Linguistics - PDF

Looking at Language through the Lens of Linguistics In this part... What do linguists do? You may have the impression that linguists are a kind of language police who check if everyone is using language in the right way. Far from it! By the end of this part, you'll know what linguistics is, what li...

Looking at Language through the Lens of Linguistics In this part... What do linguists do? You may have the impression that linguists are a kind of language police who check if everyone is using language in the right way. Far from it! By the end of this part, you'll know what linguistics is, what linguists do, and why and how they do it. Knowing a language Versus Knowing What Language Is In This Chapter Checking out what defines a language Approaching language from a scientific angle Changing who you are with language you would probably take your ability to use language for granted. Imagine what your life would be like if you could no longer use language: no more chit-chats over a cup of coffee, no more friendly greetings or sad goodbyes, no more arguments with your friends about which sports team is best. You couldn't explain the symptoms of an illness to your doctor. You wouldn't be able to warn someone across the street of a sudden danger. No more e-mails or text messages. Not only is human language important to us as humans, it's a uniquely human ability. It's also part of our genetic endowment. For both of these reasons - human language is unique and humans seem to be pre-programmed for it - the study of language (linguistics) lies at the center of efforts to understand the nature of what it is to be human. For more than 2.000 years, linguists have been trying to understand how language works, and that's what this work is all about. This chapter gives you a quick and dirty introduction to linguistics, introduction you to the defining traits of human language, showing you how linguists approach the study of language, and giving you a quick tour of the rules of the language game, the players, and what they need to know to play the game. Uncovering the Traits of Language Linguistics is the study of language; it's not the study of languages. What's the difference? Although linguists look at individual languages, when they do, they have the big picture in mind. Their goal is to understand the nature of human language. Individual languages are like different models of cars. For cars, each model varies according to engine size, wheelbase, transmission, and passenger capacity, but they all share a common set of traits. Same thing with languages - each language varies according to sound inventory, vocabulary, sentence patterns, and so on, but they all have a common set of traits. Most linguists agree that all human languages have the following six traits in common: Language is used to communicate Language is composed of arbitrary signs. Language is hierarchically organized. Humans Produce and Perceive language using auditory, visual, and eve tactile modalities. Language is unique to human beings. Humans are genetically endowed for language. Individual linguists focus on specific language traits. A functionalist focuses on the communicative function of language. A formalist focuses on the organization of language. A speech scientist focuses on speech production and perception. A gestural analyst focuses on gesture production and visual perception. An audio-visual analyst focuses on the integration of speech with gesture and the integration of audition with vision. A biolinguist focuses on the biological foundations of language, while a psycholinguist focuses on the cognitive base of language. Trait 1: Language is used to communicate Language is used to communicate concepts and intentions. To do this, it employs a system of signs with assigned meanings that communicate messages from one person's mind to another. For example, when you say to your friend the words, I'm going to watch a film," your friend now knows that you're going to walk across the room to grab the TV remote, and turn on the TV to watch a film. A sign is a discrete unit of meaning. A convention is a set of agreed upon norms. A conventional sign is one that all members of a language community agree to use with a certain meaning. For example, the word cat is a sign that members of the English language community agree, by convention, to use for those fluffy pets that go meow. The more general study of signs is called semiotics, and it applies to any system where organisms use signs to learn about and navigate their environment - it includes linguistic communication, but it also extends to animal communication as well as to the communicative use of signals from body posture, facial expression, and tone of voice. Trait 2: Signs are Arbitrary In language, the association of a conventional sign with meaning is arbitrary. For example, to describe the domesticated, carnivorous, canine mammal valued for its companionship and ability to guard, guide, haul. herd, hunt, search, track, or rescue, individual languages use different words: English has dog, French has chien, Japanese inu, and Mandarin gbu. There's no intrinsic relation between these conventional signs and the concept of this carnivorous mammal - rather, the relation is arbitrary. Sometimes you'll hear linguists say language has an arbitrary sound-meaning relation." Concretely what this means is that there's no intrinsic relation between a particular set of sounds and a particular meaning. The sound-meaning relation differs from language to language: that's a fancy way of saying that different languages have different words to express the same concept. Linguists call the lack of a connection between the form of a conventional sign and its meaning the principle of arbitrariness. This is sometimes called Saussurean arbitrariness, after the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who drew attention to this aspect of human language. Trait 3: Language is hierarchically organized Language is composed of units that are assembled according to the rules of grammar. All languages systematically combine units to form larger units, arrange units in a particular order, and substitute units for each other. Combining Units to Form Larger Units Linguistic analysis identifies and assembles units of language and arranges them from smaller to larger:  Phrases: Words combine to form phrases. The word the combines with the word dog to form the phrase the dog. Sentences: Phrases combine to form sentences. The phrase the dog combines with the phrase ran away to form the sentence The dog ran away. Groups of sentences: The sentence The dog chased the squirrel can combine with the sentence He didn't catch it. You can do this in several ways, including simply stringing one sentence after the next or joining sentences with conjunctions like but or and: The dog chased the squirrel. He didn't catch it. The dog chased the squirrel, but he didn't catch it. The dog chased the squirrel, and he didn't catch it. Ordering units relative to each other The relative ordering of sounds, words, and phrases can give different meanings. Ordering sounds relative to each other: The sounds /i/ and /t/ can combine with each other in one of two ways – /it/ 'eat' or /ti/ 'tea' – and each combination means something different. Ordering syllables relative to each other: The syllables /wi/ and /pi/ can combine in two ways – /wi.pi/ 'weepy' and /pi.wi/ 'peewee' – and each combination means something different. Ordering words relative to each other: The words sea and blue can combine in two ways, and each combination means something different. Compare the sentence Sea- Blue is my favorite color to the blue sea was visible from the road. Sea-blue is a kind of blue, while blue sea is a kind of sea. Ordering phrases relative to each other: When forming a sentence, phrases such as the dog and the squirrel can be introduced either as the subject or the object. The sentence: The dog chased the squirrel describes a situation that you're probably familiar with. But if you change the order of the two noun phrases, the meaning changes: The squirrel chased the dog. Ordering sentences relative to each other: They bought a car and then they had an accident means something quite different from They had an accident and then they bought a car. In the first situation, the car is damaged; in the second situation the car is new. Substituting units for each other Substituting one sound in place of another - or one word, phrase, or sentence in place of another - can also give different meanings. Substituting sounds: I don't mind if you /bu/ 'boo' me, just don't /su/ 'sue' me. Substituting syllables: Manufactured goods go in completely opposite directions depending on whether they are im.port.ed or ex.port.ed. Substituting words: Sometimes it doesn't make much difference if you ask for something or request it. But you'll get a whole different reaction if you demand it! Substituting phrases: Meeting a friend on the beach is very different from meeting at the courthouse. Substituting sentences: Push the salt, Could1 please have the salt, and do you think you might find a moment in your busy eating schedule to let someone else have some salt all make the same request, but they range from informal to polite to sarcastic. Trait 4: Language is produced and perceived Human languages are expressed using the human body. When you speak, you use your lungs, voice box, mouth, tongue, jaw, and even your nose. Of course, it doesn't stop there - you also move your head, do funny things with your eyebrows, wave your hands, and change your body posture. While these actions may accompany spoken language, in sign languages, the way you use your hands, and face is the language. In perceiving language, you use your hearing and vision, and even touch, to take in the linguistic information coming your way. It helps that you are both a producer and a perceiver of language because you are constantly producing signals that have never been made before - you are not a robot and simply cannot do the same thing twice, but you have a good idea of what you need to do in order to be understood. And the shoe is on the other foot when you are the perceiver because you have to make sense of signals you've never encountered before, but your knowledge of what you would do guides your perception of novel language events. Trait 5: Language is Quintessentially Human What makes humans unique on the planet is their extraordinary ability to hang on in the face of ever-changing conditions. Language plays a key role in humanity's success and mirrors the malleable persistence of its users. Language adapts to the needs of the language community. Those needs can be defined by physical geographic features (for example, a lot of names for fish, if you live on an island) and by evolving social structures (for example, stratified language styles for complex social hierarchies). Language is interactive. What you say and how you say it is learned by experience and is guided by the need to communicate with others. When different languages come into contact with one another, they can get into a tug of war for dominance or they can compromise as happened with Anglo-Saxon and Norman French in 1066 after the Norman conquest of England. Languages change constantly, but their overall evolution is slow and ponderous. Languages separated by vast geographic and temporal differences still reflect their common ancestry. The English of Shakespeare spoken in 1600 is very different in its pronunciation from modern English, but you can still read the language he wrote 400 years ago. Trait 6: Language is Genetic All humans are born with a roughly equal capacity to acquire language. Evidence for this genetic, inborn, feature of language includes these facts: Language doesn't depend on intelligence: Someone with a severe cognitive impairment can still use language. The acquisition of language and speech is fast and easy for humans: young children learn their mother tongue rapidly, from babbling at 6 months to speaking sentences by the age of three. Not even the most sophisticated computers today can learn to use language at anything like the level of a small child. In learning language, children everywhere follow the same sequence of steps, no matter which language they're learning or which cultural group or social class they belong to. And children acquire language much, much better than adults do. The innateness hypothesis claims that humans are born with a genetically determined capacity lor language. Many linguists, psychologists, and neuroscientists believe that children are genetically endowed with the capacity to acquire language - a learning ability that (like many genetically endowed behaviors) is largely lost after puberty. Studying Language Scientifically Over the last 25 centuries, linguists have developed an elaborated set of methods for studying language systematically and scientifically. These methods include tools for recording language and turning observations into appropriate data for studying the pattern and structure of specific languages. Comparison of different languages has shown how they interact, how they change through time, and how all languages, whatever their similarities and differences, have certain basic features in common. In the modern era of linguistics, sophisticated technical and conceptual tools have become available for recording observations and testing hypotheses. Linguistics has adopted empirical techniques for analyzing large data sets, or corpora, and uses computational techniques to identify patterns in sound, the distribution and frequency of words, and the structure of phrases and sentences. Linguists have combined methods taken from mathematical logic, information theory, and cognitive psychology and applied them to the study of sound patterns (phonology), word formation (morphology), phrase structure (syntax) and systems of meaning (semantics). The observations - called the data set - that linguists work with are generally drawn from one of three sources: a corpus, elicitation, or experimentation. A corpus is a recording of spontaneously produced language. An elicitation is a guided interview that elicits speaker judgments about well-formed and ill-formed expressions. Experimentation is conducted in a controlled laboratory setting and measures aspects of language perception and production as well as brain function related to language.