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Introduction- The way humans communicate and share ideas and concepts in society is complex. How are ideas conceptualized -- how are they explained -- how does discourse relate- and how do humans understand messages -- what is true about language- what is not? These are just some of the issues surrounding theories of language acquisition and development. However, a full review of all current linguistic theories is out of the realm of this paper, thus we will concentrate on a single theory of language acquisition. First, though, it is useful to understand the basic themes of theoretical linguistics, a branch of the science of speech concerned with the way humans use core factors of language, and how those core precepts are developed within a particular culture. Regardless of the language grouping, human languages have three major commonalties: articulation (the production of speech sounds, sometimes including non-verbal cues); perception (the way human ears respond to speech and how the brain analyzes the messages and; acoustics (physical characteristics of sound like color, volume, amplitude, and frequency) (Ottenheimer 2006 34-47). As one might imagine, scholars and philosophers all have different ideas on the theoretical constructs of the way humans acquire, develop, and utilize language. Even ancient philosophers like Plato had thoughts on whether children were born with an innate sense of meaning already inside their brain, or whether it was social interaction that caused different skills to be forthcoming. For Plato, not knowing or understanding the various language families, much of learning was relearning -- children were born with an innate sense of the world and just needed practice "remembering" how to communicate (Tomasello 2008). After the Renaissance, and into the Age of Enlightenment, philosophers like Hobbes and Locke argued that knowledge (of which language is an essential determiner for them) emerged from the senses (Harrison 2002).
Noam Chomsky, and other linguistic scholars, believe that human language is the sense of that language -- and culture. French, for instance, is a historical, social and political notion that is expressed linguistically as well. Thus, commonalties in culture (e.g. The French, English, Italian, Swiss, etc.) are amended by language -- in this case, the commonalties of linguistic structure as opposed to the way Chinese would not be common to French; either in language or in human culture (Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis 2003). In the late 1950s, however, psychologist B.F. Skinner took past theories and formulated a newer approach -- the behaviorist theory of language acquisition. In his 1957 book, Verbal Behavior, Skinner postulated that language was divisible into units and that was acquired through both repetition and reinforcement; it was a later step to move from repeating a word, "tree" for example, to understanding that the spoken and written words form a shorthand for an object; and that object need not be identical each time (e.g. The cognition that there is one general word for tree, but hundreds of examples) (Skinner 1992).
Some linguists embraced the theory, indicating that while it was incomplete, it did help explain some of the commonalties of linguistic behavior across cultures, and was at least a way to understand one of the aspects of language acquisition and development. Others, however, saw behaviorism as deconstruction in the worst sense; a way to look at only one small part of language, to ascribe only physical nuances and characteristics to something far more complex, and to simply take "old experimental psychology," dress it up with a new bit of frosting for theory, and supply the operative word "conditioning' in order to establish the veracity of linguistic culture (Carroll (ed.) 1956, 41). However, the very basis of this issue goes beyond just acquisition, and asks us to define the basis of usable linguistic theory in reference to robust discourse.
Definition of Discourse -- Discourse analysis, or discourse studies, is a broad term for a rubric of approaches to written, spoken, or signed language and the way the participants interact. The object of discourse analysis -- discourse, writing, talking, conversation -- really any communicative event, are typically defined much like basic linguistic phenomena -- patterns of sentences, propositions, speech acts, etc. However, contrary to much of traditional linguistics, discourse analysis not only focuses on the study of language use beyond sentence structure, it also works with naturally occurring language, and has relevance in a variety of social science fields (Blommaert 2005).
Discourse analysis is not so much a single defining "noun," but more a way of approaching linguistics -- a template, if you will, as a research method to thinking...
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