UNIVERSIDAD DE EL SALVADOR

FACULTAD MULTIDISCIPLINARIA DE OCCIDENTE

DEPARTMENT OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES

SUBJECT

LINGUISTIC

NAME OF THE ACTIVITY

STUDY GUIDE 1

STUDENT’S NAME

Delgado Morales, Luis Ernesto

Morán Rodríguez, Jazmín Esmeralda

PROFESSOR’S NAME

Brenda Veronica Batres

DATE OF DELIVERY

Wednesday, April 6th, 2022

1. What is linguistics?
 Linguistics refers to the scientific study of language. It compasses all aspects
of human language, seeking answers to fundamental questions about how
language works.

2. What is communication?

Communication is a process in which information is transmitted from a source

(the sender) to a goal (the receiver).

3. What is language?

Language is the most commonly defined as a form of communication that is

nonsterotyped and nonfinite.

4. Who is a linguist?

Linguist refers to people who are specialists in Linguistics, and do work on

specific languages, but their primary goal is to understand the nature of
language in general (Natural Language).

5. What is LAD according to Noam Chomsky?

According to Noam Chomsky the LAD is the capacity to acquire a language

and use it creativity seems to be inborn.

6. What are the main hypotheses concerning the origin of language?

The main hypotheses concerning the origin of language are:

1. Monogenesis.

2. Parallel Evolution.

7. What are the four imitation hypotheses that hold that language began
through some sort of human mimicry of naturally occurring sounds or
movements?

The four imitation hypotheses are:

 1. The ding-dong hypothesis. Began when humans started naming
objects, actions and phenomena after a recognizable sound associated
with it in the real life.
2. The pooh-pooh hypothesis. The first words came from involuntary
exclamations of dislike, hunger, pain or pleasure, eventually leading to
the expression of more developed ideas and emotions.
3. The bow-bow hypothesis. Vocabulary developed from imitations of
animal noises such as: moo, bark, meow, quack-quack. In other words,
the first human words were a type of index, a sign whose form is
naturally connected with its meaning in time and space.
4. The ta-ta hypothesis. Charles Darwin hypothesized that speech may
have developed as a sort of mouth pantomime. It's very possible that
human language, which today is mostly verbal, had its origin in some
system of gestures.

8. What are two age-old hypotheses regarding language diversity?

The two age-old hypotheses regarding language diversity are:

1. Monogenesis.

2. Parallel evolution.

9. What is natural language?

Natural language refers to a language that has evolved naturally in humans

through use and repetition without conscious planning or premeditation (as
contrasted with an artificial language or computer code)

10. What is competence?

Competence refers to a person's underlying (subconscious) linguistics ability to

create and understand sentence, including utterance they have never heard
before.

11. What is performance?

Performance is the real realization of the language knowledge, the real-world
linguistic output. It may be flawed because of memory limitations, distractions,
shifts of attention and interest, or other psychological factors.

12. What is pragmatics?

It is the study of how the meaning of expressions, words or phrases are

affected by the context. It focuses on communicative acts, and the role played
by context and nonlinguistic knowledge in the transmission of meaning;
moreover, it focuses on how meaning is inferred by context.

13. What is duality of patterning?

Duality of patterning is also known as ‘double articulation’. It is the combination

of the limited set of meaningless elements or sounds of the speech
according to the rules to create meaningful words that gives the spoken
language such expressive power.

14. What is a sign? What are its parts?

A sign is any form of gestures that convey a meaning.

Sign: The object/thing

Signifier: The physical existence (sound, word, image)

Signified: The mental concept

TOKEN: It is an individual instance of a sign. It is that part of a sign that

stimulates at least on sense organ of the receiver of the message. A token
may be a word, a scent, a gesture, a picture, etc.

REFERENT: Corresponds to the thing or the things the token designates in

the real world. The real world can be thought of as either external, mental, or
emotional, and do a referent can be a tree, an abstract idea, a perception, or
a feeling.

MEANING: It is its intention, or the concepts it evokes to users of the system

in question.
 15. What are onomatopoeic words?

Onomatopoeic words are words that phonetically imitates, resembles, or

suggests the sound that it describes. Common onomatopoeias include animal
noises such as "oink", "meow", and “roar”. Other onomatopoeic words are the
sounds of explosions: “BOOM”.

16. What do we mean by arbitrariness as a designed feature of human

language? Illustrate it.

Arbitrariness is the absence of any natural or necessary connection between a

word's meaning and its sound or form. Arbitrariness is the quality of being
"determined by chance, whim, or impulse, and not by necessity, reason, or
principle".

17. Why do we say that most native speakers’ knowledge of their

language is intuitive?

Most native speakers’ knowledge of their language is intuitive because they have
years of exposure to a language (their native language). They have been immersed
in it and used it in all interactions with people around them since they development
general cognitive.

18. What is creativity / productivity?

 Productivity is the limitless ability to use any natural language to say new
things. Besides, It's the ability to use language to create an infinite number of
messages. Productivity is also known as creativity or open-endedness.

19. Exemplify “displacement.”

When your dog says GRRR, it means GRRR, right now,because dogs don't
seem to be capable of communicating GRRR, last night, over in the park. In
contrast, human language users are normally capable of producing messages
equivalent to GRRR, last night, over in the park, and then going on to say, In
fact, I'll be going back tomorrow for some more.

20. What is a token?

Token is an individual instance of a sign. This part of sign stimulates sense

organ of the receiver of a message. Tokens can be : a word, scent, gesture or
a picture.

21. What is the difference between graded and discrete tokens?

Graded tokens convey their meaning by changes in degree. A good example

of a gradation in communication is voice volume.

Discrete tokens the real world can be thought of as external, mental, or

emotional, and so what is signified by a sign can be as diverse as a tree, an
abstract idea, a perception, or a feeling.

22. What is a token’s referent?

Token's referent corresponds to the things the token denominate in the real
world. A referent can be an abstract idea, tree, feeling or a perception.

23. What are the steps of communication?

1. Encoding the information into symbolic system: Encoding refers as

transformation an abstract idea into a message. The information is put in a
symbolic system of language, in this case for us, English.
2. Selecting a mode of communication: A person may verbalize the message
as opposed to writing it or miming it.
3. Delivering the symbols through a medium: We use a channel for taking
the message toward the receiver, this medium can be light, air, or ink.
4. Perceptual processing of the symbols by the receiver: The receiver must
perceive the symbols then he must hear, see and feel the symbols sent.
When the communication is verbal the humans ear receives these symbols
through sound waves.
5. Decoding the symbols to obtain the information: The receiver must
decode the message or in other words, the receiver must understand the
message but if the receiver isn't able decode the message, it would have
been worth nothing to do the whole process.

24. What is E-language?

E-Language means something external abstract like texts, songs, sentences,

etc. It further explains the external language which is non-mental. The external
language can be radically different from individual to another.

25. What is I-language?

I-Language denotes a mental or psychological part of a language which means

“what a speaker knows”. Chomsky made it strong that this term points out the
following meanings, ‘individual’, ‘internal’ and ‘intentional’.

26. What are some interdisciplinary of hyphenated subfields of

linguistics? Applied linguistics generally incorporates or includes several
identifiable subfields: for example, corpus linguistics, forensic linguistics,
language testing, language policy and planning, lexicography, second
language acquisition, second language writing, and translation and
interpretation.
 27. Explain and exemplify the five major subfields of linguistics?
Linguistics is the study of human language. These areas of study
phonetics, phonology, morphology, lexicology, syntax, semantics, and
pragmatics are the major subfields of linguistics that linguist’s study.

1. Phonology: Is the study of how these sounds are organized and how they
function in language. For example, being able to substitute a vowel sound for a
different vowel sound in a word.

2. Morphology: is the study of words. For example, all words, since they have
meaning, have at least 1 morpheme, but a word can have several morphemes.
For example, the word “cat” has just one morpheme, but the word “cats” has 2,
as the -s denotes plurality. In this case, we consider “cat” the root of the word and
the -s a suffix.

3. Lexicology: is the part of linguistics that studies words. Lexicology also

involves relations between words, which may involve semantics. For example,
the words eat, eats, eating, eaten are forms of lexeme: Eat

4. Syntax: Is the order or arrangement of words and phrases to form proper

sentences. The most basic syntax follows a subject + verb + direct object
formula. For example, I like to clean the house.

5. Semantics: Is the study of the relationship between words and how we draw
meaning from those words. For example, the word ¨crash¨ we associated with a
car accident, or how waves break against rocks. The meaning of the words is
analyzed in several ways.

28. What is the difference between synchronic linguistic and diachronic

linguistic? Who distinguished them first?

Synchronic linguistics is the study of language at any given point in time while
diachronic linguistics is the study of language through different periods in
history. Noam Chomsky distinguished them first (1928).
29. What is the difference between descriptive and prescriptive
linguistics?

The descriptive describes how the language is used whereas the prescriptive
explains how the language should be used by the speakers.

30. What is semantic noise?

Semantic noise is a type of disturbance in the transmission of a message that

interferes with the interpretation of the message due to ambiguity in words,
sentences or symbols used in the transmission of the message.

31. Exemplify some internal noises in communication?

Internal noise like fear, depression, anger, over excitement of the speaker, or
not knowing the meaning of a word and so on. May cause him or her to
become muddled in communication.

A fear of public speaking or a fear of enclosed spaces.

32. What is the linguistic sign?

The linguistic sign is abstract, it has a combination of two elements: the

signifier and the concept.

33. Classify the following signs:

a) involuntary cough

Iconic

b) cough for getting attention

symbolic
c) nod of head (“yes”)

symbolic

d) uh-huh (“yes”)

iconic

e) yes.

iconic

f) bzzzz (sound of a bee)

iconic

g) waving the hand (“good-bye”)

iconic

h) blushing

symptomatic

I) sweating

symptomatic

34. What are iconics tokens?

Iconic tokens are a small minority of the words.

35. Provide examples of symbolic tokens.

The color yellow in a sidewalk doest have a clear connection with the message
of driving slow.
 36. What are symptomatic tokens?

Spontaneously convey the internal state or emotions of the sender. Symptoms

do not need interpretation in a language.

Symptomatic tokens are used primarily by the receiver of a message to assess

the internal state of the sender.

37. Exemplify graded and discrete tokens:

- Grades tokens examples:

A. The baking of dog (essentially one type of bark which may become louder
and faster)

B. The hands of most clocks move in a graded manner.

C. The needle of an automobile speedometer.

Discrete tokens examples:

A. Phonemes of human language (no transition between voiced and voiceless

sound)

B. Digital displays of watches (from second to second, minute to minute or hour to

hour with no gradation)

C. Traffic lights (no gradual shifting from green to yellow to red)

38. What are some characteristics of animal communication?

The animal communication can be largely symptomatic and not deliberately,

conscious or symbolic. Animal communication is stimulus bound.
 39. Why is animal communication stimulus bound?

It is stimulus bound since it occurs only when it is triggered by exposure to a

certain stimulus or for certain specific ends. Animals do not communicate
about anything but the here and now.

40. What are the three systems of human communication?

The three systems of human communication are Speech, Writing and Gesture.

41. Exemplify the three basic types of writing:

- Logographic Writing (word)

The word tree has been represented by a stylized drawing of a tree.

So, this symbol was read as /tri/.

We could say that English had a logographic writing system.

- Syllabic Writing (syllables)

In syllables each symbol represents a syllable. For example, in Japanese the word
“kuruma” (car) can be written with three syllabic signs.

- Alphabetic Writing (Segments)

It is that each letter represents a particular spoken sound of the language

42. What is gesture?

Gesture is believed to be the first form of communication. Gesture is a

Physical manipulation that is neither verbal nor graphic but is communicative.

43. What are the most-discussed forms of gestural communication?

They are kinesics, Paralanguage and Proxemics.

44. What is the quickest and the most efficient form of human
communication?

Speech is the quickest and most efficient form of human communication.

45. What is Paralanguage?

It is a modulation of the voice.