Page 145 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

LANGUAGE

development and distribution of knowledge, as are appropriate legal
frameworks to ensure intellectual property protection.

See also: Globalisation, Information society/information economy,
Network society, New economy

LANGUAGE

Speech – usually taken to refer to the whole body of words
(vocabulary) and ways of combining them (grammar) that is used by a
nation or people. However, the term has become associated with
various specialised usages and problems in the study of communica-
tion.
The ordinary usage of the term tends to assume that language is:
. a specific language, such as Welsh, Nyungar or English;
. a nomenclature – an instrument for naming objects that exist out
there in the world;
. an instrument for expressing thoughts that exist inside the head.

None of these usages has survived intact in the study of communica-
tion. First, language is studied as a general capacity, not as an aggregate of
individual languages. Second, the relations between thoughts, words
and external objects have been the focus of much theorising, the result
of which is, at the very least, to bring into question any idea that words
simply name objects or express thoughts. Both these ideas assume
language to be a mere reflection of something else that is (it follows)
not language – in this case, thoughts and objects. The objection to
such an assumption is that it denies any active force for language,
reducing it to a mere instrument, and that it fails to take into account
the extent to which both thoughts and objects can be known only
through their representation in some form of language.
Just as atomic physics started by isolating individual atoms but
ended up by identifying much smaller particles and forces, so
linguistics has identified language as comprising structures and rules
operating between elements within words. The most basic is the
phoneme, or unit of recognisably distinct sound that figures in a
particular language. Different languages have different phonemes
(there is no /j/ in Welsh, and no /ll/, /ch/ and, /rh/ in English). But
all languages operate with a finite number of phonemes which can
then be combined to form words. Language is thus no longer seen as a

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