Introduction to Linguistics

Régimen de cursado
2 evaluaciones parciales escritas y 1 evaluación integral, con
recuperatorio.
Trabajos prácticos domiciliarios escritos al final de cada unidad
temática, sin recuperación.
Requisitos de promoción:
• 75% de asistencia a clases
• 75% de trabajos prácticos aprobados
• 100% de evaluaciones parciales aprobadas con 7 (siete) o más,
incluyendo la instancia de evaluación integral.
Linguistics is the study of language; it’s not the
study of languages.
Linguistics is the study of language; it’s not the
study of languages.
Common traits:
✓ Language is used to communicate.
✓ Language is composed of arbitrary signs.
✓ Language is hierarchically organized.
✓ Humans produce and perceive language using auditory, visual, and
even tactile modalities.
✓ Language is unique to human beings.
✓ Humans are genetically endowed for language.
What is language?
Language is at the heart of all things human. We use it when we’re
talking, listening, reading, writing and thinking. It underpins social
relationships and communities; it forges the emotional bond between
parent and child; it’s the vehicle for literarure and poetry. Language is
not just part of us, it defines us.
Linguistics is the study of how language works – how it’s used, how it’s
acquired, how it changes over time, how it’s represented in the brain.
It’s concerned not only with the more than 7,000 living languages in
the world but also with the abilities and adaptations that have made it
posible for our species to create and use language in the first place.
(O’Grady et al, 2017:1)
Linguistic knowledge
When you know a language, you can speak and be understood
by others who also know that language. This means you are
able to produce strings of sounds that signify certain
meanings and to understand or interpret the sounds produced
by others.
Everyone knows at least one language. Five-year-old children
are nearly as proficient at speaking and understanding as their
parents. Yet, the ability to carry out the simples conversation
requires profound knowledge that most speakers are unaware
of.
(Fromkin et al, 2017:2)
What do linguists do?
• Linguists study the structure of language: how speakers
create meaning through combinations of sounds, words, and
sentences that ultimately result in texts – extended stretches
of language (e.g. a conversation between friends, a speech,
an article in a newspaper).
• Linguists examine their subject matter – language –
objectively. They are not interested in evaluating “good”
versus “bad” uses of language.
• Linguists do have their biases (ideological basis of language)
but their goal is describing language not telling people how
they should or should not speak or write.
Language as part of a semiotic system
• Language is a system of communication
• The study of communication systems has its origins in
semiotics, a field of inquiry that originated in the work
of Ferdinand de Saussure -A Course in General
Linguistics (1916).
• Meaning in semiotic systems is expressed by signs,
which have a particular form (called signifier) and
some meaning that the signifier conveys (called
signified).
Ferdinand de Saussure (1853-1913)
• Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher.
His ideas laid a foundation for many
significant developments in both linguistics
and semiotics in the 20th century.
• In 1907, 1908–1909, and 1910–1911, he gave
three courses in general linguistics at the
University of Geneva, in which he developed
an approach to languages as systems of signs,
each sign consisting of a signifier (sound
pattern) and a signified (concept), both of
them mental rather than physical in nature.
Example: TABLE

•2 signifiers
•Phonemes: /teɪbəl/
•Graphemes: t-a-b-l-e
 Linguistic signs are arbitrary
•The word window has no direct connection to
the meaning that it expresses
•In other languages - different signifiers
fenêtre in French
ventana in Spanish
fenster in German
ikkunain Finnish
 The modes of language
• Signifiers are transmitted in human language most
frequently through two primary modes: speech and
writing
• Speech is primary and writing secondary (different but
complementary roles)
• Children naturally acquire the spoken version of a
language but to become literate they need formal
schooling
Koch and Oesterreicher's model
A= legal text, B = private talk, C= private email
 Studying linguistic structure
Every language has structure which can be described by postulating:
• rules governing the pronunciation of sounds; the ways that words are
put together; the manner in which phrases, clauses, and sentences
are structured; and, ultimately, the ways that meaning is created
GRAMMAR
• principles stipulating how the structures that rules create should be
used (e.g. which forms will be polite in which contexts, which forms
will not).
PRAGMATICS
rule - external
principle - internal
 Linguistic vs Prescriptive rules
Prescriptive rules are the ones that we learn in school:
• “Don’t end sentences with prepositions”
• “Don’t begin a sentence with but”
• “Don’t split infinitives.”
They are intended to provide guidance to students as they learn to
speak and write so-called Standard English.
Linguistic rules serve to describe what people know about language:
their unconscious knowledge of language that Noam Chomsky
describes as linguistic competence.
Even though a sentence uttered by a child
may not conform to the rules of Standard
English it provides evidence that the speaker
is aware of the rules of English grammar.
A rule may have been applied without having
reached a stage of acquisition where the
speaker is able to recognize the difference
between forms.
Rules of grammar
•Phonetics/Phonology: phoneme - smallest unit of
structure in lge

•Morphology morpheme meaning in lge

- smallest unit of

•Syntax how constituens in cl are grouped

largest level of structure - clause,

•Semantics cuts accross all other levels,

typically focused on
LEXICAL semantics and
reference (DEIXIS)
When studying rules of grammar, one really does not leave
the speaker’s brain, since the focus of discussion is the
abstract properties of language that any human (barring
disability) is naturally endowed with. But understanding
language involves more than describing the psychological
properties of the brain. How language is structured also
depends heavily in context: the social context in which
language is used as well as the linguistic context – the larger
body of sentences – in which a particular linguistic structure
occurs. The study of this facet of language is conducted within
the domain of pragmatics, which is concerned less with how
grammatical constructions are structured and more with why
they have the structure that they do.