INTRODUCTION

"Language touches every part of our lives; it gives words to our thoughts, voice to our
ideas, and expression to our feelings. It is a rich and a varied human ability-one that we
can use without, even a thought, that children seem to acquire automatically, and that
linguists have found to be complex yet describable. This, language, will be the object of
our study" (Language Files-1 Introduction)
In this course we want to know what language is used for, and how its system of
arbitrary vocal symbols works. The most immediate objectives of this course are:
To lead you to examine your own believes and attitudes about language and its
use.

To study and understand the sound system of English Language and Spanish
Language
To equip students with some tools and techniques for linguistic analysis and to
give you some practice in using these to discover the organizing principles of a
language.
To acquaint students with basic concepts necessary to enhance linguistic studies.
To discover similarities and differences between both languages.
To get better knowledge in the perception and production of the new language.

General conceptual goals:

Below is a list of some very general principles of human language:
Every language is enormously complex.
Despite its complexity, every language is systematic.
It is systematic on many levels, from the system of sounds to the organization of
discourses.

Some reasons deter to see its systematicity are:

1. The complexity of language obscures patterns and regularities.
2. In our speech there are hesitations, errors and changes in midstream,
interruptions, confusions and misunderstandings.
Language varies systematically from person to person, area to area, situation to
situation.

Languages are diverse, which are shown in their organization.

Despite this diversity, there are many universal properties of language.

Some properties of a language are arbitrary.
Speech is the primary manifestation of language.

All languages change as time passes.

The connection between meanings is arbitrary.
Nobody knows everything about a language, although some smart alecks boast
the contrary.
ORIGEN OF LANGUAGE

Language is the highly developed form of animal signaling. It provably developed in east
Africa around 100.000 years ago, still its origin has become a trendy topic. These
predictions must have existed. First, humans noticed actions and objects. Second, they
were able to produce a range of sounds and third they must have reached the naming
insight. These preconditions enabled humans to build up a store of words. In addition,
preferences tend to become habits and habits become rules.
THE ROLE OF LANGUAGE

Language is used for persuading and influencing others, for swapping news and
conveying essential commands. Language can be used to communicate feelings and
emotions, humans may use language for purely esthetic reasons, in writing poetry, to
release nervous tensions as anger and frustration. A day to day interaction needs a
language.
PHONOLOGY
Overview

Phonology studies the distribution and organization of sounds in a language and the
interaction between those different sounds. Those sounds are called phonemes and
phonology is a branch of linguistics that studies how phonemes function in a language.
Its objective is to analyze the restrictions and regularities that a language has.
Phoneme. - It is the smallest segment of sound that can distinguish two words. Take the

words PIT and BIT, they differ only in their initial sound, PIT begins with /p/ and BIT
begins with /b/. Phonemes are normally put into slant lines I I. Pairs of words such as
PIT and BIT or PIT and PUT which only have one different phoneme are known as
minimal pairs, and one way to identify the phonemes is to look for minimal pairs. Also a
phoneme can be defined as the minimal significant contrastive unit in the phonological
system.
Phonemics. - The complete set of sounds is called the phonemics system of a

language, phonemes themselves are abstract. In phonemics the phonemes will be