Viktoria Fromkin's Introduction To Language

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According to An Introduction To Language written by Viktoria Fromkin and Robert Rodman language is such a property of the mind that ”distinguishes humans from animals”. As we are human beings we have an inborn talent to talk. Language enables speakers to communicate with each other, to express ideas, hypotheses, emotions, desires at any time and in any situation. We can ”hardly find a moment of our waking lives free from words” as we live in such a creative world which is shaped by language. This also contributes us to raise a simple question: What is language actually? (Fromkin and Rodman, 1998)
Pursuant to Fromkin’s writing linguistic knowledge means that ”you have the capacity to produce sounds that signify certain meanings and to understand or interpret the sounds produced by others”. Thus, linguistic knowledge includes - on the one hand - linguistic competences such as phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and lexicon which are linked by grammar; and - on the other hand - it also includes linguistic performance which means the ability of producing meaningful, comprehend sentences. (Fromkin and Rodman, 1998)
First let me introduce what terms the linguistic competence exactly covers. Phonology concerns with the sound patterns of a language, even with the organizational system of sign language. The smallest contrastive units in the sound system of a language – namely the vowels and the consonants - are called phonemes. Phonemes are combined with each other in order to form words, i.e. morphemes, that are the minimal units carrying meaning. Morphology deals with the structure of these morphemes and other linguistic units, like affixes, suffixes, word stems, stresses etc. The endless combinations of morphemes - which satisfie...

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...their theories were created by individual minds. This is also a reason why we are not able to tell where one science ends and where the other begins.
As a conclusion I have to confess that language means much more than I thought before taking part on this course and before writing this essay. Namely, language acquisition have rather a biological and evolutional perspective, specially because language is something that human beings born with. Any normal newborn is capable to learn any language to which he or she is exposed. However other species of the fauna enable only to emulate the sounds of a word or sentence without understanding its meaning as they are not in possession of any kind of innate mental grammar. Only humans have such an inborn talent, such a subconscious operating system that makes them give rise to meaningful, grammatically correct sentences.

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