Language is the most
important aspect in the life of all beings.
Language is a medium of
communication of a community in a country. We use language to express inner
thoughts and emotions, make sense of complex and abstract thought, to learn to
communicate with others, to fulfill our wants and needs, as well as to establish
rules and maintain our culture.
Language can be defined
as verbal, physical, biologically innate, and a basic form of communication.
Behaviourists often
define language as a learned behaviour involving a stimulus and a
response.(Ormrod,1995)
Often times they will
refer to language as verbal behaviour, which is language that includes gestures
and body movements as well as spoken word. ( Pierce,& Eplin,1999)
Famous quotation about the language
If you talk to a man in a language
he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that
goes to his heart.
Nelson Mandela
Nelson Mandela
Kindness is the language which the
deaf can hear and the blind can see.
Mark Twain
Mark Twain
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Components
of a language
Phonetics
- At the lowest level, we have the sounds that come out of our mouths. Somehow very early on in our lives, we manage to distinguish a fairly limited number of sounds which make up the language we hear around us. Each individual language is made up of a set of sound categories called phonemes. The study of this mapping from raw sound to phonemes is called phonetics.
Phonology
·
In the course are studying language, linguists
have also noticed that you can't describe the way he language sounds just by
assigning some sequence of phonemes to each unit of meaning. For example in
English when we want to pluralize something, we add an '-s' sound. But consider
the contrast between the words 'cats' and 'dogs'. We spell both of them with an
'-s', but careful listening will reveal that 'dogs' is pronounced [dogz]. As it
turns out, this variation is predictable. This pluralizer is pronounced as a
'z' whenever the sound that precedes it is voiced, i.e. it involves engaging
our vocal cords. This clever observation comes to us courtesy of those involved
in the field of phonology.
Morphology
·
Consider again this pluralizing '-s'. Clearly
this conveys meaning, but it doesn't qualify as a word. What it qualifies as is
a morpheme, along with 'cat', 'dog', and '-ing'. The study of how morphemes can
combine in a given language to form words falls under the rubric of morphology.
Syntax
·
Once we've resolved the morphological issues, we
have a sequence of words. These words group themselves together into phrases,
in these phrases in turn combine into sentences. This is the level of syntax.
Semantics
·
So now we've taken a stream of noises (or
characters) and distilled from it a sequence of sentences. The problem of how
to represent the meaning of sentences is undertaken in the level of semantics.
Pragmatics and discourse
·
Even after extracting a set of literal meanings
from sentences, there is still the level of pragmatics. Language is
usually and a cooperative process between at least two people, and
conversations involve a subtle interplay of assumptions, requests, and
expectations on the part of each speaker. Having said something, how can you be
sure the other person understands? What should you say first? How do you keep
from repeating yourself? When is it the other person's turn to talk? Does this
person really want to know if I have a watch, or does she really want to know
what time it is? These kinds of problems are hard enough for humans to work
out, and to date no computer program even approaches human capabilities at this
level.
