Language is a means by which a group of people communicate.  It is made up of a complex system of signs where the signs are represented by either sounds or symbols in the form of letters; when put together, these symbols create words and words are then combined to create sentences.  Language is unique to groups of people in terms of its phonological, semantic, and syntactic systems and it arouses meaning in a person when these different systems combined are understood (DeVito, 2005; Beck et al., 2005).

For more information on language acquisition and application, visit Language and Culture: An Introduction to Human Communication.

Walker Percy's novel, The Moviegoer, incorporates the concept of linguistics and the role it plays in the life of Binx Bollings, a man who embarks on a "search" to find some kind of meaning.  Below is an extract taken from a paper I wrote that provides an example of how Percy plays with language and its role in the life of an individual.

   "Binx seeks to perceive the world in a different way in order to discover the meaning of his existence; he initially does so by obsessively watching movies and applying scenes from films to the reality of life.  When this does not satisfy him, he moves on in his exploration and engages in his search.   According to essayist, Rufus McCain, Binx stabilizes the concept of his search by first understanding the meaning of signs and words.  McCain draws upon Percy’s “favorite emblem” of language (Helen Keller) to emphasize the idea of how the system of signs works in life: “Percy’s protagonists ‘come to themselves,’ begin to see their predicament and catch a glimpse of that mysterious life which Helen discovered at the well-house” (4).  Like Helen comes to understand the names associated with certain sensual objects, characters in Percy’s novels assign and accept names, yet in doing so struggle with freedom and become limited by the world around them (McCain 6).  This problem for Percy is compared by McCain to Adam and Eve; the first humans on earth were tempted with transcending the world of fixed names and attaining a god-like perspective in how they view reality (5).  Similarly, the reason Binx begins his search is so that he can transcend the “everydayness” of his life and embark on a quest in which he comes to realize his pursuit of the sacramental (McCain 7).  He no longer wants to be stuck in the stabilization of the “Little Way,” which he describes as “not the big search for the big happiness but the sad little happiness of drinks and kisses, a good little car and a warm deep thigh” (Percy 135-136).  Rather that remain in his present state, Binx searches for something that will sever the ties that the system of signs has imposed on him and attempt to go back to his childhood roots of religion."