ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the properties and features of language. Language has always been an object of central concern within the Western intellectual tradition. owed to the categories of 'noun', 'verb', 'adjective' and so on, along with concepts like gender, tense, number and case, to ancient Greek scholars including Plato and Aristotle. Linguistics' next major step forward occurred at the hands of Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure argues the firm distinction between the historical development of language, and language as it exists at any moment in historical time. Saussure also argued that there must exist two separate forms of linguistics: diachronic linguistics, concerned with language history and language change, and synchronic linguistics, concerned with language as it exists at any moment in time, including the present. The chapter discusses the psychological reality as separate aspects of language processing, but as with prosody and paralanguage, or syntax and semantics according to Noam Chomsky psycholinguistic theories.
