The universalty of human Language(Chapter 2)

2. Psycholinguistics
By :
Zahra Aamir Kamil

3. Chapter 2
The Nature of Linguistic Competence

4. The universality of human language

5. All languages are profoundly similar, even though thousands of languages are
spoken in the world now, thousands have been spoken in the past, and still
thousands more will be spoken in the future. If you have struggled trying to
learn a new language, you may be quite skeptical of this similarity; if you
already speak two or more languages, you may feel that their differences are
far more numerous than their similarities.

6. Psycholinguists said that all languages are cut from the same mold.

7. What is meant by saying that human language is universal ?

8. Universal languaguage means :
✔ Languages are all similar in their organization and in their function.
✔ Every human language has a lexicon and a grammar, components which
contain the building blocks used to create a potentially infinite set of
sentences.
✔ The organization of lexicons and the formal properties of grammatical
systems are similar in all human languages.

9. Is a formal description of a language, internalized as
linguistic competence in language users.
Is simply a statement that captures a regularity of the
language.
Rule
Grammar

10. All languages have a grammar consisting of
✔ A phonological component with rules related to regularities of
the sound system of the language.
✔ A morphological component with rules governing word forms.
✔ A syntactic component with rules governing sentence structure

11. Another universal feature of human language is that language
specific grammars are restricted by something called Universal
Grammar ( UG).
✔ Universal grammar consists of general principles, which are the same for
all languages, and specifies the ways languages can differ.
✔ The properties of specific languages vary in very few ways, and these
variations create large classes of languages that are similar on a
particular characteristic.

12. ✔ Some languages mark grammatical functions in sentences (subject, verb,
and object) primarily by morphology or by changing the form of the
words.
In German:
‘the man’ is der Mann if it is the subject of the sentence,
den Mann if it is the direct object,
dem Mann if it is the indirect object.
Other languages identify grammatical functions by ordering them differently,
something that is informally referred to as word order

13. a. Mary eats cherries. ( SVO)
b. メアリーはサクランボを食べる ( SOV )
Mearii-wa sakuranbo-wo taberu.
‘Mary cherries eats.’
parameters of variation.

14. A third universal characteristic of human languages is that they each have
a lexicon.
A lexicon is the collection of words for a given language, and it is in the
lexicon that most language specificity exists. Yet lexical entries in all languages
contain the same kind of information (e.g., pronunciation, meaning,
grammatical function, etc.), and lexical entries are organized with respect to
each other in similar ways