Introduction to Linguistics

THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE

Introduction

            Unless a human being has a physical or mental disability, he or she will be born with the capacity for language; the innate ability to speak a language, or in the case of someone who is deaf, to sign a language (i.e. use gestures to communicate). The study of language is conducted within the field of linguistics. The structure of language ; how speakers create meaning through combinations of sounds, words, and sentences that ultimately result in texts extended stretches of language. Linguistics do have their biases a point that will be covered later in this chapter in the section on the ideological basis of language. Because linguistics is multidisciplinary, specialist in many disciplines bring their own expertise to the study of language.

 Psychologist, for instace, are interested I studying language as a property of the human mind. Anthropologist, on the other hand, have been more interested in the relationship between language and culture and early work by anthropologist provided extremely valuable information about for instance, te structure of the indigenous languages of the Americas.

Despite the many influences on the study of language, it is possibl to isolate some basic principles that will serve as thefocus of this chapter.  The final sections describes two competing theories of language – Noam Chomsky’s theory of generative grammar and Michael A.K. Halliday’s theory of functional grammar – and how these theories have influenced the fiew of language presented in this book.

Language as part of a semiotic systems

Language is a systems of communication, it is useful to compare it with other systems of communication. Semiotics systems is expressed by signs, wich have a particular form, called signified. It would take the form of a series of phonemes pronounced in Midwestern American English. In  writing, it would be spelled with a series of graphemes, or letters.

            Although semiotic systems are discrete, they often reinforce one another. In the 1960s it was common for males with long hear, beards, torn blue jeans, and necklaces with the peace sign on them to utter expressions such as ‘’far out’’ or ‘’groovy.’'

The world window has no direct conection to the meaning that it expresses; speakers of English could very wellhave chosen a signifier such as krod or femp.

The modes of language

In linguistics it is commonly noted that speech is primary and writing secondary. All children will naturally acquire the spoken version of a language if they are exposed to it during the formative period of language acquisition.  It is more accurate to view the two modes as having different but complementary roles.

Rules are studied under the rubric of grammar , principles within the province of pragmatics. These are prescriptive rules (discussed in greater detail in the next section) and are intended to provide guidance to students as they learn to speak and write so-called Standart English.

Rules of grammar operate at various levels ;

Phonetic/phonology; linguistic rules at this level describe how sounds are pronounced in various contexts. There is a rule of voicing assimilation in English that stipules that when a past tense marker Is added do the stem of a verb .

Morphology ; rules of morphology focus on how words and part of words are structured.

Syntax ; clause function : subject , predicator , object , complement , and adverbial.

Semantics ; is at the core of human communication, the study of semantics cuts accros all of the other levels thus far discussed.

While linguistics may share a number of assumptions about language, they approach the study of language from different theoretical perspec tives. Because linguistists influends by Noam Chomsky’s views on language believe that language is primarily a product of the mind they are more concerned with studying linguistic competence ; the unconscious knowledge of rules that every humans possesses . othe linguists take a more expansive view o language , believing that t is just as valuable to study language in social context and to consider the structure of text as well as the structure of sentences occurring in texts. This book takes this second approach to the study of the English language . after a discussion in the next chapter of the history of English and the basic concepts the explain language change, the subsequent chapters focus on the social basis of the English language , the various principles affecting the structure of text , and grammatical rules describing the form of the smaller components of language found in texts, from the sentences down to the individual speech sound.

The development of English

Synchronic studies involve investigating a language in its present form as it is currently spoken and written .  A synchronic  study of English focus on contemporary English : the current version of English spoken around the world; diachronic  studies, in contrast examine the historical development of a language , taking into consideration changes it has undergone over time. Between  synchronic and diachronic studies of language, the distinction is somewhat misleading since language are always changing , and how English is spoken today, for instance will differ from how it is spoken next year.  But it is important to realize that languages are dynamic not static entities .  in many English-speaking cultures for gender-neutral vocabulary.

Because of external and internal influences, English has change quite significantly become the old English period to the present.

The current state of the English language

According to the ethnology : languages of the world. In the world (Gordon 2005: 16; see also www.ethnologue.com) .the pidgin became a creole that is now reffered to as Jamaican creole. English is second language. It is not spoken as a native language. In Germany in contrast . English is foreign language. Modern English, and Contemporary English. The designation of contemporary English is used to reflect the fact that the English language is constantly changing.

The comparative method

The process of examining languages, grouping them into language families, and reconstructing encestral languages is known as the comparative method. Cognates are words that are passed down the family tree as languages change and develop and have proven extremely important for determining not just which languages are sibling within a language family but what the parent language of the sibling languages might have looked like.

Internal and external influences on language change

Internally influenced changes result from natural processes that all languages undergo; if it were possible to protect a language from any external influences. External influences changes, as suggested above, result more from the social and cultural context in which languages are used.

Language death

Language death is a type of language shift. Unlike bilingualism. Once these people die, the language dies to. Latin is sometimes referred to as a dead language because it not longer has any native speakers and exist only in written text surviving from earlier periods. Its legacy survive in its direct descendants such as Spanish , Italian French and Portuguese .

The social context of English

Grammatical vs. pragmatic meaning

At this level, we are within grammar studying what is known as semantics : how words individual meaning (lexical semantics) and can be used refer to entities in the external world (reference). Grammar and pragmatics may be “fuzzy”, most linguists do accept that certain elements of language are best studied under the rubric of grammar, others within the realm of pragmatics. Since the study of linguistic competence is more important than the study of communicative competence : dell hyme’s 1971 notion that human communication involves not just knowledge of how to form linguistic structure but knowledge of how to use these structures in specific communicative contexts.

Sentence vs. utterance

Grammatical sentences : constructions consisting of a subject and a finite verb (are and do, respectively). A’s turn is prepositional phrase. While these turns do not contain complete sentences. B’s turn is that those who are roller skating are ‘’running around the city’’ and in A’s turn that they are skating ‘’ mainly in golden gate park’’.

Speech act theory

The different between locutionary and illocutionary acts is sometimes referred to as, respectively the difference between ‘’saying and doing’’ imperative sentences having a specific form (the base form of the verb with an implied you). This is the locutionary force of this utterance. This is the illocutionary force of the utterance but utterance have effects on the individuals to whom they are directed; uttering leave may have the effect of actually causing an individual or individuals to leave. This is considered the perlocutionary  force of the utterance.

The cooperative principle

Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner. Quite naturally, the interviewer is interested in how the creators of the study guide did on the very test for which they are attempting to help students succeed.

Quantity
All communicants must strike a balance between providing too much and
too little information when they speak or write.

Quality
When we communicate, there is a tacit assumption that what each communicant says or writes will be truthful.

Relation
The notion of what is relevant in discourse will vary from one context to
another.

Manner
Clarity of expression is highly valued in what we say and write.

                             

Politeness

Brown and Levinson (1987: 60–1) argue that politeness in language is centered around the notion of face – “the public self-image
that every member wants to claim for himself” – and the efforts made by
interlocutors to “maintain each other’s face.” In determining the exact
level of politeness that will be employed to mitigate an FTA, Brown and
Levinson (1987: 15) propose three considerations: the power relationships
existing between speakers, their social distance, and the level of impoliteness that the FTA would create.

Other kinds of politeness

            Tact is not the only consideration motivating polite language usage. There
are additional motivating factors as well.
Gratitude for favors (either accepted or declined) and compliments are
typically expressed through variations of the lexeme thanks. In the examples below, gratitude for favors accepted is conveyed through use of the
verb thank as well as the expressives thank you and thanks, often intensified
with adverbials such as very much:
i’d like to thank my wife Rachel for her kindness and her loving support
and understanding of the husband that at eight o’clock goes back to his
office five nights a week, and to Hannah and Jeremy.

Communication is not simply the product of decoding the words in a
sentence or utterance and then determining their meaning. Any parent knows that when a child utters Dad, I’m still hungry after finishing a
snack, the child is not simply making a declarative statement: he is
requesting more food. The parent reaches this conclusion on the basis
of information derived from the social context itself, not simply the
individual words of the utterance. And to correctly interpret the meaning of this utterance, the parent has to understand the illocutionary
force of the child’s utterance: the child’s intentions in uttering the sentence. In determining that the child is issuing a directive, the parent
draws upon a number of contextual clues, particularly the fact that he
has heard this very same utterance on many occasions after his son has
completed eating a snack.

The structure of English texts

Register or genre?

such as genre and sub-genre, are commonly used too. A register is defined by “lexico-grammatical and discoursal-semantic patterns associated with situations (i.e. linguistic patterns),” while a genre consists of texts that can be classified into
“culturally-recognisable categories.”

Spoken and written registers

        Spoken and written registers have been traditionally regarded as distinct, since speech is produced under very different circumstances than writing.               Writing is more distant: the needs of the audience to whom the writing is directed have to be anticipated by the writer, and once the reader receives the text there is no way for him or her to engage with the author if something is not clear. If all spoken and written registers are considered together, however, one  finds, as Biber (1988) convincingly demonstrates in his book Variation Across Speech and Writing, that there is a continuum between speech and writing: some written registers, such as fiction, share many features with spoken registers; some spoken registers, such as panel discussions, share many features associated with
written registers.

Biber  (1988) reached this conclusion by first using a statistical test, factor analysis, to determine which linguistic constructions tended to cooccur in two corpora of spoken and written British English: the London–Lund Corpus of spoken British English and the London–Oslo–Bergen (LOB)Corpus of written British English.

Spoken registers
        Because speech is the primary mode of communication, it is worth investigating in detail some of the major spoken registers existing in English. If speech is monologic, in contrast, it will involve a single individual speaking extemporaneously or from a prepared script. broadcast news includes
scripted monologic speech, as when the news is read from a prepared text,
and spontaneous dialogic speech, as when a newsperson conducts an
interview with another individual. Spoken  text: spontaneous dialogues, which includes face-to-face conversations and telephone calls.

Spontaneous dialogs

Linguists of all theoretical persuasions have studied the structure of conversation, some of the most significant research has been conducted by sociologists and ethnographers doing research in conversation analysis.  Positing the notion of speaker turn and describing how speakers engage in turn taking when they converse.  People speaking simultaneously is “common” but overlaps tend to “be
brief.”

Unity of structure

In their discussion of the structure of registers, Halliday and Hasan (1985:39–40) distinguish closed registers, which have a very fixed hierarchical structure, from open registers, which have a looser hierarchical structure.

Written registers

Lee (2001: 53) developed this system of classification because of “the broadness and inexplicitness of the [original] BNC classification scheme.” For instance, in the original system, the sub-registers under “Fiction” in Lee’s system (drama, poetry, and prose) were all classified within a single register – imaginative prose –
even though drama, poetry, and prose exhibit significant linguistic differences. Writing can be academic or non-academic, with the same sub-registers within each of these registers.

Unity of texture

For a text to achieve coherence, it is not enough that it have a hierarchical structure. Additionally, all of its component parts must fit together in a manner that is recognizable to the hearer or reader. Various devices work together to achieve what is referred to as unity of texture: constituents within a clause are ordered in a specific way so that the thematic structure of the clause promotes the easy flow of information from clause to clause, and relationships between clauses are indicated by various markers of cohesion, such as logical connectors like therefore or
however. Without specific linkages between clauses, hearers and readers would have to infer how everything is related, making comprehension difficult if not impossible.

Thematic structure
In traditional grammar, sentences are often divided into a subject and a
predicate. The boy walked the dog, The boy is the subject and walked the dog the predicate. The notions “subject” and “predicate” are related to syntax (the topic of the next chapter): how constituents are ordered within a sentence or, more basically, a clause. The above example is a main clause that is also a declarative sentence.  The writer could just as easily have used equivalent constructions with
verbs in the active voice: Someone built it and Phyllis and Keith purchased it.
However, in this context, the passive constructions place the old information – the pronoun it – in the theme, and the new information – everything else in the two sentences – in the rheme. Old information is information recoverable from the prior linguistic context. it is old information because its referent, Stanhope Hall, occurs in the first sentence. New information is information introduced into the text for the first time. The words following the first instance of it – was built way back in 1135 as a fortified manor house – are new information because they have no prior mention in the text; the same holds true for the words following it in the second example.

Writing, it should be noted, has nothing approximating the complexity
of intonation for highlighting prominent pieces of information. In writing, a comma after thus adds emphasis to it; no comma decreases its prominence in the clause. The effects in writing, of course, are much less pronounced than in speech, since writing is a mainly visual medium, and punctuation can provide at best only a rough representation of the intonation patterns that would exist if the written text were read aloud.