THE LIFE AND GROWTH OF LANGUAGE: AN OUTLINE OF LINGUISTIC SCIENCE

About the Book:-Language may be briefly and comprehensively defined as the means of expression of human thought. In a wider and freer sense everything that bodies forth thought and makes it apprehensible in whatever way, is called language. Man is the sole possessor of language. It is true that a certain degree of power of communication, sufficient for the infinitely restricted needs of their gregarious intercourse, is exhibited also by some of the lower animals. Thus the dog’s bark and howl signify by their difference and each by its various style and tone, very different things; the domestic fowl has a song of quiet enjoyment of life, a clutter of excitement and alarm, a cluck of maternal anticipation or care, a cry of warning and so on. But these are not only greatly inferior in their degree to human language; they are also so radically diverse in kind from it that the same name cannot justly be applied to both language is one of the most marked and conspicuous, as well as fundamentally characteristic of the faculties of man.