UNIVERSIDAD FASTA

FACULTAD DE CIENCIAS DE LA EDUCACIN

LICENCIATURA EN INGLS
LINGSTICA
Trabajo Prctico #4
Language and Linguistics

Read chapter 1 from Lyons, J. (1981) Language and Linguistics: An

Introduction (available at http://www.mediafire.com/view/?
17xspd9j70h2kpc) and answer the following questions:

1) Compare the two senses of the word language.

Language (a non-count noun) refers to the capacity that all humans beings have to
communicate with each other (see also definitions in question 2), while a language (a
count noun) is a particular code used in by the people of a particular country or area, e.g,
Russian, Spanish and English.

2) Compare the notions of natural language and artificial language.

In the philosophy of language, a natural language (or ordinary language) is any
language which arises in an unpremeditated fashion as the result of the innate facility for
language possessed by the human intellect. A natural language is typically used for
communication, and may be spoken, signed, or written. Natural language is distinguished
from constructed/artificial languages and formal languages such as computer-
programming languages or the "languages" used in the study of formal logic, especially
mathematical logic. (Source: Wikipedia)

3) Define medium-transferability and explain in what senses the oral

language is more basic than the written language.
Medium-transferability is the property of language by means of which what is said out
loud can be written down, and what is written down can be read out loud (i.e.,
transference between oral and written mediums). However, medium-transferability is not
completely isomorphic: there are features of the oral language (such as pauses, different
patterns of intonation, varying degrees of word and sentence stress, etc.) which are not so
easy to codify in writing.

Modern linguistics is more concerned with the spoken language because this is said to be
more basic than the written language (this does not mean more important). Why? There
are four reasons:
o historical priority of the oral language: as far as we know, there has been no society
which developed a writing system without having an oral language first.
o biological priority: every normal human being will acquire an oral language first and
after that will learn to write. Besides, these are two completely different processes:
acquisition is subconscious and effortless, while learning is conscious and involves
some effort.
o structural priority: what is and what is not possible in a language is ultimately
determined by the oral language. For example, sdfgert is not a possible word in
Spanish or English not because it cannot be written (I actually have) but rather
because it does not respect the phonological restrictions in these languages (i.e, which
sound sequences are permissible and which ones are not).
o functional priority: whenever possible, we will use the oral language. Writing is only
used in situations in which the oral language is impossible (because of the distance
between the speakers, for example) or unreliable (because we want to keep record of
some situation, such as a commercial transaction).
4) Explain, in you own words, the four properties of language discussed in
section 1.5.
Language has many properties. Some of these are the following:
o Arbitrariness: language is arbitrary, i.e., inexplicable in terms of some more general
principle. The most obvious instance of arbitrariness is that described by Saussure:
the relation between signified and signifier in the linguistic sign. But actually, this is
just one instance; most aspects of language are arbitrary, such as the number of
phonemes in a language (about 23 in Spanish but over 40 in English), the order of
words (adjectives typically precede nouns in English, but follow them in Spanish), the
possibility to elide some elements or not (such as the subject in Spanish), etc.
o duality: language is the only system of animal communication that has two levels of
structure: one level in which strings of meaningless units (phonemes) combine to
produce strings of meaningful units (morphemes/words/phrases). The meaningless
units constitute a limited set (there is a finite number of phonemes in each language,
while the number of meaningful units is, in theory, unlimited.
o discreteness: our utterances are made up of clearly separable and identifiable units
(e.g., the word /kt/ (cat) is made up of three phonemes).
o productivity: language enables us to produce and understand an, in theory, unlimited
number of new signals.

All these four characteristics are interconnected in all languages and present to a very
high degree.