Empowerment and Social Justice - Research Paper Example

Language scholars define language in varied ways, view it from diverse perspectives, and theorise it differently; yet understanding them as a whole provides a deeper understanding of language as they have complemented each other and have laid down a broader framework to study language especially in today’s globalised world.“Languages are the best mirror of the human mind” (Leibniz 1951, cited in Chomsky 1986: 1). People utter what they think. Their word choice and the sounds they produce to form the words reflect the linguistic knowledge stored in their minds.

Even in instances where they choose to hide what they truly want to say, the way they say it still reflects what they think. For example, when a person chooses to flatter someone, he/she would choose words he/she knew corresponds to what he/she thinks and would say it the way he/she thinks that person would be flattered. You tell an age-conscious person that he/she looks younger because you think that would flatter him/her since the word ‘younger’ is the opposite of the word ‘older’, thus, younger would be pleasant to the age-conscious person.

In this context language is a ‘mental structure’ composed of the ‘system of signs’, such as, the ‘signified’ (the concept) and the ‘signifier’ (the ‘sound image’ or more exactly, the sound’s ‘psychological imprint’), by which union creates a ‘sign’ — the ‘basic linguistic unit’. However, that which unites ‘signified’ and ‘signifier’ together into a ‘sign’ differs in every language, because of language, as ‘a means of communication’, is socially contextualized giving it its ‘social nature’ – one of the ‘inner characteristics’ of language.

Since the signifiers that languages possess and the concepts they signify vary from language to language, thought, therefore, is dependent on language.