Ⅰ.Foreword

It is, of course, impossible to do justice to the range and complexity of linguistics as a discipline within the compass of a course like this one.

But it should be possible to identify the central issues it is concerned with and present a coherent outline of the area as a whole.

Of course, what counts as a central issue depends on how we identify linguistics as a discipline. Over recent years this has been a matter of considerable dispute, and there are those who would call for a radical revision of its scope and terms of reference, and would deny the validity of traditional principles of enquiry.

In this course, we will take a relatively conservative line. Because we think one needs to know what they are. We can understand established ideas without accepting them, but it makes no sense to reject or revise them without understanding them.

Ⅱ.The Nature of Language

Linguistics is the name given to the discipline which studies human language. Two questions come immediately to mind. Firstly, what is human language? How, in general terms, can it be characterized? Secondly, what does its study involve? What is it that defines linguistics as a discipline?

“In the beginning was the Word”

--- Bible, John, 1

“God created the world by a Word, instantaneously, without toil or pains.”

--- Talmud

These pieces of scripture both point to the primacy of language in the way human beings conceive of the world.

Ⅲ.The Primacy of Language

It serves as a means of cognition and communication: it enables us to think for ourselves and to cooperate with other people in our community. It provides for present needs and future plans, and at the same time carries with it the impression of things past.

Ⅳ.The Design of Language

Other species communicate after a fashion. The question is after what fashion? Birds signal to each other by singing, bees by dancing, and these song and dance routines can be very elaborate. Are they language?

As Bertrand Russell once observed: “No matter how eloquently a dog may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were poor but honest”.

What are the features then (the so-called design features) which might be said to be distinctive of human language?

One of them is arbitrariness: the forms of linguistic signs bear no natural resemblance to their meaning.

A second design feature is known as duality: Human language operates on two levels of structures. At one level are elements which have no meaning in themselves but which combine to form units at another level which do have meaning.

1. Arbitrariness

The link between linguistics signs and their meaning is a matter of convention, and conventions differ radically across languages.

e.g. Dog   狗

The fact that there is no natural connection between the form of words and what they mean makes it possible for different communities to use language to divide up reality in ways that suit them.

For Bedouin Arabic, there are a number of terms for the animal which, in English, is usually encoded simply as “camel”. These terms are convenient labels for differences important to the Arabs, but none of them actually resembles a camel.

Similarly in English there is a whole host of terms for different kinds of dog: “hound”, “mastiff”, “spaniel”, “terrier”, “poodle”, and each will call up different images. But there is nothing in common in the different words themselves to indicate that they are all dogs.

2. Duality

The distinctions between ‘s’ and ‘z’, and between ‘f’ and ‘v’ are part of the sound system of English. But the sounds do not themselves have meaning. What they do is to combine in all manner of ways to form words which are meaningful.

The feature of duality provides language with enormous productive power: a relatively small number of elements at one level can enter into thousands of different combinations to form units of meaning at the other level.

Ⅴ.Comparing With Animal Communication

Is language specifically and uniquely human? Is it species-specific?

One way of addressing this question is to compare the communication of other animals with human language to see whether it has the design features as of human language.

Another way of enquiring into whether language is species-specific or not is to try and get another species to learn it. The assumption here is that there might be some linguistic capability within animals which has simply not been activated by natural requirement. And the argument is that if certain animals can be induced to acquire language, it cannot in essence be specific to the human species.

The results of all the efforts with chimpanzees, however, have been unconvincing. Part of the reason for this is the disparity between the very efforts themselves and the relatively modest returns by way of learning.

Another question arises that, for the experimentation with the chimps, the conditions for learning being unnatural and what they are learning ceasing to be natural language, might they have a highly complex and subtle signaling system, a language comparable to ours, but exploiting visual and aural elements which do not count as significant to us?

Ⅵ.Human Language: Endowment or Accomplishment?

If language is uniquely human, does it mean that it is something we are born with, part of our genetic make-up, an innate endowment?

The argument for the genetic uniqueness of language is that it provides an explanation for a number of facts which would otherwise be inexplicable. One of these is the ease with which children learn their own language. They rapidly acquire a complex grammar which goes well beyond imitation of any utterances they might hear.

Acquisition is not, or at least not only, a matter of accumulation but also regulation. So where does this capability for regulation come from? The argument is that it must have been there to begin with; that there must exist some kind of innate, genetically programmed Language Acquisition Device (LAD), which directs the process whereby children infer rules from the language data they are exposed to.

So the idea is that as human beings we are “wired up” for language: that is to say for language in general, of course, not for any particular language. What the LAD provides is a closed set of common principles of grammatical organization, or Universal Grammar (UG), which is then variously realized in different languages, depending on which one the child is actually exposed to in its environment.

According to Chomsky, these principles define a number of general parameters of language which are given different settings by particular languages. The parameters are innate, predetermined and part of the genetic make-up of human beings. The settings are the result of varying environmental conditions. This being so, in respect to parameters, all languages are alike; in respect to settings, they are all different.

Ⅶ.Language, Mind, and Social Life

From the UG perspective, the essential nature of language is cognitive. It is seen as a psychological phenomenon.

It also functions as a means of communication and social control.

It is internalized in the mind as abstract knowledge, but in order for this to happen it must also be experienced in the external world as actual behavior.

Language can be seen as distinctive because of its intricate association with the human mind and with human society. It is related to both cognition and communication, it is both abstract knowledge and actual behavior.

Question is: how can language be systematically studied?

This question moves us from the properties of language to the principles of the discipline which studies them, from the design features of language to the design features of linguistics.

Ⅷ.The scope of Linguistics

1. Models

The purpose of linguistics is to provide some explanation of the complexity of the experience of language as cognition and communication by abstracting from it what seems to be of essential significance.

Abstraction involves the idealization of actual data, as part of the process of constructing models of linguistic description.

A model is an idealized version of reality: those features which are considered incidental are stripped away in order to give prominence to those features which are considered essential. In this respect, models can be likened to maps in that maps do not show things as they really are and that maps leave out everything which is not relevant to the particular purpose.

2. Langue and Parole

From one perspective, language is a very general and abstract phenomenon. It is a shared and stable body of knowledge of linguistic forms and their function which is established by convention in a community.

At the same time, it is very particular and variable if we look at the actuality of linguistic behavior.

Ferdinand de Saussure proposed that linguistics should concern itself with the shared social code, the abstract system, which he called langue, leaving aside the particular actualities of individual utterance, which he called parole.

According to Saussure, Langue was a collective body of knowledge, a kind of common reference manual, copies of which were acquired by all members of a community of speakers.

Langue can either be seen as a convenient principle of linguistics, or as an essential principle of language itself, or both.

3.Competence and Performance

A comparable distinction to that of Saussure, designed to idealize language data, and to define the scope of linguistic enquiry, is made by Noam Chomsky.

He distinguishes competence, the knowledge that native speakers have of their language as a system of abstract formal relations, and performance, their actual behaviour. Although performance must clearly be projected from competence, and therefore be referable to it, it does not correspond to it in any direct way.

4. Chomsky vs. Saussure

Though langue and competence can both be glossed in terms of abstract knowledge, the nature of knowledge is conceived of in very different ways.

Saussure thinks of it as socially shared, common knowledge. But for Chomsky competence is not a social but a psychological phenomenon, not a shared generality but a genetic endowment in each individual.

5. Formal Grammar vs. Functional Grammar

One objection to Chomsky’s model is that it defines the nature of linguistic knowledge too narrowly to mean knowledge of grammatical form, and more specifically of syntax. Knowing a language involves more than knowing what form it takes: it involves knowing how it functions too.

An account of grammatical knowledge cannot ignore the fact that linguistic form is functionally motivated, so that to abstract form so completely from function is to misrepresent the nature of language. In this view, linguistics is essentially the study of how languages mean, how they are functionally informed: it is semantics which is primary.

Chomsky’s formal grammar seeks to identify particular features of syntax with reference to universal and innate principles of human cognition.

A functional grammar considers how language is differentially influenced by the environment, how it is shaped by social use, and reflects the functions it has evolved to serve.

6. Linguistic competence vs. communicative competence

The notion of competence itself should be extended to include both knowledge and ability to act upon it. Performance becomes particular instances of behavior which result from the exercise of ability and are not simply the reflexes of knowledge.

Without this accessing ability, the abstract structures of knowledge – this purely linguistic competence – would remain internalized in the mind and never see the light of day. Since this ability is only activated by some communicative purpose or other, we can reasonably call this more comprehensive concept communicative competence.

Ⅰ.Principles and levels of analysis

1.Type and token

It follows that linguistic description deals in generalities, in abstract types of language element of which particular instances are actual tokens.

I wasted time and now doth time waste me.

-- Shakespeare “Richard II”

To identify an element as a token, then, is to recognize it as a particular and actual instance of a general and abstract type. But as we have seen, we can distinguish types of very different kinds. The question arises as to what the grounds are for distinguishing different types? In other words, what are the principles of classification in linguistics?

2.Principles of classification

Generally speaking, things are classified in linguistics in much the same way as they are classified everywhere else: on the basis of similarity.

Take any number of things at random and we can always find some common features and therefore some criteria for classifying them as alike, no matter how different they might otherwise be.

The question is: what kind likeness counts as significant in linguistic description?

For “safe” /seIf/ and “save” /seIv/, the only difference between these words lies in the final consonant. In other respects they are a match.

And the distinction between these consonants as sounds is that the first, /v/ is pronounced with a vibration of the vocal cords, that is to say, it is voiced; and the other, /f/, is not: it is unvoiced. Otherwise, they are alike: they are both produced by air friction between the teeth and lower lip and so can be classified as the same type of sound.

But the point to be noted is that there is not only a phonetic difference between the consonants, that is they differ as physical sounds: there is a phonemic difference too, that is their difference is functionally significant at the level of word formation. The two sounds appear in the same place in the spoken patter /seI_/ and serve to produce words of different meaning.

Similarly the letters ‘f’ and ‘v’ appear in the same written pattern ‘sa_v’ to distinguish the two words as written. So we can say that these consonants can be seen as alike, and put in the same class of elements, as letters or sounds, because they can both appear in the same place in the structure of word units. They share the same structural environment and have the same function of distinguishing words.

This principle of classification is not confined to the duality relationship between sounds and words. It applies at all levels of linguistic description.

3.Syntagmatic and Paradigmatic Relationships

A. Dimension of Analysis

When elements combine with others along a horizontal dimension, they enter into what is known as a syntagmatic relationship. So /p/, /Q/ and /t/, for example, combine syntagmatically in the word /pQ t/.

Elements which have the same potential for appearance in the same environment are said to be in paradigmatic relationship. We can show these relationships in a simple diagram as follows:

Along the horizontal dimension, we have syntagmatic elements in combination. Along the vertical dimension we have paradigmatic elements in association.

The same principle of classification applies when we consider other levels of description. In the following example, the word units of ‘pet’, ‘man’, and ‘child’ are said to be paradigmatically associated.

Words which can enter into environments like these (a …, the …, that …, etc.) are classified as nouns.

The same principle applies to the combination of phrases in sentence units.

All of these expressions, and infinitely many more, can all combine with ‘… was offensive’. So they all have the same syntagmatic relation with the rest of the sentence. Although they are all different in their won internal structure, they all have this equivalent function as a constituent in sentence structure. In this respect they can all be classed paradigmatically as noun phrases.

B. Levels of analysis

At different levels of analysis, we focus attention on different features of language. We use the data as different kinds of evidence. Generally speaking, the larger the units we deal with, the less we idealize the data and the closer we get to the actuality of people’s experience of language.

On the whole, the more comprehensively we try to describe language, the more controversial the description becomes. In other words, a morphological analysis word forms is relatively safe; a pragmatic analysis of discourse meaning is relatively risky.

Ⅱ.A word on how to study this course

1.Road to linguistics:

Read a lot

Think a lot

Debate a lot

2.Always pay attention to:

Definitions

Questions

Names

Arguments

Examples

3.Have a notebook, in which to:

Reorganize what you have learnt from different perspectives

Collect your own ideas and sort them out with neat logic

Plan your further research or prepare for application to your future career

4.Package your knowledge:

If you say you have a good grasp of a concept in linguistics, you must be able to provide the following “package” at any time:

Definition

Argument

Example

Who formulated it

Who disagree

Ⅰ.Focus on Form

Different areas of enquiry within linguistics can be distinguished by the level of analysis which serves as their starting point. Thus, phoneticians start with sounds, lexicographers with words, grammarians with sentences.

This part of the guidance lecture is primarily focused on form. Phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax will be covered in this part.

1.The patterns of sound

A. Phonetics and Phonology

When we listen or read, we do not process every physical feature of the utterance, but focus on what is significant. In speech, significance attaches to those phonetic features which are phonologically distinctive, that is to say, which belong to classes of contrastive elements in the sound systems of particular languages.

The study of allophonic manifestations, how the sounds of speech are actually made, is the business of phonetics. The study of phonemes and their relations in sound systems is the business of phonology.

B. Sound segments

The term ‘the sounds of speech’ covers a range of phenomena. It can refer, for example, to separate segments: vowels and consonants. It is the concern of phonetics to describe how the vocal organs are used to articulate them and the concern of phonology to establish the conditions of their occurrence in relation to each other.

C. Syllables

But the description of speech does not stop in sound segments. For speech does not just consist of a string of separate vowels and consonants. These sounds are organized into larger segments called syllables.

D. Stress and intonation

When a word has more than one syllable, one of them will be pronounced with more prominence than the others. This brings us to another speech sound phenomenon, that of stress.

Stress can also be differentially applied by speakers to provide prominence to certain parts of what they are saying. It is now a feature of speech which ranges beyond the individual sound segments and operates suprasegmentally over utterances.

And it is not the only suprasegmental feature. When producing utterances, our voice goes up and down, and plays a rhythmic tune. In other (more technical) words, we vary not only stress but pitch also. This patterning of stress and pitch gives a particular intonation to what we say.

2.The construction of words

A. Morphology

A convenient starting point for morphology is the word. In words such as ‘parting’, we might propose that the word is made up of two elements of meaning, or morphemes, part and –ing, the first of which is independent, or free, and the second dependent, or bound.

Morphology is concerned with two quite different phenomena: derivation and inflection.

Derivation has to do with the way morphemes get attached as affixes to existing lexical forms or stems in the process of word formation.

And inflectional morphology is different. It does not create new words but adapts existing words so that they operate effectively in sentences. It is not a process of lexical innovation but of grammatical adaptation.

Like the phoneme, the inflectional morpheme is an abstraction which is realized in various ways. It follows that just as we need the concept of the allophone, so we need the concept of the allomorph.

Morphology is the study of two aspects of words: their derivational formation and their inflectional function. The first aspect quite naturally leads us to enquire further into the way words mean, into lexical semantics, which will be dealt with in the next part. And the second aspect leads us into a consideration of the way words function in syntax, and it is to this that we now turn in the coming section.

3.The combination of words

A. Syntax

The inflectional attachments can be seen as coupling devices which allow words to function as constituents in larger structural units like phrases and sentences. This constituent structure is called syntax.

Whereas morphology deals with the way words are adapted, syntax deals with the way they are combined in sentences. The two areas are obviously interdependent, and together they constitute the study of grammar.

B. Grammatical systems

Inflection in grammatical systems can locate the event in time, setting the co-ordinates of past and present by marking the verb for tense. At the same time it marks the verb for aspect, that is to say, it represents the process as taking place either over an open period of time (progressive), or within a closed period of time (perfective), or left unspecified (simple).

Tense and aspect are systems which provide the verb with its formal identity as a sentence constituent.

Nouns also have systems which provide them with identity conditions. Just as verbs have to be processed through the dual tense/aspect system, so nouns have to be processed through the dual number/definiteness system.

C. Immediate constituent analysis

Structural linguists realize that a sentence does not only have a linear structure, consisting of individual words one after another in a line; they also have a hierarchical structure, made up of layers of word groups. The relation between a sentence and its component elements can be revealed by immediate constituent analysis.

D. Chomsky

Chomsky’s theory of syntax and its development are a major concern when we talk about syntax. Attention should be paid to the basic arguments and ideas of his standard theory, and government and binding theory.

E. Halliday

Though the generative approach to syntax has been very influential in the past 40 years, we cannot ignore another important approach to the study of language: the functional approach, within which the Prague School and systemic-functional grammar proposed by M.A.K. Halliday deserve our discussion.

Ⅱ. Focus on meaning

1. Semantics – Meaning in language

The study of how meaning is encoded in a language is the central business of semantics, and it is generally assumed that its main concern is with the meanings of words as lexical items.

But we should note that it is not only concerned with words as such. Meaning also figures at levels of language below the word and above it.

Morphemes are meaningful, for example: the derivational prefix pre- means ‘before’, so a ‘pre-fix’ means ‘something fixed before’.

The inflectional morphemes are meaningful too: ‘fix-ed’ signals ‘past’ in contrast with ‘fix-es’ which signals ‘present’.

A. Semantic components

For inflectional affixes, it is common to find two morphemes fused into one form, as in ‘come’ + past tense = ‘came’. For derivational affixes, ‘un-’ can combine with various lexical items to yield others like ‘unfix’, ‘undo’, and so on.

We can say, then that a lexical item like ‘unfix’ has two semantic elements or components, each given separate expression in the word form ‘un + fix’.

It happens that many such derived forms have semantic equivalents with are single morphemes: ‘unwell’ = ‘sick’, for example, ‘unhappy’ = ‘sad’.

Furthermore, there are many equivalents which can take the form not of single words but of phrases where the bound morpheme separates itself from bondage and becomes free. So ‘unwell’ = ‘not well’, ‘unhappy’ = ‘not happy’, ‘reborn’ = ‘born again’.

It seems reasonable to suggest that a lexical item like ‘sick’ is a version of ‘unwell’: it is just that the two morphological elements have become fused into one. It would follow that if ‘unwell’ has two elements of meaning or semantic components, then so does ‘sick’.

The general point is that we can conceive of all lexical items as encodings of one or more semantic elements or components, whether these are overtly signaled or not, and in identifying them we can establish the denotation of words.

Thus, one denotation of the verb ‘return’ can be specified as [come+back], another as [give+back]. ‘Come/go’ and ‘give/take’ in turn can be said to consist of components: something along the lines of [move+self+towards/away] on the one hand, and [move+something+towards/away] on the other.

This approach, known as componential analysis thus provides an inventory of the semantic features encoded in lexical forms.

The essential purpose of componential analysis is to identify certain general conceptual categories or semantic principles which find expression in the particular components.

Among such categories are state, process, causality, class membership, possession, dimension, location, and directionality.

B. Sense relations

Now let’s consider directionality, for example.

As we have seen, it provides the basis for the distinction between ‘come’ and ‘go’. But it also figures in other contrasts as well, for example, ‘give/take’, ‘advance/retreat’, ‘arrive/depart’, ‘push/pull’, ‘send/receive’, and ‘buy/sell’.

All of these pairs have the common feature of process, but the terms in each pair express opposite directionality, and in this respect are examples of antonymy.

There are examples where two lexical items will contract exactly the same opposition: ‘buy/sell’ = ‘purchase/sell’, ‘arrive/depart’ = ‘arrive/leave’, and so on. To the extent that ‘buy’ and ‘purchase’, and ‘depart’ and ‘leave’ are relational equivalents, they can be said to be examples of synonymy.

Earlier we analysed ‘come’ as consisting of the features [move + towards]. But ‘move’ as a semantic feature figures in the denotation of countless other lexical items as well of course. Thus, ‘walk’ is ‘to move on foot’.

But ‘walk’, too, is semantically incorporated into other words: ‘march’, ‘amble’, ‘stroll’, ‘tramp’, and ‘stride’, etc.

‘Walk’, then, is the general or superordinate term, and the others, the more particular instances included within it, are its subordinate terms or hyponyms.

2. Pragmatics – meaning in context

Semantics is the study of meaning in language. It is concerned with what language means. This is not the same as what people mean by the language they use, how they actualize its meaning potential as a communicative resource. This is the concern of pragmatics.

Speech act theory, the cooperative principle, and relevance theory are the most important issues within pragmatics.

Ⅲ. Current issues: other areas of enquiry

There are two aspects of linguistic behavior. One is psychological and concerns how linguistic knowledge is organized for access and what the accessing processes might be in both the acquisition and use of language. This has been a subject of enquiry in psycholinguistics.

The second aspect of behavior is sociological. This accessing of linguistic knowledge is prompted by some communicative need, some social context which calls for an appropriate use of language. The account of the relationship between linguistic code and social context is the business of sociolinguistics.

Broadly speaking, there are three sources of linguistic data we can draw upon to infer facts about language. We can use introspection, appealing to our own intuitive competence as the data source. We can also use elicitation, in which we use other members of the community as informants, drawing on their intuitions.

In both cases of introspection and elicitation the data is abstract knowledge, and not actual behavior. They reveal what people know about what they do but not what they actually do. If we want data of that kind, the data of performance rather than competence, we need to turn to observation.

The development of computer technology over recent years has made observation possible on a vast scale. Within corpus linguistics programs have been devised to collect and analyze large corpora of actually occurring language, both written and spoken, and this analysis reveals facts about the frequency and co-occurrence of lexical and grammatical items which are not intuitively accessible by introspection and elicitation.

Besides these branches that we have mentioned above, we will probe into other areas of modern linguistics: second language acquisition, which studies different stages of an interlanguage that is unique to the second language acquisition process itself; stylistics, the particular concern of which is the discourse analysis directed to developing awareness of the significance of linguistic features in the interpretation of literary texts.