INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS

ASSIGNMENT 1

When God created man he distinguished him from other living beings with so many

features among which is the ability to speak .i.e. language. Language, a miraculous faculty,

that has fascinated man since the dawn of history. A gift from God, that allowed him to build
his existence and procure his civilization. Although humans belong to the same species, they

speak different languages. A person from Yemen speaks differently from a person in India,

for instance. Later on humans developed the ability to transcribe their speech and produce

written forms of the language. Therefore, Like all the phenomena of life, language continued

to be the subject of human inquisition. Different attempts have been made to account for the

language. The questions that arouse the curiosity of observers pertained to its nature, function,

how and why languages resemble each other and how do they differ etc .The study of human

language developed through the course of time and have been culminated recently by the

emergence of a full-fledge progressive field that tries to answer all issues related to language

in a scientific way which is named Linguistics. In other words, the subject matter of

linguistics is the data of language as it is spoken and written.

The first query about the language is normally what is a language? However, it is not an

easy exercise to try defining language. For the simplest reason, that language is multifaceted

and complex. So, the endeavors to define the language proved to be inadequate. Many

scholars proposed definitions for the language. Henry Sweet, an English phonetician and

language scholar, stated: “Language is the expression of ideas by means of speech-sounds

combined into words. Words are combined into sentences, this combination answering to that

of ideas into thoughts.” The American linguists Bernard Bloch and George L. Trager

formulated the following definition: “A language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by

means of which a social group cooperates.” Edward Sapir said "Language is a primarily

human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas ,emotions and desires by means

of a system of voluntarily produced symbols". For J. Whatmough "Language is human… a

verbal systematic symbolism…a means of transmitting information…..a form of social

behavior… (with) high degree of convention." According to Transformational Generative

linguists like Noam Chomsky, language is the innate capacity of native speakers to
understand and form grammatical sentences .Any succinct definition of language makes a

number of presuppositions and begs a number of questions. However, none of the above

definitions is perfect. Each of them just hints at certain characteristics of language. Hence

instead of defining language, it would worthwhile to understand its major characteristics.

Language is both oral and aural. It is an organization of sounds, of vocal symbols. The

sounds produced from the mouth with the help of various organs of speech to convey some

meaningful message. This means that speech is primary to writing. Not all the languages in

the world have written forms yet they are still spoken and used. Language is a systematic

verbal symbolism; it makes use of verbal elements such as sounds words, and phrases, which

are arranged in certain ways to make sentences. Language is vocal in as much as it is made up

of sounds which can be produced by the organs of speech and perceived by the ears.

Language is non-instinctive. No language was created in a day out of a mutually agreed

upon formula by a group of humans .Language is the outcome of evolution and convention.

Every language is a convention in a community. It is non-instinctive because it is acquired by

human beings. Nobody gets a language in heritage; he acquires it. Animals inherit their

system of communication by heredity.

If one does not know a language, the words (and sentences) will be mainly

incomprehensible .It is generally the case that there is no “natural” connection between a

linguistic form and its meaning. The connection is quite arbitrary. We can’t just look at the

Arabic word ‫ ﮎ< ﻝﺏ‬and, from its shape, for example, determine that it has a natural and

obvious meaning anymore than we can with its English translation form dog. One have to

learn when acquiring the language, that the sounds represented by the letters house signify the
concept ; if you know French, this same meaning is represented by maison; if you know

Russian, it is represented by dom; if you know Spanish, by casa. Similarly, the linguistic form

has no natural or “iconic” relationship with that hairy four-legged barking object out in the

world. This aspect of the relationship between linguistic signs and objects in the world is

described as arbitrariness. There are some words in language with sounds that seem to “echo”

the sounds of objects or activities and hence seem to have a less arbitrary connection. English

examples are cuckoo, crash, slurp, squelch or whirr. However, these onomatopoeic words are

relatively rare in human language.

Another feature of the language is symbolism. The symbolism of language is a necessary

consequence of arbitrariness discussed above. A symbol stands for something else; it is

something that serves as a substitute. Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols. For

concepts, things, ideas, object etc. we have sounds and words as symbols.

Language is a means of communication. It is the most powerful, convenient and

permanent means of communication. Non-linguistic symbols such as e expressive gestures,

signals of various kinds, traffic lights, road signs, flags, emblems and many more such things,

can be used as means of communication, yet they are not as flexible, comprehensive, perfect

and extensive as language is. In other words, language is not only communicative, it is

informative too .i.e. intentionally communicative.

While we tend to think of communication as the primary function of human language, it is

not a distinguishing feature. All creatures communicate in someway. However, we suspect

that other creatures are not reflecting on the way they create their communicative messages or

reviewing how they work (or not). That is, one barking dog is probably not offering advice to

another barking dog along the lines of “Hey, you should lower your bark to make it sound

more menacing.” They’re not barking about barking. Humans are clearly able to reflect on
language and its uses (e.g. “I wish he wouldn’t use so many technical terms”). This is

reflexivity. The property of reflexivity(or“reflexiveness”) accounts for the fact that we can use

language to think and talk about language itself, making it one of the distinguishing features

of human language. Indeed, without this general ability, we wouldn’t be able to reflect on or

identify any of the other distinct properties of human language. We’ll look in detail at another

six of them: displacement, productivity, Interchangeability, cultural transmission,

modifiability and duality.

Displacement is the ability to speak about things other than the here and now. Every

signal used by a non-human creature to communicate pertains wholly and directly to the

immediate time and place of signalling. No non-human signal, with the marginal exception of

scent markings left to define territory or to provide a trail, ever refers to the past or the future,

to hypothetical or counterfactual states of affairs, or to anything not directly perceptible to the

creature signalling. To put this more picturesquely, mice do not swap stories about their close

encounters with cats, nor do bears soberly discuss the severity of the coming winter; rabbits

do not engage in heated discussions about what might lie on the far side of the hill, nor do

geese draw up plans for their next migration. Human language is utterly different. We have

not the slightest difficulty in talking about last night’s football game, or our own childhood, or

the behavior of dinosaurs which lived over 100 million years ago; with equal ease, we can

discuss political events in the U.S or the atmosphere of the planet Neptune. And, of course,

we can discuss what might have happened if the North Korea had invaded South Korea, and

we can produce fables and fantasies involving hobbits, dragons, talking animals and

intergalactic wars.

Humans are continually creating new expressions and novel utterances by manipulating their

linguistic resources to describe new objects and situations. This property is described as

productivity (or “creativity” or “open-endedness”) and essentially means that the potential
number of utterances in any human language is infinite. In contrast with studies of animal

communication, linguistic creativity is considered to be a species-specific property: the

creation of new sentences is not a feature of animal communication systems. The notion of

creativity has a long history in the discussion of language, but it has become a central feature

of contemporary studies since the emphasis placed upon it by Noam Chomsky. One of the

main aims of linguistic enquiry, it is felt, is to explain this creative ability, for which such

constructs as generative rules have been suggested." Care must; however, be taken to avoid

confusing this sense of ‘creative’ with that found in artistic or literary contexts, where notions

such as imagination and originality are central"(Crystal).

Interchangeability is another important property of human language. It refers to the

system’s ability to be mutually transmitted and received by members of the same species.

There is usullay a speaker and a listener, a sender and a receiver. Some animal signals, by

contrast, lack this property – for example, female calls which are not shared by the male

members of the species. In short, animals cannot exchange their roles as humans do.

While we may inherit physical features such as brown eyes and dark hair from our

parents, we do not inherit their language. We acquire a language in a culture with other

speakers and not from parental genes. An infant born to Korean parents in Korea, but adopted

and brought up from birth by English speakers in the United States, will have physical

characteristics inherited from his or her natural parents, but will inevitably speak English. A

kitten, given comparable early experiences, will produce meow regardless. This process

whereby a language is passed on from one generation to the next is described as cultural

transmission. It is clear that humans are born with some kind of predisposition to acquire

language in a general sense. However, we are not born with the ability to produce utterances

in a specific language such as English. We acquire our first language as children in a culture.

The general pattern in animal communication is that creatures are born with a set of specific
signals that are produced instinctively. There is some evidence from studies of birds as they

develop their songs that instinct has to combine with learning (or exposure) in order for the

right song to be produced. If those birds spend their first seven weeks without hearing other

birds, they will instinctively produce songs or calls, but those songs will be abnormal in some

way. Human infants, growing up in isolation, produce no “instinctive” language. Cultural

transmission of a specific language is crucial in the human acquisition process.

Language is a system of systems. It is structurally organized in terms of two abstract

levels; also called duality of patterning or duality of structure. At the first, higher level,

language is analyzed in terms of combinations of (meaningful) units (such as (such as dog,

god); at another, lower level, it is seen as a sequence of segments which lack any meaning in

themselves (such as the letters “g”, “d” and “o”) but which combine to form units of meaning.

In other words, language is combined paradigmatically and systematically.

Duality thus allows a language to form many tens of thousands of different words, all of

which can be produced by a vocal tract which can produce no more than a few dozens of

distinguishable speech sounds. Duality is therefore of crucial importance in facilitating the

existence of spoken languages. Duality allows human languages the ability to produce an

infinite number of utterances, all with different meanings, and hence makes open-endedness

possible.

Language is modifiable. It changes over the time. The changes usually occur according the

needs of the society. They occur at various aspects of language; words, pronunciation,

grammar, usage etc. Old English is different from Modern English; so as Old Hindi is

different from Modern Hindi. Sanskrit, Pali and Prakrat are the various forms of Sanskrit

arisen from a number of changes. The pronunciation of English has been changing steadily

and ceaselessly for as long as the language has existed. Quite apart from the difficulties of
vocabulary and grammar, the pronunciation of English in the past would be wholly

unintelligible to us, if we could hear it. We could no more understand the pronunciation of

King Alfred the Great than we can understand modern Norwegian, and the pronunciation of

the poet Geoffrey Chaucer would not be a lot easier. William Shakespeare is quite a bit closer

to us in time: we have little trouble reading what he wrote, but nevertheless many specialists

believe we would not be able to understand his speech, if we could hear it: his pronunciation

was just too different from modern ones.

One of the recent clear changes of English pronunciation is the /r/-dropping. Until

relatively recently, all English speakers pronounced a consonant /r/ in every position in which

our spelling has the letter <r>. So, not only was /r/ present in red and cream, it was also

present in far, arm, dark and bird. But then, in the seventeenth or early eighteenth century,

some people in the southeast of England began to ‘drop’ their /r/s whenever those /r/s were

not followed by a vowel. As a result, in this style of speech, /r/ was retained in red and cream,

but it disappeared from the other four words.

The scope of linguistic inquiry about the language does not end at defining the major

prosperities of human language. It is rather broad and vast. A full understanding of the

various components of language and their relations with the world outside the language

constitutes the right scope of linguistics. Nonetheless, studying the structure of language

provides the outset for further language studies. One obvious way of studying language is to

consider what its elements are, how they are combined to make larger bits, and how these bits

help us to convey messages. There is a considerable difference among the linguisticians about

the number and categorization of linguistic levels.But given how much argument there is

about what the categories involved in linguistic description are, this is clearly an important

part of linguistics, and is certainly a prerequisite for any deeper study of language.
The study of the elements of language and their function is usually split up into a number of

different branches.

1. Phonetics deals with the sounds of spoken language: how they are made, how they are

classified, how they are combined with each other and how they interact with each other when

they are combined, how they are perceived. It is sometimes suggested that phonetics is not

really a part of linguistics proper, but a sub-part of physics, physiology, psychology or

engineering (as in attempts to mimic human speech using computers). Accordingly, the label

Linguistic Phonetics is sometimes used to specify that part of phonetics which is directly

relevant for the study of human language. The linguistic aspect of phonetics .i.e. the study o f

human sounds is a part of phonology. The study of phonetics can be divided into three main

branches, ARTICULATORY PHONETICS,the study of the movement of speech organs in

the articulation of speech sounds. ACOUSTIC PHONETICS, The branch of phonetics which

studies the physical properties of speech sound(such as frequency and amplitude), as

transmitted between mouth and ear, according to the principles of acoustics (the branch of

physics devoted to the study of sound).It is wholly dependent on the use of instrumental

techniques of investigation, particularly electronics, and some grounding in physics and

mathematics is a prerequisite for advanced study of this subject. AUDITORY PHONETICS is

the branch of phonetics which studies the perceptual response to speech sounds, as mediated

by ear, auditory nerve and brain. It is a less well-studied area of phonetics, mainly because of

the difficulties encountered as soon as one attempts to identify and measure psychological and

neurological responses to speech sounds.

2. Phonology also deals with speech sounds, but at a rather more abstract level. While

phonetics deals with individual speech sounds, phonology deals with the systems which

incorporate the sounds. It also considers the structures the sounds can enter into (for example,
syllables and intonational phrases), and the generalizations that can be made about sound

structures in individual languages or across languages.

Out of the very wide range of sounds the human vocal apparatus can produce, and which

are studied by phonetics, only a relatively small number are used distinctively in any one

language. The sounds are organized into a system of contrasts, which are analyzed in terms of

phonemes, distinctive features or other such phonological units, according to the theory used.

The aim of phonology is to demonstrate the patterns of distinctive sound found in a language,

and to make as general statements as possible about the nature of sound systems in the

languages of the world. Putting this another way, phonology is concerned with the range and

function of sounds in specific languages (and often therefore referred to as ‘functional

phonetics), and with the rules which can be written to show the types of phonetic relationships

that relate and contrast words and other linguistic units. Within phonology, two branches of

study are usually recognized: segmental and suprasegmental. Segmental phonology

analyses speech into discrete segments, such as phonemes; suprasegmental or non-segmental

phonology analyses those features which extend over more than one segment, such as

intonation contours.

3. Morphology deals with the internal structure of words – not with their structure in terms

of the sounds that make them up, but their structure where form and meaning seem

inextricably entwined. So the word cover is morphologically simple, and its only structure is

phonological, while lover contains the smaller element love and some extra meaning which is

related to the final <r> in the spelling.

4. Syntax is currently often seen as the core of any language, although such a prioritising of

syntax is relatively new. Syntax A traditional term for the study of the rules governing the

way words are combined to form sentences in a language. In this use, syntax is opposed to
morphology, the study of word structure. An alternative definition (avoiding the concept of

‘word’) is the study of the interrelationships between elements of sentence structure, and of

the rules governing the arrangement of sentences in sequences. In this use, one might then talk

of the ‘syntax of the word’.

5.Lexis , The study of lexis is the study of the vocabulary of languages in all its aspects:

words and their meanings, how words relate to one another, how they may combine with one

another, and the relationships between vocabulary and other areas of the description of

languages, the phonology, morphology, and syntax.. A unit of vocabulary is generally

referred to as a lexical item, or lexeme. A complete inventory of the lexical items of a

language constitutes that language’s dictionary, or lexicon – a term particularly used in

generative grammar: items are listed ‘in the lexicon’ as a set of lexical entries. The way

lexical items are organized in a language is the lexical structure or lexical system. A group of

items used to identify the network of contrasts in a specific semantic or lexical field (e.g.

cooking, colour) may also be called a ‘lexical system’. Specific groups of items, sharing

certain formal or semantic features, are known as lexical sets. The absence of a lexeme at a

specific structural place in a language’s lexical field is called a lexical gap (e.g. brother v.

sister, son v. daughter, etc., but no separate lexemes for ‘male’ v.‘female’ cousin).

6. Semantics, deals with the meaning of language. This is divided into two parts, LEXICAL

SEMANTICS, which is concerned with the relationships between words, and SENTENCE

SEMANTICS which is concerned with the way in which the meanings of sentences can be

built up from the meanings of their constituent words. Sentence semantics often makes use of

the tools and notions developed by philosophers; for example, logical notation and notions of

implication and denotation.

language larger than a sentence – but, within this broad notion, several different applications

may be found. At its most general, a discourse is a behavioral unit which has a pre-theoretical

status in linguistics: it is a set of utterances which constitute any recognizable speech event

(no reference being made to its linguistic structuring, if any), e.g. a conversation, a joke, a

sermon, an interview. A classification of discourse functions, with particular reference to type

of subject-matter, the situation, and the behavior of the speaker, is often carried out in

sociolinguistic studies, e.g. distinguishing dialogues v. monologues, or (more specifically)

oratory, ritual, insults, narrative, and so on. Several linguists have attempted to discover

linguistic regularities in discourses (discourse analysis or DA), using grammatical,

phonological and semantic criteria (e.g. Cohesion, anaphora, inter-sentence connectivity).

Special attention has been focused on discourse markers – sequentially dependent

elements which demarcate units of speech, such as oh, well, and I mean. It is now plain that

there exist important linguistic dependencies between sentences, but it is less clear how far

these dependencies are sufficiently systematic to enable linguistic units higher than the

sentence to be established. The methodology and theoretical orientation of discourse analysis

(with its emphasis on well-formedness and rules governing the sequence of permissible units,

in both spoken and written texts) are often contrasted with those of conversation analysis.

As I have mentioned above, this information about the components of language provides

the framework for studies beyond language itself. So many branches of knowledge make use

of these findings about the language. Recently new areas of study were formed as a result of

combination with linguistics. Examples of such fields are:

•COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS, deals with the replication of linguistic behavior by

computers, and the use of computers in the analysis of linguistic behavior. This may include
CORPUS LINGUISTICS, the use of large bodies of representative text as a tool for language

description.

•EDUCATIONAL investigates how children deal with the language required to cope with the

educational system.

•ETHNOLINGUISTICS deals with the study of language in its cultural context. It can also be

called ANTHROPOLOGICAL LINGUISTICS.

•MATHMATICAL LINGUISTICS deals with the mathematical properties of languages or

the grammars used to describe those languages.

•NEUROLINGUISICS deals with the way in which linguistic structures and processes are

dealt with in the brain.

•PSYCHOLINGUISTICS deals with the way in which the mind deals with language,

including matters such as how language is stored in the mind, how language is understood and

produced in real time, how children acquire their first language, and so on.

•SOCIOLINGUISTICS deals with the way in which societies exploit the linguistic choices

open to them, and the ways in which language reflects social factors, including social context.

Having presented a bird's eye view at the subject-matter of linguistics, it is high time I

discussed its major aims. What linguists aim to do,can be inferred from the previous

discussion. In summary, the general aims of linguistics are two: to study the nature of

language, to establish a theory of the nature of language; and to describe language.

Apparently, these aims are consequential. Linguists first start to study the nature of language

and define its prosperities which would allow them to establish theories to describe the

language. Examples of theories about the nature of language are those of Chomsky and de

Saussure. The theories of both of these great scholars provide a solid ground for modern
linguistic inquiry. Armed with the theories needed, linguists describe the data of language in

hand in the most systematic and scientific way. The description of language either confirms or

refutes a theory.

To sum up, the field of linguistics is fundamentally concerned with the nature of

language and (linguistic) communication. The field as a whole represents an attempt to break

down the broad questions about the nature of language and communication into smaller, more

manageable questions that we can hope to answer, and in so doing establish reasonable results

that we can build on in moving closer to answers to the larger questions. So far, linguists went

long miles in understanding the nature of language which even contributed to the

understanding of human nature. However , the future of linguistic study still promises a lot.

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