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Language meaning and structure.
‘Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.’- Lily Tomlin
Child language:
‘Comprehension always outstrips production. ... She writes that that instinct is to learn language.
Most other experts in child language agree about our innate aptitude for language acquisition. ... He considers there to be five distinct stages of language acquisition in an infant’s life, stretching from birth to 18 months:
Chomsky wrote that children can learn the grammar of any language they are exposed to in their formative years. They can understand sentences they have never heard before, so they must have some implicit knowledge of sentence structure and the rules for how to make them. ... So, to the child, this sentence structure expresses exactly what they want to say; the erroneous grammar is irrelevant. It is as he moves on through the different stages of language acquisition that he will learn how sentences such as these are incorrect.
Some number of debates surround, and have always since serious study of the subject began, a child’s development of language skills. Two of the most common of these, and are regularly subject to changing opinions as more studies are carried out, are whether a foetus is affected by what it hears while in the womb, and whether baby talk helps or hinders the child’s language acquisition. ... Weaver (1994) suggested that such parent-child interaction facilitates the process of communication and the social function of language. ... Some examples of these adaptations of language are:
Train becomes ‘choo- choo’. ...
One of the first things a baby has to deal with is identifying language from the cacophony of sounds of their environment. Language plays a small part in the noises of everyday life- the washing machine running, the sounds of pots and pans and cutlery at dinner time and doors slamming. ...
Syntax
‘Word order is so essential to human language that an organism unequipped to notice and store sequential information could hardly acquire such systems’- Dan I. Slobin
‘Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages’, or put more simply, the study of word order and sentence structure. ...
All the above examples are the same, however, in that they are the same language set of the subject preceeding the object. ...
Sentences describing the same thing but using different words or word- order can be compared in two ways: through their surface structure and through their deep structure. The surface structure is how sentences appear to be different: their wording or the tenses used etc. The deep structure of a sentence is the overall meaning that the speaker wishes to convey. ... So, their surface structure differs but their deep structure means the same. ... The tree diagram of this sentence is thus:
S
/
NP VP
/
N V
/
I am
A more complex sentence such as ‘a good student studies hard’ [a= article (Art), good= adjective (Adj), student= noun (N), studies= verb (V), hard= adjective] might look like this:
S
/
NP VP
/ | /
Art Adj N V NP
/ | /
A good student studies Adj
|
hard
Meaning
Akmajian et al divided the meaning of language into two interpretations: through the speaker meaning or through the literal meaning.
The literal meaning is just that: what is understood by the sentence when it is taken literally and on its own: not considered in context etc. The speaker meaning is what the speaker wishes to actually express in his words.
Approximate Word count = 2861
Approximate Pages = 11.4
(250 words per page double spaced)
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