Research Topics - Unit 2: page 1

Research Topics in Language Studies

Unit 2 (week 1)

Speaking and meaning: the sounds and systems of spoken communication.

Content of the unit

The sounds and the associated body gestures of spoken language are, of course, the primary mechanism by which express and communicate the meanings which make up language. (For members of the deaf community, the hand and body gestures and positionings which make up the signing systems of deaf languages have the same primary function.) It is through sound and body gestures that we first learn language and it is the medium through which we do most of our communicating. In evolutionary terms, written forms of expression are, of course, very recent developments. For the overwhelming majority of the time that Homo Sapiens have communicated in language, it has been through the spoken form and it as a system of sounding and body gestures that language has evolved to take the forms we know today. Even though the development of writing in literate societies may have had some impact on the evolution of language in those cultures, it is still primarily through the spoken medium that languages continue to change. The spoken remains the `richest' medium of communication in that it is in speech that we have available the greatest number of possible meanings and nuances of meanings.

An understanding of the sounds of spoken language and how they are organised so as to make meanings is consequently central to any systematic understanding of language as a means of communication. Through developing linguistic analysis of the sounds of language we can,

• understand the primary mechanism by which the meanings of language are expressed, by which they take physical form,
• identify the full range of meanings that languages make available,
• understand how speech varies according to place of origin, class background, age, gender, and other features of social identity,
• understand the speech of speakers from bilingual communities which, from an English-speaking perspective, include the Indian sub-continent, Malaysia, Singapore, South Africa and the indigenous communities of Australia and north America,
• understand how the speech of non-native speakers may be systematically shaped by the sound system of their first language,
• assist second-language learners in shifting, where necessary, from the sound system of their native language to that of their target language,
• understand the mechanisms by which languages have transformed themselves over historical time,
• understand some of the relationships between modern languages which have evolved from the same parent or ancestor language,
• contribute to the development of software and hardware for computational speech recognition and speech generation,
• contribute to the diagnosis of speech pathologies and develop programs to assist those who suffer some speech impairments,
• and so on.