Entry # 13- Abstracts

 Entry #8- Oral Presentation.

Yule, G. (2014). The Study of Language. UK. Cambridge University Press.

  CHAPTER 1 " THE ORIGINS OF LANGUAGE"

 

   This chapter reviews the different theories and sources that tried to account for the origins of language. Some of these sources ranged from divine powers to physical features that may have allowed the production of speech.

    The Divine Source formulated that a divine source provided humans with language. To prove this, some experiments were carried out and they consisted of isolating babies as to have them only speak the God-given language. 

 Another theory about the origin of speech is the Natural Sound Source. The Onomatopoeic Theory stated that language may have originated from the imitation and association of sounds to the object. In modern languages, we can find examples in words such as splash, boom, bang, among others. Another theory within the Natural Sound Source, called the Pooh-Pooh Theory, explained that original sounds may have started as natural cries of emotion like pain, anger or joy. 

    Socialization was also believed to be the dawn of speech and this is explained in the Yo-he-ho theory. Early humans lived in groups and had to be organized, therefore it is believed that a set of grunts, groans and curses were the sounds they used to communicate. 

 The Tool-making Source relates cognition and language, as the tool-using and language-using abilities are close to each other in the left hemisphere of the brain. Therefore, it is believed that there was an evolutionary connection between the two. 

    Both the Physical Adaptation Source and the Genetic Source present certain physical characteristics that may help with the production of speech. Researchers compared the skull of a gorilla and a Neanderthal man and noticed remarkable differences such as the position of the larynx, shape and muscles of the oral cavity which make humans able to produce speech. The Genetic Source claims that humans possess an innate capacity, a language gene which makes us able to produce speech.  

 

  CHAPTER 2 "ANIMALS AND HUMAN LANGUAGE"  

 

Humans communicate through language, but how do animals communicate with each other? Animals don’t seem to ‘’use language’’ like we do, they communicate through a set of signals which range from chemical, electrical, acoustic, visual or tactile. There are differences between ‘’animal language’’ and ‘’human language’’ that keep us from learning the others’ language. Animals can’t ‘’use’’ human language, even if they are able to understand it, just like we can’t ‘’use’’ animal language because of our inability to produce and identify all kinds of signals. 

     The chapter focuses on the main properties of human language that sets it apart from animal language: reflexibility, arbitrariness, displacement, creativity, cultural transmission and duality. These properties should make it impossible for animals to learn and communicate using human language, but numerous experiments show that animals can ‘’learn’’ our language, even if they can’t produce it the same way as us, or have the proficiency of a human. Chimpanzees are the clear example of that, being taught ‘’Yerkish’’ (an artificial language used by non-humans) or Sign Language. 

 

  CHAPTER 11 "DISCOURSE ANALYSIS" 

 

 Humans have the ability to create complex discourse interpretations out of fragmentary linguistic messages. For instance, “Trains collide, two die”. We immediately know there has been an accident and that “Trains collide” is the cause and that “Two die” is the accident. Discourse is defined as ‘’language beyond the level of a sentence’’, so the analysis of discourse is the analysis of a text, which is composed by more than a couple of sentences. However, discourse is not always expressed in the format of a text with grammatically correct sentences, sometimes discourse is produced in fragments of language: like the headlines of a newspaper, or the broken speech of a foreign speaker. 

   There is a big variation in what people say in different contexts. To understand it we need to take into account a number of criteria such as the roles of the speaker and hearer. Conversation requires two people taking turns to speak and a common topic. 

    Discourse analysis is the effort and study to interpret what a speaker is trying to communicate. Texts need: Cohesion, the sentences composing it need to be connected to each other through cohesive ties that mark a relationship of time and elements. And coherence, the ability to make sense, to interpret something from our own experience.  

 

 

 

 CHAPTER 17 "LANGUAGE HISTORY AND CHANGE" 

 

 It was discovered that a number of languages from very different geographical areas must have some common ancestor. To find it was necessary to hypothesize on the basis of language features existing in records of languages that were thought to be descendants. By the 19th century linguistics knew that the modern Indo-European languages descended from a single tongue: “Proto-Indo-European”. There are about 30 languages families and 6912 languages in the world, yet Proto-Indo-European is the language family with the largest population and distribution over the world. The word “Proto” stands for the original form, and “Indo-European” for the Indian subcontinent and Europe. 

People who study this topic use the word “cognates” to talk about words which are used to establish a possible family connection between different languages involved. They use a comparative reconstruction which involves a word reconstruction and a sound one. Some of the principles they based upon are the majority principle and the most natural sound development principle. The reconstruction of proto-forms is an attempt to determine what a language must have been like before any written words. 

    Through time English has change in big ways. We can divide these changes into three main periods: Old English, Middle English and modern English.  Old English is an early version of English spoken by the tribes of Angles, Saxons and Jutes who moved from Northern Europe into the British Isles in the 5th Century. It is from this early version of the language that we have some basic terms such as man,woman,child, among others, and also some days of the week. From the 6th to the 8th Century these pagan tribes, known as the Anglo-Saxons, were converted to Christianity and some terms from Latin, came into English at that time. From the 9th to the 10th Century the Vikings came into England and settled in some coastal regions of the country. Some words from their language were adopted at that time. 

    The arrival of the Norman-French, following the victory of Hastings, marked the end of the Old English period and the beginning of the Middle English period. These French-speaking invaders became the ruling class so that the language of the nobility, the government, the law and the civilized life in England was French for the next two hundred years. Throughout this period an English version of French was spoken and it was considered to be the “prestige language”. Yet, the language of the peasants remained English. From Middle to Modern English some sounds disappeared in the pronunciation of certain words and some words lost sounds but kept the spelling resulting in the silent letters of contemporary English. 

There were also syntactic and semantic changes involving word order, and from Old English to Modern English there was a loss of a number of inflectional suffixes in many parts of speech. All of these changes were gradual as a consequence of the continual process of cultural transmission.  

 

  CHAPTER 18 LANGUAGE AND REGIONAL VARIATION"

 

 Chapter eighteen revolves around the different variations in language based on its geographic distribution and its associated features such as accents and dialects, which are used to describe aspects of grammar and vocabulary as well as aspects of pronunciation. According to the aforementioned, dialectology aims to identify significant differences in the way of the speech of those that live in different areas and to draw an imaginary line across a map separating two regions. This line is called an isogloss and represents a boundary between the sections with regard to that one particular linguistic item. However, a bunch of coinciding isoglosses indicates a stronger dialect boundary. Besides, a variety within a dialect continuum may be developed and codified as a standard language that is the variety associated with administrative, commercial, and educational centers, regardless of region.

      Thus, regional variation can also involve the situation of having two or more completely different languages in a region, which is called bilingualism. And in some countries there is another special situation involving two distinct varieties of a language, called diglossia. There is a “low” variety, acquired locally and used for everyday affairs, and a “high” or special variety, learned in school and used for important matters. As bilingualism tends to be found mostly among minority groups, many countries are considered to be monolingual and these groups can live out their entire lives without ever seeing their native language appear in the public domain. However, a language may become officially accepted, and there four stages in this process of language planning: the process of “selection”, the “elaboration”, the “implementation” and, finally, the “acceptance”, in which the majority of the population use this language and consider it as the national language.

      There is also the possibility of finding a pidgin, it is a variety of a language that is developed for some practical purpose, such as trading, so it has no native speakers and is characterized by having a limited vocabulary and any complex grammatical morphology. When a pidgin develops beyond its role as a trade or contact language and becomes the first language of a social community, this variety becomes a creole in a process known as creolization. However, another process known as decreolization may occur, those who have greater contact with a standard variety of the language will tend to use fewer creole forms and structures.        

 

 CHAPTER 19 "LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL VARIATION" 

 

 Chapter 19th in The Study of Language is called ‘Language and Social Variation’. In it, Yule (2010) explores the relationships between speech and society, which he analyses through the perspectives of Sociolinguistics. In this work, the author claims that society, its division in social classes, and the roles we take in them, have the power to influence our use of language in a number of ways. According to this view, our speech can vary under the influence of our socio-economic status and membership of a particular speech community. In this way, our speech is characterized by distinct features, called social markers (which can be identified in the uses of a particular grammar, lexis and pronunciation), which are a result of the norms and expectations that the social groups of which we are part of have towards the use of language. In this way, these distinct aspects that we can find in our speech conform our social dialect and our personal dialect, or idiolect. However, this view does not only explain how social factors result in our speech’s variation, but it contemplates the fact that this can also be a consequence of personal decisions, product of the perceptions that we have of ourselves, others and the world. Language, to this effect, embodies, at some level, our social identity as well. These decisions manifest themselves in aspects such as our speech style and they depend on the context in which communication takes place, as well as on the relationship between its participants. Taking those considerations into account, Yule (2010) explores concepts such as register and jargon, to explain how our speech is subject to conventional ways of using language which is appropriate in certain contexts; education and occupation, to explain the association of certain expressions with our educational backgrounds; speech accommodation, to address our ability to modify our speech style towards or away of the perceived style of the person we are talking to, that is, our audience; and many other aspects that can influence our choices of speech. This chapter, to sum up, accounts for the impacts that society generates in the use of language, reflecting the power we have to create and maintain connections among each other through speech. 

Metacognitive Analysis

Knowing the origins of the English language and its historical development help us understand the language in a deeper level. Throughout history, English has been influenced by a number of languages and a number of terms have been borrowed from Latin, French and Old Norse. These external influences, together with the internal changes occurred over the years, have contributed to shape the language. From Old English to modern English there have been a significant number of sound changes, syntactic changes and semantic changes, as a consequence of the continual process of cultural transmission. Studying the transformations that English has undergone throughout history provide us, as teachers, with essential information to deal with the different aspects of the English language as we know it today. The knowledge of these historical changes and the development of the language will result in a more effective way of teaching.

Oral presentation de vanesalonghi