Linguistics

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Linguistics
Phonology
Syntax
Morphology
Semantics
Pragmatics
Theoretical linguistics
Generative linguistics
Cognitive linguistics
Language acquisition
First language acquisition
Second language acquisition
Applied linguistics
Psycholinguistics
Phonetics
Sociolinguistics
Creolistics
Evolutionary linguistics
Linguistic variation
Linguistic typology
Anthropological linguistics
Computational linguistics
Descriptive linguistics
Historical linguistics
Comparative linguistics
History of linguistics
Language • natural • constructed
Grammar

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Linguists investigate language itself, rather than simply describe how particular languages work. For example, what do languages as diverse as English, Japanese and Zulu have in common ? How do they differ? What aspects of language are universal for all humans? Theoretical linguists are concerned with questions about the apparent 'instinct' to communicate, and explain what it is that we intuitively 'know' about language.[1]

Other linguists use this knowledge and understanding to improve practice in fields including foreign language teaching, speech therapy and translation. The use of linguistics to approach real-life problems is known as applied linguistics.[2] Furthermore, when evidence is needed or an idea must be tested, theoretical and applied research often draw on descriptive linguistics, which documents the facts of individual languages; examples include information on a language's tenses or its range of speech sounds.

History of linguistics

For more information, see: History of linguistics.

While modern linguistics is largely inspired by the works of Noam Chomsky in the 1950', the question af language, its origin and its nature has been a centre of interest in many civilizations. Two interesting contributions are that of Ancient Greece and Ancient India around the 5th century BCE. [3]. In Europe, interest in language continued during some parts of the Middle-Ages and of the Modern Era. However, language was often studied from a philosophical point of view and insights into the way language works mainly involved explaining the grammar of particular languages.

In the 19th century, scholars devoted thremselves to the study of the changes of languages over time, paving the way to modern linguistics. Phonetics became an pbject of systematic inquiry. However, these works differed from current mainstream linguistics in that they did not establish universal laws common to all languages and all speakers at a given time.

From the 1950', Noam Chomsky and his contemporaries initiated new methods in linguistics. This produced explicit theories of grammar [4][5] - namely, systems that required no reference to other kinds of knowledge. For example, whereas a casual definition of a noun is 'a person, place or thing', Chomsky envisaged a system that could distinguish a noun from any other sort of linguistic unit without needing to know what a person, place or thing is. This approach to uncovering the components of language, rather than investigating the history

Approach to studying language

Modern linguists' methodologies, assumptions and practices differ significantly from those of past generations.

Prescription and description

Main article: Linguistic prescriptivism

Linguists seek to clarify the nature of language, to describe how people use it, and to find the underlying grammar that speakers unconsciously adhere to. Linguists do not judge what speech is better or worse syntactically, correct or incorrect grammatically, and do not try to prescribe future language directions. Nonetheless, some professionals and many amateurs do try to prescribe rules of language, holding a particular standard for all to follow.

Prescription comes in two flavors, those that are linguistically founded and those that are not. For instance, the rule of English that subjects and verbs must agree (i.e. that when the subject is third-person singular, the verb takes an "s" ending, like "I/you/they run" but "he runs") can be the basis of linguistically founded prescription, so long as the speaker is intending to speak standard American English. Speakers of standard American English do follow subject-verb agreement, and thus if the intention is to teach that language, this rule should be taught.

However, prescriptivists often stray from this type of linguistically founded recommendation. These prescriptivists tend to be found among the ranks of language educators and journalists, and not in the academic discipline of linguistics. Often speakers of the acrolect of a particular language, they may hold clear notions of what is right and wrong and what variety of language is most likely to lead the next generation of speakers to 'success'. For example, they may believe that all speakers of what they would call English should follow the same rule of subject-verb agreement, while in fact some varieties of English, which are in a sense distinct languages in their own right, do not do subject-verb agreement the same way. The reasons for their intolerance of non-standard dialects, treating them as "incorrect" , may include distrust of neologisms, connections to socially-disapproved dialects (i.e., basilects), or simple conflicts with pet theories.

Prescriptivists often also make linguistically unfounded recommendations that seem plausibly true, but which aren't. For instance, the rule against stranding a preposition (often at the end of a sentence, such as in "I met the professor I wrote to.") is commonly believed to be a rule of English. However, it is a rule only in the sense that prescriptive grammarians want it to be. Speakers of English not only leave prepositions stranded regularly, indicating that it is perfectly natural English to do so, but often obeying the rule by pied-piping the preposition to the front results in a sentence that would sound ridiculous to any native speaker of English. The rule is simply linguistically unfounded.

Descriptive linguists, on the other hand, do not accept the prescriptivists' notion of "incorrect usage" in a general sense. They aim to describe the usages the prescriptivist has in mind, either as common or deviant from some linguistic norm, as an idiosyncratic variation, or as regularity (a rule) followed by speakers of some other dialect (in contrast to the common prescriptive assumption that "bad" usage is unsystematic). Within the context of fieldwork, descriptive linguistics refers to the study of language using a descriptivist approach. Descriptivist methodology more closely resembles scientific methodology in other disciplines.

Historical linguistics

Whereas the core of theoretical linguistics is concerned with studying languages at a particular point in time (usually the present), historical linguistics (or diachronic linguistics) examines how language changes through time, sometimes over centuries. Historical linguistics enjoys both a rich history (the study of linguistics grew out of historical linguistics) and a strong theoretical foundation for the study of language change.

In universities in the USA, the non-historic perspective seems to have the upper hand. Many introductory linguistics classes, for example, cover historical linguistics only cursorily. The shift in focus to a non-historic perspective started with Saussure and became predominant with Noam Chomsky.

Explicitly historical perspectives include historical-comparative linguistics and etymology.

Speech versus writing

Languages have only been written for a few thousand years, but have been spoken (or signed) for much longer. The written word may therefore provide less of a window onto how language works than the study of speech, even assuming that the culture which the language forms part of has a writing system - the majority of the world's languages remain unwritten. Furthermore, the study of written language can play no part in investigating first language acquisition, since infants are obviously yet to become literate. Overall, language is held to be an evolutionary adaptation, whereas writing is a comparatively recent invention. Spoken and signed language, then, may tell us much about human evolution and the structure of the mind.

Of course, linguists also agree that the study of written language can be worthwhile and valuable. For linguistic research that uses the methods of corpus linguistics and computational linguistics, written language is often much more convenient for processing large amounts of linguistic data. Large corpora of spoken language are difficult to create and hard to find, and are typically transcribed and written. Additionally, linguists have turned to text-based discourse occurring in various formats of computer-mediated communication as a viable site for linguistic inquiry. Writing, however, brings with it a number of problems; for example, it often acts as a historical record, preserving words, phrases, styles and spellings of a previous era. This may be of limited use for studying how language is used at the present time.

Innatism

One of the most interesting aspects of language is that normally, young children acquire whatever language is spoken (or signed, in the case of sign language) around them when they are growing up, without apparently having to be deliberately "taught" the language. By contrast, other animals, even highly intelligent primates that are closely related to humans, need very intensive teaching to be taught even a few minimal elements of human language. Therefore, it has been widely concluded that there must be some basic innate property of humans that enables them to language. It is claimed that there is a Universal Grammar (UG) that underlies all language and is biologically unique to humans, although precisely what is in UG, where it comes from, and whether a UG exists in any interesting sense are controversial issues.

Properties of language

It has been understood since the time of the ancient Greeks that languages tend to be organized around grammatical categories such as noun and verb, nominative and accusative, or present and past. The vocabulary and grammar of a language are organized around these categories.

In addition, language organizes elements into recursive structures; this allows, for example, a noun phrase to contain another noun phrase (as in the chimpanzee's lips) or a clause to contain a clause (as in I think that it's raining). Though recursion in grammar was implicitly recognized much earlier (for example by Otto Jespersen), the importance of this aspect of language was only fully realized after the 1957 publication of Noam Chomsky's book Syntactic Structures,[6] which presented a formal grammar of a fragment of English. Prior to this, the most detailed descriptions of linguistic systems were of phonological or morphological systems, which, especially in English, tend to be closed and admit little creativity.

Chomsky used a context-free grammar augmented with transformations. Since then, context-free grammars have been written for substantial fragments of various languages (for example GPSG, for English), but it has been demonstrated that human languages include cross-serial dependencies, which cannot be handled adequately by Context-free grammars. This requires increased power, for example transformations.

An example of a natural-language clause involving a cross-serial dependency is the Dutch[7][8]

Ik denk dat Jan Piet de kinderen zag helpen zwemmen
I think that Jan Piet the children saw help swim
'I think that Jan saw Piet help the children swim'

The important point is that the noun phrases before the verb cluster (Jan, Piet, de kinderen) are identified with the verbs in the verb cluster (zag, helpen, zwemmen) in left-right order.

This means that natural language formalisms must be relatively powerful in terms of generative capacity, which is to say that they must be able to account for very complex word orders and relations between the words. On the other hand, formalisms must not be too powerful so as to predict word orders that do not occur in any language. Some of the commonly studied formalisms include LFG, HPSG, Minimalism, Tree Adjoining Grammar, and Categorial Grammar. The formalisms all tend to be too weak or too powerful in various ways, and an important concern for theoretical syntax is to find how to constrain the formalisms to match the languages that we see.

of and relationships between particular languages, is one way of separating modern linguistics from its precursors.

The study of linguistics

Core areas

Some linguists, such as theoretical syntacticians, focus on one 'core' areas. Research may involve developing a model to describe and predict the workings of the system of language itself, rather than explain how people happen to use language.

The division between theoretical and applied linguistics holds for several 'core' fields, which together constitute the grammar of a language.

  • Syntax is the study of how units such as words combine into sentences. For example, why is Bill ate the fish acceptable, while Ate the Bill fish is not ?
  • Phonology refers to the system speakers use to represent language. For example, cat can be expressed through the utterance [kæt],[9] letters on a page, hand movements in a sign language, and even the dots and dashes of Morse code. Although there are potentially infinitely many ways of producing a sound, shaping a letter or moving a hand, phonologists are interested only in how these group into abstract categories: for example, how and why [k] is often perceived as different from [t], whereas in many languages, other sounds as different as those are not.
    • Phonetics focuses on the physical sounds of speech, so often informs phonological inquiry by showing how pronunciations are related.[10] However, since this does not primarily concern itself with the study of abstract patterns in language, phoneticians' work usually complements linguistics, rather than describes a central component.
  • Morphology examines how linguistic units such as words and their subparts (such as prefixes and suffixes) combine. One example of this might be the observation that while walk+ed is acceptable, *ed+walk[11] is not.
  • Semantics, within linguistics as opposed to other subjects such as philosophy, refers to the study of how language conveys meaning. For example, English speakers typically realise that Chomsky's famous sentence Colorless green ideas sleep furiously is well-formed in terms of word order, but incomprehensible in terms of meaning.[12] Other aspects of meaning studied here include how speakers understand ambiguous sentences such as Visiting relatives can be boring depending on context, and the extent to which sentences which are superficially very different, such as The wine flowed freely and Much wine was consumed, mean similar things.[13]
  • Pragmatics is the study of how utterances relate to the context they are spoken in. For instance, the sentence I have one pencil can mean two very different things, depending on whether the speaker has been asked how many pencils they have, or are just confirming that they have at least one. This sort of understanding is not predictable just by knowledge of language; speakers must also know something about the intentions and assumptions of others to co-operate in communication.

Other areas

To factor out circumstances that may obscure these fundamental insights, many linguists may choose to focus on language as presumed to occur in an idealised, adult, monolingual native speaker - prerequisites often found in mainstream generative linguistics.[14]

In contrast, linguists whose research moves away from any of these four criteria have concentrated on fields arranged around the study of language use and learning:

  • The study of language acquisition; how language is learnt by children as a first language and by adults as a second language. As this involves all kinds of learning, including in the classroom, this field is highly varied in the range of linguists, both theoretical and applied, who want to know how language emerges from infancy onwards
  • Sociolinguistics, the study of how language varies according to cultural context, the speaker's background, and the situation in which it is used;
  • Stylistics, the study of how language differs according to use and context, e.g. advertising versus speechmaking;
  • Linguistic variation, the study of the differences among the languages of the world. This has implications for linguistics in general: if human linguistic ability is narrowly constrained, then languages must be very similar. If human linguistic ability is unconstrained, then languages might vary greatly.

Other cross-disciplinary areas of linguistics include neurolinguistics, evolutionary linguistics, computational linguistics and cognitive science.

Applied linguistics

Whereas theoretical linguistics is concerned with finding and describing generalities both within particular languages and among all languages, applied linguistics takes these results and applies them to other areas. Often applied linguistics refers to the use of linguistic research in language teaching, but results of linguistic research are also used in many other areas.

Many areas of applied linguistics involve computer applications. Speech synthesis and speech recognition use phonetic and phonemic knowledge to provide voice interfaces to computers. Applications of computational linguistics in machine translation, computer-assisted translation, and natural language processing are fruitful areas which have come to the forefront in recent years . They have had a great influence on theories of syntax and semantics, as modelling syntactic and semantic theories on computers constrains the theories to computable operations and provides a more rigorous mathematical basis.

Today, 'applied linguistics' is sometimes used to refer to 'second language acquisition"', but these are distinct fields, in that many researchers spend more time on either theoretical or applied research.


Footnotes

  1. ↑ The view that language is an 'instinct' comparable to walking or bird flight is most famously articulated in Pinker (1994).
  2. ↑ Increasingly, however, applied linguists have been developing their own views of language, which often focus on the language learner rather than the system itself: see for example Cook (2002) and the same author's website.
  3. ↑ For example the early Indian grammarian {{UnicodePāṇini}}'s (ca 520–460 BCE) examination of Sanskrit produced several insights into the nature of grammar, such as the morpheme, which remain highly relevant in modern research and Plato in Cratyluswonders whether language has a natural or conventional origin.
  4. ↑ Chomsky N (1957) Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton.
  5. ↑ Chomsky N, Halle M (1968)
  6. ↑ Chomsky, Noam. 1957. "Syntactic Structures". Mouton, the Hague.
  7. ↑ Bresnan, Joan, Ronald Kaplan, Stanley Peters, and Annie Zaenen. 1982. Cross-serial dependencies in Dutch. Linguistic Inquiry 13:613-636.
  8. ↑ Shieber, Stuart. 1985. Evidence against the context-freeness of natural language. Linguistics and Philosophy 8:333-344.
  9. ↑ Symbols in square brackets represent speech sounds using the International Phonetic Alphabet; slanting brackets, as in /kæt/ 'cat', are used to represent phonemes - distinct, abstract units that may represent several sounds or written letters.
  10. ↑ Phonetics also covers speech perception (how the brain discerns sounds) and acoustics (the physical qualities of sounds as movement through air), as well as the study of articulation (sound production through the movements of the lungs, tongue, etc.).
  11. ↑ An asterisk * indicates that what follows is unacceptable to speakers of that language.
  12. ↑ Chomsky, 1957: 15.
  13. ↑ Aitchison (2003): 87-99.
  14. ↑ Beginning with Chomsky (1957) and subsequent works.
  15. ↑ e.g. Pinker, 1997; Scovel, 1997.
  16. ↑ The most famous case is Genie, an individual who was deprived of language throughout much of her childhood.

References

  • Aitchison J (2003) Teach Yourself Linguistics. London: Hodder. 6th edition. ISBN 0-07-142982-4.
  • Anderson SR (1985) Phonology in the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton.
  • Chomsky N. (1966) Cartesian Linguistics: a Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought. New York: Harper & Row.
  • Chomsky N, Halle M (1968) The Sound Pattern of English. New York: Harper & Row.
  • Cook VJ (2002) Portraits of the L2 User. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
  • Pinker S (1994) The Language Instinct. New York: William Morrow & Company. ISBN 0-06-095833-2 (Harper Perennial Modern Classics reprint, 2000).
  • Pinker S (1999) How the Mind Works. New York: Norton.
  • Scovel T (1997) Psycholinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Further reading

  • Aitchison, Jean [1995] (1999). Linguistics: An Introduction, 2nd. London: Hodder & Stoughton. 
  • Adrian, Akmajian (2001). Linguistics, et al. MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-51123-1. 
  • Griniewicz, Sergiusz; Elwira M. Dubieniec (2004). Introduction To Linguistics, 2nd. Białystok, WSFiZ, 91. 
  • Hudson, G. (2000) Essential Introductory Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell.
  • Lyons, John (1995), Linguistic Semantics, Cambridge University Press. (ISBN 0-521-43877-2)
  • Napoli, Donna J. (2003) Language Matters. A Guide to Everyday Questions about Language. Oxford University Press.
  • O'Grady, William D., Michael Dobrovolsky & Francis Katamba [eds.] (2001), Contemporary Linguistics, Longman. (ISBN 0-582-24691-1) - Lower Level
  • Taylor, John R. (2003), Cognitive Grammar, Oxford University Press. (ISBN 0-19-870033-4)
  • Trask, R. L. (1995) Language: The Basics. London: Routledge.
  • Ungerer, Friedrich & Hans-Jorg Schmid (1996), An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics, Longman. (ISBN 0-582-23966-4)


Popular books about linguistics

Other References

  • Aronoff, Mark & Janie Rees-Miller (Eds.) (2003) The Handbook of Linguistics. Blackwell Publishers. (ISBN 1-4051-0252-7)
  • Asher R (Ed.) (1993) Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Oxford: Pergamon Press. 10 vols.
  • Bright, William (Ed) (1992) International Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Oxford University Press. 4 Vols.
  • Brown KR. (Ed.) (2005) Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2nd ed.). Elsevier. 14 vols.
  • Bussmann H (1996) Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics. Routledge (translated from German).
  • Crystal D
    • (1987) The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language. Cambridge University Press.
    • (1991) A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. Blackwell. (ISBN 0-631-17871-6)
    • (1992) An Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Language and Languages. Oxford: Blackwell.
  • Frawley W (Ed.) (2003) International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.
  • Malmkjaer K (1991) The Linguistics Encyclopaedia. Routledge (ISBN 0-415-22210-9)
  • Trask RL
    • (1993) A Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in Linguistics. Routledge. (ISBN 0-415-08628-0)
    • (1996) Dictionary of Phonetics and Phonology. Routledge.
    • (1997) A student's dictionary of language and linguistics.
    • (1999) Key Concepts in Language and Linguistics. London: Routledge.

External links

See also

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