2013 02 14, wykład

Lecture 1: Language, its meaning and functions

System of communication:

it's system used by human beings and other species, for example animals. It’s not only verbal language, but also gestures.

Examples of communication among animals:

Language is a system of communication:

  1. inborn/innate

/’The result of child acquisition is the tacit or latent language knowledge whose operation principles may be compared to those of a spider which can spin web successfully without any awareness of the principles it is following’/

  1. distinctive feature of human beings

Language functions:

  1. interactional – deals with how humans use language to interact with other members of community (how they use language socially, emotionally, e.g. to show co-operation, anger, pleasure)

  2. transactional – concerns the ability of human beings to use language to communicate knowledge, skills and information

Why is language a distinctive property of human beings only?

Yule 1996: 31-36

Language origins

Otto Jespersen 1921 (from Yule 1996)

‘The genesis of language is not being sought in the prosaic but the poetic side of life; the source of speech is not gloomy seriousness but many play and youthful hilarity…

In primitive speech I hear the laughing cries of the exultation when lads and lassies vied with one another to attract the attention of the other sex, when everybody sang his merriest and danced his bravest to lure a pair of eyes to throw admiring glances in his direction. Language was born in the courting days of mankind.’

/Otto Jespersen/

  1. The divine source

    • God created Adam and ‘Adam called every living creature’ (Genesis)

    • In Hindu tradition language comes from Sarasvati – the wife of Brahma, the creator of the universe

The early experiments

  1. The natural sound source:

‘Bow-wow’ theory of language origins

  1. Yo-heave-ho theory

    another natural sound theory according to which first words might have originated from the sound produced by a person during physical work and effort (grunts, groans, swear words)

    whatever the origin human sounds must have had some social dimension, too

  2. The oral – gesture theory – links physical gestures and orally produced sounds:

    physical gestures were developed as a mean of communication

    oral gestures were developed – they were movements or articulatory organs (tongue, lips, etc.) imitating physical gestures (i.e. movement of the tongue for ‘goodbye’ resembles waving of the hand)

  1. Glossogenetics

    • it's connected to the idea of biological adaptation of human beings and their speech organs in the course of evolution. At some point of education there appeared certain physical features, particularly relevant for speech.


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