Chapter One
Invitations to
Linguistics
1. Why Study Language?
2
1.1 Some myths about language





Language is only a means of communication.
Language has a form-meaning
correspondence.
The function of language is to exchange
information.
English is more difficult to learn than
Chinese.
Black English is not standard and should be
reformed.
3
1.2 Some fundamental views about L





Children learn their native language swiftly,
efficiently and without instruction.
Language operates by rules.
All languages have three major components:
a sound system, a system of lexicogrammar
and a system of semantics.
Everyone speaks a dialect.
Language slowly changes.
4



Speakers of all languages employ a range of
styles and a set of jargons.
Languages are intimately related to the
societies and individuals who use them.
Writing is derivative of speech.
5
2. What is Language?
Language “is not to be confused with
human speech, of which it is only a
definite part, though certainly an essential
one. It is both a social product of the
faculty of speech and a collection of
necessary conventions that have been
adopted by a social body to permit
individuals to exercise that faculty”.
--Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913):
Course in General Linguistics (1916)
6
“Language is a purely human and
non-instinctive method of
communicating ideas, emotions
and desires by means of voluntarily
produced symbols.”
--Edward Sapir (1884-1939):
Language: An Introduction to the
Study of Speech (1921)
7
“A language is a system of arbitrary vocal
symbols by means of which a social group cooperates.”
--Bernard Bloch (1907-1965) & George Trager
(1906-1992): Outline of Linguistic Analysis (1942)
“A language is a system of arbitrary vocal
symbols by means of which the members of a
society interact in terms of their total culture.”
--George Trager: The Field of Linguistics (1949)
8
“From now on I will
consider language to be a
set (finite or infinite) of
sentences, each finite in
length and constructed out
of a finite set of elements.”
--Noam Chomsky (1928- ):
Syntactic Structures (1957)
9
Language is “the institution whereby humans
communicate and interact with each other by
means of habitually used oral-auditory arbitrary
symbols.”
--Robert A. Hall (1911-1997): Introductory
Linguistics (1964)
“Language is a system of arbitrary vocal
symbols used for human communication.”
--Ronald Wardhaugh: Introduction to
Linguistics (1977)
10
“The question ‘What is language?’ is
comparable with -- and, some would say, hardly
less profound than -- ‘What is life?’, the
presuppositions of which circumscribe and
unify the biological sciences... it is not so much
the question itself as the particular
interpretation that the biologist puts upon it and
the unravelling of its more detailed implications
within some currently accepted theoretical
framework that nourish the biologist's day-today speculations and research. So it is for the
linguist in relation to the question ‘What is
language?’”
--John Lyons (1932- ): Language and Linguistics
(1981)
11
“... in a sense all definitions
[of language] are, by
themselves, inadequate, since,
if they are to be more than
trivial and uninformative,
they must presuppose ...
some general theory of
language and of linguistic
analysis.”
--R. H. Robins (1921-2000):
General Linguistics (1989)
12
“Language is a form of human
communication by means of a
system of symbols principally
transmitted by vocal sounds.”
--Stuart C. Poole: An
Introduction to Linguistics
(1999)
13
“Language is a means of verbal
communication.”
It is instrumental in that communicating
by speaking or writing is a purposeful act.
 It is social and conventional in that
language is a social semiotic and
communication can only take place
effectively if all the users share a broad
understanding of human interaction
including such associated factors as
nonverbal cues, motivation, and sociocultural roles.

-- Our textbook (2006)
14
3. Design Features of Language

Language distinguishes human beings from
animals in that it is far more sophisticated
than any animal communication system.
15
Human language is ‘unique’

Arbitrariness

Duality

Creativity

Displacement
16
3.1 Arbitrarines


Saussure: the forms of linguistic signs bear
no natural relationship to their meaning
Arbitrary relationship between the sound of
a morpheme and its meaning, even with
onomatopoeic words:

The dog barks wow wow in English but “汪汪
汪” in Chinese.
17

Arbitrariness at the syntactic level: language
is not arbitrary at the syntactic level.
He came in and sat down.
 He sat down and came in.
 He sat down after he came in.


The link between a linguistic sign and its
meaning is a matter of convention.
18
3.2 Duality

The property of having two levels of
structures, such that units of the primary
level are composed of elements of the
secondary level and each of the two levels
has its own principles of organization:

Primary units ‘words’ (meaningful) consist of
secondary units ‘sounds’ (meaningless).
19

Hierarchy of language: stratification as ‘the
infinite use of finite means’.

Sounds > syllables > morphemes > words
> phrases > clauses >
sentences/utterances > texts/discourses
20
3.3 Creativity


Language is resourceful because of its
duality and its recursiveness. We can use it
to create new meanings.
Words can be used in new ways to mean new
things, and can be instantly understood by
people who have never come across that
usage before.
21


Birds, bees, crabs, spiders, and most other
creatures communicate in some way, but the
information imparted is severely limited and
confined to a small set of messages.
Because of duality the human speaker is
able to combine the basic linguistic units to
form an infinite set of sentences, most of
which are never before produced or heard.
22

The recursive nature of language provides a
potential to create an infinite number of
sentences. For instance:

He bought a book which was written by a
teacher who taught in a school which was
known for its graduates who ...
23
3.4 Displacement

Human languages enable their users
to symbolize objects, events and
concepts which are not present (in
time and space) at the moment of
communication.

Thus, we can refer to Confucius, or the
North Pole, even though the first has
been dead for over 2550 years and the
second is situated far away from us.
24


Animal communication is
normally under “immediate
stimulus control”. For instance,
a warning cry of a bird
instantly announces danger.
Human language is stimulusfree. What we are talking about
need not be triggered by any
external stimulus in the world
or any internal state.
25



The honeybee's dance exhibits
displacement a little bit: he can refer to a
source of food, which is remote in time and
space when he reports on it.
A dog cannot tell people that its master will
be home in a few days.
Our language enables us to communicate
about things that do not exist or do not yet
exist.
26

Displacement benefits human
beings by giving us the power to
handle generalizations and
abstractions. Once we can talk
about physically distant thing,
we acquire the ability to
understand concepts which
denote “non-things”, such as
truth and beauty.
27
4. Origin of language

The ‘Divine’ origin:

“In the beginning was the
Word, and the Word was with
God, and the Word was God.”
(Gospel, John 1: 1)
28

“And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and
they have all one language; and this they begin to
do; and now nothing will be restrained from them,
which they have imagined to do.” (Genesis, 11: 6)
29
4.1 The “bow-wow” theory

In primitive times people imitated the
sounds of the animal calls in the wild
environment they lived and speech
developed from that.


Onomatopoeic words seem to be a convenient
evidence for this theory. But they are very
different in the degree of resemblance they
express with the natural sounds.
This theory lacks supportive evidence.
30
4.2 The “pooh-pooh” theory

In the hard life of our primitive ancestors,
they utter instinctive sounds of pain, anger
and joy. As for evidence, we can only cite the
universal use of sounds as interjections.
What makes the theory problematic is that there
is only a limited number of interjections in
almost all languages.
 Besides, interjections such as Oh, Ah, Oops
bear little relationship with the sound system of
a language and therefore are not good evidence.

31
4.3 The “yo-he-ho” theory

As primitive people worked
together, they produced some
rhythmic grunts which
gradually developed into
chants and then into language.

We do have prosodic use of
rhythms in languages, but
rhythmic grunts are far different
from language in its present
sense. The theory is again at
most a speculation.
32


The by-now fruitless search for the origin of
languages reflects people's concern with the
origin of humanity and may come up with
enlightening findings in future.
One thing we can say for certain is that
language evolves within specific historical,
social and cultural contexts.
33
5. Functions of language


Linguists talk about the functions of
language in an abstract sense, that is, not in
terms of using language to chat, to think, to
buy and sell, to read and write, to greet,
praise and condemn people, etc.
They summarize these practical functions
and attempt some broad classifications of
the basic functions of language.
34

For Jakobson, language is
above all for communication.

While for many people, the
purpose of communication is
referential, for him (and the
Prague school structuralists),
reference is not the only, not
even the primary goal of
communication.
35

In his famous article, Linguistics and Poetics,
he defined six primary factors of any speech
event, namely:


speaker, addressee, context, message, code,
contact.
In conjunction with these, Jakobson
established a well-known framework of
language functions based on the six key
elements of communication, namely:
36






referential (to convey message and
information),
poetic (to indulge in language for its own
sake),
emotive (to express attitudes, feelings and
emotions),
conative (to persuade and influence others
through commands and requests),
phatic (to establish communion with others)
metalingual (to clear up intentions and
meanings).
37


They correspond to such communication
elements as context, message, addresser,
addressee, contact and code respectively.
Jakobson's views of the functions of
language are still of great importance.
38
Context
REFERENTIAL
Addresser
EMOTIVE
(e.g. intonation
showing anger)
Message
POETIC
(e.g. poetry)
Addressee
CONATIVE
(e.g. imperatives
and vocatives)
Contact
PHATIC
(e.g. Good morning!)
Code
METALINGUAL
(e.g. Hello, do you hear me?)
39


Halliday proposes a theory of
metafunctions of language,
that is, language has ideational,
interpersonal and textual
functions.
Ideational function constructs a model of
experience as well as logical relations,
interpersonal function enacts social
relationships and textual function creates
relevance to context.
40

In his earlier works, Halliday proposed
seven categories of language functions by
observing child language development:
Instrumental
 Regulatory
 Representational
 Interactional
 Personal
 Heuristic
 Imaginative

41

Still other classifications employ different
categories and use different terms, but all
share a lot in common about the basic
functions of language.

Below is a summary of the major functions of
language.
42
5.1 Informative function

Language is the instrument of thought and
people often feel need to speak their
thoughts aloud. The use of language to
record the facts is a prerequisite of social
development. The informative function is
indeed a crucial function of language.

It is also called ideational function in the
framework of functional grammar.
43

Halliday notes that

“Language serves for the expression of
‘content’: that is, of the speaker's experience of
the real world, including the inner world of his
own consciousness. ... In serving this function,
language also gives structure to experience, and
helps to determine our way of looking at things,
so that it requires some intellectual effort to see
them in any other way than that which our
language suggests to us”.
44
5.2 Interpersonal function


By far the most important sociological use
of language, and by which people establish
and maintain their status in a society.
In the framework of functional grammar,
the interpersonal function is concerned with
interaction between the addresser and
addressee in the discourse situation and the
addresser's attitude toward what he speaks
or writes about.
45

For example, the ways in
which people address
others and refer to
themselves (e.g. Dear Sir,
Dear Professor, Johnny,
yours, your obedient
servant) indicate the
various grades of
interpersonal relations.
46

Attached to the interpersonal function is its
function of expressing identity. For example,
the chanting of a crowd at a football match,
 the shouting of names or slogans at public
meetings,
 the stage-managed audience reactions to TV
game shows
 They all signal who we are and where we belong.

47

Language marks our
identity, physically in terms
of age, sex, and voiceprints;
psychologically in terms of
language, personality and
intelligence; geographically
in terms of accents and
dialects; ethnically and
socially in terms of social
stratification, class, status,
role, solidarity and distance.
48

The interpersonal function is such a broad
category that it is often discussed under
various other terms as in the following
performative, emotive, expressive and phatic
functions of language. They seem to
emphasize different aspects of the
interpersonal function.
49
5.3 Performative function

This concept originates from the
philosophical study of language represented
by Austin and Searle, whose theory now
forms the back-bone of pragmatics
(Chapter 8). For example,
I now declare the meeting open.
 I bet you two pounds it will rain tomorrow.

50

The performative function of language is
primarily to change the social status of
persons, as in marriage ceremonies, the
sentencing of criminals, the blessing of
children, the naming of a ship at a
launching ceremony, and the cursing of
enemies.

The kind of language employed in performative
verbal acts is usually quite formal and even
ritualized.
51

The performative function can extend to the
control of reality as on some magical or
religious occasions.

For example, in Chinese when
someone breaks a bowl or a plate
the host or the people present are
likely to say 岁岁平安 as a means
of controlling the invisible forces
which the believers feel might
affect their lives adversely.
52
5.4 Emotive function


The emotive function of language is one of
the most powerful uses of language because
it is crucial in changing the emotional status
of an audience for or against someone or
something.
It is a means of getting rid of our nervous
energy when we are under stress, e.g. swear
words, obscenities, involuntary verbal
reactions to a piece of art or scenery;
conventional words/phrases, e.g.

God, My, Damn it, What a sight, Wow, Ugh, Oh.
53

It is also discussed under the term
expressive function. The expressive function
can often be entirely personal and totally
without any implication of communication
to others.

For example, a man may say Ouch! after
striking a fingernail with a hammer, or he may
mutter Damn when realizing that he has
forgotten an appointment.
54

Exclamations such as Man! Oh boy! and
Hurrah! are usually uttered without any
purpose of communicating to others, but as
essentially a verbal response to a person's
own feelings.

Such expressive utterances can also be a
communal response of a group of people who
reinforce one another's expressive use of
language to show their solidarity.
55
5.5 Phatic communion

Phatic communion refers to the
social interaction of language,
originating from Malinowski's
study of the functions of language
performed by Trobriand Islanders.
For example,

Mrs. P sneezes violently.

Mrs. Q: Bless you.
Mrs. P: Thank you.

56

We all use such small, seemingly
meaningless expressions to maintain a
comfortable relationship between people
without involving any factual content.

Ritual exchanges about health or weather such
as Good morning, God bless you, Nice day
often state the obvious. Yet they indicate that a
channel of communication is open if it should
be needed.
57

Different cultures have different
topics of phatic communion.
According to David Crystal, the
weather is not a universal
conversation filler as the English
might like to think.
 Rundi women (in Burundi, Central
Africa), upon taking leave, routinely
and politely say “I must go home now,
or my husband will beat me.”

58

Broadly speaking, this function refers to
expressions that help define and maintain
interpersonal relations, such as slang, jokes,
jargons, ritualistic exchanges, switches to
social and regional dialects.

We have to learn a large repertoire of such
usages if we are to interact comfortably with
different people.
59
5.6 Recreational function


The recreational function of a language is
often overlooked because it seems so
restrictive in purpose and supposedly so
limited in usefulness.
However, no one will deny the use of
language for the sheer joy of using it, such
as a baby's babbling or a chanter's chanting.
60

In the Latin and Islamic worlds as
well as in some areas of China,
there is widespread use of verbal
dueling, in which one singer begins
a song of usually few lines and
challenges his opponent to continue
the content or provide a rejoinder in
a similar rhythm and rhyme scheme.

Such verbal duels may last for a few
hours and is performed for the sheer
joy of playing on language.
61

To take one example, the wellknown movie《刘三姐》
features a scene of “对歌”
(song dueling) mostly for the
sheer joy of playing on
language.
62

If you observe a children’s play, you will find
the power of sound. Sometimes even
nonsensical lyrics perform a recreational
function in the game:

the repetitive rhythms help to control the game,
and the children plainly take great delight in it.
Adults also have their way to appreciate
language for its own sake.
63

For instance, poetry writing gives them the
pleasure of using language for its sheer
beauty.

Very close here to Jakobson's poetic function.
64
5.7 Metalingual function


Our language can be used to talk about itself.
To organize any written text into a coherent
whole, writers employ certain expressions to
keep their readers informed about where
they are and where they are going.
65

For instance, instead of
saying


The lion chased the unicorn
all round the town,
they say

All around the town the lion
chased the unicorn.
A unicorn
66

This is the metalingual function of language
and meshes with the thematic function of
language in functional grammar.

It makes the language infinitely self-reflexive:
We human beings can talk about talk and think
about thinking, and thus only humans can ask
what it means to communicate, to think, to be
human.
67
6. What is Linguistics?


The scientific study of human language
Aims of linguistic theory:
What is knowledge of language? (Competence)
 How is knowledge of language acquired?
(Acquisition)
 How is knowledge of language put to use?
(Performance/language processing)

68

A grammar includes everything one knows
about the structure of one’s language:
Phonetics and Phonology (the sounds and the
sound system or patterns)
 Lexicon (the words or vocabulary in the mental
dictionary)
 Morphology (the structure of words)
 Syntax (the structure of phrases and sentences
and the constraints on well-formedness of
sentences)
 Semantics (the meaning of words and sentences)

69
7. Main branches of linguistics






Phonetics
Phonology
Morphology
Syntax
Semantics
Pragmatics
70
7.1 Phonetics

Phonetics studies speech sounds, including
the production of speech, that is how speech
sounds are actually made, transmitted and
received, the description and classification
of speech sounds, words and connected
speech, etc.
71

We can approach it on various levels.
At one level, speech is a matter of anatomy
and physiology. We can study organs such as
tongue and larynx and their functions in the
production of speech.
 At another level, we can focus on the speech
sounds produced by these organs by
identifying and classifying the individual
sounds. This is the domain of articulatory
phonetics.

72


We can also investigate the properties of the
sound waves — acoustic phonetics.
As speech is intended to be heard or
perceived, it is therefore possible to focus on
the way in which a listener analyses or
processes a sound wave — auditory
phonetics.
73
7.2 Phonology

Phonology studies the rules governing the
structure, distribution, and sequencing of
speech sounds and the shape of syllables. It
deals with the sound system of a language
by treating phoneme as the point of
departure.

A phoneme is the smallest linguistic unit of
sound that can signal a difference in meaning.
74
7.3 Morphology

Morphology is concerned with the internal
organization of words. It studies the
minimal units of meaning — morphemes
and word-formation processes.

Although many people think of words as the
basic meaningful elements of a language，
many words can be broken down into still
smaller units, called morphemes.
75

Morphemes serve different purposes. Some
derive new words by changing the meaning
or the part of speech, others only refine and
give extra grammatical information about
the already existing meaning of a word.

As morphemes are pairings of sounds with
meanings, there are many complexities involved,
forming a new field by the name
morphophonology.
76
7.4 Syntax

Syntax is about principles of forming and
understanding correct sentences.

The form or structure of a sentence is governed
by the rules of syntax, which specify word order,
sentence organization, and the relationships
between words, word classes and other sentence
elements.
77

We know that words are organized into
structures more than just word order.
The children watched [the firework from the
hill ].
 The children watched [the firework ] [from the
hill ].
 The chicken is too hot to eat.

78
7.5 Semantics

Semantics examines how meaning is
encoded in a language.

It is not only concerned with meanings of
words as lexical items, but also with levels of
language below the word and above it, e.g.
meaning of morphemes and sentences.
79

The following are what the key concepts
look like:
semantic components
 denotation of words
 sense relations between words such as
antonymy and synonymy
 sense relations between sentences such as
entailment and presupposition and others.

80
7.6 Pragmatics

Pragmatics is the study of meaning in
context. It deals with particular utterances in
particular situations and is especially
concerned with the various ways in which
the many social contexts of language
performance can influence interpretation.

In other words, pragmatics is concerned with
the way language is used to communicate rather
than with the way language is internally
structured.
81


It regards speech performance as primarily a
social act ruled by various social conventions.
Some key concepts such as reference, force,
effect, and cooperative principles may
appear commonsensical, yet pragmatics is
just about one of the most promising fields
of linguistic studies.
82

Take conversation for example.
Since language is transmitted primarily via the
speech mode, pragmatic rules govern a number
of conversational interactions, such as
sequential organization, repair of errors, role
and speech acts.
 Organization of conversations includes taking
turns, opening, maintaining and closing a
conversation, establishing and maintaining a
topic etc.

83
8. Macrolinguistics


Linguistics is not the only field concerned
with language.
Other disciplines such as psychology,
sociology, ethnography, the science of law
and artificial intelligence etc. are also
preoccupied with language.
84

Although Saussure's goal was to establish
the autonomy of linguistics, giving it a welldefined subject of study and freeing it from
reliance on other disciplines, with its
coming of age linguistics is developing
interactive links with other sciences.

The central goal of describing the underlying
system remains: this is the province of general,
descriptive linguistics.
85

But since language has both individual and
social aspects, it is naturally of interest to
psychologists and sociologists among others.

Therefore it is not surprising that we have some
branches of macrolinguistics that show an
interdisciplinary nature from their very names:
86
8.1 Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics investigates the
interrelation of language and mind, for
example, in processing and producing
utterances and in language acquisition.

It also studies language development in the
child, such as the theories of language
acquisition, biological foundations of language,
and a profound aspect—the relationship
between language and cognition.
87
8.2 Sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics is the study of the
characteristics of language varieties, the
characteristics of their functions, and the
characteristics of their speakers as these
three constantly interact and change within
a speech community.

An umbrella term which covers a variety of
different interests in language and society,
including the social functions of language and
the social characteristics of its users.
88
8.3 Anthropological linguistics

Anthropology and linguistics became closely
associated in the early days of
anthropological fieldwork when
anthropologists enlisted the help of linguists
to study unwritten languages.

In contrast with other linguists, then,
anthropological linguists are interested
primarily in the history and structure of
formerly unwritten languages.
89

Because an unwritten language must be
heard in order to be studied, it does not
leave any traces once its speakers died off.
Anthropological linguists must begin in the
present, with comparisons of contemporary
languages.
 Then they may draw inferences about the kinds
of change in language that may have occurred
in the past and that may account for similarities
and differences observed in the present.

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8.4 Computational linguistics

Computational linguistics centers around
the use of computers to process or produce
human language (also known as “natural
language”, to distinguish it from computer
languages).

To this field, linguistics contributes an
understanding of the special properties of
language data, and provides theories and
descriptions of language structure and use.
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
Some current application areas include
translating from one language to another
(Machine Translation), storing and finding
relevant documents in large collections of
text (Corpus Linguistics and Information
Retrieval), and carrying out various forms of
computer mediated communication.
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9. Important distinctions in linguistics




Descriptive vs. prescriptive
Synchronic vs. diachronic
Langue & parole
Competence and performance
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9.1 Descriptive vs. prescriptive



Don't say X.
People don't say X.
The first is a prescriptive command, while
the second is a descriptive statement.

The distinction lies in prescribing how things
ought to be and describing how things are.
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
The reason why present-day linguists are so
insistent about the distinction between the
two types of rules is simply that traditional
grammar was very strongly normative in
character, e.g.
You should never use a double-negative;
 You should not split the infinitive; etc.

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Humorous grammar rules






Never end a sentence with a preposition.
And don't start a sentence with a
conjunction.
It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
Avoid cliches like the plague. (They're old
hat.)
Also, always avoid annoying alliteration.
No sentence fragments.
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
In the 18th century, all the main European
languages were studied prescriptively.
The grammarians tried to lay down rules for the
correct use of language and settle the disputes
over usage once and for all.
 Some usages were prescribed to be learned by
heart, followed accurately or avoided altogether.
It was a matter of black or white, right or wrong.

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
These attitudes are still with us, though
people realize nowadays the facts of usage
count more than the authority-made
“standards”.

The nature of linguistics as a science
determines its preoccupation with description
instead of prescription.
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9.2 Synchronic vs. diachronic


A synchronic description takes a fixed
instant (usually, but not necessarily, the
present) as its point of observation. Most
grammars are of this kind.
Diachronic linguistics is the study of a
language through the course of its history.
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9.3 Langue & parole

Saussure distinguished the
linguistic competence of
the speaker and the actual
phenomena or data of
linguistics (utterances) as
langue and parole.
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
While parole constitutes the immediately
accessible data, the linguist's proper object
is the langue of each community, the
lexicon, grammar, and phonology implanted
in each individual by his upbringing in
society and on the basis of which he speaks
and understands his language.
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9.4 Competence and performance

This fundamental distinction is
discussed by Chomsky in his
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax
(1965).
A language user's underlying
knowledge about the system of
rules is called his linguistic
competence.
 Performance refers to the actual
use of language in concrete
situations.

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
Chomsky points out that this distinction is
related to the langue-parole distinction of
Saussure; but he does not accept the view of
seeing langue as a mere systematic
inventory of items.

Competence is closer to the famous German
linguist Humboldt's conception, that is, it
should refer to the underlying competence as a
system of generative processes.
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