25 January 2022 Aaron J.

Dinkin
Linguistics 501 adinkin@sdsu.edu

Lecture 2
What linguists think about and how
Linguists think about “grammar” differently than other people often do.

All languages (and dialects) have a grammar

—they have systematic rules governing the structure of sentences, words, etc.
All languages (and dialects) are equally sophisticated
—they are equally capable of expressing the full range of human ideas.
Linguists don’t make value judgments between languages/dialects
—there’s no such thing as a “good grammar” or “bad grammar”.

Non-linguists often claim there are certain “correct” ways of speaking a language, which all
speakers “should” adopt.
E.g., for English, they propose rules like:
• “Don’t end a sentence with a preposition” (Who are you talking to?)
• “Don’t use ain’t” (That ain’t right.)
Prescriptive rules: telling people how others believe they should speak.
Prescriptive rules are what some non-linguists think “grammar” means,
and they caricature violations of them as “bad grammar”.

Linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive.

We aim to describe the rules people actually use to govern their language,
not the rules that people claim they should use.
Sentences that violate prescriptive rules are still produced by systematic rules—
just not the same rules that prescriptivists advocate.
Prescriptivism is often just about promoting the standard dialect of a language—
pretending it’s the only variety of the language with systematic structure.
But every dialect has its own grammar, with rules its own speakers follow.
Prescriptivists often claim their rules are necessary for “clarity” or “logic”,
but standard dialects are no more clear or logical than nonstandard ones!

For example: possessive and reflexive pronouns in standard English:

my myself
your yourself
his himself
Himself doesn’t follow the pattern established by the other pronouns!
A logical pattern would produce hisself, not himself.
But hisself is non-standard, considered “bad grammar” by prescriptivists!
In this case, the non-standard dialects are more logical than the standard.
I’m not saying that hisself is more correct than standard himself, either—
every dialect’s grammatical structures are correct for that dialect.
Another example:
A very common nonstandard feature in English is the “double negative”:
using multiple negative words to express a negative sentence:

double negative: I don’t know nothing about it.

standard (single negative): I don’t know anything about it.

Prescriptivists often call the double negative illogical,

because in logic, two negatives cancel out and make a positive.
They claim this illogicality is why the double negative is nonstandard.
But that’s not the real reason!

In French, using a double negative is more standard than the single negative:
standard: Je ne sais rien. (‘I don’t know anything’)
single negative: Je sais rien.

If logic were the reason for features being standard or nonstandard, the double negative would
be nonstandard in French as well. But it’s highly standard!

Prescriptive rules are not what linguists mean by “grammar”.

When linguists call something ungrammatical (in a given dialect),
they mean it’s a construction that no speaker (of that dialect) would use because it’s not
consistent with the unconscious rules people naturally apply:
She ain’t here may be grammatical, but *She here ain’t is ungrammatical—
not because your third-grade teacher told you it was “bad grammar”,
but because it’s something no speaker of English would actually try to say.
Nonstandard varieties don’t “lack grammar” or use “bad grammar”;
they just have a different set of grammatical rules than standard varieties.

Grammatical knowledge is mostly subconscious:

we apply the rules of our dialect to construct words and sentences,
but often without being able to state what the rules actually are.
E.g.: English -ed in some words (slipped, washed, etc.) is pronounced as “t”;
in other words (jogged, buzzed, etc.) it’s pronounced as “d”.
There is a consistent rule that determines which words use “t” and “d” sounds,
and English speakers consistently follow the rule,
but if you asked them they mostly couldn’t tell you what it is.
(They might not have even noticed that -ed has two different pronunciations!)
We can (usually) identify what sounds acceptable and what doesn’t,
but we don’t know how we know!
This knowledge is known as your linguistic competence.

The typical way of determining whether a sentence is grammatical:

asking a native speaker of the language—
i.e., someone who grew up speaking the language and therefore acquired competence in it as
part of the natural human language-learning instinct.
Whether a sentence is grammatical isn’t the same as whether it means anything:
• Friendly milk will countermand my trousers doesn’t have any clear meaning,
but it obeys the structural rules of English sentence construction.
• *Me want cookie does have a clear meaning, but it is not grammatical.

All languages change over time, in both grammar and lexicon.

Prescriptivists often caricature language change as “degradation”,
and claim to be trying to preserve an older, more perfect form of a language.
But the language always meets the needs of its speakers,
and what prescriptivists care about also changes over time.

A key question of linguistics:

are there facts that must be true of the grammars of all languages?
This would tell us what the features of the general human language-learning instinct (i.e.,
“Universal Grammar”) are.

Many languages are endangered—

spoken by small populations, where children are more likely to be brought up speaking a
more widespread language instead of the local language.
Linguists believe it’s important to protect linguistic diversity—
each individual language is part of its community’s cultural heritage,
and a piece of the puzzle to understanding how language overall works.

Linguistic competence is thought to be divided up into several modules controlling different

levels of linguistic structure: sounds, sentences, meanings, etc.; each studied in a particular
subfield of linguistics.
The grammar of a language consists of these components and how they interact.

Major subfields of linguistics to be explored in this course:

Phonetics
—the study of speech sounds:
• How do we use our vocal organs to produce speech sounds?
• What are the physical acoustic properties of speech sounds?

Phonology
—the study of the structured relationships between sounds in the grammar:
• What rules dictate which speech sounds are used when?
• How much detail do you have to know about the pronunciation of a word in order to be
able to say it correctly?

Morphology
—the study of the internal compositional structure of words:
• How are words constructed out of smaller meaningful units?
• How does the internal structure of a word relate to its meaning and its relationship to
other elements of the sentence?
Syntax
—the study of the structure of sentences and phrases:
• What combinations of words make up grammatical sentences?
• How is the structure of complex sentences related to simpler sentences?

Semantics
—the study of the meaning of words and sentences:
• What determines if a given sentence is true or false?
• How is the meaning of a sentence related to that of the words in it?

Pragmatics
—the study of how language is used to communicate:
• How can an utterance communicate information other than its literal meaning?
• What assumptions do listeners make about the communicative intent of speakers?

Historical linguistics
—the study of language change over the long term:
• How does language change?
• How can we learn about earlier stages of any given language?
• How are families of languages related to each other?

Sociolinguistics
—the study of language variation in communities:
• How do social features like gender, age, and class influence how people use language?
• Why do people speak differently in different social situations?

Other more-or-less interdisciplinary subfields:

• Psycholinguistics: how is language represented in the mind?
• Neurolinguistics: how is language processed in the brain?
• Computational linguistics: how can human language be modeled in a format that can be
represented on a computer?
• Anthropological linguistics: how is the use of language related to a society’s culture?

Written language is not usually a primary focus of linguistic research:

Spoken language is what is produced by human linguistic competence; writing is a
culturally-dependent technology for recording spoken language.
However, the study of writing systems is itself a subfield of linguistics;
and beyond that, written data is often used for studying languages when it’s more available
or easier to process than spoken data.