LECTURE THREE

ASPECTS OF LINGUISTICS

By Alec

In this lecture, I’m going to focus on theoretical linguistics, which is necessary for us, English teachers.

I. The Scientific Study of Language

1.     Linguistics

   The science of language, deals with the history and scientific investigation of language whether one studies a phenomenon common to all mankind, or examines the resemblance and differences between languages, belonging to a given linguistic family, or to sub-groups of such a family, or investigates an individual language or one or more of its dialects.

2. Language

Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication. All languages have dual systems of sounds and meanings. Language is unpredictable only in the sense that the variations of the processes that are employed are unpredictable. The things, which are predictable about all languages, are called linguistic universals. The primary media of language is sound. There is no connection, or at least in a few cases only a minimal connection, between the sounds that people use and the objects to which these sounds refer. Language is possessed only by human being and used for communication.

3.    Paralinguistic features

Those formal patterns of speech which characterize an individual speaker of a language, e.g. voice quality such as “falsetto”, “creak”, “giggle”, etc.

4. Kinetics

The study of gestures, they may be as small as eyebrow movements, facial twitches, and charges in positioning the feet, or they may be larger gestures involving uses of the hands and shrugs of the shoulders. They vary widely among cultures and within cultures.

5. Proxemics

The study of the using of the space (distance) between the speaker and the listener in the process of communication.

6. The design features of human language

a.    duality;

b.    productivity;

c.    arbitrariness;

d.    interchangeability(man can be both a producer and receiver of massagers);

e.    dis-placement (language can be used to refer to real or imagines matters in the past, present, or future, and can be used to talk about language itself);

f.   Specialization (communication organisms should not have a total physical involvement in the act of communication. They should not stop to make a response, nor should the response be totally determined by the stimulus.);

g.    cultural transmission;

h.    Discreteness (language makes use of discrete elements); reflexiveness (use language to talk about itself); semanticity (it has content); and prevarication (can be used to talk about false hoods).

   II. The Distinctive Sounds of Language

1.     Phonetics

The study of speech processes, including the anatomy, neurology and pathology of speech, the articulation, classification and perception of speech sounds. Phonetics is a pure science and need not be studied in relation to a particular language, but it has many applications. The linguistic aspects of phonetics, i.e. the study of the sound systems of a particular language, are part of phonology. The study of phonetics can be divided into three main branches, articulatory phonetics, acoustics phonetics, and auditory phonetics.

2.    Phoneme and allophone

The smallest unit of phonology. The concept of the phoneme arose out of the awareness that the precise phonetic realization of a particular sound is not so important as its function within the sound system of a particular language. The phonetic realization of a phoneme may vary: its phonetic variants are called allophones. The occurrence of a particular allophone may be determined by its environment or it may be in free variation. In phonology the smallest possible segment of sound is abstracted from the continuum of speech.

3.    Complementary distribution

Term used to describe a situation where two variants are mutually exclusive in a particular environment. Thus, in English, the two allophones of the phoneme /p/, [phhhh] aspirate as in the word pin and [p] non-aspirate as in the word spin, are said to be in complementary distribution because only the non-aspirate form [p] occurs after /s/ and only the aspirate for [phhhh] occurs at the beginning of a word.

4.    Supersegmental feature/phoneme

A distinctive feature of speech that extends more than one speech sound or one phonological segment in an utterance, e.g. pitch, stress, intonation; its influence may spread over more than one phoneme.

III. Morphology

In this section, we ought to learn the terms like morpheme, allomorpheme; besides, we have to learn:

1.     Inflection and derivation

The process or result of adding affixes to roots to form new words. Adding affixes to stems to decide or restrict their grammatical meaning. In English, all the inflectional affixes are suffixes. Derivation does not always result in a change of part of speech class. English derivational affixes may be either prefixes or suffixes.

2. Lexeme

When the meaning of a particular morpheme or combination of morphemes in a word cannot be predicted entirely from the meanings of the individual morphemes, the word is a lexeme.

IV. Syntactic Structures

The word grammar nowadays tends to be restricted to that part of the analysis of language, which was handled in classical grammar under the headings of inflexion and syntax. Modern grammatical theory is frequently said to be formal, in contrast with traditional grammar, which was national. National grammar starts with the assumption of grammatical universality of all language, while formal grammar, a rejection to the former, makes no assumptions about the universality of such categories as the parts of speech and claims to describe the structure of every language on its own terms.

The formal approach to grammatical description has frequently been understood to carry to the farther implication that semantic considerations are irrelevant both in the determination of the units of grammatical analysis and in the establishment of rules for their permissible combination in sentences of the language.

In formal grammar, we use terms like acceptability, idealization of the data, distribution, etc.

We understand that content words are an open set, while structure words are a close set, the number of which in a certain language is the same. A great number of new words appear nowadays as a result of the development of IT.

Two or more words, considered as individual lexical items, used in habitual association with on another in a given language are called collocations, e.g. in English, green collocates with grass; dark with night, etc.

T-G grammar is a grammar of sentences and encapsulates the claims that speakers of a language speak in sentences and sentences are the basic unit of linguistic communication. Sometimes an utterance is said to be grammatical, like

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

but not at all acceptable.

V. Semantics

The system and study of meaning in language. Many different theories of meaning have been put forward by different authors and schools, first in the realm of philosophy (philosophical semantics) and more recently within the scope of linguistics. The Greeks had introduced the controversy between the view of the realists (naturalism) that words are linked to essential feature of the things to which they refer and the view of the norminalists (norminalism) who insisted on the conventional nature of words as names. While philosophical approaches to meaning have often been concerned with the origin of verbal symbols and their validity in terms of truth and logical consistency. Linguistic semantics has studied meaning more in terms of the connections between speech acts and the physical and intellectual environment of the speaker. Some linguists have stressed the intimate links between the internal structure of a particular language and the way its speakers depend on it to classify the world around them (Humboldtism, Whorfian Hypothesis). Others have asked whether it is possible at all to account for the relationships between utterances and the infinite number of situations in which they are made. On these grounds, many linguists, particularly those associated with one period of American distributionism, have attempted to exclude semantic considerations from their formal analysis. On the other hand, it is virtually impossible to explain linguistic phenomena without any reference to the communicative context in which they occur, and most contemporary linguists therefore emphasis that semantics must be regarded as an important branch or level of linguistic analysis. Among the major theories in linguistic semantics have been:

The Conceptual Theory (Conceptualism), in which meaning is defined as the “mental image”, the speaker has of the thing he is talking about;

The Reference of Correspondence Theory, which assumes a direct relationship between a linguistic symbol and the thing it denotes;

The Contextual Theory, which attempts to explain the meaning of words by the habitual “collocations” it normally enters with other words in specific situations;

The Field Theory which interprets the meaning relationships between the members of restricted semantic field;

Componental Analysis which shows how sets of terms are made up of universal semantic features;

Combinational Semantics or Semotactics which looks at both the lexical meaning of individual items and their syntagmatic arrangement;

Generative Semantics which studies underlying logical relations.

VI. Language Change and Variation

1. Language Change

Every language is always changing from its sounds to its vocabulary and even to its grammatical system in all kinds of ways, but the ways themselves are to some extent predictable. Only certain kinds of change take place. In phonology, a feature changes, or rules are switched, or some other kind of restriction takes place. In syntax, a certain syntactic device develops, or case endings weaken, or word order patterns change. In meaning, changes result from language contact, from cultural developments requiring new vocabulary, and from reshaping existing meanings. But in no case a radical change occurs overnight. The process is predictable in that only certain kinds of things happen and they happen slowly. The exact changes are not predictable, for example that a certain set of stops will lose their stop quality and become fricatives, or a particular inflection will disappear, or a particular item will stay in the language after it has been borrowed or undergone a change in meaning. Nor is the process of change itself well understood.

There are some hypotheses of language change. But some are less convincing, and we can find little value in those theories so far as the subject of language change is concerned.

Language Variation

A language varies in time and in space. In fact, a language can be  seen as a set of language systems sufficiently similarly to be considered by their speakers to be members of the same language.

Synchronic study reveals the difference between languages and languages, between dialects and dialects. Diachronic study deals with change that takes place over time in the course of evolution.

Since no language is uniform entity, language varies by age (child language), by sex and occupation (jargon), by function (written, spoken; formal, informal; slang). There are many ways in which language varieties can be distinguished, but basically three certain criteria are important.

1. The geographical and social background of the speaker and the actual situation in which the speech act takes place.

Dialect is a variant of the standard language, which itself can be regarded as a dialect. We distinguish a variant in sound by accent. We also have regional, geographical, territorial, and social dialects (sociolct), as well as temporal dialect.

Register or manner of discourse, in contrast to sociolect and regional dialect, is a functional variant of a language. According to field of discourse, register can be further divided into manner of discourse, formal or informal language, etc.

2.    The medium or mode, through which language is expressed, likes written language, spoken language, and extralinguistic feature.

The subject matter under discussion: like special language.

The language of an individual speaker, which is influenced by any of these factors at a given time, is usually called idiolect, while style is the writer’s idiolect, especially the grammar and lexis of the idiolect, in a given register. In so far as style implies literary style, register here means literary, including poetic, genre and medium. Style is thus linguistic form in interrelation with literary form.

 To learn linguistics, the importance of which is unnecessarily repeated here, we have to get to know some methodological concepts, such as syntagma and paradigma; langue and parole. Here you are given a very brief introduction to this science. I sincerely suggest that you read and study and do some research in this filed, which might be of great help in you language teaching practice.

March 15, 2001