1. Linguistic knowledge and performance 2. What is Grammar? 3. Descriptive Grammars 4. Prescriptive Grammars 5. Language Universals 6. Sign languages 7. Animal “languages” What is Language?Linguistic Knowledge Knowing a language means...?? The capacity to produce sounds that signify certain meanings and to understand or interpret the sounds produced by others. Language is much more than speech. The ability to carry out the simplest conversation requires profound knowledge that most speakers are unaware of.Knowledge of the sound system Knowing what sounds(or signs) are in that language and what sounds are not. ex) this, that (English) zis , zat (French) Knowing the sound system of a language includes more than knowing the inventory of sounds. It means also knowing which sounds may start a word, end a word, and follow each other. ex) Nk rumah( a former president of Ghana) vs. si nk phonetics phonologyKnowledge of words Knowing that certain sequences of sounds signify certain concepts oonventional and arbitrary relation of form(sounds) and meaning(concept) ex) sign languagesKnowledge of words Sound symbolism : words whose pronunciation suggests the meaning Onomatopoeic words : words that imitate the sounds associated with the objects or actions they refer to ex) cock-a-doodle-do(English) kukkokiekuu (Finnish) ex) gl -(sight) : glare, glint, gleam, glitter, glossy, glaze, glance, glimpse.. gl -(have nothing to do with sight) : gladiator, glucose, glory, globe.. No speakers of English knows all 472,000 entries in Webster’s Dictionary. Even if someone know all the words in Webster’s, that person would still not know English.The creativity of linguistic knowledge Knowledge of a language enables you to combine sounds to form words, words to form phrases, and phrases to form sentences. Noam Chomsky made a powerful argument against the behaviorist view of language. Knowing a language means being able to produce new sentences never spoken before and to understand sentences nitely many possible sentences. When you know a language, you know the sounds, the word, and the rules for their combination.Linguistic knowledge and performance Linguistic competence : what we know Linguistic performance : how we use knowledge in actual speech production and comprehension When we speak, we may stammer, or pause, or produce slips of the tongue . There is a difference between linguistic knowledge and the way we use that knowledge in performance.Linguistic knowledge and performance Linguistic knowledge is unconscious knowledge. The linguistic system – the sounds, structures, meanings, words, and rules for putting them all together- is acquired with no conscious awareness. Our ability to speak, to understand, and to make judgments about the grammaticality of sentences reveals our knowledge of the rules of our language.What is Grammar? systematic ambiguity the explicit theory constructed by the linguist and proposed as a description of the speaker’s competence competence ityou know about the sounds, word, phrases, and sentences of your language. No language or variety of a language (called a dialect) is superior to any other in a linguistic sense. Descriptive GrammarsPrescriptive Grammars “Purists” have believed that some version of a language are better than others. There are certain “correct” forms that all educated people should use in speaking and writing. Language change is corruption. The goal of prescriptive grammar is not to describe the rules people know, but to tell them what rules they should follow.Prescriptive Grammars Problems - Language change is not corruption because in the course of time languages change and words change meaning. - Grammars and usages of particular groups in society may be dominant for social and political reasons, but from a linguistic(scientific) perspective they are neither superior nor inferior to the grammars and usages of less prestigious members of society.Language Universals There are rules of particular languagGrammars It specifies the different components of the grammar and their relations. It is a major aim of linguistic theory to discover the nature of UG. The linguist’s goal is to reveal the “laws of human language”.Sign languages : evidence for the innateness of langu age Deaf children who are exposed to sign languages acquire them just as hearing children acquire spoken languages. Sign languages are fully developed languages, and signers create and comprehend unlimited numbers of new sentences, just as speakers of spoken languages do.Sign languages : evidence for the innateness of language Language acquisition and use are not dependent on the ability to produce and hear sounds, but on a far more abstract cognitive capacity that accounts for the similarities between spoken and sign languages.Animal “languages” : The birds and the bees Most animals possess “signaling” communication system. invariant Birdcalls and songs have a communicative function. no evidence of any internal struct}