On Language

2010

SN Social Sciences, 2021

The study of language has been historically proposed as a model for human sciences. For the structuralists, it is because languages, like society, and cultural habits , are man-made rule-based systems. For the Darwinists, it is because cultures and societies are like living species, and can be studied with biological methodology. Sociology, biology and linguistics are considered analogous in different ways. To support work in theoretical and applied linguistics, this paper discusses the problem of the nature of language, investigating how the question "What is language?" has been approached from different angles. Textbook answers guide us in many different directions: language is a tool for communication-and for thinking. It is a collection of words and instructions how to use them. It is the characteristic which-arguably separates humans from other animals. It is a social construction, a system of symbols, a system of systems, and so on. To classify perspectives, the intellectual history of schools of linguistic thought is examined, connecting linguistic theory with related disciplines. A taxonomy is proposed based on two axes: humanistic versus biological; and historical versus systemic. Main linguistics frameworks are identified and placed into a fourfold table based on these axes. They include the Bloomfieldian school (Type 1); Saussurean structuralism and its derivatives (Type 2); generative grammar and biolinguistics (Type 3); and cognitive-evolutionary linguistics (Type 4).

Moderna Språk

International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 2000

Reviewed by PAUL A. JOHNSTON JR. Western Michigan University From time to time, it is good and sometimes enlightening to reexamine older or unusual Linguistic theories. Like browsing through one's attic, one might come up with mostly useless junk, but usually there are some small treasureshalfforgotten approaches and views on this or that aspect of language that provide the key to making theoretical advances, perhaps even the next major paradigm shift. Mike Beaken's book on language origins and development seems to be a result of such a quest. Using a wide variety of sources, but largely building on Soviet Marxist sources (as well as Halliday and a good deal of anthropology), he attempts to construct a speaker-centred theory of how human language grew from gestural origins into the form it has today. First and foremost, language is for Beaken a product of human societies, and of human labour (in the broader, Marxist sense, as goal-oriented activity), no less than the stone ax, the wooden plow, or the computer. He is thus in opposition to the prevailing nativist theories, like Chomsky's, Bickerton's, or Pinker's, which hold in one form or another that language capabilities are biologically innate to us; and to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which he stands on its head: language does not constrain thought and culture, but cultureor societal activity patternsconstrain the form of language. By this view, the sense in which language evolved was not Darwinian, but historical. We created first gestural, then spoken, and finally written language as we developed ever more 'modem' social structures, and we continue to bend language to our needs even today. Each step in the process has an explicit reason, rooted in what the social group needs to do, whether that is carrying food back to a home base, calling to people who cannot be seen, foraging for food, or reckoning and measuring. The organization of the book on the whole is clear: the first two chapters provide basic arguments for his approach, including fairly well-formed (if overstated) rebuttals to nativists and sociobiologists, and a discussion of the connec

Journal of Pragmatics, 2009

(paperback) GBP 21.99. x + 446 pp. Also available online through Wiley InterScience subscription service This is no less than the nineteenth in the Blackwell Guides to Philosophy series. One might have expected Philosophy of Language to have appeared earlier in the series. It consists of an introduction and 20 chapters, often of about 15 pages each but sometimes more. Devitt and Hanley have assembled a genuinely distinguished set of authors. Following the introduction there are three sections: Foundational Issues, which consists of a single article by Martin Davies, followed by sections on Meaning and on Reference. This rather traditional principle of organization covers a reasonably broad range of topics. Given the importance of theories of meaning that depend on reference and truth there is considerable intermingling of content between the second and third sections. The way the series works is for authoritative authors to provide an overview of issues in the field, while not concealing their own positions. A reader of this journal who felt they wished to be exposed at a serious level to some of the main current themes in the Philosophy of Language could do well to look into this volume. There are other places to look, for example The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Language which has well over twice the number of pages and double the number of articles, some on more specialized topics. The Blackwell Guide has its place, though, being perhaps less daunting and significantly more portable. Devitt and Hanley's 16-page introduction is indeed a good place to start for a reader with, say, a linguistics training and no great acquaintance with contemporary philosophy. It takes the reader through the topics discussed in the volume and thus lays out the nature of some of the obsessions and directions of philosophers with an interest in language. Martin Davies' Chapter 1: Foundational Issues is understandably challenging, but worthy of interest from readers of this journal. It is one place where you will see a philosopher's perspective on the relationship between semantics and pragmatics. But that is just one of a variety of foundational issues discussed, others being whether semantics can be a philosophical project, and the contrast between Davidson's (1984) and Grice's (1989) approaches to meaning. Chapter 2: The Nature of Meaning, by Paul Horwich, provides a kind of overview of the section on meaning. It covers: meaning scepticism, reductionism, language and thought, compositionality, normativity, externalism, deflationism, prospects for a use theory of meaning, and further problems. Looking through the authors referred to in that chapter gives you a good selection of the major players in the field. The semantics/pragmatics relationship, which was mentioned in Chapter 1, is developed more fully by Kent Bach in Chapter 8: Speech Acts and Pragmatics. The chapter covers performative utterances, the locutionary/illocutionary/ perlocutionary act distinction, kinds of illocutionary acts, Gricean reflexive communicative intentions (used to illuminate some illocutionary acts, as recommended by Strawson, 1972), conversational implicature and Bach's (1994) own notion of impliciture, conventional implicature (the notion originated in Frege, 1952!), the semantics/ pragmatics distinction, including the distinction between wide context (where there is contextual information relevant to ascertaining the speaker's intention) and narrow context (involving only information relevant to providing semantic values of context-sensitive expressions). There is also an interesting section on the significance of the semantics/pragmatics distinction. This illustrates Grice's stance against postulating unnecessary ambiguities, showing how the phenomena can be explained in terms of implicatures. It also covers how a simplistic association of meaning and use by ordinary language philosophers can lead to error, for example the move from the observation that describing something as good is typically used to express www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma

On Nature and Language, 2002

Editors' introduction: some concepts and issues in linguistic theory 1 The study of language in a biological setting Dominant linguistics paradigms in the first half of the twentieth century had centered their attention on Saussurean "Langue," a social object of which individual speakers have only a partial mastery. Ever since the 1950s, generative grammar shifted the focus of linguistic research onto the systems of linguistic knowledge possessed by individual speakers, and onto the "Language Faculty," the species-specific capacity to master and use a natural language (Chomsky 1959). In this perspective, language is a natural object, a component of the human mind, physically represented in the brain and part of the biological endowment of the species. Within such guidelines, linguistics is part of individual psychology and of the cognitive sciences; its ultimate aim is to characterize a central component of human nature, defined in a biological setting. The idea of focusing on the Language Faculty was not new; it had its roots in the classical rationalist perspective of studying language as a "mirror of the mind," as a domain offering a privileged access to the study of human cognition. In order to stress such roots, Chomsky

Most views about the nature of language agree in one point, that languages change. The background to these views is the notion of language as an organism, which originated in the 19th century. In later interpretations, this organic view of language was often taken to be metaphorical, but it continues to affect the ideas about linguistic change, leading away from the role of the speakers. Only behavioral frameworks avoid the misconception of language as an entity. After sketching the historical background of the notion of language as an organism in Section 2, I discuss its consequences for theories of linguistic change in the discussion about internal and external causes and the role of acquisition (Section 3). In Section 4, I go into various attempts that have been made to safeguard the position of language as a systematic entity. The last section offers some suggestions about an alternative way of looking at verbal behavior.

Online Submission, 2010

Language attracts everyone on earth. That is because we have and use language. Although there are some minority languages that have limited expressions such as the lack of writing systems in Aynu itak and Shona languages, they can effectively express their emotion and thought with their languages. In addition, every human being can acquire their native language regardless of how difficult the linguistic structure of the language. Noam Chomsky (1965) pointed out that the language specific domain in the human brain, called The Language Faculty, stimulates humans to acquire language. He also posited that the production of human language from the faculty comes as a consequence of natural human endowment that works innately in the human brain. On the other hand, Steven Pinker has a different view on the language faculty. He believes that biological adaptation affords humans the language faculty and it is truly instinctive, following Darwin's natural selection. These two different views give opportunity for researching why human language and its faculty exist in the human brain. Truly speaking, the major function of human language is to verbalize our thoughts and feelings to others and to the speakers or writers themselves. Therefore, language must contain "Information" and "Meaning". Generative semantics, as suggested by George Lakoff and other

Journal of Language, Culture, and Religion, 2021