Tiempos Verbales Del Subjuntivo

LECTURE NOTES
ON

LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION

Dr Liza Das
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
Indian Institutes of Technology Guwahati

Developed under Quality Improvement Programme
Curriculum Development Cell Activities
All India Council for Technical Education
Government of India

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Table of Contents:
Preface …………………………………………………………………..

3

1. Definitions andProperties ………………………………………..

4

2.

Language Origin …………………………………………………… 13

3.

Evolutionary Theory ………………………………………………. 17

4.

Language in the Brain and Mind ………………………………… 26

5.

Language and Cognitive Metaphor ……………………………..

37

6.

Language Acquisition ……………………………………………..

63

7. Language Sounds and Meanings………………………………...

73

8. Language Change…………………………………………………… 109
9. Aspects of Communication ………………………………………… 119

References ………………………………………………………………… 149

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Preface
The study of language and communication has evolved over the years and
newer areas have to be systematically incorporated into the teaching of the
subject to young students. These lecture notes and materials are brought
together with a view to bringing under a project a view of language and
communicationthat would look at both standard material and new developments
in the field. It is hoped that a useful picture of the human language faculty will
emerge from the material provided below. The notes on communication skills are
included to highlight also the non-verbal elements of communication. I have
adapted material and cited from several books which I mention in the reference
provided below. Ihave also benefited from and used classroom discussions and
presentations made by my students over the last few years of teaching in IIT
Guwahati. The material has been arranged in a manner that would facilitate and
highlight the way the notes are to be used for lectures.

(Liza Das)

IIT Guwahati, 2006

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1
Definitions and Properties

The following definitions may be offered tostudents to provide an idea of
the wide areas Language Studies can encompass:
a) “Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating
ideas, emotions and desires by means of voluntarily produced symbols.” (Edward
Sapir)
b) The language of a class or social position is potentially a prison-house, “a
sealed-off and impermeable monoglossia.” (Mikhail Bakhtin)

c) To thequestion: “WHO is speaking?” Mallarme, the French poet, answered,
“Language is speaking.”

d) Language determines one's entire way of life, including one's thinking and all
other forms of mental activity. To use language is to limit oneself to the modes of
perception already inherent in that language. The fact that language is only form
and yet molds everything goes to the core of what ideologyis. (Benjamin Whorf)

e) Its systematic nature in order to be complete needs only to be valid, and not
to be true. Language effects the original split between wisdom and method.
"Freedom of speech" does not exist; grammar is the invisible "thought control" of
our invisible prison.

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With language we have already accommodated ourselves to a world of
unfreedom.

The tendency to takethe conceptual as the perceived and to treat concepts as
tangible, is as basic to language as it is to ideology. (Roland Barthes)
f) “A language [is] a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and
constructed out of a finite set of elements.” (Noam Chomsky)

Human Language and Communication have the following properties:
1. Displacement: Capacity to produce messages thatcan refer to past and
future time, and to other locations.
*2. Arbitrariness: There is no one-to-one correspondence between a linguistic
form and its meaning. Meaning is always arbitrary and maintained by convention.
3. Productivity: The ability to be creative and to produce utterances not heard
before.
4. Cultural transmission: Language does not develop...