once the listener decodes this message
• The first four steps represent the information source and the next steps are the transmitter
• Step six is the signal
• Step seven is the receiver and encompasses steps 2-4 in reverse.
• The listener receives the communicated idea as the final step
• Perfect communication, where the listener receives the exact idea isnt normal

Design Features of Language

• Charles Hockett designed a list to identify descriptive characteristics of language, it tells about what language is like:
• Semanticity: Signals in a communication system must have meaning or function.
• Pragmatic Function: Serves a purpose, aiding survival, influencing behavior, and expanding knowledge.
• Interchangeability: Ability to both transmit and receive messages.
• Cultural Transmission: Language is acquired through culture, not inherited.
• Arbitrariness: No natural connection between linguistic form and meaning.
• Discreteness: Language is composed of discrete units to create larger ones.
• Double Articulation: Linguistic forms have two levels of sound production and meaning, with a limited number of sounds can result in many words.
• Displacement: Humans can talk about non-present things, past, future, hopes, and dreams.
• Productivity: Humans create new expressions, making potential utterances infinite.

Linguistics

• Linguistics is the scientific study of language, encompassing analysis and modeling.
• Traditional areas of linguistic analysis include phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.
• Phonetics studies minimal language units ie speech sounds represented in IPA & also studies;
• Articulatory phonetics which deals with how we make sounds
• Acoustic phonetics: Physical properties as sound waves.
• Auditory phonetics: Perception of speech sounds.
• Phonology studies how sounds are organized and interact within a language or how sounds are organized in the language.

Morphology

• Morphology studies words, their formations, and relationships to other words.
• Morphemes are minimal units of meaning in English words such as "talks, talker, talked" consisting of "talk" elements,
• Units of grammatical function indicate past tense or plural examples like re-new-ed and tour-ist-s
• Free morphemes can stand alone (new, tour), while bound morphemes (re-, -ist, -ed, -s) cannot.
• Derivational morphemes create new words, like affixes (un-, mis-, etc.), that appear in words like "unhappy" or "terrorism."
• Prefixes are added to the beginning (un-, mis-), and suffixes are added to the end (-less, -ish).
• Inflectional morphemes don't create new words but indicate grammatical function, inflectional morphemes show if a word is plural/singular.
• English has eight inflectional morphemes, all suffixes: possessive ('s), plural (-s), 3rd person singular present tense (-s), etc

Syntax

• Syntax combines words/phrases into larger phrases; words (Bob, cake, out), and phrases (out the window, my cake).
• A linguistic expression's syntactic properties determine how it combines with others
• English sentence structure typically features subjects before verbs and objects after, following SVO (Subject-Verb-Object) word order.

Semantics

• Semantics studies the meaning of words, phrases, and sentences.
• There is always an attempt to focus on the words, rather than an occasion
• Referential meaning are basic and essential conveyed by word's use while the dictionary describes the meaning

Semantic Roles

• Semantic roles fulfill within the situation described by a sentence.
• Agent (entity performing action), theme (entity involved in/affected by action), instrument (entity used by agent).
• Experiencer fills semantic role if a noun phrase shows what it is feeling or the state of feeling.
• If we transfer money to checking, the source is savings and the goal is the checking.

Pragmatics

• Pragmatics studies how people use language in conversations and how context helps determine if utterance is appropriate.
• Speech acts describe actions with language (requesting, commanding) and the speaker performs an action with an utterance.
• Utterances perform actions that are direct and indirect
• Direct speech acts can be defined in an interrogative structure, to determine someone's ability
• Indirect speech acts can be used in a declarative structure, to make a request to person to close

Speech roles

• In order to establish a relationship between ourselves and our interlocutor we give different speech roles.
• Basic speech roles involve giving/demanding information/goods/services, with information present or language non-essential.
• Statement has been given information, where the question gets information demanded.
• An offer happens when goods and services are given and a command happens when goods and service are demanded.