What you know when you know a Language?

1.2.1 Linguistic Competence and Linguistic Performance

In first place we have to know that, as a speakers we are not conscious of what we know or aware of how our body or language works, we only use it because we are used to do it, we unconscious of what we know about us, about how we works, about how our language works, that´s when we talk about linguistic competence (hidden knowledge, is in your mind you can´t see it), but when people reveal some of their knowledge, meaning that not all the knowledge is hidden we refer to linguistic performance, the way that we produce and comprehend language, our performance is what we do with our linguistic competence, when we develop what we know through the speech. When we make some mistake when you are talking, for example if your tongue is tied and you can´t speak or you forget the pronunciation of a word, that doesn´t mean that you don´t know how to speak it just because maybe you were distract, when we talk about this we refer to performance errors.

1.2.2 The Speech Communication Chain

When we refer to the Speech Communication System, we can say that we are talking about the steps that we normally do at the time of speaking, when we are communicating our thoughts to another person, to communicate ideas from your mind to another one. We have to consider that language is not the only system of communication, there is sign language, semaphore flags, pictures that convey emotion, etc. The key elements in a communication system are an information source, a transmitter, a signal, a receiver and a destination, that way one person acts as a the information source and the transmitter, sending a signal to the other person, the receiver and the destination.

The communication Chain:

In first place the transmitter and the information source think of what he wants to communicate, when the transmitter already know what he wants to communicate he pick up words (semantics), that way he can express the idea, then the words that the transmitter picked up are put together in a correct order following the grammatical rules (syntax and morphology), then the transmitter find out the pronunciation of those words (phonology), then the transmitter send those pronunciations through his vocal anatomy (articulatory phonetics), that way the transmitter (the speaker) sent the message through the air. In second place, the listener who acts as the receiver and the destination hears the message, the sounds, to decode the sounds as language, then, when the  message is finally understood or when the listener receive the idea that the speaker, the transmitter, send the message will come to its destination, when the listener connects to the speaker.

1.2.3 What You Know When You Know a Language

The things you know when you know a spoken language are:

• When you know a language you have to be able to indentify sounds
•  Recognize a language and the way you communicate to others.
• Not only recognize sounds, also be able to reproduce them, even without knowing how you do it. When we talk about the production of sounds that´s when we are talking of phonetics.
• You know about the distribution and combination of the sounds and also know how these sounds work together as a system.
• When you know about a language you about the phonology the study of sounds in a particular language or in languages generally, phonology will help you too identify the words and sounds of your own language even though the words are not pronounce on a correct way.
• You also know how to break individual words down into smaller parts that have a particular meaning or function, and then combine those words, even though knowing which combinations are words. (morphology)
• You know how to identify if a sentence is well written or not if it correspond to the uses grammar if the word is grammatical or ungrammatical (without sense )
• You have to know about the semantics, the meaning of the words, when you know that an object has two different words, two different ways to be written but, at the end they have the same meaning. When we talk about the meanings, we refer to semantics.
• You have to know about pragmatic, the ability to use context in order to interpret an utterance´s meaning. When the meaning of the word or sentences also involve the context.
• And finally you also know about syntax, how words are combines to form phrases and sentences.

To understand and learn a language, in addition to using it, you must know how it works.

1.2.4 How You Store Your Linguistic Competence

Besides the things you have to learn or know about language you also need to know where all this knowledge is, it is difficult to know where is it because you can see or touch the language, language only exists in our minds and when we produce a sentence and then when we uttered the sentence or the word is going to exist in the in the mind of the listener. You also can think of your linguistic competence as an ability to use language and being a language itself.

There are two parts of this knowledge:

• Lexicon, the collection of all the words that you know, the function that they serve, what they refer to, how they´re pronounced, and how they are related to other words.
• Mental grammar, the rules you know of language which helps you to produce well-formed utterances and to interpret the utterance of others, how to combine sounds and words to create these well formed utterances, this rules are store in the mental grammar.

1.2.5 Uncovering and Describing What You Know

One of the jobs of linguistic is figure out the hidden knowledge that speakers store in their mental grammar and that way describe speaker´s performance and deduce the rules that form the speaker´s competence, in order to find out the internal structure of language (lexicon) and the mental rules, linguistics have to describe language as it is used.

Descriptive grammars: when a linguist describing English might make some observations and conclude some generalizations e.g. the words sofa and couch means roughly the same, these generalizations and others like them describe what English speakers do analyzing these generalizations is what we called descriptive grammars

Mental grammar contains all of the rules that an individual speaker uses to produce and comprehend utterances and Descriptive grammar contains the rules that someone has deduced based on observing speakers´ linguistic performance.

SUMMARY