INTRODUCTION

TO
LINGUISTICS
LECTURE1

Lectures – 30 hours, Olga Siuchina

exam
KEY POINTS OF THE COURSE
• LANGUAGE
• The definition of Language
• Features of Language
• Functions of Language
• Levels of the language
• LINGUISTICS
• Main branches of linguistics
• Objects of study in linguistics
THE AIMS AND OBJECTIVES OF THE COURSE
• To lead you to examine your own linguistic beliefs and
attitudes;
• To make you aware of the diversity of linguistic systems;

• To give you a reasonable taste of most of the subfields of

linguistics: phonetics, phonology, morphology, semantics,
syntax, pragmatics, historical linguistics,
psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics;
• To equip you with some tool and techniques for linguistic
analysis.
 Everywhere, every day, everybody uses language.
There is no human society, no matter how small or
how isolated, which does not use a language.
 Each human language is a complex of knowledge
and abilities enabling speakers of the language to
communicate with each other, to express ideas,
hypotheses, emotions, desires, and all the other
things that need expressing.
 GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF HUMAN LANGUAGE
• Every language is enormously complex.
• Despite this enormous complexity, every language is
systematic, often in ways that are hidden and surprising
(relationships in language are called rules).
• Not only is language systematic, but it is systematic on
many levels, from the system of sounds to the organization
of discourse.
• Languages vary systematically from person to person, area
to area, situation to situation. Speakers are not consciously
aware of most of this variation.
• Languages are diverse. There are surprising differences in
the ways individual languages are organised.
• Despite the diversity, there are a great many universal
properties of languages. That is, there are characteristics
shared by all languages as well as characteristics no
language can have.
• It is not easy for speakers of a language to reflect on their
speech. We are often not aware of rules that govern our
speech. The same is with principles that govern ball
throwing or riding a bicycle.
• The attitudes that people hold about their language or other
languages can be very different from the facts about them.
• Speech is the primary manifestation of language, and
writing is only a secondary one.
• Although children learn their first language, they cannot
really be said to be taught it. They intuit the rule of their
language from what they hear.
• All languages change as time passes. Often speakers are not
aware of that.
• Linguists try to give accounts of the properties of a
language.
• Linguists try to determine the ways in which all languages
are alike and the ways in which they differ.

WHAT IS LINGUISTICS?
 The field of science that tries to answer the
question "How does language work?" is called
linguistics, and the scholars who study it are
called linguists
 Linguistics, simply, is the study of language.
 What is language ?
 Is language human specific ?
 Do animals have language?

WHAT IS LANGUAGE?
 Language is the system of
human communication,
either spoken or written,
consisting of the use of
words in a structured and
conventional way.
• Language is purely human and
non-instinctive method of communicating ideas,
emotions and desires by means of voluntarily
produced symbols (Sapir, 1921).
• Language is a system of arbitrary, vocal symbols
which permit all people in a given culture, or other
people who have learned the system of that culture
to communicate or to interact (Finocchiaro, 1965).
DEFINITION OF A
LANGUAGE
• Language is a system of communication by sound,
operating through the organs of speech, among members of
a given community, and using vocal symbols possessing
arbitrary conventional meaning (Pei, 1966)
 • Language is a system of conventional, spoken or written
symbols by means of which human beings, as members of
a social group and participants in its culture, communicate
(Encyclopaedia Britannica).

LINGUISTIC KNOWLEDGE
(COMPETENCE)
Knowledge of the Sound System: Knowing what sounds are in
that language and what sounds are not.
• Knowledge of Words:
Knowing the sound units
that are related to specific
meanings.
• Knowledge of Sentences:
Knowing how to form
sentences.
LEVELS OF A LANGUAGE
Phonetic

• sounds

Lexical

• words

Grammatical

• sentences and texts

Linguistic competence and linguistic performance
• Linguistic Competence: • Linguistic
What you know about Performance:
a language. How you use this
knowledge in actual
speech production and
comprehension.
 BRANCHES OF LINGUISTICS
• Phonetics: the pronunciation system of a language
• Phonology: functioning of sounds in speech
• Morphology: word formation and parts of speech
• Syntax: sentence formation
• Semantics: the interpretation of words and sentences
• Pragmatics: how speakers use language in given
contexts
Relations of linguistics with
other sciences
• Historical Linguistics
• Sociolinguistics
• Psycholinguistics
• Ethnolinguistics (or Anthropological Linguistics)
• Dialectology
• Computational Linguistics
• Psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics
HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS: LANGUAGE AND
HISTORY

• How did Latin develop into the various romance languages

French, Italian, Spanish, Rumanian, Portuguese, Romansch,
Catalan, Occitan, Sardinian etc.?
• What did the parent of the various Germanic languages
German, English, Dutch, Norwegian, Icelandic, Swedish,
Danish, Icelandic, Frisian, Faeroese, Gothic etc. sound like,
of which we have no written records, but which must have
been spoken at around the same time as Classical Latin?

SOCIOLINGUISTICS:
LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL FACTORS
• What distinguishes the dialect of Georgia
from that of New York?
• What are the effects of mass media and
personal mobility on dialect differences?
PSYCHOLINGUISTICS: LANGUAGE AND
THE MIND
• Why do people sometimes make errors in
their native language?
• How do children learn the complexities of a
language without formal instruction?
COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS: LANGUAGE
AND COMPUTERS/COMPUTATION

• Can we learn anything about human language using

tools and formalisms that were developed to
describe and interpret formal computer languages?
• How can we teach computers to use human
language?
WATCH THE INTRODUCTORY VIDEO AND BE
READY TO DISCUSS IT

THE VIDEO COVERS MOST OF THE TOPICS,

DISCUSSED I THE LECTURE

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LorhwnfLn8Q
• GEN102 - Language and Linguistics