What you know when you know a language? by Jannedy, S., Poletto, R & Weldon,T.

Summary Lecture

The people don’t know how their body acts, for example when we walk, we don’t think how we can move ours legs; the process that we have to make to advance. The same happens when we need to talk, all the process that occurs on our body is automatically, and we probably don’t know exactly how to do so. That’s why here appears Linguistics, which is interested in this “hidden” knowledge; here they refer to as linguistic competence.

        On the other hand we have linguistic performance, which is refers to the way that we can produce and comprehend language.

We can make errors doing some motor task, but also we may make performance errors, such as being unable to remember a word.

At the beginning of this summary we stared talk about that “hidden” knowledge or motor task, the main chain that we study in Linguistics is the Communication Chain; which needs five key elements, those are an information source, a transmitter, a signal, a receiver and a destination.

Then the text refers to the main content; when we know a language we know all their areas to speak that language, those areas are phonetics (the study of the sounds of human speech), phonology ("the sounds of language"), morphology (the study of the structure and content of word forms), syntax(the study of the principles and rules for constructing sentences), semantics (the study of meanings)and pragmatics(studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning).

The language exist only in the mind of it’s speaker. There are two parts of this existemsialist knowledge. The first is lexicon, which consists of the collection of all the words that you know: what functions they serve, what they refer to, how they are pronounced, and how they’re related to other words. The second is made up of all the rules that we know about our language, mental grammar. Then if we combine those two areas, we have our linguistics competences.