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WHAT IS LANGUAGE? - Coggle Diagram
WHAT IS LANGUAGE?
LINGUISTIC KNOWLEDGE
When you know a language, you can speak and be understood by others who know that language.
you are able to produce strings of sounds that signify certain meanings and to understand or interpret the sounds produced by others.
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Deaf people produce and understand sign languages just as hearing persons produce and understand spoken languages.
The languages of the deaf communities are equivalent to spoken languages, differing only in their modality of expression.
Yet the ability to carry out the simplest conversation requires profound knowledge that most speakers are unaware of.
WHAT IS GRAMMAR
the term refers to the explicit theory constructed by the linguist and proposed as a description of the speaker's competence.
DESCRIPTIVE GRAMMAR
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explains how it is possible to speak and understand and make judgments about well-formedness, and it tells what you know about the sounds, words, phrases, and sentences of your language.
Every grammar is equally complex, logical, and capable of producing an infinite set of sentences to express any thought.
PRESCRIPTIVE GRAMMARS
Prescribing rather than describing the rules of grammar, which give rise to the writing of prescriptive grammars
Lowth was influential and because the rising new class wanted to speak properly, many of these new rules were legislated into English grammar, at least for prestige dialect
Writing is another story as it follows certain prescriptive rules of grammar, usage, style and that the spoken language does not
TEACHING GRAMMAR
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helpful to people who do not speak the standard or prestige dialect, they are used in school in foreign language classes
This kind of grammar gives the words and their pronunciations, and explicitly states the rules of the language, especially where they differ from the language of instruction.
UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR
the universal rules are of particular interest because they give us a window into human 'faculty of language' which enables us to learn and use any particular language
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- KNOWLEDGE OF THE SOUND SYSTEM
knowing which sounds may start a word, end a word, and follow each other.
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One way this unconscious knowledge is revealed is by the way speakers of one language pronounce words from another language.
Part of knowing a language means knowing what sounds
(or signs1) are in that language and what sounds are not.
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LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT
linguistic determinism: The strongest form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis because it holds that the language we speak determines how we perceive and think about the world.
linguistic relativism: A weaker form of the hypothesis which says that different languages encode different categories and that speakers of different languages therefore think about the world in different ways.
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: The claim that the structure of a language influences how its speakers perceive the world around them
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According to the philosophy expressed in the myths and religions of many peoples, language is the source of human life and power.