Nature of Language

Nature of language

Every creature strives to communicate with its own kind. One of the ways in which this need is fulfilled is by expressing thoughts in the medium of language.

Meaning of Language

Language is a means of communication

Language is the bridge between individuals that tells them they are needed, they are not alone. Language thus gives self-expression and by extension, identity.

Language is a systematic and conventional means of human communication by way of vocal sounds.

Language is a system for communicating. Written languages use symbols (that is, 

characters) to build words. The entire set of words is the language's vocabulary. The ways in which the words can be meaningfully combined is defined by the language's syntax and grammar. The actual meaning of words and combinations of words is defined by the language's semantics.

Functions of Language

• ·  Gives self-expression and identity. It tells our listeners or readers about ourselves, in particular about regional origins, social backgrounds, levels of education, occupation, age, sex and personality.
• · It gives shapes to thoughts and emotions and communicates these to intended audiences.
• ·     It is the basic elements with which the history of the world has been recorded.
• ·    It is a time capsule that allows us to view any moment in the past of a literate man.
• ·    It is a storehouse of information.
• ·   It helps to express judgement, opinions, assertions etc. it is used if a statement is true or false.
• · It helps to maintain social rapport between people to build and maintain relationship.

One of the basic human urge is to communicate.

A Communication Model

  

Communication happens when the decoder receives, decodes and understand the message of the encoder.

The encoder and the decoder are called the interlocutors. (Person who take part in a conversation)

Language is not only human phenomenon. Animals cry, hoot, bleat, coo, dance and sing to communicate their message.

Sounds are basic units of language. But not sounds in themselves or in a jumble. Sounds have to be meaningful. They acquire meaning when they organize themselves in an intelligible combinations and forms as:

Sounds + Forms + Meaning gives us an intelligible (that can be understood) sensible structure to understand the world around us. These three components, in fact, represent the three fundamental dimension of the organizations as well as the three levels of analysis in language – Phonological, Syntactic and Semantic.

1. Phonological level – Sound and their organizations. (sounds put together to form a word)

2. Syntactic level – Forms and their organizations. (words put together to form phrases)

3. Semantic level – Meaning as manifested at the phonological and syntactic levels. (phrases put together to form sentences)

Features of Human Language:

Language as a system: Language is a system of system. Language is not a collection of sounds and forms at random but a highly organized system in which each unit has its place and value. Each sound is related to other sounds, each word is related to other words to make meaning.

Arbitrariness: Human Language is an arbitrary phenomenon. There is no natural connection or relationship between a word and its meaning. The signifier and the signified are brought together arbitrarily.

Open-ended System: The sounds, words and sentences in language may be finite or limited, but the combinations and constructions are infinite or unlimited. Thus, this creative and productive potential of the language enables its user to manipulate and make varieties of constructions to express himself or herself. So human has the ability to say things that never been said before, including the possibility to express invented things or lies.

Duality of structure: Human language is organized at two levels: Sound production and its Meaning. At the level of sound productions or individual sounds like a, b, c, d, e ….. But none of these individual sounds have any meaning in themselves. Their meaning comes from the meaningful combination to produce words. Although our capacity to produce new sounds (letters) is limited, we frequently coin new words. Hence our capacity to produce vocabulary (words) is unlimited.

Displacement: Human language can be used to refer to any dimension of space and time. We can use language to refer to the past, present and future. It can also be used to refer to any place, here or elsewhere; in neither case does the language user have to move from his or her place to refer to any time or place.

Meta-linguistic system: Human language can be used to talk about itself. Its features, functions, varieties and levels of sophistications.

Cultural Transmission: Human Beings may be born with innate predispositions to acquire language, but they are not born with the ability to produce utterances in a specific language. Language is not genetically transmitted. It is culturally transmitted and has to be consciously learned. (The process thereby language is passed down from generation to generation is described as cultural transmission)

Language is an individual and social phenomenon: Language serves in expressing individual needs and urges; it brings an individual into relationship with the external world.

Theories of Language Acquisition

Language acquisition is the process by which we are able to develop and learn a language. This includes (in general but depends on the specific language) speaking, listening, writing, and overall communication. Our ability to acquire language is a uniquely human trait because although bonobos, a species of primate, can produce vocalizations with meaning, birds can produce song, and whales have their own version of a language, no species on Earth that we know of can express neverending infinite ideas (sentences) along with a limited set of symbols (gestures, words, and sounds). The term language acquisition often refers to the first-language acquisition which simply means that it’s the first language learned as an infant (unless the child learns two or more language at the same time). However, there is also the term second-language acquisition which refers to the process in both children and adults when they learn addition languages apart from their native one. Each of these terms has at least one language acquisition theory behind them and the big question of “how do we learn a language?”

A Little History behind Language Acquisition Theory

As with most of history, it all begins with some philosophers in ancient societies who were interested in how humans were able to develop language. Using “armchair psychology” (sitting and thinking about the problem), the large conclusion from these philosophers was that we were able to learn languages as we do due to the subset of a human’s ability to gain knowledge and learn concepts. Easier said they found that language was an innate ability that we were born with. Plato felt that word-meaning mapping was also innate in one way or another. Grammarians who studied Sanskrit debated over 12 centuries on whether or not a humans ability to recognize and use the correct meaning of words in Sanskrit (an ancient Indian language that is over 3,000 years old) was something passed down by generations and learned from pre-established conventions (for example, a child learns the word for horse because he hears older speakers talking about horses) or whether it was innate (“God-given”).

A while later, philosophers such as John Locke and Thomas Hobbes got in on the language party and argued that knowledge (and language, in Locke’s case) come from abstracted sense impressions. What does that mean? They argue that language comes from a sensory experience.

Behaviorists, people who believe that everything is acquired through conditioning, argued that language is learned through operant conditioning- a form of conditioning that happens through rewards and punishments which makes someone associate between a particular behavior and its consequence. A child learns that a specific combination of words or sounds stands for a specific thing/idea through successfully repeated associations. For example, a child would learn that their house animal, Whiskers, is a cat while their other house animal, Fido, is a dog. He would do so because when the child would call Whiskers his dog, his parents would say that no, Whiskers is a cat, not a dog. The “big face” for this language acquisition theory is B.F. Skinner and he went on to publish this theory.

However, Noam Chomsky, one of the world’s greatest linguists to date strongly criticised Skinner’s theory. Chomsky argued that kids often ignore their parents’ corrections and would not likely learn that actual, proper use of the word or phrase and end up using it incorrectly, by means of Skinner’s conditioning theory. Chomsky’s language acquisition theory involved a more mathematical approach to language development based on a syntax (the meaning of a word) study.

The Behaviourist Theory (the Sociocultural Theory)

The sociocultural theory, also known as the interactionist approach, takes ideas from both biology and sociology to interpret our language acquisition. This language acquisition theory states that children are able to learn language out of a desire to communicate with their surrounding environment and world. Language thus is dependent upon and emerges from social interaction. The theory argues that due to our language developing out of a desire to communicate, our language is dependent upon whom we hang around and with whom we want to communicate. Essentially, the theory says that our environment when we grow up has a heavy influence on how quickly and how well we learn to talk. For example, an infant who is raised by a single dad will develop the word “dada” or “baba” before developing “mama”.

Behaviourists believe that children learn to speak by imitations and parents then reinforce or correct their speech constantly. They believe that the child is born with an empty slate and language items ate written on that mental slate as the child grows and experiences the world which it is experienced.

The Behaviourist Theory focuses on the use of imitation and practice for language acquisition. According to this theory babies learn oral language from the humans in their environment through imitation rewards and practice. Then a baby tries to speak a word and succeeds parents and other adults in his world often praise him. This propels the child to try harder to achieve more. Behaviourism is an approach to language acquisition based on the proposition that behaviour can be researched scientifically without recourse to inner mental states. It is a form of materialism denying any independent significance for mind. The behaviourist theory emerges on the basis of following assumptions.

1.           Language learning is a habit formation resembling the formation of other habits. That is a language is learned in the way in which other habits are learned.

2.           Free will is illusory and all behaviour is determined by the environment either through association or reinforcement.

3.           Human acquire a language as discrete unit of habits independently trained not as an integrated system

This theory puts emphasis on three important factors like stimulus, response and reinforcement.

The Rationalistic Theory (the Nativist Theory)

Rationalistic argue learning is a much more complex process. The child is born with all the facilities to learn language. The linguistic ability is in inherited in the mind of the child. All the child does is discover and test.  

American linguist Noam Chomsky proposed a completely different view of language acquisition. His Rationalist view was a direct challenge to the established Behaviourist theories of the time rekindling the age-old debate over whether language exists in the mind before experience or not. This oral language development theory states that learning is a natural process for human beings. The Rationalist Theory gives rise to the Language Acquisition Device (LAD which is thought to be a part of the brain that enables all children to grasp language naturally). However, the Rationalist Theory fails to explain why children from different cultures and environments vary in the time taken to develop oral language. The Rationalist Theory is more widely accepted and understood than the Behaviourist Theory.

More Detailed Idea: 

Being the most well-known and one of the most scientifically accurate theories yet, the Nativist Theory suggests that we are born with genes that allow us to learn language. This language acquisition theory argues that there is a theoretical device known as the language acquisition device (LAD) that is somewhere in our brain. 

This “device” is in charge of our learning a language the same way the hypothalamus, for example, is in charge of regulating our body temperature. The language acquisition theory also suggests that there is a universal grammar (a theory by Noam Chomsky) that is shared across every language in the world because universal grammar is part of our genetic makeup. Essentially, almost all languages around the world all have nouns and verbs and similar ways to structure thoughts. All languages have a finite amount of rules that apply to all languages from which we can build an infinite amount of phrases. The core and basic ideas from these finite rules are built into our brains (according to Universal Grammar and the Nativist Theory).

This language acquisition theory explains well how humans seem to have a far more complicated and complex set of communication patterns than any other species in the world. It also is a working theory for how children are able to learn so quickly complicated ideas. This language acquisition theory is comparable to how we think of numbers- everyone in the world knows what 4 apples look like regardless if we say that there are four, cuatro, vier, or dört apples.

The theoretical assumptions underlying the Rationalist theory is as follows:

1.          Every human child possesses innate knowledge of language structure which called language Acquisition Device or LAD.

2.          Language learning is distinct from other cognitive capacities.

3.          Young children learn and apply grammatical rules and vocabulary as they are exposed to them and do not require initial formal teaching.

Similarities between Behaviourist Theory and Rationalist Theory

Both are the theory of language learning.

Both of these theories help to describe some aspects of first language acquisition.

Neither the Behaviourist nor the Rationalist theories are able to adequately encompass the complexity of language acquisition.

Both of them are some way logical in some aspect of acquiring first language.

Both of them are not totally independent one has been corrected by the other.

Both of them have emphasis on a specific part of language learning process but none of them is completely wholly appropriate for first language learning.

Differences between Theory and Rationalist Theory

Behaviourist Theory	Rationalist Theory
According to behaviourism language is learnt in the way other habits are learnt.	According to rationalism language develops in the same way as other biological functions.
Through behaviourist theory language acquisition is a stimulus response process.	Language acquisition is a congenital process.
In behaviourism knowledge is seen as constant.	In rationalism knowledge is seen dynamic.
In behaviourism learning is said to be successful when the child can repeat what was taught.	In rationalism learning is said to be successful when the child can generate innumerable grammatically correct sentences and rejects ungrammatical ones.
The behaviourist view holds that children need formal teaching and guidance to learn in a correct way.	The Rationalist view maintains that children do not require primary formal instruction.
It ignores the creativity of human beings.	It views language acquisition as a creative process.
The behaviourist theory is mechanical.	The Rationalist theory is not mechanical since it does consider the child as an inert recipient.
The behaviourist theory cannot explain how the child precedes in his/her journey of language acquisition.	The Rationalist theory gives some rational explanations about children’s language acquisition procedure.
Language acquisition is the result of nurture.	Language acquisition is the result of nature.
The behaviourists experiment upon animals not human beings.	The Rationalist experiment on human child not animals.