Basic Concepts of Linguistics

Speakers’ linguistic ability or knowledge of a language enables them to combine words to form phrases and phrases to form sentences. Knowing a language means being able to produce new sentences never spoken before and to understand sentences never heard before. The linguist Noam Chomsky refers to this ability as part of the creative aspect of language use. Every speaker of a language can create great literature, but all people who know a language can and do create new sentences when they use and understand new sentences created by others. This creative ability is because language use is not limited to stimulus-response behavior. Eventually, there is a difference between having the knowledge necessary to produce sentences of a language and applying this knowledge. It is a difference between what we know, which is our linguistic competence, and how we use this knowledge in actual speech production and comprehension, which is our linguistic performance.

Speakers of all languages – spoken and signed- have the knowledge to understand kor produce sentences of any length. When they attempt to use that knowledge, though, when they perform linguistically, there are physiological and psychological reasons that limit the number of adjectives, adverbs, clauses, and so on.

Linguistics is concerned with the diverse aspects of the nature of language from both theoretical and practical perspectives. It deals with the phenomena of language learning and teaching. At present, linguistics is established as an independent discipline at many universities across the globe, and thus helps us uncover, create, exchange, and disseminate knowledge of the nature of language in general and languages in particular, as well as the experience of language learning and teaching.

For the most part, linguistic knowledge is not conscious knowledge. The linguistic system, the sound, structure, meanings, words, and rules for putting them all together, is learned subconsciously with no awareness that rules are being learned.

 Definition of linguistics:

Here are some definitions of linguistics:

Robins (1985) defines language as: " a system of vocal symbols by means of which human beings communicate." He holds that linguistics is concerned with human language as a universal and recognizable part of human behavior and of the human faculties, perhaps one of the most essential to human life as we know it, and one of the most far-reaching of human capabilities in relation to the whole span of mankind’s achievements.

 According to Richards, Platt, and Weber (1985)," a system of human communication by means of a structured

arrangement of sounds( or their written representation ) to form larger units". Here,  linguistics stands for the study of language as a system of human communication.

It is thus clear that linguistics as a discipline aims at exploring the general principles upon which all languages are constructed and operate as systems of communication in the societies in which they are used.