Introduction

Each of us is already an expert in the language we grew up speaking. We don’t have to stop and
think about how to pronounce words, or how to form questions, or how to talk about something
that will happen in the future or something that happened in the past. Still, each of these tasks is
actually pretty complex. And it’s amazing that we know how to do it—effortlessly, without
direct instruction from anyone. We acquire the rules of our language at an early age just by being
exposed to it.

Acquisition versus Learning

The process of language acquisition is different from the process of language learning.
Acquisition takes place unconsciously, without direct instruction. Any of us who has studied a
second language in school knows that learning a language is a conscious (and often difficult!)
process requiring practice and study. Our ability to acquire our native language, on the other
hand, is similar to a bird’s ability to fly. Birds don’t teach their off spring to fly; the young birds
just do it when they reach a certain developmental stage and are in the appropriate environment.
Similarly, children who are exposed to language acquire it regardless of race, class, or culture.

Human Language features

Linguist Charles Hockett proposed a list of design features that characterize human language
and distinguish it from other communication systems (other animal systems, traffic signals, etc.).
Hockett’s list has been revised and reexamined by many linguists, but the features of human
language that remain on almost every researcher’s list include the following.

 Semanticity: Specific signals can be matched with specific meanings. In short, words
have meanings.
 Arbitrariness: There is no logical connection between the form of the signal and the
thing it refers to. For example, dog in English is Hund in German and perro in Spanish.
 Discreteness Messages in the system are made up of smaller, repeatable parts rather
than indivisible units. For instance, in spoken language, individual phonemes like /p/
and /b/ are distinct from each other, and even a small change in a phoneme can result in a
change of meaning (e.g., "pat" vs. "bat"). This characteristic allows for the combination
of a finite set of sounds or symbols to create an infinite number of meanings in human
language.
 Displacement The language user can talk about things that are not present—the
messages can refer to things in remote time (past and future) or space (here or elsewhere).
  Productivity Language users can understand and create never-before-heard utterances.
 Duality of patterning A large number of meaningful utterances can be recombined in a
systematic way from a small number of different parts of language. For example, the
meaningless sounds /k/ + /a:/ create meaningful sound car /ka:/. or suffixes can be
attached to many roots, and words can be combined to create novel sentences.

What is Grammar

Human language is also characterized by grammar, which is a system that governs how sounds,
words, and sentences are structured and understood. It is also used to produce and understand
sentences never uttered or heard before. This grammar includes five components. Each
component interacts with the others, but each can also be studied on its own.

• Phonetics The inventory of sounds in a language

• Phonology Rules of how sounds are combined in a language

• Morphology Rules of word formation in a language

• Syntax Rules of sentence formation in a language

• Semantics Rules that govern how meaning is expressed by words and sentences in a language

Universal Grammar

We all acquire a complex grammatical system, regardless of how and where we are raised. This
suggests that we all tackle language acquisition with the same basic cognitive hardwiring to
accomplish that task. If we are all hardwired in some way to acquire language, what is the nature
of this hardwiring? Chomsky's theory aims to explain how children, regardless of which
language they are exposed to or which culture they come from, can learn complex linguistic
systems so quickly and effortlessly. The idea is that their brains are pre-wired with a set of
grammatical rules that apply universally, and exposure to a specific language helps them fine-
tune those rules to that particular language. These grammatical rules must have similar properties
across languages, these what linguists refer to as Universal Grammar (UG).

Universal Grammar (UG) the set of linguistic rules common to all languages;
hypothesized to be part of human cognition. i.e an innate ability to acquire language. Chomsky
proposed that humans are born with a cognitive linguistic system that provides the basic
principles for language. One of the goals of modern linguistics is to study languages in order to
learn more about what they have in common and to learn more about UG. For example, all
languages seem to combine subjects and predicates to form larger units, clauses. It seems to be a
principle of Universal Grammar that clauses in all languages have subjects, though languages
may differ in how the subject is expressed.

Generative Grammar

Generative grammar is a system of grammatical rules that allow speakers to create possible
sentences in a language.

Chomsky’s theory of grammar is called generative because it is designed to describe a precise

and finite set of rules that generates (or has as its output) the possible sentences in a language.
Mathematical operations such as division and multiplication are also generative; though many of
you had to memorize multiplication tables in school, what you also learned was how to multiply,
and the knowledge of that operation allows you (now) to multiply any numbers you want to. We
can think of generative grammar in the same way; we don’t memorize all the sentences in a
language in order to speak it; rather, we learn or acquire a system of rules that allow us to
produce and understand the possible sentences in the language. Chomsky proposed that some of
these generative rules might also be grounded in Universal Grammar and thus be common to all
languages.

Linguistic Competence

People have unconscious knowledge of language and use it to speak and understand language.
This knowledge is referred to by linguistic competence—the unconscious knowledge of
language that allows people to speak, understand, and generate grammatically correct sentences.
This knowledge includes grammar rules, syntax, phonology, and more, even if speakers are not
able to explicitly describe these rules.

Linguists, such as Noam Chomsky, distinguish between competence (the internal knowledge of
language) and performance (the actual use of language in concrete situations). While people may
make errors in speech (performance), their underlying knowledge of how language works
(competence) remains intact.

A language is really a continuum of language variety that

changes over time and space

Language exists on a continuum, both in terms of time and space, which is often described
through concepts like language variation and language change. Over time, languages evolve,
influenced by historical, social, and cultural factors resulting variations based on geography,
social class, age, or other factors. For example, British and American English are varieties of
English that differ in pronunciation, vocabulary, and sometimes grammar. Language also
changes spatially, dialects and regional varieties emerge in some regions, with different groups
of speakers developing distinct features while still being part of the same overarching language.
Some neighboring dialects of a language may be mutually intelligible, but as you move further
away, dialects become less understandable to each other

Linguistics, the Scientific Study of Language

So far, much of our discussion has focused on the question, ‘What is language?’ or more
specifically, ‘What is it that we know about language?’ Here, linguistics is the study of how we
get to know what we know about language.
As in physics or chemistry, language scientists examine data, form hypotheses about the data,
test those hypotheses against additional data, and formulate theories, or collections of
hypotheses, that can be tested against competing theories. Linguistics, the scientific study of
language, is informed by a long history of the study of grammar, and many of the ideas central to
current linguistic theory go back to ancient times.

Exercise

The term grammar has many meanings. Explain the distinct meanings of grammar in the
following sentences.
a) I better watch my grammar around you!
b) Please proofread your paper for grammar and style.
c) I’m taking a class on Spanish grammar.
d) There have been three grammars written on the language Quechua.
e) Our innate capacity for the grammar of a language is quite amazing.