✓ Discussion, doubts, and clarification
✓ The field of Linguistics
February 10th (Wed)
The Nature… Class
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✓ Language as a cognitive capacity
✓ “Diving” into Chomsky and his ideas
Homework 1 due Friday.
Stick to a few points to be developed!
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• Linguistics is the scientific and objective study of human
language... a science that belongs to cognitive psychology,
social sciences, arts...
• From a mental (formal) or social (functional) perspective
• In its historical evolution (diachronic) or in its current
operation (synchronic).
• The linguist observes the language in a non-judgmental way
and describes the knowledge that speaking subjects have of
their language.
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Non-linguists often accuse linguists of maintaining that “any sort
of language is equally good”, particularly when we decline to
join them in their passionate campaigns against whatever it is
that has irked them. But this is misguided. Individual linguists have
their own ideas about what constitutes good or appropriate
usage in English, just like anybody else – except that the linguists’
views are usually far better informed than other people’s. But
there is a big difference between expressing opinions and finding
out what the facts are, and it is finding the facts that is the
primary task of a linguist. Nobody would attack a botanist merely
because that botanist was interested in finding out what plants
are like, instead of creating beautiful gardens.
R.L. Trask, Introducing Linguistics (2000)
• Grammatical knowledge is not like other knowledge types
(mathematics, traffic rules, chess, etc). = It is subconscious.
• Have you noticed the pronunciation of the <c> in “cup” and
“cop”; or the one of <s> “see” and “Sue”?
• Have you ever tried to explain the difference in the interpretation
of these sentences?
• The pig that saw the horse jumped over the sheep.
• The pig saw the horse that jumped over the sheep.
• Honestly, I like her.
• I honestly like her.
I like her, honestly.
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Noam Chomsky and the cognitive revolution
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Energeia (active doing)
Ergon (the product of that doing)
Humboldt (around 1800)
Langue (abstract, systematic rules and
conventions of a system; independent of, and
pre-exists, individual users)
Parole (concrete instances of the use of langue)
Ferdinand de Saussure (1916)
• "knowing" the language
• an idealized capacity located as a psychological or mental
property or function.
• Speakers of a language can produce and understand an
unlimited number of statements and they recognize this when
certain statements are unacceptable = linguistic competence.
• “doing” something with the language
• the production of actual utterances.
“From the point of view that I adopt here, the
fundamental empirical problem of linguistics is to explain
how a person can acquire knowledge of language”
Chomsky, 1973
Chomsky's theory is interested in:
• The i-language (internal, individual, intensional)
• Linguistic competence (an individual's overall knowledge
of his or her language), as opposed to performance (the
application of that knowledge (and other abilities/functions
such as muscle control and memory)).
• The model/nature of the linguistic knowledge build (= what
we actually know when we know a language.)
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A new conception of grammar:
• From this perspective, the grammar of a particular language
is conceived as a system of principles or rules, some of which
are found in all human languages and some of which are not.
• Universal Grammar is the mental system that allows us to
form and interpret the sounds, words and phrases of our
language.
• In Linguistics, this system is called a grammar.
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• Simply put, a grammar that generates new structures.
• Differs from the traditional and structuralist grammars that
preceded it.
• A model of the mental grammar of each speaker of a
language that allows them to understand an infinite range of
potentially new sentences.
• The pig likes the horse.
• The sheep said that the pig likes the horse.
• He thinks that the sheep said that the pig likes the horse.
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• It generates an infinite set of structured sentences (sound
and meaning) from a finite lexicon.
• Linguistic theory must be able to accurately and
adequately describe all the languages of the world (=
descriptive adequacy).
• On the other hand, all the natural languages must be
acquired by children in a similar way across species. (=
explanatory adequacy).
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The ultimate goal:
• To develop, from the study of languages, an explicit
model of the language faculty of the human being, that
is, a model of Universal Grammar.
• To develop a theory that would represent the system of
knowledge that every speaker of a language has and
under which he or she is said to "know" that language.
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Is there any reason to believe that
there are universal principles, and
that such principles are innate and
specific to the human species?
Language Acquisition
• All children develop mastery of the language to which
they are exposed at a similar pace and without
apparent effort, going through similar stages.
The comparative study of languages
• The languages of the world share common
characteristics that can be related to a series of
universal principles of organization or functioning.
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= All grammars are fundamentally the same
• There are principles and properties that are common to all
human languages.
• All languages have a set of contrastive sounds that help to
distinguish words (bread vs. breath, lift vs. gift, babble vs.
battle).
• All languages have more consonants than vowels.
• If a language has the consonant /d/, it will also have the
consonant /t/.
• All languages have the vowel /a/.
We will come back to this in March, during the Language Structures module.
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= All grammars are fundamentally the same
• There are also universal constraints on word order:
• If we want to express that Nick has lost his own wallet, many
languages will put "his" after "Nick", but no language will put
"he" before "Nick".
• Nick lost his wallet.
(his = Nick or someone else)
• He lost Nick’s wallet.
(he ≠ Nick)
• Nick a perdu son portefeuille.
(son = Nick or someone else)
• Il a perdu le portefeuille à Nick. (il ≠ Nick)
We will come back to this in March, during the Language Structures module.
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language system in your brain
Mental rules ≠ Grammar rules
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Lexicon
Rules
1. Mental grammar linguists try to understand.
2. Mental system of the rules of a language.
3. The correct, proper ways to use a language.
A grammar is a system that combines small pieces of
language into large ones. It allows us to judge what is
(and what is not) a possible word, sound, sentence even
if we haven‘t heard or read such combinations before.
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Structure
Meaning
(The structure provides the meaning)
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• Any language (oral or sign language) has a phonetic
component and a phonological component.
• It also has a morphological (words) and syntactic (sentences)
component.
• Since words and sentences have meaning, there is also a
semantic component (meaning).
• = And every variety of a language has a grammar.
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Component
Domain
Phonetics
articulation and perception of speech sounds
Phonology
patterns of speech sounds
Morphology word formation
Syntax
phrases and sentence formation
Semantics
interpretation of words and phrases (meaning)
We will come back to this in March, during the Language Structures module.
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• There is no "primitive" or "rudimentary" language.
• In fact, the most complex grammars are found in societies
without writing systems (and living without electricity).
• There is no "good" grammar and no "bad" grammar.
• All grammars tell speakers how to produce and interpret
the words and phrases of their language.
• Non-standard varieties:
• You want what?
I’ve never went
• Diphthongs in Quebec French: fête, pâte
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