Santiago Gomez

Federico Navarro

Language is inherently human not in the sense that animals or plants do not communicate, but because language communication bears a number of features, which Widdowson calls features of design, that sets human communication apart from animal communication. 

Animal communication is reactive in essence, communicating information about something that is happening in the moment. Human language communication is proactive, meaning it is used to generate events by communicating with other members of the species. This communication system has certain features that do not replicate anywhere else:

Arbitrariness: Linguistic signs are arbitrarily related to their meaning. except onomatopeias. Different societies may differentiate  peculiarities of meaning by a greater range of terms to define and express them. For example the many words for ice that inuits have in contrast to the number of words that English has.

Duality: Not-meaningful elements of language combine to form meaningful elements of language. Sounds are combined to create words which contain meaning. The peculiarity of duality is that it allows the creation of many signs from a rather small number of elements. Spoken language, scripture, braille, and Morse code are media for conveying language. Nevertheless, it is understood that language was  in origin spoken and that  without this origin there is no language, this argument is of a complex empirical nature because there have been documented cases of people with no previous knowledge  or way to acquire spoken or written language (e.g Helen Keller), who have indeed through the medium of touch, and by the use of a pulse code, acquired language.

Context- independent: It allows us to communicate about things beyond our current situation, things that may be in the past, things that are far beyond our sensory capabilities, things that may be future possibilities, or things that are product of our imagination.

Endowment or acomplishment: 

To some linguists (e.g. Chomsky) language learning is a genetic predisposition of humans. These linguists argue in favor of the notion of the Language Aquisition Device (LAD), as the starting engine embedded in our human minds. Essentially, the LAD generates a Universal Grammar (UG) which works as the blueprint of the different language systems. Each language is a different configuration of the same engine.

Language nature is not only a  psychological construct, but also a social one. Because we communicate through language, we can also influence others and be influenced by them. Widdowson mentions that language is socially motivated. Each community, through speech and pushed by its own interests, shapes language configuration in their way and by doing so sets their communication system  apart from the one of other communities. There is a feedback cycle here where people influence language and language influences speakers as they acquire its signs, and by doing so setting social expectations particular to that group of people. 

A functional view of language: As a tool for speakers , Halliday explains that for the speakers mind language has an ideational function, which helps the speaker to understand the third person (he,she it) , external reality and bring it under control,  and an interpersonal function, which aims at communicating with a second person (you) to meet our social needs.

The objective of Linguistics is to study language. 

Language design features: The arbitrariness of signs –-the abstraction from immediate experience provides for the creation of conceptual categories– enables us to be proactive communicators rather than reactive communicators, like animals do (we can speak about things that happened long ago, things we think may be happening right now very far away, things that may happen in the near or far future). Language creates a reality by explaining experience. Different languages create different versions of reality. Language abstraction drawback: limits the apprehension of experience. Language elements and structure limits human understanding of immediate experience. The camera's limit in FPS is similar to this. Humans are in a continuous process of changing and questioning language, in order to perfect communication, for the aforementioned reason.

Models and maps.

Abstraction is experience becoming an idea. Linguistics provide an explanation for the phenomena of language by creating  models to describe it.  

Models are an idealized version of reality, much like the way language operates to form words that represent the world. The features selected for creating each model are considered "essential". There may be features that are left out of the model for considering them irrelevant. There’s a parallelism with maps, in the sense they give up certain details of the world in order to give the most comprehensive yet useful and economic way of portraying a place. Different models of the same fact may highlight different features, and in that way they tell us different stories. There is subjectivity  at play in this concern. 

Dimensions of idealization.

Language is both a very generalized abstraction of experience, an  "act of social conformity" achieved by communicating with a group of people through speech, but also it allows us to dissent from broader generalizations by expressing detailed communication. Language allows through its common social code, ample ways of expressing nuances because it employs different elements (i.e. intonation, pauses, vocabularies and different grammatical rules) and allows speakers to exploit these elements by breaking rules to fit a communication situation. So the idealization of the language system is there to be challenged by the speakers in different situations with different needs for communication.

Langue and parole.

Parole: An act of Speech. Individual utterance. Heterogeneous. It is taken as not part of a system, but as a raw fact. We would need many consistent acts of parole to arrive to the conclusion that it may be evidence of a characteristic of langue.

Langue: The abstract, language system. Homogeneous, shared social code. Acquired by all members of a community of speakers. According to saussurean theory, it is the synchronic (i.e. "the same time") dimension of a language system. He did not regard the diachronic (i.e. "throughout time") dimension as langue. To Widdowson, Saussure mistook the synchronic aspect of langue for a fixed nature of langue. I would argue that Widdowson disagrees with Saussure in that it is only a simplified model of synchronicity because langue variation in a synchronic cross-section is the manifestation of different rule sets that are appearing with different generations and kinds of speakers, who are changing langue.  So to summarize, Widdowson disagrees fundamentally in the fact that not only langue changes across time (in a diachronic manner), but also in a synchronic manner, because of a difference in system rules across the social space. Picture a situation where you are talking to a student of a younger age, who is using new words (‘rushear’, from rush), new grammar rules( ‘me encanta la cocinación’, instead of cocinar), or new meaning (‘está re nazi’, meaning extreme) to the communicational situation. It is not necessarily true that we would not understand them or identify his speech as another language.

My conclusion is that Widdowson uses the example of langue et parole to argue that models in linguistics are not perfect and can be improved or changed , such is the case of the diachronicity-synchronicity in saussurean theory.

When you know some language, it implies that you have inferred certain generalities from particulars, and vice versa.

Type and token.

Linguistic description deals in generalities, abstract types of language and particular instances within them are called tokens.

Some elements are: Word elements, Letter elements, Word type, Letter type, etc

The example given is taken from Shakespeare’s Richard II

I WASTED TIME AND NOW DOTH TIME WASTE ME.

There are 9 word elements, and 32 word letters. Considering that the word TIME appears twice, there are 8 word types. At the same time the 32 letters are only 10, because of repetition of the letters like “I”/“W”.

Now, the word waste or wasted are tokens of the same type or of different type (If we consider them having different meaning (Lexical).

Also, you can analyze and group the letters into consonants and vowels. This shows how you can analyze and identify them from different perspectives.

To identify an element as a token, is to recognize it as a particular and actual instance of a general and abstract type. A token is a part of the type. Like pealing an onion, you can have many layers of types of analysis.

Principles of classification

Elements are classified in basis of similarity; you can identify similarities quiet easily and group elements based on that. We identify features they share, or have in common, ignoring what distinguish them.

As mentioned in the first chapter, a feature that appears to distinguish human communication is Duality. This is how from the smallest elements like sounds and letters, we combined them to form units at a higher level.

You can classify based on phonetic and phonemic differences, how the sound of /v/ and /p/  are different because one is aspirated and the other is unaspirated, but there is not a phonetic difference, with aspiration.

Dimensions of analysis.

Classification of sounds is based on the possibility of their appearing in the same structural environment.

Sameness (/f/ and /v/ can appear on the same environment) and Difference (/f/ and /v/ can relate to each other because they appear in the same environment.) are two kind of relationships

When elements combine with others along a horizontal dimension, they enter a SYNTAGMATIC relationship (elements in combination, in the vertical dimension they enter into PARADIGMATIC relationship.

These are the 2 axis that all linguistic analysis show present.

Levels of analysis

The analysis of language can be adjust to focus on different aspects, a word can be taken as a combination of sounds or letters, or a part of a sentence, or an isolated unit, etc.

Morphology is something that can be used to further analyze lexical items

OVERT SEQUENCE AND COVERT STRUCTURE

The order in which words are used in a sentence is not arbitrary and very seldom objective, so certain order in words can vary the impact a phrase would be understood as. Part of an analysis is to ask what sequence was chosen, and for what purpose. The items in that sequence are part of a text, and their function is to organize information in certain way.

The patterns of sound: Phonetics and phonology

We make language manifest through spoken and written utterance.

Some terms to take into consideration are allophones, graphemes and utterance.

Allophones are variant pronunciations of a phoneme that do not change the meaning of a word in a particular language. Allophones are conditioned by phonetic factors such as adjacent sounds, syllable position, and speech rate. While they may sound different to speakers, they are perceived as the same sound within a given linguistic system.

Graphemes are the smallest units of a writing system that represent distinct linguistic units, such as phonemes or morphemes. They are the written symbols or combinations of symbols used to represent sounds or meaningful elements in a language. They are the basic elements of written language and are used to encode spoken language into a visual form.

An utterance is a unit of spoken language that is bounded by silence or a pause and has communicative intent. It is a discrete stretch of speech produced by a speaker in a particular context, whether it be a single word, a phrase, a sentence, or a longer discourse. They are the fundamental building blocks of spoken discourse and serve various communicative functions in conversation and other forms of oral communication. In both spoken and written form tokens are elements of behavior and types are elements of knowledge.

Syllables

Usually syllables consists of one vowel sound between two consonants (CVC) but can be as small as (VC)/ (CV). 

Stress and intonation

If a word has more than one syllable, one of them is pronounced more prominently than the others, that is called stress. This also happens in sentences, depending in the choice you make to different things can be inferred.

For example: “The CHAIRMANG may resign.” And  “The chairman MAY resign.” Have different connotations.

At the same time, intonation can impact a lot in spoken communication, if the sentence ends up in a rise, it gives the idea of a question being asked.

 The construction of words morphology

Morphemes can be Free or Bound, for example “PASSING” we can divide it in “PASS” and “ING”, from those morphemes one can be independent like “PASS” and the other “ING” cannot.

Derivation and inflection

Derivation deals with affixes, prefixes and suffixes, with can change the lexical form of a word.

Inflection on the other hand, deals with conjugations, like ED, and how it changes from an /t/ sound, or a /d/ sound and the /it/ sound.

The combination of words: syntax

The structural unit which is bigger than just words, and how the need to be organized to convey meaning, is called syntax.

Syntax is the branch of linguistics that studies how words are organized into sentences and phrases. This is similar to understanding the grammar of a language, but focuses more on how words come together to create meaning. It is interested in word order (the order in which words appear in a sentence), how different parts of a sentence fit together to make sense, and the patterns that sentences follow.

One thing that lets us order words is our recognition of what kind of words are, nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc, usually have their order in a sentence.

It’s not the same “Church gothic in live artist” than “Artist live in Gothic Church.”

In Chapter 5, the author delves into areas of enquiry and focuses on meaning, making a significant point: "Word order is a syntactic device in English" (Widddowson, 2005, 53). This statement, however, needs to be viewed in a specific context: "It is only the way they are ordered that makes them different"(as cited in the same source, 53)—reiterating the importance of word order in determining meaning (also mentioned in the same source, 53). 

This chapter presents some key concepts, such as semantic components; for example, in English, the word "sick" means lack of health. However, it can also be inferred using two morphological elements, such as "unwell." Other concepts are the denotation of words, e.g., "Return," meaning the same using "comeback." Another point considered is componential analysis, which searches to identify semantic features, such as directionality, among many categories, of which "come" and "go" can be mentioned. The latter also takes us to the next concept, sense relations. The previous example illustrates contrast, and within this scope, we can also use "give/take," "arrive/depart," "send/receive, etc. The author categorizes this under the term antinomy. Other categories dealt with are synonymy, superordinate, and hyponymy, related with this: "each superordinate necessarily possesses a semantic feature common to all its hyponyms." (Ob cit, p 59)

An interesting approach corresponds to formulaic phrases, such as "time after time" or "over and over." As well as the usage of fixed collocations.

The second part of the chapter delves into the fascinating realm of meaning in context or pragmatics. 'One aspect then is (prepositional) reference, another is (illocutionary) force and percutionary effect.' (Ob cit, p 63). This aspect of language is deeply intertwined with culture and the metalinguistic elements that envelop language, incorporating a layer of richness and complexity into our understanding. Under this, we explore speech acts and schema, further highlighting the cultural nuances of language. The example of the word Brazil is used about a football match; we understand that by considering the context of the phrase: "Brazil scored just before the final whistle."

On another level, what is presented as a negotiation of meaning might create ambiguity or uncertainty depending on the context. Last but not least, there are paralinguistic features such as utterances, tones, gestures, and eye contact.

The last chapter summarizes the current issues discussed within the field of linguistics. After reading the preceding chapters, the author emphasizes which subdiscipline deals with these different things. For example, psycholinguistics has worked with behavior and psychological aspects; when social codes are added, it is time to discuss sociolinguistics. There is also talk of functional linguistics competing with sociolinguistics to take over this field. It has also been said that this is related to formal linguistics and everyday problems.

When discussing linguistic data, it is mentioned that there are three ways of collecting data: introspection, elicitation, and observation. 

The first is the traditional approach taken by linguists in the past; in the case of elicitation, community members are used as informants. In these two cases, we are talking about abstract elements; if we want to focus on behavior, we must focus on observation.

The work ends by highlighting the areas of use of linguistics, such as descriptive linguistics, which involves language analysis through elicitation and observation. On the other hand, we have applied linguistics, as used by anthropologists at the time or by the military at certain times. The use of discourse can be analyzed through the use of codes. In short, linguistics offers an invaluable spectrum for understanding how humans learn a second language.

Finally, language can also be approached through critical discourse analysis, which refers to stylistics.