In this section , I am going to summarize a book entitled An Introduction ton Language by Victoria Fromkin and Robert Rodman. This book is very useful for all students of English. I may sometimes use my own words or my own example sentences. As some of you know, I taught linguistics  in the Teachers' Training Institute of Hama for 8 years.

What is Language?
When we study human language, we are approaching what some might call the " human essence," the distinctive qualities of mind that are , so far as we know, unique to man. Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind
As a matter of fact, we live in a world of words. We talk to our friends, our associates, our wives and husbands, our teachers and our parents in-laws. We talk face to face and over the telephone, and everyone responds with more talk. Hardly a moment of our waking lives is free from words, and even in our dreams we talk and are talked to.  We also talk when there is no one to answer.
  The possession of language distinguishes humans from other animals. To understand our humanity one must understand the nature of language that makes us human. According to the philosophy expressed in the myths and religions of many peoples, it is language that is the source of human life and power. We are all " human " because we all know at least one language. But what does it mean to " know" a 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 the sounds produced by others. Here , the reference is to normal-hearing people. Deaf people produce and understand sign languages just as hearing persons produce and understand spoken languages.
  Everyone knows a language.  Five-year-old children are almost as proficient at speaking and understanding as their parents. Yet the ability to carry out the simplest conversation requires profound knowledge that most speakers are unaware of. This is true of speakers of Japanese as of English, of American as of Navajo. A speaker of English can produce a sentence having two relative clauses without knowing what a relative clause is , like
My grandson who was born in Homs and who now  lives in London is named Abdul Malek , after the famous Umayyad caliph .
  In a parallel fashion, a child can walk without understanding or being able to explain the principles of balance and support, or the neurophysiological control mechanisms that permit one to do so. The fact that we may know something unconsciously is not unique to language.  What, then, do speakers of English or French or Arabic know?
Knowledge of the Sound System
Knowing a language means knowing what sounds (or signs) are in that language and what sounds are. This unconscious knowledge is revealed by the way speakers of one language pronounce words from another language. If we speak only English, for example, we may substitute an English sound for a non- English sound when pronouncing " foreign " words. Most English speakers pronounce the name Bach with a final k sound because the sound represented by the letter ch in German is not an English sound. If we pronounce it as the Germans do, we are using a sound outside the English sound system.
  knowing the sound system of a language includes more than knowing the inventory of sounds. It includes knowing which sounds may start a word, end a word and follow each other. As a matter of fact, no word in English begins with the ng sound. Children who learn English recognize this fact about their language.
Knowledge of Words
Knowing a language is knowing that certain sound sequences signify certain concepts or meanings. Speakers of English know what boy means and that it means something different from toy or girl or pterodactyl.
Arbitrary Relation of Form and Meaning
If you do not know a language, the words (and sentences) will be mainly incomprehensible, because the relationship between speech sounds and the meanings they represent in the languages of the world is, for the most part, an arbitrary one. We have to learn ( when we are acquiring the language) that the sounds represented by the letters house ( in the written form of the language) signify a concept, which is known as maison by the French. If you are an Arab, you will represent the same meaning by the letters bait.
  This arbitrary relationship between the form (sounds) and meaning (concept) of a word in spoken language is also true of the sign languages used by the deaf in the sense that a person who knows Chinese Sign Language would find it difficult to understand American Sign Language, and vice versa.
  There is some sound symbolism in language- that is, words whose pronunciation suggests the meaning. A few words in most languages are onomatopoeic- the sounds of the words imitate the sounds of nature. Even here, the sounds differ from one language to another, reflecting the particular sound system. In English, we say cock-a-doodle-doo to represent the rooster's crow, but in Russian they say kukuriku.
  Sometimes particular sound sequences seem to relate to a particular concept. In English many words beginning with gl relate to sight, such as glare, glint, gleam, glossy, glance, glimpse and glisten. However, such words are limited in number in any language, and gl may have nothing to do with "sight" in another language, or even in in other words in English, such as gladiator, glucose, glory, globe and so on.
The Creativity of Linguistic Knowledge
Knowledge of a language enables you to combine words to form phrases, and phrases to form sentences. We cannot buy a dictionary of any language with al its sentences because no dictionary can list all the possible sentences. Knowing a language means being able to produce new sentences never spoken before and to understand sentences never heard before. The linguist Noam Chomsky refers to this ability as part of the creative aspect of language use.
  This creative ability is due to the fact that language use is not limited to stimulus-response behavior. It's true that if someone steps on our toes we will automatically respond with a scream or grunt, but these sounds are really not part of language; they are involuntary reactions to stimuli.
  Even involuntary cries like ouch are constrained by our own language system, as are the filled pauses that are sprinkled through conversational speech- er or uh or you know in English. They contain only the sounds found in the language. French speakers, for example, often fill their pauses with the vowel sound that starts with their word for egg- oeuf - a sound that does not occur in English. Knowing....
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عذراً, يجب أن تسجل من هنا لترى الرابط إذا كنت عضواً, فقط قم بتسجيل الدخول
(To be continued)

 
Knowledge of Sentences and Nonsentences
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 in a language were formed by putting one word after another in any order, then language could simply be a set of words. You can see that words are not enough by examining the following strings of words:
       a.  It is anxious to go John.
       b. John kissed the old lady who own the shaggy dog.
       c. Exams his flunked student a was who John.
       d. John, who was a student, flunked his exams.
The intuitive knowledge of the native speaker of

 
language we must understand the nature of this internalized, unconscious set of rules, which is part of every grammar of every language.
  When linguists wish to describe a language, they attempt to describe the grammar of the language that exists in the minds of its speakers. There may be some differences among speakers' knowledge, but there must be shared knowledge because it is this grammar that makes it possible to communicate through language. The linguist's description is a true model of the speakers' linguistic capacity. Thus, descriptive grammar does not tell you how you should speak; it

 
Language Universals
Grammar includes everything speakers know about their language- the sound system, called phonology; the system of meanings, called semantics; the rules of word formation, called morphology; and the rules of sentence formation, called syntax. It also includes the vocabulary of words- the dictionary or lexicon. Many people think of the grammar of a language as referring solely to the syntactic rules. This latter sense is what students usually mean when they talk about their class in "English grammar".
  It is certainly the business of a grammarian to find out, and not to make, the laws of a language. This business is just what the linguist attempts- to find out the laws of a language, and the laws that pertain to all languages. Those laws that pertain to all human languages, representing the universal properties of language, constitute a universal grammar.
  Chomsky states that there is a universal grammar that is part of the human biologically endowed language faculty. to discover the nature of this Universal Grammar whose principles characterize all human languages is a major aim of the linguistic theory. The linguist's goal is to discover the laws of human language as the physicist's goal is to discover the laws of physical universe. The complexity of language, as a product of the human brain, undoubtedly means that this goal will never be fully achieved. However, all scientific theories are incomplete; new hypotheses are proposed to account for more data.