Lecture 4Language, Mind, Culture & Society The purpose of linguists is to explain language. Language is so intricately & intimately bound up with human life that its essential nature is not easy to discern. Language signs, being arbitrary, provide for abstraction: enable to set up conceptual categories to define our own world. Language does not just reflect reality, but creates it. In this sense, it provides us with an explanation of experience. The languages of different communities will represent different variants of reality, so the explanation of experience is a matter of cultural custom & linguistic convention. The essential nature of language is cognitive. It is seen as psychological phenomenon. The form of language reveals a lot about the human mind. This is the only one aspect of language. The language also functions as a means of communication & social control. It is internalized in the mind as abstract knowledge, but in order for this to happen it must also be experiences in the external world as actual behavior. The 2nd aspect of looking at language would see in terms of social functions it serves. It is fashioned as a system of signs to meet the elaborate cultural & communal needs of human societies. The focus of attention is on ‘language as social semiotic’ (Michael Halliday),that is on language as a system of signs which are socially motivated. Language not as genetic endowment, but as generic accomplishment. Are human beings absolutely alone & unique in their use of systems of signs to express social meanings? We all know that animals use signs of various kinds & they use the signs to communicate. No animal signaling system displays the creative potential & complexity of structure which we have noted in human language. The signs animals use are hardly comparable to the subtleties of the semiotic systems that have been developed in language to service the complex social organization & communicative requirements of human communal life.
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