Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition

Features of language
Language has two fundamental features which mark it as
quite different in kind from signals: productivity and
structural complexity.
First, language allows every human being to produce
utterances, often quite novel, in an infinite number of contexts,
where the language is bent, moulded and developed to fit ever-
developing communicative needs. Old expressions are
changed, new ones coined. Humans are not genetically
programmed to use fixed calls or movements. They have an
innate general capacity for language (often called the Language
Acquisition Device—LAD), but it is a creative capacity. Given
the opportunity to learn from their environment, all humans
can communicate in a limitless variety of ways.
Second, language is not a sequence of signals, where each
stands for a particular meaning. If words were merely fixed
signals of meaning, then each time a word occurred it would
signal the same thing, irrespective of the structure of the whole
utterances—in fact there would be no ‘whole utterances’
beyond individual words. So
John plays football
and
plays football John
and
football plays John
would all mean the same thing, i.e. each would be a string of
the same three meanings, merely presented in different order.
Language, clearly, relies as much on its structure as on its
semantic properties to convey meaning. Communication can
be infinitely varied and infinitely complex just because the
language is a highly structured system which allows an infinite
range of permutations. The structure is of many types: the
organisation of a fixed range of sounds, the ordering of words
in phrases and sentences, the use of inflections, the semantic
and grammatical relationships between words, the interplay of
stress, intonation and rhythm in the actual production of
speech, and the dovetailing of paralinguistic features.

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Language and Communication
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