Introduction to Language and Linguistics

Language

• a symbolic, rule-driven system of conventional signs employed for purposes of communication, self-expression, representation, thinking, definition of the world and reality, storage and transmission of knowledge, establishing and maintaining of social relations, supporting and participating in group identities, incorporating new members into an existing group, marking boundaries with or excluding other individuals or groups, and the creative and recreative transformation of the world.

Innate Language Capacity in Humans:

• language organ or device in the brain; evidence from language-learning abilities of young children (Noam Chomsky, Paul Broca, Carl Wernicke)
  • aphasia (damage to left-hemisphere of brain and inability to articulate speech)
  • aprosodia (damage to right-hemisphere of brain and inability to comprehend emotional aspects of speech)
  • Theory of Universal Grammar: it appears all humans have a certain built-in language competence, a universal or core grammar capacity existing as a deep mental structure that gives rise to all the different grammars of the different languages of the world (evidence for this theory is furnished by comparative observation of different languages and of the ways in which children learn language).
• animal-sound roots: grunts, barks, whines
• language universals:
  • all languages have a grammar
  • all languages change over time
  • all languages use sounds to convey meaning
  • certain sound qualities convey similar meaning in all languages: low pitch associated with dominance, intimidation, hostility, authority; high-pitch associated with submission, respect, obedience, friendliness (humans tend to use high pitch when addressing babies and in courtship)

Language and Reality:

• Language structures and informs the way in which speakers of that language understand the world (Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf). People's sense of reality is embedded and embodied in the language which they speak. Rather than describing the objective, external world, language creates a subjective perception of it which is specific to that language and shared by its speakers.

Language Features:

• symbolic, conventional & arbitrary: nothing natural, eternal, pure or essential about the specific words that a language uses
  • evidence from variation of onomatopoeias (echoic words) in different languages (English dog bark: arf, arf; Spanish: guau, guau; German: wau, wau; Japanese: wung, wung)
• systematic: operates through the interaction of various systems (of sounds, meanings, sequencing/grouping of meaningful elements, written characters, etc.)
• grammatical: structured and governed by rules
• redundant: same grammatical and meaning information often carried by multiple elements in a statement
• idiomatic: idioms are expressions peculiar to a language and whose meaning cannot be predicted from the meanings of their constituent parts, e.g. "turn on"
• creative and productive: using a fixed number of rules and elements, speakers of the language can produce a virtually unlimited number of statements
• markedness: the degree to which a language departs from common tendencies in most languages, degree of complexity or unusualness

Systems of Language:

• grammar: the study and characterization of the rules and systems (phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon, semantics, and graphics) that constitute a language and govern the relationships between its signifiying elements
• phonology: the study of the system of speech sounds of a language
  • phones and phonemes
    • phone: a vocal sound
    • phoneme: a minimal sound unit recognized as distinct and significant by the speakers of a language (e.g. [p], [b], [a]); the smallest sound that can distinguish one word from another (e.g.[f]at/[v]at, stri[f]e, stri[v]e)
    • allophones are variants of a phonemic sound which the speakers of the language don't perceive as conveying differential meaning (e.g. compare the different sounds of the "t" in "cat," "satin," "cater"-- they sound very different but, to speakers of American English, they are all just t's!)
  • about 100-150 human sounds (see International Phonetic Alphabet)(only 35-45 used in English)
• morphology: the study of the combination of significant language units (morphemes) to form words; the classification of the character and functionality of such words
  • parts of speech: nouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs, function words (prepositions, articles, conjunctions, pronouns, auxiliaries)
  • grammatical functions: case (subject, direct object, indirect object, etc.), number (singular, plural), person (first, second, third), tense (present, past, etc.), mood (indicative, subjunctive, etc.), etc.
  • morpheme: the smallest meaningful unit of a language (roots, stems, and affixes) (e.g. un-like-ly)
    • free and bound morphemes (e.g. "the" is free morpheme, "un-" is a bound morpheme
    • affixes: morphemes which are appended to the beginning (prefixes) or ending (suffixes) of a word to signify grammatical and other functions
    • root: the basis or main part of a word to which affixes can be added
    • stem: a root or a root plus another morpheme to which affixes can be added
  • inflection: variation in the form of a word to signify grammatical functions or changes in meaning--inflections can take the form of added affixes (dog, dogs) or changes in internal parts of the word (run, ran)
    • declension: inflection of nouns and pronouns
    • comparison: inflection of adjectives
    • conjugation: inflection of verbs
• syntax: the study of the order or structure of words in phrases, clauses, sentences
• lexicon: total inventory of the morphemes of a language
• semantics: the study of meaning in language
• graphics: the writing system of a language
• paralanguage: extra-linguistic signals and information contributing to meaning and supporting the functioning of the systems of the language (tone of voice, pitch, tempo/speed, rhythm, pauses, volume, sighs, coughs, gestures, body motions, setting, cultural context, etc.)
  • prosody: study of the stress, accent, pitch, and rhythm patterns of a language (dyslexia possibly related to inaccurate perception of rhythms of spoken language, more ...)
    • pitch difference: "he's here" vs "he's here?"
    • stress/accent difference: "rébel" vs "rebél"
    • pause: "he died happily" vs "he died, happily"
  • kinesics: body-motion, gestures accompanying language and contributing to meaning
    • proxemics (useof space, proximity between speakers)
  • pragmatics: language users' shared knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, context of an utterance
    • presuppositions
    • deictics: this/that, here/there

World Languages

• about 6,800 languages in the world
• Most widely spoken languages (1999 data, including first and second language speakers, see individual languages in Ethnologue; see also http://www.krysstal.com/spoken.html):
  • Mandarin Chinese 1,052 million speakers
  • English, 508 million (730 million by more recent estimates)
  • Hindi, 487 million
  • Spanish 417 million
  • Russian 277 million
  • Arabic, 246 million
  • Bengali, 211 million
  • Portuguese 191 million
  • Malay-Indonesian, 159 million
  • French 128 million
  • German, 128 million
• language dominance related to population size, political, social, economic, and technological factors
• lingua franca: a language used by people from different cultures as a common medium of communication for business, education, etc. (e.g. English in the international arena)
• artificial international languages, e.g. Volapuk, Esperanto, lack of success; patriotism and nationalistic feelings have worked against such experiments
• dialects: variants of a language associated with a place, social or ethnic group, etc.
• pidgin and creole languages: special hybrid languages which develop as means of communication at points of contact between peoples who speak different languages (a pidgin is the initial stage of such developments, a creole is a pidgin that has become the native language of its speakers)

Types of Languages

• synthetic: characterized by the use of inflections to signify grammatical and other meanings (e.g. classical Greek and Latin)
• analytic: characterized by word order and function words (prepositions, articles, auxiliaries, conjunctions) to signify grammatical and other meanings (modern English)
• agglutinative: words formed by combining/aggregating fixed morphemes (e.g. Swahili, Turkish)
• isolating: words are invariable and not combined with other morphemes; grammar indicated by word order and function words (e.g. Chinese, Vietnamese)

Language Change:

• change as fundamental aspect of language
• systematic or sporadic
• principle of least effort: tendency to economy, efficiency
• analogy: tendency to imitation, regularity
• imperfect learning
• external pressures: social, economic, political factors; foreign influence
• slower changes in graphics/writing than in sounds of spoken language

References and Websites of Interest:

• International Phonetic Alphabet
• English and the International Phonetic Alphabet
• Ethnologue: Languages of the World
  • Listing of languages of the world
  • Country index and languages map
  • Creole Languages
  • Special Languages (Creoles, Pidgins, etc.)
• KryssTal: Languages and Linguistics

Last updated: 01/09/2007

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