LECTURE ONE
WHAT IS LINGUISTICS ?
WHAT IS LANGUAGE ?
WHAT IS LINGUISTICS ?
LANGUAGE
• Language provides the means for us to
take our place in society, to express our
wants and convey information, to learn
about the people and world around us
• In short, it enables us to live
effectively, to develop our capabilities,
and to satisfy our curiosity about our
surroundings
EARLIER CONCERNS FOR
LANGUAGE AND ITS USE
• Panini - language is a system made up of classes
and subclasses - grammars and dictionaries are
largely concerned with indicating the
interrelationships between the elements of
languages interpreted as systems
• the Hebrews recognized that language holds
societies together - tower of Babel
• western culture long maintained its unity through
use of Latin as its learned language
EARLIER CONCERNS FOR
LANGUAGE AND ITS USE (contd)
• causes of speech defects or aphasia
• want to ‘penetrate’ into the secret of the
human spirit and learning something of its
nature and laws
• uses and effects of language
What is the trait which most
decisively distinguishes human
beings from all other creatures on
the planet?
Love ?
Warfare ?
Art and Music ?
Technology ?
Human Language
• human language is arguably the single most
remarkable characteristic that sets our
species apart
• our development of everything from music
to warfare could never have come about in
the absence of language
• LANGUAGE IS WHAT MAKES US
HUMAN, AND HUMAN LANGUAGE
IS UNIQUE
VIEWS OF THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE
• traced to the Garden of Eden
- the first woman and the first man spoke the
language bestowed on them by their creator
• language originated in a paradise where its
pristine form was perfectly logical and
perfectly grammatical
• ‘yo-heave-ho’ theory
• Phrygian origins
Language Diversity -- from Babel to Babble
Why do languages differ from one another
Why did they change ?
• The Old Testament relates that before the
Tower of Babel, all men and women spoke
the same language and could understand
one another without difficulty
Language Diversity -- from Babel to Babble
(contd.)
• human haughtiness eventually provoked
God into punishing people by confounding
their language and introducing mutually
unintelligible tongues
• given this story, language differences
among people can be seen as a penalty for
sinful behavior
Language Diversity -- from Babel to Babble
(contd.)
• similarly, Muslims believe that God spoke to
Prophet Mohammed in a form of Arabic that was
by definition ‘pure’ and ‘perfect’
• The Holy Koran is viewed as the exemplar of pure
and grammatically perfect Arabic
• the many varieties of present-day Arabic spoken
in Africa and the Gulf, and elsewhere, are seen as
having risen through the subsequent weakness and
culpability of their speakers
Language Diversity -- from Babel to Babble
(contd.)
• professional linguists take a different approach
• they see the multiplicity of languages as the
product of natural historical change
• the inevitable result of people shaping and
reshaping their languages to meet changing social
and intellectual needs, and as a reflection of
contact with peoples speaking other languages
DESIGN FEATURES OF LANGUAGE
(fundamental properties of language )
•
•
•
•
•
duality of patterning
displacement
open-endedness
stimulus-freedom
arbitrariness
DUALITY OF PATTERNING
• for most people, most of the time, the ordinary
medium of language is speech
• how do we speak ? we allow air from the lungs to
pass out through our mouths, and at the same time,
we move our mouths in various ways to produce
speech sounds-- consonants and vowels
• every utterance we make consists of speech
sounds, one after another
DUALITY OF PATTERNING (contd.)
• how many different speech sounds can you
produce ?- there is no cut-and-dried answer
to this question
• however, unless you have had specialist
training in phonetics (the study of speech
sounds), you find it very difficult to produce
even a hundred different individual speech
sounds
DUALITY OF PATTERNING (contd.)
• in fact, every human language operates with
only a small set of speech sounds
• take English for example, consider the word
cat - how many speech sounds does it
contain ? (answer : 3 )
• the k-sound, the flat a, and the t-sound
DUALITY OF PATTERNING (contd.)
For convenience, let us introduce special
symbols for each of the speech sounds
• / k / , /æ /, / t /
• we use the slashes / / to indicate we
are talking about distinctive speech
sounds (phonemes) of a particular
language --in this case, English
DUALITY OF PATTERNING (contd.)
• now, if someone asks you what the English
word / k æ t / means, you will have no
trouble in answering
• but suppose , someone asks you what the
English phoneme / k / means ?
• this time it is impossible for you to answer
as the phoneme / k / has no meaning in
English ( nor / æ / or / t /
DUALITY OF PATTERNING (contd.)
• but now notice something else -- these same
meaningless phonemes can be rearranged to
produce different words with different
meanings
• thus the order / t æ k / produces the word
tack, while / æ k t / produces the word act,
/ æ t / gives at, and / t æ k t / gives tacked
or tact
DUALITY OF PATTERNING (contd.)
• what is happening is that, by combining a
very small set of meaningless speech
sounds in various ways, we can produce a
very large number of different meaningful
items -- words.
• all human languages are constructed in this
way, and this is called duality of
patterning or duality
DUALITY OF PATTERNING (contd.)
• duality is the use of a small number of
meaningless elements in combination to
produce a large number of meaningful
elements
DUALITY OF PATTERNING (contd.)
Why is this significant ?
• suppose , every individual sound we could
produce had its own meaning, then
-- the number of different meanings
we could express would be no greater
than the number of sounds we could
produce
then ??
DUALITY OF PATTERNING (contd.)
• we have seen that we can’t produce more
than about a hundred speech sounds, the
result would be that a language could
contain only about a hundred ‘words’
• this would be catastrophic--imagine English
consisting no more than a hundred words
DUALITY OF PATTERNING (contd.)
• DUALITY IS UNIQUE TO HUMAN
LANGUAGE
• in fact, bird songs and whale songs arguably
contain an element of duality, but these are
not exactly signaling systems
• other creatures have signaling systems
which are based on the principle of ‘one
sound, one meaning’
Incidentally !!
• how many phonemes are there in English ?
• answer : around 40 -- why such a vague
answer ?
• because not all English speakers use exactly
the same set of speech sounds -- e.g. do you
pronounce the words book or buck
differently or identically ? (people who pronounce
them differently have one more vowel than those who pronounce them
identically )
DISPLACEMENT
• displacement is the use of language to talk
about things other than the here and now
• we are able to talk about last night’s
badminton game, our childhood, or the
behavior of dinosaurs which lived over 100
million years ago
OPEN-ENDEDNESS
• open-endedness is our ability to use
language to say anything at all, including
lots of things we’ve never said or heard
before
• A large pink spider wearing sunglasses and
a polka dot sarong danced across the floor
(It is most unlikely that you have ever seen the sentence above, but you
have no difficulty in understanding it--even though you may not believe
it)
NON-HUMAN ANIMALS
non-human animals do not
exhibit displacement (mice do not swap stories about
• (with an exception)
their close encounters, rabbits do not engage in heated arguments about
what may lie over the hill)
• virtually all ‘utterances’ by non-human
animals appear to relate directly, and
exclusively, to the time and place of
uttering
NON-HUMAN ANIMALS (contd.)
• these creatures also exhibit nothing we
could call open-endedness
• it appears to be that each species’ signaling
system contains only a small number of
possible utterances
NON-HUMAN ANIMALS (contd.)
• lacking duality, non-human creatures appear
to be locked into a world of expression
which we can barely conceive of -- a system
of communication lacking both a past and a
future, bounded by the horizon, and devoid
of novelties, consisting only of the endless
repetition of a few familiar messages about
what‘s going on at the moment
Exception !!!
• in the 1950’s and 1960’s an Austrian ethologist, Karl von Frisch
carried out a series of studies which revealed something unexpected
about the behavior of European honeybees.
• when a honeybee scout discovers a useful source of nectar, it flies back
to its hive and then performs an astonishing little dance inside,
watched by the other bees
• the details of the dance vary depending both on the distance of the
nectar and on the particular species and variety of bee
• in the most famous case, the dancing bee performs a tail-wagging
dance in the form of a squashed figure eight with a straight middle
section
• Von Frisch was able to decode this dance
Exception !!! (contd.)
• the time the dancing bee takes to complete a circuit of the figure eight
indicates the distance to the nectar source (a longer time represents a
longer flight)
• the level of excitement demonstrated by the bee represents the quantity
of nectar, and hence the number of bees needed to harvest it (greater
excitement - more nectar, and hence more bees needed)
• finally, and most stunningly, the orientation of the straight part of the
figure eight represents the direction of the source with respect to the
position of the sun (e.g.. if the straight section is oriented at 80 degrees
to the left of straight up, the bees will fly toward a point of 80 degrees
to the left of the sun)
• this is DISPLACEMENT ! The dancing bee is passing on information
about a nectar source which it visited some time ago, which is now
perhaps miles away, and which it therefore cannot see)
Exception !!! (contd.)
• wonderful as the bee dance is, it is none the less, as von Frisch was
able to show, severely limited in important respects
• in a famous experiment, he allowed some bee scouts to find an
artificial nectar source, a bowl of water and sugar, placed on a
telephone pole twenty feet high, much higher than the bees were
accustomed to finding nectar
• the bee scouts returned to the hive and danced as usual. The result ?? A
swarm of bees soon arrived at the pole, buzzed around it in seeming
confusion for a while, and then went home. The dancing scouts had
been unable to include in their dance the novel bit of information about
the height -- or as von Frisch put it, there is no word in honeybee for
‘up’
STIMULUS - FREEDOM
• stimulus-freedom is the ability to say anything you
like in any context
• suppose someone says to you, ‘What do you think of my kebaya ?’-you are free to make any response you like, including none at all.You
might reply, ‘it’s pretty’ or ‘it is so ugly’ or ‘it doesn’t suit you’.
• this however does not mean that human language is totally random.
There are social pressures that make some responses more likely than
others
• the absence of stimulus-freedom would mean that your every remark is
determined by the context, so that like a character in a play, you do not
have the choice of what to say
STIMULUS - FREEDOM (contd.)
• there are, of course, certain formal and especially ceremonial context
in which you are bound by the context -e.g.. church services
• non-human signals are NOT stimulus-free, but
rather stimulus bound i.e.. a non-human creature produces
a particular signal always and only when the appropriate stimulus is
present
ANIMAL SIGNALING SYSTEMS
Vs
HUMAN LANGUAGES
• lacking duality, lacking displacement,
lacking open-endedness, lacking stimulusfreedom, animal signaling systems are
almost unfathomably different from human
languages
• human language is unique on this earth, and
without it , we could not count ourselves as
human at all
ARBITRARINESS
• this is the absence of any necessary
connection between a linguistic form and its
meaning
• the overwhelming presence of arbitrariness
in language is the chief reason it takes so
long to learn the vocabulary of a foreign
language-- it is generally impossible to
guess the meaning of an unfamiliar word
WHAT IS LINGUISTICS ?
• Linguistics can be defined as the
scientific inquiry of human language
• Linguistics is best regarded as an enterprise whose
principal objective is to provide an increasingly
adequate understanding of particular facets of
languages, thereby gradually building our
understanding of the nature of language itself
WHAT IS LANGUAGE ?
• Language is defined as an arbitrary vocal
system used by human beings to
communicate with one another
• however, speech is more than
communication -- it is action
• a language is a communication system that
has work to perform, a system that speakers
exploit purposefully
WHAT IS LANGUAGE ?(contd.)
• Language is used to DO things, not merely
to REPORT them or TALK ABOUT them
BRANCHES OF LINGUISTICS
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there are many branches of linguistics
and new ones continue to arise
historically, the central branch has been grammar
some linguists are interested in the description of
particular languages
• others, in uncovering the patterns across languages
and explaining universal patterns in psychological
or social terms
BRANCHES OF LINGUISTICS (contd.)
• other linguists focus on language variation both
across speech communities and within a single
community, across time, and across different
situations of use