Mata kuliah Introduction to Linguistic pada Inisiasi 2 ini memberikan materi mengenai definisi bahasa dan karakteristik bahasa pada manusia. Definisi bahasa sangat erat hubungannya dengan karakteristik bahasa. Bahasa adalah suatu sistem arbitrary simbol-simbol vokal yang digunakan untuk komunikasi pada manusia.
Mari kita lihat inisiasi selengkapnya.
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INISIASI 2
Dear students,
It is very nice to meet you again in the Online Tutorial of Introduction to Linguistics/PBIS4202 for the second session. In this session we will discuss the material from module 1: Language and Linguistics, focused on two topics namely The Definition of Language and The Characteristics of Human Language. Now we will come to the details.
The definition of language is closely related to its characteristics. This particular definition states that ‘language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication’. Ronald Wardhaugh (1972:3) stated that based on the definition the key term in the above definition is ‘system’. Each language contains two systems: a system of sounds and a system of meaning. Beside system, it is also said that language is ‘arbitrary’. It means that we cannot predict exactly which specific features we will find in a particular language if we are unfamiliar with that language or with a related language. The term ‘vocal’ refers to the fact that the primary medium of language is sound, and it is sound for all languages, no matter how well developed are the writing systems. The term ‘symbol’ refers to the fact that there is no connection between the sounds that people use and the objects to which those sounds refer.
Human language is related to the term ‘communication’. It means that language is used for communication. Kiat Boey Lim (1975:1) also agrees that language is used for communication, and it is made up of sounds. He also add another feature of human language:
productive or creative: refers to the ability of native speakers to understand and produce any number of sentences (even though those which they have never heard before) in their mother tongue.
Recursion: means that sentences may be produced with other sentences inside them by means of relativization (dependent and independent clauses), or by using conjunction.
arbitrary: The relation between a word and its meaning is a matter of convention. There is no necessary connection between the sounds people use and the topics to which these sounds refer.
social and psychological phenomena: In accordance with language as a social phenomenon, we can see that language is possessed by society; the speech community of a particular language. In other side, language as a psychological phenomenon refers to the fact that language belongs to individual person.
Ben Crane (1981) stated that related to the human communication system, we should note that there are three systems of human communication: in the form of speech, writing, and gesture.
Speech: for most people, speech is the basic system of communication. Speech is arbitrary and segmentable. Some words seem to contradict the principle that the relationship between sounds and meanings has no logical or necessary relationship (arbitrary). There are few words which are called onomatopoeic words. For instances: buzz, swish, bang, meow, etc. Sounds are strung together to form meaning-bearing units, and these units strung together to form sentences.
Writing: allows the preservation of communications over space and through time, and its great importance in human history and in complex societies would be hard to overestimate. Today there are three basic types of writing, namely logographic, syllabic, and alphabetic. Some languages in the world, most notably Chinese, have writing system in which each symbol represents a word; such a writing system is called logographic. The earlier symbols of logographic are mostly pictorial representations which are called pictographs. In a syllabic writing system, each symbol represents a syllable. The examples of this writing system are Egyptian hieroglyphs. Syllabic writing served as the source of alphabetic writing. Alphabetic writing is that each letter represents a particular spoken sound of a language. Most countries, for instances England, Indonesia, etc., use this system of writing. On the other hand, mixed writing system are used by some countries. For examples writing system used in Japan; Kanji are logographs, Hiragana and Katakana are the two Japanese syllabories, and Romaji is the Japanese system of writing that uses the Roman alphabet.
The role of gesture is less obvious. Among the deaf, of course, it may replace speech as the principle form of communication; but for most people it is an important supplement to speech. The term gesture includes all human communication that involves waving of the hands, facial signals, grunts, and other vocalizations that do not make up words. The gesture is frequently called body language. Gesture could be various manipulations of the environment that have communicative intent such as smoke signals. Gesture was basic to the development of human communication and that it is still much used. The widely-discussed forms of gestural communication fall under the heading of kinesics; the study of the positioning and movement of the body and its parts during conversation.
Okay students, that’s our material for this session. I hope this outline can help you understand the material in the module 1. If you get problems, you can contact or email the tutor to get help.
Good Luck.
Salinan catatan materi inisiasi 2 ini dapat diambil di sini.
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