Unit 1 & 2

Human language develops spontaneously in infancy, from the third year onwards, thanks to the biological and psychological capacities of the child and his or her interaction with the linguistic and social environment.

• True

• False

Language consists of a structured set of signs and formal rules of combination (code) that make it possible to create finite grammatical sentences from an infinite number of basic units.

• True

• False

The main characteristics of the communicative function of language are arbitrariness and referential displacement.

• True

• False

Analysing language as a specialised and complex behaviour or activity implies considering the subject as a user of language, who knows a certain system of signs (formal dimension) that allows him/her to develop actions on the environment (functional dimension) through processes of production and comprehension (behavioural dimension).

• True

• False

As a sign system, any language can be described in semantic (sign-object), syntactic (sign-sign) and pragmatic (sign-context) terms.

• True

• False

Human verbal language is composed of non-arbitrary signs that acquire their meanings through social conventions.

• True

• False

Language is a semiotic mediating instrument, i.e. a way of using signs to communicate and/or represent something other than them (referent).

• True

• False

Charles Sanders Peirce, the main detractor of today's semiotics or science of signs, differentiated between index, icon and symbol as sign features.

• True

• False

The thirdness or triadic relationship is the characteristic by which object, mediating sign and interpreting thought are not related.

• True

• False

The icon maintains a relationship with the referent it represents based on spatio-temporal contiguity.

• True

• False

Answer explanation

Icon: What links the object with the sign is its resemblance