Abel - The Functions of Language

1. The functions of language are cognitive ("language transmits information"), expressive ("when we attend to the words themselves and to their atmosphere"), and performatory ("they are themselves the sole instrument of the action").
2. Each boy in the story has a different interpretation of what the visitor wants him to describe, based solely on the finger pointing and the question "What is this?"
3. "The inscrutability of reference" is the inevitable confusion that comes from trying to get to definitions of language from pointing to things, etc. When someone is trying to learn a new definition, it is hard to know if they are seeing the right characteristics of the situation being referred to in defining it.
4. He means that words that are merely spoken and written down mean nothing, but when applied to a community that has a language and puts a meaning to each word, they mean much more and it is hard to make them mean something else when a meaning has already been assigned.
5. "An animal utters a fixed number of signals, each of which is associated with a specific behavior or situation" whereas humans learn and create language. It isn't restricted to communicating information. They can accommodate to new situations and create "an infinite number of new sentences."
6. Chomsky argues that everyone, regardless of the language spoken, knows certain language structures and thus they were not learned. These innate structures provide a basis for language learning, so every human has the ability to learn language.
7. Abel doesn't agree with Chomsky. He argues language universals don't exist, which is the basis for Chomsky's argument.
8. I don't think an infant with nobody around him and only a radio for a language source would learn to speak. He might be able to parrot things, like phrases that he heard often, but without human interactions to lend meaning to the words, the language would be nothing but sounds.
9. Since Abel says language is a learned skill, it is just another behavior that makes humans unique. Our language is partly instinctual and partly learned.
10. He is talking about the social norms that we all follow by a certain vague instinct. We can tell what is socially acceptable most of the time, but Abel says that we cannot fully express these pressures and feelings of what is "proper."