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language as a TOOL - Speakers encode meanings into sounds, Listeners decode speech sounds (or hand shapes) into meaning language as a type of KNOWLEDGE - You have a finite set of building blocks and rules. You know how to use them. This is unconscious knowledge. You understand the inventory of sounds in your language: Phonetics. You understand the sound patterns in your language, what sequences are possible: Phonology. lexicon - your mental dictionary, you know words that are not in any written dictionary, and may never be morphology - the "rules" that allow you construct words syntax - How to build good PHRASES and SENTENCES semantics - Meanings of words and how to use them Education? - Being a fully competent native speaker of a language is independent of educational level. Being more (or less) educated does not make a person a "better" (or "worse") native speaker. linguistic competence - What you know in your mind What you can do Systematiclinguistic performance - What actually comes out of your mouth What you do do Subject to physical limitations such as breath, fatigue, nerves, etc. Slips of the Tongue are performance errors. Features of Language - 1. Arbitrariness: The relationship between a word and its meaning is arbitrary. (This is why the sounds used to name the same object vary across languages.) 2. Creativity: Speakers use a finite set of building blocks and rules to create and understand an infinite set of novel sentences. (Sentences cannot simply be memorized or learned by imitation.) Creativity is a universal property of human language. Language Universals - -All languages have ways of forming questions. -All languages have means for negating an utterance. -All languages have means for indicating when an action takes place. -All languages possess a set of discrete sounds (or gestures). -All languages permit displacement—the ability the talk about things other than the here and now. -All languages exhibit stimulus-freedom, the ability to say anything at all—including nothing—in any circumstances. descriptive grammar - linguist's description or model of the mental grammar What speaker's rules actually are speaker's grammar linguist's grammar prescriptive grammar - rules of grammar (often based on Latin) used by teachers What speaker's rules should be