Aitchison's Linguistics PDF

Aitchison’s Linguistics Jean Aitchison First printed under the title General Linguistics 1972 Second edition 1978 Third edition 1987 Fourth edition 1992 Fifth edition 1999 Sixth edition 2003 Seventh edition under the title Aitchison’s Linguistics 2010 For UK order enquiries: please contact Bookpoint Ltd, 130 Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4SB. Telephone: +44 (0) 1235 827720. Fax: +44 (0) 1235 400454. Lines are open 09.00–17.00, Monday to Saturday, with a 24-hour message answering service. Details about our titles and how to order are available at www.teachyourself.com For USA order enquiries: please contact McGraw-Hill Customer Services, PO Box 545, Blacklick, OH 43004-0545, USA. Telephone: 1-800-722-4726. Fax: 1-614-755-5645. For Canada order enquiries: please contact McGraw-Hill Ryerson Ltd, 300 Water St, Whitby, Ontario L1N 9B6, Canada. Telephone: 905 430 5000. Fax: 905 430 5020. 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Impression number 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Year 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 Acknowledgements The author and publishers thank the following for permission to reproduce material in this book: The Estate of the late Sir Alan Herbert for a passage from What a Word by A.P. Herbert, and to Dr J.B. Searle for his limerick ‘There was a young man of Dunlaoghaire’. André Deutsch Ltd/Little Brown/Curtis Brown Ltd for two lines from the poem ‘The Octopus’ by Ogden Nash. The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of John Maseﬁeld for two lines from the poem ‘Cargoes’. ‘Politics and the English Language’ by George Orwell copyright © George Orwell, 1946 by permission of A.M. Heath on behalf of Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd and Mark Hamilton as the Literary Executor of the Late Sonia Brownell Orwell. The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of A.E. Housman for the extract from ‘A Shropshire Lad’ from The Collective Poems of A.E. Housman. David Higham Associates and New Directions for the extract from Dylan Thomas’s ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’. Random House UK Ltd for the extract from D.J. Enright’s A Mania for Sentences. Faber & Faber Ltd and Harcourt, Brace & Company for the extract from T.S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’ from The Four Quartets. Every effort has been made to contact the holders of copyright material but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make the necessary alterations at the ﬁrst opportunity. Acknowledgements iii Contents Introduction ix Only got a minute? x Only got ﬁve minutes? xii Part one: Starting out 1 What is linguistics? 3 What is a linguist? 4 How does linguistics differ from traditional grammar? 5 The scope of linguistics 8 2 What is language? 14 Use of sound signals 15 Arbitrariness 16 The need for learning 16 Duality 17 Displacement 18 Creativity (productivity) 19 Patterning 20 Structure dependence 22 Human language versus animal communication 24 Origin of language 25 The role of language 26 3 The study of language 29 Nineteenth century: historical linguistics 30 Early- to mid-twentieth century: descriptive linguistics 31 Mid- to late-twentieth century: generative linguistics and the search for universals 34 Twenty-ﬁrst century: future trends 37 4 Deciding where to begin 40 Language as a game 40 Single-language specialists versus universalists 42 iv Part two: The inner circles 5 Sound patterns 51 Sorting out the basic sounds 53 The phonemes of English 54 Allophones 55 Sound combinations 57 Shared properties of phonemes 58 Non-segmental phonemes 60 Metrical phonology 61 6 Words and pieces of words 65 Deﬁning words 66 Identifying words 68 Morphemes 70 Recognition of morphemes 71 Types of morpheme 72 Allomorphs 73 Word classes 76 Major word classes 78 7 Sentence patterns 81 Linking words together 81 Constituent analysis 83 Tree diagrams 85 Rewrite rules 86 Identifying constituents 88 NP tests 91 Adding in extra patterns 92 Layers of branches 96 Complex sentences 99 Verbs: the syntax–meaning overlap 101 8 Meaning 104 Word meaning 106 Semantic ﬁelds 107 Coping with overlaps 110 Synonyms and opposites 111 Classiﬁcation (inclusion) 113 Fuzziness and family resemblances 114 Making sense of the world 116 The meaning of sentences 117 Contents v Part three: The outer rings 9 Using language 123 The cooperative principle 124 Speech acts 126 Remembered frameworks 128 Discourse analysis 129 Taking it in turns 131 Repairs 132 Politeness 133 10 Language and society 137 The notion of a language 137 Dialect and accent 138 From high to low 139 Speech versus writing 142 Charting phonological variation 144 Phonological variation in British English 146 Social networks 148 Language and sex 150 Power talking 152 Change in language styles 153 Multilingual communities 154 Pidgins and creoles 155 11 Language and mind 159 Psycholinguistic evidence 160 Acquiring language 160 The content–process controversy 162 The rule-governed nature of child language 164 Learning the meaning of words 166 Doing it by hand 167 Recognizing words 167 Understanding syntax 169 Speech production 170 Speech disorders 173 Language and the brain 175 12 Language and style 179 Style and stylistics 180 The same bright, patient stars 181 Ways with words 182 vi Twisting words 183 Gluing it all together 184 Saying it again, but subtly 185 Searching for the skeleton: poems, news 186 The language of advertising 188 Part four: Changes and comparisons 13 Language change 195 How language changes 196 Spread of change within a language 198 Causes of language change 200 Natural tendencies 201 Therapeutic changes 202 Changes that trigger one another 203 Interacting changes 205 Reconstruction 206 14 Comparing languages 210 Contrastive linguistics 210 Language similarities 211 Genetic similarities 212 Building a family tree 215 Reconstructing the parent language 215 Unreliability of reconstructions 216 Linguistic areas 217 Language types 219 Morphological criteria for language classiﬁcation 220 Word-order criteria 221 15 Attitudes towards change 226 A tradition of worry 226 Progress and decay fallacies 227 Proper behaviour 228 Standard English 229 Non-standard English 230 Part ﬁve: Towards a universal grammar 16 Seeking a suitable framework 235 Simple models of grammar 236 Deep and surface structures 240 Contents vii Transformational grammar 242 Deep structure 244 Transformations 248 17 Trouble with transformations 251 Waving a magic wand 251 Preserving the meaning 252 Generative semantics 255 Trace theory 257 Limiting the power of transformations 258 Sharing out the work 259 Ofﬂoading 261 Combining 262 Slimmed-down transformations 263 18 Back to basics 265 Universal Grammar (UG) 265 From deep structure to D-structure 268 Government and binding 269 Broadening the range 273 The bare bones 274 Where now? 277 Further reading 279 List of symbols and abbreviations 293 Phonetics: the study of speech sounds 294 Index 301 Credits Front cover: © D. Hurst/Alamy Back cover: © Jakub Semeniuk/iStockphoto.com, © Royalty- Free/Corbis, © agencyby/iStockphoto.com, © Andy Cook/ iStockphoto.com, © Christopher Ewing/iStockphoto.com, © zebicho – Fotolia.com, © Geoffrey Holman/iStockphoto.com, © Photodisc/Getty Images, © James C. Pruitt/iStockphoto.com, © Mohamed Saber – Fotolia.com viii Introduction Welcome to Aitchison’s Linguistics! This book is an introduction to introductions to linguistics. There are several books on the market which call themselves ‘introductions’ to the subject, but which are in fact more suited to second-year students. This book is to help people working by themselves to break into the ‘charmed circle’ of linguistics. It explains basic concepts and essential terminology. Linguistics is a specialized ﬁeld, so technical vocabulary cannot be avoided – though I have tried to explain every term used as clearly as possible Linguistics is a ﬁeld sometimes split by controversies. Wherever possible, I have taken a ‘middle-of-the-road’ view. Not that a middle-of-the-road view is necessarily right, but it is possibly more helpful for those new to the subject. Hopefully, readers will view this book as a stepping-stone to further linguistic study, and will eventually decide for themselves on which side of the road they wish to stand over key language issues. Linguistics is a fast-changing subject, and parts of it have moved on considerably since the ﬁrst edition of this book was published in 1972. Above all, linguistics has continued to expand, like a tree which grows numerous new branches. This new edition contains a number of changes, including updated suggestions for further reading. I am most grateful to all those who have made helpful suggestions and comments, especially to any students or readers who spotted errors in the older editions. I hope none remain in this new edition, but if anyone ﬁnds any, I would be very grateful to know about them. Happy reading! Jean Aitchison, 2010 Introduction ix Only got a minute? The use of language is an integral part of being human. Linguistics is the study of language, and how it works. This book explains the main design features of language, and shows how language differs from animal communication. Language is a patterned activity, which involves three major types of organization: sound patterns (phonology), word patterns (morphology and syntax) and meaning patterns (semantics). These three constitute the core of any language, sometimes known as the grammar. But beyond grammar, this book covers language usage and conversation (pragmatics), social variation within a language (sociolinguistics), language and mind (psycholinguistics), literary language (stylistics), language change (historical linguistics), types of language (typological linguistics). It also points out links with other x disciplines, such as language teaching (applied linguistics), philosophy (philosophical linguistics), anthropology (anthropological linguistics), artiﬁcial intelligence (computational linguistics), and dictionary making (lexicography and terminology). Only got a minute? xi 5 Only got ﬁve minutes? All normal humans acquire at least one language in the early years of their life, and use it frequently. Linguistics is the systematic study of language, and aims to cover all its main branches. Descriptive linguistics A key part of linguistics is describing the languages of the world, including previously unwritten languages, in a coherent and well- organized way. Such a description is known as a grammar. A grammar covers sound patterns (phonology), within-word patterns (morphology), word patterns (syntax) and meaning patterns (semantics). Sometimes morphology and syntax are bracketed together as morphosyntax. Grammars handle the parts of language that are most easily describable, in that the patterns are partly detachable from the external world. Yet, in recent years, perhaps the greatest attention has been paid to areas of linguistics which handle how speakers use language to interact with the world. Language–world interaction Several different branches of linguistics explore how speakers interact with the world in their use of language. The best-known are pragmatics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics and stylistics. Pragmatics is a huge ﬁeld, which looks especially at how human beings interact with one another. People typically cooperate in their dealings with each other, they organize their speech in the order of occurrence of events, they take it in turns to talk, and they try to be polite to one another. xii Sociolinguistics explores social factors which lead to speech variation within a community, especially differences in geographical location, social class and sex. Sociolinguistics also re-examines, and in some cases dismisses, old myths, such as the long-standing, but false belief that women talk more than men. Psycholinguistics, the study of language and mind, examines speech in the mind of individuals. It explores how children acquire language, how humans comprehend one another and how they organize speech for production. It also looks at language and the brain, particularly at brain areas most relevant to language, and outlines what happens when things go wrong, such as when someone suffers a stroke. Stylistics, the study of literary language, includes inquiry into the language of the media, especially newspapers and advertising. Language change In the nineteenth century, the main interest of historical linguists was the reconstruction of a proto-language, such as Proto-Indo- European, the ancestor from which numerous well-known existing languages developed. This is still an interesting topic, but in the twenty-ﬁrst century is no longer predominant. In the twentieth century, linguists became particularly concerned with studying language change as it happens. Variation within language was at one time thought to be random, but was later realized to be an indication that a change was in progress. Linguists realized that changes work their way gradually through a language, moving from one group to another, and also from one word to another. Causes of language change also became clearer. Natural tendencies, such as a propensity to leave the endings off words, sometimes disrupt patterns. Then therapeutic changes smooth out the disruptions. Languages always remain patterned, otherwise human communication would break down. Only got ﬁve minutes? xiii Chomsky and transformational grammar Noam Chomsky is the linguist whose fame and inﬂuence have spread furthest outside linguistics. He still attracts considerable attention. It is important to understand why his work has been so inﬂuential, and what his main ideas were. Recently, linguists have started to move in new directions, away from the abstract ideas of Chomsky, and towards a more ‘down-to-earth’ approach to linguistics. Happy reading! Language is a key component of human behaviour, so everybody (ideally) will enjoy ﬁnding out how it works. xiv Part one Starting out Worry about words, Bobby. Your grandmother is right. For, whatever else you may do, you will be using words always. All day, and every day, words matter. Though you live in a barrel and speak to nobody but yourself, words matter. For words are the tools of thought … A.P. Herbert 2 1 What is linguistics? This chapter explains how linguistics differs from traditional grammar studies, and outlines the main subdivisions of the subject. Most people spend an immense amount of their life talking, listening and, in advanced societies, reading and writing. Normal conversation uses 4,000 or 5,000 words an hour. A radio talk, where there are fewer pauses, uses as many as 8,000 or 9,000 words per hour. A person reading at a normal speed covers 14,000 or 15,000 words per hour. So someone who chats for an hour, listens to a radio talk for an hour and reads for an hour possibly comes into contact with 25,000 words in that time. Per day, the total could be as high as 100,000. The use of language is an integral part of being human. Children all over the world start putting words together at approximately the same age, and follow remarkably similar paths in their speech development. All languages are surprisingly similar in their basic structure, whether they are found in South America, Australia or near the North Pole. Language and abstract thought are closely connected, and many people think that these two characteristics above all distinguish human beings from animals. Insight Normal humans use language incessantly: speaking, hearing, reading and writing. They come into contact with tens of thousands of words each day. 1. What is linguistics? 3 An inability to use language adequately can affect someone’s status in society, and may even alter their personality. Because of its crucial importance in human life, every year an increasing number of psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, teachers, speech therapists, computer scientists and copywriters (to name but a few professional groups) realize that they need to study language more deeply. So it is not surprising that in recent years one of the fastest-expanding branches of knowledge has been linguistics – the systematic study of language. Linguistics tries to answer the basic questions ‘What is language?’ and ‘How does language work?’. It probes into various aspects of these problems, such as ‘What do all languages have in common?’, ‘What range of variation is found among languages?’, ‘How does human language differ from animal communication?’, ‘How does a child learn to speak?’, ‘How does one write down and analyse an unwritten language?’, ‘Why do languages change?’, ‘To what extent are social class differences reﬂected in language?’ and so on. What is a linguist? A person who studies linguistics is usually referred to as a linguist. The more accurate term ‘linguistician’ is too much of a tongue- twister to become generally accepted. The word ‘linguist’ is unsatisfactory: it causes confusion, since it also refers to someone who speaks a large number of languages. Linguists in the sense of linguistics experts need not be ﬂuent in languages, though they must have a wide experience of different types of language. It is more important for them to analyse and explain linguistic phenomena such as the Turkish vowel system, or German verbs, than to make themselves understood in Istanbul or Berlin. They are skilled, objective observers rather than participants – consumers of languages rather than producers, as one social scientist ﬂippantly commented. Insight A linguist in the sense of someone who analyses languages need not actually speak the language(s) they are studying. 4 Our type of linguist is perhaps best likened to a musicologist. A musicologist could analyse a piano concerto by pointing out the theme and variations, harmony and counterpoint. But such a person need not actually play the concerto, a task left to the concert pianist. Music theory bears the same relation to actual music as linguistics does to language. How does linguistics differ from traditional grammar? One frequently meets people who think that linguistics is old school grammar jazzed up with a few new names. But it differs in several basic ways. First, and most important, linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive. Linguists are interested in what is said, not what they think ought to be said. They describe language in all its aspects, but do not prescribe rules of ‘correctness’. Insight Those who work on linguistics describe languages; they do not dictate how to use them. It is a common fallacy that there is some absolute standard of correctness which it is the duty of linguists, schoolteachers, grammars and dictionaries to maintain. There was an uproar in the USA when in 1961 Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language included words such as ain’t and phrases such as ants in one’s pants. The editors were deliberately corrupting the language – or else they were incompetent, argued the critics. ‘Webster III has thrust upon us a dismaying assortment of the questionable, the perverse, the unworthy and the downright outrageous,’ raged one angry reviewer. But if people say ain’t and ants in one’s pants, linguists consider it important to record the fact. They are observers and recorders, not judges. ‘I am irritated by the frequent use of the words different to on radio and other programmes’ ran a letter to a daily paper. 1. What is linguistics? 5 ‘In my schooldays of ﬁfty years ago we were taught that things were alike to and different from. Were our teachers so terribly ignorant?’ This correspondent has not realized that languages are constantly changing. And the fact that he comments on the frequent use of different to indicates that it has as much right to be classiﬁed as ‘correct’ as different from. The notion of absolute and unchanging ‘correctness’ is quite foreign to linguists. They might recognize that one type of speech appears, through the whim of fashion, to be more socially acceptable than others. But this does not make the socially acceptable variety any more interesting for them than the other varieties, or the old words any better than new ones. To linguists the language of a pop singer is not intrinsically worse (or better) than that of a duke. They would disagree strongly with the Daily Telegraph writer who complained that ‘a disc jockey talking to the latest Neanderthal pop idol is a truly shocking experience of verbal squalor’. Nor do linguists condemn the coining of new words. This is a natural and continuous process, not a sign of decadence and decay. A linguist would note with interest, rather than horror, the fact that you can have your hair washed and set in a glamorama in North Carolina, or your car oiled at a lubritorium in Sydney, or that you can buy apples at a fruitique in a trendy suburb of London. A second important way in which linguistics differs from traditional school grammar is that linguists regard the spoken language as primary, rather than the written. In the past, grammarians have over-stressed the importance of the written word, partly because of its permanence. It was difﬁcult to cope with ﬂeeting utterances before the invention of sound recording. The traditional classical education was also partly to blame. People insisted on moulding language in accordance with the usage of the ‘best authors’ of the ancient world, and these authors existed only in written form. This attitude began as far back as the second century bc, when scholars in Alexandria took the authors of ﬁfth- century Greece as their models. This belief in the superiority of the written word has continued for over two millennia. 6 But linguists look ﬁrst at the spoken word, which preceded the written everywhere in the world, as far as we know. Moreover, most writing systems are derived from the vocal sounds. Although spoken utterances and written sentences share many common features, they also exhibit considerable differences. Linguists therefore regard spoken and written forms as belonging to different, though overlapping systems, which must be analysed separately: the spoken ﬁrst, then the written. Insight Spoken and written language need to be analysed separately. Both are important, and neither is better than the other. A third way in which linguistics differs from traditional grammar studies is that it does not force languages into a Latin-based framework. In the past, many traditional textbooks have assumed unquestioningly that Latin provides a universal framework into which all languages ﬁt, and countless schoolchildren have been confused by meaningless attempts to force English into foreign patterns. It is sometimes claimed, for example, that a phrase such as for John is in the ‘dative case’. But this is blatantly untrue, since English does not have a Latin-type case system. At other times, the inﬂuence of the Latin framework is more subtle, and so more misleading. Many people have wrongly come to regard certain Latin categories as being ‘natural’ ones. For example, it is commonly assumed that the Latin tense divisions of past, present and future are inevitable. Yet one frequently meets languages which do not make this neat threefold distinction. In some languages, it is more important to express the duration of an action – whether it is a single act or a continuing process – than to locate the action in time. In addition, judgements on certain constructions often turn out to have a Latin origin. For example, people frequently argue that ‘good English’ avoids ‘split inﬁnitives’ as in the phrase to humbly apologize, where the inﬁnitive to apologize is ‘split’ by humbly. A letter to the London Evening Standard is typical of many: ‘Do split inﬁnitives madden your readers as much as they do me?’ 1. What is linguistics? 7 asks the correspondent. ‘Can I perhaps ask that, at least, judges and editors make an effort to maintain the form of our language?’ The idea that a split inﬁnitive is wrong is based on Latin. Purists insist that, because a Latin inﬁnitive is only one word, its English equivalent must be as near to one word as possible. To linguists, it is unthinkable to judge one language by the standards of another. Since split inﬁnitives occur frequently in English, they are as ‘correct’ as unsplit ones. Insight Each language must be described separately, and must never be forced into a framework devised for another. In brief, linguists are opposed to the notion that any one language can provide an adequate framework for all the others. They are trying to set up a universal framework. And there is no reason why this should resemble the grammar of Latin, or the grammar of any other language arbitrarily selected from the thousands spoken by humans. The scope of linguistics 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 useful for a linguist. Yet it is a basic background knowledge, rather than part of linguistics itself. Phoneticians are concerned with the actual physical sounds, the raw material out of which language is made. They study the position of the tongue, teeth and vocal cords during the production of sounds, and record and analyse sound waves. Linguists, on the 8 Figure 1.1. other hand, are more interested in the way in which language is patterned. They analyse the shape or form of these patterns rather than the physical substance out of which the units of language are made. The famous Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, expressed the difference well when he compared language with a game of chess. The linguist is interested in the various moves which the chessmen make and how they are aligned on the board. It does not matter whether the chessmen are made of wood or ivory. Their substance does not alter the rules of the game. Insight The patterns of any language are more important than the physical substance out of which they are made. 1. What is linguistics? 9 Although phonetics and linguistics are sometimes referred to together as ‘the linguistic sciences’, phonetics is not as central to general linguistics as the study of language patterning. For this reason, information about phonetics has been placed in an appendix at the end of the book. In Figure 1.1, phonetics is surrounded by phonology (sound patterning), then phonology is surrounded by syntax. The term ‘syntax’, used in its broadest sense, refers to both the arrangement and the form of words. It is that part of language which links together the sound patterns and the meaning. Semantics (meaning) is placed outside syntax. Phonology, syntax and semantics are the ‘bread and butter’ of linguistics, and are a central concern of this book. Together they constitute the grammar of a language. GRAMMAR PHONOLOGY SYNTAX SEMANTICS Figure 1.2. But a word of warning about differences in terminology must be added. In some (usually older) textbooks, the word ‘grammar’ has a more restricted use. It refers only to what we have called the syntax. In these books, the term ‘syntax’ is restricted to the arrangement of words, and the standard term morphology is used for their make-up. This is not a case of one group of linguists being right in their use of terminology, and the other wrong, but of words gradually shifting their meaning, with the terms ‘syntax’ and ‘grammar’ extending their range. Insight The word grammar refers to sound patterns, word patterns and meaning patterns combined, and not (as in some older books) word order and word endings only. 10 Around the central grammatical hub comes pragmatics, which deals with how speakers use language in ways which cannot be predicted from linguistic knowledge alone. This fast-expanding topic has connections both with semantics, and with the various branches of linguistics which link language with the external world: psycholinguistics (the study of language and mind), sociolinguistics (the study of language and society), applied linguistics (the application of linguistics to language teaching), computational linguistics (the use of computers to simulate language and its workings), stylistics (the study of language and literature), anthropological linguistics (the study of language in cross-cultural settings) and philosophical linguistics (the link between language and logical thought). These various branches overlap to some extent, so are hard to deﬁne clearly. Psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics and stylistics are perhaps the ones which have expanded fastest in recent years. For this reason, they are given chapters to themselves in this book. Finally, there are two important aspects of linguistics which have been omitted from the diagram. The ﬁrst is historical linguistics, the study of language change. This omission was inevitable in a two-dimensional diagram. But if the wheel diagram is regarded as three-dimensional, as if it were the cross-section of a tree, then this topic can be included. A grammar can be described at one particular point in time (a single cut across the tree), or its development can be studied over a number of years, by comparing a number of different cuts made across the tree-trunk at different places. 1. What is linguistics? 11 Figure 1.3. Because it is normally necessary to know how a system works at any one time before one can hope to understand changes, the analysis of language at a single point in time, or synchronic linguistics, is usually dealt with before historical or diachronic linguistics. The second omission is linguistic typology, the study of different language types. This could not be ﬁtted in because it spreads over several layers of the diagram, covering phonology, syntax and semantics. This chapter has explained how linguistics differs from traditional grammar studies, and has outlined the main subdivisions within the subject. The next chapter will look at the phenomenon studied by linguistics: language. 12 THINGS TO REMEMBER A normal person is likely to come into contact with tens of thousands of words each day. A person who studies linguistics is known as a linguist. A (linguistic) linguist analyses languages, but does not necessarily speak them. A linguist describes languages, but does not prescribe (dictate) how to use them. All languages, and all aspects of a language, are interesting. Languages change constantly. Spoken and written language need to be analysed separately. No language must be forced into the framework of another. Language patterns are more important to a linguist than the substance out of which the patterns are formed. Language can be analysed at a single point in time (synchronic linguistics), or its development over a number of years can be studied (diachronic linguistics). 1. What is linguistics? 13 2 What is language? This chapter outlines some important ‘design features’ of human language, and explores the extent to which they are found in animal communication. It also looks at the main purposes for which language is used. Linguistics can be deﬁned as ‘the systematic study of language’ – a discipline which describes language in all its aspects and formulates theories as to how it works. But what exactly is language? People often use the word in a very wide sense: ‘the language of ﬂowers’, ‘the language of music’, ‘body language’ and so on. This book, in common with most linguistics books, uses the word to mean the specialized sound-signalling system which seems to be genetically programmed to develop in humans. Humans can, of course, communicate in numerous other ways: they can wink, wave, smile, tap someone on the shoulder, and so on. This wider study is usually known as ‘the psychology of communication’. It overlaps with linguistics, but is not the concern of this book. It is also clear that humans can transfer language to various other media: written symbols, Braille, sign language, and so on. Sign language in particular has interesting characteristics which are not all predictable from the spoken word. However, language based on sound is more widespread, and perhaps more basic, and so has been given priority in this book. 14 But can language be deﬁned? And how can it be distinguished from other systems of animal communication? A useful approach was pioneered by the American linguist Charles Hockett. This is to make a list of design features, and to consider whether they are shared by other animals. Some important ones will be discussed in the next few pages. Use of sound signals When animals communicate with one another, they may do so by a variety of means. Crabs, for example, communicate by waving their claws at one another, and bees have a complicated series of ‘dances’ which signify the whereabouts of a source of nectar. But such methods are not as widespread as the use of sounds, which are employed by humans, grasshoppers, birds, dolphins, cows, monkeys, and many other species. So our use of sound is in no way unique. Insight Sound signals have several advantages. They can be used in the dark, and at some distance, they allow a wide variety of messages to be sent, and they leave the body free for other activities. Humans probably acquired their sound-signalling system at a fairly late stage in their evolution. This seems likely because all the organs used in speech have some more basic function. The lungs are primarily used for breathing. Teeth, lips and tongue are primarily for eating. The vocal cords (thin strips of membrane deep in the throat) were used primarily for closing off the lungs in order to make the rib cage rigid for actions requiring a great effort. When people lift something heavy, they automatically hold their breath. This is caused by the closing of the vocal cords. The grunt when the heavy object is dropped is caused by the air being expelled as the vocal cords open. Millions of years ago we possibly needed 2. What is language? 15 a rigid rib cage for swinging in the trees – but humans still need this mechanism today for such actions as weightlifting, defecation and childbirth. Insight All the organs used in speech have some more basic function, such as eating or breathing. Humans may therefore have acquired language at a relatively late stage in their evolution. Arbitrariness There is often a recognizable link between the actual signal and the message an animal wishes to convey. An animal who wishes to warn off an opponent may simulate an attacking attitude. A cat, for example, will arch its back, spit and appear ready to pounce. In human language, the reverse is true. In the great majority of cases, there is no link whatsoever between the signal and the message. The symbols used are arbitrary. There is no intrinsic connection, for example, between the word elephant and the animal it symbolizes. Nor is the phrase ‘These bananas are bad’ intrinsically connected with food. Onomatopoeic words such as quack-quack and bang are exceptions – but there are relatively few of these compared with the total number of words. Insight In most words, no link exists between the sounds used and their meaning. The need for learning Many animals automatically know how to communicate without learning. Their systems of communication are genetically inbuilt. Bee-dancing, for example, is substantially the same in bee colonies 16 in different parts of the world, with only small variations. Even in cases where an element of learning is involved, this is usually minor. In one experiment a chafﬁnch reared in a soundproof room away from other chafﬁnches developed an abnormal type of song. Yet when the bird was exposed to only occasional tape recordings of other chafﬁnches, its song developed normally. This is quite different from the long learning process needed to acquire human language, which is culturally transmitted. A human brought up in isolation simply does not acquire language, as is shown by the rare studies of children brought up by animals without human contact. Human language is by no means totally conditioned by the environment, and there is almost certainly some type of innate predisposition towards language in a new-born child. But this latent potentiality can be activated only by long exposure to language, which requires careful learning. Duality Animals which use vocal signals have a stock of basic sounds which vary according to species. A cow has under 10, a chicken has around 20, and a fox over 30. Dolphins have between 20 and 30, and so do gorillas and chimpanzees. Most animals can use each basic sound only once. That is, the number of messages an animal can send is restricted to the number of basic sounds, or occasionally the basic sounds plus a few simple combinations. Human language works rather differently. Each language has a stock of sound units or phonemes which are similar in number to the basic sounds possessed by animals; the average number is between 30 and 40. But each phoneme is normally meaningless in isolation. It becomes meaningful only when it is combined with other phonemes. That is, sounds such as f, g, d, o, mean nothing separately. They normally take on meaning only when they are combined together in various ways, as in fog, dog, god. 2. What is language? 17 This organization of language into two layers – a layer of sounds which combine into a second layer of larger units – is known as duality or double articulation. A communication system with duality is considerably more ﬂexible than one without it, because a far greater number of messages can be sent. Insight The organization of language into two layers, one layer of mostly meaningless sounds arranged into a second layer of larger units, makes language powerful and ﬂexible, and is rare in animal communication. At one time, it was thought that duality was a characteristic unique to human language. But now some people claim that it exists also in birdsong, where each individual note is meaningless. It is the combination of notes into longer sequences which constitutes a meaningful melody. Displacement Most animals can communicate about things in the immediate environment only. A bird utters its danger cry only when danger is present. It cannot give information about a peril which is removed in time and place. This type of spontaneous utterance is nearer to a human baby’s emotional cries of pain, hunger or contentment than it is to fully developed language. Insight Unlike most other animals, humans can discuss objects and events that are removed in time and place. Human language, by contrast, can communicate about things that are absent as easily as about things that are present. This apparently rare phenomenon, known as displacement, does occasionally occur in the animal world, for example, in the communication of honey bees. If a worker bee ﬁnds a new 18 source of nectar, it returns to the hive and performs a complex dance in order to inform the other bees of the exact location of the nectar, which may be several miles away. But even bees are limited in this ability. They can inform each other only about nectar. Human language can cope with any subject whatever, and it does not matter how far away the topic of conversation is in time and space. Creativity (productivity) Most animals have a very limited number of messages they can send or receive. The male of a certain species of grasshopper, for example, has a choice of six, which might be translated as follows: 1 I am happy, life is good. 2 I would like to make love. 3 You are trespassing on my territory. 4 She’s mine. 5 Let’s make love. 6 Oh how nice to have made love. Not only is the number of messages ﬁxed for the grasshopper, but so are the circumstances under which each can be communicated. All animals, as far as we know, are limited in a similar way. Bees can communicate only about nectar. Dolphins, in spite of their intelligence and large number of clicks, whistles and squawks, seem to be restricted to communicating about the same things again and again. And even the clever vervet monkey, who is claimed to make 36 different vocal sounds, is obliged to repeat these over and over. Insight Most animals are restricted in what they can communicate about. Humans can talk about anything, and be understood. This type of restriction is not found in human language, which is essentially creative (or productive). Humans can produce 2. What is language? 19 novel utterances whenever they want to. A person can utter a sentence which has never been said before, in the most unlikely circumstances, and still be understood. If, at a party, someone said, ‘There is a purple platypus crawling across the ceiling,’ friends might think the speaker was drunk or drugged, but they would still understand the words spoken. Conversely, in an everyday routine situation, a person is not obliged to say the same thing every time. At breakfast, someone might say ‘This is good coffee’ on one day, ‘Is this coffee or dandelion tea?’ on the next, and ‘It would be cheaper to drink petrol’ on the next. Patterning Many animal communication systems consist of a simple list of elements. There is no internal organization within the system. Human language, on the other hand, is most deﬁnitely not a haphazard heap of individual items. Humans do not juxtapose sounds and words in a random way. Instead, they ring the changes on a few well-deﬁned patterns. Take the sounds a, b, s, t. In English, there are only four possible ways in which these sounds could be arranged, bats, tabs, stab or bast (the latter meaning ‘inner bark of lime’, Oxford English Dictionary). All other possibilities, such as *sbat, *abts, *stba, are excluded (an asterisk indicates an impossible word or sentence). The starred words are not excluded because such sequences are unpronounceable, but because the ‘rules’ subconsciously followed by people who know English do not allow these combinations, even for new words. A new washing powder called Sbat would be unlikely to catch on, since English does not permit the initial sequence sb, even though in some other languages (for example, ancient Greek) this combination is not unusual. Similarly, consider the words burglar, loudly, sneezed, the. Here again, only three combinations are possible: The burglar sneezed 20 loudly, Loudly sneezed the burglar and (perhaps) The burglar loudly sneezed. All others are impossible, such as *The loudly burglar sneezed, or *Sneezed burglar loudly the. And had the four words been burglars, a, sneezes, loudly, there is no way in which these could be combined to make a well-formed English sentence. *A burglars is an impossible combination, and so is *burglars sneezes. In brief, English places ﬁrm restrictions on which items can occur together, and the order in which they come. From this, it follows that there is also a ﬁxed set of possibilities for the substitution of items. In the word bats, for example, a could be replaced by e or i, but not by h or z, which would give *bhts or *bzts. In the sentence The burglar sneezed loudly, the word burglar could be replaced by cat, butcher, robber, or even (in a children’s story) by engine or shoe – but it could not be replaced by into, or amazingly, or they, which would give ill-formed sequences such as *The into sneezed loudly or *The amazingly sneezed loudly. Every item in language, then, has its own characteristic place in the total pattern. It can combine with certain speciﬁed items, and be replaced by others. The – burglar – sneezed – loudly A – robber – coughed – softly That – cat – hissed – noisily Figure 2.1. Language can therefore be regarded as an intricate network of interlinked elements in which every item is held in its place and given its identity by all the other items. No word (apart from the names of some people or objects) has an independent validity or existence outside that pattern. The elements of language can be likened to the players in a game of soccer. A striker, or a goal- keeper, has no use or value outside the game. But placed among the other players, a striker acquires an identity and value. In the same way, linguistic items such as the, been, very, only acquire signiﬁcance as part of a total language network. 2. What is language? 21 Structure dependence Let us now look again at the network of interlocking items which constitutes language. A closer inspection reveals another, more basic way in which language differs from animal communication. Look at the sentences: The penguin squawked. It squawked. The penguin which slipped on the ice squawked. Each of these sentences has a similar basic structure consisting of a subject and a verb (Figure 2.2). The penguin It squawked The penguin which slipped on the ice Figure 2.2. The number of words in each sentence is no guide whatsoever to its basic structure. Simple counting operations are quite irrelevant to language. For example, suppose someone was trying to work out how to express the past in English. They would have no success at all if they tried out a strategy such as ‘Add -ed to the end of the third word.’ They might, accidentally, produce a few good sentences such as: Uncle Herbert toasted 17 crumpets. But more often, the results would be quite absurd: *Clarissa hate frogs-ed. *The girl who-ed hate frogs scream. In fact, it is quite impossible for anybody to form sentences and understand them unless they realize that each one has an inaudible, invisible structure, which cannot be discovered by mechanical means such as counting. Once a person has realized this, they can locate the component to which the past tense -ed must be added 22 even if they have never heard or said the sentence before, and even if it contains a totally new verb, as in: The penguin shramped the albatross. In other words, language operations are structure-dependent – they depend on an understanding of the internal structure of a sentence, rather than on the number of elements involved. This may seem obvious to speakers of English. But the rarity, or perhaps absence, of this property in animal communication indicates its crucial importance. Its presence has not been proved in any animal system (though birdsong may turn out to be structure-dependent, according to some researchers). Moreover, the types of structure-dependent operation found in language are often quite complicated, and involve considerably more than the mere addition of items (as in the case of the past tense). Elements of structure can change places, or even be omitted. For example, in one type of question, the ﬁrst verbal element changes places with the subject: 1 2 [That dirty child] [must] wash, has the related question 2 1 [Must] [that dirty child] wash? And in the sentence, Billy swims faster than Henrietta, it is generally agreed that the sentence means ‘Billy swims faster than Henrietta swims’, and that the second occurrence of swims is ‘understood’. Such sophistication is mind-boggling compared with the 36 cries of the vervet monkey, or even the relatively complex dances by which bees indicate the whereabouts of honey to their colleagues. 2. What is language? 23 Human language versus animal communication So far, the main similarities and differences between human and animal communication can be summed up as follows: Human language is a signalling system which uses sounds, a characteristic shared by a large number of animal systems. In animal communication, there is frequently a connection between the signal and the message sent, and the system is mainly genetically inbuilt. In human language, the symbols are mostly arbitrary, and the system has to be painstakingly transmitted from one generation to another. Duality and displacement – the organization of language into two layers, and the ability to talk about absent objects and events – are extremely rare in the animal world. No animal communication system has both these features. Creativity, the ability to produce novel utterances, seems not to be present in any natural communication system possessed by animals. Finally, patterning and structure dependence may also be unique language features. To summarize: language is a patterned system of arbitrary sound signals, characterized by structure dependence, creativity, displacement, duality and cultural transmission. This is true of all languages in the world, which are remarkably similar in their main design features. There is no evidence that any language is more ‘primitive’ than any other. There are certainly primitive cultures. A primitive culture is reﬂected in the vocabulary of a language, which might lack words common in advanced societies. But even the most primitive tribes have languages whose underlying structure is every bit as complex as English or Russian or Chinese. But one other similarity links human language with animal communication: it is predestined to emerge. Just as frogs inevitably croak, and cows moo, so humans are prearranged for talking. 24 Human language is innately guided. Human infants are not born speaking, but they know how to acquire any language to which they are exposed. They are drawn towards the noises coming out of human mouths, and they instinctively know how to analyse speech sounds. Bees present a parallel case: they are not born equipped with an inbuilt encyclopedia of ﬂowers. Instead, they are preprogrammed to pay attention to important ﬂower characteristics – especially scent. So they quickly learn how to recognize nectar-ﬁlled blooms, and do not waste time ﬂying to kites or bus stops. Origin of language Language is a highly developed form of animal signalling. But there is a missing link in the chain. How, and when, did we start to talk? Until recently, most linguists regarded this fascinating topic as outside linguistics, many agreeing with the nineteenth-century linguist William Dwight Whitney that ‘the greater part of what is said and written upon it is mere windy talk’. Yet suddenly, language origin has become a trendy topic. Chunks of information are being slotted into place in a giant evolutionary jigsaw puzzle whose picture is slowly emerging. Language probably developed in east Africa, around 100,000 years ago. Three preconditions must have existed. First, humans had to view the world in certain common ways: they noticed objects and actions, for example. Second, they were able to produce a range of sounds – a spin-off of walking upright, according to one view. Third, they must have attained the ‘naming insight’, the realization that sound sequences can be symbols which ‘stand for’ people and objects. These preconditions enabled early humans to build up a store of words. But what about linguistic ‘rules’, conventional word arrangements? In all probability, rules came about among early 2. What is language? 25 humans in much the same way as new rules emerge in any language today. Brieﬂy, preferences tend to become habits, and habits become ‘rules’. Original language preferences possibly reﬂected ways in which humans view the world. Most languages put words for actions near the objects which are acted upon, for example, ‘The ﬁsherman caught a ﬁsh’, as in English, or ‘The ﬁsherman a ﬁsh caught’t, the order preferred in, say, Turkish. So preferences to habits to rules may be a natural progression. There was probably always ﬂexibility, which is why all languages are not the same. Eventually, an instinctive need to maintain patterns possibly overruled any desire to preserve a strict world-to-language link. The role of language But why did language begin? Social chit-chat, the meaningless small talk of everyday life, may have played a key role, as it does today: ‘Hallo, how nice to see you. How are you? Isn’t the weather terrible?’ Keeping in touch via talking could have replaced the friendly grooming indulged in by primates, according to one view. It has even been called ‘grooming talking’. The use of language for persuading and inﬂuencing others has probably always been important. Yet ‘information talking’ – swapping news and conveying essential commands – may not be as basic as was once assumed. It is prominent primarily in public forms of language, less so in private conversations, which form the bulk of day-to-day interactions. Language can of course be used to communicate feelings and emotions, though this aspect of language is not well developed. Humans, like other primates, can convey emotions via screams, grunts, sobs, gestures and so on. So they need language only to conﬁrm and elaborate these more primitive signals. 26 These days, various other biologically less important functions of language are also found. Humans may use language for purely aesthetic reasons. In writing poetry, for example, people manipulate words in the same way as they might model clay or paint a picture. Or they may talk in order to release nervous tension, a function seen when people mutter to themselves in anger and frustration. This chapter has listed some important design features of language, and considered to what extent they are found in other animal communication systems. It has also mentioned some of the main purposes for which language is used. The next chapter will outline the major directions taken by linguists over the past two centuries, as they explored the thickets of language. 2. What is language? 27 THINGS TO REMEMBER The sound sequences used in language are arbitrary: mostly, there is no link between the sounds and the message being conveyed. Language is double-layered. A stock of basic sounds is combined into larger units. Double-layering makes language ﬂexible and powerful. Language can communicate about people and events removed in time and place. Human language is ‘creative’, in that novel utterances can be produced. Every human language rings the changes on a ﬁnite number of patterns. Language is structure-dependent in that speakers understand invisible, inaudible patterns. Language possibly emerged around 100,000 years ago. Social chit-chat may be the main reason why language emerged. Information talking is not the main role of language: persuasion and interaction may be more important. 28 3 The study of language This chapter sketches the main directions linguistics has taken in the past two centuries, and makes some predictions about future trends. The discipline of linguistics can be likened to a pathway which is being cut through the dark and mysterious forest of language. Different parts of the forest have been explored at different times, so we can depict the path as a winding one. As Figure 3.1 shows, there have been three major directions in linguistics in the past two centuries. Let us discuss each of these in more detail. ? ? ? ? UISTICS IVE LING RAT E C20 AT GE I D - L TICS D NE GU C19 M IS ES RI E A R C HISTORICAL LIN PT LY IVE -M ID C ICS 20 LINGUI ST Figure 3.1. 3. The study of language 29 Nineteenth century: historical linguistics Before the nineteenth 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. Plato, for example, is said to have been the ﬁrst person to distinguish between nouns and verbs. 1786 is the year which many people regard as the birthdate of linguistics. In that year, an Englishman, Sir William Jones, read a paper to the Royal Asiatic Society in Calcutta pointing out that Sanskrit (the old Indian language), Greek, Latin, Celtic and Germanic all had striking structural similarities. So impressive were these likenesses that these languages must spring from one common source, he concluded. Although Jones has the credit of making this discovery, it was an idea that was occurring independently to several scholars at around the same time. Sir William Jones’ discovery ﬁred the imagination of scholars. For the next hundred years, other linguistic work was eclipsed by the general preoccupation with writing comparative grammars – grammars which ﬁrst compared the different linguistic forms found in the various members of the Indo-European language family, and second, attempted to set up a hypothetical ancestor, Proto- Indo-European, from which all these languages were descended. (Figure 3.2 below excludes Hittite and Tocharian, which were not recognized as Indo-European languages until the twentieth century.) INDO-EUROPEAN Indo-Iranian Albanian Armenian Balto-Slavonic Greek Italic Celtic Germanic (Sanskrit, etc.) (Russian, etc.) (Latin, etc.) (Welsh, etc.) We W (German, English, etc.) Figure 3.2. The nineteenth-century concern with reconstructing Proto-Indo- European, and making hypotheses about the way it split into the various modern languages, was encouraged by the general 30 intellectual climate of the times. In the mid-nineteenth century, Darwin published his famous On the Origin of Species, putting forward the theory of evolution. It seemed natural to attempt to chart the evolution of language alongside the evolution of species. This emphasis on language change eventually led to a major theoretical advance. In the last quarter of the century, a group of scholars centred around Leipzig, and nicknamed the ‘Young Grammarians’, claimed that language change is ‘regular’. They argued that if, in any word of a given dialect, one sound changes into another, the change will also affect all other occurrences of the same sound in similar phonetic surroundings. For example, in Old English the word chin was pronounced ‘kin’ (spelt cinn). This change from a k-sound to ch affected all other k-sounds which occurred at the beginning of a word before e or i. So we also get chicken, child, chide, chip, chill, cheese, cheek, chest, chew and so on – all of which originally had a k-sound at the beginning. Although, today, the claims made by the Young Grammarians have been modiﬁed to some extent (as will be discussed later in the book), it was an important step forward for linguists to realize that language changes were not just optional tendencies, but deﬁnite and clearly statable ‘laws’ (as the Young Grammarians perhaps misleadingly called them). Insight Linguistic interests tend to vary from century to century. The inﬂuence of the nineteenth-century scholars was strong. Even today, one still meets members of the general public who expect the cataloguing of linguistic changes and the reconstruction of Proto- Indo-European to be the central concern of modern linguistics. Early- to mid-twentieth century: descriptive linguistics In the twentieth century, the emphasis shifted from language change to language description. Instead of looking at how a selection of items changed in a number of different languages, 3. The study of language 31 linguists began to concentrate on describing single languages at one particular point in time. If any one person can be held responsible for this change of emphasis, it is the Swiss scholar Ferdinand de Saussure (1857– 1913), who is sometimes labelled ‘the father of modern linguistics’. Amazingly, he died without having written any major work on general linguistics. But his students collected together his lecture notes after his death and published them under the title Course in General Linguistics (1915), which exerted a major inﬂuence on the course of linguistics, particularly in Europe. De Saussure’s crucial contribution was his explicit and reiterated statement that all language items are essentially interlinked. This was an aspect of language which had not been stressed before. Nobody had seriously examined the relationship of each element to all the others. As noted earlier, it was de Saussure who ﬁrst suggested that language was like a game of chess, a system in which each item is deﬁned by its relationship to all the others. His insistence that language is a carefully built structure of interwoven elements initiated the era of structural linguistics. Insight The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure may have been the ﬁrst person to realize that all linguistic items are interconnected. The term ‘structural linguistics’ is sometimes misunderstood. It does not necessarily refer to a separate branch or school of linguistics. All linguistics since de Saussure is structural, as ‘structural’ in this broad sense merely means the recognition that language is a patterned system composed of interdependent elements, rather than a collection of unconnected individual items. Misunderstandings sometimes arise because the label ‘structuralist’ is often attached to the descriptive linguists who worked in the USA between 1930 and 1960. Let us now turn to these. In the USA, linguistics began as an offshoot of anthropology. Around the beginning of the twentieth century, anthropologists 32 were eager to record the culture of the fast-dying American-Indian tribes, and the American-Indian languages were one aspect of this. Although often interesting, the work of those early scholars was, for the most part, haphazard and lacking cohesion. There were no ﬁrm guidelines for linguists to follow when they attempted to describe exotic languages. This state of affairs changed with the publication in 1933 of Leonard Bloomﬁeld’s comprehensive work entitled simply Language, which attempted to lay down rigorous procedures for the description of any language. Bloomﬁeld considered that linguistics should deal objectively and systematically with observable data. So he was more interested in the way items were arranged than in meaning. The study of meaning was not amenable to rigorous methods of analysis and was therefore, he concluded, ‘the weak point in language study, and will remain so until human knowledge advances very far beyond its present state’. Insight The American linguist Leonard Bloomﬁeld laid down a reliable framework for linguists working on unwritten languages. Bloomﬁeld had immense inﬂuence – far more than the European linguists working during this period – and the so-called ‘Bloomﬁeldian era’ lasted for more than 20 years. During this time, large numbers of linguists concentrated on writing descriptive grammars of unwritten languages. This involved ﬁrst ﬁnding native speakers of the language concerned and collecting sets of utterances from them. Second, it involved analysing the corpus of collected utterances by studying the phonological and syntactic patterns of the language concerned, as far as possible without recourse to meaning. Items were (in theory) identiﬁed and classiﬁed solely on the basis of their distribution within the corpus. In the course of writing such grammars, a number of problems arose which could not be solved by the methods proposed by Bloomﬁeld. So an enormous amount of attention was paid to the reﬁnement of analytical techniques. For many, the ultimate goal 3. The study of language 33 of linguistics was the perfection of discovery procedures – a set of principles which would enable a linguist to ‘discover’ (or perhaps more accurately, ‘uncover’) in a foolproof way the linguistic units of an unwritten language. Because of their overriding interest in the internal patterns or ‘structure’ of the language, such linguists are sometimes labelled ‘structuralists’. The Bloomﬁeldians laid down a valuable background of linguistic methodology for future generations. But linguistics also became very narrow. Trivial problems of analysis became major controversial issues, and no one who was not a linguist could understand the issues involved. By around 1950 linguistics had lost touch with other disciplines and become an abstruse subject of little interest to anyone outside it. It was ready for a revolution. Mid- to late-twentieth century: generative linguistics and the search for universals In 1957, linguistics took a new turning. Noam Chomsky, then aged 29, a teacher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published a book called Syntactic Structures. Although containing fewer than 120 pages, this little book started a revolution in linguistics. Chomsky is, arguably, the most inﬂuential linguist of the twentieth century. Certainly, he is the linguist whose reputation has spread furthest outside linguistics. He has, in the opinion of many, transformed linguistics from a relatively obscure discipline of interest mainly to graduate students and future missionaries into a major social science of direct relevance not only to linguists, but also to psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers and others. Chomsky shifted attention away from detailed descriptions of actual utterances, and started asking questions about the nature of the system which produces the output. According to Chomsky, Bloomﬁeldian linguistics was both far too ambitious and far too limited in scope. It was too ambitious in that 34 it was unrealistic to expect to be able to lay down foolproof rules for extracting a perfect description of a language from a mass of data. It was too limited because it concentrated on describing sets of utterances which happened to have been spoken. A grammar, Chomsky claimed, should be more than a description of old utterances. It should also take into account possible future utterances. In short, the traditional viewpoint that the main task of linguists was simply to describe a corpus of actual utterances cannot account for the characteristic of productivity, or creativity, as Chomsky preferred to call it. This, as we noted in Chapter 2, is the ability of human beings to produce and comprehend an indeﬁnite number of novel utterances. Chomsky pointed out that anyone who knows a language must have internalized a set of rules which specify the sequences permitted in their language. In his opinion, a linguist’s task was to discover these rules, which constitute the grammar of the language in question. Chomsky therefore used the word ‘grammar’ interchangeably to mean, on the one hand, a person’s internalized rules, and on the other hand, a linguist’s guess as to these rules. This is perhaps confusing, as the actual rules in a person’s mind are unlikely to be the same as a linguist’s hypothesis, even though there will probably be some overlap. A grammar consisting of a set of statements or rules that specify which sequences of a language are possible, and which impossible, is a generative grammar. Insight Chomsky used the word grammar to mean not only the ‘rules’ which a person has inside their head which specify the sequences of their language, but also a linguist’s attempt to express these rules, which he labelled a generative grammar. Chomsky, therefore, initiated the era of generative linguistics. In his words, a grammar will be ‘a device which generates 3. The study of language 35 all the grammatical sequences of a language and none of the ungrammatical ones’. Such a grammar is perfectly explicit, in that nothing is left to the imagination. The rules must be precisely formulated in such a way that anyone would be able to separate the well-formed sentences from the ill-formed ones, even if they did not know a word of the language concerned. The particular type of generative grammar proposed by Chomsky was a so-called transformational one. The basic characteristics of transformational- generative grammar (TGG) will be outlined later in the book. Insight Chomsky not only introduced the idea of a generative grammar, he also proposed a speciﬁc type of such grammars, a transformational-generative grammar. As well as initiating the era of generative grammars, Chomsky also redirected attention towards language universals. He pointed out that as all humans are rather similar, their internalized language mechanisms are likely to have important common properties. He argued that linguists should concentrate on ﬁnding elements and constructions that are available to all languages, whether or not they actually occur. Above all, they should seek to specify the universal bounds or constraints within which human language operates. The constraints on human language are, he suggested, inherited ones. Human beings may be preprogrammed with a basic knowledge of what languages are like, and how they work. Chomsky has given the label Universal Grammar (UG) to this inherited core. He regards it as a major task of linguistics to explore its make-up. Chomsky’s later work, his so called Minimalist Program, became more and more abstract. Increasingly, he turned to specifying broad general principles, the bare bones of human language, taking less interest in the nitty-gritty details of individual tongues. He likened himself to a scientist who is not content just watching apples dropping to the ground, but is trying to understand the 36 principle of gravity. In this, he was part of a current trend among scientists, many of whom are engaged in a ‘quest for a Theory of Everything, summing up the entire universe in an equation you can wear on your T-shirt’, as one mathematician expressed it. Insight Chomsky’s later work became increasingly abstract, as he tried to specify broad general principles underlying all languages. But what happens now? Chomsky was the major linguistic inﬂuence for the second half of the twentieth century. He still has many devoted followers. But he also has critics. They argue that Chomsky overemphasizes constraints, the boundaries within which human language operates. Firm boundaries have proved quite elusive. Repeatedly, some constraint is proposed, followed rapidly by the discovery of a language which breaks it. Nor has he propounded a full linguistic ‘Theory of Everything’. So will the next generation continue to follow in his footsteps, or is anyone breaking fresh ground? Twenty-ﬁrst century: future trends Chomsky’s inﬂuence is a permanent one. An explosion of interest in language among non-linguists has been a valuable by-product of his work. He has directed attention towards the language potential of human beings, rather than the detailed description of linguistic minutiae. As a result, huge numbers of psychologists, neurologists, anthropologists, sociologists and philosophers have begun to take a greater interest in language and linguistics. Collaboration with them has led to the spiralling development of what were once ‘fringe areas’, such as psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics, but are now major – and still expanding – ﬁelds in their own right. Yet alongside these developments, a quest for a less abstract framework is gathering in intensity. Several inﬂuential language 3. The study of language 37 scholars have suggested that linguists ought to be looking not so much for an overall theory of language, but should be exploring the various components which make up human linguistic ability. As Ray Jackendoff of Brandeis University has pointed out in his inﬂuential book Foundations of Language: ‘Grammar is not a single uniﬁed system, but a collection of simpler systems … the evolution of the language capacity can be seen as … adding more and more little tricks to the cognitive repertoire available to the child acquiring a language’ (2002, p. 264). Similarly, Michael Tomasello, a co-director of the Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, has argued: ‘The human capacity for language is best seen as a conspiracy of many different cognitive, social-cognitive, information-processing, and learning skills, some of which humans share with primates, and some of which are unique products of human evolution’ (2003, p. 321). Insight Recent work has started to explore human language capacity in a more down-to-earth way. Of course, languages mostly do not vary wildly – they cluster around statistical norms. Linguistic statisticians, and also typologists, are beginning to estimate the degree to which a construction is ‘natural’ both within individual languages, and within human language as a whole. Hopefully, in the next century, we will have a much ﬁrmer grasp of linguistic ‘norms’, and how far they can be stretched. This hunt is now aided by corpus linguistics, the study and use of computerized databases for linguistic research. This chapter, then, has sketched – in outline – the main directions taken by linguistics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and has given some pointers to future directions. The next chapter will consider how linguists today set about studying language. 38 THINGS TO REMEMBER The interests of linguists vary from century to century. Nineteenth-century linguists were particularly interested in trying to compare different related languages. Their aim was to set up the hypothetical ancestor of Indo-European languages, Proto-Indo-European. The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure realized that all items in a language are interlinked. The American linguist Leonard Bloomﬁeld showed how to analyse unwritten languages. The American linguist Noam Chomsky initiated the era of generative linguistics. Chomsky ﬁrst proposed a transformational generative grammar. His work then became more abstract, as he tried to outline a Universal Grammar framework. Chomsky was particularly interested in linguistic constraints. Later linguists have moved to looking at language as a collection of different abilities. 3. The study of language 39 4 Deciding where to begin This chapter shows that language can be explored in different ways, and outlines how this exploration might be carried out. Language is an enormous and very complex phenomenon. If one wants to study it, where should one begin? People tend to argue about this. One way of studying something complex is to suggest that it is like something we humans already know something about. This chapter will propose that language could be envisaged as a game. Language as a game Suggestive metaphors often help humans to handle complex phenomena. For example, only when the heart was thought of as a pump did we begin to understand the circulation of the blood. Insight Metaphors may provide awareness of phenomena that are otherwise complex, or difﬁcult to comprehend. Language can be regarded as a complicated type of game, assuming a ‘game’ to be ‘a speciﬁed type of activity governed by rules’. The various facets involved in a game can show why there is some disagreement when linguists try to decide where to begin studying language. 40 In a typical game, such as chess or soccer, anyone trying to ﬁnd out how the game is played has to deal with three broad types of question: the aims of the game, the principles of interaction, and the permitted moves. Under the aims of the game, comes the fundamental question: what are people trying to do when they play it? In soccer, the players are trying to kick the ball into a net in order to score. The ‘aims’ of language involve not only the broad functions outlined in Chapter 2 (conveying information, expressing emotion, keeping in touch socially, and so on), but also more speciﬁc purposes for which language can be used, such as: Obtain information: Where’s the parrot? Make someone do something: Shut the door! Make a promise: I’ll pay you next week. The principles of interaction involve questions such as: How many people can play? Do they all play at the same time, or do they take it in turns? If so, how does one know when a person’s turn is over? Within language, people take it in turns to speak, and each language tends to have certain socially prescribed ‘turns’. For example, in English, a greeting is usually followed by another greeting: John: Good morning, Felicity. Felicity: Why hallo there, John. Under permitted moves, linguists explore which ‘moves’ are permitted, and which not. In chess, some pieces can move across the board only in straight lines, and others only diagonally. With regard to language, there are rules underlying well-formed sequences of a language. In English, for example, verbs precede their objects, as in The cat ate the canary, rather than *The cat the canary ate which would be the standard order in, say, Turkish. All of these aspects of a game are important, and no one could play without some acquaintance with them. In language also, all these facets are applicable, and native speakers have a ﬁrm grasp 4. Deciding where to begin 41 of them. When dealing with language, one might at ﬁrst sight want to tackle these facets in the order listed above. But in practice, there is a problem. It is easier to specify the basic permitted moves than it is to give a clear account of the aims and principles of interaction, which are closely interwoven with the social structures of the society involved. For this reason, the majority of professional linguists prefer to begin with those aspects of language which can most easily be detached from the social background. They therefore start with the permitted moves or, in linguistic terminology, the grammar of the language. They consider this to be the core of linguistic study, and expect to add on its interrelationships with society at a later stage. A knowledge of the linguistic resources of a language is often a prerequisite to an intelligent discussion of how these resources are used. Insight When studying language as a game, it is best to start with the permitted moves, because these are not so intertwined with the social structure of a society. In this book, therefore, we shall be moving from the basic linguistic core outwards. In other words, we shall start from the centre of the circle diagram shown in Chapter 1 (Figure 1.1), and move out to the edges later. But a decision as to where to begin does not necessarily imply an overall order of importance: people put on their socks before their shoes, but they are not necessarily giving more importance to socks than to shoes. But as a next step, possible reasons for studying language will be considered. Single-language specialists versus universalists People want to study language for different reasons. In general, people fall into one of two categories. On the one hand, some people might want to study language because they are interested in knowing more about one particular language. Into this ﬁrst category might come a teacher of French, or a missionary who had discovered 42 a new South American language, or a person who has an American- Indian great-grandmother and wants to know more about Nootka. On the other hand, there are those who want to ﬁnd out more about language itself, as an intriguing human ability. Into this second category come the majority of professional linguists and other social scientists – people such as sociologists, psychologists and anthropologists, who need to know about the phenomenon of language as a whole. Insight Some people study language because they are interested in one particular language, while others want to know about the phenomenon of language as a whole. These two groups are likely to write different types of grammar, and to view linguistics quite differently. People interested in a particular language will be trying to write a perfect grammar of their chosen language, or one section of it, usually by making a detailed study of the patterns of that language alone. For example, they might be interested in the relationship of French vowels to one another, perhaps with a view to perfecting their accent for a trip to France. It would be quite irrelevant to them whether this vowel system coincided with that of any other language, and such people would probably pick those aspects of linguistics to help them which seemed to be best suited to the phenomenon they were examining, even if it meant choosing an unfashionable or unknown model of grammar. They are likely to consider that the chief role of linguistics is the development of analytic techniques which will enable them to fulﬁl their chosen task. Those interested in language as a whole, on the other hand, will be trying to ﬁnd a framework which would be suitable for all languages. Such people may well write a grammar of a particular language, but they will be doing this in order to test out a theory with wider implications, since one way of testing a proposed universal framework is to see whether it will ﬁt any given language. If it does not, then it must be amended or abandoned. This type of 4. Deciding where to begin 43 person might also be working on French vowels, but they would be interested not so much in the vowels themselves, as in ﬁnding a skeleton plan which could ‘capture’ their characteristics alongside those of other languages. A framework which was perfect for French, but was inadequate for, say, Greek, Swahili and Icelandic, would have to be abandoned. Unfortunately, in recent years, extremists from each of these groups of people have spent an unnecessary amount of time attacking one another. Those interested in a particular language have argued that those searching for a universal framework are too theoretical and irrelevant to everyday life. One hears comments such as, ‘Modern linguistics doesn’t help me very much when it comes to teaching my Spanish class’, or ‘I’m doing a thesis on ﬁsh imagery in Shakespeare, and I can’t see where linguistics ﬁts in.’ The universal-framework enthusiasts counter this criticism by saying that the individual language specialists are narrow-minded people who simply like collecting facts, and one hears comments such as, ‘I wish she’d stop making lists of irregular verbs in Arawak and get on with something useful.’ As will be clear from Chapter 3, the reasons for this controversy are partly historical. It is characteristic of an academic discipline to take new turnings: the ‘old’ school will regard the new with suspicion and distaste, and the ‘new’ will condemn the old as misguided and out of date. Since those who are interested in individual languages have very similar aims to the Bloomﬁeldian descriptive linguists, they tend to be treated as old-fashioned by universal framework linguists, who are often convinced that they are ‘right’ merely because their type of linguistics has tended to be more fashionable in recent years. In fact, the two views are complementary, not contradictory. No one can work seriously on a universal framework unless they have at their disposal a considerable amount of information about individual languages against which to test their theories. Conversely, the heaping up of masses of information about diverse languages reduces linguistics to the level of a hobby such as 44 stamp-collecting unless some attempt is made to handle the miscellaneous facts within a wider framework. Moreover, it is perhaps wrong to assume that anyone interested in linguistics must fall into either category. Nowadays, a growing number of people are carrying out both types of study. In addition, those who start out with an interest in a particular language will ideally move on to becoming interested in language as a human phenomenon. The progression from a predilection for, say, German word formation

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