PSY 1200 Lecture Notes - Frontal Lobe, Jargon, Dan Slobin
28 May 2023
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1 What Is
Language?
DEFINING LANGUAGE
Language is a form of communication—whether spoken, written, or
signed—that is based on a system of symbols. Language consists of the
words used by a community and the rules for varying and combining
them.
Think how important language is in our everyday lives. We need
language to speak with others, listen to others, read, and write. Our
language enables us to describe past events in detail and to plan for the
future. Language lets us pass down information from one generation to
the next and create a rich cultural heritage. Language learning involves
comprehending a sound system (or sign system for individuals who are
deaf), the world of objects, actions, and events, and how units such as
words and grammar connect sound and world (Israel, 2019; Mithun,
2019).
All human languages have some common characteristics (Clark, 2017;
Genetti, 2019; Ringe, 2019). These include infinite generativity and
organizational rules. Infinite generativity is the ability to produce and
comprehend an endless number of meaningful sentences using a finite
set of words and rules. Rules describe the way language works. Let’s
explore what these rules involve.
LANGUAGE’S RULE
SYSTEMS
When nineteenth-century American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson said,
“The world was built in order and the atoms march in tune,” he must
have had language in mind. Language is highly ordered and organized
(Clark, 2017; White, 2019). The organization involves five systems of
rules: phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.
Phonology
Every language is made up of basic sounds. Phonology is the sound
system of the language, including the sounds that are used and how they
may be combined (Demuth, 2019). For example, English has the initial
consonant cluster spr as in spring, but no words begin with the cluster
rsp.
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Phonology provides a basis for constructing a large and expandable set of
words out of two or three dozen phonemes (Swingley, 2017). A phoneme
is the basic unit of sound in a language; it is the smallest unit of sound
that affects meaning. For example, in English the sound represented by
the letter p, as in the words pot and spot, is a phoneme. The /p/ sound is
slightly different in the two words, but this variation is not distinguished
in English, and therefore the /p/ sound is a single phoneme. In some
languages, such as Hindi, the variations of the /p/ sound represent
separate phonemes.
Morphology
Morphology refers to the units of meaning involved in word formation. A
morpheme is a minimal unit of meaning; it is a word or a part of a word
that cannot be broken into smaller meaningful parts (Deevy, Leonard, &
Marchman, 2017; Mithun, 2019). Every word in the English language is
made up of one or more morphemes. Some words consist of a single
morpheme (for example, help), whereas others are made up of more than
one morpheme (for example, helper has two morphemes, help and er,
with the morpheme -er meaning “one who”—in this case “one who
helps”). Thus, not all morphemes are words by themselves—for example,
pre-, -tion, and -ing are morphemes.
Just as the rules that govern phonology describe the sound sequences
that can occur in a language, the rules of morphology describe the way
meaningful units (morphemes) can be combined in words (Mithun,
2019). Morphemes have many jobs in grammar, such as marking tense
(for example, “she walks” versus “she walked”) and number (“she walks”
versus “they walk”).
Syntax
Syntax involves the way words are combined to form acceptable phrases
and sentences (Hendrickson & others, 2017; Indefrey, 2019; Meteyard &
Vigliocco, 2019; Ringe, 2019). If someone says to you, “Bob slugged
Tom” or “Bob was slugged by Tom,” you know who did the slugging and
who was slugged in each case because you have a syntactic
understanding of these sentence structures. You also understand that the
sentence “You didn’t stay, did you?” is a grammatical sentence but that
“You didn’t stay, didn’t you?” is unacceptable and ambiguous.
If you learn another language, English syntax will not get you very far.
For example, in English an adjective usually precedes a noun (as in blue
sky), whereas in Spanish the adjective usually follows the noun (cielo
azul). Despite the differences in their syntactic structures, however,
syntactic systems in all of the world’s languages have some common
ground (Ringe, 2019). For example, no language we know of permits
sentences like the following one:
The mouse the cat the farmer chased killed ate the cheese.
