Ms.

Phan Lê Chi
6/12
10 chapters
Midterm test: 40% of the course
At least 4 assignment
Linguistics
- History of langugage
- Grammar
- Syntax
- Phonetics and phonology
- Semantics
- Morphiology
- Word formation
- Progamtics
- First language acquisition
- Second language acquisition

UNIT 1. INTRODUCTION THE ORIGINS OF LANGUAGE

The Divine Source
- In most religions, there exists a belief that a divine source provides human with
language. (God grand human language)
- In the biblical tradition: God created Adam and ‘whatsoever Adam called every
living creature, that was the name theoref’
- In a Hindu tradition: Sarasvati, with of Brahma (the god who made the language)
- Basic hypothesis: if human infants were allowed to grow up w/o hearing any
language around them, then they would begin using the orignial God-given
language
The Natural Sound Source
- The human auditory system is already functioning before birth (the baby react
when he’s still inside his mother)
- The early capacity develops into an ability to identify sounds in the environment
- The Bow-wow theory
o When different objects flew by, making a caw-caw or coo-coo sound, the
early human tried to imitate the sounds.
o They used them to refer to those objects even when they weren’t present
o Onomatopeia (từ tượng thanh): cuckoo, splash, bang, boom etc
- The “pooh-pooh” theory
o Speech developed from the instinctive sounds people make in emotional
circumtances
 o The original sounds of language may have come from natural cries of
emtion (pain, anger, joy) (wow, ouch,)
o We produce spoken language while we exhale
o The expresseive noises epople make in emotional reactions contains sounds
that are not used in speech production => thus are not considered source
sound
The Musical Source
- For some scholars, musical ability developed before the ability to create words
- Our first musical instrument was the human voice, or control of the vibration of
the vocal folds
- Studies of newborn infants have found that they can recognize the intonation of
their mother’s voice
- Using internation: a music of the sentence
- They also show a preference for the intonation of their mother’s language