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1 An Introduction To Linguistics and Language Studies
1 An Introduction To Linguistics and Language Studies
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,
terminology is rife in any field of activity (witness the proliferation of new
words related to new technologies). As with other fields, linguistics needs
terms in order to delineate its concepts, yet often people are put off by the
technical jargon. Tom and Meriel Bloor (2004: 16) provide an interesting
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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
might be shortened to ‘wheelstopper’. Then, Bloor and Bloor ask, would
that be considered a technical term, and need to be banned? The point is
that every field has its terms to refer to the activity and concepts involved
in its realization. The odd thing about linguistics, perhaps, is that it needs a
language to talk about itself, to talk about language; in other words, it needs
a meta-language. Linguistics shares this meta-language with the type of
prescriptive grammar book which tells people what is ‘right’ and what is
‘wrong’ in language use, through the use of terms such as subject, verb,
adjective, noun, etc. This sharing of terms is rather unfortunate, as it leads
to the notion that linguistics is about correctness in language use. However,
this is far from the reality of linguistic study.
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
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
previously, and adjectives, such as visible, specialized, and invisible. Nouns,
verbs, adjectives and adverbs form the content words of language, those
that refer to something in our experience (whether real or imagined).
Perhaps more difficult to categorize are function words, or words which
allow us to connect the different parts of phrases, clauses and sentences, or
to convey another type of meaning, such as polarity (referring to the ‘yes/
no’ dimension of clauses and sentences) in the case of not, prepositions
and prepositional phrases such as in (as in in blood), to (as in to the eye),
and with. The to in to uncover and to illuminate is not a preposition, but is
needed in English to form the infinitive of the verb, and when it is used for
this purpose, it is often called a ‘particle’, and not included in a traditional
word class category. Other function words include the and a, labeled
‘articles’ by some and ‘determiners’ by others; that is a relative pronoun in
this context, as it introduces a relative clause describing the type of liquid
(although it sometimes has other functions, such as in Give me that book or
She said that she would call). Such as functions to introduce an example,
and would fit with other phrases, like in order (to), which serve as discourse
markers to signal relationships between ideas, but not all of these words are
considered to belong to the traditional word classes. Thus, linguists may not
always agree on the exact categories to work with in describing language;
however, while there is some disagreement on how to classify some bits of
language (and we will study different theoretical perspectives on grammar
in Chapters 3 and 4), they would agree on major classes such as noun, verb,
adjective, adverb, and preposition.
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?
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4 An Introduction to Linguistics and Language Studies
or more correct than any other language or dialect. 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. 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
understanding of how language works, a knowledge which can be applied to
other languages. However, prior knowledge of other languages is certainly
not a prerequisite for undertaking linguistic study. After all, we all speak a
language and have spent years studying it in school and using it to get on
with our daily lives. The study of linguistics has a further benefit: working
with multiple perspectives concerning the nature of language and how it
works differently in different contexts can provide an understanding which
can help us be more successful in using our first language in a range of
situations.
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An Introduction to Linguistics and Language Studies 5
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6 An Introduction to Linguistics and Language Studies
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,
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)
members of a system; and (b) defined by their relationships to each other.
We know what something means by knowing also what it does not mean.
We know that pat and bat are different from each other because /p/ is not /b/.
Both /p/ and /b/ are consonants, and both are articulated by bringing the lips
together and allowing sound to explode its way through, as it were (more in
Chapter 2 on how these sounds are articulated, in the sections on phonetics
and phonology). However, there is a major difference in that with /b/ we
vibrate our vocal cords, and with /p/ we do not. We can also contrast meat
with both flesh and food and understand how these signs are conceptually
alike and conceptually different.
Furthermore, elements of language stand in relationship to each
other in two important ways. First of all, they are in relationship
to each other in the ways in which they can string together on the
syntagmatic dimension; for example, ‘p’ is followed by ‘a’ and then
by ‘t’ to make pat; another example of the syntagmatic dimension is
that in English we put the adjective before the noun, as in ‘black cat’.
Elements of language also relate to each other on the paradigmatic
dimension; for example we understand pat as differentiated from bat,
cat, sat, etc. because we can substitute p with b, c, and s. To illustrate
the paradigmatic set of choices further, we can consider ‘black’ in its
relationship to other colors, and ‘cat’ in its relationship to other animals,
or, more generally, we know that ‘black’ belongs to a set of words known
as adjectives and ‘cat’ to that of nouns.
For Saussure, linguistics then is the study of the system of a language
in order to articulate the elements which distinguish one functional form
from another. This understanding of the differences is what constitutes the
meaning-making capability of language. What is of interest to linguists, in
Saussure’s view, is the system of forms, or la langue as Saussure termed it,
rather than la parole, or the actual use of language by individual speakers.
Langue refers to the “hoard deposited by the practice of speech in speakers
who belong to the same community, a grammatical system which, to all
intents and purposes, exists in the mind of each speaker” (Course, 13–14).
Langue belongs to all of us, as it is a collective social product.
Saussure’s ideas about linguistics have influenced generations of
linguists, including the structuralists, who focused a great deal of effort
on describing the systems of many different languages. Structuralists make
inventories of parole in order to delineate langue. Thus, structuralists created
descriptions of the sound and meaning units of a great number of languages
by collecting data (recording large amounts of actual speech) and analyzing
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8 An Introduction to Linguistics and Language Studies
the component parts of the data into smaller units (phonemes, morphemes,
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
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
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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An Introduction to Linguistics and Language Studies 11
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12 An Introduction to Linguistics and Language Studies
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
and the study of language.
We have left out here the scores of linguists who have helped to further
the projects of the linguists mentioned in this chapter and who have created
perspective and projects of their own. A number of other linguists will be
mentioned throughout the book, but, unfortunately, it is not possible to
mention all whose work has added to our ever-growing understanding of
language. You will notice that Saussure, Chomsky and Halliday came to
develop their theories of linguistics based on compelling questions for which
they could not find answers in existing ways of analyzing and explaining
language. What burning questions do you have about language?
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An Introduction to Linguistics and Language Studies 13
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
(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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14 An Introduction to Linguistics and Language Studies
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An Introduction to Linguistics and Language Studies 15
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2 A Focus on Spoken Interaction
A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series
of differences of ideas. (Ferdinand de Saussure 1959: 120)
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