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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)
Wallace Chafe’s image of language as a pane of glass which linguists are
trained to turn their attention on brings to mind another possible metaphor
for thinking about the work of linguists. CSI 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. In much the same way, linguists use a variety of
methods of analyzing language in order to illuminate many different aspects
of language: 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 (and if we can prevent a complete loss) … You will
have your own reasons for wanting to learn more about linguistics and about
principled ways of studying language, as you join the legions of linguists,
past and present, around the world and provide your contributions to the
study of language.
Often, people approach the study of linguistics with a feeling of great
awe, perhaps because they feel that the terminology is difficult. However,
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2 An Introduction to Linguistics and Language Studies
thing that puts pressure on the wheels to stop them turning’, which with time
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Exercise 1.1
Make a list of word classes1 as you know them. Do not worry about
being ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ about the terms. Now analyze the sentence
‘CSI 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,’
assigning each of the words to a word class.
In doing Exercise 1.1, you have been involved in a theoretical task: that
of classifying words into categories. You may have found some of the words
easier to categorize than others. Words like CSI, criminologists, clues, eye,
tools, luminal, liquid, hemoglobin, blood and stains you may have labeled
as nouns. Perhaps you learned in school that nouns refer to people, places
and things, as these words do. However, linguists would not attempt to
define nouns by reference to what they refer to, but rather by how they
can be used in phrases, clauses and sentences, in terms of how they can be
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strung together to form acceptable syntactic strings and also how they can
function to create meaning. The same is the case for all linguistic categories,
as we will be seeing throughout the book, especially in Chapters 3 and 4.
Also perhaps not difficult to categorize are verbs, the category in which
1. Linguists prefer the term ‘word class’ to the more traditional ‘part of speech’, as ‘word
class’ is a more accurate term for what is essentially the practice of dividing up words
into different types or classes. If you would like more practice on placing words into
classes, the webpage by Dick Hudson, University College London, designed for middle
school English teachers in the UK is very helpful: http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/
dick/tta/wc/wcall.htm
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An Introduction to Linguistics and Language Studies 3
perhaps you included uncover, use, reacts, and illuminate, adverbs, such as
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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
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4 An Introduction to Linguistics and Language Studies
or more correct than any other language or dialect. All languages and
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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. That is from a linguistic,
and a linguist’s, point of view. However, from a social perspective, there
are differences in how languages and dialects are perceived. It is much the
same as with ways of dressing. There is no reason to think that wearing a
suit and tie is somehow objectively superior to wearing sweatpants, or that
wearing a space suit is more sophisticated than wearing a bikini. Decisions
as to the appropriateness of a way of dressing has everything to do with
context, and people will make judgments on ways of dressing depending on
their social position and on pre-existing views of what that way of dressing
represents.
It is the same with language and dialects. 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
deemed as not appropriate or which one might not usually encounter in a
given situation or context. At the same time, a sociologist simply describing
different manners of dress would not make judgments in terms of what the
best form of fashion is outside of a context. In the same vein, a linguist
would not make judgments as to which is the best language or which is
the best dialect, which is the ‘correct’ way of speaking. It is the business of
linguists to describe language. In this book, we study many different methods
that linguists and those involved in the study of language use to undertake
this description, commenting on the theoretical perspectives underpinning
those methods.
There is a common misconception that a linguist is someone who
speaks many different languages. While there are many linguists who can
speak more than one language, there are also those who feel comfortable
mainly in one language. After studying linguistics they do have a general
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An Introduction to Linguistics and Language Studies 5
seem like a daunting study to more artistic minds, is that it is the scientific
study of language. It is the case that linguistics involves the principled study
of an object of inquiry known as human language. The ‘principled’ part is
informed by differing theoretical perspectives on that object of study. In
this introduction, we look at some of those perspectives in their historical
contexts, in order to prepare for the chapters ahead. There are three linguists
whom I would like to introduce in this opening chapter, as their work has
motivated vast areas of linguistic work and legions of people whose passion
is an understanding of language. The innovative theoretical perspectives
of these three people underpins much of twentieth–twenty-first-century
linguistics, and some broad brushstrokes on their beliefs and insights into
language provide a good introduction to the chapters ahead.
death in 1913, his colleagues and students published notes from his teachings
as a book entitled Cours de linguistique générale, in which Saussure defines
the field of linguistics. Several of Saussure’s revelations about the nature of
language revolutionized the way that this object of inquiry was viewed, and
thus have had a profound impact on language study up to this day.
First of all, Saussure eschewed a diachronic approach, or a study of
language over time, as he placed little importance on understanding how
languages came to be as they were, emphasizing instead a synchronic
approach, one which focuses on describing language at a given point in
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6 An Introduction to Linguistics and Language Studies
signs, which consist of two parts: signified and signifier. The signified is
the concept which is referred to, and the signifier is the label used for that
concept (see Figure 1.1).
SIGNIFIED
SIGNIFIER
CAT
There are several principles of Saussure´s theory of signs which are
important of an understanding of his view of language. First of all, the
relationship between a given signified and its signifier is arbitrary. There is
nothing in the essence of the signified in the rough diagram above which
would lead one to utter the string of sounds spelled by ‘c-a-t’. Second,
while we might think of language as a naming game, with signifieds being
assigned to already existing signifiers, this is far from the case, as evidenced
by differences across languages, dialects, and registers in what is named; that
is, different languages carve up experience in different ways. For example,
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Arabic has different words for a mother’s sister (khala) and a father’s
sister (ama), while English uses aunt for both. There is further evidence
for language not being a system which names already-existing concepts:
there are differences across time in relationships between signifieds and
signifiers. For example, meat during the seventeenth century referred to
food in general, and in the present time, in food terms, it refers only to the
flesh of an animal. Thus, signs are not stable in terms of the relationship
between signified and signifier.
So, if language is not a fixed nomenclature for pre-existing concepts,
how do we use it to mean anything? Saussure’s efforts to define linguistics
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An Introduction to Linguistics and Language Studies 7
led him to a further key principle: language is a set of signs which are: (a)
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8 An Introduction to Linguistics and Language Studies
the component parts of the data into smaller units (phonemes, morphemes,
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groups and phrases), and by relating these units into a system of paradigms
and syntagms. (In the sections on phonology – Chapter 2 – and morphology
– Chapter 3 – in this textbook, you will be involved in carrying out these
types of analyses.) Indeed, the work of American structuralists, led by the
great American structuralist Leonard Bloomfield, especially during the 1930s
and 1940s, has been of great importance in leaving us a legacy of inventoried
languages which have since been lost or which are endangered.
2. Structuralism has provided support for some second language teaching methods. The
audiolingual method, for example, drew on structuralism to devise drills (which are still
used in language classes today) which would reinforce correct use of the language.
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An Introduction to Linguistics and Language Studies 9
organizes linguistic elements into well-formed strings; that is, each one
of us holds in our heads 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. Syntactic theories attempt to make transparent
that mental knowledge by modeling it, and in many cases by showing how
language might be generated by a computer if programmed to have the same
kind of rule-based knowledge. Indeed, the growth of Chomskyan mentalist
syntactic theory was contemporary to the growth of computer technology
and capabilities, which added a dimension to the study of syntax: a desire to
be able to replicate the ability of humans to produce language. This desire
calls for a theory of language which is precise and explicit, and Chomsky
used formulas and definitions in the style of mathematics to describe
and model linguistic competence, and thus his theory (and other related
theories) have come to be called ‘formal’ (which are often contrasted with
‘functional’ theories). Furthermore, because of the interest in underlying
mental structures rather than on actual performance, Chomskyan theory
focuses attention on idealized utterances, or instances of language which are
considered to be well-formed according to the syntactic rules of a language,
rather than on real language in use. We will revisit Chomsky’s linguistic
theory in Chapter 4.
Chomsky later moved from the terms competence and performance to
using the terms I-language and E-language (Chomsky 1986), I-language
being the internal set of linguistic rules that children develop over their
early years. A further motivation in Chomsky’s work in linguistics was the
observation that children develop this rule-governed notion of language
simply from hearing language, language that is not always presented to
them in an ideal syntactically-ruled way. E-language, or external language,
is often incomplete and thought of as rather messy, especially in certain
contexts such as informal conversation. The point that Chomsky makes is
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that the data available to a child is often more limited than the I-language
that the child develops out of this data. Thus Chomsky posited that humans
have an innate faculty for acquiring the idealized I-language, a point which
we return to in Chapter 7.
1.3 M. A. K. Halliday
Michael Halliday became interested in the study of language because of his
own experiences first learning and then later teaching Chinese. He writes
that his motivation for developing a way of analyzing language:
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10 An Introduction to Linguistics and Language Studies
was driven by the need to solve particular problems in teaching the language
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and to explain features of the language to the learners. And that could mean
everything from, say, the Chinese tone system, the nature of Chinese writing,
and therefore of writing systems in general, to the relations between grammar
and vocabulary. (Halliday and Hasan 2006: 16)
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Exercise 1.3
Analyze the following texts in terms of field, mode and tenor. Explain
your choices.
1. Keep out!
2. Whatcha 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.
4. Shadows covered wide areas of European life in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries. The vigorous expansion into bordering 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.
1.4 Conclusion
We have seen in this introductory chapter that linguistics is a field of study
that examines language in a principled way. There are various theoretical
perspectives from which that object of study can be analyzed, as language
is multi-faceted; language is influenced by our physiological make-up,
by our brains and by our speech organs, by how we use it to achieve that
which we wish to achieve in carrying out communicative acts. Thus, it can
be examined using different lenses. In the rest of this course, we will learn
to use some of the different lenses available to those involved in linguistics
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Exercise 1.4
Attribute each of the following phrases to either Ferdinand de Sausurre, Noam
Chomsky, or Michael Halliday. What motivates your response? What does the
quote tell you about their perspective on the study and analysis of language?
1. ‘If we could embrace the sum of word-images stored 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 intrinsic
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 generations, 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 …
[for example]. To determine what a five-franc piece is worth one most
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
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(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.’
6. ‘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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