Language

Features Common to All Languages 

• all languages have vowels and consonants; 
• all languages have words; 
• all languages can create new words when required and modify their meanings; 
• all languages can form questions; 
• in all languages, we can use hypothetical, unreal, and fictional utterances; 
• all languages have grammatical rules.

Approaches to Language

Descriptive

• Linguistics attempts to describe the grammar of the language that exists in the minds of its speakers.
• It describes a person's basic linguistics knowledge. It explains how it is possible to speak and understand and it summarizes what speakers know about the sounds, words, phrases, and sentences of their language.
• It involves observing the language and trying to discover the main rules.
• Descriptive rules allow different dialects of a language and even variations within a dialect.

Prescriptive

• Prescriptivists tell you someone’s idea of what is “good” or “bad”.
• Prescriptive rules make a value judgment about the correctness of certain utterances and generally try to enforce a single standard.
• They attempt to impose the rules for speaking and writing on people without much regard for what the majority of educated speakers of a language actually say and write.
• So-called prescriptive grammar usually focuses only on a few issues and leaves the rest of a language undescribed.

Arbitrariness

The relation between form and meaning in language can be either:

• Arbitrary:
• the meaning is not deducible from the form.
• the form is not deducible from the meaning.
• the connection between the form and meaning must be learned via memorization. Examples: traffic lights, warning siren.
• Nonarbitrary:
• the meaning is derivable from the form and vice versa. Examples: a “no-smoking” sign (with a crossed-out cigarette), a deer-crossing sign (with a silhouette of a deer).

There are two very limited and partial exceptions to the arbitrariness of language: 

• Onomatopoeia: words whose sound imitates either the sound they denote or a sound associated with something they denote. These words are not entirely arbitrary. 
• Sound symbolism: it refers to the very vague, elusive way in which certain sounds “feel” more appropriate for describing certain objects or meanings than do other sounds.