Dychotomies

Diachrony (historical) is the process that a language has

done or developed in the past, that mean the history of
the language.
Synchrony (non-historical) is the study of a language in a
specific time.
For instance, illustrates this point using an analogy with a
game of chess: if we walk into a room while a chess
game is being played, it is possible to assess the state of
the game by studying the position of the pieces of the
board.
Langage vs. Langue vs. Parole
LANGAGE is the human skill to talk each other. It is
divided in two aspects:
Langue: it is the language system of signs used by deaf
people.
Parole: it is the act of speaking.
Signifiant vs. Signifi
The study of meaning is composed by two sides:
Signifiant is the thing that signifies or sound image.
Signifi is the thing signified or concept.

Syntagmatic vs. Paradigmatic

If the signs are in a lineal position, it refers to
SYNTAGMATIC, but if the signs are contrasted with
other signs in the language, it refers to PARADIGMATIC.

2- A female chimpanzee called Washoe was domesticated by

a couple of scientists ( Beatrix and Allen Gardner) and she was
able to use a version of American Sign Language. The
scientists used to use sign language when Washoe was around
with the purpose to she adopted this signs. Three and a half
years later Washoe learnt signs for more than a hundred
words, such as airplane, baby, banana, etc. Moreover Washoe
acquired the ability to combined this signs to produce
sentences like open food drink ( to get someone to open the
refrigerator), this would indicate that her communication
system had the potential for productivity.
We can compare this situation with a human one, when a
baby expresses with signs that she/ he wants something
because cannot speak yet. So the baby develops the use of
signs as Washoe.
Another example we found was waggle dance used by bees
when it find a tree covered in blossom and returns to
communicate the rest with that kind of dance that it found a
feeding source. In comparison with the system used by
humans called displacement that is when a person is capable
to refer about something in the past or even in the future

time, for instance a boy that let him knows his father that he
must give him money for have washed his car last weekend.
3- Type of languages:
Agglutinative: It is the union of morphemes forming a word.
Agglutinative uses affixes and each word have an unique
meaning, it means that these words do not change to join with
others.
Isolating: when we refer to language we refer to a
combination of a couple of morpheme in each word, but also
words that contain just one morpheme.
Inflection: it occurs in a language when a word change by
adding affixes. It has to be grammatically correct. For instance
in English, a noun, watch in singular or watches in plural;
a verb see, saw, seen, seeing. An adjective big
bigger biggest. However, inflection does not exist in all
languages.
Polysynthetic: it is a language in which words are contained by
many morphemes (morpheme is the smallest unit in a
language). Also, have to be an agreement between the
elements of a language, which means a verb, subject and
object complemented each other and have significant
meaning.

4Edward Sapir, an American linguist believed that humans

perceptions of the world have limitations imposed by the
language spoken, and therefore if the language is complex,
having complex grammatical categories or large lexicons, the
speakers will be prepared or apt to observe the world.
According to linguistic determinism our language affects the
way we form an opinion about we know.
Edward Sapir refers to that language permits people to have a
variety of thoughts. A word can has many different meanings;
on the one hand can is a modal verb; on the second hand
can is a noun with many meanings, can means a prison and
for American people can means toilet.
The linguistic relativism explains that our knowledge about
grammar and language has an influence on our own and

particular point of view about our surroundings which is

different from others.
5Evolution of writing
We can describe Pictograms as a tradition of drawing on
caves or picture-writing. So, a form such as
was used for
the sun. there was a relationship between the picture and the
meaning. These pictures came into a more fixed symbolic
form that is, it became more abstract. This was called ideawriting or Ideograms. Both of them are not words or sounds
of a specific language so, it can be understood with the same
meaning in different places. The more abstract is the symbol
the more word-writing is.
When symbols are used to represent words in a language,
they are described as examples of word-writing, or
Logograms.
For example, Sumerians used to use logographic writing, their
symbols were like shapes for that reason it was called as
cuneiform writing (wedge shaped) because the writing was
got by pressing a wedge- shaped into a soft clay tablets. It
was hard to get the meaning of these symbols or imagine the
object reflected in.
A modern writing system that is based on the use of
logograms can be found in China. Many Chinese written
symbols are used as representations of the meaning of words
and not of the sounds of spoken language.
Rebus writing represented the sounds of a language. There
is a symbol for a unit and that symbol represents the sound of
the same word, so whenever the sound is produced its symbol
appears in any word.
For instance when you make the sound /ai/ (the pronoun I) it is
represented by
eye/ai/).
Syllabic writing is a combination of symbols (it could be a
consonant and vowel) which represents the sound of that
syllable. There are no purely syllabic writing systems in use
today, but modern Japanese can be written with a set of single
symbols syllabary.

In Alphabetic writing exists symbols which represents to a

sound. It appeared in the Semitic language (Arabic and
Hebrew). Words written in these languages consist of symbols
for the consonant sounds in the word.
The early Greeks invented a remodeled system that included
vowels. This change produces a distinct symbol for a vowel
sound such as a (called alpha). This new system is what we
know nowadays as alphabet. Then, it moved through the
Western Europe, the Romans and through the rest of the
world.
6Having Linguistics is important for us
Everyone needs or have a way to communicate with others
around and it is important to know the beginning of language
by a basic job called Linguistics, that subject is essential to be
in our curriculum because it will demonstrate what we know
about language and its different branches.
To begin with, we can say that Linguistics help us how to
spread our knowledge about languages. It is important to
know about languages because we will start working as
teachers or translators of English in a near future, so we have
to investigate or research about the origin of these languages
and the relationship between them. Therefore it permits us to
have a notion about grammar development or changes in
languages that we mentioned before and also made us to
upgrade our vocabulary and lexicon every time if it is
necessary.
In addition, we are people who live in society so we need
language for our communication with the rest of the people
because of that Linguistics is necessary. Although Linguistics
is complex we try to look on the bright side, we could learn
why some languages look like others that are rarely for us
because before we met Linguistics we did not know where
languages such as French, Germany, English, Spanish, etc.
come from.

Finally we can add that the study of Linguistics let us get

acquaintances about communication between animals but
also the system of communication used by deaf people.
To sum up we could learn that Linguistics is included in
different subjects such as Grammar, Morphology, Phonetics,
Phonology, etc. and so on.

Linguistics
First
Assignmen
t
Students name:

Fernandez Carolina
Hidalgo Mirta

Molina Silvana.
Teachers name:

Arce Santiago.

Career:
2nd year Profesorado para la Educacion
Secundaria & Traductorado.
Modality:

Presencial.

Bibliography:

The study of language. Yules, George.

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language.

Crystal, David.

Instituto Superior Dardo Rocha U.E.P. n 71