Questão 3169243

Attention! Questions from 44 and 45 are based on Text 06.

Text 06 – Levels of Language (Variation).

People tend to believe that a language is a rather simple thing, if only because every healthy

human being speaks one, and thus we believe we know everything that needs to be known. But this

is only true if we accept “knowing” to mean subconscious, internalized knowledge – as soon as we

try to spell out the rules that we apply without thinking we run into all kinds of problems (if this weren’t

05 the case engineers would have developed the Perfect Speech Computer decades ago, a machine

allowing us to translate anything into any other language without loss of information).

Just an example: English allows the structures believe in a miracle and hand in a paper, and they

look very similar (verb+in+a+noun). Why, then, can you say believe in it but not *hand in it (note that

the preceding asterisk by convention marks a structure which is not permitted under the

10 subconscious rules of a language), and hand it in but not *believe it in? You are more likely to know

an answer if you are a second-language speaker of English who has learned such a rule at some

point, and less so if as a native speaker you just apply any rule perfectly well (and in that sense of

course you “know” it perfectly well, subconsciously) but could not spell it out explicitly.

So, to sum up our insights so far: there are rules in language, but these rules have to be

15 understood as shared habits in a speech Community and as subconscious knowledge on how to

encode and decode information with sound sequences; and these regularities are not of the

quasimathematical, one-to-one kind (such that one “thought” would allow exactly one form of

expression., and no more) but are rather fuzzy, permiting choices.

From: English Around the World (Cambridge Introductions to the English Language). P. 19 (topic 2.2) Kindle

Book. At https://ler.amazon.com.br/?asin=B088TFZHRD&ref_=kwl_kr_iv_rec_1.

According to general beliefs people tend to have when concerning what a language is, text 06 points out that: