What is Language?
A useful first step to deal with language might be to attempt to define it. This is not as easy
as it sounds; most of the definitions found in elementary textbooks are too wide. The
following are definitions of language commonly referred to in linguistics' textbooks. We
supply them in this lesson although we believe that describing the characteristics of human
language (next lesson!) would be more helpful than attempting to define it.
➢ “Language is part of culture; it is part of human behaviour… One can also say, simply
that language is an acquired vocal system for communicating meanings… Language has
a social function and that without it society would probably not exist.” (Nasr 1980).
➢ Human language, unlike any other communication system known in the animal
kingdom, is unrestricted in scope and infinite in extent. Against the severe restrictions
placed on topics about which bees and even trained chimpanzees can communicate,
human beings can, in any language, talk about all the furniture of earth and heaven and
about all human experiences. Language is adaptable and modifiable according to the
changing needs and conditions of speakers" (Robins 1979).
➢ Bolingers (1968) defines language as a “system of vocal-auditory communication,
interacting with the experiences of its users, employing conventional signs composed of
arbitrary patterned sound units and assembled according to set of rules”.
➢ Sapir (1921) defines language as “a purely human and non-instinctive method of
communicating ideas, emotions, and desires by means of means of voluntarily produced
symbols”.
➢ “Languages are the principle system of communication used by particular groups of
human beings within this particular society” (Lyons 1970).
➢ Langacker shows that “language is everywhere. It permeates out thoughts, mediates out
relations with others, and even creeps into our dreams. Most human knowledge and
culture is stored and transmitted in language”.
➢ “Since language is part of our culture and also part of human behaviour, our attitude
towards it must not be different from that towards any other part of culture or human
behaviour… what is correct or incorrect in a language at any given time is determined
only on the basis of how educated people in important position actually use the
language" (Nasr 1980).
1
Some Aspects of Language
It has been said that language is the very essence of what makes us human. If we are to
fully understand what it means to be human, then, we must understand what language is, how
it works, and how we use it.
Language is more than just communication; it is the primary method by which we do
things together. Language is the expression of human communication through which
knowledge, belief, and behavior can be experienced, explained, and shared. This sharing is
based on systematic, conventionally used signs, sounds, gestures, or marks that convey
understood meanings within a group or community. Language is a social medium, and thus a
social skill. This is the social aspect of language.
Language is not information, but the format for processing information -- not
explanation, but mastery. We tend to think of explanations of the language as critical. And
for many, explanations are intellectually satisfying. But the real cognitive aspect of language
is in our use of the language to think. Therefore, understanding explanations of the language
is not the same as using the patterns of the language to form our very thoughts!
Language is a motor skill. A new language will feel funny, and difficult to produce. It
is analogous to riding a bicycle or mastering a physical sport. The tongue, lips, throat and
other speech apparatus have to learn new positions and sequences of positions.
This takes preparation, practice, mastery and training. The learner will fall off the bicycle,
have limited skill at first, but the total experience builds as one continues to work on the
various aspects of the motor skills involved. This is the physical aspect of language.
References
Bolinger, D. (1968). Aspects of language, Harcourt, Brace and World.
Lyons, J. (1970). Language and linguistics – An introduction.
Nasr, R. (1980). The Essentials of Linguistic Science. Longman.
Robins, R. H. (1979) A Short History of Linguistics 2nd ed. London: Longman.
Sapir, E. (1921). Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech. New York: Harcourt,
Brace.
2
Some Aspects of Language
It has been said that language is the very essence of what makes us human. If we are to
fully understand what it means to be human, then, we must understand what Language is,
how it works, and how we use it.
Language is more than just communication; it is the primary method by which we do
things together. Language is the expression of human communication through which
knowledge, belief, and behavior can be experienced, explained, and shared. This sharing is
based on systematic, conventionally used signs, sounds, gestures, or marks that convey
understood meanings within a group or community. Language is a social medium, and thus a
social skill. This is the social aspect of language.
Language is not information, but the format for processing information -- not
explanation, but mastery. We tend to think of explanations of the language as critical. And
for many, explanations are intellectually satisfying. But the real cognitive aspect of language
is in our use of the language to think. Therefore, understanding explanations of the language
is not the same as using the patterns of the language to form our very thoughts!
Language is a motor skill. A new language will feel funny, and difficult to produce. It
is analogous to riding a bicycle or mastering a physical sport. The tongue, lips, throat and
other speech apparatus have to learn new positions and sequences of positions.
This takes preparation, practice, mastery and training. The learner will fall off the bicycle,
have limited skill at first, but the total experience builds as one continues to work on the
various aspects of the motor skills involved. This is the physical aspect of language.
1
Human language vs. Animal Communication
Language is the most important aspect in the life of all beings. We use it to express inner
thoughts and emotions, make sense of complex and abstract thought, to learn to communicate with
others, to fulfil our wants and needs, as well as to establish rules and maintain our culture.
There have been a number of attempts to determine the defining properties of human language and
different lists of features can be found. These are properties of human language that distinguished
human communication from that of animals. The following is a slightly modified list of features
proposed by the American linguist Charles Hockett (1960):
Language is Human
Only human beings have the capacities to use language and communicate in a uniquely human
way. Every human infant has an instinct to babble, express himself linguistically, and produce
sounds and utterances never heard before. Yet no animal has this power.
Vocal Auditory Channels
Much of human language is performed using the vocal tract and auditory channel. Hockett
viewed this as an advantage for human primates because it allowed for the ability to participate in
other activities while simultaneously communicating through spoken language.
Conventional
This feature refers to the idea that linguistic units are used according to fixed rules and
agreement among its speakers. Language, therefore, can be said to be conventional as a consequence
of this apparent agreement. Speakers in a given community, for example, use the same sort of
constructions to deal with similar situation. This convention makes up and fixes linguistic systems,
and people use language according to these fixed rules.
Systematic
Language can be represented by a sequence of symbols. An examination of many languages
shows that the number of symbols required is limited. But whatever the numbers of symbols, not all
combination of sounds is possible. This illustrates part of what is meant by saying that language is
systematic. This also means that language is rule governed. It can be described in terms of limited
number of units that can combine only in a limited number of ways.
eg: Table (a sequence of three sounds)
Tables (a sequence of four sounds)
When we add the suffix "s" we get another sound. However, we cannot add another sound as prefix.
Language is a System of Systems
Language consists of a number of linked systems, and structure can be seen in it at all levels.
Language has both phonological rules (sound) and grammatical system, each with its proper units
and rules of acceptable combination and order. Units are not permitted to combine for several
phonological, grammatical, stylistic, or semantic reasons. Language is a system, of systems all of
which operate at the same time. Consider how the plural is expressed differently in different words.
e.g.: child /children; dog/dogs /z/; cats /s/; roses /iz/, sheep.
Arbitrariness
It is generally admitted that there is no connection between a linguistic form and its meaning.
In the great majority of cases, there is no link between the signal and the message. The symbols used
are arbitrary. There is no connection, for example, between the word elephant and the animal it
symbolises. In animal communication, the reverse is true. For the majority of animal signals, there
is often a strong connection between the conveyed message and the signal used to convey it. An
2
animal that wishes to warn off an opponent may stimulate an attacking attitude. A cat, for example,
will arch its back, spit and appear ready to jump.
Creativity (or Productivity)
Most animals have a very limited number of messages they can send or receive. Bees, for
instance, can communicate only about nectar. Dolphins, in spite of their intelligence, seem to be
restricted to communicating about the same thing again and again. This type of restriction does not
exist in human language, which is creative (or productive). This is the ability to produce and
understand any number of messages that have never been expressed before and that may express new
ideas. In all animal communication systems, the number of signals is fixed.
Language is Meaningful
The reason why linguists are interested in studying language is that the sounds produced in
speech are connected with almost every fact of human life and communication, it has content and
meaning. There is a relation between the kinds of sounds speakers of various languages make and
their cultural background
Language Reciprocity or Interchangeability
Language has reciprocity feature, which is that ability of individuals to both send and receive
messages.
Displacement
This refers to the ability to communicate about things that are not present in space or time.
Animal communication is almost exclusively designed for a particular moment, here and now. It
cannot effectively be used to related events, which are far removed in time and place. Human
language allows the users of language to talk about things and events not present in the immediate
environment.
Duality of Patterning
This property is called duality, or double articulation. It refers to the fact that language is
organized in two levels simultaneously.
▪ First level: distinct sound (order)
▪ Second level: distinct meaning.
We can have the same group of sounds with different meanings. Duality feature refers to the fact that
we can use the same basic set of sounds to mean different things. Consider for e.g. from the sounds
/t, k, æ/, we can get: cat /kæt/, act /ækt/, tack /tæk/ (direction) tap (a knock/ stopper) and pat (a
touch).
References
Hockett, Charles F. (1960), "The Origin of Speech," Scientific American.
FUNCTIONS OF LANGUAGE
Human Language fulfils several functions:
1. Communicative function: The primary function of language is to communicate ideas. But
language can also be used to communicate feelings and emotions and also to maintain social
contacts on a friendly level, this is called phatic communication.
2. Phatic Communication: it refers to the social function of language, it arises out of human
need to signal friendship. For instance, one may say "nice day" just to start a conversation
with another. The utterance “nice day” in this case has no content but has a social function.
3. Emotional Interaction: Language has an emotive and expressive function. It is used as a
means of getting rid of nervous energy when we are under stress, anger, frustration.
4. Language has Social /Interactional function: It is used for social cooperation and
interaction eg: when one "sneezes" the other say "god bless you". Language is used not for
communication but to maintain relationship between people. Conventional greetings like
'good morning', 'pleased to meet you' … do not communicate ideas; they are produced to
strengthen social relation.
5. Transactional function: This means that while using language for communication
purpose, it has an informative function at the same time. That is the communication of
information and knowledge.
6. The control of reality: Language enables us to influence one another's behaviour, and
human co-operation. All forms of beliefs involve the use of language as a means of
controlling the force that affect their lives.
7. Recording facts: Language is used for the purpose of recording facts storing information
for future use. This language displays greater degree of organization, impersonality, and
explicitness. The function of language is represented by all kinds of record keeping: e.g.:
historical records, scientific reports, geographical survey, etc.
8. Cultural transmission: Language is used to transmit culture, traditions, beliefs, literature,
and civilisation from one generation to another through language. Language is part of the
culture being transmitted at same time.
9. Language is the instrument of thought: When philosophers use language to clarify their
ideas on a subject they are using it as an instrument of thought.
10. The expression of identity: Language is hardly informative but it has an important role
in fostering a sense of identity. Our use of language reflects a great deal about ourselves,
about our regional origin, social and educational background, occupation, sex, age, and
personality. In other words, language expresses our personal identity; that is who we are,
where we belong.
What is Linguistics?
Linguistics is the study of the principles underlying human language. Linguists (those persons
who study ‘linguistics’) investigate the structure of language, its relationship to other systems of
communication, the acquisition of first and second languages, language in its social context, the causes
and effects of language change, and universal properties of language.
Linguistics is the scientific study of language as a universal human phenomenon. Linguists
investigate the structure of language, its relationship to other systems of communication, the
acquisition of first and second languages, language in its social context, the causes and effects of
language change, and universal properties of language.
Theoretical linguistics concerns itself with the question of what it means to know a language, to
learn a language, and to use a language. Answers to these questions not only provide us with a better
understanding of the structure of human languages, but also with an understanding of the properties
that define the human language ability. Since language is central to most human activity, questions and
answers arising from theoretical developments in linguistics often have significant impact far beyond
the limits of the discipline of Linguistics.
Linguistics: Descriptive not prescriptive
Linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive. A linguist is interested in ‘what is said’ not ‘what
ought to be said’. He describes language in all its aspects, but does not prescribe rules of, what he
believes, ‘correctness’. It is commonly believed that there is some standard of correctness which is the
job of linguists, grammars and dictionaries to maintain. A linguist considers it his duty to record the
fact. He is an observer of facts, not a judge.
Linguistics as a science
In defining linguistics as the scientific study of language, one is saying that :
➢ it deals with a particular body of material; it discovers facts about spoken and written
language;
➢ it proceeds by operations that can be known and described;
➢ the facts it discovers can be justified by referring them to principles and to a theory that
can be stated. Linguistics examines the spoken or written material and makes general
statements about a variety of elements that relate to rules.
In its operations, linguistics is guided by three principles of science:
➢ that the material should be complete;
➢ that the material should show agreement between its different parts; and
➢ that the statement about the material should be brief.
The scope of Linguistics
The following are subfields of linguistics:
Phonetics
The branch of linguistics which studies the characteristics of human speech sounds and provides
methods for their description, classification, and transcription. Students will become familiar with the
International Phonetic Alphabet, which represents the sounds of any human language. For example,
the word "baked" would be transcribed as [bejkt].
Phonology
The branch of linguistics which studies the sound systems and sound patterns of languages.
Students will become familiar with the rules that govern how we pronounce words. For example, the 'l'
sound in the word "lie" is different than in the word "play" and different again in the word "fall".
Morphology
It is the branch of linguistics which studies the structure of words. Students will become familiar
with the processes of word formation. For example, they will learn why we can produce words like
"whiten" and "soften", but not "bluen" or "slowen".
Syntax
It is the branch of linguistics which studies the structure of sentences. Students will become
familiar with the principles governing the way words are combined into sentences. For example, they
will learn why sentences like "What did you eat eggs with?" sound fine, but sentences like "What did
you eat eggs and?" sound bad.
Semantics
The branch of linguistics devoted to the study of meaning in language. Students will become
familiar with the ways in which language is used to convey information. For example, they will learn
why the word "himself" in the sentence "The boy's uncle admired himself" can refer only to the uncle
and not to the boy.
Phonology, syntax, and semantics are the main concern of linguistics, and together they form the
grammar of a language, as shown in Fig.1 below
PHONOLOGY ----------------- SYNTAX
---------------- SEMANTICS
Fig. 1. Grammar
Synchronic vs. Diachronic linguistics
The definition of linguistics being the scientific study of language is one that is found in a large
number of textbooks and introductions to the subject. The term linguistics was first used in the
middle of the 19th century. The investigation of language has been subject to many changes in the
interpretation of the words ‘science’ and ‘scientific’. One topic that finds a place for discussion of
the status of linguistics is as a ‘science’ is its ‘autonomy’, or independence of other disciplines.
Linguists have felt that, in the past, the study of language was distorted by the standards of other
studies such as logic, philosophy and literary criticism. For this reason the publication of Cours de
Linguistique Générale (Saussure 1916, published posthumously by his students), with its concluding
sentence linguistics should study language ‘for its own sake’ or ‘as an end in itself’ marked the
beginning of ‘modern linguistics’.
Among the many notions that Ferdinand de saussure (1857-1913) introduced in the Cours de
Linguistique Générale are:
Synchronic and diachronic:
throughout the 19th century linguistic research was very
historical in character. One of the main aims of the subject was to group language into families, of
which the Indo-European family is the best known, on the basis of their independent development
from a common source. There was thus little interest in the study of the language of a given
community without reference to historical considerations.
Saussure’s distinction between the
diachronic and the synchronic study of language is a distinction between these two opposing
viewpoints.
Diachronic (or historical) linguistics examines how language changes through time, sometimes
over centuries. It enjoys both a rich history and a strong theoretical foundation for the study of
language change: for instance the way in which French and Italian have evolved from Latin.
Synchronic linguistics studies languages at a particular point in time (usually the present). It
investigates the way people speak in a given community at a given point in time.
Langue and Parole. The two terms by langue and parole, for which there is no accepted
English equivalents, have been also introduced by the Swiss linguist F. de Saussure, to distinguish
one of the senses of the word ‘LANGUAGE’. Langue refers to the language SYSTEM shared by a
community of speakers; it is the collective language system of a speech community. It is contrasted
with parole, which refers to the concrete utterances produced by individual speakers in actual
situations.
1
DESCRIBING LANGUAGE SOUNDS
Distinction between ‘Phonetics’ and ‘Phonology’
Phonetics is the science which studies the characteristics of human sound–making; especially
those sounds used in speech, and provides methods for their description, classification and
transcription. There are branches of the subject:
1. Articulatory Phonetics studies the way speech sounds are made, i.e. articulated by the
vocal organs.
2. Acoustic Phonetics studies the physical properties of speech sound as transmutes between
mouth and ear.
3. Auditry Phonetics studies the way in which people hear sounds. It studies the perceptual
response to speech sounds as mediated by ear, auditory nerve and brain.
Phonology is a branch of linguistics which studies the sound system of languages. Its aim is to
demonstrate the patterns of distinctive sounds found in a language and to make statements about
the nature of sound systems in the languages of the world.
Linguistics is first and foremost concerned with the spoken word. So the priority task for
anyone describing sounds is to decide how to represent the flow of speech. The written alphabet is
unsatisfactory, since it often provides little guide to pronunciation. When linguists deal with
sounds, then they abandon conventional spelling, and use one of the devised systems of notation in
which one symbol represents one sound. The best known of these systems is the International
Phonetic Alphabet (I.P.A), in which a number of symbols are borrowed from the written alphabet.
e.g.
[b] as in bread
[f ] as in father
[ɔ] as in hot
[ŋ] as in thing (a combination of ‘n’ and ‘g’).
[I ] as in hit (a small size capital I).
The symbols representing sounds are put between square brackets [ ]. Sometimes absolute
letters are used: e.g. [∫] as in dish. Other symbols are from the Greek alphabet: e.g. [θ] as in thin.
Sometimes supplementary marks called diacritics are added to the symbols; two dots ‘:’ indicate
length as long [u:] in foot. By such means, the IPA has built up a store of symbols which can
represent any sound in any language.
Sorting out the basic sounds
After a linguist has familiarized himself with the transcription system, the next step will be to
find a reliable native speaker of the language he is working on, from whom he can collect samples
of speech. In the beginning he will concentrate on the transcription of sounds, dealing with single
words first. As time goes by, and he gets accustomed to the sounds of language he is studying, the
linguist will describe more and more accurately. At the same time, he will realize that he is not
dealing with an endless variety of strange sounds, but rather he is dealing with a relatively small
number of basic sounds or phonemes, each of which may have several variant forms. Most
linguists have looked upon the phoneme as one of the basic unit of language, or the minimal unit in
the sound system of a language. In other words, it is the smallest segment of sound that can
distinguish two words.
e.g. The words ‘foot’ and ‘food’ differ in their final sound /t/ and /d/. This is the smallest
amount by which these two words could differ and remain distinct forms. Any smaller subdivision
would not be possible, because English does not subdivide /t/ and /d/. The words ‘bit’ and ‘bet’ ,
on the other hand differ only in the vowel sounds /e/ and /i/. This is again the smallest amount by
which these two words differ. Pairs of words such as foot and food, bit and bet which differ by
only one phoneme are known as minimal pairs, and one way to identify the phonemes of any
language is to search for minimal pairs.
2
The phonemes of English
The number of phonemes varies from language to language. The average is around 35. English
has 44: consonants and vowels. Vowels can be subdivided into pure vowels as in bit, bet, bat, and
diphthongs or gliding vowels in which the voice glides from one vowel to another, as in buy, spray,
boat, night, etc.
Allophones
Anyone working on a spoken language must not only make a list of phonemes of that language,
but must also consider their variant forms or allophones. An important part of the identification of
phonemes consists of finding out which variant sounds belong to each phoneme. The amount of
variation varies from phoneme to phoneme. Sometimes the variation is predictable, i.e. the way a
phoneme is pronounced can be influenced by the sounds round it, or by its position in the word.
For instance, the phoneme /p/ is pronounced with aspiration when it occurs at the beginning of a
word. After the sound /s/ the aspiration disappears as in spot, spill, etc. The aspirated variant [pʰ]
and the non-aspirated one [p] are both allophones of the same phoneme /p/ and each occurs in a
different set of environments. Similarly, the English phoneme /l/ has one form at the beginning of a
word, and another form at the end. In the word lip, for instance, the first consonants pronounced as
a ‘clear’ ‘l’, while in pill, it is pronounced as a ‘dark’ ‘[ɫ]’. L is light if it is followed by a vowel;
otherwise it is dark, it is vocalized. So the ‘clear’ [l] and the ‘dark’ ‘l’ [ɫ] variants are both
allophones of the same phoneme /l/. Some accents have only Dark L: Scottish, American; some
other accents have only Light L: Welsh.
Shared properties of phonemes
In the above section we have considered phonemes as separate units, each one having its own
allophones. But many phonemes share many features. The English phonemes (44 in number), for
instance, are not completely different from one another. Take for example / p /, / t /, / b /, / d/, / m/,
and /n/.
1. They share the property of being CONSONANT.
2. /b/, /d/, /m/, and /n/ are all VOICED, e.g. met, debt.
3. /p/, /b/, /m/ are all LIBIALS, i.e. pronounced with the lips.
4. /m/ and /n/ are NASALS, i.e. when spoken air is expelled through the nose.
CONSONANTAL
VOICED
LABIAL
NASAL
+
/p/
+
+
-
/t/
+
-
/b/
+
+
+
-
/d/
+
+
-
/m/
+
+
+
+
/n/
+
+
The ‘+’ sign indicates the presence of a certain property, and the ‘–’ sign indicates its absence.
The phoneme /n/ for eg. might be described as having the features consonantal, voiced, and
nasal. The term FEATURE stands for the property of a phoneme. Compared with /m/, the
phoneme /n/ lacks the feature labial. Otherwise, the two phonemes /m/ and /n/ are the same.
Therefore, the presence or absence of the feature labial is the feature which separates /m/ from
/n/. Any feature which distinguishes one phoneme from another is termed a DISTINCTIVE
FEATURE.
IL1/UBM/2014-15
MORPHEMES and WORDS
Phonemes, as we have seen in the previous lesson, are meaningless on their own. They become
meaningful only when combined into larger units to form what we call morphemes, which we shall
consider in this lesson.
Definition of Morpheme
The smallest syntactic unit is the morpheme. Morphemes vary in size; neither syllables nor length
can lead to their identification. What is essential is that a morpheme cannot be divided up into smaller
syntactic segments. The following sentence contains 13 morphemes.
e.g. The bigg-est of all the car-s mov-ed back slow-ly
1 2
3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
Fig.1
The items The, car, all, of, back are all single morphemes because none of them can be syntactically
divided up further. On the other hand, moved and slowly each consists of 2 morphemes: move is found
in other words like moving, moves, and also as a word by itself, a noun ‘a move’ while –ed is found in
words as finished, laughed, cried, etc., and slowly as two morphemes: slow and –ly; each of them can be
found elsewhere as in slower and mostly. Similarly, bigg-est consists of 2 morphemes: big, and –est are
found elsewhere as in bigger, and richest. There is no upper limit to the number of morphemes per
word.
Recognition of morphemes
A linguist identifies morphemes by comparing a wide variety of utterances. He looks at sentences
which are partially the same:
The driv - er mov - ed quickl - ly and stopp - ed the car by the shop
The kid -s shout - ed loud - ly and kick –ed the ball off
The partial similarity between moved, shouted, kicked and stopped enables a linguist to isolate the
segment -ed. And the partial similarity between quickly and loudly enables him to isolate -ly. Not all
morphemes are as easily segmentable as these examples. But the identification of morphemes is done
by this basic technique, i.e. the comparison of the partially similar utterances.
Types of morphemes
Morphemes can be either free (able to stand alone as a word) or bound (unable to stand alone,
i.e., they are attached to another form).
Bound morphemes are also called affixes; all affixes in English are bound morphemes of the following
types:
1. Prefixes precede the base form: un-lock, re-write, de-concentrates, and misunderstand.
2. Suffixes follow the base form: eats, work-ed, fox-es, acceptable, quickly, driving.
3. Infixes are inserted inside the base form.
Free: dog, talk, believe, red, etc.
Bound: un-, pre-, -s, -ing, -able, -er, -re, -ist, -ed, etc.
In a complex word like 'unbelievable', the main free morpheme 'believe' is called the root or base
form. The basic word-form involved is technically known as the stem. Example:
Unconcerned ------------ Unconcern
-ed
Carelessness-------------- Care less -ness
In words like 'receive', 'repeat' we can recognize the bound morpheme 're-' (do again), but the
elements 'ceive' and 'peat' are clearly not free morphemes, to make the distinction we may refer to 'ceive'
and 'peat' as 'bound stems' and others as 'free stems'.
•
Free morphemes: Two types
1. LEXICAL MORPHEMES: are that set of ordinary nouns, adjectives and verbs which we think
of as the words which carry the content of the messages e.g.: boy, house, look, and long. They are
treated as an 'open' class of words.
2. THE FUNCTIONAL MORPHEMES e.g.: and, but, because, in, the, it. This set consists of the
functional words such as conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns. They are described as 'closed' class of
words.
• Bound morphemes: Two types
1. DERIVATIONAL MORPHEMES make new words in the language and often to make words of
a different grammatical category: e.g. the derivational morpheme -ness changes the adjective good to the
noun goodness. The noun care can become the adjective careful or careless, teach (verb) teach-er
(noun). Derivational morphemes will include suffixes such as the -ish in foolish, the -ly in badly and ment in payment. It will also include prefixes such as re-, pre-, ex-, dis-, un-, and many more.
2. INFLECTIONAL MORPHEMES indicate aspects of the grammatical function of a word. They
are used to show if a word is singular or plural, it is past tense or not, if it is comparative or possessive
form. Inflectional morphemes never change the grammatical category of a word, e.g. both old and older
are adjectives, the -er creates a different form of the adjective. English has only eight inflectional
morphemes, illustrated in the following examples:
Let me tell you about Jim's two sisters.
One likes to have fun and is always laughing.
The other liked to study and always taken things seriously.
One is the loudest person in the house and the other is quieter than a mouse.
Morphs and Allomorphs
Sometimes a morpheme has only one phonological form; e.g.
Loud /l d/
- ly
/-l /
But frequently a morpheme has a number of variants known as allomorphs. Allomorphs are
not always easy to classify. Completely different forms may be allomorphs of the same morpheme.
Cats, dogs, horses, sheep, oxen, geese all contain the English plural morpheme.
An allomorph is said to be phonologically conditioned when its form is dependent upon the adjacent
phonemes. An allomorph is said to lexically conditioned when its form seems to be an accidental one
linked to a particular vocabulary item. The English plural morpheme is a very good example of both
phonologically and lexically conditioned allomorphs.
Phonological conditioning
The study of the different phonemic shapes of allomorphs is known as morphophonology sometimes
shortened to morphonology.
/-z/ /-s/ /-iz/ are all phonologically conditioned allomorphs of the English plural morpheme. That is,
each allomorph occurs in a predictable set of environments:
/-z/ occurs after most voiced phonemes as in dogs, lambs, bees.
/-s/ occurs after voiceless phonemes, as in cats, giraffes, shunks.
/-iz/ occurs after sibilants (hissing and hushing sounds) as in horses, cheeses, dishes.
Lexical conditioning
Words such as oxen, sheep, and geese present a problem. Although they function as plurals in the
same way as cats, dogs, they are not marked as plurals in the same way. Such lexically conditioned
plurals do not follow any specific rule. Each one has to be learnt separately. Words such as oxen,
sheep, geese, can be identified as syntactically equivalentto the cats and dogs type of plural because they
stand in the same place in a sentence:
The ----------------------- are making a lot of noise
cats
dogs
horses
sheep
oxen
geese
Fig. 2
Oxen, sheep and geese each contain two morphemes:
ox + plural
sheep + plural
geese + plural
But only oxen is easily divisable into two: ox + /ən/ (-en)
Sheep can be divided into two if a zero morpheme is assumed. It is written /0/: e.g; sheep + /0/.
There is no obvious way to analyse geese. Some linguists have suggested that the plural vowel /i:/ in
/gi:s/ (geese) which replaces the /u:/ in /gu:s/ (goose) should be regarded as a special type of morphemic
elementcalled a replacive. They would in this case analyse the plural as:
/gu:s/ + /i:/ (/u:/).
Here the formula /i:/ (/u:/) means ‘/i:/ replaces /u:/’. And it is better to state simply that the form
/gi:s/ (geese) represents two morphemes: goose + plural and that these two cannot be separated.
Note that similar explanation is required for such as went, took, which represent: go + past tense;
take + past tense.
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1
SENTENCE PATTERNS
Words by themselves, or words strung together in a random way, are of little use. Words may be
combined together into larger utterances according to certain patterns.
The sentence is normally taken as the largest unit useful for linguistic analysis. We shall consider
here, first, how words may be combined to form larger units. Then, we shall see how to analyse sentences
into their component parts, or constituents.
Linking words together
Different languages use different for showing the relationship of one word to another. Most languages
have one or two of the most common devices:
Word order
It is the device used most frequently in English.
e.g. The big elephant frightened the little cat.
The little cat was frightened by the big elephant.
The words themselves in these two sentences are similar. It is the word order which indicates ‘who
frightened whom’, and it is ‘the elephant’ that is ‘big’, not ‘the cat’.
Another device commonly used in English is the use of function words or the so-called empty words,
such as in, of, by, on, which exist only to indicate syntactic relationships, and do not refer to anything
identifiable in the external world.
e.g.
The little cat was frightened by the big elephant.
The Queen of England.
Constituent Analysis
Sentences are not simply words put together by means of various devices. In English sentences such
as * The big elephant frightened the little cat drove the Queen of Jordan do not exist.
Instead, and like every other language, English has a limited number of recurring sentence patterns. A
technique of syntactic analysis identifies these patterns by a process of successive substitution. Examine
the sentence:
The dogs may bite the lady.
In this sentence, the and dogs may be replaced by one word such as dogs, without changing the basic
pattern. This means that these two words are closely related, and together form a single component.
Second, the words may and bite go together since they could be replaced by a single word such as bite.
Finally, the words the and lady go together, since they could also be replaced by a word such as Mary,
her. Notice as a first step, we have reduced a sentence with six components down to three basic ones.
The dogs may bite the lady
Fig.1
Of these three components, the last two could be replaced by a single word such as bit. We conclude
that they can be considered together as a single component. We have reduced a sentence with six
components down to a basic two:
The dogs
Fig.2
may bite
the lady
The linguistic technique which divides up sentences into their component parts or constituents in this
way is known as constituent analysis. The test of substitution is basic to such an analysis.
Tree diagram
The successive layers of constituents which make up a sentence can be shown most clearly on a tree diagram. It
is called so because its branches are similar to the branches of a tree. As in Fig.3
2
The advantage of a tree diagram is that each join or node on a tree can be labeled so that the
whole construction becomes clearer: see Fig. 4
A diagram such as the one above, which indicates the way in which a sentence is divided up into
words and phrases is also known as a phrase marker, often shortened to P-marker. Such a diagram
contains important information about the structure of English sentences. For instance the P-marker above
shows the fact that this sentence, like the vast majority of English sentences, consists basically of a noun
phrase (a phrase containing a noun) followed by a verb phrase (a phrase containing a verb).
Rewrite rules
An alternative way of expressing the expressing the information found on a tree diagram is by means
of rewrite rules.
A rewrite rule is replacement rule, in which the symbols to the left of an arrow are replaced by an
expanded form written the right of the arrow:
S → NP + VP means ‘replace the symbol S by NP + VP’.
VP → VB + NP means ‘replace the symbol VP by VB + NP
On a tree diagram these two rules would appear as: in Fig.5
The dog may bite the lady could be rewritten as follows:
S
→
NP + VP
VP →
VB + NP
NP →
DET + N
VB →
AUX + V
DET →
the
N
→
dog, lady
AUX →
may
V
→
bite
The great advantage of rewrite rules is that they are perfectly explicit.
Identifying constituents
Every sentence, as we have seen, can be broken down into constituents. Not all sentences, however, can
be analysed as easily as The dog may bite the lady. How should the sentence
The mouse ran up the chair
be analysed? Should we bracket (ran up) together assuming that the two words can be replaced by one
word like climbed? Or should we bracket (up the chair) together assuming that the phrase can be replaced
by one word such as upwards? This type of problem can be solved by seeing whether the groups of
words in question belong together as a constituent elsewhere. One way of checking this is to build
sentences in which the original words are ordered differently
Up the chair ran the mouse
*The mouse ran the chair up
These sentences indicate that the words up the chair form a unit, since when the original sentence is
combined differently, the new derived sentence is correct when the words up the chair remain are kept
together, but incorrect when they are separated. Therefore the sentence may be analysed as:
(The mouse) (ran) (up the chair)
And draw the P-marker as: Fig. 6
3
Word classes
Consider the sentences:
Andy ate chocolate
Andy ate well
Intuitively, one feels that chocolate and well are different types of constituents. But we can show this
changing the order of the words:
Chocolate was eaten by Andy.
*Well was eaten by Andy.
What Andy ate was chocolate.
*What Andy ate was well.
The difference shows that the words chocolate and well are syntactically different and must be labelled
differently (Fig. 5). Fig. 7
In linguistic terminology, these two words are said to belong to different word classes: chocolate
is a noun, and well is an adverb. In traditional terminology, chocolate and well belong to different parts
of speech. Every language has different word classes which can be identified on the basis of syntactic
behaviour.
Complex sentences
So far we have looked at simple sentences. However, many sentences have one or sentence-like
structures attached to them or inserted in them. Consider the sentence:
Andy ate chocolate and Peter drank milk.
Here two sub-sentences are attached together to form a single one through the conjoining process. This
means that more than two sentences can be joined together. However, conjoining is not the only process
by which sentences are linked together. Often, subsidiary sentences are inserted or embedded into one
main sentence through the embedding process. Consider the sentence:
The rumour that the teacher had given bad marks worried students.
The rumour
worried students
↑
That the teacher had given
Fig. 8
In theory, a sentence may have more than one sentence embedded in it. Notice there are two sentences
embedded in the following simple sentence:
The fact that the rumour that the teacher had given bad marks worried students is not surprising.
Simple sentence:
The fact
Embedding 1:
Embedding 2:
is not surprising
↑
(that) the rumour
worried students
↑
(that) the teacher
has given bad marks
Fig. 9
Both embedding and conjoining processes point to an important property of language – that of recursion.
Recursion is the possibility of re-using the same the same structure, so that the length of the sentence is not
limited. This means that we cannot make a complete list of all the possible sentences of any language. Rather, we
must work out the sentences underlying system.
_____________________
Ling1/LMD/2015-16
1
SEMANTICS
Semantics is a major branch of linguistics concerned with the study of meaning in a language. It
includes the study of word meaning and sentence meaning. The study of semantics includes the study
of how meaning is constructed, interpreted, clarified, obscured, illustrated, simplified negotiated,
contradicted and paraphrased.
Words and lexemes
As a lexical unit may contain more than one word, David Crystal has coined the term lexeme.
This is usually a single word, but may be a phrase in which the meaning belongs to the whole rather
than its parts, as in verb phrases tune in, turn on, drop out or noun phrase (a) drop out.
The question of meaning is to a large extent related to the meaning of individual words or lexical
items. In connection to word meaning, three points need to be considered. First, the semanticists is
concerned with full words, such as apple, door, white, man, etc., rather than with empty words such as
in, of, that, which, etc. whose role is mainly syntactic. Second, the semanticist is concerned with
straightforward descriptive meaning and ‘emotive’ meaning or ‘connotation’. The word adolescent,
for instance, is taken to mean someone who is between childhood and adulthood. It is also used to
mean that the person concerned is likely to be immature, obstinate, etc. Third, the semanticist
considers the fact that meaning is double-faced. The meaning of a lexical item such as tree is
considered in two ways: (i) as one element in a language system, whose meaning depends on
relationships with the other words in the system. Second, its ‘meaning’ is linked up with a certain
class of objects recognizable in real world:
Language system
bush
tree
wood
etc.
concept
Outside world
TREE
Fig. 1
These three aspects are complementary: the linguist examines first one, then the other, starting
with internal relationships between linguistic elements.
Semantic fields
A semantic field is a set of words grouped in a certain way. For example, the semantic
field of "dog" includes "canine" and "to trail persistently" (also, to hound, to chase, to pursue).
A general and intuitive description is that words in a semantic field are not synonymous, but are
all used to talk about the same general phenomenon. According to semantic field theory, a
meaning of a word is dependent partly on its relation to other words in the same conceptual area.
The kinds of semantic fields vary from culture to culture and anthropologists use them to study
belief systems and reasoning across cultural groups.
"The words in a semantic field share a common semantic property. Most often, fields are
defined by subject matter, such as body parts, landforms, diseases, colours, foods, or kinship
relations. . . "Let's consider some examples of semantic fields. . . . The field of 'stages of life' is
arranged sequentially, though there is considerable overlap between terms (e.g., child, toddler) as
well as some apparent gaps (e.g., there are no simple terms for the different stages of adulthood).
Adolescent, for instance denotes someone who is no longer a child, but not yet an adult
2
Baby
│
toddler
│
child
│
adolescent
│
adult
Fig. 2
Cool refers to the temperature between cold and warm.
cold
│
cool
│
warm
│
hot
Fig. 3
Every language cuts up the world in different ways, and such a way of studying language gives a
picture of how a particular area or a lexical field is divided up. One language may have more
subdivisions than another in certain areas. For instance, Arabic has numerous words for different types
of camel, and English has a variety of words for different types of dog. The words covering a certain
area in one language do not necessarily correspond to those in any other language. For example, it is not
easy to translate into French the sentence The cat sat on the mat. Does the mat refer to the French word
paillasson? A small rug (tapis)? or a bedside mat (descente de lit)? None of the French words
corresponds accurately to the English word mat or rug, or carpet. Tapis often translates carpet and rug
in English.
These examples show us that for linguists, it is important to deal with the lexical structure of a
language rather than with isolated words.
Semantic relations and word meaning:
The meaning of words and their relationship is often transmitted through the use of polysemy,
synonymy, antonymy, or hyponymy.
➢ Polysemy: poly-semy, which means "many-meanings". In a language, the same arrangement of
sounds and letters can have different meanings; the precise meaning of a word is derived from its
context. e.g.: can = be able; can = container; can = to put in cans.
Head= upper part of a body, of a bottle; chief/principal (of a department, school, etc).
➢ Synonymy: synonyms are words that have different forms and same meaning. It is rarely found that
two words have identical meaning, because there is no need to have two words with same meaning in
a language. Some of these words cannot be used interchangeably like: big = large, we can say a big
man, but not a *large man.
➢ Antonym: We often define words generally adjectives, by referring to its opposite. We identify the
feature on which they contrast, example: life ≠ death, married ≠ single. These are true antonyms we
also have gradable ones. The opposite of ‘different’ is ‘same’; between the two words, things can be
slightly different, quite different, very different, which is impossible with the words ‘life’ and ‘death’.
Same with big ≠ small, full ≠ empty, pull ≠ push cheap ≠ expensive, hot ≠ cold.
3
➢ Hyponymy: Sometimes the meaning of a word is included in the meaning of another one. For
instance apple, orange, grapes are all hyponyms of the subordinate fruit; tea and coffee are referred
to as ‘beverages’, and ‘beverages’ come under ‘drinks’. This indicates that the vocabulary of a
language is hierarchically structured or classified in this way: each entry includes a list of hyponyms
(i.e. lexical items that come under it).
➢ Homonyms: Are words with same written form but different meanings example: bank of a river, and
financial bank; race: ethnic, and race: running competition.
➢ Homophony: Refers to words having same pronunciation but, have different spelling and meaning.
Example: meat and meet; flour and flower; sea, and see.
Componential analysis
A study of inclusion in any language shows that lexical items overlap in meaning and share
common properties. For instance, both lions and tigers contain an element of ‘wild animal – ness’.
Humans, lions, gorillas, and spiders all share the property of being ‘animate beings’. Consider other
examples: calf, puppy, and baby. One common element in these items is that of ‘non-adultness’; and
cow, woman, and tigress all contain an element of ‘female-ness’. The division of lexical items into
their component parts or properties is known as componential analysis (Fig. 3). A + (plus) sign
indicates the presence of a certain property, a – (minus) indicates its absence.
man
woman
child
bull
cow
calf
MALE
+
-
-
+
-
-
HUMAN
+
+
+
-
-
-
ADULT
+
+
-
+
+
-
BOVINE
-
-
-
+
+
+
FIG.4
Language and logic
So far, we have dealt with meaning of words and suggested that it may be useful to identify their
properties. However, it may also be useful to study the meaning of whole sentences. Consider the
sentences:
* The child ate the chocolate and then smelt it.
* The bird remained alive for an hour after the hunter killed it.
* The president arrived tomorrow
Each of the two sentences is well-formed syntactically: nouns, verbs, etc are in the right place. But one
understands intuitively that they are contradictory or illogical. Logic has the advantage of showing the
logical relationships which exist between lexical items in a sentence.
---------------------
Language Universals
For many people, Chomsky is the most influential linguist who has redirected people’s attention
towards language universals. Chomsky suggests that past scholars have failed to find language
universals because they have looked for components common to all languages. Instead, according to
him, they should concentrate on two other aspects: (1) they should try to find a grammatical
framework suitable for all languages, and (2) within this framework, they should concentrate on
finding elements and constructions that are available to all languages. There may be a universal pool
from which each language picks different elements, and which each language combines in different
ways. Chomsky also suggests that there are universal constraints or rules on the ways linguistic
elements can be combined. To sum up, the primary aim of a linguist is for Chomsky to discover the
universal bounds within which human language operates.
What do the languages of the world have in common? And how do they differ from each other?
There exist basic patterns or principles that are shared by all languages. These patterns are called
universals.
Types of Universals
There are several examples for universals:
•
Semantic Universals
There are semantic categories that are shared by all cultures and referred to by all languages;
these are called semantic universals. For example, one semantic universal regards our notion of color
containing eleven basic color terms: black, white, red, green, blue, yellow, brown, purple, pink,
orange, and grey. The pattern or principle that all languages universally admit is that they do not
entertain a notion of a color term outside of that range. This means, any imaginable color is
conceived of as a mixture, shade, or subcategory of one of these eleven basic color terms. The eleven
color terms are not in usage equally among the languages. Another semantic universal is the case of
pronouns: English (singular and plural with first, second, and third person), other languages the
pronoun of the dual.
•
Phonological Universals
Different languages may have very different sets of vowels; there are universal rules governing
the distribution of vowels. Languages with few vowels always have the same set of vowel types.
And if a language has more vowels, it is always the same type of vowel that is added to the set.
These vowels may not always sound exactly the same, but they are always created at the same
location in our vocal apparatus.
•
Syntactic Universals
The order subject, verb, object (SVO) may be defined as the basic order of English sentences.
In other languages, such as Japanese (SOV) or Arabic (VSO), there are different basic orders.
Therefore, there are two different basic orders that languages follow: (1) SVO, VSO, SOV and (2)
VOS, OVS, OSV. Since the first order is the one which applies to the basic structures of far more
languages than the second one does, the universal rule is that, among the languages of the world,
there is a great tendency for the subject of a sentence to precede the direct object.
Competence and performance
An aspect of language which Chomsky regards important is the property of productivity, or
creativity. This, as we saw in semester 1, is the ability of human beings to produce and comprehend
an indefinite number of new sentences. A person who knows a language is in a situation similar to
1
that of someone who has learnt to play chess. A chess player has not simply memorized different
states of play, and the moves associated with each move. Instead he has acquired knowledge of
which moves are possible, and which not.
For Chomsky, competence refers to a speaker's knowledge of his language as manifest in his
ability to produce and to understand a theoretically infinite number of sentences most of which he
may have never seen or heard before, it cannot be observed. Performance refers to the specific
utterances, including grammatical mistakes and non-linguistic features like hesitations,
accompanying the use of language.
Criteria for judging grammars
Chomsky made a distinction between grammars which achieved descriptive adequacy and
those which went further and achieved explanatory adequacy. A descriptively adequate grammar for
a particular language defines the (infinite) set of grammatical sentences in that language; that is, it
describes the language in its entirety. In other words, a grammar should attempt to be
psychologically real in some sense. A grammar which achieves explanatory adequacy has the
additional property that it gives an insight into the underlying linguistic structures in the human
mind; that is, it does not merely describe the grammar of a language, but makes predictions about
how linguistic knowledge is mentally represented. For Chomsky, if a grammatical theory has
explanatory adequacy it must be able to explain the various grammatical nuances of the languages of
the world as relatively minor variations in the universal pattern of human language.
Generative linguists think that for native speakers of natural languages, grammaticality is a
matter of linguistic intuition of the native speaker, a competence learned by language acquisition.
Transformational grammar or transformational-generative grammar (TGG)
In linguistics, a transformational grammar or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) is
a generative grammar, especially of a natural language, that has been developed by Chomsky. The
key term here is ‘generative’; a generative grammar is one that contains a list of symbols and a list
of rules for combining these symbols in various ways to produce every English sentence. Such a
grammar is said to ‘generate’ all the possible sentences in a language. In other words, rules that
generate or determine (the unlimited number of sentences) are actually general rules about language
which permit a native speaker, among other things, to judge the grammaticality of any new sentence.
Transformation rules may involve changes in the order of elements, addition, and deletions.
Deep structure and surface structure (DS and SS)
In the 1950s and 1960s, Chomsky developed the idea that each sentence in a language has
two levels of representation: a deep structure and a surface structure. The deep structure was (moreor-less) a direct representation of the basic semantic relations underlying a sentence, and was
mapped onto the surface structure (which followed the phonological form of the sentence very
closely) via transformations. There is a common misunderstanding that Deep Structure was
supposed to be identical across all languages (thus creating a universal grammar), but Chomsky did
not in fact suggest this in so many words. However, Chomsky did believe that there would be
considerable similarities between the Deep Structures of different languages, and that these
structures would reveal properties common to all languages which were concealed by their Surface
Structures. It is arguable that the overriding motivation for the introduction of transformations was
simply to make grammars more (mathematically) powerful, rather than to explain the origin of
syntactic variations between languages. Though the ability of a grammatical theory to generalize
across languages is fundamental to its worth in Chomsky's view, some of the definitive literature on
early transformational grammar (e.g. Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, 1965) emphasizes
the role of transformations in obtaining the necessary level of mathematical power in the syntactic
component of a grammar, which, in his opinion, the structuralist grammars popular at the time did
2
not have. Chomsky also emphasizes the importance of modern formal mathematical devices in the
development of grammatical theory:
But the fundamental reason for [the] inadequacy of traditional grammars is a more technical
one. Although it was well understood that linguistic processes are in some sense "creative",
the technical devices for expressing a system of recursive processes were simply not
available until much more recently. In fact, a real understanding of how a language can (in
Humboldt's words) "make infinite use of finite means" has developed only within the last
thirty years, in the course of studies in the foundations of mathematics. (Aspects of the
Theory of Syntax, p. 8)
Transformational grammar is a broad term describing grammars (almost exclusively those of natural
languages) which have been developed in a Chomskyan tradition. The term is usually synonymous
with the slightly more specific transformational-generative grammar.
Deep structure versus surface structure
In 1957, Chomsky published Syntactic Structures, in which he developed the idea that each
sentence in a language has two levels of representation — a deep structure (DS) and a surface
structure (SS). The DS represented the core semantic relations of a sentence, and was mapped on to
the SS (which followed the phonological form of the sentence very closely) via transformations. We
can use the terms ‘deep structure’ and ‘surface structure’ to refer to the general structure and the
actually produced sentence. For example,
Charlie broke the window (active)
Has two different surface structures
The window was broken by Charlie (passive)
These two sentences are very closely related, even identical at some less superficial level, i.e., they
have the same ‘underlying’ deep structure.
Grammar must be capable of showing how a single underlying abstract representation can become
different surface structure.
Chomsky believed that there would be considerable similarities between languages' deep structures,
and that these structures would reveal properties, common to all languages, which were covered by
their SS. The concept of DS plays an important role in transformational grammar (TG).
Transformations
The term 'transformation' in linguistics refers to a rule that takes an input typically called the
Deep Structure (DS) or D-structure (in the extended standard theory and changes it in some restricted
way to result in a Surface Structure (SS). In TGG, Deep structures were generated by a set of phrase
structure rules.
For example a typical transformation in TG is the operation of subject-auxiliary inversion (SAI).
This rule takes as its input a declarative sentence with an auxiliary:
John has eaten all the biscuits.
and transforms it into Has John eaten all the biscuits? In their original formulation (Chomsky 1957),
these rules were stated as rules that held over strings of either terminals or constituent symbols or
both.
3
X NP AUX Y
X AUX NP Y
(where NP = Noun Phrase and AUX = Auxiliary)
In the 1970s, by the time of the Extended Standard Theory, following the work of Joseph Edmonds
on structure preservation, transformations came to be viewed as holding over trees. By the end of
government and binding theory in the late 1980s, transformations are no longer structure changing
operations at all; instead they add information to already existing trees by copying constituents.
The earliest conceptions of transformations were that they were construction-specific devices. For
example, there was a transformation that turned active sentences into passive ones.
Reasons for Language Universals
One way of trying to account for universals is the monogenesis hypothesis: the idea that all
languages stem from the same proto-language (see lesson on ‘survey of language’) and have
inherited the same universal traits from this proto-language. Another possible explanation for
universals is the language contact hypothesis, according to which languages have many things in
common because they are constantly influenced by each other; exceptional features are often found
in peripheral languages that have developed in relative isolation. Furthermore, one common
explanation for language universals is the innateness hypothesis (see lesson on ‘human language vs
animal communication’), the idea that our ability to use language is a part of our genetic endowment.
Under this hypothesis, we may be genetically predisposed to distinguish between vowels and
consonants, and to let subjects precede objects. The innateness hypothesis explains our ability to
learn and use language as an effect of an innate grammar, a genetic programme specifically designed
to determine the development of our language ability. Finally, this leads us to the large variety of
functional explanations for language universals. Some language features are universal because they
make linguistic utterances easier both to produce and to interpret—for cognitive, anatomic or other
reasons. The fact that all languages have both consonants and vowels is an obvious example. A
language with only consonants would be more difficult to hear, since consonants are generally less
sonorant than vowels.
2010/11
4
Other areas of linguistics
(I) Language change
Language change is the phenomenon whereby phonetic, morphological, semantic, syntactic features
of language vary over time. All languages change continually. At any given moment the English language,
for example, has a huge variety within itself: descriptive linguists call this variety synchronic variation.
From these different forms comes the effect on language over time known as diachronic change (cf. lesson
Synchronic vs diachronic linguistics, Semester 1). Two linguistic disciplines in particular concern
themselves with studying language change: (1) historical linguistics (cf. lesson Semester 1) and (2)
sociolinguistics (to study last session of semester 2).
Types of language change
Three main aspects of language change over time: vocabulary, pronunciations, and sentence
structure.
Vocabulary can change quickly as new words are borrowed from other languages, or as words get
combined or shortened. Some words are even created by mistake. As noted in the Linguistic Society of
America's publication Is English Changing?, pea is one such example. Up until about 400 years ago, pease
referred to either a single pea or many peas. At some point, people mistakenly assumed that the word pease
was the plural form of pea, and a new word was born. While vocabulary can change quickly, sentence
structure—the order of words in a sentence—changes more slowly.
Throughout its history English, for instance, has borrowed words from other languages; it has re-combined
and recycled them to create new meanings, and lost some old words. The appearance of a new word marks
only the beginning of its existence. Once generally accepted as part of the language, the meanings it has for
speakers can shift, causing, sometimes, misunderstandings. For example, ‘villain’ once meant a peasant or
farmhand, but has come to imply a criminal individual in modern English. This exemplifies a word that has
undergone pejoration, which means that a negative association has become attached to it. Conversely, other
words have undergone amelioration, where a more positive meaning prevails. Thus, the word 'wicked'
(generally meaning 'evil'), as of 2009 means ‘brilliant’ in slang or in a colloquial context.
Phonetic and phonological changes
The concept of sound change covers both phonetic and phonological developments. Speakers tend
to make their utterances as efficient and effective as possible to reach communicative purposes. Speakers
especially use economy in their articulation, which tends to result in phonetic reduction of speech forms. See
vowel reduction, cluster reduction, and elision. After some time a change may become widely accepted and
may end up treated as a standard. Example:
going to [ˈɡoʊ.ɪntʊ] → gonna [ˈɡʌnə], with examples of both vowel reduction [ʊ] → [ə] and elision
[nt] → [n], [oʊ.ɪ] → [ʌ].
Spelling changes
Differences in spelling often catch the eye of a reader of a text from a previous century. The pre-print
era had fewer literate people: languages lacked fixed systems of orthography, and the handwritten
manuscripts that survive show words spelled according to regional pronunciation and to personal preference.
The development of the printing press in the 15th century, however, presented printers with problems of
standardisation: texts from the 15 through to the 17 centuries show many internal spelling irregularities.
Writers contributed to the variety: Shakespeare spelled his own name in many different ways. Modern
English spellings do not result from a single consistent system; rather, they show evidence of previous
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pronunciations which changed over time. For example, the spelling of words such as ‘night’ hints at an
older pronunciation, the ‘gh’ representing a sound similar to that conveyed by ‘ch’ in the Scottish
pronunciation of loch. Other examples include the "k"-sound once pronounced in words like ‘knee’ or
‘knight’, and the ‘ch’ in ‘chicken’ or ‘cheese’, which English-speakers once pronounced as ‘k’.
Syntactic change
When comparing synchronic dialects, we do not know which one preserves older forms and which
are innovative. Thus when noting that speakers of Standard Australian English allow sentences such as (1),
while speakers of Standard American English do not allow this agreement rule and prefer the sentence in
(2),
no claim is made about which dialect preserves the older pattern and which has diverged.
1. My team are going to win the Grand Final this year.
2. My team is going to win the World Series this year.
Reasons for languages change
It is surprising that languages change. They are passed down through the generations for parents and
children to communicate with each other. Yet linguists find that all languages change over time - though at
different rates. For example, while Japanese has changed little over 1,000 years, English evolved rapidly in
just a few centuries. Languages change for a variety of reasons: for social, economic and political reasons.
History shows many examples of language change provoked by invasions, colonization and migration. Even
without these kinds of influences, a language can change considerably if users change the way they speak it.
Frequently, the needs of speakers lead to language change. New technologies, industries, products
and experiences require new words. For instance, plastic, cell phones and the internet did not exist in
Shakespeare’s time. The vocabulary and phrases people use depend on where they live, their age, education
level, social status and other factors. Often, for example, teens and young adults use different words and
phrases from their parents. Some of them spread through the population and slowly change the language.
Other influences on language
Language also changes whenever speakers come into contact with each other. No two individuals
speak in the same way: people from different geographical places clearly speak differently, but even within
the same small community there are variations according to a speaker’s age, gender, ethnicity and social and
educational background. Through our interactions with different speakers of the community, we encounter
new words, expressions and pronunciations and integrate them into our own speech. Even if your family has
lived in the same area for generations, you can notice a number of differences between the language you use
and the way your grandparents speak. Every generation contributes to language change.
Language change can be a good thing
Most contemporary linguistic commentators accept that change in language, like change in society, is
an unavoidable process, but more often a means of refreshing a language, providing alternatives that allow
slight differences of expression.
Language Families
When dealing with language families we speak about the relationship between languages. A
language family is the set of languages deriving from a common ancestor or parent, eg: indo-European. This
is usually done with the help of historical (diachronic) or comparative linguistics.
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Family tree
During the 19th c linguists' preoccupation was the historical study of language to find out a common
ancestor. Original form (proto), language in Indian-sub continent (indo) in Europe (European). With protoindo-European established as the “great-grand mother”, scholars set out the branches of her family tree
showing the ancestry of many modern languages as illustrated.
Proto-indo-European
Germanic
Celtic
Italic
Hellenic
Balto-slavic
latin
AncientGreek
German
Gaelic Italian
English
Irish
Spanish
Danish
Welsh French
Norwegian
portuguese
Greek
Baltic
Slavic
Latvian
Lithuan
Russian
Polish
Bulgarian
Indo-Iranian
Indic
Sanscrit
Iranian
semitic
Arabic
Hebrew
Persian
Hindi
Bengali
Marathi
This tree diagram covers a small number of the world languages. There are about thirty language
families which have produced about 4,000 languages in the world. Some of these languages are much more
widely spoken than others. In terms of number of speakers, Chinese (close to 1 billion); English (350
million); Spanish 300 million; Hindi 200, Arabic and Russian 150 million.
Relationship between languages that was established because of similarities like:
Sanskrit
Latin
Greek
pitar
bhratar
pater
frater
pater
phrater
Father
brother
Indo-European languages
Scholars directed their attention to the determination of other language families. However their
interest in indo European languages remained important in historical and contrastive studies, because it had
very ancient written records that goes back to 100 or 1000 years ago. Since related languages are for the
most part different forms of some earlier single language, the further we go back in time the less difference
will we find between languages being compared.
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Introduction to Psycholinguistics and Sociolinguistics
Psycholinguistics is defined as the study of language and the mind, and sociolinguistics as the study of
language and the community. Alternatively, psycholinguistics may be described as the study of language
and the individual, and sociolinguistics as the study of language and society. These are somewhat two
different labels, but psycholinguistics overlaps to a considerable degree with sociolinguistics.
Psycholinguistics covers a range of topics.
▪ It explores the representation and functioning of language in the mind;
▪ It looks at the representation of language in the brain (neurolinguistics,);
▪ It considers how children acquire their first language (language acquisition) and how children and
adults acquire and learn their second and subsequent languages (second/foreign language learning.
However, of particular interest to psycholinguists, are the following questions:
▪ Are human beings born equipped with language knowledge, i.e., innateness?
▪ Do the grammars suggested by linguists, in particular Transformational Generative Grammar; reflect
an individual’s mental grammar?
▪ How individuals comprehend and produce utterances?
Sociolinguistics has been defined above as the study of language and society. While psycholinguistics is
interested in discovering universals behind the diversity of human languages, sociolinguistics tries to
analyse the social factors which lead to this diversity. Of particular interest to the sociolinguists are the
following topics:
▪ Language variation is concerned with social constraints determining language in its contextual
environment. Code-switching is the term given to the use of different varieties of language in
different social situations.
▪ Linguistic factors influencing language, such as voice pitch, pronunciation, word choice, intonation,
etc.
▪ The relation between linguistic variation and social structures: social variables, e.g., geographical
identity, socio-economic class, ethnicity, religion, status, gender, level of education, age, etc.,
and how creation and adherence to these rules is used to categorize individuals in social or
socioeconomic classes.
As the usage of a language varies from place to place (dialect), language usage varies among social classes,
and it is these sociolects, i.e., varieties in the way a language is spoken, that sociolinguistics studies.
Main branches of linguistics
Linguistics studies language but languages can be studied from different stand points. Therefore we
do not talk of ‘linguistics’ as one field but of fields of linguistics. Each field according to its objective(s):
• General linguistics
•
provides concept, theories about languages to be analysed.
Descriptive linguistics analyses and describes the way language operates and is used scientifically.
•Historical linguistics
studies the stages of developments in languages (how, why it changes).
• Comparative linguistics
finds out similarities between languages and their relationship.
• Applied
linguistics applies findings methods or theoretical principles to the study of problems from other
areas of experience where language is the subject matter.
•
Sociolinguistics studies language as part of culture and society, linguistic variation, etc.
Psycholinguistics studies the influence of psychological factors on language use and learning; relation
between language and thought; language acquisition.
•
Psycholinguistics and Sociolinguistics
Psycholinguistics is defined as the study of language and the mind, and sociolinguistics as the study of
language and the community. Alternatively, psycholinguistics may be described as the study of language
and the individual, and sociolinguistics as the study of language and society. These are somewhat two
different labels, but psycholinguistics overlaps to a considerable degree with sociolinguistics.
Psycholinguistics is interdisciplinary and is studied by people in a variety of fields, such as psychology,
cognitive science, and linguistics. There are several subdivisions within psycholinguistics that are based on
the components that make up human language.
Psychology is an academic and applied discipline that involves the scientific study of human or animal
mental functions and behaviors. In this field, a professional practitioner or researcher is called a
psychologist. Psychologists are classified as social or behavioral scientists. Psychologists attempt to
understand the role of mental functions in individual and social behavior, while also exploring underlying
physiological and neurological processes.
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of both the psychological and neurobiological
factors that enable human beings to acquire, use, understand and produce language. Modern research makes
use of biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and information theory to study how the brain processes
language. There are a number of subdisciplines with non-invasive techniques for studying the neurological
functions of the brain. Neurolinguistics, which is the study of the neural mechanisms in the human brain
that control the comprehension, production, and acquisition of language, for example, has become a field in
its own right.
Psycholinguistics covers the cognitive processes that make it possible to generate a grammatical and
meaningful sentence out of vocabulary and grammatical structures, as well as the processes that make it
possible to understand utterances, words, text, etc. Developmental psycholinguistics studies children's ability
to learn language.
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study of how information is represented and transformed in the
brain. It consists of multiple research disciplines, including psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy,
neuroscience, learning sciences, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and education. It spans many levels of
analysis, from low-level learning and decision mechanisms to high-level logic and planning; from neural
circuitry to modular brain organization. The term cognitive science was coined by Christopher LonguetHiggins in his 1973 commentary on the Lighthill report, which concerned the then-current state of Artificial
Intelligence research. In the same decade, the journal Cognitive Science and the Cognitive Science Society
were founded
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To sum up psycholinguistics covers a range of topics.
▪
It explores the representation and functioning of language in the mind;
▪
It looks at the representation of language in the brain (neurolinguistics,);
▪
It considers how children acquire their first language (language acquisition) and how children and
adults acquire and learn their second and subsequent languages (second/foreign language learning.
However, of particular interest to psycholinguists, are the following questions:
-
Are human beings born equipped with language knowledge, i.e., innateness?
-
Do the grammars suggested by linguists, in particular Transformational Generative Grammar,
reflect an individual’s mental grammar?
-
How individuals comprehend and produce utterances?
Sociolinguistics has been defined above as the study of language and society. While psychololinguistics is
interested in discovering universals behind the diversity of human languages, sociolinguistics tries to
analyse the social factors which lead to this diversity. Of particular interest to the sociolinguists are the
following topics:
-
Language variation is concerned with social constraints determining language in its contextual
environment. Code-switching is the term given to the use of different varieties of language in
different social situations.
-
Linguistic factors influencing language, such as voice pitch, pronunciation, word choice,
intonation, etc.
-
The relation between linguistic variation and social structures: social variables, e.g., geographical
identity, socio-economic class, ethnicity, religion, status, gender, level of education, age, etc., and
how creation and adherence to these rules is used to categorize individuals in social or
socioeconomic classes.
As the usage of a language varies from place to place (dialect), language usage varies among social classes,
and it is these sociolects, i.e., varieties in the way a language is spoken, that sociolinguistics studies.
Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms,
expectations, and context, on the way language is used. Sociolinguistics differs from sociology of language
in that the focus of sociolinguistics is the effect of the society on the language, while the latter's focus is on
the language's effect on the society. Sociolinguistics overlaps to a considerable degree with pragmatics. It is
historically closely related to Linguistic Anthropology and the distinction between the two fields has even
been questioned recently.
It also studies how language varieties differ between groups separated by certain social variables, e.g.,
ethnicity, religion, status, gender, level of education, age, etc., and how creation and adherence to these rules
is used to categorize individuals in social or socioeconomic classes. As the usage of a language varies from
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place to place (dialect), language usage varies among social classes, and it is these sociolects that
sociolinguistics studies.
The social aspects of language were in the modern sense first studied by Indian and Japanese linguists in the
1930s, and also by Gauchat in Switzerland in the early 1900s, but none received much attention in the West
until much later. The study of the social motivation of language change, on the other hand, has its
foundation in the wave model of the late 19th century. The first attested use of the term sociolinguistics was
by Thomas Callan Hodson in the title of a 1939 paper. Sociolinguistics in the West first appeared in the
1960s and was pioneered by linguists such as William Labov in the US and Basil Bernstein in the UK.
For example, a sociolinguist might determine through study of social attitudes that a particular vernacular
would not be considered appropriate language use in a business or professional setting. Sociolinguists might
also study the grammar, phonetics, vocabulary, and other aspects of this sociolect much as dialectologists
would study the same for a regional dialect.
The study of language variation is concerned with social constraints determining language in its contextual
environment. Code-switching is the term given to the use of different varieties of language in different social
situations.
William Labov is often regarded as the founder of the study of sociolinguistics. He is especially noted for
introducing the quantitative study of language variation and change, making the sociology of language into a
scientific discipline.
A Vernacular, mother tongue or mother language is the native language of a population located in a
country or in a region defined on some other basis, such as a locality. For example, Navajo is a local
language in the southwest of the United States, English is the state language of a number of countries.
Code-switching is a linguistics term denoting the concurrent use of more than one language, or language
variety, in conversation. Multilinguals, people who speak more than one language, sometimes use elements
of multiple languages in conversing with each other. Thus, code-switching is the syntactically and
phonologically appropriate use of more than one linguistic variety.
Code-switching is distinct from other language contact phenomena, such as borrowing, pidgins and creoles,
loan translation (calques), and language transfer (language interference). Speakers form and establish a
pidgin language when two or more speakers who do not speak a common language form an intermediate,
third language. On the other hand, speakers practice code-switching when they are each fluent in both
languages. Code mixing is a thematically related term, but the usage of the terms code-switching and codemixing varies. Some scholars use either term to denote the same practice, while others apply code-mixing to
denote the formal linguistic properties of said language-contact phenomena, and code-switching to denote
the actual, spoken usages by multilingual persons.
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