Linguistics

SOCIOLINGUISTICS.
A language is what the members of a particular society speak, however, we will see, speech in almost any society can take many very different forms, and just what forms we should choose to discuss when we attempt to describe the language of a society may prove to be a contentious matter. Sometimes too a society may be plurilingual; that is, many speakers may use more than onelanguage, and we define language. The definition of language includes in it a reference to society.

Knowledge of Language :
When two or more people communicate with each other in speech, we can call the system of communication that they employ a code. In most cases that code will be something we may also want to call a language. We should also note that two speakers who are bilingual (whohave access to two codes) and who for one reason or another shift back and forth between the two languages as they converse by code-switching are actually using a third code, one which draws on those two languages.
The system (or the grammar) is something that each speaker ‘knows,’ but two very
important issues for linguists are just what that knowledge is knowledge of and
how it may best becharacterized. Anyone who knows a language knows much more about that language than is contained in any grammar book that attempts to describe the language. What is also interesting is that this knowledge is both something which every individual who speaks the language possesses (since we must assume that each individual knows the grammar of his or her language by the simple reason that he or shereadily uses that language) and also some kind of shared knowledge, that is, knowledge possessed by all those who speak the language.

It is possible to talk about ‘dead’ languages, e.g., Latin or Sanskrit. However, in such cases we should note that it is the speakers who are dead, not the languages themselves, for these may still exist, at least in part.
Today, most linguists agree that theknowledge speakers have of the language
or languages they speak is knowledge of something quite abstract.
* It is a knowledge of rules and principles and of the ways of saying and doing things with sounds, words, and sentences, rather than just knowledge of specific sounds, words, and sentences.

It is knowing what is in the language and what is not; it is knowing the possibilities thelanguage offers and what is impossible. This knowledge explains how it is we can understand sentences we have not heard before and reject others as being ungrammatical, in the sense of not being possible in the language. Communication among people who speak the same language is possible because they share such knowledge, although how it is shared – or even how it is acquired – is not wellunderstood, psychological and social factors are important, and genetic ones too.

Confronted with the task of trying to describe the grammar of a language like English, many linguists follow the approach which is associated with Chomsky, undoubtedly the most influential figure in late twentieth-century linguistics.
Chomsky has argued on many occasions that, in order to make meaningful discoveriesabout language, linguists must try to distinguish between what is important and what is unimportant about language and linguistic behavior. The important matters, sometimes referred to as language universals, concern the learnability of all languages, the characteristics they share, and the rules and principles that speakers apparently follow in constructing and interpreting sentences; the lessimportant matters have to do with how individual speakers use specific utterances in a variety of ways as they find themselves in this situation or that. Chomsky has also distinguished between what he has called competence and performance. He claims that it is the linguist’s task to characterize what speakers know about their language, their competence, not what they do with their language, their...