The origins of language

FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION  I. Acquisition:  For a human to understand language, they have to interact with other language users since they were an infant. This is to bring the capacity of general language to come into contact with a particular language such as English.   The child is also must have the ability to receive and send sound signals of a language. It's also important for an infant to be able to hear as a deaf child will stop producing sound after six months after birth. *Input:  Many factors that help with the development of a child's language acquisition such as the behaviour of their parents and relatives who live with them in the same environment and provide language samples are called input .  The speech style characterized by it's simplified word which is used a lot by a person who has a lot of experience with young children is associated with "baby talk" .  *Caregiver Speech:  This speech style is characterized by the frequent us...

Language and the Brain   I. Neurolinguistics:   The study of relation between language and the brain. II. Language Areas in the Brain: *Broca's Area:  The "anterior speech cortex" or also known as Broca's area . Located on the left hemisphere of the brain. This part was believed to take the responsibility of generating spoken language. *Wernicke's Area:  The "posterior speech cortex" or also known as Wernicke's area . Located in the left hemisphere. This part was confirmed to comprehend spoken language. *The Motor Cortex and the Arcuate Fasciculus: Mortor cortex  This part is take control of muscle movements (legs, arms, foots, hands, ...). Additionally a part of Motor cortex  that is close to  Broca's area controls the articulary muscles (jaw, tongue, laryxn, ...) Arcuate fasciculus  It is a bunch of nerve fibers that are connected between Wernicke's area and Broca's area .  *The Localization View:   The localization view claimes...

  Pragmatics I. Invisible Meaning:  Pragmatics focuses on how different factors can affect the interpretation of meaning in communication or reading. Factors include intentions of speakers, the relationship between a speaker and listener, and the scenarios that can change the context of a message. II. Context:  To understand the context of something, people can not solely rely on the literal meaning of words. Instead, when interpreting the meaning, it is important to consider multiple elements and judge them more broadly to fully understand the intention mentioned by the writer or speaker. *Deixis:   Deixis or deictic expressions is a term use for words that is used to point to people (you, me, us, them), places (here, there, over there) and times (now, last time, next time). All these deictic expressions are interpretated in term of what person, places or times the speaker has in mind, and usually vague if we don't know the context of them before. III. Reference: ...

  SEMANTICS I. Meaning:   Beside the meaning in language, semantics also has some other aspect of meaning. Instead of agree with the subjective or personal meaning, the lesson focus on the widely accepted objective or factual meaning of words.  This distinction is categorized in term of referential meaning as opposed to associated or emotive meaning . Referential meaning covers the types of meaning that dictionaries are designed to describe. II. Semantic Features:  In term of semantic features, a word features components that are called meaning components. These features help to provide specific aspects of  meaning and defferentiate between words. III. Semantic Roles:  Words have different roles based on the situation described by a sentence.  *Agent and Theme:  The entity that perform the action is knew as  Agent .  The entity that is involved or affected in the the action is knew as  Theme .  *Instrument and Experiencer: ...

SYNTAX I. Syntactic rules:  When providing an analysis of the syntax of a language, we tend to follow the "all and only" criterion. This mean the analysis must account all grammatically correct phrases and sentences and only those grammatically correct phrases and sentences of whatever language we are analyzing. *A Generative Grammar:  A limited number set of rules that is capable of generating a potentially infinite number of properly formed structures is called generative grammar . II. Deep and Surface Structure:   Deep structure is other "underlying" level where the basic components (Noun phrase + Verb + Noun phrase) shared by two sentences have difference  in surface structure can be represented.   Deep structure is an abstract level of structural organization in which all the elements determining structural interpretation  " surface structure "  are represented. III. Syntactic Analysis:  In syntactic analysis, some abbreviations are used for ...

  GRAMMAR I. English Grammar:  The process of describing and assembling possible structures of phrases and sentences and then removing all ungrammatical sequences is called the  grammar  of a language. II. Traditional Grammar:  The terms "article", "adjective" and "noun" come from the  traditional grammar  that has its origins in the description of languages such as Latin and Greek. Current grammatical categories, which are used to analyse English are adapted from a well-established grammatical description of Latin relied on earlier analyses of Greek. *The Parts of Speech Noun "boys" Article "the" Adjective "lucky" Verb "found" Adverb "carefully" Preposition "in" Pronoun "they" Conjunction "and" III. The Prescriptive Approach:   Prescriptive approach  is a way of talking to describe the rules for the "proper" use of English, which was set by 18th England grammarians w...