intro-linguistics

8/7/2019 intro-linguistics

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IN TR O DU CTIO N TO L IN G U ISTICS

A S S I G N M E N T 1

When God created man he distinguished him from other living beings with so many features

among which is the ability to speak .i.e. language. Language, amiraculous faculty, that

hasfascinated man since the dawn of history.A gift from God, that allowed him to build his


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existence and procure his civilization.Although humans belong to the same species, they

speak different languages.A person from Yemen speaks differently from a person in India, for

instance.Later on humans developed the ability to transcribe their speech and produce written

forms of the language.Therefore,Like all the phenomena of life,language continued to be the

subject of human inquisition. Different attempts have been made to account for the

language.The questions that arouse the curiosity of observers pertained to its nature,function,

how and why languages resemble each other and how do they differ etc .The study of human

language developed through the course of time and have been culminated recently by the

emergence of a full-fledge progressive field that tries to answer all issues related to language

in a scientific way which is named Linguistics.In other words,the subject matter of linguistics

is the data of language as it is spoken and written.

The first query about the language is normally what is a language? However, it is not an easy

exercise to try defining language.For the simplest reason, that language is multifaceted and

complex. So, the endeavors to define the language proved to be inadequate.Many scholars

proposeddefinitions for the language. Henry Sweet, an English phonetician and language

scholar, stated: Language is the expression of ideas by means of speech-sounds combined

into words. Words are combined into sentences, this combination answering to that of ideas

into thoughts. The American linguists Bernard Bloch and George L. Trager formulated the

following definition: A language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by means of which a

social group cooperates. Edward Sapir said "Language is a primarily human and non-

instinctive method of communicating ideas ,emotions and desires by means of a system of

voluntarily produced symbols". For J.Whatmough "Language is human a verbal systematic

symbolisma means of transmitting information..a form of social behavior (with)high

degree of convention." According to Transformational Generative linguists like Noam

Chomsky,language is the innate capacity of native speakers to understand and form


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grammati al t i t i iti language makes a number of

presuppositions and begs a number of questions. However, none oft e above definitions is

perfect.Each ofthem just hints at certain characteristics oflanguage. Hence instead of

defining language, it would worthwhile to understand its major characteristics.

Language is both oral and aural.Itis an organi ation of sounds, of vocal symbols.The sounds

produced from the mouth with the help of various organs of speech to convey some

meaningful message. This means that speech is primary to writing. Not allthe languages in

the world have written forms yetthey are still spoken and used.Language is a systematic

verbal symbolism; it makes use of verbal elements such as sounds words, and phrases, which

are arranged in certain ways to make sentences. Language is vocalin as much as itis made up

of sounds which can be produced by the organs of speech and perceived by the ears.

Language is non-instinctive. No language was created in a day out of a mutually agreed

upon formula by a group of humans.Language is the outcome of evolution and convention.

Every language is a convention in a community. Itis non-instinctive because itis acquired by

human beings. Nobody gets a language in heritage; he acquires it.Animals inherittheir system

of communication by heredity.

If one does not know a language, the words (and sentences) will be mainly incomprehensible

.Itis generally the case thatthere is no natural connection between a linguistic formand

itsmeaning. The connection is quite arbitrary.We cantjustlook atthe Arabicword and,

from its shape, for example, determine thatit has a natural and obviousmeaning anymore

thanwe canwith its English translation formdog. One haveto learn when acquiring the

language, thatthe sounds represented by the lettershouse signify the concept ; if you


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know French,this same meaning is represented by maison; if you know Russian,it is

represented by dom; if you know Spanish, bycasa.Similarly, the linguistic formhas no natural

or iconic relationship with that hairy four-legged barking object out inthe world. This aspect

of the relationship between linguistic signs and objects in theworld is described as

arbitrariness. There are some words in language with sounds that seem to echo the sounds

of objects or activities and hence seem to have a less arbitrary connection. English examples

are cuckoo, crash, slurp, squelch or whirr. However, these onomatopoeic words are relatively

rare in human language.

Another feature of the language is symbolism. The symbolism of language is a necessary

consequence of arbitrariness discussed above.A symbol stands for something else;it is

something that serves as a substitute.Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols. For

concepts,things, ideas, object etc.we have sounds and words as symbols.

Language is a means of communication.It is the most powerful,convenient and permanent

means of communication.Non-linguistic symbols such as e expressive gestures, signals of

various kinds, traffic lights, road signs, flags, emblems and many more such things, can be

used as means of communication, yet they are not as flexible, comprehensive, perfect and

extensive as language is. In other words, language is not only communicative,it is informative

too .i.e. intentionally communicative.

While we tend to think of communication as the primary function of human language, it is not

a distinguishing feature. All creatures communicate in someway. However,we suspect that

other creatures are not reecting on the way they create their communicative messages or

reviewing how they work (or not). That is, one barking dog is probably not offering advice to

another barking dog along the lines of Hey, you should lower your bark to make it sound

more menacing. Theyre not barking about barking.Humans are clearly able to reect on


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language and its uses (e.g. I wish he wouldnt use so many technical terms). This is

reexivity. The property of reexivity(orreexiveness) accounts for the fact that we can use

language to think and talk about language itself, making it one of the distinguishing features

of human language. Indeed, without this general ability, we wouldnt be able to reect on or

identify any of the other distinct properties of human language. Well look in detail at another

six of them: displacement, productivity, Interchangeability, cultural transmission,

modifiability and duality.

Displacement is the ability to speak about things other than the here and now. Every signal

used by a non-human creature to communicate pertains wholly and directly to the immediate

time and place of signalling. No non-human signal, with the marginal exception of scent

markings left to dene territory or to provide a trail, ever refers to the past or the future, to

hypothetical or counterfactual states of affairs, or to anything not directly perceptible to the

creature signalling. To put this more picturesquely, mice do not swap stories about their close

encounters with cats, nor do bears soberly discuss the severity of the coming winter; rabbits

do not engage in heated discussions about what might lie on the far side of the hill, nor do

geese draw up plans for their next migration. Human language is utterly different. We have

not the slightest difficulty in talking about last nights football game, or our own childhood, or

the behavior of dinosaurs which lived over 100 million years ago; with equal ease, we can

discuss political events in the U.S or the atmosphere of the planet Neptune. And, of course,

we can discuss what might have happened if the North Korea had invaded South Korea, and

we can produce fables and fantasies involving hobbits, dragons, talking animals and

intergalactic wars.

Humans are continually creating new expressions and novel utterances by manipulating their

linguistic resources to describe new objects and situations. This property is described as

productivity (or creativity or open-endedness) and essentially means that the potential


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number of utterances in any human language is innite. In contrast with studies of animal

communication, linguistic creativity is considered to be a species-specic property: the

creation of new sentences is not a feature of animal communication systems. The notion of

creativity has a long history in the discussion of language, but it has become a central feature

of contemporary studies since the emphasis placed upon it by Noam Chomsky. One of the

main aims of linguistic enquiry, it is felt, is to explain this creative ability, for which such

constructs as generative rules have been suggested." Care must; however, be taken to avoid

confusing this sense of creative with thatfound in artistic or literary contexts, where notions

such as imagination andoriginality are central"(Crystal).

Interchangeability is another important property of human language. It refers to the

systems ability to be mutually transmitted and received by members of the same species.

There is usullay a speaker and a listener, a sender and a receiver.Some animal signals, by

contrast, lack this property for example, female calls which are not shared by the male

members of the species. In short, animals cannot exchange their roles as humans do.

While we may inherit physical features such as brown eyes and dark hair from our

parents, we do not inherit their language. We acquire a language in a culture with other

speakers and not from parental genes. An infant born to Korean parents in Korea, but adopted

and brought up from birth by English speakers in the United States, will have physical

characteristics inherited from his or her natural parents, but will inevitably speak English. A

kitten, given comparable early experiences, will produce meow regardless. This process

whereby a language is passed on from one generation to the next is described as cultural

transmission. It is clear that humans are born with some kind of predisposition to acquire

language in a general sense. However, we are not born with the ability to produce utterances

in a specic language such as English. We acquire our rst language as children in a culture.

The general pattern in animal communication is that creatures are born with a set of specic


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signals that are produced instinctively. There is some evidence from studies ofbirds as they

develop their songs that instinct has to combine with learning (or exposure) in order for the

right song to be produced. If those birds spend their rst seven weeks without hearing other

birds, theywill instinctively produce songs or calls, but those songs will be abnormal in some

way. Human infants, growing up inisolation, produce no instinctive language. Cultural

transmission of a specic language is crucial in the human acquisition process.

Language is a system of systems.It is structurally organized in terms of two abstract levels;

also called duality of patterning or duality of structure. At the rst, higher level, language is

analyzed in terms of combinations of (meaningful) units (such as (such as dog, god) ; at

another, lower level, it is seen as a sequence of segments which lack any meaning in

themselves (such as the letters g, d and o) but which combine to form units of meaning.

In other words, language is combined paradigmatically and systematically.

Duality thus allows a language to form many tens of thousands of different words, all of

which can be produced by a vocal tract which can produce no more than a few dozens of

distinguishable speech sounds. Duality is therefore of crucial importance in facilitating the

existence of spoken languages. Duality allows human languages the ability to produce an

innite number of utterances, all with different meanings, and hence makes open-endedness

possible.

Language is modifiable. It changes over the time. The changes usually occur according the

needs of the society. They occur at various aspects of language; words, pronunciation,

grammar, usage etc. Old English is different from Modern English; so as Old Hindi is

different from Modern Hindi. Sanskrit, Pali and Prakrat are the various forms of Sanskrit

arisen from a number of changes.The pronunciation of English has been changing steadily

and ceaselessly for as long as the language has existed. Quite apart from the difficulties of


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vocabulary and grammar, the pronunciation of English in the past would be wholly

unintelligible to us, if we could hear it. We could no more understand the pronunciation of

King Alfred the Great than we can understand modern Norwegian, and the pronunciation of

the poet Geoffrey Chaucer would not be a lot easier. William Shakespeare is quite a bit closer

to us in time: we have little trouble reading what he wrote, but nevertheless many specialists

believe we would not be able to understand his speech, if we could hear it: his pronunciation

was just too different from modern ones.

One of the recent clear changes of English pronunciation is the /r/-dropping. Until

relatively recently, all English speakers pronounced a consonant /r/ in every position in which

our spelling has the letter . So, not only was /r/ present in red and cream, it was also

present in far, arm, dark and bird. But then, in the seventeenth or early eighteenth century,

some people in the southeast of England began to drop their /r/s whenever those /r/s were

not followed by a vowel. As a result, in this style of speech, /r/ was retained in red and cream,

but it disappeared from the other four words.

The scope of linguistic inquiry about the language does not end at defining the

majorprosperities of human language.It is rather broad and vast. A full understanding of the

various components of language and their relations with the world outside the language

constitutes the right scope of linguistics. Nonetheless, studying the structure of language

provides the outset for further language studies.One obvious way of studying language is to

consider what its elements are,how they are combined to make larger bits, and how these bits

help us to conveymessages. There is a considerable difference among the linguisticians about

the number and categorization of linguistic levels.Butgiven how much argument there is

about what the categories involved in linguistic description are, this is clearly an important

part of linguistics, and is certainly a prerequisite for any deeper study of language.


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The study of the elements of language and their function is usually split upinto a number of

dierent branches.

1. Phonetics deals with the sounds of spoken language: how they are made, how they are

classied, how they are combined with each otherand how they interact with each other when

they are combined, howthey are perceived. It is sometimes suggested that phonetics is

notreally a part of linguistics proper, but a sub-part of physics, physiology,psychology or

engineering (as in attempts to mimic human speechusing computers). Accordingly, the label

Linguistic Phonetics issometimes used to specify that part of phonetics which is directly

relevant for the study of human language. The linguistic aspect of phonetics .i.e. the study o f

human sounds is a part of phonology. The study of phonetics can be divided into three main

branches, ARTICULATORY PHONETICS,the study of the movement of speech organs in

the articulation of speech sounds. ACOUSTIC PHONETICS,The branch of phonetics which

studies the physical properties of speech sound(such as frequency and amplitude), as

transmitted between mouth and ear, according tothe principles of acoustics (the branch of

physics devoted to the study of sound).It is wholly dependent on the use of instrumental

techniques of investigation,particularly electronics, and some grounding in physics and

mathematics is aprerequisite for advanced study of this subject.AUDITORY PHONETICS is the

branch of phonetics which studies the perceptualresponse to speech sounds, as mediated by

ear, auditory nerve and brain. It is aless well-studied area of phonetics, mainly because of the

difficulties encountered as soon as one attempts to identify and measure psychological and

neurological responses to speech sounds.

2. Phonology also deals with speech sounds, but at a rather moreabstract level. While

phonetics deals with individual speech sounds,phonology deals with the systems which

incorporate the sounds. Italso considers the structures the sounds can enter into (for


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example,syllables and intonational phrases), and the generalizations that canbe made about

sound structures in individual languages or acrosslanguages.

Out of the very wide range of sounds the human vocal apparatuscan produce, and which are

studied by phonetics, only a relatively small numberare used distinctively in any one

language. The sounds are organized into asystem of contrasts, which are analyzed in terms of

phonemes, distinctivefeatures or other such phonological units, according to the theory used.

Theaim of phonology is to demonstrate the patterns of distinctive sound found in alanguage,

and to make as general statements as possible about the nature ofsound systems in the

languages of the world. Putting this another way, phonology is concerned with the range and

function of sounds in specic languages(and often therefore referred to as functional

phonetics), and with the ruleswhich can be written to show the types of phonetic relationships

that relateand contrast words and other linguistic units. Within phonology, two branches of

study areusually recognized: segmental and suprasegmental. Segmental phonologyanalyses

speech into discrete segments, such as phonemes; suprasegmental ornon-segmental

phonology analyses those features which extend over more thanone segment, such as

intonation contours.

3. Morphology deals with the internal structure of words not withtheir structure in terms of

the sounds that make them up, but theirstructure where form and meaning seem inextricably

entwined. So theword coveris morphologically simple, and its only structure is phonological,

while lovercontains the smaller element love and some extra meaning which is related to the

nal in the spelling.

4. Syntax is currently often seen as the core of any language, althoughsuch a prioritising of

syntax is relatively new. Syntax A traditional term for the study of the rules governing the

waywords are combined to form sentences in a language. In this use, syntax isopposed to


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morphology, the study of word structure. An alternative denition(avoiding the concept of

word) is the study of the interrelationships betweenelements of sentence structure, and of the

rules governing the arrangementof sentences in sequences. In this use, one might then talk of

the syntax of theword.

5.Lexis ,The study of lexis is the study of the vocabulary of languages in all its aspects:

words and their meanings, how words relate to one another, how they may combine with one

another, and the relationships between vocabulary and other areas of the description of

languages, the phonology, morphology, and syntax.. A unit of vocabulary isgenerally referred

to as a lexical item, or lexeme. A complete inventory of thelexical items of a language

constitutes that languages dictionary, or lexicon a term particularly used in generative

grammar: items are listed in the lexicon as a set of lexical entries. The way lexical items are

organized in a languageis the lexical structure or lexical system. A group of items used to

identify thenetwork of contrasts in a specic semantic or lexical eld (e.g. cooking,

colour)may also be called a lexical system. Specic groups of items, sharing certainformal

or semantic features, are known as lexical sets. The absence of a lexemeat a specic structural

place in a languages lexical eld is called a lexical gap(e.g. brother v. sister, son v. daughter,

etc., but no separate lexemes for male v.female cousin).

6.Semantics deals with the meaning of language.This is divided into twoparts, LEXICAL

SEMANTICS, which is concerned with the relationshipsbetween words, and SENTENCE

SEMANTICS which is concerned with theway in which the meanings of sentences can be

built up from the meanings of their constituent words. Sentence semantics often makes use

ofthe tools and notions developed by philosophers; for example, logicalnotation and notions

of implication and denotation.


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7.Discourse,a term used in linguistics to refer to a continuous stretch of(especially spoken)

language larger than a sentence but, within this broadnotion, several different applications

may be found. At its most general, a discourseis a behavioral unit which has a pre-theoretical

status in linguistics: it is a setof utterances which constitute any recognizable speech event (no

referencebeing made to its linguistic structuring, if any), e.g. a conversation, a joke,a sermon,

an interview. A classication of discourse functions, with particularreference to type of

subject-matter, the situation, and the behavior of thespeaker, is often carried out in

sociolinguistic studies, e.g. distinguishingdialogues v. monologues, or (more specically)

oratory, ritual, insults, narrative,and so on. Several linguists have attempted to discover

linguistic regularities indiscourses (discourse analysis or DA), using grammatical,

phonological andsemantic criteria (e.g. Cohesion, anaphora, inter-sentence connectivity).

Special attention has been focused on discourse markers sequentially dependent elements

which demarcate units of speech, such as oh, well, and I mean.It is now plain that there exist

important linguistic dependencies between sentences, but it is less clear how far these

dependencies are sufciently systematicto enable linguistic units higher than the sentence to

be established. The methodology and theoretical orientation of discourse analysis (with its

emphasis onwell-formedness and rules governing the sequence of permissible units, inboth

spoken and written texts) are often contrasted with those of conversation analysis.

As I have mentioned above, this information about the components of language provides

the framework for studies beyond language itself. So many branches of knowledge make use

of these findings about the language. Recently new areas of study were formed as a result of

combination with linguistics. Examples of such fields are:

COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS, deals with the replication of linguisticbehavior by

computers, and the use of computers in the analysis oflinguistic behavior. This may include


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CORPUS LINGUISTICS, the use oflarge bodies of representative text as a tool for language

description.

EDUCATIONAL investigates how children deal with the language required to cope with the

educational system.

ETHNOLINGUISTICS deals with the study of language in its culturalcontext. It can also be

called ANTHROPOLOGICAL LINGUISTICS.

MATHMATICALLINGUISTICS deals with the mathematical properties oflanguages or the

grammars used to describe those languages.

NEUROLINGUISICS deals with the way in which linguistic structuresand processes are

dealt with in the brain.

PSYCHOLINGUISTICS deals with the way in which the mind deals withlanguage,

including matters such as how language is stored in themind, how language is understood and

produced in real time, howchildren acquire their rst language, and so on.

SOCIOLINGUISTICS deals with the way in which societies exploit the linguistic choices

open to them, and the ways in which language reectssocial factors, including social context.

Having presented a bird's eye view at the subject-matter of linguistics, it is high time I

discussed its major aims. What linguists aim to do,can beinferred from the previous

discussion. In summary,the general aims of linguistics are two: to study the nature of

language, to establish a theory of the nature of language;and to describe language.

Apparently, these aims are consequential.Linguists first start to study the nature of language

and define its prosperities which would allow them to establish theories to describe the

language. Examples of theories about the nature of language are those of Chomsky and de

Saussure.The theories of both of these great scholars provide a solid ground for modern


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linguistic inquiry.Armed with the theories needed,linguists describe the data of language in

hand in the most systematic and scientific way. The description of language either confirms or

refutes a theory.

To sum up,the field of linguistics is fundamentally concerned withthe nature of language and

(linguistic) communication.The eld as a whole represents an attempt to breakdown the broad

questions about the nature of language and communication into smaller, more manageable

questions that we can hope toanswer, and in so doing establish reasonable results that we can

build onin moving closer to answers to the larger questions. So far, linguists went long miles

in understanding the nature of language which even contributed to the understanding of

human nature. However , the future of linguistic study still promises a lot.

Bibliography


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Bauer, Laurie. The Linguistics Students' Handbook, Edinburgh University Press

Ltd.Edinburgh,2007

Crystal, David. A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. 6th

ed Blackwell Publishing

Ltd,2008

Chapman ,Siobhan and Routledge, Christopher.Key Ideas in Linguistics and thePhilosophy of

Language. Edinburgh University Press Ltd, Edinburgh, 2009

''Encyclopedia Britannica'' online

Formkin, Victoria. An Introduction to Language, 7th ed.Wadsworth,2003

Lyon, John. Language and LinguisticsAn Introduction, . Cambridge University Press,2009

The Linguistics Encyclopedia.Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006

Yule, Georg. The Study of Language. 4th

ed.Cambridge University Press. New York, 2010

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