人们聚在一起,无论做什么总离不了说话。我们生活在语言的世界里。我们对家人说话,对亲属说话,对朋友说话,对同事说话，我们还对陌生人说话。我们面对面地说话,我们在电话里说话，我们回答问题时还要说话。电视机和收音机在言语的海洋里起着推波助澜的作用。除了睡觉之外,我们很少有不说话的时候，我们甚至在睡梦中也会说话。有些人在睡眠中会大声说话。我们还会自言自语,有时对宠物说话,有时则对自己说话。我们是这个星球上唯一能说话的动物。

拥有语言，确切说是拥有创造性的语言，较之任何其他属性更能将人类同其他动物区别开来。要理解人就必须理解那种使我们成为人的语言。

Whatever else people do when they come together, they talk. We live in a world of language. We talk to our family members, our relatives, our friends, our colleagues and total strangers. We talk face to face and over the telephone, and respond with more talk. Television and radio further swell this torrent of words. Hardly a moment of our waking lives is free from words, and even in our dreams we talk. Some of us talk aloud in our sleep. We also talk when there is no one to answer. Sometimes we talk to our pets and sometimes to ourselves. We are the only animals on the planet of Earth that talk.

The possession of language, or rather, the language with a creative aspect, more than any other attribute, distinguishes humans from other animals. To understand our humanity we must understand the language that makes us human.

懂一种语言使你可以说这种语言,你说的话也可以被其他懂这种语言的人听懂。这意昧着你能够发出表示某种概念或意义的声音，能够听懂或解释其他人发出的声音。因此，懂得一种语言不仅指了解这种语言包含了哪些语音，还指了解语音与意义的关系。

你如果不懂某种语言，别人用这种语言对你说话时发出的声音你基本上无法理解，这是因为大部分语音与语义之间的关系是任意确定的。

When you know a language, you can speak and be understood by others who know that language. This means you have the capacity to produce sounds that signify certain concepts or meanings and to understand or interpret the sounds produced by others. Therefore, knowing a language does not only mean knowing what sounds are in that language, but also means knowing how to relate sounds and meanings.

If you do not know a certain language, the sounds spoken to you will be mainly incomprehensible, because the relationship between speech sounds and the meanings they represent is, for the most part, an arbitrary one.

懂得一种语言你就能遣词造句。懂得一种语言意味着你能够说出前人未说过的话,也能听懂在此之前无人说过的话。语言学家称这种能力为语言运用的创造属性。

懂得一种语言包括懂得哪些句子在某种场合中使用是怡当的。这就是说,，语言的使用受到场合或上下文的约束。当一个人对另外一个人说话时，他或她会根据不同的对象使用不同的词汇和语气。当一个人说出一句话时，同样这句话在不同的场合、对不同的听众可以包含不同的内容。

Knowing a language enables you to combine words to form phrases, and phrases to form sentences. Knowing a language means being able to produce new sentences never spoken before and to understand sentences never heard before. Linguists refer to this ability as the creative aspect of language use.

Knowing a language includes knowing what sentences are appropriate in a particular situation. That is to say, language use is situation-dependent or context-dependent. When one speaks to someone else, he or she may use different words and tones to different people. When one utters a sentence, this same sentence may mean different things in different situations and to different audiences.

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