Study plan
4-Lesson Learning Path: What Is Language?
Create a short 4-lesson learning path from the indexed study content, centered on [What Is Language? — Chapter 1](material:63), using only genuine study material and excluding reference/instructions documents as teaching content.
Lessons in this plan
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1
Foundations: What counts as human language?
Identify core properties that distinguish human language from other communication systems, including discreteness, displacement, productivity, and duality of patterning.
- 2 Language, animal communication, and sign language Compare human language with animal communication and evaluate the chapter’s evidence from the Washoe and Nim case studies, while recognizing that sign languages share key structural features of spoken languages.
- 3 What is grammar? Rules, varieties, and grammaticality Explain grammar as a system of phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic rules; distinguish descriptive from prescriptive grammar; and describe how language varieties and dialects relate to mutual intelligibility.
- 4 How language is studied: universal grammar and modern linguistics Summarize the chapter’s introduction to universal grammar, Noam Chomsky’s influence on generative grammar, and major subfields used in the scientific study of language today.