Linguistic Development Research Paper Page 8
ADVERTISEMENT
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
374 WHAT IS IT THAT DEVELOPS?
8
phonological substitution, but in the period of linguistic studies, researchers tried to find the rules
that governed substitutions. They were not content merely to catalogue the substitutions.
With the advent of transformational grammar in the 50s a new approach to phonetics was developed.
It came to be known as “generative phonology”. It differs from taxonomic phonemics in many ways.
Language is described in terms of features. Sounds are broken down into their various parts. For
example the sound /b/ is not treated as a single unit but of a series of features [+ stop],[+labial], [+
voiced] and so on. Another way in which there is a difference in the method of generative phonology
is in the use of formal devices to describe the sound patterns of language. These include restrictions
on the way rules are written and the way they can be joined together. The formal devices are
encountered more in recent times in speech journals and in speech generation research.
4
What Is It That Develops?
The purpose of this report is not to examine the physiological or neurological architecture of the
language chain in any great detail. What I hope to do is cover the developmental aspects of language
with reference to these features of the language apparatus. In many cases it is not known how the
various physical parts of the apparatus develop. I will on occasion speculate on what might be
happening, but speculation is all that I shall do.
This section is therefore a brief overview of the physical endowment which we use to make language.
It is intended solely to put the developmental discussions in context and to explain the terminology.
There are four kinds of linguistic knowledge:
1. phonology
2. semantics
3. syntax
4. pragmatics
phonology refers to the set of basic units of speech: phonemes. They have no meaning on their own,
but they can be chained together to form words, that do. English has around 45 phonemes,
other languages have up to 60 (but no more).
semantics is the stage at which the individually meaningless phonemes are assembled to produce
meaningful portions of language, called morphemes. Morphemes are either words or gram-
matical markers such as prefixes or suffixes to indicate for instance tense or plurality. The
meanings are arbitrarily assigned and bear no inherent relationship to the sound which they
are denoted by. Children go through a stage when they recognize that words are used to convey
meaning. This is no mean task when considered in detail. One of the primary problems of
semantics is knowing exactly how children go about deducing the meaning of words, and how
they generalize or specialize concepts. (How can you know what a child means by a word, if
what they mean is different from what you mean?)
syntax refers to the form or structure of the language, and deals with the rules that specify how
words are combined in order to express meanings. It deals with how to interpret the meaning of
a sentence depending upon the word order. For example, consider the following two sentences:
John hit Jim
Jim hit John
ADVERTISEMENT
0 votes
Related Articles
Related forms
Related Categories
Parent category: Education