No one inherits the ability to use a particular language, but children are typically born with the ability and the drive to acquire language—namely, the one (or ones) to which they are routinely exposed from infancy. Children bring to this task considerable innate ability, because their exposure is largely to a random selection of utterances (apart from any attempts at systematic teaching that they may encounter) occurring in their general vicinity or addressed to them. Yet by late childhood they have, through progressive stages, acquired the basic vocabulary of at least one language, together with its phonological and grammatical structure. This is substantially the same situation the world over, among literate and illiterate communities, and the process takes up much the same number of years of childhood. Thus, it would appear that all languages are roughly equal in complexity and in difficulty of mastery. Moreover, it is thought that some two-thirds of the world’s children grow up in multilingual settings, suggesting that bilingualism is actually a more common human condition than monolingualism. Certainly, children who acquire two languages do so at the same rate as children who acquire one language. There seems to be no theoretical limit to the number of languages a young child is capable of acquiring.
It is therefore clear that humans bring into the world an innate faculty for language acquisition, language use, and grammar construction. The last phrase refers to the internalization of the rules of the grammar of one’s first language from a more or less random exposure to utterances in it. Human children are very soon able to construct new, grammatically acceptable sentences from material they have already encountered; unlike the parrot in human society, they are not limited to mere repetition of utterances.
The part played by this innate ability and its exact nature remain unclear. Until the 1950s scholars considered language acquisition to be carried out largely by analogical creation from observed patterns of sentences occurring in utterances received and understood by the child. Such a view, much favoured by persons inclined to a behaviourist interpretation of human learning processes (e.g., the American linguist Leonard Bloomfield), stressed the very evident differences between the structures of different languages, particularly on the surface. Following the pioneering work of the American linguist Noam Chomsky in the late 1950s, a number of linguists placed much more emphasis on the inherent grammar-building disposition and competence of the human brain, which is activated by exposure to utterances in a language, especially during childhood, in such a way that it fits the utterances into predetermined general categories and structures. Such linguists, inheritors of the 17th- and 18th-century interest in “universal grammar,” put their stress on the underlying similarities of all languages, especially in the deeper areas of grammatical analysis (see linguistics: Transformational-generative grammar). Additional areas of investigation in the late 20th century were the cognitive systems and abilities underlying language acquisition and use (e.g., concept development, memory, and attention) and the relevance of social interaction (especially language play) between child and adult. Theories of child language acquisition, as a consequence, became more multifaceted and complex than the approaches that dominated linguistic research in the 1970s and ’80s. Meaning and style in language
The whole object and purpose of language is to be meaningful. Languages have developed and are constituted in their present forms in order to meet the needs of communication in all its aspects.
It is because the needs of human communication are so various and so multifarious that the study of meaning is probably the most difficult and baffling part of the serious study of language. Traditionally, language has been defined as the expression of thought, but this involves far too narrow an interpretation of language or far too wide a view of thought to be serviceable. The expression of thought is just one among the many functions performed by language in certain contexts. Types of meaning Structural, or grammatical, meaning
First, one must recognize that the meaning of any sentence comprises two parts: the meanings of the words it contains and the structural or grammatical meaning carried by the sentence itself. In English the dog chased the cat and the boy chased the cat differ in meaning because dog and boy are different words with different word meanings; the same applies to equivalent sentences in other languages. The two sentences the dog chased the cat and the cat chased the dog, though containing exactly the same words, are different in meaning because the different word orders distinguish what are conventionally called subject and object. In Latin the two corresponding sentences would be distinguished not by word order, which is grammatically indifferent and largely a matter of style, but by different shapes in the lexical equivalents of dog and cat. In Japanese the grammatical distinction of subject and object, normally marked by the word order subject–object–verb (SOV), can be reinforced by a subject particle after the first word and an object particle after the second.
The formal resources of any language for making distinctions in the structural meanings of sentences are limited by two things: the linear (time) dimension of speaking and the limited memory span of the human brain. Writing copies the time stream of speech with the linear flow of scripts. Diagrams and pictures employ two dimensions, and models employ three; but writing is partially relieved of memory-span restrictions by the permanence of visual marks. Because written texts are almost entirely divorced from oral pronunciation, sentence length and sentence complexity can be carried to extremes, as may be observed in some legal and legislative documents that are virtually unintelligible if read aloud.
Within these linear restrictions, distinctions corresponding to the main uses of language can be made. All languages can employ different sentence structures to state facts (declarative), to ask questions (interrogative), and to enjoin or forbid some course of action (imperative). More delicate means exist to soften or modify these basic distinctions—e.g., It’s cold today, isn’t it?; Isn’t it still raining?; Shut the door, if you don’t mind; Don’t be long, will you? Languages use their resources differently for these purposes, but, generally speaking, each seems to be equally flexible structurally. The principal resources are word order, word form, and, in speech, pitch and stress placement. In English, as an example, a word or phrase can be highlighted by being placed first in the sentence when it would not normally occur there: compare he can’t bear loud noises with loud noises he can’t bear or loud noises, he can’t bear them. The object noun or noun phrase can also be put first by making the sentence passive; this allows the original subject to be omitted if one does not know or does not want to refer to an agent: the town was destroyed (by the revolutionaries). Within and together with all these possibilities, almost any word can be made contrastively prominent in spoken language by being stressed (spoken more loudly) or by being uttered on a higher pitch, and very often these two are combined: I asked you for RED roses (not yellow); I meant it for YOU (not her); HE knows nothing about it (someone else may). Prominence is especially associated with intonation, itself an important carrier of structural meaning in speech. One may state facts, ask questions, and give instructions with a variety of intonations indicating, along with visible gestures, different attitudes, feelings, and social and personal relations between speaker and hearer.