Human Communication: Three Systems
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Chapter 2: Human Communication: Three Systems CHAPTER 2 HUMAN COMMUNICATION: THREE SYSTEMS hrough symbols humans can produce an unlimited number of messages. The power and scope of our ability to communicate are enhanced by the fact that we have not one but three systems of communication: speech, writing, and gestures. For most people, speech is the basic system of communication. Writing, however, allows the preservations of communications over space and through time, and its great importance in human history and in complex societies would be hard to overestimate. The role of gesture is less obvious. Among the deaf, of course, it may replace speech as the principal form of communication; but for most people it is an important supplement to speech. Together these systems allow us to communicate in a variety of situations with subtle shades of meaning. Speech Speech requires the manipulation of the tongue, lips, vocal cords, lungs, velum, and all other parts of what is commonly called vocal tract . Physiologically, it requires such complex integration of nerves and muscles that it is difficult to imagine how anyone ever learns to speak. The speech centers of the brain are physically more extensive than the centers controlling any other form of activity. The portions of the brain apparently involved in controlling tongue movements alone 13 | P a g e Linguistics for English Language Teaching: Sounds, Words, and Sentences are nearly twenty times larger than those controlling leg movements, despite the fact that the tongue muscles are only a fraction of the weight of leg muscles. The large size of the speech centers reflects the complexity of speech. When we are speaking, the tongue is in constant motion, and its position in relation to other elements of the vocal tract is essential to the production of appropriate sounds. In producing speech, the brain conceives a notion to say something and sets in motion a series of electrical impulses to all the muscles of the vocal tract. These muscles, in turn, set up a complex sound wave, and the result is that something is “said”. Thus, when humans communicate by means of spoken language, they express meanings that are conveyed through sounds. Understanding the relationship between meaning and sound is the departure point for linguistic inquiry. SOUND AND MEANING There is no logical or necessary relationship between the sounds of words and their meanings. Speech is arbitrary and segmentable. For example, the word cat may be divided into at least three segments or units of sounds: a k-like sound, a vowel, and a t-like sound. There is nothing about these three sounds that suggests felinity. These sounds, moreover, recur regularly in English and may be recombined in different orders to form different words, such as act and tack . Thus no sound carries meaning by itself ; but when sounds are put into sequences with other sounds, these sequences may carry meaning. Some words seem contradict the principle that the relationship between sound and meaning is arbitrary. Onomatopoeic words such as buzz, swish, bang, and meow , for example, sound like the things they represent. Similarly, some words contain sounds that have become imbued, in part, with meaning, such as the sl- in slime , slippery, slush, and slop . Similarly, the gl- in such words as glow, glimmer, glitter, and glisten may convey a certain meaning. However, these words make up only a tiny fraction of language; for most words, the relationship between sound and meaning is almost completely arbitrary. Certain modern words like television and typewriter seem to be predictable from other existing forms like tele “across”, vision “sight”, type “print’, and writer “source of writing”; but the meanings of these forms are ultimately arbitrary, too. 14 | P a g e Chapter 2: Human Communication: Three Systems This arbitrary relation is also indicated by the fact that the world’s languages use somewhat different sounds. For example, the clicking sounds of some African languages do not occur in English; in fact, most speakers of English would find it difficult to integrate these sounds into speech. Certain English sounds, like the initial sounds in judge and then , are difficult many non-English speakers to produce in a speech context. At any rate, whatever sounds a language employs must be strong together to form a message. Sounds are strung together to form meaning-bearing units, and these units are strung together to form sentences. This stringing-together is accomplished according to a system of rules called grammar . According to the most popular modern conception of a grammar, it contains three components: a phonological , a syntactic, and a semantic component. The phonological component is concerned with the sound of a language; the syntactic component is concerned with the combining of meaning-bearing units into the sentences of a language; and semantic component is concerned with the meanings of sentences. All languages are assumed to share some basic underlying similarities in their grammars. SYNTAX AND SEMANTICS The relationship between syntax and semantics is close and complex. For example, consider the three meaningful units boy, girl, and love . Languages have two means of expressing relationship between such units; word order and word endings. Thus, in English, word order (structure) establishes the difference in meaning between The boy loves the girl and The girl loves the boy . Not all languages that use word order to specify relationships use the same order. English is basically a subject-verb-object language (SVO); Japanese is a subject- object-verb language (SOV); and Tagalog is verb-subject-object language (VSO). In classical Latin, word order was relatively unimportant as a means of expressing relationship; instead, word ending (inflections) specified most relationships. Most language today use both word order and word endings to indicate relationship between words. In English, word order is extremely important for establishing these relationships, and word endings are used less frequently. For instance, we distinguish between the subject, object, and possessive forms of pronouns: he and she are 15 | P a g e Linguistics for English Language Teaching: Sounds, Words, and Sentences subject forms: him and her are object forms, his and hers are possessive forms. We mark verb for the third person singular present tense by ending –s (she runs ); and for most verbs, we mark the past tense with the ending –d. Our system of adjectives is somewhat divided in that the comparative form of some adjectives is marked by the ending –er (bigger, prettier ) whereas others require the addition of the word more (more beautiful, more ridiculous ). Thus, learning a language involves mastering both its word endings of inflection s and its word order or structure. Only then one can understand the full range of messages conveyed by a language. Writing Linguists are usually more interested in speech than in writing, and writing has often been viewed as a reflection of speech. Although we have no proof, we assume that speech preceded writing. This assumption is supported by the observations that children can learn to speak before they learn to write and that many of the world’s peoples do not possess written forms of their language. Many scholars believe that Continental Celtic, the language of much of Europe before the Roman Empire, was unwritten as a result of a religious prohibition on any graphic representation of speech. At some points, however, early humans discovered that they could communicate by making marks on material. The earliest known pictures, cave drawing, date from about 20,000 B.C., but we cannot be certain that they were intended to communicate; that is, to transmit in formation from one person to another. Writing as we now it today developed rather late—hardly more than five or six thousand years ago—but it has become particularly important since the invention of the printing press some five hundred years ago. Today there are three basic types of writing: logographic, syllabic, and alphabetic. Logographic Writing Many languages of the world, most notably Chinese, have a writing system in which each symbol represent a word; such a writing system is called logographic . Thus, in Chinese the symbols means “man”, means “woman”, and means “mountain” respectively. This system developed out of a much less stylized system in which, for example, the symbols for mountain was .. These earlier symbols, which provided a more pictorial representation of the 16 | P a g e Chapter 2: Human Communication: Three Systems concepts to be communicated, are called pictographs . The likelihood is strong that the first picture messages were memory aids or personal records of events. However, at some points they were used to convey a meaning to another person in much the same way that one draws a map for a friend who needs directions. The pictures eventually became formalized, at which time they became logographs rather than simply pictures. Many of the symbols in a logographic system bear little resemblance to the objects they are meant to represent. The logographic system has its advantages. Speakers of the different dialects in China today have difficulty communicating with each other in speech, but two Chinese may readily communicate with each other in writing. No matter how a word may be pronounced in various Chinese dialects, its logograph is the same across China. On the other hand, a disadvantage is readily apparent; one must learn an enormous number of logographs before one can read and write Chinese. It is not quite correct to say that each logograph is different, however, for a logograph typically is compounded of several parts. The Chinese word meaning “peace”, for instance, is , which derives from the idea of a woman ( ) under a roof ( ). These two symbols recur frequently in compound logograph, including many whose meanings bear little or no relationship to either womanhood or roofs.