Speech communication chain

1. Think
2. Semantics: pick out words to express the idea
3. Symtax and Morphology: put these words together in a certain order following rules
4. Phonology: figure out how to pronounce these words
5. Articulatory phonetics: send those pronunciations to your vocal anatomy
6. Speak: send the sounds throught the air
7. Perceive: Listener hears the sounds.
8. Decode: Listener interprets sounds as language
9. Connect: Listener receives communicated idea

lexicon: consists of the collection of all the words that you know

rules: stored in the form of a mental grammar, a statement of some pattern that occurs in language.

• grammar: set of all the elements and rules (phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics) that make up a language.

Features of language:

• Mode of Communication: means by which these messages are transmitted and received.
• Semanticity: property requiring that all signals in a communication system have a meaning or a function.
• Pragmatic Function: they must serve some useful purpose.
• Interchangeability: ability of individuals to both transmit and receive messages.
• Cultural Transmission: aspects that we can acquire only through communicative interaction with other users of the system.
• Arbitrariness: generally recognized that the words of a language represent a connection between a group of sounds or signs.
  • Form + Meaning = Linguistic Sign
  • Arbitrariness in Language
  • Evidentce for Arbitrariness
  • Onomatopoeia
  • Sound Symbolism
  • Nonarbitrary Aspects of Language
• Discreteness: property of language that allows us to combine together discrete units in order to create larger communicative units.
• Displacement: ability of a language to communicate about things, actions, ideas and so on, that are not present in space or time while speakers are communicating.
• Productivity: a language's capacity for novel messages to be build up out of discrete units.