The Origin of Language

Aristotle defined language as an activity that links sound and meaning, and requires therefore the coordination of two distinct systems: a phonetic system that receives and produces sounds (the sensory-motor component of language) and a cognitive system that gives meaning to sounds (the semantic component of language). Modern linguistics has underlined that a third essential component of language is syntax, the set of rules that all combinations of sounds must follow in order to be accepted as valid linguistic expressions.