Language and Communication

Communication and language of animal

2010-08-13T17:07:00.000-07:00

Communication and language of animal
Earth’s earliest organisms evolved primitive mechanisms of exchange capable of informing of species, gender and intent.

This convenience occurred through what was then nature’s most sophisticated medium: chemo-communication.

Continuous need over millions of year to contact another of the same evolving species in order to procreate necessitated ever more complex methods of communication.

Out of this evolutionary process ‘language’ in its broadest sense was born.

Each type of language used in native differs. The deeper one probes, the more one discovers each species’ communicative ability distinguished by ever more elaborate definitions of the concept ‘language’.

In its simplest definition, language signifies ‘medium of information exchange’. The definition allows the concept of language to encompass facial expressions, gestures, posture, whistles, hand signs, writing, mathematical language, programming (or computer) language and so forth.

The definition also accommodates the ants’ chemical ‘language’ and the honey bees’ dance ‘language’.

The definition further recognized the many bioacoustics exchanges of information (the sound emissions of life forms) that occur in frequencies beyond human hearing.

For example, an average 25 year old human can hear only about ten octaves at the loudness and closeness of normal conversation – that is, between 30 and 18 000 hertz.

Birds, frogs, toads, and dogs all vocalize within this range. However, most other creatures appear to communicate both below and above the range humans consider ‘normal’.

Infrasound comprise emissions below 30 hertz such as many sounds made by finback whales, blue whales, elephants, crocodilian, oceans waves, volcanoes, earthquakes and severe weather.

Ultrasound occurs above 28 000 hertz, frequencies, commonly used by insects, bats, dolphins and shrews.

There is far more to language than vocal communication alone, however. In its most universal meaning, language is the nexus of the animate word, its limit drawn only by humankind’s crayon.
Communication and language of animal

The Language of Emotions

2010-06-26T16:34:00.000-07:00

The Language of Emotions
The language of emotions has most often been studied as part of a larger subset of language, typically referred to as “internal state language.”

Some investigators have focused exclusively on the emotion lexicon or in the lexicon of desire (subset of volition and ability), feeling (positive and negative emotion), an metal state or other subsets.

These semantic subcategories are quite heterogenous and all findings must be interpreted in the context of the specific definitions used.

Many words of English which can refer to emotions or other internal states have multiple meanings, only some of which are relevant here.

For example, the word like may refer to an emotional state or a judgment of similarity; the word blue to an emotional state or a color; and the word can to ability/permission or to a container.

For this reason, observational studies of internal state language require careful examination of potential internal state words in context, and parental checklists require the specification of the relevant meaning.

Although the vocabulary of emotions and other internal states is extensive and distinctive these words have no distinctive grammatical correlate or pronunciation.

Thus this aspect of language is not specifically marked in any way for children, despite the very considerable challenge such words pose.

These words are relatively abstract: most of them do not have a clear, consistent, visible referent.

Even in those cases which do have a visible referent such as happy and mad, it is transitory an somewhat idiosyncratic across individuals.

Furthermore, the essence as well as the self. Such as act of categorization would appear to require a high degree of non-egocentrism, on the part of the child to infer an internal state for another.

Reassert in internal state language did not begin until relatively recently, in part because of the assumption that such non-egocentrism would not be reliably established until the concrete operational period i.e. the early school years.

Finally, the processes that have been posited to enable children to master an enourmous vocabulary in the preschool years have a little to offer in this area of learning.

For example, the taxonomic constraint has been proposed as a pre-existing bias to apply labels to categories of similar objects, and the principle of mutual exclusively has been proposed as a bias to assume that a new refers to a new object or set of objects. Neither appears to be particular relevant for internal state language.
The Language of Emotions

The Meaning

2010-05-26T18:42:00.001-07:00

The Meaning
Perhaps the favorite notion in folk linguistics is meaning. It is almost possible to resist the temptation to start the explanation of language.

The ‘meaning’ used as a blanket term to cover the special properties of linguistics symbols that enable them to play their striking roles in people’s lives.

A word of warning about the term ‘meaning;. Its popularity in linguistics is, in one respect, unfortunate, In its ordinary use term is vague, perhaps even ambiguous.

Certainly it has many applications that have nothing to do with language.

We start out theory of meaning, our semantics, with an hypothesis: that the core of a linguistics symbol’s meaning lies in the fact that the symbol represents something; for example, the core of the meaning of ‘Regan’ lies in the fact that it represent a well-known former president of the United States.

This representational hypothesis may seen too obvious to mention; even the word ‘symbol; suggest it. Indeed, it is probably the oldest idea of all about meaning.

What does a sentence represent? Think of an indicative sentence, the sort that is typically used in making an assertion ( as opposed to asking a question, issuing a command, etc.). The sentence represents the situation that would make it sure; it represents its truth condition.

The sentence is true of a certain situation in the world obtains and not true if the situation does not. So, hypothesis is that this property of a sentence is the core of its meaning.

Thus it is central to the meaning of ‘Bulldog are ugly’ that it is true if and only if bulldog really are ugly. The hypothesis is in the spirit of the popular philosophical slogan, “The meaning of a sentence is its truth condition”.
The Meaning

Linguistic form in communication

2010-04-22T09:36:00.001-07:00

Linguistic form in communication
Linguistic form serves a variety of functions, but one of its primary functions is to enable communication.

Communication involves a communicator and a communicatee.

Verbal communication is one of the kinds of communication (others occlude gestural, visual, etc) and involves languages.

The two primary media for verbal communication are speech and writing; for clarity here (and to avoid terms like ‘communicatee’).

A speaker produces an utterance and this communicates to the hearer. Communication is successful when the hearer attributed a set of thought to the speaker as her informative intention when the hearer recognizes what the speaker intends to tell him.

These thoughts can have any content whatsoever. Thus for example if the speaker tells the hearer a story, among the thoughts which she communicates are thoughts about the narrated work and its characters and what happens, but she also communicates thoughts about the structure and functions of the story itself – communicating that the story is about to reach its peak, or that there is a shift form one episode to another for example.

Communication can be vague. For example the speaker may say ‘my love is a red red rose’. The hearer may use this as evidence that speaker intends to tell him that the loved person is beautiful, precious, will not live for ever, and so on: the analogy with a flower means that various characteristics of the flower will be carried over to the loved person.

Successful communication involves the hearer reconstructing some of these thoughts and attributing them to the speaker: the communication is equally with different sets of thoughts.

There is no single tightly constrained set of the meanings intended, just some of meanings which can be inferred from the utterance.
Linguistic form in communication

Philosophy about Language

2010-04-03T03:04:00.000-07:00

Philosophy about Language
Language being the subject of many inquires, there are many approaches to the considerations of its origin and nature, its properties and uses, its defect and the ways of overcoming them.

Philosophy is only one among the disciplines or modes of inquiry that are concerned with language.

This concern on the part of philosophy may have arisen initially from difficulties encountered in the use of language for philosophical discourse; but it extends beyond that to the uses of language in ordinary discourse, in all other disciplines and for all other purposes; nor can philosophy avoid being concerned with the substitution of specially constructed languages for ordinary language as instruments of discourse.

While the philosophical interest in language would thus appear to be all-encompassing in scope, the philosophical approach to language is in fact limited to the kind of questions that it is legitimate for a philosopher to try answer.

There are many question about language that can be answer only by historical research, by the empirical methods of the social and behavioral sciences, or by one or another field of humanistic scholarship, such as philology.

It is necessary, therefore, to define the scope of a philosophy of language by staying the problems with which philosophy is competent to deal, and by drawing a line of demarcation that separates these problems from other closely related problems that are beyond philosophy’s scope and in addition, are posterior; that is cannot be adequately dealt with unless and until prior problems have been solved.
Philosophy about Language

The Faces of Language

2010-03-06T02:58:00.001-08:00

The Faces of Language
What is language? What aspects of this universal communicative system are distinctively human and distinctively significant for socio-emotional development? Four characteristics are most important.

The first is that language is a system of categorization.

Word meaning, grammatical rules, all linguist structures function as categories at can be used to go “beyond the information given”.

Categories provides us a basis for acting in the future on the basis of the past even though the past never repeats itself exactly.

The challenge for child learner of language is to perform a leap of induction for each word, a leap from a few examples (a few dogs, a few shades of green, etc) to a general concept, and to do this 6000 times by the age of 6.

A second distinctive quality of language is displacement; we are not limited to the here-and- now, but can talk about persons, objects and events not present. In this way language unites past, present and future.

A third essential property of language is productivity or creativity.

The overwhelming majority of utterances we produce and hear are novel. When we encounter new situations, or have new meanings to convey we can construct new sentences with reasonable hope that we will be understood by our listeners.

Finally, language has both a public and a private face. That is, language has an interpersonal function – as an instrument of social interaction - and intrapersonal function – as an instrument of cognitive functioning without any distinct formal marking to distinguish them.

This view of language has a long intellectual heritage, but in psychology today is most associated with the name to the great Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky whose rediscovery by English-speaking psychologists in the 1960s transformed cognitive and developmental psychology.
The Faces of Language

Stimulus Independent of Language

2010-02-22T20:33:00.000-08:00

Stimulus Independent of Language
In most circumstances, as full a description a person’s physical environment does not enable you to predict her next utterance.

The contrast with animal communication systems, for example, is notable.

Briefly, animal communication system seem to be of two sorts. First, birds (and apparently nonhuman primates) have a fixed and fairly small repertoire of distinct signals, each of which has a set function: flight call, alarm call and the like.

A particular environment elicits the appropriate response. Human language does not consist in such a small fixed repertoire of predictable responses.

Second consider bees. A bee returning from a distant food source dances a message. The positioning of the dance and its pattern indicate the direction and distance of the food source.

This remarkably efficient system of communication differs from those of birds in having an limited number of signals: the length and the pattern are capable of indefinitely many variations.
Nevertheless, the bee’s system is not flexible in the way human language is. Each response is environmentally fixed: if you know where the bee has been and if you know the coding system, you can predict the pattern of the dance.

In contrast, of a person comes from a food source – a good restaurant for example – you cannot predict her words.

Her food description indeed, whether she talks about food at all – is stimulus independent.
Stimulus Independent of Language

Form and function to language literature

2010-01-28T03:20:00.001-08:00

Form and function to language literature
Linguistics does not have a universally agreed role in the analysis of literature among either linguists or literary theorists.

Disagreement about the use of linguistics can often be traced to views about functions, and the relation between form and function.

Linguistics is a practice which seeks to find a final analysis of the forms of language but which cannot do so because it is unable to escape itself to become a theory of how the world actually is.

This view is associated in particular with poststructuralist theorists, who has a general principle feel that any kind of form can never finally be determined, but always from the gaze of the analysts.

Another view is that literary text exceeds their form. Thus the text as a whole may be seem as having holistic qualities such as a whole it is more that the sum of its parts, and has qualities as a whole cannot be underside by the analysis of the parts.

Or the text may be seen as having transcendent qualities, aspect which hold of it but which cannot be discovered by formal analysis.

Both views are associated in particular with Romantic and post Romantic theorists; these views remain quiet influential and are often invoked in the suggestion that linguistics cannot ultimately cope with literature.
Form and function to language literature

Dialectical Variation

2010-01-15T19:17:00.000-08:00

Dialectical Variation
It is notoriously difficult however to define precisely what a dialect is, and in fact the term has come to be used in various was.

The classic example of a dialect is the regional dialect: the distinct of a language spoken in a certain geographical area.

For example we might speak of Ozark dialects or Appalachian dialects on the grounds that inhabitants of these regions have certain distinct linguistic features that differentiate them from speakers of other forms of English.

We can also speak of a social dialect: the distinct form of a language spoken by members of a specific socioeconomic class, such as the working class dialects on England or the ghetto languages in the United States.

In addition, certain ethnic dialects can be distinguished, such as the form of English sometimes referred to as Yiddish English, historically associated with speakers of Eastern European Jewish ancestry.

It is important to note that dialects are not never purely regional, or purely social or purely ethnic.

For example, the distinctive Ozark and Appalachian dialects are not merely dialects spoken by any of the inhabitants.

As see, regional, social, and ethnic factors combines and intersect in various way in the identification of dialects.
Dialectical Variation

Language and Cognition

2009-12-11T18:51:00.001-08:00

Language and Cognition
A fascinating aspect of the relationship between language and culture is the impact of language on their way we organize our thought (cognition) and perceive our environment.

The anthropologists Edward Sapir first brought the problem of language, culture and perception into open, and one of his students, Benjamin Lee Whorf, developed this idea further in his own research and writing.

Together, they were responsible for the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,, which focuses on the relationship between language and culture.

One important question in this regard is: Are we really free to express anything and everything through language?

The answer is: Maybe not. To some extent our language structures and hence limits or directs our communication.

If our studied a foreign language, you know that there are some ideas or way thinking that are language-specific, unique to that language.

If you speak a particular language, you might use different terms to refer to older brothers and younger brothers.

This forces you to think of your brothers differently than if you speak English, where all brothers are called by same term regardless of age.

Or to use another example, not all languages have the concepts of past, present and future built into their verbs.

For native English speakers, it is natural to think about time and to structure thought in terms of a linear view of time.

However, of we all assume that an infant can learn any language in the world, then we can see that it is not some inborn trait that directs a person’s way of thinking but, rather, something contained in the structure of the language.
Language and Cognition

Functions of verbal behavior

2009-10-30T19:21:00.000-07:00

Functions of verbal behavior
Verbal behavior has various at the same time. One of the most importance functions of verbal behavior is to communicate but not all verbal behavior is communicate it has communication as its primary function.

The production of verbal art or literature can in principle serve any of a wide range of functions, including but not restricted to communication.

Here are some of the other functions which can be served by verbal behavior and which are sometimes served specifically by verbal art:

Entertainment
The display of skill
Praise of a good patron, or censure of an enemy
The promotion of cultural values and morality
The expression of mutual experience, thus bonding together and audience
Recording of historical events, or laws or tenets of religion
Communication with supernatural beings
The control of the physical world by magical means
Healing

Any of these functions can also be served by non-verbal behaviors: for example, while communication is one of the possible of verbal behavior, it is also possible to communicate non-verbally.
Functions of verbal behavior

Languages Styles and Language Dialects

2009-10-06T10:59:00.000-07:00

Languages Styles and Language Dialects
Consider the following sentence:
You makin’ sense, but you don’ makin’ sense!

Speakers of the standard dialect of English are likely to conclude that this sentence is ungrammatical.

The first clause lacks a (finite) verb that the standard dialect requires and the sequence do+ be in the second clause is a combination that the standard dialect prohibits.

Speakers of the standard dialect might also question the logic of the sentence (and hence, as has unfortunately happened, the logical abilities of its utterer).

After all, the two clauses appear to contradict each other.

No human language is fixed, uniform, or unvarying; all languages show variation. Actual varies from group to group, and speaker to speaker, in terms of the pronunciation of a language, the choice of words and the meaning of those words and even the use of syntactic constructions.

To take a well known example, the speech of American is noticeably different from speech of the British, and the speech of these two groups in turn is distinct from the speech of Australians.

When groups of speakers differ noticeably in their language, they are often said to speak different dialects of the language.
Languages Styles and Language Dialects

What is Phonology?

2009-09-10T01:01:00.000-07:00

What is Phonology?
Phonology is the subfield of linguistics that studies the structure and systematic patterning of sounds in human language.

The term phonology is used in two ways. On the one hand, it refers to a description of the sounds of a particular language and the rules governing the distribution of those sounds.

Thus we can talk about the phonology of English, German, or any other language.

On the other hand, it refers to that part of the general theory of human language that is concerned with the universal properties of natural sound systems (i.e., properties reflected in many, if not all, human languages).

Phonology is not specifically concerned with aspects of speech production or perception which are purely the result of the physical properties of the system.

For instance it is often said that the articulation of the ‘k’ sounds in the words car and key differ from each other slightly.

In the ‘k’ of the key the tongue is brought slightly towards the front of the mouth in comparison with the ‘k’ of car.

The reason for this, of course is that the ‘ey’ vowel of key drags the tongue forward slightly, because that vowel is produced with the tongue slightly further forward in the mouth that the ‘a’ vowel of car.

This kind of phenomenon is of great interest to those speech scientist who study the precise way in which human speech sounds are produced and their influence on each other during speaking.
What is Phonology?

Structure of language

2009-08-25T02:30:00.000-07:00

Structure of language
The structure of language, or the way of morphemes are put together to form words and sentences that are both meaningful and correct.

We used the term syntax to refer to the way words are put together into phrases and sentences.

The term grammar refers to the overall set of rules for speaking and writing a given language.

Every language has syntactic rules that govern how words are put together. In English we say “the blue hat,” while in French one would say “the hat blue”.

It is not that one way is any better that the other but, rather that one way is agreed upon as “correct” in each language and the other is not.

We can all accept the statement “I sat on the chair,” but we know that a similar statement, “the chair sat on I,” is incorrect.

The words are the same, but the difference in order makes the second example nonsensical.

Using the same reasoning, we can accept a statement as correct even of we have never heard it before in exactly that way.

This fact led a linguist named Noam Chomsky to develop a new area of linguistic study called generative or transformational grammar.

Chomsky reasoned that of a native speaker can create an infinite number of grammatically correct statements without ever having heard of them, there must be a set of underlying linguistics rules that allow a person to generate his or her language.

The process of moving from those underlying rules (which Chomsky called deep structure) to the actual statement (surface structure) is termed a transformation.

In the same way, a native speaker can reject any statements that are not correct without ever having heard them before and usually without having to think about them.

Chomsky argues that the deep structure of all languages are the same, and that all born with an innate knowledge of deep structure.

They are also born with the capacity for making transformation, regardless of the deep and surface structures of their language.
Structure of language

Linguistics and the Study of Form

2009-08-05T18:51:00.000-07:00

Linguistics and the Study of Form
In the twentieth century, linguistics has been prominent in the study of form, partly because linguistics form is particularly rich and complex.

The prominence of linguistics has enabled to have a significant influence on the development of other disciplines which study form in areas other than language: anthropology, psychoanalysis, sociology, musicology, film theory and literary study for example.

This influence has come about for basically two reasons. First, one of the most influential early works on linguistics Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1913), suggested that the methods of linguistics might be extended to all communicative systems whether or not they use language, to become the basis of a general semiotics.

Second, contact between two Europeans who met in New York in the 1940s, the linguist Roman Jakobson and the anthropologist Claude Levi–Strauss. Left the latter convinced that phonology (the study of linguistics sounds) could provide a methodological basis for all the human sciences, and thus laid the path towards the French structuralism of the 1950s and 1960s, in which linguistics inspired a range of disciplines.

The influence of linguistics on other disciplines, including the study of literature, has been fruitful, but also had the effect of de-emphasizing the specificity of linguistics and the distinctive status of linguistics form.

Thus it has become common to describe various kinds of non-linguistics form by using the terminology of linguistics: writes refer to ‘the syntax of film’ or ‘the language of clothing’, for example.

And literary form is sometimes analyzed as tough it was like linguistics form: thus narratives are sometimes seen as analogous to sentences.

These kinds of approach see ‘form; as something very general which exists similarly in many different media.

In opposition to these tendencies, most kinds of modern linguistics emphasize the distinctive characteristics of language, and the fact that when linguistics form is brought proper focus, it does not resemble any other kind of form.

This has been a fundamental principle of generative linguistics from its inception with Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structure (1957).

It has also been the basis for a claim about the human mind: if linguistic form is different from any other kind of form then the human child’s ability to acquire a language so rapidly and efficiently (and therefore learn how to speak and understand a language) might be based on some propensity towards the learning of specifically linguistics form.

Thus it is possible that linguistics form emerges from mental structures which are specialized for language and with which human are born.

This has a further implication for literary linguistics. If linguistics form depends on specific mental structure and certain aspects of linguistics forms are adapted to literary use in ways which conform to general principle across languages, then it is possible that by studying the adaption of linguistics form in literary form we can therefore study the mind.

Literary scholars have sometime been content to borrow the terminology of linguistics while being resistant to the psychological implications of linguistics theory; both tendency can be traced to the same underestimation of the distinctiveness of linguistic form.
Linguistics and the Study of Form

Communication and Emotion

2009-06-29T19:03:00.000-07:00

Communication and Emotion
Communication is possible without words too. And this is largely thanks to the basic emotions every share.

When anthropologists first come onto contact with a previously isolated people, their only means of communication is via facial expressions and bodily gestures, many of which are specifically designed to express emotions.

The anthropologists may smile, an expression that will be recognized immediately by the isolated tribespeople.

The tribespeople may smile in return, showing that they share the same basic emotional repertoire.

Different cultures have elaborated on this repertoire, exalting different emotions, downgrading others and embellishing the common feelings with cultural nuances, but these differences are more like those between two interpretations of the same musical works, rather than those between different compositions.

Just as two orchestras will play the same symphony slightly differently, so two cultures will play out their emotional repertoire in different tones.

It will be clear to all however, that the score is the same.
Communication and Emotion

Communicative Act Potential

2009-06-25T04:51:00.000-07:00

Communicative Act Potential
Sentences also exhibit meaning properties and relations that words and phrases may lack.

One important property of a sentence is its communities act potential.

Sentences with different structures often have different communicative functions – they are conventionally used to perform different communicative acts in speaking.

Thus, a speaker who wants to assert or state that something is true will normally utter a declarative sentence such as Snow is white.

On the other hand, if the speaker wants to issue an order, request, or command, then an imperative sentence such as Leave the room! is appropriate.

Finally, if speaker wants to ask a question, then the obvious choice is an interrogative sentence such as What time is it? As a first approximation we could diagram these facts a s follows:

a. Declarative sentence – Used to constate (assert, state, claim, etc.)
b. Imperative sentence – Used to direct (order, request, command, etc.)
c. Interrogative sentence – Used to question.

It seems to be a part of the semantics of these structural types (declarative, imperative, interrogative) that they have the distinct communicative function as above.

In any event, we would not say someone understood sentences of these types unless that person understood the differences in communicative function.

That these different types of sentences had these different normal uses is an important semantic fact.

However, the field of semantics has traditionally concentrated on the assertive function of language, concerning itself mainly with the properties and relations that declarative sentences have regarding truth.
Communicative Act Potential

Early Years of Telegraph

2009-05-18T22:38:00.000-07:00

Early Years of Telegraph
In early years of telegraphy, telegraph wires ran above the ground.

Then in 1847, the chemist, and physicist Michael Faraday suggested insulating them with gutta-percha so that they could be laid underground or on the seabed.

The first London to Paris cable was in use in 1851 and after several attempts, transatlantic telegraph cable was laid in 1865.

By this time the telegraph was firmly establish, at the end of the 1860s 111,000 miles (180,000 km) of telegraph wires crisscrossed continental Europe.

One of the great advantages of the telegraph was the speed with which news could now be collected and distributed.

London’s The Times likened the transatlantic cable to he arrival of Columbus in the new World, though at the same time the editor warned his reporter that ‘telegrams are for facts; background and comment must come by post’.

He telegraph service quickly revolutionized journalism.

By end of the 1850s, as many as 120 provincial newspapers in Great Britain received news by wired from parliament daily, and the London based news agency that Julius Reuter has first started in Germany sent foreign news to editors in every town in the country.

Another innovation that the telegraph brought was the foreign correspondent or war correspondent - the man on the spot at momentous events who could send news as soon as it happened, instead of weeks or months later.
Early Years of Telegraph