INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGE STUDIES Part I

INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS AND

LANGUAGE STUDIESPart I

Linguistic form

• „I find it helpful to think of linguistic form as if it were located in a pane of glass through which ideas are transmitted from speaker to listener. Under ordinary circumstances language users are not conscious of the glass itself, but only of the ideas that pass through it. The form of language is transparent, and it takes a special act of will to focus on the glass and not the ideas. Linguists undergo a training that teaches them how to focus on the glass…the experience of becoming conscious of previously unconscious phenomena is one of the principal joys of linguistic work” (Wallace Chafe 1994:38)

Language studies

• Linguists use a variety of methods of analyzing language in order to find how we acquire it, how and why we pronounce it the way we do, how we string words together to make meaning, how we understand meaning, how and why we are effective in using language for communication in some situations but perhaps not in others, how and why it changes, why languages disappear…

Linguistic terminology: meta-language• Linguistics needs a language to talk about language, i.e. it needs a

meta-language• Linguistics shares this meta-language with prescriptive grammar,

which may lead to the idea that linguistics is about correctness in language use – this is very far from the reality of linguistic studies

Exercise 1.1.

• 1. Make a list of word classes as you know them.• 2. Now analyze the sentence:• ‘Criminologists, in order to uncover clues not visible to the eye, use

specialized tools, such as luminal, a liquid that reacts with the hemoglobin in blood to illuminate previously invisible blood stains’,• 3. Assign each of the words to a word class

Content words

• Nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs• Refer to something in our experience (whether real or imagined)

Function words

• Allow us to connect different parts of phrases, clauses and sentences, or to convey another type of meaning, such as polarity (‘yes’ or ‘no’ polarity), prepositions, prepositional phrases, articles, discourse markers

Exercise 1.2.

• Make a list of utterances which you have heard or have used yourself which you consider bad usage, or incorrect language.• Can you identify why you consider them incorrect?

Variability of language

• Linguistic work is about describing language, not about prescribing what people should do.• Language is constantly changing• All languages and dialects are equal from a descriptive linguistic point

of view• All languages and dialects have the necessary resources to draw upon

to create new meanings in a systematic way, in order to match the communicative needs of the community which speaks the language or dialect

Variability of language

• From a social perspective, there are differences in how languages and dialects are perceived• Certain ways of speaking are considered more appropriate in given

contexts and situations, and people attach judgments to different ways of speaking which in some settings are considered as not appropriate or which one might not usually encounter in a given situation or context

Who are linguists?

• Person who speaks many languages?

How can linguistics help us?

• Working with multiple perspectives concerning the nature of language and how it works in different contexts can provide an understanding which can help us be more successful in using our first language in a range of situation

Linguistics

• A scientific study of language• Different theoretical perspectives

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913):the father of modern linguistics

18th and 19th c. linguistics

• 1) historical and comparative studies: history of language, relationships among languages, regularities in language change; • 2) also: grammars of different languages, describing their

pronunciations, rules for forming words and sentences, to aid those wishing to learn another language or for translation of documents and literary texts

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)

• Cours de linguistique générale (1913)• Synchronic approach: focuses on describing language at any point in

time as it exists as a system• Language: system of signs, which consist of two parts: signified and

signifier

Sign

• Signified• Signifier• CAT


• The relationship between a signified and its signifier – arbitrary• The relationship between a signified and its signifier – not fixed:

differences in how we carve up experience in different languages (e.g. words for a mother’s sister and a father’s sister in Arabic and English); differeces across time in relationships between signifieds and signifiers: e.g. meat in 17th c. meant ‘food’)• Signs are not stable in terms of the relationship between signified and

signifier


• If language is not a fixed nomenclature for pre-existing concepts, how do we use it to mean anything?• Language is a set of signs which are: • a) members of a system• B) defined by their relationships to each other (e.g. pat and bat)


• Elements of language stand in relationship to each other in two important ways:• 1) syntagmatic: the ways in which they string together; a set of

smaller structural units combined according to appropriate rules (e.g. the little girl)• 2) paradigmatic: constitute choices, so that only one linguistic item

may be present at a time in a given position (e.g. Lat. N. amicus, G. amici, D. amico, A. amicum…)


• Linguistics – a study of the system of a language in order to articulate the elements which distinguish one functional form from another• Langue – the system of forms• Parole – the actual use of language by individual speakers

Discussion question

• When we learn another language, we sometimes discover words and phrases that do not have an exact counterpart in our own language.• Discuss Saussure’s notion that there is no signified without a signifier,

especially in terms of translating terms for more abstract notions.• How can this be applied to legal translation?

Noam Chomsky (1928)

Noam Chomsky (1928)

• In Chomsky’s view: structuralist analysis was adequate for descriptions of phenemes, morphemes, and clause constituents (e.g. noun phrases, verb phrases etc.) but it was not robust enough to account for syntax, especially the ability of syntax to generate an infinite number of sentences

Noam Chomsky (1928)

• For Chomsky, actual language use, or performance, was only the tip of the iceberg of linguistic competence, or the underlying mental processes which we carry out in our production of language

Noam Chomsky (1928)

• We have a repository of the rules by which our language organizes linguistic elements into well-formed strings;• We have syntactic expertise in terms of a set of finite rules which

allows us to generate an infinite number of sentences, many of which we have never heard before

Noam Chomsky (1928)

• Syntactic theories attempt to make transparent the mental knowledge by modeling it, and in many cases showing how language might be generated by a computer if programmed to have the same kind of rule-based knowledge• Chomsky’s mentalist syntactic theory – contemporary to the growth

of computer technology, which added a dimension to the study of syntax: a desire to be able to replicate the ability of humans to produce language

Noam Chomsky (1928)

• This desire calls for a theory of language which is precise and explicit: formulas and definitions in the style of mathematics to describe and model linguistic competence• Such theories – formal (contrasted with functional)• Because of the interest in underlying mental structures rather than on

actual performance, Chomsky’s theory focuses on idealized utterances, or instances of language which are considered to be well-formed according to syntactic rules, rather than on real language in use

Noam Chomsky (1928)

• Chomsky later moved from the terms competence and performance to using the terms I-language and E-language (Chomsky 1986)• I-language: internal set of linguistic rules • E-language: external language, often incomplete• Humans have an innate faculty for acquiring the idealized I-language

Michael Halliday (1925)


• Systemic functional linguistics• Influenced by J.R. Firth, who drew attention to the relationship

between meaning and context, including the surrounding co-text that a piece of language participates in; this co-text lends meaning to words: ‘You shall know a word by the company it keeps’• Halliday: a systemic framework of functional choices• Language – a system of choices at different levels, and each choice

provides an aspect of meaning


• Clauses function to create meaning at the same time in three ways: interpersonally: • 1) by establishing and maintaining relationships between people; • 2)by constructing the world, whether real, invented, or abstract, and• 3) textually: organizing the interpersonal and the ideational into

coherent texts


• Mood: • imperative,• indicative: declarative, interrogative


• Register: linguistic choices made in a situational context: • 1) lexico-grammatical; • 2) field (subject matter), • 3) mode (written or spoken), and• 4) tenor (relationship between interlocutors: symmetrical, as

between friends, or asymmetrical, as between employer and employee)

Exercise 1.3.

• Analyze the following texts in terms of field, mode and tenor. Explain your choices• 1. Keep out!• 2. Watcha doin’? Wanna get a burger or somethin’?• 3. I am writing to enquire about the position in sales advertised in the

Saturday August 12 edition of The Times.

Exercise 1.3.

• Shadows covered the wide areas of European life in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The vigorous expansion into bordeing areas that had marked European history since the eleventh century came to an end. The Christian West fought to halt the expansion of the Muslim Turks. Plague, famine, and recurrent wars decimated populations and snuffed out their former prosperity. The papacy and feudal government struggled against mounting institutional chaos. Powerful mystical and heretical movements and new critical currents in Scholasticism rocked the established religious and philosophical equilibrium of the thirteenth century.

Exercise 1.4. Attribute each of the following to either F. de Saussure, N. Chomsky, or M. Halliday

• 1. ‘If we could embrace the sum of word-images in the minds of all individuals, we could identify the social bond that constitutes language. It is a storehouse filled by the members of a given community through their active use of speaking, a grammatical system that has a potential existence in each brain, or, specifically, in the brains of a group of individuals. For language is not complete in any speaker; it exists perfectly only within a collectivity.’


• 2. ‘It seems clear that we must regard linguistic competence – knowledge of a language – as an abstract system underlying behavior, a system constituted by rules that interact to determine the form and intrisic meaning of a potentially infinite number of sentences’


• 3. ‘Every text – that is, everything that is said or written – unfolds in some context of use; furthermore, it is the uses of language that, over tens of thousands of generatons, have shaped the system. Language has evolved to satisfy human needs; and the way it is organized is functional with respect to these needs.’


• 4. ‘Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-hearer, in a completely homogeneous speech community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance’.


• 5. ‘Language is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others…To determine what a five-franc piece is worth one must know: 1) that it can be exchanged for a fixed quantity of a different thing, e.g. bread; and 2) that it can be compared with a similar value of the same system, e.g. a one-franc piece, or with coins of another system (a dollar, etc.). In the same way a word can be exchanged for something dissimilar, an idea; besides, it can be compared with something of the same nature, another word. Its value is therefore not fixed so long as one simply states that it can be ‘exchanged’ for a given concept’


• ‘Spoken and written language, then, tend to display different KINDS of complexity; each of them is more complex in its own way. Written language tends to be lexically dense but grammatically simple; spoken language tends to be grammatically intricate but lexically sparse’… ‘The value of having some explicit knowledge of the grammar of written language is that you can use this knowledge, not only to analyze the texts, but as a critical resource for asking questions about them’.

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INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGE STUDIES Part I