An Introductory Course In General Linguistics PDF

MINISTRY OF HIGHER EDUCATION AND SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH UNIVERSITY OF BAGHDAD COLLEGE OF EDUCATION FOR WOMEN DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AN INTRODUCTORY COURSE IN GENERAL LINGUISTICS BY YASMIN HIKMET ABDUL HAMEED Re-Printed by Someone Wishing Best For You NOVEMBER, 1998 400.7 Y29 Yasmin Hikmet Abdul Hameed An Introductory course In General Linguistics by Yasmin Hikmet Abdul Hameed. – Baghdad: University of Baghdad, 1998. 128p. ; 28 cm. 1.languages – study and teaching I. Title 321 / 1999 )‫المكتبة الوطنية (الفهرسة اثناء النشر‬ 3111 ‫ لسنة‬123 ‫رقم االيداع في دار الكتب والوثائق في بغداد‬ ‫ بغداد‬/ ‫مديرية دار الكتب للطباعة والنشر‬ CHAPTER ONE 1. Introduction In recent years, one of the fastest expanding fields of the study has been general linguistics – the scientific study of language. It tries to answer the basic questions: What is Language? and How does language work?. Linguistic science has developed very rapidly in the last fifty years. Hundreds of books on the subject have been published. Courses in linguistic science are very common in colleges and universities. Students of language and literature are now required to take a variety of courses in linguistics. Even students in such fields as sociology, education and anthropology are advised to take courses in linguistics because of the interrelationship that exists among these areas of study. Linguistic science has also influenced foreign language textbooks. No language book is considered to be of any value if it is not based on some of the findings of modern linguistics. In addition, no language teacher can escape linguistic science if he is expected to do his job effectively and on scientific basis. 1.1. Linguistics as a Scientific Study of Language General linguistics means the scientific study of language. As with other branches of knowledge and scientific study, linguistics must be studied in two ways: 1. In relation to other sciences outside itself, and 2. In the different branches within itself. Moreover, linguistics performs two tasks: 1 1. It is concerned with the study of particular languages as ends in themselves, in order to be able to produce complete and accurate descriptions of them. 2. It also studies languages as means to a further end, in order to be able to obtain information about the nature of language in general. 1.1.1. Linguistics as a Science Language is considered worthy of learned attention as a regular body of facts and theory is built up around it. As an empirical science, linguistics operates with publicly verified data obtained by means of observation and experiment. The aim of following a scientific procedure in studying language is to present an analysis in such a way that every part of it can be tested and verified not only by the linguist himself, but also by anyone else who chooses to refer to it or to make a description of his own based on the same principles. What is required in this respect is empirical evidence and sound justifications to support one's findings or theories. The purpose of linguistics is to examine the material and to make general statements about its various elements that relate to regular rules. It is also an empirical and practical science, since the material it deals with can be observed with the senses. For example, speech can be heard, the movement of the speech organs can be seen and felt or with the aid of instruments; and writing can be seen and read. Note: Linguistics may be said to be at the centre of all other branches of knowledge as being the study of the tool (language) that they most use to talk about their subject matters. 2 1.1.1.1. The Scientific Procedure followed in Studying Any Science including Linguistics A scientific study is one that is based on: a) The systematic investigation of the data conducted with reference to some general theory of language structure. b) Direct object observations. Observation of events prier to the setting up of a hypothesis which is then carefully investigated via systematic description or experimentation and a theory developed. This is a standard procedure in linguistics as in other sciences. c) A scientific study is also concerned with the formulation of sound theoretical principles and clear and consistent terminology. d) In order to be acceptable, a theory must be:  Exhaustive, i.e., one which accounts for all the facts (adequate treatment of all the relevant material which should be complete).  Economical, i.e., one which is as simple and straightforward as possible. In other words, a shorter statement or analysis employing fewer terms is to be preferred to one which is longer or more involved.  Consistent, i.e., one in which there are no internal contradictions. The material should show agreement between its different parts. As a result of applying these criteria, i.e., the steps of the scientific procedure, a linguist is expected to achieve the greatest possible degree objectivity in his description. This objectivity, to some extent, gives linguistics the status of a science and leads us to expect that modern linguistic studies will provide particular accurate information about language structure. 3 1.2. Macrolinguistics VS. Microlinguistics Macrolingustics Prelinguistics Metalinguistics Phonetics Microlinguistics Phonology Grammar Semantics Macrolinguistics refers to the whole study of language. It is divided into three main subfields including: a) Prelinguistics: whose primary subject matter is phonetics. A term in the 1950 to refer to articulatory and acoustic phonetics as opposed to phonology. Also, it is concerned with all types of human communcation including the pre-linguistic phenomena such as miming, gestures and other paralinguistic features and other problems of cultural behaviour. b) Microlinguistics: which is a branch of Macrolinguistics referring to what may be called the 'central core' of language study, i.e., the areas of phonology, grammar and semantics. c) Metalinguistics: whose subject matter is the relationship between language and all extra-linguistic features or communicative behaviour including sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics and communication theory and other widely diverse fields of macrolinguistics such as speech pathology, lexiography, historical linguistics, etc. 4 1.3. The Scope of Linguistics General linguistics covers a wide range of topics and its boundaries are difficult to define. A diagram in the shape of a wheel gives a rough impression of the range covered. In the centre is phonetics – the study of human speech sounds. A good knowledge of phonetics is essential for a linguist. We must have knowledge of phonetics before studying linguistics. Phonology – the study of the sound systems of languages; Grammar – the study of the language structure comprising: (a) morphology – the 5 study of the word structure and (b) syntax – the study of the sentence structure; and Semantics – the study of meaning in a language, are the bread and better of linguistics. In other words, they form the core of linguistic study that deals with the internal structure of language. Semantics is placed outside phonology and grammar, because of its closer connection with the external world. Around this central core are the various branches of linguistics, which are being rapidly developed at the present time such as sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, etc. Adjacent to those branches, but outside the circle, are the disciplines to which these branches of linguistics are most closely connected. 1.4. Linguistics and Other Disciplines 1.4.1. Psycholinguistics This science is concerned with the influence of psychological matters on language use and learning. It is the sub-field of linguistics whose goal is to discover the psychological principles that underlie the ability of humans to comprehend, produce and acquire language (e.g., the first language acquisition). It is concerned with the study of human behaviour and language. Its main interest is the relation between language and thinking. 1.4.2. Sociolinguistics It has attracted great interest in the recent years because of the way in which its concerns relate to contemporary social problems. It is the science concerned with the influence of social matters on language use and learning (accent, dialect, behavior, morals and clothes). In other words, it is a branch of linguistics which studies all aspects of the relationship language and society. It deals with the study of such matters 6 as the linguistic identity of social groups (such as the language of minority group like the language of immigrants), social attitudes to language, formal and informal, standard and non-standard forms of language, the patterns and needs of national language use, social varieties and levels of language (the way language varies between people of different regional, social and professional backgrounds, the difference between male and female language and so on). 1.4.3. Philosophical Linguistics A little-developed branch of linguistics which studies, on the one hand, the role of language in relation to the understanding and explanation of philosophical concepts and, on the other hand, the philosophical status of linguistic theories, methods and observations, e.g., philosophical grammar (national grammar as opposed to descriptive grammar) and in semantics, it studies things like the truth conditions and linguistics, language and logic, etc. 1.4.4. Anthropological Linguistics Anthropology is the science of beginning, developments, customs and beliefs of Mankind. Anthropological Linguistics is a branch of linguistics which studies language variation and use in relation to the cultural patterns and beliefs of man as investigated using the theories and methods of anthropology, e.g., it studies the way in which linguistic features may identify a member of a community (usually primitive) with a social, religious, occupational or kinship group. 1.4.5. Stylistics Traditionally, stylistic analysis has been mainly concerned with analysis of literary style or the language variety characteristic of a writer. More recently, emphasis has been shifted to the linguistic description of 7 the utterance itself in terms of its components and characteristic deviations from the standard language and other studies. In its most general sense, stylistics refers to the application of linguistic techniques to the study of particular kinds of language current within a given speech community such as the language of science, of law, of religion, of literature or the language of different social classes. There are many different 'varieties' or 'styles' of language that we use in the appropriate situations. Stylistics studies which variety of speech or writing is appropriate to which situation and tries to develop our awareness and control of these variations. It shows us what is going on in a particular use of language. 1.4.6. Language Teaching It concerns all educational theory and practice including instruction in both the native language and the foreign language. Traditionally, languages were taught by grammar-translation method and by reading literature. Recently, there has been a trend towards increased and more efficient modern language teaching. Contemporary methods concentrate more on the practice of actual skills such as comprehension, conversation, speaking, reading, etc. These days a great deal of attention is paid to the communicative aspects in teaching. 1.4.7. Applied Linguistics Applied linguistics refers to the application of linguistic methodology, techniques of analysis and research findings to some non- linguistic fields. Linguistics, in this sense, is thus very much a means to some end, rather than an end in itself. This term has been used mainly as a synonym with foreign language teaching, but several other fields of application have emerged in recent years. These include the linguistic analysis of language disorder (clinical 8 linguistics), the use of language in mother tongue education (Educational Linguistics) and development in lexicography (the art and science of dictionary making) and translation. There are many such fields and there is still much work to be done. 1.4.8. Communication Engineering A branch of linguistics which deals with the application of the information theory to communication, i.e., the passing of messages from a source to receiver via a channel. 1.4.9. Ethnolinguistics The study of language in relation to culture-taking 'culture' in the sense in which it is used in anthropology and more generally in the social sciences (here culture presupposes society and society in turn depends on culture). 1.4.10. Mathematical Linguistics Refers to a number of applications of mathematical models and procedures to linguistic studies. It begins with the counting of linguistic units such as phonemes or vocabulary items. 1.4.11. Computational Linguistics A branch of language studies which applies computer techniques to linguistic and literary research, e.g., in word-frequency counts and other fields requiring statistical analysis, such as machine translation and speech recognition. 1.5. The Uses, Applications and Advantages of Linguistics There are various applications and advantages that one could point to concerning linguistic study: 9 1.5.1. Machine Translation It refers to the automatic production of a translation by computer or similar machine. The machine programme must contain rules to analyze the original text in the source language and to find grammatical and lexical equivalents contained in its dictionary store, and to synthesis a new version of the original text in the target language. Fully automatic high-quality translation has proved a very difficult and expensive operation, but research in this field has contributed to progress in linguistic analysis. 1.5.2. Telecommunication in Its Many Forms Phonetics is extremely important in the field of telephone transmission. It costs money to send voices along wires, and if one can cut down on the amount of voice which needs to be transmitted, there would be a very great saving. The linguistic problem is therefore to determine which features of speech are essential for acceptability and which are not. Thus, many researches on this work are still going on. 1.5.3. Linguistic Information and Mechanical Techniques Many applications of linguistic information to mechanical techniques can be seen such as: a. A new kind of 'visual-deaf-aid' could be produced using information obtained from acoustic phonetics, b. Another machine is called a 'sound spectrograph' which can produce a picture of speech sounds, though this picture is very complex and difficult to read. Thus, different sounds could be produced as a series of easily recognizable shapes. Then, one can turn speech directly into a kind of writing. One can speak into 11 microphone and the picture of what one says comes on to the screen. Deaf people once they had learnt this new 'alphabet' would then be able to read the speech directly. Note: It has been claimed that the pictures of speech produced by the sound spectrograph contain information which will allow us, if trained, to identify the speakers. It is claimed that it is possible to pick out from ten sentences spoken by five people which sentences were produced by the same people. Some courts in the USA have accepted evidence based on information derived from these pictures of speech (or voiceprints) on the analogy of fingerprints. 1.5.4. Linguistics and Speech Pathology A rapidly developing relationship exists between linguistics and the field of speech pathology. There are many kinds of language disorder involving both the way in which we produce speech and the way in which we receive and comprehend it. Before any kind of therapy, there must be a clear picture of exactly what the linguistic deficiency is, and how far removed it is from normality. Is it a disorder of a phonetic, phonological, grammatical or sematic nature or some combination of these? Linguists do not attempt to do the therapists job. They simply try to put at their disposal precise information about the linguistic state they are trying to help their patients to achieve. 11 1.5.5. The Advantages of Linguistics Apart from the fields and applications of linguistics, one could make a very long list of possible careers for those trained in linguistics who have specialized in modern languages. These can be listed below: a. Most of the branches of the Civil Service (esp. the Diplomatic services). b. The British Council and other bodies concerned with international relations and exchange (public relations in general). c. The tourist industry. d. Public Administration (esp. in Education). e. International Organizations (UNESCO) f. Port authorities, commerce, banking and insurance. g. Export industries and overseas companies. h. Advertising. i. Mass media concerns (broadcasting and journalism in particular). j. Engineering, computing (the potential link between human language and the notion of a programming language). k. The hotel and catering industry. l. The armed forces. m. Telephone and telegraph organizations. n. Professional translating and interpreting. o. Travel agencies, libraries, large department stores, and of course, all kinds of secretarial work. There are jobs in all these fields for people with a good knowledge of one or more modern foreign languages who have the ability to learn foreign language. 12 CHAPTER TWO A Brief History of England and the English Language Two thousand years ago, the country we now call England was Britain-occupied by the Celtic race known Britons who spoke a Celtic language that has survived in present-day Wales, parts of Scotland and Ireland. Britain was invaded and conquered by the Romans in AD 43 and remained part of the Roman Empire until the decline of the State of Rome in about AD 450. Very soon Britain was invaded again and conquered by the Angles and Saxons. They drove out and killed the Britons, so that Britain became the land of the Angles (Angle-land or England). The language spoken was now Anglo-Saxon or Old English (an extremely complicated grammatical language), but for many centuries, there were different dialects in different parts of the country. There were two further invasions of England: (a) The Danes came, raided, settled and were finally absorbed into the English race. (b) Another branch of those Danes (Northern of the Vikings) settled in Nor(th)mandy and become French as the centuries passed by. It was those Normans that last invaded England beating the English in 1066. Their Duke became King William I of England. French became the official language of the country and remained so far about 300 years after the Norman conquest (until nearly the end of the 14th century). With the Normans ruling England, there were three languages in the country: a. Most of the population of about two million people spoke their own tongue or language (English) adding a few words from their Norman overlords. 13 b. Also, there were the Norman Nobles, the land owners, officials and courtiers at that time who naturally spoke French. c. There were a number of scholars as in all European countries who could speak Latin. On the basis of the above discussion, we may divide English into three kinds: old, middle, and modern. 1. Before AD 450 Celtic 2. AD 450 to 1150 Old English (Anglo-Saxon) 3. AD 1150 to 1500 Middle English 4. AD 1500 onwards Modern English 2.1. Diachronic Vs. Synchronic Study of Language The term diachronic is one of the main temporal dimensions of linguistic investigation introduced by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure in which languages are studied from the point of view of their historical development, e.g., the changes which have taken place between Old and Modern English could be described in phonological, grammatical and semantic terms. Linguistics is not to be viewed as a historical study of language. Comparative Philology is a branch of historical linguistic studies. It deals with the comparison of the characteristics of different languages or different states of a language through history. It compares the various forms of related languages and attempts to reconstruct the mother language from which they all developed. It starts with the discovery of the similarities between Ancient Sanskrit and other languages of the Indo- European family such as Classical Greek and Latin (the emphasis is on language change through history). 14 Synchronic (non-historical descriptive studies) was carried out in the first half of the 20th century as a reaction to the historical studies which were valid in the 18th and 19th century. Here languages are studied at a given time, i.e., one describes a state of the language disregarding whatever changes might be taking place. It refers to an approach to linguistic studies in which the forms of one or more languages are investigated at one particular stage of their development. This is the approach followed by modern linguists. A descriptive linguist is like a photographer who petrifies a group of people in a certain position regardless of what went before and after the taking of the picture. The following diagram (introduced by De Sassure) represents the diachronic and synchronic approaches to language study: C Historical Diachronic A B Synchronic D In this diagram, A – B is a synchronic static axis (at rest). It can be intersected at any point with C – D the moving axis representing the diachronic studies. 15 2.1.1. Languages Families Historical studies of languages flourished in the 18th century in Europe. These studies revealed certain similarities among the languages studied in Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, etc. The comparative historical studies of language began in 1786. The founder of these studies was 'Sir William Jones'. The similarities were found in phonology, grammar and to some extent in vocabulary as seen in the example below: English Latin Greek Sanskrit Ten Decem deka dasa Two duo duo dva Heart cordia kardia hrd In the above example, initial and final /t/ in English corresponds to the /d/ in other languages. The sound that occurs in some position in words of one language appears in the same relative position in semantically similar words of the other languages. Whereas these three languages have preserved an original /d/, speakers of English through history have changed the pronunciation of their /d/ into /t/. These findings encouraged the historical linguist to group such languages together in families. Such a grouping assumes that these related languages descended from a parent language known as 'the proto-language' which covers centuries underwent changes in its systems attributed to its diversification into several dialects. So, these languages in their turn underwent similar changes and other languages appeared. The largest language family today is the Indo-European family of languages of which English is one branch. It is called so, because it includes languages spoken in India and Iran, like Sanskrit and the Indo- Iranian languages, in addition to many European languages. 16 The Indo-European family consists of eight main branches, as shown in the diagram below: Daughter Languages Proto language Indo-European (Descendants) (Parent Language Greek Armenian Latin Albanian Celtic Indo-Iranian Sanskrit Germanic Slavonic It is the Germanic branch which concerns us here for English descended from it. It is divided into three language groups. These are: West Germanic, North Germanic and East Germanic. Each of these is subdivided into other languages as the following diagram shows: 17 Germanic North West Germanic Germanic Danish Icelandic Dutch Flemish Swedish Gutnish Frisian Low German Anglo Saxon Norwegian Old High German High German English East Germanic Burgundian Vandal Gothic 18 2.2. The difference Between a Linguist and a Language Teacher A linguist is not a language teacher. He is a person who studies languages scientifically and empirically. He needs not to be fluent in languages or speaks many languages (i.e., polyglottism or multilingualism which refers to individuals, communities, manuscripts, books, inscriptions and dictionaries using several languages). Rather, a linguist must be able to talk about a language, how does it work and the differences between one language and another. He must have an analytic state of mind towards all kinds of things which take place in language. He must have a wide experience of different types of languages. It is more important for him to be able to analyse and explain linguistic phenomena such as the Turkish vowel system, German verbs and Arabic parts of speech. He is a skilled objective observer. A linguist is likened to a musicologist who could analyse a piano concerto by pointing out theme, variations, harmony, but he needs not play the concerto himself. He leaves that to the concert pianist. A linguist is not a language teacher, because teaching and learning a foreign language is based on: 1. Teachers who are interested in methods of teaching a foreign language which is not their native. So, teachers are not linguists, but people belong to education. 2. As long as those teachers are not linguists even if they speak several languages, they would not be qualified to be called linguists, because they use rules of their own to teach the language. This means they reflect themselves in their teaching - a process based on subjective judgment. 3. Any process of analysing and describing a language should be based on direct objective observation which these teachers lack. 19 2.3. The Differences Between a Linguist and a Literary Critic A linguist is not a literary critic although both of them deal with language in use, but at entirely different levels. Linguists are interested in studying the kind of language used in literary texts, but this does not turn them into critics. Dealing with language in use, linguists: a. are concerned with describing the facts of the utterances to see what patterns of sound, grammar and vocabulary are being used, and in what proportions and to explain why one method of expression has been chosen rather than another. b. are not trying to evaluate the language in terms of aesthetic, moral or other critical standards, and c. tell us how the writer uses and manipulates the language to produce an effect on the reader, whereas a critic is the one who tells us whether one literary work is good or bad – the thing that requires non-linguistic judgments. Studying an author's language requires two distinct operations: 1. Evaluating their effect on the readers (the job of a literary critic). 2. Identifying and describing the prominent linguistic features of the utterance (the job of a linguist). 2.4. Elocution Lessons are not Part of Linguistic Studies The comparison is between elocution (the art or style of speaking well especially in public) and phonetics, which is a prerequisite for linguistic studies. Both activities are closely connected with the nature of speech sounds, their articulation and reception. Elocution, on the other hand, studies speech sounds with the aim of improving their quality in the light of some social and aesthetic standard. Phonetics, on the other hand, 21 investigates all sounds of human speech objectively whether they confirm to any given social or personal standard or not. In other words, a phonetician provides us with precise description and identification of the speech sounds within a scientific frame, e.g., short /a/ in the word (bath) which is heard in Northern dialects of England is not beautiful or ugly from the view point of a phonetician. This is the job of someone interested in elocution. A phonetician's job is to describe and identify this sound scientifically. 21 CHAPTER THREE 3.1. The History of Linguistics: Greek – Twentieth Century 3.1.1. Greeks Before the 19th century, language in the western world was of interest mainly to philosophers. It is significant that the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle made major contributions to the study of language. The Greek were more interested in the origin of language than in analysing it. They had little systematic knowledge of other languages. Plato was the first person to distinguish between nouns and verbs. In the Hellenistic era (3rd century BC), grammarians in Alexandria (the centre of academic activity at that time) dealt with grammatical matters as tense, mood, case and aspect, i.e., they had special interests in the grammatical categories of nouns and verbs. Also, texts of famous classical Greek authors were studied. 3.1.2. Romans The Romans copied the Greeks exactly in all aspects of linguistics. Varro was called the most learned man of his time. He wrote a twenty five volume work on the Latin Language under the heading Etymology, Morphology and Syntax. The most famous Latin grammars are those by Donatus (AD 400) and Priscian (AD 500) which were used as standard textbooks as late as the Middle Ages. They followed the Greek and introduced a similar speculative approach to language. In their description of Latin, they use Greek terminology and categories with little change. 22 3.1.3. The Middle Ages and After In the Middle Ages, a number of scholars known as speculative grammarians made the most notable contribution to the study of language. Their prime concern was to find the relationship between words and the physical world of object. They believe that grammar is universal, i.e., all grammars are basically the same and only differ superficially. They were also interested in the origin of language, whether or not all languages came from a single source. They believed that Hebrew was Man's original language. 3.1.4. Sir William Jones (1786) and the 19 th C. 1786 was one of the most important dates in the history of linguistics. An Englishman called Sir William Jones pointed out that Sanskrit (the old Indian Language), Greek, Germanic, Latin and Celtic all had structural similarities. He concluded that all these languages sprang from one common source. In the 19th C., linguists concentrated on writing detailed comparative grammars comparing the different grammatical forms of the various members of the Indo-European language family. They focused on written records. The interest was in historical analysis and interpretation. In the last quarter of the century, a group of scholars known as Junggrammatiker (or Young grammarians / Neo grammarians) centered near Leipzing. They investigated the sound change of many Indo- European languages. They thought that sound laws are regular, i.e., they admit no exceptions, i.e., within certain geographical limits and between certain dates, a change of one sound into another in any language would affect in the same way all words containing the sound in the same phonetic environment of other sounds. But these changes cannot be 23 expected to affect all words at the same time. Some words may be subject to the change while others may escape it or are affected by a different change. Older scholars objected this view and pointed out numerous exceptions to these so called laws. 3.1.5. The Twentieth Century and de Saussure (1857-1913) De Saussure is the founder of modern structural linguistics and he was a lecturer in Geneva University. His early work was in philology. In the 19th C., linguists were more interested in historical linguistics (diachronic linguistics). In the 20th C., the emphasis shifted to synchronic/ descriptive studies. De Saussure's central ideas concerning the study of language were expressed in the form of pairs of concepts (dichotomies). These can be illustrated as bellow: 3.1.5.1. Diachronic Vs. Synchronic In a diachronic study, de Saussure sees language as a continually changing medium. In a synchronic approach, he sees it as a living whole existing as a state at a particular moment of time. In this view, it is always necessary to carry out some degree of synchronic work before making a diachronic study, i.e., before we can say how a language has changed from state X to state Y, we need to know something about X and Y. In a synchronic analysis, there is no need to refer to history. Saussure illustrated this using an analogy with a game of chess: If we walk into a room and while a chess game is being played, it is possible to assess the state of the game by studying the position of the pieces on the board. 3.2.5.2. Langage Vs. Langue Vs. Parole Languge is the faculty of speech present in all normal human beings due to heredity-our ability to talk to each other. This faculty is composed 24 of two aspects: langue (language system) and parole (language behaviour) the act of speaking: Langue refers to the abstract knowledge of language (the totality of language). It represents the generalized system of rules and word images stored in the minds of individuals or native speakers. Parole refers to the actual physical utterance. It is the realization of langue in speech. It refers to the actual and concrete act of speaking on the part of a person (a dynamic social activity) in a particular time and place. Langage Langue Parole 'Language System' 'Language Behaviour' 3.1.5.3. Significant Vs. Signifie De Saussure recognized two sides to the study of meaning, but emphasized that the relationship between the two is arbitrary. His labels for the two sides are significant (= the thing that signifies / sound image) and signifie (= the thing signified / concept). De Saussure called the relationship between the two a "linguistic Sign". The sign is the basic unit of communication within a community. Language is seen as a system of signs. Concept Sound Image 25 3.1.5.4. Syntagmatic Vs. Paradigmatic A sentence is a sequence of sings, and each sign contributing something to the meaning of whole. When the signs are seen as a linear sequence, the relationship between them is called syntagmatic. It indicates the horizontal relationship between linguistic elements forming linear sequences in the sentence, as in Syntagmatic She + can + go Come + quickly When a sign is seen as contrasting with other signs in the language, the relationship is called paradigmatic or associative. It refers to the vertical relationship between linguistic signs that might occupy the same particular place in a given structure. These two dimensions of structure can be applied to phonology, vocabulary and any other aspect of language. Each word in a language is in a paradigmatic relationship with a whole set of alternatives. The result is a conception of language as a vast network of interrelated structures and mutually defining entities – a linguistic system. Syntagmatic She + can + go Paradigmatic He + will + come I + may + sit You + might + see 26 According to de Saussure, language is a system of relations. His aim was that he wanted to define language as an object that can be studied scientifically. He pointed out the structural nature of language, the fact that its elements are essentially interlinked. He compared language to a game of chess; it is the relationship of each chessman to other chessmen which is the essence of the game, i.e., the role of each chessman is entirely dependent on the position of the other chessmen on the board. 3.1.6. Bloomfield and the Americans In America, linguistics developed far faster than in Britain. This was due to the presence of numerous American-Indian languages which were fast becoming extinct and scholars rushed to record them before it was too late. The most famous anthropologists, sociologists and linguists were F. Boas and Edward Sapir (whose book Language Written in 1921 is still an excellent introduction to linguistics). Leonard Bloomfield, who also wrote a book entitled Language, initiated a new era in American Linguistics. He emphasized the scientific study of language based on objective systematic observation of data. He was not interested in the study of meaning, but in structure only. Thus, trivial problems of analysis became major issues and linguistics lost touch with other disciplines and became of little interest to anyone outside it. 3.1.7. Chomsky In 1957, linguistics took a new turning when N. Chomsky published a book called Syntactic Structures. It really revolutionized the study of linguistics. He redefined the aims and functions of grammar. Also, he 27 specified the new-type of grammar which is transformational (using transformational rules in its description of language). In this grammar, he added a semantic component saying that meaning should have the same formal treatment as syntax. 3.2. The Branches of General Linguistics General Linguistics Historical Linguistics Comparative Linguistics Descriptive Linguistics Comparative Philology Typology 3.2.1. Historical Linguistics It is the study of the developments of languages in the course of time, of the ways in which languages change from one period to period and of the causes and results of such changes both outside the languages and within them. 3.2.2. Descriptive Linguistics Descriptive linguistics is often regarded as the major part of general linguistics. It is certainly the fundamental aspect of the study of language. As its title suggests, it is concerned with the description and analysis of the ways in which a language operates and is used by a given set of speakers at a given time. 28 3.2.3. Comparative Linguistics It deals with the comparison of two and more different languages from one or more points of view, and more generally, with the theory and techniques applicable to such comparisons. Comparative linguistics is divided into: a) Comparative Philology: a comparison made with a view to inferring historical relationships among particular languages, and b) Typology: a comparison based on resemblance of features between different languages without any historical considerations being involved. It studies the structural similarities between/among languages regardless of their history in an attempt to establish a satisfactory classification of languages. In addition, it studies the classification of languages according to features of phonology, grammar and lexis rather than historical development. 3.2.4. Contrastive Study of Language (Contrastive Analysis) It is a method of linguistic analysis, which shows the differences between two or more languages concerning the grammatical, phonological or semantic level, i.e., it studies the dissimilarities of these languages. It can also be used to identify the differences between units at some levels of analysis in a particular language. For example, in phonology, we see the contrast between English /p/ and /b/ or voiced vs. voiceless. On the grammatical level, there is a difference between inflectional ending and derivational, and on the semantic level, there is a difference between various lexical relations. 29 CHAPTER FOUR Traditional Grammar Vs. Modern Structural Linguistics First of all, we should say that by traditional grammar we mean the Aristotelian orientation towards the nature of language as exemplified in the work of ancient Greeks and Romans, the speculative work of the Medieval and the prescriptive approach of the 18th century grammarians. On the other hand, by linguistics we mean the empirical structural approach to language as represented principally by American linguistics during the period of the early 1940s and mid-1950s. Modern structural linguistics can be said to begin with the publication of Ferdinand de Saussure's lectures under the title of Course in General Linguistics in 1916. Behind de Saussure, stretching back over 2000 years lies the era of traditional grammar. De Saussure was the first person to point out clearly that language was a highly organized structure in which all the elements are interdependent. From him, we date the era of 'structural linguistics'. The term structural linguistics (in its general sense) refers to any linguistic study of a language, which considers it as an independent system of sound features, grammar and vocabulary in its own right. It is sometimes misunderstood. In fact, it does not refer to a separate school or branch of linguistics. Linguistics since de Saussure is structural, as structural in this sense means the recognition that language is a patterned system composed of interdependent elements rather than a collection of unconnected individual items. Misunderstanding is arisen as certain American linguists of the 1950s, who are sometimes called structuralists, gave all their attention to 31 the way items were arranged to form a total structure excluding all other aspects of linguistics. 4.1. The Misconceptions of Traditional Grammarians 4.1.1. The Priority of the Written Language Traditional grammarians tended to assume the spoken language is inferior to and, in some sense, dependent upon the standard written language. In opposition to this view, contemporary linguists maintain that the spoken language is primary and that writing is essentially a means of representing speech in another medium. The principle of the priority of the spoken language over the written implies: a) that speech is older and more widespread than writing. Speech goes back to the origins of human society. Children often learn to speak before they learn to write. b) More important to linguistic analysis is the fact that all systems of writing can be shown to be based upon units of the spoken language rather than the reverse. c) Linguistics does also study writing, but it is important to realize that the written language is completely independent of the spoken language from which it is originally derived. And any written activity is a later and more sophisticated process than speech. d) Speech is the primary medium of linguistic expression. We begin to speak before we write. Most of us speak much more than we write in everyday life. All natural languages were spoken before they were written. There are many languages in the world today which have never been written down. To base one's statement about language on writing rather than speech leads to all kinds of confused thinking. 31 In traditional grammar, the material presented mostly does not even cover the whole range of the language's written form, but is restricted to specific kinds of writing – the most formal style in particular. They avoided anything relevant to informality and considered it 'slang' or 'bad grammar' though the informality is in regular and widespread use by educated people. A language can be used in many levels of formality and it should be one of the jobs of a grammar to take account of these differences and not to select some levels as 'right' and exclude others as 'wrong'. For example, we are all familiar with the 'rule' of English which tells us that we should use 'whom' and not 'who' as a relative pronoun in a sentence like The man ………. I saw was tall and dark. In fact, it is not a question of 'whom' being correct usage, and 'who' being incorrect: each is correct in certain circumstances and incorrect in others. The difference is essentially one of formality: 'whom' in this context tends to be a more formal way of making the point than 'who', which is more colloquial. 4.1.2. The Influence of Latin Traditional grammarians tried to describe English in terms of another language usually Latin, for Latin was regarded as superior and as a model of description in Europe for centuries. One of the most common examples in this respect is to say It is I instead of saying It is me or to say that the 'noun' in English has five or six cases normally: 1. Nominative 'fish' 2. Vocative 'O fish' 3. Accusative 'fish' 4. Genitive 'of a fish' 5. Dative 'to/for a fish' 6. Ablative 'by/with/from a fish' 32 In fact, they treat English as if it were Latin. But it is not since the patterns of English grammar work differently from the patterns of Latin grammar. There is no need to force six cases of the noun into English just because it was so in Latin. English in fact has only two noun cases: 1. The genitive case (where we add an (-'s) as in 'cat's' or 'cats'). 2. And the general case which is used everywhere 'cat' or 'cats'. The general point to be made, therefore, is that in the description of a language or some part of a language, we must not impose findings from the description of some other language even if we have a strong preference for this other language. English must be described in its own terms and not through Latin terminology. It is a complex enough language without trying to force the complexities of Latin into it. 4.1.3. Logic and Language Traditional grammarians treat Latin as a kind of authority which one can turn to when wondering what to do about English grammar. There are other authorities of this kind such as the criterion of 'Logic'. For instance, concerning the way a language is constructed, one may say 'English is a more logical language than French' or it is more logical to say 'spoonfuls' than the other thing 'spoonsful', without basing their descriptions of language structure on scientific facts and evidences. In fact, human language is not a logical construct, though some people think so. It is not even regular. It can change its form sometimes over the years and it is full of irregularities. One can not apply reasoning to language. We say for instance, 'big' – 'bigger', 'small' – 'smaller', but if we adopt a logical criterion then we should say 'good - gooder' is a 33 correct form. Traditional grammarians say this is a matter of logic without saying irregularities or exceptions or giving any language description. In short, it is best in language to avoid the word 'logic' and to use instead the terms 'regular' and 'irregular' to show that there is always a tendency for the irregular forms in a language to be made to conform to the patterns of the regular ones a process referred to as 'analogy' (treating irregular forms as if they were regular ones). This is apparent especially in the speech of children saying 'mouses*' and 'seed*' for 'mice' and 'saw'. 4.1.4. The Complexity of Language There is no 'most complex' language where complexity means 'difficult to learn'. Standards of difficulty are relative: a thing is more difficult to do depending on how much practice we have had at doing it, and how used we are to doing similar things. We should not, therefore, say that one language is more complex or difficult to learn than another. To say, for instance, that Chinese is an awfully difficult language to learn, it may be true for a certain person, but we must be careful not to draw the conclusion that it is so. If one speaks a language which is at all similar to Chinese in its sounds, grammar and vocabulary, it will be a lot easier for him to learn than for one who does not. We conclude, the greater the grammatical and other differences one's own language and any other, the more complex that language turns out to be. Similarly, we must not talk about some languages as if they were 'simple', 'crude' or 'primitive' languages. This often when we talk about languages of tribes in Africa or South America which are said to be at a very law level of cultural development. It does not mean that because a tribe happens to be anthropologically 'primitive', its language is linguistically 'primitive' too. The word 'primitive' implies 'being near the 34 bottom of a scale or standard of development of some kind'. Such a standard may exist in comparative anthropology, but not in language. The only realistic standard we ought to apply to a language is the language itself. We can not measure one language against the yard-stick provided by another. Languages always keep pace with the social development of its users. Just because some tribes do not have as many words as English, does not mean that it is 'more primitive' than English. It has no need of so many words, because it has enough words for its own purposes. Its people do not require the vast range of technical terms which English has. If such a tribe, through some process of economic development, did begin to come into contact with technical things, then new words would be coined or borrowed, so that people could cope. So languages are not better or worse only different. 4.1.5. Aesthetics and language From the aesthetic view point, a language, word, structure, etc. is said to be more 'beautiful', 'ugly', 'affected' and so on than another which was a very common attitude in older times (when beauty was associated with eloquence and the Classic). For example, in the Middle Ages grammar (in a form of a textbook) was ''the art of speaking and writing well''. In these days, aesthetic judgements about language concern people's accent or ways of pronunciation although these are unrealistic standards. In fact, no one sound is better or more beautiful than another is: We respond to other people's language in terms of our own social background and familiarity with their speech. If we are from London, for instance, then we will react to their speech in a very different way than if we are not. 35 If we insist on criticizing someone else's accent as 'affected' or 'ugly', then we are simply trying to impose our own standards of beauty on others (i.e. judging other people in terms of our own particular linguistic preferences) forgetting that we probably sound just as odd to the people we are criticizing. 4.1.6. History and Language Traditional grammarians think that the true 'true' or 'correct' meaning of a word is its oldest one. For instance, they say the real meaning of 'History' is 'investigation', because this was its meaning of (historia) in Greek, or the real meaning of 'nice' is 'fastidious' as this was one of its senses in Shakespeare's time. People even call a word 'meaningless' if it no longer has a particular earlier meaning. In modern linguistics, the meaning of a word is to be found by studying the way in which the word is used in modern English – the kinds of objects or ideas currently being referred to. The meanings a word may have had years ago are irrelevant to this. If we rely on history in discussing meaning, we shall never know the real meaning of the words we use. In addition, if the oldest meaning of the word is the correct one, then we can hardly stop with Shakespeare! We must trace the meaning of the word (nice), for instance, back into Old French (meant = 'silly') and thence to Latin (meant 'ignorant') and thence to ancestor Latin having no clear meaning and even this is not the 'oldest' language. The oldest language id lost forever, not written down and thus without records. We should treat each new linguistic generation, in its own terms. One does not need past information to study the present state of a language. And the reverse is also true. 36 4.1.7. The Best Authors Traditional grammarians considered the usage of language of the 'best authors' as the most 'reliable' and 'correct' forms. Early dictionaries did the same by including only those words that had been used by a reputable author. Most of the quotations illustrating grammatical rules in traditional grammar are taken from famous novelists or-non-fiction writers. If we all speak like Shakespeare or Dickens, for instance, all the time (as many grammar books would have us do), the result of applying such a standard is to produce a description of a very restricted, specialized literary English. As we mentioned previously, we should treat each new linguistic generation in its own terms. Thus, if we use the standard of 'best author', it means that all change in language is for the worse and that the older states of a language are superior to the more recent – which is not true. 4.1.8. Impression Traditional grammarians were impressionistic, i.e., they depend on their intuitions (on themselves) and considered themselves as authority while in fact this is unsatisfactory, because grammarians must not depend on their intuitions. Many textbooks are impressionistic at many points. The rules being based on the author's own usage. While, it is extremely difficult to write even a part of a grammar of a language based upon oneself as the 'informant' (the source of information about what is going on). In brief, traditional grammarians were prescriptive not descriptive, i.e., they prescribe or give rules of their own to people saying what people ought to say. In the early part of the twentieth century, structural grammarians, began to develop precise methods of description. The American 37 structuralists (also 'descriptivists') felt that the traditional theories of grammar were intuitive. So, most structural grammarians want to make linguistics as a completely objective science. Bloomfield sought to describe present day English not as people think it "should be", but as "it actually is". He was looking for methods of describing language that were free of human error or subjective judgements. They described what people (Native speakers) really say. Another aspect of an impressionistic approach to linguistic description is that the information, which appears in a grammar book, is highly selective. Not traditional grammar is near complete, i.e., providing a complete description of all the sentences of a language. They include rules only these they want people to use. A grammar should contain rules which account for all the structures in current use, i.e., the exceptions as well as the regularities. 4.1.9. Definition Traditional grammar is characterized by extreme vagueness of definition, and a failure to be explicit about important issues. Often crucial theoretical assumptions about the language or the grammar are made, but not stated explicitly. In addition, many terms needed to talk about language are badly defined. The clearest example of badly defined terms is that of the parts of speech. Parts of speech are supposed to tell us something about how the grammar of a language works. However, the traditional definitions of many of the parts of speech are usually most ungrammatical. The noun, for example, is regularly defined as being 'the name of person, place or thing'. But this definition tells us nothing about the grammar of nouns at all. It only gives us what they mean. A grammatical definition of noun must give us grammatical information. It should, for example, tell us 38 about the places and functions of nouns in sentences, how they inflect, whether they follow or precede articles and prepositions, the types of noun modification and so on. The above definition gives us non of this. Moreover, the information that it does give, is so vague as to be useless. Are abstracts nouns like 'friendship' included in this definition? Can one reasonably say that 'friendship' is a thing? Thus, defining parts of speech in terms of their meaning can lead to several problems when we begin grammatical study. 4.1.10. Prescriptive Vs. Descriptive The Traditional attitude to language is 'prescriptive' (they do not describe what the speakers of language say). According to them, grammarians were concerned to make rules about how people ought to speak and write, in conformity with some standards they deal with or rely heavily on. They were not concerned with how people actually did speak and write. This is really the central differences between the new and the old attitude to language. Before one can prescribe rules about language, one must first describe the observed facts about the language. Modern linguists want to describe language in its own terms. They do not describe it in terms of some non-linguistic standards of correctness (such as Latin, aesthetic judgement, etc.). A linguist is aware that the grammarians of a language do not make the rules of that language; they cannot do this and they should not do it. They should restrict themselves to codify what is already there – the usage of the people who speak the language (the native speaker). 39 Notes: A. Prescriptive Linguistics: An attitude to language studies, which seeks to establish rules for correct usage. Modern linguistics is descriptive in nature, i.e., it records actual usage. Prescriptive grammars include such rules as: 1. "I" should be used after the verb "be", e.g., "It is I" instead of saying "It is me". 2. "Whom" should be used as the relative pronoun in the object function, e.g., "The man whom I saw" and so on. 3. Also they said, do not end the sentence with a preposition. B. Descriptive Linguistics: describes the facts of linguistic usage as they are and not how they ought to be. A linguist is interested in what is said, not what he thinks ought to be said. He describes language in all its aspects, but does not prescribe rules of correctness. A linguistic study is said to be descriptive if it is as objective as possible and based solely on observed facts. 41 CHAPTER FIVE An Introduction to Grammar: Historical Background 5.1. Traditional Grammar Note: You should keep in mind the fact that the 'correct' approach to grammar studies and human use of language has never been established yet, because no single approach has remained entirely unquestioned. Traditional Grammar The Greek The Romans The Middle Ages The Renaissance Vernacular English Grammar 5.1.1. Ancient Greeks For the Greeks, the earliest known motives for language study seem to be philosophical rather than practical. Plato concentrated his philosophical attention on the analysis of words and their meaning. He concluded that a given word bears an 'inherent', 'natural' and 'logical' relationship to the thing or concept for which it stands. They believed that language had been given to humans as a divine gift. They believed Greece was the place of the original civilization. Thus, they considered all languages other than Greek as barbaric. Only Greek was considered worthy of serious study. 41 Aristotle, Plato's most gifted pupil, continued to investigate the words and their meanings, but he also had several grammatical contributions. He added a third word class, viz., the conjunction class. He made notes on certain structural word features, e.g., noun possesses case verb possesses tense. In addition, he provided the earliest definition of the term 'word' describing it as "the smallest meaningful language unit". After Aristotle, the next important work in grammar study is that of the 'Stoics', around 300 BC. Their contributions can be summarized in the following points: 1. The expanded Aristotle's three word classes to four, i.e., adding 'articles' to noun, verbs, and conjunctions. 2. They subdivided words in the noun class into proper and common nouns. 3. They made detailed studies of tense and agreement in verbs and of case in nouns concluding that nouns possess five cases: nominative, accusative, dative, genitive and vocative. 4. They were also concerned with "the nature of language reveal inner truths about human nature." Dionesius Thrax (a Greek philosopher and grammarian, lived in Alexandria in the first century BC.) expanded the word classes to eight, adding prepositions, adverbs, participles and pronouns. He gave examples and detailed definitions to each in his book Techne Grammatike. 5.1.2. Ancient Rome Years later, when the centre of Western Civilization had shifted from Greece to Rome, Greek learning came to influence every aspect of the cultured Roman life including language. 42 When Roman scholars wrote their first Latin grammars, they patterned them after their earlier Greek Models. This was possible because both languages were highly inflected languages with many grammatical similarities. Varro, one of the few original thinkers, added an additional case to the noun in Latin 'the ablative' case not found in Greek. He was also interested in 'analogy' and he pointed to the many irregularities of language. Quintilian, a Latin scholar, sided with the analogists. He stressed the importance of including the study of grammar and rhetoric in the education of the cultured Rome. He made some contributions in the study of language, e.g., he studied the word etymology indicating that meaning is more important than form in word development. The two Latin Grammarians Donatus (AD 400), who wrote a book on the parts of speech and another in which he summarized the basics of Latin grammar, and Priscian (AD 500), who wrote eighteen volumes on Latin grammar, relied heavily on Greek works especially those of Thrax, and ignored Varro and Quintilian. Note: The important difference between Greeks and Romans is that in Greece there had been a monolingual society. The Greek scholars studied grammar as part of their larger philosophical concern. The educated Roman, on the other hand, studied the grammar of two languages and for more practical reasons. 43 5.1.3. The Middle Ages [The Medieval Period AD 600-1400] The medieval period is the largest in Western Europe's history having lasted for approximately a thousand years in which scholarship suffered a severe decline and during which few ideas were generated. It was called the dark ages by the "Renaissance Scholars". In the Middle Ages, the respect for learning died and no new ideas emerged. However, within the last few years, linguistic research has produced evidence that the situation was not really so bleak as had been thought. Among the medieval scholars was 'French Benedictine', who wrote a treatise entitled De Grammatico in which he expressed considerable interest in grammatical dictionaries. 'Peter of Spain', who was interested in semantics too, studied the grammatical and semantic implications of different meanings attributed to a single word or expression. 'Peter Helias', who lived in the 12th C., stressed the importance of grammar study. One of the best of those vernacular grammars at that time was The First Grammatical Treatise in the 12th C., which is also called The Old Norse written by a unanimous writer. This work is especially interesting to Modern linguists because many of its language techniques and its detailed study of phonology of Icelandic were very much like these developed by 19th and 20th C. historical and structural linguists. 5.1.4 The Renaissance (1400-17th C.) It is impossible to assign exact dates of the Renaissance period, but we can say it starts from around the late 1400s up to the 17 th C. After that Dark Ages of the Medieval period, interest in scholarship and in culture was renewed gradually. 44 Among the Renaissance scholars, whose work has only recently received the attention of the 20th C. linguists, was a 16th C. Spanish Classical scholar named 'Francisco Sanchez'. He was a professor of Greek and rhetoric. His book Minerva, written around 1587, was for many years considered the standard work on Latin Grammar. 'Peter Ramus' was another Renaissance scholar, who wrote grammars of Greek, Latin, and French. In his work Scholae, he stressed consulting the current usage of native speakers as the best guide to usages practices. General Notes: 1. Until the early part of the 18th C., a great majority of European scholarly works continued to be written in Latin. 2. Nevertheless, a few scholars had begun to write grammars of European Vernacular Languages as early as the late Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the 18th C. They realized that the vernacular languages could no longer be ignored, since vast numbers of people were speaking and writing in them. 3. Hence, grammarians took upon themselves the duty of writing prescriptive grammars for particular languages. They made themselves responsible for writing rules of 'correctness' (Latin based). 5.1.5. The Development of Vernacular English Grammar In the early 16th C., English explorers and colonists had extended the influence of England's culture and language to the farthest regions of the world. Then English had become a perfectly respectable and healthy world language. 45 English grammar study began during the late 17th C. and early 18th C. One of the earliest of these studies was a large work written in Latin by 'John Wallis' in 1653, who was not a language scholar but a mathematician. He wrote his grammar rules as though English were Latin (a prescriptive and authoritarian grammar). Early in the 18th C., a few and very small and rather poor grammars of the English were written; and until the middle of the 18 th C., the first widely respected English dictionary and the first detailed vernacular English grammar were published, Dr. Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language in 1755; and bishop Robert Lowth's A Short Introduction to English Grammar in 1762. Note (1): Most of the definitions and rules of usage are based on the best authors of the past and Latin (in Dr. J. Dictionary). Note (2): 'Lowth' indicated that the most reliable grammatical 'authority' was logic also rules of correctness must be based on the best authors. His grammar was 'authoritarian' and 'prescriptive'. A contemporary of Lowth was Joseph Priestly, who published Rudiments of English Grammar in 1761. He spoke out against the prescriptive' reliance on the authority of Latin. Thirty years after Lowth came 'Lindy Murray', who published his English Grammar in which he reinforced the prescriptive grammar rules of Lowth. His book became the first widely used school text. The 19th C. was the era of comparative and historical study of languages more especially of the Indo-European languages. The interest of the great majority of the 19th C. linguists in England and Europe was focused on the existing work in historical and comparative linguistics. 46 5.2. Structural Grammar of English Introduction The growth of Modern linguistics started from the end of the 18th C. to the present day. Two main approaches to language study, one European, one American, unite to form the modern subject of linguistics. The first arises out of the aims and methods of 19th C. comparative philology, with its focus on written records and its interest in historical analysis and interpretation. The beginning of the 20th C. saw a sharp change of emphasis with the study of the principles governing the structure of living language being introduced by the Genevan linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). Saussure's early work was in philology, but he is mainly remembered for his theoretical ideas, as summarized in the Course in General Linguistics, which is widely held to be the foundation of the modern subject. The second approach arose from the interest of American anthropologists who were concerned to establish good descriptions of the American Indian languages and cultures before they disappeared. Generally speaking, most of the structuralists had become extremely critical of traditional grammar most of which they labeled 'misguided' attacking it as meaning-dependent, subjective, prescriptive, intuitive- in short, as unscientific. 5.2.1. American Structural Linguistics / The First Stage The most significant work which made use of the new field-study methods was that begun by a small group of American anthropologists around the turn of the century. They wanted to bring Christianity to the American-Indian tribes and translate the Bible into as many tribal languages they could. 47 However, there were no records to rely on. In addition, the Indian tongues proved to be different from any of the languages familiar to them. Therefore, field workers found themselves without guidelines. Thus, they relied on methods of analyzing sounds recording hundreds of sounds. Only then was it possible to device a tentative alphabet transcribing the important sounds of a language. Their work can be summarized as follows: a) First, they had to identify the phonemes of a language. b) Then, they had to find which sound sequence made up the words of a language (to find out how these phonemes combine together into meaningful units 'morphemes') c) Last, the structure of the language's sentences had to be analyzed and recorded. But, syntax was not really given its due significance. Therefore, the most important contributions of structural linguists were in the areas of phonology (sound structure) and morphology (word structure). The pioneer in this field was Franz Boas (1858-1942) who published the first volume of the Handbook of American Indian Languages in 1911. He was a German-born anthropologist who spent most of his life studying American-Indian cultures. He became the first professor of anthropology at Columbia University in 1899. For many years, he dominated the discipline in America. He was a very active and productive field worker. He was spoken of by his colleagues in terms of 'genius'. Linguistics, in fact, began in America as an off shoot of anthropology. Ten years later (after the publication of Boas' book), another anthropologically oriented book appeared, Language by Edward Sapir (1884-1939). He was a German Jewish (poet, critic, musician, as well as, trained Germanist). He was a student of Boas in which he outlined the scientific procedure to be followed in linguistic studies. They 48 depended on speech to supply data. They wanted to describe most of the American-Indian languages. They insisted that a command of the language is an indispensable means of obtaining accurate and thorough knowledge, because much information can be gained by listening to conversations of the natives and taking part in their daily life. Structuralism in America was an off spring of the field-workers. The relation between Boas and Sapir was similar to that between Sapir and Bloomfield. Both have books entitled Language. These two basic books led to the study of Modern linguistics in America. 5.2.2. European Structural Linguistics / The First Stage In Europe, there were three different things happening simultaneously: 1. The Missionaries It was the work that was done by the missionaries who found themselves in primitive regions all over the world, in India, Africa, etc. They had to learn the language, in order to communicate with people. They tried to develop a phonetic system, in order to record it and the language of people whom they attached with. They produced excellent studies about language depending on native speakers. Finally, the discovery of phonemes and their shapes can be attributed to them. 2. De Saussure's Linguistics De Saussure was the founder of modern structural linguistics. His time witnessed the rapid rise of descriptive linguistics as opposed to historical linguistics. 49 3. The Neo-Traditional Grammarians They represent the period from traditional grammar to structural grammar. They follow the traditional concepts but came up with new methods of collecting data. They refute the traditional view concerning the insistence that Latin contains sort of universal rules and one should return to Latin, in order to find these rules. This was the difference between traditional grammar and Neo-traditional grammar, yet they have the same concept. In addition, they began to base their rules and descriptions on real data part of which was gathered from native speakers, but much of it was taken from the works of great linguists. The outstanding Neo-traditional grammarians are: a) Otto Jespersen, who wrote: 1. A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles, in 1909; 2. Language, Its Nature, Development and Origin, in 1922; 3. The Philosophy of Language, in 1924; 4. Growth and Structure of the English language, 1960; and 5. Essential of English Grammar, in 1964. b) Curme, who wrote A Grammar of English Language, 2 Vols., 1931 and Parts of Speech and Accidence, 2 Vols., 1935. c) Zandvoort, who wrote A Handbook of English Grammar in 1957. d) Henry Sweet (1845-1912), who was one of the leaders in the study of phonetics and of old. Middle and modern English in Great Britain in the second half of the 19th C. he was synchronic and descriptive in his approach to language study. He also wrote New English Grammar. e) Daniel Jones, who wrote Outline of English Phonetics in 1914. Furthermore, in 1917, he published his English Pronouncing Dictionary. He was the leading British phonetician. f) Cruisinger, who wrote A Grammar Book. 51 5.2.3. The Second Stage of Structuralism in America Both European and American approaches developed rapidly. In America, the development of detailed procedures for the study of spoken language also led to progress in phonetics and phonology and a special attention was paid to morphology and syntax. The goal of structural linguists was to describe English grammar rigorously and objectively. Leaonard Bloomfield was the major developer of the 20th C. structuralism in America. He published his Introduction to the Study of Language in 1914 and later his famous book Language in 1933. This book dominated the linguistic thinking for over twenty years, in which he presented many descriptive studies of grammar and phonology. His theory is based on "rigorous discovery procedures." He and his followers based their descriptions of the facts of English on actual utterances which could be empirically verified. Ignoring references to semantics, they concentrated on presenting accurate descriptions of the sound, word and sentence structure of English. They considered the study of meaning as the weak point in language study and Bloomfield himself maintained that it is too early for this generation to deal with semantics. Thus, according to them, the linguistic levels begin like this: phonology, morphology and syntax. Bloomfield presented a detailed outline of the principles of structural language analysis. He stressed the importance of using empirical data. To him, the grammarian's task was only to collect as much as language data as possible. Then, he analysed and classified the data on the basis of objective evidence to reach a conclusion. He maintained that a grammar could be defined as a perfect, objective description of language and the ultimate goal of a linguist was to find rules that led to such grammar. 51 The Bloomfieldian approach came to be called 'structuralist', because of the various kinds of technique it employed to identify and classify features of sentence structure (the analysis of sentences into their constituent parts). It also represented the behaviourists' view in psychology, that consists of the theory of stimulus and response; trial and error, reward and punishment. To them, language was considered as a human behavior and this theory was associated with language acquisition notably in the study of meaning. The greatest figure in this field was B. F. Skinner, who wrote Verbal Behaviour in 1957. In the late 1950s, Chomsky criticized the behaviourists adopting a mentalistic approach in linguistics. Other linguists of structuralism in America are Z. Harris, who wrote Methods in Structural Linguistics; Charles Fries, Lado, Hockett, Francis, Stageberg, Paul Robert and Gleason. The great pioneers who wrote on phonology were 'Trager and Simth', as well as 'Nida', who wrote on morphology. 5.2.4. The Second Stage of Structuralism in Europe There was a separate kind of structural linguistics in Europe not influenced by behaviourism in America. The leading psychologist in this field was 'Piaget'. Unlike the behaviourists, he had a better outlook of the psychology of language, which was different in principle from behaviourism. He provided a truthful account on how humans acquire and use language. In Europe, de Saussure's ideas were taken up by several groups of scholars (especially in Switzerland, Denmark, Gechoslovakia and 52 France), and schools of thoughts emerged based on Saussurean principles. The most notable of which are the following: 1. The Prague School: The name was given to the views and methods of the linguistic Circle of Prague and the scholars it influenced. It was founded in 1926 by Vilem Mathesius (1882-1946), who was a professor of English at Caroline University. They were not in line with behaviourism. Their main interest laid in the phonological theory. The most important work was that of 'R. Jakobson', which led to the distinction between phonetics and phonology. Accordingly, speech sounds belonged to parole and phoneme to langue as they applied de Saussure's theory to the phoneme concept. They believed that a phoneme is a complex phonological unit realized by the sounds of speech and such phoneme is composed by a number of separate distinctive features which characterize it as a linguistic entity, e.g., + bilabial + bilabial /p/ + stop ; /b/ + stop - voiced + voiced The followers of this school were also interested in the analysis of language as a system of functionally related units, as emphasis which showed Saussurean influence. 2. The Copenhagen School A group of linguists constituted the Copenhagen linguistic Circle in the mid 1930s and developed an approach to linguistics known as 'Glossematics'. The leading theoretician of this school was Louis Hjelmslev (1899-1965). Through the work of Hjelmslev, the school developed a philosophical and logical basis for linguistic theory. 53 3. The Firthian School It was called so according to J. R. Firth (1890-1960), a professor of General linguistics in the University of London from 1944 to 1956. He was a key figure in the development of British linguistics. It was also called the London school. It was an opposition to Bloomfieldian linguistics in America. It shares the basic insights of structuralism as originated by de Saussure. Firth devoted much of his attention to phonology. He based his work on that of the anthropologist B. Malinowski. He developed this theory of 'context of situation' in semantics. Little of Firth's teaching was published, but many of his ideas have been developed by the Neo-Firthian group of scholars, whose main theoretician is M. A. K. Halliday, a professor of General Linguistics at the University of London from 1965 to 1970. Halliday (1925- ) has developed a grammatical theory since the 1960s, known as systemic linguistics in which grammar is seen as a network of 'system' of interrelated contrasts. 5.3. Chomsky and Transformational Grammar Introduction Between 1933 and 1957, linguistics had set itself the task of perfecting 'rigorous discovery procedure,' i.e., finding a set of principles which would enable the linguist to discover a grammar from a mass of data collected from an informant (usually a native speaker). In 1957, at the highest structuralism's influence on linguistic studies, a young professor of Modern Language, Avram Noam Chomsky, at the Massachusetts Institute of Linguistics and Technology, published a (108) pages monograph entitled Syntactic Structures. This book challenged many of the basic beliefs of linguistics in his theory of language structure known as T.G.G. (Transformational Generative Grammar). Chomsky is the student of the structuralist Z. Harris, who started as a structuralist and 54 ended as a transformationalist. He received his earliest training at Bloomfieldian school of structural linguistics. In that small book, Chomsky criticized the structuralist approach to language study. He maintained that the entire structuralist theory had been built upon wrong assumptions rejecting their method of taxonomic linguistics (i.e., data-gathering techniques and classification of data) and their belief in the adequacy of 'discovery procedure'. Note: Taxonomic Linguistics is an approach to linguistic analysis and description which looks at language phenomena with the primary aim of listing and classifying them into groups, for example, part of speech in grammar and types of consonants in phonetics. Followers of T.G.G. have often criticized such taxonomic description as lacking a systematic theoretical framework. The publication of Syntactic Structures proved to be a turning point in the 20th C. Linguistics. In this and subsequent publications, Chomsky developed the conception of 'generative grammar', which departed radically from the structuralism and behaviourism of the previous decades. Chomsky's proposals were intended to discover the mental realities underlying the way people use language. Thus, the influence of the mentalism school is most marked in his work especially in his notion of 'competence' and 'innateness' and in his general view concerning language and mind indicating that "mental states and processes can explain behavior." He introduced many of his early theories and concepts in his Syntactic Structures and his well-known Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behaviour (1959). In this book, he criticized behaviourists as they failed to offer a scientific explanation of how it is possible for a child at the age of five or six to produce and understand large number of sentences that he has not previously heard. 55 Rejecting the structuralist's view, Chomsky emphasized that utterances cannot be identified as 'grammatical' only on the basis of their having been spoken and then collected by a linguistic field worker. An adequate grammar should be able to explain rather "what the speaker knows to be possible," i.e., to be able to produce and understand from limited number of rules unlimited number of grammatical utterances even those he has never beard before. Chomsky insisted that a grammar theory to be adequate must be able to explain native speaker's linguistic intuitions (i.e., a grammar knowledge that every speaker has in his head). Unlike Chomsky, structuralists did not believe in such words as 'mind', 'insight' and 'intuition'. Note (1): We should avoid the mistake of viewing Chomsky's T.G.G. as an extended structuralist theory although his grammar is like theirs in being syntactically based but his goals are fundamentally different. Note (2): The work of Chomsky embodies a recognition of the strength of traditional and structural work, but formalizes the descriptive mechanisms of these studies and suggests means of correcting the weaknesses of their methods. 5.3.1. Some General Notes and General Characteristics of T.G.G. 1. The transformational theory has undergone several stages of development: a) From 1957 through 1964, the transformational-generative theory of language focused primarily on syntax rather than on semantics. Chomsky indicated that "a grammar model should be based on syntax rather than on semantics. Syntax is an independent component of a grammar system and one which is primary." This shows that the early theory was concerned more with form than meaning. Thus, in 1957, 56 transformationalists followed the linguistic ladder starting with syntax, phonology and semantics. This means that syntax is central and we first need sentences to express our ideas not sounds. b) In 1965, Chomsky modified his theory as he published his book Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (The Aspects Model) or (The Standard Theory). It is the most influenced book of grammar in the second half of the 20 th C. According to this model, the linguistic ladder started with semantics, syntax and phonology. Still syntax is central and most important than the others that are called 'interpretive'. For example, if we want to give a talk, you first arrange the idea thinking of the rules of grammar taken from the syntactic component such as NP (Det) + N + (PL). These rules organize the idea, but we need meanings to arrange the idea semantically. Therefore, we go up to the semantic component (so it is interpretive). Finally, we have to apply the phonological rules of language to be able to speak. Thus, we go down to the phonological component taking pronunciation. So, it is interpretive too. Semantics Syntax (Heart) Phonology 2. Chomsky's theory at the beginning was called transformational grammar. Then, it was called generative grammar. It is pure generative as it is a kind of grammar, which is specialized to change one structure to another. Thus, if language is not transformational, it will be a static language without life. The relationship between language and life is that language satisfies human needs. So, language without transforms is lifeless. As last, it was called transformational- generative grammar (T.G.G.). It is structural, but in a new way. It is 57 called transformational, because it depends on transformations. It is called generative, because it generates all and only the possible grammatical sentences. 3. Chomsky believes in the universality of human languages. He believes that all human languages are but one and the same, i.e., languages share the general linguistic features and levels like: phonology, morphology, grammar and so on. They differ only in some specific points (language specifics). The transformationalists have a theory which should be applicable to all human languages. Chomsky believes that a linguistic theory should be universal. Structural linguists, on the other hand, do not believe in language universality although traditional grammarians believe in it considering Latin as a model (a language containing universal rules that can be applied to any language). 4. T.G.G. lays heavy emphasis on the native speaker and his intuition. The native speaker is a major thing in T.G.G. The transformationalists concentrate on the native speaker's knowledge and his linguistic competence (i.e., the rules and word images stored in his mind). According to them, the native speaker is the one who can decide whether something is right or wrong by his intuition. The structuralists also consider the native speaker as the source of information, but their method of collecting data was based on observations and they take information from the speech of the informant which represents language behavior. Chomsky indicates that speakers use their competence (abstract knowledge of language) to go far beyond the limitations of any corpus by being able to create and recognize novel sentences and to identify performance errors (in speech). 5. It is believed (according to T.G.G.) that a native speaker has in his intuition what is called 'competence' and 'performance'. Competence 58 is all native speaker's knowledge about his language which enables him to understand and generate unlimited number of sentences even those he has not heard before. This competence is stored in his mind in the shape of rules and word images, and when he speaks, he uses these rules unconsciously. Performance is the actual use of competence in real situations. It is found in the form of speech and writing. This parallels Saussure's concept of 'langue' and 'parole'. 6. Transformationalists believe in level mixing (i.e., linguistic levels) which is very important in linguistic analysis, i.e., we can use one level to explain things related to another level. In T.G.G., the linguistic levels start with semantics, syntax and morphology. They believed that one level must be applied to another, i.e., we must mix all levels together. The structuralists, on the other hand, do not believe in level mixing at all. They refuse it completely believing in level separate. They believe in the order: phonology, morphology, syntax giving priority to phonology, as speech is the source of information to them. 7. The theory divides sentences into two types: (a) kernal, i.e., the original sentence / the basic sentence pattern, a sentence which has not received any change yet, as in "Zeki can open the box" and (b) derived or transformed sentences that have received one or more changes, as in, e.g.: Zeki cannot open the box. (1 change Neg.) Can't Zeki open the box? (2 changes Neg. + interr.) Can't the box be open by Zeki? (3 changes Neg. + interr. + passive) 8. They believed that a language has a number of transformational rules. This number is fixed. These finite rules generate infinite number of acceptable sentences (transformed from basic ones). Some of these 59 transformations are universal such as: negative and interrogative. Some others are particular or not universal. Sometimes there are universal rules, but they are applied on languages differently, e.g., passivization. 9. They differentiate between deep structure (DS) and surface structure (SS). Deep structure is the abstract syntactic representation of a sentence (also referred to as an underlying or base structure) – the original form to which no change has happened yet. It goes with competence in the mind. Competence Deep Structure Kernal sentence e.g., Zeki cut Zeki. A surface structure of a sentence, on the other hand, is the final stage in the syntactic representation of a sentence – the form which has received one more changes. It goes with performance in speech or writing: Performance Surface structure Transformed sentence e.g., Zeki cut himself. (Reflexivization transformation) 10. Structuralists cannot differentiate between sentences, which are similar on the surface but have different deep structures. But transformationalists can do this and analyse ambiguous sentences too: e.g., (1) John is eager to please. (2) John is easy to please. Structuralists say these two sentences are alike as they focus on the surface structure, but Chomsky in his Syntactic Structures shows the difference between them referring to their deep structures saying: In 61 sentence (1), John pleases somebody, whereas in sentence (2) somebody pleases John. Transformationalists also interpret ambiguous sentences such as: e.g., Ann whacked a man with an umbrella. This sentence has two interpretations: (a) Ann had an umbrella and she whacked a man with it. (b) Ann whacked a man and the man happened to be carrying un umbrella. 11. They believed that sentences are unlimited in number. Sentences of a language must be well-formed, i.e., they must be syntactically and semantically acceptable. Any sentence which is not

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