Introduction to Linguistics

Pink moon :Unit One : Language and Linguistics ?What is linguistics Linguistics is a science that deals with any language to study it.(a science that* .(studies languages The language is the means of communication, but not all means of communication* .are languages .It is wrong to call that animal means of communication animal language* There are some characteristics, of human languages, which are missing in animal .means of communication :The importance of learning languages * .To know about other people culture and habits-1 (To translate from one language to an other.(we must know the two languages-2 .To make people communicate and understand each other -3 To know the language characteristics, and so to study it deeply and more -4 .efficiently To help us in lexicography -5() General Linguistics: means the study of the various systems that language is made* .up of (e.g.) sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, applied linguistics.etc) ."The first characteristic which distinguished human language is "speechThe second characteristic s writing. That is because we learn how to speak the how to.write There is a number of core studies that seem to deal with the most essential:components of language a)the sound of language (phonology): a study that deal with human .language sounds .phonetics) is the particular sounds of a certain language) .b)the words of the language: deals with units of meaning ,morphology): is the study of words and its components) .the morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of the language* :e.g.) the word "boy" has one morpheme, but the word "boy/s" has two morphemes)

(when we deal with the meanings or the relation between words. *(Semantics c)The combinations of words to make sentences (the syntax): the linguistic science .that deals with the structure of building sentences :Characteristics of human languages** .the meaning of words is arbitrary, not based on logic-1 .onomatopiec: words whose sounds convey the meaning-2 .language is a very complicated system. And system means rules -3 .language is a rule-governed Behaviour-4 .language is a systematic structure -5 .the language can generate new sentences -6 :Human language versus Animal means of communication** .human language is not inherited but animal m. is inherited -1 .the difference is not on quantity but on quality -2 .Individual sounds in human language is meaningless, but they can imitate sounds -3 In animal case; each individual sound has its own meaning, and their total number of.meanings they can express and the number of sounds they can use are limited .the animal means of communication is real -4 .but the human language can express real events and thoughts or imaginative ones.connotation: the special meaning of sentences= , .denotation: the literary meaning of the word that we can find in the dictionary= . (: ) ?What is grammar** Grammar is the set of rules that helps us to speak a particular language, and it governs .the language .descriptive: describes how the people actually use the language (1 prescriptive: the linguist is the one who tells people how to govern language, or (2 .what rules to govern language (The modern language is descriptive) :taboo= Sibawaihi: the Arab grammarian who gave us the earliest Arabic Grammar " Al-* Kitab", which was a perspective grammar of Arabic, and it can be considered a .teaching grammar

:Competence and Performance** .competence means what we know about the language= .performance means how do we use our competence= Knowing a language means knowing the various rules of that language,phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic, in addition to a personal lexicon. These rules enable the speaker to use the language accurately and .appropriately .(accurately: without linguistic mistakes (structurally accepted= appropriately: to know the social rules which enable you to speak appropriately= .linguistic competence: the ability to generate long sentences that may last for hours= communicative competence: the ability to use the language appropriately in a= community that speaks that language as the mother tongue, or the ability to use the .society without mistakes in appropriacy :Language Universals** ( ) .All language sounds are the result of a very limited number of vocal organs-1 .The set of phonetic features is universal-2 .All languages have consonant and vowel sounds-3 .All languages have plosive sounds and fricative sounds-4 .All languages have ways of referring to time-5 All languages have ways of referring to "one" or more than "one" (singular &-6 (plural .(All languages have rules for building parts of the sentences (phrase structure rules -7 All languages have a set of transformational rules that change positive into-8 .negative, the interrogative, the passive, etc If the language has gender categories in the noun (male or female), it has gender-9 .category for the pronoun Languages with the dominate word order(verb-subject-object) have the adjective-10 .(after the noun (as is the case in Arabic

The End of Unit One