What Is Language?

The possession of language, perhaps more than any other attribute, distin-guishes humans from other
animals. To understand our humanity, one must understand the nature of language that makes us human.
According to the phi-losophy expressed in the myths and religions of many peoples, language is the source of
human life and power. To some people of Africa, a newborn child is a kintu, a “thing,” not yet a muntu, a
“person.” Only by the act of learning lan-guage does the child become a human being. According to this tradition,
we all become “human” because we all know at least one language.

Linguistic Knowledge
When you know a language, you can speak and be understood by others who know that language. This
means you have the capacity to produce sounds that signify certain meanings and to understand or interpret
the sounds produced by others. But language is much more than speech. Deaf people produce and understand
sign languages just as hearing persons produce and understand spo-ken languages. The languages of the deaf
communities throughout the world are equivalent to spoken languages, differing only in their modality of
expression.

Knowledge of the Sound System

Part of knowing a language means knowing what sounds (or signs1) are in that language and what
sounds are not. One way this unconscious knowledge is revealed is by the way speakers of one language
pronounce words from another language. If you speak only English, for example, you may substitute
an English sound for a non-English sound when pronouncing “foreign” words like French ménage à
trois. If you pronounce it as the French do you are using sounds out-side the English sound system.

Knowing the sound system of a language includes more than knowing the inventory of sounds. It
means also knowing which sounds may start a word, end a word, and follow each other. The name of a
former president of Ghana was Nkrumah, pronounced with an initial sound like the sound ending the
English word sink. While this is an English sound, no word in English begins with the nk sound.
Speakers of English who have occasion to pronounce this name often mispronounce it (by Ghanaian
standards) by inserting a short vowel sound, like Nekrumah or Enkrumah. Children who learn English
recognize that nk cannot begin a word, just as Ghanaian children learn that words in their language can
and do begin with the nk sound.

Knowledge of Words

Knowing the sounds and sound patterns in our language constitutes only one part of our linguistic
knowledge. Knowing a language means also knowing that certain sequences of sounds signify certain
concepts or meanings. Speakers of English know what boy means, and that it means something different
from toy or girl or pterodactyl. You also know that toy and boy are words, but moy is not. When you
know a language, you know words in that language, that is, which sequences of sounds are related to
specific meanings and which are not.

Arbitrary Relation of Form and Meaning

The minute I set eyes on an animal I know what it is. I don’t have to reflect a moment; the right name
comes out instantly. I seem to know just by the shape of the creature and the way it acts what animal it
is. When the dodo came along he [Adam] thought it was a wildcat. But I saved him. I just spoke up in
a quite natural way and said, “Well, I do declare if there isn’t the dodo!”
If you do not know a language, the words (and sentences) of that language will be mainly
incomprehensible, because the relationship between speech sounds and the meanings they represent is,
for the most part, an arbitrary one. When you are acquiring a language you have to learn that the
sounds represented by the letters house signify the concept ; if you know French, this same mean-ing is
represented by maison; if you know Russian, by dom; if you know Spanish, by casa. Similarly, is
represented by hand in English, main in French, nsa in Twi, and ruka in Russian.

The following are words in some different languages. How many of them can you understand?

kyinii
doakam
odun
asa
toowq
bolna
wartawan
inaminatu
yawwa

People who know the languages from which these words are taken under-stand that they have the
following meanings:

a large parasol (in Twi, a Ghanaian language)

living creature (in Tohono O’odham, an American Indian language)

wood (in Turkish)

morning (in Japanese)

is seeing (in Luiseño, a California Indian language)

to speak (in Hindi-Urdu); aching (in Russian)

reporter (in Indonesian)

teacher (in Warao, a Venezuelan Indian language)

right on! (in Hausa, a Nigerian language)

These examples show that the words of a particular language have the mean-ings they do only by
convention. Despite what Eve says in Mark Twain’s satire Eve’s Diary, a pterodactyl could have been
called ron, blick, or kerplunkity.

As Juliet says in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet:

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet.

This conventional and arbitrary relationship between the form (sounds) and meaning (concept) of a
word is also true in sign languages. If you see someone using a sign language you do not know, it is
doubtful that you will understand the message from the signs alone. A person who knows Chinese Sign
Language (CSL) would find it difficult to understand American Sign Language (ASL), and vice versa,
as illustrated in Figure 6.1.

Many signs were originally like miming, where the relationship between form and meaning is not
arbitrary. Bringing the hand to the mouth to mean “eat-ing,” as in miming, would be nonarbitrary as a
sign. Over time these signs may change, just as the pronunciation of words changes, and the miming
effect is lost. These signs become conventional, so that knowing the shape or movement of the hands
does not reveal the meaning of the gestures in sign languages, as also shown in Figure 6.1.

1. FATHER(ASL)
2. FATHER(CSL)
3. SUSPECT(ASL)
4. SUSPECT(CSL)

Figure 6.1

The Creativity of Linguistic Knowledge

In pointing out the creative aspect of language, Chomsky made a powerful argument against the
behaviorist view of language that prevailed in the first half of the twentieth century, which held that
language is a set of learned responses to stimuli. While it is true that if someone steps on your toes you
may automati-cally respond with a scream or a grunt, these sounds are not part of language. They are
involuntary reactions to stimuli. After we reflexively cry out, we can then go on to say: “Thank you
very much for stepping on my toe, because I was afraid I had elephantiasis and now that I can feel the
pain I know I don’t,” or any one of an infinite number of sentences, because the particular sentences we
produce are not controlled by any stimulus

Our creative ability is reflected not only in what we say but also includes our understanding of new or
novel sentences. Consider the following sentence: “Daniel Boone decided to become a pioneer because
he dreamed of pigeon-toed giraffes and cross-eyed elephants dancing in pink skirts and green berets on
the wind-swept plains of the Midwest.” You may not believe the sentence; you may question its logic;
but you can understand it, although you have probably never heard or read it before now.
Knowledge of a language, then, makes it possible to understand and produce new sentences. If you
counted the number of sentences in this book that you have seen or heard before, the number would be
small. Next time you write an essay or a letter, see how many of your sentences are new. Few sentences
are stored in your brain, to be pulled out to fit some situation or matched with some sentence that you
hear. Novel sentences never spoken or heard before cannot be stored in your memory.

Simple memorization of all the possible sentences in a language is impos-sible in principle. If for every
sentence in the language a longer sentence can be formed, then there is no limit to the number of
sentences. In English you can say:

This is the house.

or

This is the house that Jack built.

or

This is the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.

or

This is the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack
built.

And you need not stop there. How long, then, is the longest sentence? A speaker of English can say:

The old man came.

or

The old, old, old, old, old man came.

How many “olds” are too many? Seven? Twenty-three?

It is true that the longer these sentences become, the less likely we would be to hear or to say them. A
sentence with 276 occurrences of “old” would be highly unusual in either speech or writing, even to
describe Methuselah. But such a sen-tence is theoretically possible. If you know English, you have the
knowledge to add any number of adjectives as modifiers to a noun and to form sentences with an
indefinite number of clauses, as in “the house that Jack built.”

All human languages permit their speakers to increase the length and com-plexity of sentences in these
ways; creativity is a universal property of human language.

Knowledge of Sentences and Nonsentences

To memorize and store an infinite set of sentences would require an infinite stor-age capacity. However,
the brain is finite, and even if it were not, we could not store novel sentences, which are, well, novel.
When you learn a language you must learn something finite—your vocabulary is finite (however large
it may be)—and that can be stored. If sentences were formed simply by placing one word after another
in any order, then a language could be defined simply as a set of words. But you can see that knowledge
of words is not enough by examining the following strings of words:
 a. John kissed the little old lady who owned the shaggy dog.
Who owned the shaggy dog John kissed the little old lady.
John is difficult to love.
It is difficult to love John.
John is anxious to go.
It is anxious to go John.
John, who was a student, flunked his exams.
Exams his flunked student a was who John.

If you were asked to put an asterisk or star before the examples that seemed ill formed or ungrammatical
or “no good” to you, which ones would you mark? Our intuitive knowledge about what is or is not an
allowable sentence in English convinces us to star b, f, and h. Which ones did you star?

Would you agree with the following judgments?

a. What he did was climb a tree.

*What he thought was want a sports car.3
Drink your beer and go home!
*What are drinking and go home?
I expect them to arrive a week from next Thursday.
*I expect a week from next Thursday to arrive them.
Linus lost his security blanket.
*Lost Linus security blanket his.

If you find the starred sentences unacceptable, as we do, you see that not every string of words
constitutes a well-formed sentence in a language. Our knowledge of a language determines which
strings of words are well-formed sentences and which are not. Therefore, in addition to knowing the
words of the language, linguistic knowledge includes rules for forming sentences and making the kinds
of judgments you made about the examples in (1) and (2). These rules must be finite in length and finite
in number so that they can be stored in our finite brains. Yet, they must permit us to form and understand
an infinite set of new sentences. They are not rules determined by a judge or a legislature, or even rules
taught in a grammar class. They are unconscious rules that we acquire as young children as we develop
language.

A language, then, consists of all the sounds, words, and infinitely many pos-sible sentences. When you
know a language, you know the sounds, the words, and the rules for their combination.

Linguistic Knowledge and Performance

Our linguistic knowledge permits us to form longer and longer sentences by join-ing sentences and
phrases together or adding modifiers to a noun. Whether we stop at three, five, or eighteen adjectives,
it is impossible to limit the number we could add if desired. Very long sentences are theoretically
possible, but they are highly improbable. Evidently, there is a difference between having the knowl-
edge necessary to produce sentences of a language and applying this knowledge. It is a difference
between what we know, which is our linguistic competence, and how we use this knowledge in actual
speech production and comprehen-sion, which is our linguistic performance.

Speakers of all languages have the knowledge to understand or produce sen-tences of any length. Here
is an example from the ruling of a federal judge:
We invalidate the challenged lifetime ban because we hold as a matter of federal constitutional law that
a state initiative measure cannot impose a severe limitation on the people’s fundamental rights when
the issue of whether to impose such a limitation on these rights is put to the voters in a measure that is
ambiguous on its face and that fails to mention in its text, the proponent’s ballot argument, or the state’s
official description, the severe limitation to be imposed.

However, there are physiological and psychological reasons that limit the number of adjectives,
adverbs, clauses, and so on that we actually produce and understand. Speakers may run out of breath,
lose track of what they have said, or die of old age before they are finished. Listeners may become
confused, tired, bored, or disgusted.

When we speak, we usually wish to convey some message. At some stage in the act of producing speech,
we must organize our thoughts into strings of words. Sometimes the message is garbled. We may
stammer, or pause, or pro-duce slips of the tongue. We may even sound like Hattie in the cartoon, who
illustrates the difference between linguistic knowledge and the way we use that knowledge in
performance.

For the most part, linguistic knowledge is unconscious knowledge. The lin-guistic system—the sounds,
structures, meanings, words, and rules for putting them all together—is acquired with no conscious
awareness. Just as we may not be conscious of the principles that allow us to stand or walk, we are
unaware of the rules of language. Our ability to speak, to understand, and to make judg-ments about the
grammaticality of sentences reveals our knowledge of the rules of our language. This knowledge
represents a complex cognitive system. The nature of this system is what this book is all about.