LANGUAGE

Language

[Institution's Name]

Language

Introduction

By the term language, people typically think of various languages like English, French or Spanish. Often people do not think of the real meaning of language. Many linguists as well as authors have over time said that studying a language is not easy. Language is essential for the communication as well as construction of meaning. Hence, to cognitive scientists, as well as linguists, language remains to be commonly taken as the mind's window.

Language and lexicon

According to Willingham (2007), the basic purpose of any language is to provide a means of communication between species. Language is the way humans are able to verbally express their desires, feelings, needs, questions, complaints, and so on. Language has gained recognition as a transmission of an individual's feelings as well as thoughts through a combination of signals. Usually people are able to communicate with each other in various languages, while some are not. People who are deaf and dumb depend on sign language while people who are blind rely on other means of communication.

The identifiable words that are used in verbal communication are automatically stored in the mental dictionary known as lexicon. When people communicate, the words heard are recognized in a part of the memory called lexicon. It stores all the elements related to word structure like; spelling, pronunciation, sound and other related parts of speech. The function of recognizing the words and how they are spelled is all performed by lexicon, but the meaning of words is not stored in the lexicon (Willingham, 2007).

Key features of a language

According to Boeckx (2009), over time linguists have come up with several distinct features of language which in one way or the other can be taken to be occurring in a variety of languages. Below are the common features of a language.

The foremost feature of a language is displacement. This feature denotes the ability to use language to talk of not only the current happening or the current situation but also a wide range of other happenings in the past, present as well as future. All the happenings can be real, imagined or otherwise. For example, while engaged in a game of chess, one can talk about not only the game but other things related or unrelated to the game. OR for instance, a woman while cooking can talk to the other person on entirely different subject.

Another feature called Arbitrariness, according to this feature of language; there is nothing that connects a sound or word with its actual meaning or in a real world situation. What this essentially means is that by just looking at a word, one cannot come up with its meaning. For example, there is nothing to tell an individual that the word 'handball' in English has the same meaning as 'handyspiele' in German. Hence for one to derive meaning from words that can be considered to be arbitrary, knowledge of the language in question is essential. However, there exist some exceptions to this feature as according to Jarvis et ...