Linguistics

00. Introduction
Theoretical Linguistics
01. Phonetics 02. Phonology 03. Morphology 04. Syntax 05. Semantics 06.
Pragmatics 07. Discourse Analysis
Language as Signs
08. Semiotics 09. Sign Language 10. Orthography
Language and the Human Mind
11. Psycholinguistics 12. Neurolinguistics 13. Language Acquisition 14.
Evolutionary Linguistics
The Diversity of Language
15. Typology 16. Historical Linguistics 17. Dialectology and Creoles 18.
Sociolinguistics 18. Anthropological Linguistics
Appendices
Glossary IPA Chart Further reading Bibliography License
Language is all around us. Language allows us to share complicated thoughts,
negotiate agreements, and make communal plans. Our learning, our courting, our
fighting all are mediated by language.

You can think of language as a technology humans manipulate their bodies to

produce sounds, gestures, and appearances that encode messages using a shared
system.

How then does the technology of language work? Answering this question is
surprisingly hard; our language skills are automatic and therefore hard to reflect
upon. Nevertheless, throughout the centuries, scholars have devised ways to study
human language, although there is still much more research to be done and many
mysteries to explore. The field of scholarship that tries to answer the question
"How does language work?" is called linguistics, and the scholars who study it are
called linguists.[1]

Contents [hide]
1 How do linguists learn about language?
2 Describing and prescribing
3 Hidden knowledge: how linguistic inquiry works
3.1 Case study 1: English plurals
4 The idea of deep structure and the general outline of linguistic theory
4.1 Case Study 2: The English auxiliary wanna
5 Using linguistic evidence cautiously
6 Structure of this Book Layers of Linguistics
7 Workbook section
7.1 Exercise 1: Me and John
8 Notes
How do linguists learn about language?[edit]
Linguistics is a science.[2] This means that linguists answer questions about
language by observing the behavior of language users.

Astronomy has its enormous telescopes, particle physics has its supercolliders,
biology and chemistry have intricate and expensive apparatus, all for learning
about their particular facets of the world. Modern linguists go straight to the
source by observing language users in action. One of the charms of linguistics is
that the data is all around you; you need nothing more than a patient ear and an
inquiring mind to do original linguistic research of your own. But you need not
start from scratch generations of linguists before you have laid a fairly stable
groundwork for you to build on. Throughout the history of linguistics, the primary
source of data for linguists have been the speech, writing, and intuitions of
language users around them.

This is not the only way one could imagine learning about language. For example,
one could study respected authorities. But this approach raises an obvious
question: how did the respected authorities learn what they knew? If each language
were invented by an ancient sage, who determined once and for all how that language
worked, the authoritative approach would have great appeal. We would go to the
writings of the Founding Sage of Danish, for example, and to the writings of the
sage's immediate disciples, to find out the Original Intent, much as American
judges refer to the Constitution. But, as far as we can tell, this is not how most
languages come to be. We have ancient authorities in plenty, but in most cases
these authorities were merely trying to codify the practices of the people who
seemed to them most skillful in the use of language. In other words, these
authorities were themselves scientific linguists of a sort: they observed language
users and tried to describe their behavior.

Describing and prescribing[edit]

In literate cultures, it is common to have a tradition of language instruction. In
formal classes, students are taught how to read and write. Furthermore, the teacher
tells the students rules of proper usage. This is what is referred to as a
prescriptive tradition, in which students are told what to do. It is similar to
being taught the proper way to do arithmetic or knit a sweater. Formal language
instruction is usually normative, which means that it involves a sense of "should
and shouldn't", a notion of right and wrong behavior.

By contrast, linguists follow a descriptive tradition, in which the object is to

observe what people really do, and form theories to explain observed behavior. Any
specific use of language is only considered right or wrong on the basis of whether
it appears in ordinary, natural speech.

As a member of a literate culture, you have probably been exposed to a certain

amount of your culture's traditional language instruction. When you first take up
the study of linguistics, you will probably experience some discomfort as you
observe language behaviors that you have been taught are wrong. It will be hard to
suppress an almost instinctive reaction: "This behavior is incorrect. My
observation is no good; the person I am observing is an unreliable source of
information."

It is important to remember that traditional language instruction and scientific

linguistics have completely different goals and methods. Traditional language
instruction is intended to train students to use a standard language. Language
standards exist largely to make sure formal communication is possible between
distant regions, between generations, between centuries, between social classes.
Modern civilization arguably depends on such formal communication. Its rules must
be constant over wide areas, over long spans of time, across different social and
economic groups. This leads to an interesting contradiction:

The formal rules of a standard language are almost arbitrary. It doesn't matter in
detail what they are, so long as everyone agrees to them and more or less follows
them when formal communication is needed.
Traditional language teachers need to imbue these mostly-arbitrary rules with a
sense of rightness, in order to enlist the students' moral sense in the cause of
preserving the stability of the standard language.
The natural result is that students emerge from traditional language instruction
with a strong sense that certain language behaviors are simply wrong. Most members
of a literate culture have this moral sense about language, and find it hard to
suppress. Yet to do objective science, to find out how language really works, it is
necessary to adopt a detached viewpoint and to treat all language users as valid.
The first principle of linguistics is: Respect people's language behavior, and
describe it objectively.

In this book we will adopt this objective stance: language behaviors are not
intrinsically right or wrong, and we seek to describe what they are, not to
prescribe what they should be.

Hidden knowledge: how linguistic inquiry works[edit]

Linguists often say that they study the knowledge that a native speaker must have
in order to use their language not formal, school-learned knowledge, but a more
subtle kind of knowledge, a knowledge so deeply-ingrained that language users often
do not know they know it.

We will illustrate the type of knowledge we mean with a "consciousness-raising"

exercise. We will show you some things about English that you must already know,
but almost certainly don't 'know you know'.

Case study 1: English plurals[edit]

A fork
Suppose you have one fork, and I hand you another one. Now you have two forks.
If you have a spoon and find another, you have two spoons.
If your garden has a rosebush, you might plant a second to have two rosebushes.
(We will use boldface for language examples, that is, things that people might
actually say.)

In order to speak English, you have to know how to make the plural, or multiple
form, of most nouns you hear. You probably do this effortlessly. If you ask most
people how to do it, they will say "Oh, you just add s."

But listen carefully.

To form the plural of fork, you add a hissing sound, the first sound in the word
sap.
To pluralize spoon, you add a buzzing sound, the first sound in the word zap.
To pluralize rosebush, you add an entire extra syllable, sounding similar to the
word is.
You use these three different plural endings every day, effortlessly, without
conscious reflection. You always use the right one. It is even amusing to try to
use the wrong plural ending. You can say *forkiz, or *spoonce, but you never do.
(We use an asterisk to draw your attention to the fact that few people would ever
say these things.) You must know the rules governing the use of these different
plural endings somewhere inside you, but in all likelihood you never knew you knew
until this moment. You must have some way to select the correct ending to use with
each word, otherwise you would occasionally say things like *rosebushss. But unless
you have thought about this before, it is almost certain that even now that you
have been exposed to the concept, you still have no idea how you manage to select
the appropriate plural suffix every time. Here is something that you definitely
know, but you cannot state it out loud. It is unconscious knowledge.

Can you analyze your own behavior and figure out how you decide whether to use -s,
-z, or -iz? Take a few minutes and try. Write out a dozen or so common English
nouns and classify them according to what plural ending you would use. Do you see
any patterns? (Watch out for completely irregular nouns like foot/feet; for now we
are only concerned with "S-plurals".)

One theory you might come up with is that the correct plural suffix must simply be
memorized for each noun. This is a perfectly reasonable theory. Perhaps forks
sounds better to us than *forkiz simply because the former is the only plural we
have ever heard. However, this is not the case, because for new words we have never
encountered we can still pick out a plural ending that sounds right. For example:

If you have a zug, and you find another, you now have two ...
Mike just finished making his third bidge, so he has made three ...
I inherited a blick from each of my grandparents, which is why I have four ...
(Jean Berko-Gleason first studied examples similar to these as set in her wug
test).

Complete these sentences with the appropriate plurals. Then have five English-
speaking friends do it, but don't let them collude: force them to form their own
plurals. You and your five friends will all agree: the first example gets a buzzing
plural -z, the second gets a whole syllable -iz, and the third gets a hiss -s. And
none of you have ever heard those words before, nor do you have any clue what they
mean. If plural endings were simply memorized, you and your friends would have had
to guess the endings, and you would likely have made different guesses.

The second principle of linguistics is, Language knowledge is often unconscious,

but careful inquiry can reveal it.

The idea of deep structure and the general outline of linguistic theory[edit]
What have linguists learned about how language works? What is the overall shape of
modern linguistic theory?

Linguists espouse a variety of theories about language; differences between these

theories are sometimes quite striking even to laypeople and sometimes so subtle
that only well-read linguists can understand the distinctions being made. Arguments
between linguists who support different theories can be quite heated. But
underneath the noisy debate about details there is widespread consensus, which has
been coalescing since the 1950s. This consensus sees, in every corner of human
linguistic ability, at least two layers: a surface structure consisting of the
sounds we actually speak and hear, and the marks we write and read, and a deep
structure which exists in the minds of speakers. The deep and surface structures
are often strikingly different, and are connected by rules which tell how to move
between the two kinds of structure during language use. These rules are part of
every language-user's unconscious knowledge.

The idea of deep structure is an unintuitive one. It is natural to be skeptical

about it. Why do linguists believe that language structures inside the mind are so
different from what we speak and hear? We will use another case study to give an
example of the evidence.

Case Study 2: The English auxiliary wanna[edit]

(1a) Rachel doesn't want to do her linguistics homework.

(1b) Rachel doesn't wanna do her linguistics homework.

In many varieties of English, the two words want to can often be contracted into
wanna. English users are more likely to do this in speech than in writing, and are
more likely to do it in relaxed, informal contexts. (Linguists use the word
registers to describe the different behaviors language-users adopt depending on
context.) The pronunciation of wanna lacks the clear t sound of want to. English
users evidently must know both variants.

Can want to always be contracted? Consider the following examples.

(2a) Who do you want to look over the application?

(2b) *Who do you wanna look over the application?

Again, we are using an asterisk to call your attention to the fact that the second
example is not natural English to most native users. It is, in fact, traditional in
linguistics to use an asterisk to mark an example that is somehow unacceptable or
unnatural for native users.

As in our first case study, we seem to have found a mysterious piece of unconscious
knowledge that English users all share. We do not resist changing (1a) into (1b),
but something makes the change from (2a) to (2b) much less comfortable. What could
it be? How do English speakers decide when want to may be contracted?

Perhaps the contraction is inhibited by the fact that (2a) is a question. We can
test this theory with a similar example.

(3a) Who do you want to invite to the party?

(3b) Who do you wanna invite to the party?

Here, the contraction works fine. So the question-theory cannot be correct. In

fact, the similarity between (2a) and (3a) makes (2a)'s resistance to contraction
quite puzzling.

What follows is not the answer to the puzzle. Rather, it is a sketch of part of a
theory that some linguists use to explain the observed behavior of wanna. This
theory was arrived at by considering many, many examples, and consulting many, many
native English speakers. It is not in any way authoritative, but it illustrates the
point we are trying to make. Consider some possible answers to questions (2a) and
(3a), which we repeat for ease of reference:

(2a) Who do you want to look over the application?

(2c) I want Yuri to look over the application.

(3a) Who do you want to invite to the party?

(3c) I want to invite Yuri to the party.

Notice that in sentence (2c), the name Yuri comes between want and to, separating
these two words, while in (3c), the words want to are still next to each other. Let
us hypothesize that in our minds, questions like (2a) and (3a) have some kind of
mark that shows where we expect the answer to be inserted. Linguists sometimes call
such a mark a trace, and symbolize it with t. So we might show this "mental form"
of our two questions as follows:

(2d) Who do you want t to look over the application?

(3d) Who do you want to invite t to the party?

If such traces really exist in our minds, they would provide a very elegant
explanation of when want to can be contracted. The proposed explanation is that we
can contract want to only when there is nothing between the two words in the mental
form of the sentence. We already knew this to be true when the interrupting
material is audible. Of course want to cannot be contracted in (2c), because Yuri
is in the way. Our proposal is to extend this explanation to inaudible material,
and to say that want to cannot be contracted in (2a) because a trace is in the way.

You might object that we have invented traces precisely to explain when want to
cannot contract; that we will simply hypothesize that every uncontractable example
has a trace in the middle. This is a fair objection, but remember that we are not
putting traces wherever we want, but only where we expect the answer to the
question to fit. You are encouraged to try more examples on yourself and your
friends.
This step of introducing traces to explain when want to may be contracted is a
serious and profound piece of theory-building. We are saying that sentences in the
mind are not exactly like their counterparts spoken aloud. They are not mere mental
tape-recordings they can possess aspects, like traces, that cannot be heard. As
soon as we take this theoretical step, we open up a new question: 'How is language
represented in the mind?'. Linguists use the term deep structure to discuss the way
sentences are represented in the mind. In contrast, surface structure means
sentences as we hear or read them.

This leads to the third principle of linguistics: Sentences have a deep structure
in the mind, that is not directly observable, but may be inferred indirectly from
patterns of language behavior. It is this third principle that separates recent
linguistic scholarship (since about 1950) from the centuries of work that went
before.

Using linguistic evidence cautiously[edit]

Before we proceed, we must say a few words about the mode of inquiry we are using.
As we throw various examples at you, we are either marking them with asterisks
starring them, as linguists say or we are not. In essence, we are asking you to
go along with our judgment about whether or not the examples are natural, native
English. We would prefer to be scientific about it; one way of doing this would be
to perform a study in which we present our examples to a few hundred native English
users, and have our subjects tell us whether they thought the examples were good
English or not.

But such studies take a lot of time and effort, and it's easy to make mistakes in
experimental technique that would weaken our confidence in the results. It is
extremely tempting to use oneself as an experimental subject, and use one's own
judgment about whether an example is natural English or not. There are obvious
pitfalls to this approach. One may not be as typical a speaker as one believes. Or
one's judgment may be unreliable in the highly artificial situation of asking
oneself questions about one's own language.

But nevertheless, in some cases, the situation seems clear-cut enough that we can
give examples, as we have been, in the reasonable confidence that the reader will
agree with our judgments. This is a shortcut, and is not a good substitute for real
data. But in reality, a lot of linguistics gets done this way, with scholars using
themselves as informal experimental subjects. Doing research in this way incurs a
debt, the debt of eventually backing up our claims with real experimental studies.
It's fine to get preliminary insights by probing our own intuitions about language.
Eventually, though, we must do real science, and we must remember that in any
conflict between experimental data and our own intuitions, real data always wins.

Structure of this Book Layers of Linguistics[edit]

As you may already have noticed, language is a hugely multifaceted entity. When we
learn how to write in school, we are taught that individual letters combine to
create words which are ordered into sentences that make up a composition. Spoken
language is similar, but the reality of language is much more subtle.

The structure of language may be separated into many different layers. On the
surface utterances are constructed out of sequences of sounds. The study of the
production and perception of these sounds is known as phonetics. These sounds
pattern differently in different languages. The study of how they group and pattern
is known as phonology. These groups of sounds then combine to create words, which
is morphology. Words must be ordered in specific ways depending on a language's
syntax. The literal meaning assigned to words and sentences is the semantic layer,
and the meaning of sentences in context is known as pragmatics. Each of these may
be considered a branch of theoretical linguistics, which studies the structure of
models of language.
Don't worry if it's not yet clear to you what each of these subfields of
linguistics deals with. The first chapters of this book go through these fields
layer by layer, building up a clear picture of what linguistics is. We will then
explore various topics of inquiry which apply our linguistic knowledge of these
layers to solve real-life problems, a pursuit known as applied linguistics.
Branches of applied linguistics include: computational linguistics, anthropological
linguistics, neurolinguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, discourse
analysis and language acquisition.

Workbook section[edit]
Exercise 1: Me and John[edit]
If you took English classes at school, you may have been warned against using the
following sentence:

(4a) Me and John are friends.

You probably were instructed to replace it with the following:

(4b) John and I are friends.

Pronouns such as me, him, her, ... are termed 'objective pronouns' because
traditionally they are considered to never appear as the subject[3] of a verb, and
prescriptivists rule that as such usage of them in this position is "incorrect".
However (4a) is not marked with an asterisk because it is still largely acceptable
to native English speakers, and as descriptive linguists we are interested in both
forms.

Now note that certain arrangements of pronouns (I, me, John, etc.) in the sentence
make it ungrammatical to all English speakers:

(4c) *I and John are friends.

(4d) *Her and John are friends.

(4d) *I and him are friends.

List all possible combinations of two pronouns in the sentence "___ and ___ are
friends." that you can think of, and label each sentence which would not be said by
native speakers with an asterisk. Then create a theory as to what makes any
sentence of this form unacceptable.

Notes[edit]
Jump up ? In common parlance, a linguist can simply be someone who speaks many
languages. This is not the sense we mean, and whenever we say linguist, we are
referring to a scholar of linguistics. We will call someone who speaks many
languages a polyglot. Some linguists are also polyglots, but it is perfectly
possible to be either one without being the other.
Jump up ? Some debate this statement, contending that modern linguistic theory
lacks predictive power. We will, however, let this assumption stand for now.
Jump up ? Generally (though not always) whatever is performing the action. Don't
worry about the definition of subject for now it will be defined in a later
chapter.
Category: Linguistics
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