Term Paper on "Language Is Arbitrary"

Term Paper 2 pages (667 words) Sources: 1+

[EXCERPT] . . . .

The ability to learn language is hard-wired into the cognitive structure of the human brain, as notes Steven Pinker, a psycholinguist whose book The Language Instinct suggests that language is an instinct, an evolutionary adaptation as well as something learned. Communal verbal exchanges may have evolutionary roots, but the structures exchanges these take, so they can be understood and generated socially, are specific rather general to the human animal. Even the deaf uneducated in sign language strive to communicate, within their linguistic parameters and ability to understand through the sensory data they do possess, of the body and hand.

Language is an instinct to acquire, but an art to perfect, says Pinker. Its morphological structure and the syntactic meaning of different words are arbitrary. There is no inherent reason, other than common cultural exposure, for instance, that Japanese takes some of its sound and sensory data used to communicate from China rather than from the Indo-European structures of writing and semantic meanings attached to words. But this does not mean that the data, although arbitrary, arose from the human mind in an arbitrary fashion. There was an evolutionary selection process that favored certain acquisition processes in certain areas, and individuals whom were better able to communicate with one another were better able to survive.

Both Pinker and Frompkin's more introductory text on linguistics have a social component as well. Neither judge different types of language, from slang to more formal kinds of English, because such arbitrary judgments of 'correct' use of structure are dependant upon social norms -- there is no natural overall form of a language, merely a moment in time in that language's history where certain forms, as understood in a relational structure are deemed to be correct or not. This method of understanding language means that English and indeed all languages, are living and expansive entities, rather than closed modalities of understanding.

Works Cited

Frompkin, Victoria. (2002) Introduction to Language. Heinle: Seventh edition.

Pinker, Steven. (2000) The Language Instinct.… READ MORE

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