Professional Documents
Culture Documents
FOUNDATION OF LINGUISTICS
suhendrayusuf@uninus.ac.id. hendrayusuf@yahoo.com
Course description
This course introduces the student to a general description of the study of language and its
implication for the TEFL/TESL classroom. The course introduces approaches to the study of
language, the use of language in communication, aspects of linguistics, and other disciplines
related to linguistics. This course is also designed to introduce aspects of the English language, the
patterns and development of the language, and other ‘Englishes’, esp. American English. It
provides students also with insights into the classification of languages and history of linguistics.
Textbooks
There is no assigned textbook for the course. Lectures and course materials – taken from the
various sources as listed in the bibliography – will comprise the basic material.
Assignments
2. Group assignment will be a report of relevant course materials available on the websites
worldwide. The keywords are: linguistics, general-linguistics, introduction-to-linguistics.
Evaluation
There will be two evaluations and two quizzes. Each one will assume that all the materials
previously covered is known and so the basic focus will be on the new materials. The final grade
will be determined by the total number of points earned (10 pts for attendance, 20 pts assignment,
30 pts mid test + quiz-1, and 40 pts final exam + quiz-2).
Week-1 Course description and ‘rules of the game’: introduction to the study of language,
approaches to the study of language
Week-2 Language as system and other definitions
Week-3 Language in communication, nonlinguistic communication, design features of human
language
Week-4 Quiz-1; Aspects of Linguistics: Phonetics and Phonology
Week-5 Aspects of Linguistics: Morphology, Syntax, Semantics
Week-6 Linguistics and other disciplines: Psycholinguistics & Sociolinguistics
Week-7 Other relationships: Anthropolinguistics etc.
Week-8 Mid-test
Week-9 The English Language: Some aspects of the language, development of English
Week-10 American/Canadian English: patterns and developent of AmEnglish
Week-11 Other Englishes
Week-12 Quiz-2; Languages of the world: Indo-European
Week-13 Languages of the world: Asian and Pacific, African, and American
Week-14 Languages of the world: pidgin and creole; international languages
Week-15 History of Linguistics
Week-16 Final test
CONTENTS
A. Language and Linguistics
1. What language is
Language as system ◊ arbitrary ◊ vocal ◊ symbol ◊ human ◊ communication
2. Other definitions
B. Language in Communication
C. Aspects of Linguistics
1. Psycholinguistics
Language Acquisition ◊ Speech perception ◊ Aphasia and Neurolinguistics
2. Sociolinguistics
Social dimensions
3. Other Relationships
Anthropological linguistics ◊ Computational linguistics ◊ Mathematical
linguistics
Stylistics ◊ Philosophy of language ◊ Applied linguistics
3. American/Canadian English
Patterns of American English ◊ Regional Dialects ◊ Social/Cultural
Dialects ◊ Black English ◊ Development of American English
4. Other Englishes
Australian and New Zealand English ◊ India-Pakistan ◊ African English
1. Language Classification
Indo-European ◊ Asian and Pacific ◊ African ◊ the Americas ◊ Pidgin and
Creole
2. International Languages
G. History of linguistics
1. Earlier History
Non-Western traditions ◊ Greek and Roman antiquity ◊ The European
Middle Ages
Foundation of Linguistics
The field of linguistics may be divided in terms of three dichotomies: synchronic versus
diachronic, theoretical versus applied, microlinguistics versus macrolinguistics.
Languages may be studied as they exist at a specific time; an example might be Parisian
French in the 1980s. This is called a synchronic approach. In contrast, a diachronic, or
historical, approach considers changes in a language over an extended time period. The
study of the development of Latin into the modern Romance languages is an example of
diachronic linguistics. Linguistics in the 20th century encompasses studies from both
the diachronic and synchronic points of view; 19th-century language studies usually
focused on a diachronic approach.
The terms microlinguistics and macrolinguistics are not yet well established, and they
are, in fact, used here purely for convenience. The former refers to a narrower and the
latter to a much broader view of the scope of linguistics. According to the
microlinguistic view, languages should be analyzed for their own sake and without
reference to their social function, to the manner in which they are acquired by children,
to the psychological mechanisms that underlie the production and reception of speech,
to the literary and the aesthetic or communicative function of language, and so on. In
contrast, macrolinguistics embraces all of these aspects of language. Various areas
within macrolinguistics have been given terminological recognition: psycholinguistics,
sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, dialectology, mathematical and
computational linguistics, and stylistics.
1. What language is
Linguists are in broad agreement about some of the important characteristics of human
language and one definition of language widely associated with linguistics may be used
to illustrate areas of agreement. This particular definition states that language is a
system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication. The definition is
rather imprecise in that it contains considerably redundancy, particularly in employing
both the terms system and arbitrary, some redundancy is perhaps excusable, however,
for it allows certain points to be more heavily emphasized than they would otherwise
have been.
Language as system
The key term in the above definition is system. It is also the most difficult term to
discuss. We may observe that a language must be systematic, for otherwise it could not
be learned or used consistently. However, we must also ask in what ways a language is
systematic. A very basic observation is that each language contains two systems rather
than one, a system of sounds and a system of meanings. Only certain sounds are used by
speakers of any language and only certain combinations of these sounds are possible.
The sound system of a language allows a small number of sounds to be used over and
over again in various combinations to form units of meaning. The meaning system
allows these units of meaning to be arranged in an infinite number of ways to express
both simple and complicated ideas.
All languages have dual system of sounds and meanings. Linguists concern themselves
not only with characteristics of the two systems but also with how the systems relate to
each other within one overall linguistic system for a particular language.
Language as arbitrary
The term arbitrary in the definition does not mean that everything about language is
unpredictable, for languages do not vary in every possible way. It means that we cannot
predict exactly which specific features we will find in a particular language if we
unfamiliar with that language or a related language. There will be no way of predicting
what a word means just from hearing it of knowing in advance whether or how nouns
will be inflected. If languages were completely unpredictable in their systems, we could
not even talk about nouns, verbs, vowels, etc. at all. Linguistic systems are not
completely unpredictable.
The process of deletion, e.g., I could have gone and Peter could have gone too; I could
have gone and Peter could have too; I could have gone and Peter too., will also be
found in all languages, but a particular variation will depend on the language. All
languages will have devices for negation. 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.
For example, all languages seem to be characterized as systems of rules of certain
kinds. All have nouns and verbs. All have consonants and vowels. The specifics for
each language are however largely unpredictable and therefore arbitrary.
Language as vocal
The term vocal in the definition refers to the fact that the primary medium of language
is sound, and it is sound for all languages, no matter how well developed are their
writing systems. All the evidence we have confirms the fact that writing is based on
speaking. Writing systems are attempts to capture sounds and meanings on paper.
Language as symbol
The term of symbol refers to the fact that 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 a symbolic system, a system in which words are
associated with objects, ideas, and actions by convention. In only a few cases is there
some direct representational connection between a word and some phenomenon in the
real world. Onomatopoeic words like bang, crash, and roar are examples from English,
although the meanings of these words would not be at all obvious to speakers of other
languages. Some writers claimed that English words beginning with sl and sn as in
slime, slut, snarl, snob are used to denote a variety of unpleasant things. In much the
same way the vowel sound in twig and bit is said to be associated with small things and
the sounds in huge and moose with large things. However, once again we are in an area
of subjectivity, as counterexamples are not difficult to find, e.g., sleep, snug, hill, and
spoon.
Language as human
The term human refers to the fact that the kind of system that interests us is possessed
only by human beings and is very different from the communication systems that other
forms of life possess. Language is uniquely human in another aspect. People can
perform acts with language just as they can with objects of different kinds. A sentence
like I pronounce you husband and wife can all be acts (performatives) because saying
something in the right circumstances is also doing something beyond making noises.
Language as communication
Language is used for communication, allowing people to say things to each other and
express their communicative need. Language is the cement of society, allowing people
to live, work, and play together, to tell the truth or lies.
2. Other definitions
Language is a system of arbitrary, vocal symbols which permits all people in a given culture, or
other people who have learned the system of that culture, to communicate or to interact.
(Finocchiaro 1974: 3)
Language is system of communication by sound, i.e., through the organs of speech and
hearing, among human beings of a certain group or community, using vocal symbols
possessing arbitrary conventional meanings. (Pei & Gaynor 1954: 119)
Language is defined as the set of all possible sentences and the grammar of a language
as the rules which distinguish between sentences and non-sentences. (Green 1972: 25)
Speech is human activity that varies without assignable limit as we pass from social
group, because it is a purely historical heritage of the group, the product of long-
continued social usage. It varies as all creative effort varies – not as consciously,
perhaps, but none the less as truly as do the religions, the beliefs, the customs, and the
arts of different peoples. Walking is an organic, and instinctive, function (not, of
course, itself an instinct); speech is a non-instinctive, acquired, “cultural” function.
(Sapir 1921:4)
Language is a set (finite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out of a
finite set of elements. (Chomsky 1957: 13)
Linguistics has but one proper subject -- the language system viewed in its own light
and for its own sake. (Allen and Corder, ed., 1975:148)
Linguistics is the study of human speech including the units, nature, structure, and
modification of language. (Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary 1981:664)
Linguistics is the science of language, e.g. of its structure, acquisition, relationship to
other forms of communication. (Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary 1980:494)
Linguistics is the science that describes and classifies languages. The linguist identifies
and describes the units and patterns of the sound system, the words and morphemes and
the phrases and sentences, that is, the structure of a language. (Lado 1964:18)
Linguistics is the field of study the subject of which is language. Linguists study
language as man’s ability to communicate, as individual expression, as the common
heritage of a speech community, as spoken sound, as written text, etc. (Hartman &
Stork 1972:132)
B. Language in Communication
anguage is the principal means used by human beings to communicate with one
another. Language is primarily spoken, although it can be transferred to other media,
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such as writing. If the spoken means of communication is unavailable, as may be the
case among the deaf, visual means such as sign language can be used. A prominent
characteristic of language is that the relation between a linguistic sign and its meaning
is arbitrary: There is no reason other than convention among speakers of English that a
dog should be called dog, and indeed other languages have different names (for
example, Spanish perro, Russian sobaka, Japanese inu). Language can be used to
discuss a wide range of topics, a characteristic that distinguishes it from animal
communication. The dances of honey bees, for example, can be used only to
communicate the location of food sources. While the language-learning abilities of apes
have surprised many—and there continues to be controversy over the precise limits of
these abilities—scientists and scholars generally agree that apes do not progress beyond
the linguistic abilities of a two-year-old child.
Paralanguage
Those who have worked on problems of communication claim to have discovered what
they call a system of paralanguage. The paralinguistic system is composed of various
scales and we assume that in normal communication utterances fall near the center point
of each scale.
The first scale is a loudness-to-softness scale. Most utterances do not draw attention to
themselves on this scale, but appear to be uttered with just the right intensity of sound.
However, an occasional utterance will strike us as being overloud whereas another will
appear oversoft. Sometimes overloudness is a necessary characteristic o certain types of
communication, as when the carnival barker shouts: Roll up! Roll up! See this beautiful
young lady shot 60 feet up in the air from the cannon! Oversoftness too may on
occasion be used to invoke suspense in a story, as in And then what do you think
happened to the little girl when she got lost in the woods and that big bad wolf found
her?
A second scale is the pitch scale, that is, how high or how low the voice is pitched in
speaking. Extrahigh pitch is usually interpreted to indicate strain or excitement,
whereas extralow pitch is taken as a sign of displeasure, disappointment, or weariness.
A fifth scale is one of a tempo of an utterance. We have all observed the smooth tempos
of certain salesmen and some of us the tempo of the student with the obvious rehearsed
story, as in So I went to the Dean and I said to him that I just didn’t like the course and
he called Professor smith and they discussed my problem and then I met the chairman
and we talked about the college’s philosophy, and … We can contrast such a tempo
with a spat out: Now - you – just – listen – to – me – I’m – having – no – more – of –
this – silly – nonsense – out – of – you. These two utterances are near the opposite ends
of any tempo scale.
Kinesics
Alongside the paralinguistic system of voice modulation exists another system, a system
of gestures. The study of gestures is called kinesics. The gestures may be as small as
eyebrow movements, facial twitches, and changes in positioning the feet, or they may
be larger gestures involving uses of the hands and shrugs of the shoulders. Again, the
correct uses of gestures must be learned and like linguistic usages, they vary widely
among cultures and within cultures.
In North American culture, they move their heads up and down to agree and sideways to
disagree. In the Semang people thrust the head forward expresses agreement, and in the
Ovibundu people shake a hand in front of the face with the forefinger extended
expresses negation. When the American meet people, they greet them by nodding,
shaking hands, clasping arms, kissing, or embracing. They do not greet each other by
buffeting the other’s head with a fist like the Copper Eskimo, or with the backslapping
routine of Spanish American, or with the embracing and mutual back-rubbing of certain
Polynesian peoples.
Proxemics
Proxemics is the study of how people use the space between speakers and listeners in
the process of communication. Comfortable distances exists for various activities and
these distances must be learned. There are appropriate distances for talking to friends,
for communicating with strangers, for addressing superiors.
The linguist and anthropologist Charles Hockett has pointed out that human language
has certain design features that no system of animal communication possesses. The
features are as follows:
1. Duality, the fact that it contains two subsystems, one of sounds and the other of
meanings;
2. Productivity, the fact that language provides opportunities for sending and receiving
messages that have never been sent/received before and for understanding novel
messages;
3. Arbitrariness, the fact that there is almost no predictability in many of its
characteristics and there is almost never any connection between symbol and object;
4. Interchangeability, the fact that any human being can be both a producers and a
receiver of messages;
5. Displacement, the fact that language can be used to refer to real or imagined matters
in the past, present, or future. It can even be used to talk about language itself;
6. Specialization, the fact that communicating organisms should not have a total
physical involvement in the act of communication. They should not have to stop
what they are doing to make a response, nor should the response be totally
determined by stimulus. Human beings can talk while engaged in activities totally
unrelated to the subject under discussion;
7. Cultural transmission, the fact that the details of linguistic system must be learned
anew by each speaker. They are not biologically transmitted from generation to
generation;
8. Discreteness, the fact that language makes use of discrete elements, e.g., phonemes
and morphemes, not continuous waves – it is digital, not analog;
9. Reflexiveness, the fact that we can use language to talk about language – language is
its own metalanguage;
10. Semanticity, the fact that language is about something – it is not just “sound and
fury” but has a content; and
11. Prevarication, the fact that language can be used to tell falsehoods.
C. Aspects of Linguistics
here are many different ways to examine and describe individual languages and
changes in languages. Nevertheless, each approach usually takes into account a
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language's sounds (phonetics and phonology), sound sequences (morphology, or the
makeup of words), and relations among words in a sentence (syntax). Most analyses
also treat vocabulary and the semantics (meaning) of a language.
Phonetics is the study of all speech sounds and the ways in which they are produced.
Phonology is the study and identification of the meaningful sounds of a language.
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics concerned with the production, physical nature, and
perception of speech sounds. The main fields of study are experimental phonetics,
articulatory phonetics, phonemics, acoustical phonetics, and auditory phonetics.
Auditory phonetics is the field involved in determining how speech sounds are
perceived by the human ear.
Experimental Phonetics
This is the physical science that collects measurable data about the articulatory,
acoustic, and auditory properties of vocal sounds, using instruments such as the
kymograph, which traces curves of pressure, and the X ray. The amount of detail in the
measurement of vocal sounds is limited only by the precision of the instrument.
Differences are found in every vocal sound.
Articulatory Phonetics
This describes speech sounds genetically—that is, with respect to the ways by which the
vocal organs modify the air stream in the mouth, nose, and throat in order to produce a
sound. All the vocal activities involved in a sound need not be described, but only a
selection of them, such as the place and manner of articulation. Phonetic symbols and
their articulatory definitions are abbreviated descriptions of these selected activities.
The symbols most commonly used are those adopted by the International Phonetic
Association (IPA) and are written in brackets.
The organs of articulation are either movable or stationary. Movable organs such as
lips, jaws, tongue, or vocal chords are called articulators. By means of them a speaker
modifies the surge of air from the lungs. Stationary parts include the teeth, the alveolar
arch behind them, the hard palate, and the softer velum behind it. Sounds made by
touching two articulators—for example, the bilabial p, which requires both lips—or
those made by an articulator and a stationary part of the vocal apparatus are named from
the organs that make the juncture, which is called the point of articulation. Reference to
the tongue, when it is an articulator, is not expressed—for example, the t sound, which
is produced by the alveolar arch touched by the tongue, is called alveolar.
The manner of articulation is determined by the way in which the speaker affects the air
stream with the movable organs. This action may consist of stopping the air completely
(plosive); leaving the nasal passage open during the stopping (nasal); making contact
with the tongue but leaving space on either side of it (lateral); making merely a
momentary light contact (flap); leaving just enough space to allow a continuing stream
of air to produce friction as it passes through (fricative); or permitting the air stream to
pass over the center of the tongue without oral friction (vocal). The speaker produces
vowels of different quality by varying the position of his or her tongue on its vertical
axis (high, mid, low) and on its horizontal axis (front, central, back). For example, a
speaker moves the tongue from low to high in pronouncing the first two vowels of Aïda,
and from back to front in pronouncing successively the vowel sounds in who and he.
The tongue positions for the vowels u, i, and a are the cardinal points on the so-called
vowel triangle uai. The vowel ¶ has the most neutral position. The quality of a vowel
also depends on whether the speaker keeps the lips rounded or unrounded, keeps the
jaws close together or open, or holds the tip of the tongue flat or curled up (retroflex).
At the same time the speaker may move the tongue gradually upward and to the front,
or upward and to the back, making diphthongal off-glides.
Other modifications may also affect the quality of the sounds. For example, nasals
rather than vowels may be made the prominent part of the syllable, and certain typical
vowel formations, called semivowels, may be nonsyllabic. The quality of certain sounds
is also affected by whether the speaker keeps the speech organs tense or lax. The vocal
cords are vibrated to produce sounds that are voiced. Vowels are voiced, and in English,
lax consonants are more or less voiced. When the speaker gives a strong puff of air after
the contact, this is called aspiration. If the hand is placed before the lips, aspiration may
be observed in the ph sound produced at the beginning of the word pie. The
accompanying charts of the International Phonetic Alphabet, using standard
transcriptions in brackets, presents a schematic description of these activities in
English, although not all the modifications are included. An accurate phonetic
transcription of all would describe even regional accents.
Acoustical Phonetics
This is the study of speech waves as the output of a resonator—that is, the vocal tract
coupled to other sources. Sound waves are closer than articulations to the essence of
communication, because the same auditory impression can be produced by a normal
articulation and by an entirely different sound apparatus, like that of parrots. A
spectrograph may be used to record significant characteristics of speech waves and to
determine the effect of articulatory activities. Parts of this record of speech waves can
be cut out experimentally and the rest played back as sound in order to determine which
features suffice to identify the sounds of a language.
Phonology or Phonemics
This is a study of the sounds of speech in their primary function, which is to make vocal
signs that refer to different things sound different. The phonemes of a particular
language are those minimal distinct units of sound that can distinguish meaning in that
language. In English, the p sound is a phoneme because it is the smallest unit of sound
that can make a difference of meaning if, for example, it replaces the initial sound of
bill, till, or dill, making the word pill. The vowel sound of pill is also a phoneme
because its distinctness in sound makes pill, which means one thing, sound different
from pal, which means another. Two different sounds, reflecting distinct articulatory
activities, may represent two phonemes in one language but only a single phoneme in
another. Thus phonetic r and l are distinct phonemes in English, whereas these sounds
represent a single phoneme in Japanese, just as ph and p in pie and spy, respectively,
represent a single phoneme in English although these sounds are phonetically distinct.
Phonemes are not letters; they refer to the sound of a spoken utterance. For example,
flocks and phlox have exactly the same five phonemes. Similarly, bill and Bill are
identical phonemically, regardless of the difference in meaning. Each language has its
own inventory of phonetic differences that it treats as phonemic—that is, as necessary
to distinguish meaning. For practical purposes, the total number of phonemes for a
language is the least number of different symbols adequate to make an unambiguous
graphic representation of its speech that any native could read if given a sound value for
each symbol, and that any foreigner could pronounce correctly if given additional rules
covering nondistinctive phonetic variations that the native makes automatically. For
convenience, each phoneme of language may be given a symbol.
2. Morphology
The grammatical description of many, if not all, languages is conveniently divided into
two complementary sections: morphology and syntax. The relationship between them,
as generally stated, is as follows: morphology accounts for the internal structure of
words, and syntax describes how words are combined to form phrases, clauses, and
sentences.
Morphology is concerned with the units, called morphemes, that carry meaning in a
language. These may be word roots (as the English cran-, in cranberry) or individual
words (in English, bird, ask, charm); word endings (as the English -s for plural: birds,
-ed for past tense: asked, -ing for present participle: charming); prefixes and suffixes
(e.g., English pre- , as in preadmission, or -ness, in openness); and even internal
alterations indicating such grammatical categories as tense (English sing-sang), number
(English mouse-mice), or case.
There are many words in English that are fairly obviously analyzable into smaller
grammatical units. For example, the word "unacceptability" can be divided into un-,
accept, abil-, and -ity (abil- being a variant of -able). Of these, at least three are
minimal grammatical units, in the sense that they cannot be analyzed into yet smaller
grammatical units--un-, abil-, and ity. The status of accept, from this point of view, is
somewhat uncertain. Given the existence of such forms as accede and accuse, on the
one hand, and of except, exceed, and excuse, on the other, one might be inclined to
analyze accept into ac- (which might subsequently be recognized as a variant of ad-)
and -cept. The question is left open. Minimal grammatical units like un-, abil-, and -ity
are what Bloomfield called morphemes; he defined them in terms of the "partial
phonetic-semantic resemblance" holding within sets of words. For example,
"unacceptable," "untrue," and "ungracious" are phonetically (or, phonologically) similar
as far as the first syllable is concerned and are similar in meaning in that each of them
is negative by contrast with a corresponding positive adjective ("acceptable," "true,"
"gracious"). This "partial phonetic-semantic resemblance" is accounted for by noting
that the words in question contain the same morpheme (namely, un-) and that this
morpheme has a certain phonological form and a certain meaning.
Morphs that are in complementary distribution and represent the same morpheme are
said to be allomorphs of that morpheme. For example, the regular plurals of English
nouns are formed by adding one of three morphs on to the form of the singular: /s/, /z/,
or /iz/ (in the corresponding written forms both /s/ and /z/ are written -s and /iz/ is
written -es). Their distribution is determined by the following principle: if the morph to
which they are to be added ends in a "sibilant" sound (e.g., s, z, sh, ch), then the
syllabic allomorph /iz/ is selected (e.g., fish-es /fis-iz/, match-es /mac-iz/); otherwise
the nonsyllabic allomorphs are selected, the voiceless allomorph /s/ with morphs ending
in a voiceless consonant (e.g., cat-s /kat-s/) and the voiced allomorph /z/ with morphs
ending in a vowel or voiced consonant (e.g., flea-s /fli-z/, dog-s /dog-z/). These three
allomorphs, it will be evident, are in complementary distribution, and the alternation
between them is determined by the phonological structure of the preceding morph. Thus
the choice is phonologically conditioned.
Very similar is the alternation between the three principal allomorphs of the past
participle ending, /id/, /t/, and /d/, all of which correspond to the -ed of the written
forms. If the preceding morph ends with /t/ or /d/, then the syllabic allomorph /id/ is
selected (e.g., wait-ed /weit-id/). Otherwise, if the preceding morph ends with a
voiceless consonant, one of the nonsyllabic allomorphs is selected--the voiceless
allomorph /t/ when the preceding morph ends with a voiceless consonant (e.g., pack-
ed /pak-t/) and the voiced allomorph /d/ when the preceding morph ends with a vowel or
voiced consonant (e.g., row-ed /rou-d/; tame-d /teim-d/). This is another instance of
phonological conditioning. Phonological conditioning may be contrasted with the
principle that determines the selection of yet another allomorph of the past participle
morpheme. The final /n/ of show-n or see-n (which marks them as past participles) is
not determined by the phonological structure of the morphs show and see. For each
English word that is similar to "show" and "see" in this respect, it must be stated as a
synchronically inexplicable fact that it selects the /n/ allomorph. This is called
grammatical conditioning. There are various kinds of grammatical conditioning.
Alternation of the kind illustrated above for the allomorphs of the plural morpheme and
the /id/, /d/, and /t/ allomorphs of the past participle is frequently referred to as
morphophonemic. Some linguists have suggested that it should be accounted for not by
setting up three allomorphs each with a distinct phonemic form but by setting up a
single morph in an intermediate morphophonemic representation. Thus, the regular
plural morph might be said to be composed of the morphophoneme /Z/ and the most
common past-participle morph of the morphophoneme /D/. General rules of
morphophonemic interpretation would then convert /Z/ and /D/ to their appropriate
phonetic form according to context. This treatment of the question foreshadows, on the
one hand, the stratificational treatment and, on the other, the generative approach,
though they differ considerably in other respects.
The principal division within morphology is between inflection and derivation (or
word formation). Roughly speaking, inflectional constructions can be defined as
yielding sets of forms that are all grammatically distinct forms of single vocabulary
items, whereas derivational constructions yield distinct vocabulary items. For example,
"sings," "singing," "sang," and "sung" are all inflectional forms of the vocabulary item
traditionally referred to as "the verb to sing"; but "singer," which is formed from "sing"
by the addition of the morph -er (just as "singing" is formed by the addition of -ing), is
one of the forms of a different vocabulary item. When this rough distinction between
derivation and inflection is made more precise, problems occur. The principal
consideration, undoubtedly, is that inflection is more closely integrated with and
determined by syntax. But the various formal criteria that have been proposed to give
effect to this general principle are not uncommonly in conflict in particular instances,
and it probably must be admitted that the distinction between derivation and inflection,
though clear enough in most cases, is in the last resort somewhat arbitrary.
3. Syntax
Syntax refers to the relations among word elements in a sentence. For example, English
word order is most commonly subject-verb-object: Mary baked pies. The order pies
baked Mary is not meaningful English syntax.
Syntax, for Bloomfield, was the study of free forms that were composed entirely of free
forms. Central to his theory of syntax were the notions of form classes and constituent
structure. (These notions were also relevant, though less central, in the theory of
morphology.) Bloomfield defined form classes, rather imprecisely, in terms of some
common "recognizable phonetic or grammatical feature" shared by all the members. He
gave as examples the form class consisting of "personal substantive expressions" in
English (defined as "the forms that, when spoken with exclamatory final pitch, are calls
for a person's presence or attention"--e.g., "John," "Boy," "Mr. Smith"); the form class
consisting of "infinitive expressions" (defined as "forms which, when spoken with
exclamatory final pitch, have the meaning of a command"--e.g., "run," "jump," "come
here"); the form class of "nominative substantive expressions" (e.g., "John," "the
boys"); and so on. It should be clear from these examples that form classes are similar
to, though not identical with, the traditional parts of speech and that one and the same
form can belong to more than one form class.
What Bloomfield had in mind as the criterion for form class membership (and therefore
of syntactic equivalence) may best be expressed in terms of substitutability. Form
classes are sets of forms (whether simple or complex, free or bound), any one of which
may be substituted for any other in a given construction or set of constructions
throughout the sentences of the language.
The smaller forms into which a larger form may be analyzed are its constituents, and
the larger form is a construction. For example, the phrase "poor John" is a construction
analyzable into, or composed of, the constituents "poor" and "John." Because there is no
intermediate unit of which "poor" and "John" are constituents that is itself a constituent
of the construction "poor John," the forms "poor" and "John" may be described not only
as constituents but also as immediate constituents of "poor John." Similarly, the
phrase "lost his watch" is composed of three word forms--"lost," "his," and "watch"--all
of which may be described as constituents of the construction. Not all of them,
however, are its immediate constituents. The forms "his" and "watch" combine to make
the intermediate construction "his watch"; it is this intermediate unit that combines with
"lost" to form the larger phrase "lost his watch." The immediate constituents of "lost his
watch" are "lost" and "his watch"; the immediate constituents of "his watch" are the
forms "his" and "watch." By the constituent structure of a phrase or sentence is meant
the hierarchical organization of the smallest forms of which it is composed (its ultimate
constituents) into layers of successively more inclusive units. Viewed in this way, the
sentence "Poor John lost his watch" is more than simply a sequence of five word forms
associated with a particular intonation pattern. It is analyzable into the immediate
constituents "poor John" and "lost his watch," and each of these phrases is analyzable
into its own immediate constituents and so on, until, at the last stage of the analysis, the
ultimate constituents of the sentence are reached. The constituent structure of the whole
sentence is represented by means of a tree diagram.
Each form, whether it is simple or composite, belongs to a certain form class. Using
arbitrarily selected letters to denote the form classes of English, "poor" may be a
member of the form class A, "John" of the class B, "lost" of the class C, "his" of the
class D, and "watch" of the class E. Because "poor John" is syntactically equivalent to
(i.e., substitutable for) "John," it is to be classified as a member of A. So too, it can be
assumed, is "his watch." In the case of "lost his watch" there is a problem. There are
very many forms--including "lost," "ate," and "stole"--that can occur, as here, in
constructions with a member of B and can also occur alone; for example, "lost" is
substitutable for "stole the money," as "stole" is substitutable for either or for "lost his
watch." This being so, one might decide to classify constructions like "lost his watch"
as members of C. On the other hand, there are forms that--though they are substitutable
for "lost," "ate," "stole," and so on when these forms occur alone--cannot be used in
combination with a following member of B (cf. "died," "existed"); and there are forms
that, though they may be used in combination with a following member of B, cannot
occur alone (cf. "enjoyed"). The question is whether one respects the traditional
distinction between transitive and intransitive verb forms. It may be decided, then, that
"lost," "stole," "ate" and so forth belong to one class, C (the class to which "enjoyed"
belongs), when they occur "transitively" (i.e., with a following member of B as their
object) but to a different class, F (the class to which "died" belongs), when they occur
"intransitively." Finally, it can be said that the whole sentence "Poor John lost his
watch" is a member of the form class G. Thus the constituent structure not only of
"Poor John lost his watch" but of a whole set of English sentences can be represented
by means of the tree diagram given in the above figure. New sentences of the same type
can be constructed by substituting actual forms for the class labels.
Any construction that belongs to the same form class as at least one of its immediate
constituents is described as endocentric; the only endocentric construction in the model
sentence above is "poor John." All the other constructions, according to the analysis,
are exocentric. This is clear from the fact that the letters at the nodes above every
phrase other than the phrase A + B (i.e., "poor John," "old Harry," and so on) are
different from any of the letters at the ends of the lower branches connected directly to
these nodes. For example, the phrase D + E (i.e., "his watch," "the money," and so
forth) has immediately above it a node labelled B, rather than either D or E. Endocentric
constructions fall into two types: subordinating and coordinating. If attention is
confined, for simplicity, to constructions composed of no more than two immediate
constituents, it can be said that subordinating constructions are those in which only one
immediate constituent is of the same form class as the whole construction, whereas
coordinating constructions are those in which both constituents are of the same form
class as the whole construction. In a subordinating construction (e.g., "poor John"), the
constituent that is syntactically equivalent to the whole construction is described as the
head, and its partner is described as the modifier: thus, in "poor John," the form "John"
is the head, and "poor" is its modifier. An example of a coordinating construction is
"men and women," in which, it may be assumed, the immediate constituents are the
word "men" and the word "women," each of which is syntactically equivalent to "men
and women." (It is here implied that the conjunction "and" is not a constituent,
properly so called, but an element that, like the relative order of the constituents,
indicates the nature of the construction involved. Not all linguists have held this view.)
One reason for giving theoretical recognition to the notion of constituent is that it helps
to account for the ambiguity of certain constructions. A classic example is the phrase
"old men and women," which may be interpreted in two different ways according to
whether one associates "old" with "men and women" or just with "men." Under the first
of the two interpretations, the immediate constituents are "old" and "men and women";
under the second, they are "old men" and "women." The difference in meaning cannot
be attributed to any one of the ultimate constituents but results from a difference in the
way in which they are associated with one another. Ambiguity of this kind is referred to
as syntactic ambiguity. Not all syntactic ambiguity is satisfactorily accounted for in
terms of constituent structure.
4. Semantics
Bloomfield thought that semantics, or the study of meaning, was the weak point in the
scientific investigation of language and would necessarily remain so until the other
sciences whose task it was to describe the universe and man's place in it had advanced
beyond their present state. In his textbook Language (1933), he had himself adopted a
behaviouristic theory of meaning , defining the meaning of a linguistic form as "the
situation in which the speaker utters it and the response which it calls forth in the
hearer." Furthermore, he subscribed, in principle at least, to a physicalist thesis,
according to which all science should be modelled upon the so-called exact sciences and
all scientific knowledge should be reducible, ultimately, to statements made about the
properties of the physical world. The reason for his pessimism concerning the prospects
for the study of meaning was his feeling that it would be a long time before a complete
scientific description of the situations in which utterances were produced and the
responses they called forth in their hearers would be available. At the time that
Bloomfield was writing, physicalism was more widely held than it is today, and it was
perhaps reasonable for him to believe that linguistics should eschew mentalism and
concentrate upon the directly observable. As a result, for some 30 years after the
publication of Bloomfield's textbook, the study of meaning was almost wholly neglected
by his followers; most American linguists who received their training during this period
had no knowledge of, still less any interest in, the work being done elsewhere in
semantics.
The two most important developments evident in recent work in semantics are, first, the
application of the structural approach to the study of meaning and, second, a better
appreciation of the relationship between grammar and semantics. The second of these
developments will be treated in the following section on Transformational-generative
grammar . The first, structural semantics, goes back to the period preceding World War
II and is exemplified in a large number of publications, mainly by German scholars--
Jost Trier, Leo Weisgerber, and their collaborators.
The structural approach to semantics is best explained by contrasting it with the more
traditional "atomistic" approach, according to which the meaning of each word in the
language is described, in principle, independently of the meaning of all other words.
The structuralist takes the view that the meaning of a word is a function of the
relationships it contracts with other words in a particular lexical field, or subsystem,
and that it cannot be adequately described except in terms of these relationships. For
example, the colour terms in particular languages constitute a lexical field, and the
meaning of each term depends upon the place it occupies in the field. Although the
denotation of each of the words "green," "blue," and "yellow" in English is somewhat
imprecise at the boundaries, the position that each of them occupies relative to the other
terms in the system is fixed: "green" is between "blue" and "yellow," so that the phrases
"greenish yellow" or "yellowish green" and "bluish green" or "greenish blue" are used
to refer to the boundary areas. Knowing the meaning of the word "green" implies
knowing what cannot as well as what can be properly described as green (and knowing
of the borderline cases that they are borderline cases). Languages differ considerably as
to the number of basic colour terms that they recognize, and they draw boundaries
within the psychophysical continuum of colour at different places. Blue, green, yellow,
and so on do not exist as distinct colours in nature, waiting to be labelled differently, as
it were, by different languages; they come into existence, for the speakers of particular
languages, by virtue of the fact that those languages impose structure upon the
continuum of colour and assign to three of the areas thus recognized the words "blue,"
"green," "yellow."
The language of any society is an integral part of the culture of that society, and the
meanings recognized within the vocabulary of the language are learned by the child as
part of the process of acquiring the culture of the society in which he is brought up.
Many of the structural differences found in the vocabularies of different languages are
to be accounted for in terms of cultural differences. This is especially clear in the
vocabulary of kinship (to which a considerable amount of attention has been given by
anthropologists and linguists), but it holds true of many other semantic fields also. A
consequence of the structural differences that exist between the vocabularies of
different languages is that, in many instances, it is in principle impossible to translate
a sentence "literally" from one language to another.
1. Psycholinguistics
The term psycholinguistics was coined in the 1940s and came into more general use
after the publication of Charles E. Osgood and Thomas A. Sebeok's Psycholinguistics:
A Survey of Theory and Research Problems (1954), which reported the proceedings of a
seminar sponsored in the United States by the Social Science Research Council's
Committee on Linguistics and Psychology.
The boundary between linguistics (in the narrower sense of the term: see the
introduction of this article) and psycholinguistics is difficult, perhaps impossible, to
draw. So too is the boundary between psycholinguistics and psychology. What
characterizes psycholinguistics as it is practiced today as a more or less distinguishable
field of research is its concentration upon a certain set of topics connected with
language and its bringing to bear upon them the findings and theoretical principles of
both linguistics and psychology. The range of topics that would be generally held to fall
within the field of psycholinguistics nowadays is rather narrower, however, than that
covered in the survey by Osgood and Sebeok.
Language Acquisition
One of the topics most central to psycholinguistic research is the acquisition of
language by children. The term acquisition is preferred to "learning," because
"learning" tends to be used by psychologists in a narrowly technical sense, and many
psycholinguists believe that no psychological theory of learning, as currently
formulated, is capable of accounting for the process whereby children, in a relatively
short time, come to achieve a fluent control of their native language. Since the
beginning of the 1960s, research on language acquisition has been strongly influenced
by Chomsky's theory of generative grammar , and the main problem to which it has
addressed itself has been how it is possible for young children to infer the grammatical
rules underlying the speech they hear and then to use these rules for the construction of
utterances that they have never heard before. It is Chomsky's conviction, shared by a
number of psycholinguists, that children are born with a knowledge of the formal
principles that determine the grammatical structure of all languages, and that it is this
innate knowledge that explains the success and speed of language acquisition. Others
have argued that it is not grammatical competence as such that is innate but more
general cognitive principles and that the application of these to language utterances in
particular situations ultimately yields grammatical competence. Many recent works
have stressed that all children go through the same stages of language development
regardless of the language they are acquiring. It has also been asserted that the same
basic semantic categories and grammatical functions can be found in the earliest speech
of children in a number of different languages operating in quite different cultures in
various parts of the world.
Although Chomsky was careful to stress in his earliest writings that generative
grammar does not provide a model for the production or reception of language
utterances, there has been a good deal of psycholinguistic research directed toward
validating the psychological reality of the units and processes postulated by generative
grammarians in their descriptions of languages. Experimental work in the early 1960s
appeared to show that nonkernel sentences took longer to process than kernel sentences
and, even more interestingly, that the processing time increased proportionately with
the number of optional transformations involved. More recent work has cast doubt on
these findings, and most psycholinguists are now more cautious about using grammars
produced by linguists as models of language processing. Nevertheless, generative
grammar continues to be a valuable source of psycholinguistic experimentation, and the
formal properties of language, discovered or more adequately discussed by generative
grammarians than they have been by others, are generally recognized to have important
implications for the investigation of short-term and long-term memory and perceptual
strategies.
Speech perception
Another important area of psycholinguistic research that has been strongly influenced
by recent theoretical advances in linguistics and, more especially, by the development
of generative grammar is speech perception. It has long been realized that the
identification of speech sounds and of the word forms composed of them depends upon
the context in which they occur and upon the hearer's having mastered, usually as a
child, the appropriate phonological and grammatical system. Throughout the 1950s,
work on speech perception was dominated (as was psycholinguistics in general) by
information theory , according to which the occurrence of each sound in a word and
each word in an utterance is statistically determined by the preceding sounds and words.
Information theory is no longer as generally accepted as it was a few years ago, and
more recent research has shown that in speech perception the cues provided by the
acoustic input are interpreted, unconsciously and very rapidly, with reference not only
to the phonological structure of the language but also to the more abstract levels of
grammatical organization.
Other areas of psycholinguistics that should be briefly mentioned are the study of
aphasia and neurolinguistics. The term aphasia is used to refer to various kinds of
language disorders; recent work has sought to relate these, on the one hand, to
particular kinds of brain injury and, on the other, to psychological theories of the
storage and processing of different kinds of linguistic information. One linguist has put
forward the theory that the most basic distinctions in language are those that are
acquired first by children and are subsequently most resistant to disruption and loss in
aphasia. This, though not disproved, is still regarded as controversial. Two kinds of
aphasia are commonly distinguished. In motor aphasia the patient manifests difficulty in
the articulation of speech or in writing and may produce utterances with a simplified
grammatical structure, but his comprehension is not affected. In sensory aphasia the
patient's fluency may be unaffected, but his comprehension will be impaired and his
utterances will often be incoherent.
2. Sociolinguistics
Just as it is difficult to draw the boundary between linguistics and psycholinguistics and
between psychology and psycholinguistics, so it is difficult to distinguish sharply
between linguistics and sociolinguistics and between sociolinguistics and sociology.
There is the further difficulty that, because the boundary between sociology and
anthropology is also unclear, sociolinguistics merges with anthropological linguistics
(see below).
It is frequently suggested that there is a conflict between the sociolinguistic and the
psycholinguistic approach to the study of language, and it is certainly the case that two
distinct points of view are discernible in the literature at the present time. Chomsky has
described linguistics as a branch of cognitive psychology, and neither he nor most of his
followers have yet shown much interest in the relationship between language and its
social and cultural matrix. On the other hand, many modern schools of linguistics that
have been very much concerned with the role of language in society would tend to
relate linguistics more closely to sociology and anthropology than to any other
discipline. It would seem that the opposition between the psycholinguistic and the
sociolinguistic viewpoint must ultimately be transcended. The acquisition of language,
a topic of central concern to psycholinguists, is in part dependent upon and in part itself
determines the process of socialization; and the ability to use one's native language
correctly in the numerous socially prescribed situations of daily life is as characteristic
a feature of linguistic competence, in the broad sense of this term, as is the ability to
produce grammatical utterances. Some of the most recent work in sociolinguistics and
psycholinguistics has sought to widen the notion of linguistic competence in this way.
So far, however, sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics tend to be regarded as relatively
independent areas of research.
Social dimensions
Language is probably the most important instrument of socialization that exists in all
human societies and cultures. It is largely by means of language that one generation
passes on to the next its myths, laws, customs, and beliefs, and it is largely by means of
language that the child comes to appreciate the structure of the society into which he is
born and his own place in that society.
As a social force, language serves both to strengthen the links that bind the members of
the same group and to differentiate the members of one group from those of another. In
many countries there are social dialects as well as regional dialects, so that it is
possible to tell from a person's speech not only where he comes from but what class he
belongs to. In some instances social dialects can transcend regional dialects. This is
notable in England, where standard English in the so-called Received Pronunciation
(RP) can be heard from members of the upper class and upper middle class in all parts
of the country. The example of England is but an extreme manifestation of a tendency
that is found in all countries: there is less regional variation in the speech of the higher
than in that of the lower socioeconomic classes. In Britain and the United States and in
most of the other English-speaking countries, people will almost always use the same
dialect, regional or social, however formal or informal the situation and regardless of
whether their listeners speak the same dialect or not. (Relatively minor adjustments of
vocabulary may, however, be made: an Englishman speaking to an American may
employ the word "elevator" rather than "lift" and so on.) In many communities
throughout the world, it is common for members to speak two or more different dialects
and to use one dialect rather than another in particular social situations. This is
commonly referred to as code-switching. Code-switching may operate between two
distinct languages (e.g., Spanish and English among Puerto Ricans in New York) as
well as between two dialects of the same language. The term diglossia (rather than
bilingualism) is frequently used by sociolinguists to refer to this by no means
uncommon phenomenon.
In every situation, what one says and how one says it depends upon the nature of that
situation, the social role being played at the time, one's status vis-à-vis that of the
person addressed, one's attitude towards him, and so on. Language interacts with
nonverbal behaviour in social situations and serves to clarify and reinforce the various
roles and relationships important in a particular culture. Sociolinguistics is far from
having satisfactorily analyzed or even identified all the factors involved in the selection
of one language feature rather than another in particular situations. Among those that
have been discussed in relation to various languages are: the formality or informality of
the situation; power and solidarity relationships between the participants; differences of
sex, age, occupation, socioeconomic class, and educational background; and personal or
transactional situations. Terms such as style and register (as well as a variety of others)
are employed by many linguists to refer to the socially relevant dimensions of
phonological, grammatical, and lexical variation within one language. So far there is
very little agreement as to the precise application of such terms.
3. Other Relationships
Anthropological linguistics
Computational linguistics
Mathematical linguistics
Algebraic linguistics derives principally from the work of Noam Chomsky in the field
of generative grammar (see above Chomsky's grammar ). In his earliest work Chomsky
described three different models of grammar--finite-state grammar, phrase-structure
grammar, and transformational grammar--and compared them in terms of their capacity
to generate all and only the sentences of natural languages and, in doing so, to reflect in
an intuitively satisfying manner the underlying formal principles and processes. Other
models have also been investigated, and it has been shown that certain different models
are equivalent in generative power to phrase-structure grammars. The problem is to
construct a model that has all the formal properties required to handle the processes
found to be operative in languages but that prohibits rules that are not required for
linguistic description. It is an open question whether such a model, or one that
approximates more closely to this ideal than current models do, will be a
transformational grammar or a grammar of some radically different character.
Stylistics
The term stylistics is employed in a variety of senses by different linguists. In its widest
interpretation it is understood to deal with every kind of synchronic variation in
language other than what can be ascribed to differences of regional dialect. At its
narrowest interpretation it refers to the linguistic analysis of literary texts. One of the
aims of stylistics in this sense is to identify those features of a text that give it its
individual stamp and mark it as the work of a particular author. Another is to identify
the linguistic features of the text that produce a certain aesthetic response in the reader.
The aims of stylistics are the traditional aims of literary criticism. What distinguishes
stylistics as a branch of linguistics (for those who regard it as such) is the fact that it
draws upon the methodological and theoretical principles of modern linguistics.
Philosophy of language
Applied linguistics
In the sense in which the term applied linguistics is most commonly used nowadays it is
restricted to the application of linguistics to language teaching. Much of the recent
expansion of linguistics as a subject of teaching and research in the universities in many
countries has come about because of its value, actual and potential, for writing better
language textbooks and devising more efficient methods of teaching languages.
Linguistics is also widely held to be relevant to the training of teachers of the deaf and
speech therapists. Outside the field of education in the narrower sense, applied
linguistics (and, more particularly, applied sociolinguistics) has an important part to
play in what is called language planning; i.e., in advising governments, especially in
recent created states, as to which language or dialect should be made the official
language of the country and how it should be standardized.
English belongs to the Anglo-Frisian group within the western branch of the Germanic
languages, a subfamily of the Indo-European languages. It is related most closely to the
Frisian language, to a lesser extent to Netherlandic (Dutch-Flemish) and the Low
German (Plattdeutsch) dialects, and more distantly to Modern High German.
Vocabulary
The English vocabulary has increased greatly in more than 1500 years of development.
The most nearly complete dictionary of the language, the Oxford English Dictionary (13
vol., 1933), a revised edition of A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (10
vol., 1884-1933; supplements), contains 500,000 words. It has been estimated, however,
that the present English vocabulary consists of more than 1 million words, including
slang and dialect expressions and scientific and technical terms, many of which only
came into use after the middle of the 20th century. The English vocabulary is more
extensive than that of any other language in the world, although some other languages—
Chinese, for example—have a word-building capacity equal to that of English.
Extensive, constant borrowing from every major language, especially from Latin,
Greek, French, and the Scandinavian languages, and from numerous minor languages,
accounts for the great number of words in the English vocabulary. In addition, certain
processes have led to the creation of many new words as well as to the establishment of
patterns for further expansion. Among these processes are onomatopoeia, or the
imitation of natural sounds, which has created such words as burp and clink; affixation,
or the addition of prefixes and suffixes, either native, such as mis- and -ness, or
borrowed, such as ex- and -ist; the combination of parts of words, such as in brunch,
composed of parts of breakfast and lunch; the free formation of compounds, such as
bonehead and downpour; back formation, or the formation of words from previously
existing words, the forms of which suggest that the later words were derived from the
earlier ones—for example, to jell, formed from jelly; and functional change, or the use
of one part of speech as if it were another, for example, the noun shower used as a verb,
to shower. The processes that have probably added the largest number of words are
affixation and especially functional change, which is facilitated by the peculiarities of
English syntactical structure.
Spelling
English is said to have one of the most difficult spelling systems in the world. The
written representation of English is not phonetically exact for two main reasons. First,
the spelling of words has changed to a lesser extent than their sounds; for example, the
k in knife and the gh in right were formerly pronounced (see Middle English Period
below). Second, certain spelling conventions acquired from foreign sources have been
perpetuated; for example, during the 16th century the b was inserted in doubt (formerly
spelled doute) on the authority of dubitare, the Latin source of the word. Outstanding
examples of discrepancies between spelling and pronunciation are the six different
pronunciations of ough, as in bough, cough, thorough, thought, through, and rough; the
spellings are kept from a time when the gh represented a back fricative consonant that
was pronounced in these words. Other obvious discrepancies are the 14 different
spellings of the sh sound, for example, as in anxious, fission, fuchsia, and ocean.
Role of Phonemes
The main vowel phonemes in English include those represented by the italicized letters
in the following words: bit, beat, bet, bate, bat, but, botany, bought, boat, boot, book,
and burr. These phonemes are distinguished from one another by the position of
articulation in the mouth. Four vowel sounds, or complex nuclei, of English are
diphthongs formed by gliding from a low position of articulation to a higher one. These
diphthongs are the i of bite (a glide from o of botany to ea of beat), the ou of bout
(from o of botany to oo of boot), the oy of boy (from ou of bought to ea of beat), and
the u of butte (from ea of beat to oo of boot). The exact starting point and ending point
of the glide varies within the English-speaking world.
Inflection
Modern English is a relatively uninflected language. Nouns have separate endings only
in the possessive case and the plural number. Verbs have both a strong conjugation—
shown in older words—with internal vowel change, for example, sing, sang, sung, and a
weak conjugation with dental suffixes indicating past tense, as in play, played. The
latter is the predominant type. Only 66 verbs of the strong type are in use; newer verbs
invariably follow the weak pattern. The third person singular has an -s ending, as in
does. The structure of English verbs is thus fairly simple, compared with that of verbs
in similar languages, and includes only a few other endings, such as -ing or -en; but
verb structure does involve the use of numerous auxiliaries such as have, can, may, or
must. Monosyllabic and some disyllabic adjectives are inflected for degree of
comparison, such as larger or happiest; other adjectives express the same distinction by
compounding with more and most. Pronouns, the most heavily inflected parts of speech
in English, have objective case forms, such as me or her, in addition to the nominative
(I, he, we) and possessive forms (my, his, hers, our).
Parts of Speech
Although many grammarians still cling to the Greco-Latin tradition of dividing words
into eight parts of speech, efforts have recently been made to reclassify English words
on a different basis. The American linguist Charles Carpenter Fries, in his work The
Structure of English (1952), divided most English words into four great form classes
that generally correspond to the noun, verb, adjective, and adverb in the standard
classification. He classified 154 other words as function words, or words that connect
the main words of a sentence and show their relations to one another. In the standard
classification, many of these function words are considered pronouns, prepositions, and
conjunctions; others are considered adverbs, adjectives, or verbs.
Three main stages are usually recognized in the history of the development of the
English language. Old English, known formerly as Anglo-Saxon, dates from AD 449 to
1066 or 1100. Middle English dates from 1066 or 1100 to 1450 or 1500. Modern
English dates from about 1450 or 1500 and is subdivided into Early Modern English,
from about 1500 to 1660, and Late Modern English, from about 1660 to the present
time.
Old English, a variant of West Germanic, was spoken by certain Germanic peoples
(Angles, Saxons, and Jutes) of the regions comprising present-day southern Denmark
and northern Germany who invaded Britain in the 5th century AD; the Jutes were the
first to arrive, in 449, according to tradition. Settling in Britain, the invaders drove the
indigenous Celtic-speaking peoples, notably the Britons, to the north and west. As time
went on, Old English evolved further from the original Continental form, and regional
dialects developed. The four major dialects recognized in Old English are Kentish,
originally the dialect spoken by the Jutes; West Saxon, a branch of the dialect spoken
by the Saxons; and Northumbrian and Mercian, subdivisions of the dialects spoken by
the Angles. By the 9th century, partly through the influence of Alfred, king of the West
Saxons and the first ruler of all England, West Saxon became prevalent in prose
literature. A Mercian mixed dialect, however, was primarily used for the greatest
poetry, such as the anonymous 8th-century epic poem Beowulf and the contemporary
elegiac poems.
Old English was an inflected language characterized by strong and weak verbs; a dual
number for pronouns (for example, a form for “we two” as well as “we”), two different
declensions of adjectives, four declensions of nouns, and grammatical distinctions of
gender. Although rich in word-building possibilities, Old English was sparse in
vocabulary. It borrowed few proper nouns from the language of the conquered Celts,
primarily those such as Aberdeen (“mouth of the Dee”) and Inchcape (“island cape”)
that describe geographical features. Scholars believe that ten common nouns in Old
English are of Celtic origin; among these are bannock, cart, down, and mattock.
Although other Celtic words not preserved in literature may have been in use during the
Old English period, most Modern English words of Celtic origin, that is, those derived
from Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, or Irish, are comparatively recent borrowings.
The number of Latin words, many of them derived from the Greek, that were introduced
during the Old English period has been estimated at 140. Typical of these words are
altar, mass, priest, psalm, temple, kitchen, palm, and pear. A few were probably
introduced through the Celtic; others were brought to Britain by the Germanic invaders,
who previously had come into contact with Roman culture. By far the largest number of
Latin words was introduced as a result of the spread of Christianity. Such words
included not only ecclesiastical terms but many others of less specialized significance.
About 40 Scandinavian (Old Norse) words were introduced into Old English by the
Norsemen, or Vikings, who invaded Britain periodically from the late 8th century on.
Introduced first were words pertaining to the sea and battle, but shortly after the initial
invasions other words used in the Scandinavian social and administrative system—for
example, the word law—entered the language, as well as the verb form are and such
widely used words as take, cut, both, ill, and ugly.
At the beginning of the Middle English period, which dates from the Norman Conquest
of 1066, the language was still inflectional; at the end of the period the relationship
between the elements of the sentence depended basically on word order. As early as
1200 the three or four grammatical case forms of nouns in the singular had been
reduced to two, and to denote the plural the noun ending -es had been adopted.
The declension of the noun was simplified further by dropping the final n from five
cases of the fourth, or weak, declension; by neutralizing all vowel endings to e
(sounded like the a in Modern English sofa), and by extending the masculine,
nominative, and accusative plural ending -as, later neutralized also to -es, to other
declensions and other cases. Only one example of a weak plural ending, oxen, survives
in Modern English; kine and brethren are later formations. Several representatives of
the Old English modification of the root vowel in the plural, such as man, men, and
foot, feet, survive also.
With the leveling of inflections, the distinctions of grammatical gender in English were
replaced by those of natural gender. During this period the dual number fell into disuse,
and the dative and accusative of pronouns were reduced to a common form.
Furthermore, the Scandinavian they, them were substituted for the original hie, hem of
the third person plural, and who, which, and that acquired their present relative
functions. The conjugation of verbs was simplified by the omission of endings and by
the use of a common form for the singular and plural of the past tense of strong verbs.
In the early period of Middle English, a number of utilitarian words, such as egg, sky,
sister, window, and get, came into the language from Old Norse. The Normans brought
other additions to the vocabulary. Before 1250 about 900 new words had appeared in
English, mainly words, such as baron, noble, and feast, that the Anglo-Saxon lower
classes required in their dealings with the Norman-French nobility. Eventually the
Norman nobility and clergy, although they had learned English, introduced from the
French words pertaining to the government, the church, the army, and the fashions of
the court, in addition to others proper to the arts, scholarship, and medicine.
Midland, the dialect of Middle English derived from the Mercian dialect of Old English,
became important during the 14th century, when the counties in which it was spoken
developed into centers of university, economic, and courtly life. East Midland, one of
the subdivisions of Midland, had by that time become the speech of the entire
metropolitan area of the capital, London, and probably had spread south of the Thames
River into Kent and Surrey. The influence of East Midland was strengthened by its use
in the government offices of London, by its literary dissemination in the works of the
14th-century poets Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and John Lydgate, and ultimately by
its adoption for printed works by William Caxton. These and other circumstances
gradually contributed to the direct development of the East Midland dialect into the
Modern English language.
During the period of this linguistic transformation the other Middle English dialects
continued to exist, and dialects descending from them are still spoken in the 20th
century. Lowland Scottish, for example, is a development of the Northern dialect.
The transition from Middle English to Modern English was marked by a major change
in the pronunciation of vowels during the 15th and 16th centuries. This change, termed
the Great Vowel Shift by the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen, consisted of a shift in the
articulation of vowels with respect to the positions assumed by the tongue and the lips.
The Great Vowel Shift changed the pronunciation of 18 of the 20 distinctive vowels and
diphthongs of Middle English. Spelling, however, remained unchanged and was
preserved from then on as a result of the advent of printing in England about 1475,
during the shift. (In general, Middle English orthography was much more phonetic than
Modern English; all consonants, for example, were pronounced, whereas now letters
such as the l preserved in walking are silent).
All long vowels, with the exception of /ì/ (pronounced in Middle English somewhat like
ee in need) and /u/ (pronounced in Middle English like oo in food), came to be
pronounced with the jaw position one degree higher. Pronounced previously in the
highest possible position, the/ì/ became diphthongized to “ah-ee,” and the/u/ to “ee-oo.”
The Great Vowel Shift, which is still in progress, caused the pronunciation in English
of the letters a, e, i, o, and u to differ from that used in most other languages of Western
Europe. The approximate date when words were borrowed from other languages can be
ascertained by means of these and other sound changes. Thus it is known that the old
French word dame was borrowed before the shift, since its vowel shifted with the
Middle English /a/ from a pronunciation like that of the vowel in calm to that of the
vowel in name.
Modern English Period
In the early part of the Modern English period the vocabulary was enlarged by the
widespread use of one part of speech for another and by increased borrowings from
other languages. The revival of interest in Latin and Greek during the Renaissance
brought new words into English from those languages. Other words were introduced by
English travelers and merchants after their return from journeys on the Continent. From
Italian came cameo, stanza, and violin; from Spanish and Portuguese, alligator,
peccadillo, and sombrero. During its development, Modern English borrowed words
from more than 50 different languages.
In the late 17th century and during the 18th century, certain important grammatical
changes occurred. The formal rules of English grammar were established during that
period. The pronoun its came into use, replacing the genitive form his, which was the
only form used by the translators of the King James Bible (1611). The progressive
tenses developed from the use of the participle as a noun preceded by the preposition
on; the preposition gradually weakened to a and finally disappeared. Thereafter only the
simple ing form of the verb remained in use. After the 18th century this process of
development culminated in the creation of the progressive passive form, for example,
“The job is being done.”
The most important development begun during this period and continued without
interruption throughout the 19th and 20th centuries concerned vocabulary. As a result of
colonial expansion, notably in North America but also in other areas of the world, many
new words entered the English language. From the indigenous peoples of North
America, the words raccoon and wigwam were borrowed; from Peru, llama and quinine;
from the West Indies, barbecue and cannibal; from Africa, chimpanzee and zebra; from
India, bandanna, curry, and punch; and from Australia, kangaroo and boomerang. In
addition, thousands of scientific terms were developed to denote new concepts,
discoveries, and inventions. Many of these terms, such as neutron, penicillin, and
supersonic, were formed from Greek and Latin roots; others were borrowed from
modern languages, as with blitzkrieg from German and sputnik from Russian.
20th-Century English
Basic English
A simplified form of the English language based on 850 key words was developed in
the late 1920s by the English psychologist Charles Kay Ogden and publicized by the
English educator I. A. Richards. Known as Basic English, it was used mainly to teach
English to non-English-speaking persons and promoted as an international language.
The complexities of English spelling and grammar, however, were major hindrances to
the adoption of Basic English as a second language.
The fundamental principle of Basic English was that any idea, however complex, may
be reduced to simple units of thought and expressed clearly by a limited number of
everyday words. The 850-word primary vocabulary was composed of 600 nouns
(representing things or events), 150 adjectives (for qualities and properties), and 100
general “operational” words, mainly verbs and prepositions. Almost all the words were
in common use in English-speaking countries; more than 60 percent were one-syllable
words. The abbreviated vocabulary was created in part by eliminating numerous
synonyms and by extending the use of 18 “basic” verbs, such as make, get, do, have,
and be. These verbs were generally combined with prepositions, such as up, among,
under, in, and forward. For example, a Basic English student would use the expression
“go up” instead of “ascend.”
Pidgin English
English also enters into a number of simplified languages that arose among non-
English-speaking peoples. Pidgin English (see Pidgin), spoken in the Melanesian
islands, New Guinea, Australia, the Philippines, and Hawaii and on the Asian shores of
the Pacific Ocean, developed as a means of communication between Chinese and
English traders. The Chinese adopted many English words and a few indispensable non-
English words and created a means of discourse, using a simple grammatical apparatus.
Bêche-de-Mer, a pidgin spoken in the southern and western Pacific islands, is
predominantly English in structure, although it includes many Polynesian words.
Chinook Jargon, used as a lingua franca by the Native Americans, French, and English
on the North American Pacific coast, contains English, French, and Native American
words; its grammatical structure is based on that of the Chinook language. The use of
pidgin is growing in Africa, notably in Cameroon, Sierra Leone, and East Africa.
The influence of the mass media appears likely to result in standardized pronunciation,
more uniform spelling, and eventually a spelling closer to actual pronunciation. Despite
the likelihood of such standardization, a unique feature of the English language remains
its tendency to grow and change. Despite the warnings of linguistic purists, new words
are constantly being coined and usages modified to express new concepts. Its
vocabulary is constantly enriched by linguistic borrowings, particularly by cross-
fertilizations from American English. Because it is capable of infinite possibilities of
communication, the English language has become the chief international language.
3. American/Canadian English
It differs from English spoken elsewhere in the world not so much in particulars as in
the total configuration. That is, the dialects of what is termed Standard American
English share enough characteristics so that the language as a whole can be
distinguished from Received Standard (British) English or, for example, Australian
English.
The differences in pronunciation and cadence between spoken American English and
other varieties of the language are easily discernible. In the written form, however,
despite minor differences in vocabulary, spelling, and syntax, and apart from context, it
is often difficult to determine whether a work was written in England, the United States,
or any other part of the English-speaking world.
American lexicographer Noah Webster was among the first to recognize the growing
divergence of American and British usages. His work An American Dictionary of the
English Language (1828) marked this difference with its inclusion of many new
American words, indigenous meanings attached to old words, changes in pronunciation,
and a series of spelling reforms that he devised (-er instead of British -re, -or to
replace-our, check instead of cheque). Webster went so far as to predict that the
American language would one day become a distinct language. Some later
commentators, notably H. L. Mencken, compiler of The American Language (3
volumes, 1936-1948), have also argued that it is a separate language, but most
authorities today agree that it is a dialect of British English.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the study of American English was concerned
mainly with identifying Americanisms and giving the etymologies of Americanisms in
the vocabulary: words borrowed from Native American languages (mugwump, caucus);
words retained after having been given up in Great Britain (bug, to mean insects in
general rather than bed bug specifically, as in Great Britain); or words that developed a
new significance in the New World (corn, to designate what the British call maize,
rather than grain in general). Large numbers of American terms (elevator, truck, hood
[of an automobile], windshield, garbage collector, drugstore) were shown to differ from
their British counterparts (respectively: lift, lorry, bonnet, windscreen, dustman,
chemist's). Such lexical differences between Standard American and British English
still exist, but, as a result of modern communications, speakers of English everywhere
have no trouble in understanding one another. More recently, linguistic researchers have
turned their attention to the study of variation patterns in American English and to the
social and historical sources of these patterns.
Regional Dialects
Regionally oriented research before 1940 distinguished three main regional dialects of
Standard American English, each of which has several subdialects. The Northern (or
New England) dialect is spoken in New England and New York State; one of its
subdialects is the “New Yorkese” of New York City. The Midland (or General
American) dialect is heard along the coast from New Jersey to Delaware, with variants
spoken in an area bounded by the Upper Ohio Valley, West Virginia, eastern Kentucky,
and eastern Tennessee. The Southern dialect, with its varieties, is spoken from
Delaware to South Carolina. From their respective focal points these dialects, according
to this theory, have spread and mingled across the rest of the country.
Social/Cultural Dialects
Social/cultural dialects vary both the vocabulary and grammar of Standard American
English and are not always intelligible to speakers of the standard language. The most
distinctive variety of American English, in terms of vocabulary and grammar, is the
social/cultural dialect known as Gullah, actually a contact language, or creole, spoken
by blacks in the Georgia-South Carolina low country but also as far away as southeast
Texas. Gullah, combining 17th- and 18th-century Black English and several West
African languages, has given to American English such words as goober (peanut),
gumbo (okra), and voodoo. It is the dialect used in the novel Porgy (1925) by American
writer DuBose Heyward. “Me beena shum” (I was seeing him/her/it) is barely
intelligible to a speaker of Standard American English, and almost all Gullah speakers
shift to more standard usage when conversing with outsiders.
Black English
Until the 19th century, most blacks throughout the country spoke a creole similar to
Gullah and West Indian English. Change in the direction of Standard American English
vocabulary and syntax, particularly in the 20th century, has been rapid but never
complete. The Black English of the inner cities characteristically retains such locutions
as “He busy” (He is busy) as opposed to “He be busy” (He is busy indefinitely) and
“She been said that” to express action markedly in the past (she had said that). In the
1960s Black English became a topic of linguistic controversy in educational circles
because of its supposed deficiencies and ultimately was the subject of legislative action
under the Bilingual Education Act (1968). Nevertheless, Black English has made
contributions to American English vocabulary, especially through jazz—from the word
jazz itself to such terms as nitty-gritty and uptight.
English commentators in the 18th century noted the “astounding uniformity” of the
language spoken in the American colonies, excepting the language spoken by the slaves.
(Subvarieties of English, however, were spoken by Native Americans and other non-
British groups.) The reason for this uniformity is that the first colonists came not as
regional but as social groups from all parts of England, so that dialect leveling was the
dominant force.
Grammatical Formality
Regional Variations
In earlier times, the dialect of New England, with its British form of pronunciation (ah
for a in path, dance; loss of the r sound in barn, park), was considered prestigious, but
such pronunciations failed to inspire nationwide emulation. Indeed, no single regional
characteristic has ever been able to dominate the language. (One of the reasons that
some linguists define Black English as a language rather than a dialect is that its
vocabulary, pronunciation, and syntax are similar in all parts of the country, rural and
urban.)
Today, the concept of so-called Network Standard, promoted by radio and television,
provokes some argument from dialectologists, who champion diversity and richness of
speech, but regional variations have by no means been obliterated. The Midland (or
General American) distinct r sound persists (car), and even educated speakers in the
South do not differentiate pen from pin.
The uniformity of the English spoken by the British colonists until about 1780 was soon
disrupted by non-English influences. First, many Native American words were taken
over directly to describe indigenous flora and fauna (sassafras, raccoon), food
(hominy), ceremonies (powwow), and, of course, geographic names (Massachusetts,
Susquehanna). Phrasal compounds, translated or adapted from the Native American,
were also added to English: warpath, peace pipe, bury the hatchet, fire water. Other
borrowings came in time from the Dutch (boss, poppycock, spook), German (liverwurst,
noodle, cole slaw, semester), French (levee, chowder, prairie), Spanish (hoosegow,
from juzgado, “courtroom”; mesa, ranch[o]; tortilla), and Finnish (sauna).
4. Other Englishes
Unlike Canada, Australia has few speakers of European languages other than English
within its borders. There are still many Aboriginal languages, though they are spoken
by only a few hundred speakers each and their continued existence is threatened. More
than 80 percent of the population is British. By the mid-20th century, with rapid decline
of its Aboriginal tongues, English was without rivals in Australia.
During colonial times the new settlers had to find names for a fauna and flora (e.g.,
banksia, iron bark, whee whee) different from anything previously known to them: trees
that shed bark instead of leaves and cherries with external stones. The words brush,
bush, creek, paddock, and scrub acquired wider senses, whereas the terms brook, dale,
field, forest, and meadow were seldom used. A creek leading out of a river and entering
it again downstream was called an anastomizing branch (a term from anatomy), or an
anabranch, whereas a creek coming to a dead end was called by its native name, a
billabong. The giant kingfisher with its raucous bray was long referred to as a laughing
jackass, later as a bushman's clock, but now it is a kookaburra. Cattle so intractable that
only roping could control them were said to be ropable, a term now used as a synonym
for "angry" or "extremely annoyed."
A deadbeat was a penniless "sundowner" at the very end of his tether, and a no-hoper
was an incompetent fellow, hopeless and helpless. An offsider (strictly, the offside
driver of a bullock team) was any assistant or partner. A rouseabout was first an odd-
job man on a sheep station and then any kind of handyman. He was, in fact, the "down-
under" counterpart of the wharf labourer, or roustabout, on the Mississippi River. Both
words originated in Cornwall, and many other terms, now exclusively Australian, came
ultimately from British dialects. "Dinkum," for instance, meaning "true, authentic,
genuine," echoed the "fair dinkum," or fair deal, of Lincolnshire dialect. "Fossicking"
about for surface gold, and then rummaging about in general, perpetuated the term
fossick ("to elicit information, ferret out the facts") from the Cornish dialect of English.
To "barrack," or jeer noisily, recalled Irish "barrack" ("to brag, boast"), whereas
"skerrick" in the phrase "not a skerrick left" was obviously identical with the "skerrick"
meaning "small fragment, particle," still heard in English dialects from Westmorland to
Hampshire.
Some Australian English terms came from Aboriginal speech: the words boomerang,
corroboree (warlike dance and then any large and noisy gathering), dingo (reddish-
brown half-domesticated dog), galah (cockatoo), gunyah (bush hut), kangaroo, karri
(dark-red eucalyptus tree), nonda (rosaceous tree yielding edible fruit), pokutukawa
(evergreen bearing brilliant blossom), wallaby (small marsupial), and wallaroo (large
rock kangaroo). Australian English has slower rhythms and flatter intonations than RP.
Although there is remarkably little regional variation throughout the entire continent,
there is significant social variation. The neutral vowel / / (as the a in "sofa") is
frequently used, as in London Cockney: "arches" and "archers" are both pronounced [a:t
z], and the pronunciations of RP "day" and "go" are, respectively, [d i] and [g u].
Although New Zealand lies over 1,000 miles away, much of the English spoken there is
similar to that of Australia. The blanket term Austral English is sometimes used to
cover the language of the whole of Australasia, or Southern Asia, but this term is far
from popular with New Zealanders because it makes no reference to New Zealand and
gives all the prominence, so they feel, to Australia. Between North and South Islands
there are observable differences. For one thing, Maori, which is still a living language
(related to Tahitian, Hawaiian, and the other Austronesian [Malayo-Polynesian]
languages), has a greater number of speakers and more influence in North Island.
In 1950 India became a federal republic within the Commonwealth of Nations, and
Hindi was declared the first national language. English, it was stated, would "continue
to be used for all official purposes until 1965." In 1967, however, by the terms of the
English Language Amendment Bill, English was proclaimed "an alternative official or
associate language with Hindi until such time as all non-Hindi states had agreed to its
being dropped." English is therefore acknowledged to be indispensable. It is the only
practicable means of day-to-day communication between the central government at New
Delhi and states with non-Hindi speaking populations, especially with the Deccan, or
"South," where millions speak Dravidian (non-Indo-European) languages--Telugu,
Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam. English is widely used in business, and, although its
use as a medium in higher education is decreasing, it remains the principal language of
scientific research.
In 1956 Pakistan became an autonomous republic comprising two states, East and West.
Bengali and Urdu were made the national languages of East and West Pakistan,
respectively, but English was adopted as a third official language and functioned as the
medium of interstate communication. (In 1971 East Pakistan broke away from its
western partner and became the independent state of Bangladesh.)
African English
Africa is the most multilingual area in the world, if people are measured against
languages. Upon a large number of indigenous languages rests a slowly changing
superstructure of world languages (Arabic, English, French, and Portuguese). The
problems of language are everywhere linked with political, social, economic, and
educational factors.
The Republic of South Africa , the oldest British settlement in the continent, resembles
Canada in having two recognized European languages within its borders: English and
Afrikaans, or Cape Dutch. Both British and Dutch traders followed in the wake of 15th-
century Portuguese explorers and have lived in widely varying war-and-peace
relationships ever since. Although the Union of South Africa, comprising Cape
Province, Transvaal, Natal, and Orange Free State, was for more than a half century
(1910-61) a member of the British Empire and Commonwealth, its four prime ministers
(Botha, Smuts, Hertzog, and Malan) were all Dutchmen. In the early 1980s Afrikaners
outnumbered Britishers by three to two. The Afrikaans language began to diverge
seriously from European Dutch in the late 18th century and has gradually come to be
recognized as a separate language. Although the English spoken in South Africa differs
in some respects from standard British English, its speakers do not regard the language
as a separate one. They have naturally come to use many Afrikanerisms, such as kloof,
kopje, krans, veld, and vlei, to denote features of the landscape and occasionally employ
African names to designate local animals and plants. The words trek and commando,
notorious in South African history, have acquired almost worldwide currency.
The West African states of The Gambia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Nigeria, independent
members of the Commonwealth, have English as their official language. They are all
multilingual. The official language of Liberia is also English, although its tribal
communities constitute four different linguistic groups. Its leading citizens regard
themselves as Americo-Liberians, being descendants of those freed blacks whose first
contingents arrived in West Africa in 1822. South of the Sahara indigenous languages
are extending their domains and are competing healthily and vigorously with French
and English.
stimates of the number of languages spoken in the world today vary depending on
where the dividing line between language and dialect is drawn. For instance, linguists
E disagree over whether Chinese should be considered a single language because of its
speakers' shared cultural and literary tradition, or whether it should be considered
several different languages because of the mutual unintelligibility of, for example, the
Mandarin spoken in Beijing and the Cantonese spoken in Hong Kong. If mutual
intelligibility is the basic criterion, current estimates indicate that there are about 6000
languages spoken in the world today. However, many languages with a smaller number
of speakers are in danger of being replaced by languages with large numbers of
speakers. In fact, some scholars believe that perhaps 90 percent of the languages spoken
in the 1990s will be extinct or doomed to extinction by the end of the 21st century. The
12 most widely spoken languages, with approximate numbers of native speakers, are as
follows: Mandarin Chinese, 836 million; Hindi, 333 million; Spanish, 332 million;
English, 322 million; Bengali, 189 million; Arabic, 186 million; Russian, 170 million;
Portuguese, 170 million; Japanese, 125 million; German, 98 million; French, 72
million; Malay, 50 million. If second-language speakers are included in these figures,
English is the second most widely spoken language, with 418 million speakers.
1. Language Classification
Linguists classify languages using two main classification systems: typological and
genetic. A typological classification system organizes languages according to the
similarities and differences in their structures. Languages that share the same structure
belong to the same type, while languages with different structures belong to different
types. For example, despite the great differences between the two languages in other
respects, Mandarin Chinese and English belong to the same type, grouped by word-
order typology. Both languages have a basic word order of subject-verb-object.
A genetic classification of languages divides them into families on the basis of their
historical development: A group of languages that descend historically from the same
common ancestor form a language family. For example, the Romance languages form a
language family because they all descended from the Latin language. Latin, in turn,
belongs to a larger language family, Indo-European, the ancestor language of which is
called Proto-Indo-European. Some genetic groupings are universally accepted.
However, because documents attesting to the form of most ancestor languages,
including Proto-Indo-European, have not survived, much controversy surrounds the
more wide-ranging genetic groupings. A conservative survey of the world's language
families follows.
The Indo-European languages are the most widely spoken languages in Europe, and
they also extend into western and southern Asia. The family consists of a number of
subfamilies or branches (groups of languages that descended from a common ancestor,
which in turn is a member of a larger group of languages that descended from a
common ancestor). Most of the people in northwestern Europe speak Germanic
languages, which include English, German, and Dutch as well as the Scandinavian
languages, such as Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. The Celtic languages, such as
Welsh and Gaelic, once covered a large part of Europe but are now restricted to its
western fringes. The Romance languages, all descended from Latin, are the only
survivors of a somewhat more extensive family, Italic, which includes, in addition to
Latin, a number of now extinct languages of Italy. Languages of the Baltic and Slavic
(Slavonic) branches are closely related. Only two of the Baltic languages survive:
Lithuanian and Latvian. The Slavic languages, which cover much of eastern and central
Europe, include Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian. In
the Balkan Peninsula, two branches of Indo-European exist that each consist of a single
language—namely the Greek language and the Albanian language. Farther east, in
Caucasia, the Armenian language constitutes another single-language branch of Indo-
European.
The other main surviving branch of the Indo-European family is Indo-Iranian. It has two
subbranches, Iranian and Indo-Aryan (Indic). Iranian languages are spoken mainly in
southwestern Asia and include Persian, Pashto (spoken in Afghanistan), and Kurdish.
Indo-Aryan languages are spoken in the northern part of South Asia (Pakistan, northern
India, Nepal, and Bangladesh) and also in most of Sri Lanka (see Indian Languages).
This branch includes Hindi-Urdu, Bengali, Nepali, and Sinhalese (the language spoken
by the majority of people in Sri Lanka). Historical documents attest to other, now
extinct, branches of Indo-European, such as the Anatolian languages, which were once
spoken in what is now Turkey and include the ancient Hittite language.
The Uralic languages constitute the other main language family of Europe. They are
spoken mostly in the northeastern part of the continent, spilling over into northwestern
Asia; one language, Hungarian, is spoken in central Europe. Most Uralic languages
belong to the family's Finno-Ugric branch. This branch includes (in addition to
Hungarian) Finnish, Estonian, and Saami. Europe also has one language isolate (a
language not known to be related to any other language): Basque, which is spoken in
the Pyrenees. At the boundary between southeastern Europe and Asia lie the Caucasus
Mountains. Since ancient times the region has contained a large number of languages,
including two groups of languages that have not been definitively related to any other
language families. The South Caucasian, or Kartvelian, languages are spoken in Georgia
and include the Georgian language. The North Caucasian languages fall into North-
West Caucasian, North-Central Caucasian, and North-East Caucasian subgroups. The
genetic relation of North-West Caucasian to the other subgroups is not universally
agreed upon. The North-West Caucasian languages include Abkhaz, the North-Central
Caucasian languages include Chechen, and the North-East Caucasian languages include
the Avar language.
South Asia contains, in addition to the Indo-Aryan branch of Indo-European, two other
large language families. The Dravidian family is dominant in southern India and
includes Tamil and Telugu. The Munda languages represent the Austro-Asiatic language
family in India and contain many languages, each with relatively small numbers of
speakers. The Austro-Asiatic family also spreads into Southeast Asia, where it includes
the Khmer (Cambodian) and Vietnamese languages. South Asia contains at least one
language isolate, Burushaski, spoken in a remote part of northern Pakistan.
A number of linguists believe that many of the languages of central, northern, and
eastern Asia form a single Altaic language family, although others consider Turkic,
Tungusic, and Mongolic to be separate, unrelated language families. The Turkic
languages include Turkish and a number of languages of the former Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics (USSR), such as Uzbek and Tatar. The Tungusic languages are
spoken mainly by small population groups in Siberia and Manchuria. This family
includes the nearly extinct Manchu language. The main language of the Mongolic
family is Mongolian. Some linguists also assign Korean and Japanese to the Altaic
family, although others regard these languages as isolates. In northern Asia there are a
number of languages that appear either to form small, independent families or to be
language isolates, such as the Chukotko-Kamchatkan language family of the Chukot and
Kamchatka peninsulas in the far east of Russia. These languages are often referred to
collectively as Paleo-Siberian (Paleo-Asiatic), but this is a geographic, not a genetic,
grouping.
The Sino-Tibetan language family covers not only most of China, but also much of the
Himalayas and parts of Southeast Asia. The family's major languages are Chinese,
Tibetan, and Myanmar. The Tai languages constitute another important language family
of Southeast Asia. They are spoken in Thailand, Laos, and southern China and include
the Thai language. The Miao-Yao, or Hmong-Mien, languages are spoken in isolated
areas of southern China and northern Southeast Asia. The Austronesian languages,
formerly called Malayo-Polynesian, cover the Malay Peninsula and most islands to the
southeast of Asia and are spoken as far west as Madagascar and throughout the Pacific
islands as far east as Easter Island. The Austronesian languages include Malay (called
Bahasa Malaysia in Malaysia, and Bahasa Indonesia in Indonesia), Javanese, Hawaiian,
and Maori (the language of the aboriginal people of New Zealand).
Although the inhabitants of some of the coastal areas and offshore islands of New
Guinea speak Austronesian languages, most of the main island's inhabitants, as well as
some inhabitants of nearby islands, speak languages unrelated to Austronesian.
Linguists collectively refer to these languages as Papuan languages, although this is a
geographical term covering about 60 different language families. The languages of the
Australian Aborigines constitute another unrelated group, and it is debatable whether all
Australian languages form a single family.
The languages of Africa may belong to as few as four families: Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-
Saharan, Niger-Congo, and Khoisan, although the genetic unity of Nilo-Saharan and
Khoisan is still disputed. Afro-Asiatic languages occupy most of North Africa and also
large parts of southwestern Asia. The family consists of several branches. The Semitic
branch includes Arabic, Hebrew, and many languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea, including
Amharic, the dominant language of Ethiopia. The Chadic branch, spoken mainly in
northern Nigeria and adjacent areas, includes Hausa, one of the two most widely spoken
languages of sub-Saharan Africa (the other being Swahili). Other subfamilies of Afro-
Asiatic are Berber, Cushitic, and the single-language branch Egyptian, which contains
the now-extinct language of the ancient Egyptians.
The Niger-Congo family covers most of sub-Saharan Africa and includes such widely
spoken West African languages as Yoruba and Fulani, as well as the Bantu languages of
eastern and southern Africa, which include Swahili and Zulu. The Nilo-Saharan
languages are spoken mainly in eastern Africa, in an area between those covered by the
Afro-Asiatic and the Niger-Congo languages. The best-known Nilo-Saharan language is
Masai, spoken by the Masai people in Kenya and Tanzania. The Khoisan languages are
spoken in the southwestern corner of Africa and include the Nama language (formerly
called Hottentot).
Some linguists group all indigenous languages of the Americas into just three families,
while most separate them into a large number of families and isolates. Well-established
families include Eskimo-Aleut. The family stretches from the eastern edge of Siberia to
the Aleutian Islands, and across Alaska and northern Canada to Greenland, where one
variety of the Inuit (Eskimo) language, Greenlandic, is an official language. The Na-
Dené languages, the main branch of which comprises the Athabaskan languages,
occupies much of northwestern North America. The Athabaskan languages also include,
however, a group of languages in the southwestern United States, one of which is
Navajo. Languages of the Algonquian and Iroquoian families constitute the major
indigenous languages of northeastern North America, while the Siouan family is one of
the main families of central North America.
The Uto-Aztecan family extends from the southwestern United States into Central
America and includes Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec civilization and its modern
descendants. The Mayan languages are spoken mainly in southern Mexico and
Guatemala. Major language families of South America include Carib and Arawak in the
north, and Macro-Gê and Tupian in the east. Guaraní, recognized as a national language
in Paraguay alongside the official language, Spanish, is an important member of the
Tupian family. In the Andes Mountains region, the dominant indigenous languages are
Quechua and Aymara; the genetic relation of these languages to each other and to other
languages remains controversial.
Individual pidgin and creole languages pose a particular problem for genetic
classification because the vocabulary and grammar of each comes from different
sources. Consequently, many linguists do not try to classify them genetically. Pidgin
and creole languages are found in many parts of the world, but there are particular
concentrations in the Caribbean, West Africa, and the islands of the Indian Ocean and
the South Pacific. English-based creoles such as Jamaican Creole and Guyanese Creole,
and French-based creoles such as Haitian Creole, can be found in the Caribbean.
English-based creoles are widespread in West Africa. About 10 percent of the
population of Sierra Leone speaks Krio as a native language, and an additional 85
percent speaks it as a second language. The creoles of the Indian Ocean islands, such as
Mauritius, are French-based. An English-based pidgin, Tok Pisin, is spoken by more
than 2 million people in Papua New Guinea, making it the most widely spoken auxiliary
language of that country. The inhabitants of the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu speak
similar varieties of Tok Pisin, called Pijin and Bislama, respectively.
2. International Languages
From time to time different natural languages have been used as universal tongues. As a
result of conquest or colonialism, subjugated nations have been forced to abandon their
own languages or have gradually adopted the language of the conqueror; conversely,
occupying forces have often gradually assimilated the languages of the conquered, as
was the case of the Normans in England. In other cases, peoples neighboring on a
commercially, culturally, or politically preeminent nation have voluntarily, although
usually only partly, adopted the language of that nation as auxiliary to their own. By
such means the Latin language came closest of all native languages to becoming a truly
universal tongue. Similarly, French from the 18th to the 19th century and English in the
20th century enjoyed relative universality in diplomatic, scientific, and commercial
circles.
Other attempts at universal means of communication have been made by the use of a
lingua franca or pidgin, or by simplifying existing languages; an example of the last is
Basic English, devised between 1925 and 1930. The use of living native languages has
generally, however, proved to be impracticable because of difficulties in learning them
or because of nationalistic prejudices.
For these reasons, many attempts have been made to construct artificial universal
languages, based on elements of natural languages with simplifications of grammar and
spelling. Volapük, devised in 1880 by the German bishop Johann Martin Schleyer, and
Esperanto, invented in 1887 by a Polish physician, Dr. Ludwik L. Zamenhof, were both
based on a combination of Latin, the Romance languages, and the Germanic languages.
Volapük eventually proved too difficult to learn and to use; Esperanto is still the most
widely spoken of the artificial languages. Interlingua, created in 1951 by the
International Auxiliary Language Association, is derived from English and the Romance
languages; it has primarily been used in international scientific and technological
journals, thus eliminating the need for costly multiple translations.
International languages include both existing languages that have become international
means of communication and languages artificially constructed to serve this purpose.
The most famous and widespread artificial international language is Esperanto;
however, the most widespread international languages are not artificial. In medieval
Europe, Latin was the principal international language. Today, English is used in more
countries as an official language or as the main means of international communication
than any other language. French is the second most widely used language, largely due to
the substantial number of African countries with French as their official language.
Other languages have more restricted regional use, such as Spanish in Spain and Latin
America, Arabic in the Middle East, and Russian in the republics of the former USSR.
G. History of linguistics
1. Earlier History
Non-Western traditions
Certainly the most interesting non-Western grammatical tradition--and the most original
and independent--is that of India, which dates back at least two and one-half millennia
and which culminates with the grammar of Panini , of the 5th century BC. There are
three major ways in which the Sanskrit tradition has had an impact on modern linguistic
scholarship. As soon as Sanskrit became known to the Western learned world the
unravelling of comparative Indo-European grammar ensued and the foundations were
laid for the whole 19th-century edifice of comparative philology and historical
linguistics. But, for this, Sanskrit was simply a part of the data; Indian grammatical
learning played almost no direct part. Nineteenth-century workers, however, recognized
that the native tradition of phonetics in ancient India was vastly superior to Western
knowledge; and this had important consequences for the growth of the science of
phonetics in the West. Thirdly, there is in the rules or definitions (sutras) of Panini a
remarkably subtle and penetrating account of Sanskrit grammar. The construction of
sentences, compound nouns, and the like is explained through ordered rules operating
on underlying structures in a manner strikingly similar in part to modes of
contemporary theory. As might be imagined, this perceptive Indian grammatical work
has held great fascination for 20th-century theoretical linguists. A study of Indian logic
in relation to Paninian grammar alongside Aristotelian and Western logic in relation to
Greek grammar and its successors could bring illuminating insights.
Whereas in ancient Chinese learning a separate field of study that might be called
grammar scarcely took root, in ancient India a sophisticated version of this discipline
developed early alongside the other sciences. Even though the study of Sanskrit
grammar may originally have had the practical aim of keeping the sacred Vedic texts
and their commentaries pure and intact, the study of grammar in India in the 1st
millennium BC had already become an intellectual end in itself.
Much of Greek philosophy was occupied with the distinction between that which exists
"by nature" and that which exists "by convention." So in language it was natural to
account for words and forms as ordained by nature (by onomatopoeia --i.e., by imitation
of natural sounds) or as arrived at arbitrarily by a social convention. This dispute
regarding the origin of language and meanings paved the way for the development of
divergences between the views of the "analogists," who looked on language as
possessing an essential regularity as a result of the symmetries that convention can
provide, and the views of the "anomalists," who pointed to language's lack of regularity
as one facet of the inescapable irregularities of nature. The situation was more complex,
however, than this statement would suggest. For example, it seems that the anomalists
among the Stoics credited the irrational quality of language precisely to the claim that
language did not exactly mirror nature. In any event, the anomalist tradition in the
hands of the Stoics brought grammar the benefit of their work in logic and rhetoric.
This led to the distinction that, in modern theory, is made with the terms signifiant
("what signifies") and signifié ("what is signified") or, somewhat differently and more
elaborately, with "expression" and "content"; and it laid the groundwork of modern
theories of inflection, though by no means with the exhaustiveness and fine-grained
analysis reached by the Sanskrit grammarians.
The Alexandrians, who were analogists working largely on literary criticism and text
philology, completed the development of the classical Greek grammatical tradition.
Dionysius Thrax , in the 2nd century BC, produced the first systematic grammar of
Western tradition; it dealt only with word morphology. The study of sentence syntax
was to wait for Apollonius Dyscolus , of the 2nd century AD. Dionysius called grammar
"the acquaintance with [or observation of] what is uttered by poets and writers," using a
word meaning a less general form of knowledge than what might be called "science."
His typically Alexandrian literary goal is suggested by the headings in his work:
pronunciation, poetic figurative language, difficult words, true and inner meanings of
words, exposition of form-classes, literary criticism. Dionysius defined a sentence as a
unit of sense or thought, but it is difficult to be sure of his precise meaning.
The Romans, who largely took over, with mild adaptations to their highly similar
language, the total work of the Greeks, are important not as originators but as
transmitters. Aelius Donatus , of the 4th century AD, and Priscian , an African of the
6th century, and their colleagues were slightly more systematic than their Greek models
but were essentially retrospective rather than original. Up to this point a field that was
at times called ars grammatica was a congeries of investigations, both theoretical and
practical, drawn from the work and interests of literacy, scribeship, logic, epistemology,
rhetoric, textual philosophy, poetics, and literary criticism. Yet modern specialists in
the field still share their concerns and interests. The anomalists, who concentrated on
surface irregularity and who looked then for regularities deeper down (as the Stoics
sought them in logic) bear a resemblance to contemporary scholars of the
transformationalist school. And the philological analogists with their regularizing
surface segmentation show striking kinship of spirit with the modern school of
structural (or taxonomic or glossematic) grammatical theorists.
It is possible that developments in grammar during the Middle Ages constitute one of
the most misunderstood areas of the field of linguistics. It is difficult to relate this
period coherently to other periods and to modern concerns because surprisingly little is
accessible and certain, let alone analyzed with sophistication. In the early 1970s the
majority of the known grammatical treatises had not yet been made available in full to
modern scholarship, so that not even their true extent could be classified with
confidence. These works must be analyzed and studied in the light of medieval learning,
especially the learning of the schools of philosophy then current, in order to understand
their true value and place.
The field of linguistics has almost completely neglected the achievements of this
period. Students of grammar have tended to see as high points in their field the
achievements of the Greeks, the Renaissance growth and "rediscovery" of learning
(which led directly to modern school traditions), the contemporary flowering of
theoretical study (men usually find their own age important and fascinating), and, in
recent decades, the astonishing monument of Panini. Many linguists have found
uncongenial the combination of medieval Latin learning and premodern philosophy. Yet
medieval scholars might reasonably be expected to have bequeathed to modern
scholarship the fruits of more than ordinarily refined perceptions of a certain order.
These scholars used, wrote in, and studied Latin, a language that, though not their
native tongue, was one in which they were very much at home; such scholars in groups
must often have represented a highly varied linguistic background.
Some of the medieval treatises continue the tradition of grammars of late antiquity; so
there are versions based on Donatus and Priscian, often with less incorporation of the
classical poets and writers. Another genre of writing involves simultaneous
consideration of grammatical distinctions and scholastic logic; modern linguists are
probably inadequately trained to deal with these writings.
The modistae did not innovate in discriminating categories and parts of speech; they
accepted those that had come down from the Greeks through Donatus and Priscian. The
great contribution of these grammarians, who flourished between the mid-13th and mid-
14th century, was their insistence on a grammar to explicate the distinctions found by
their forerunners in the languages known to them. Whether they made the best choice in
selecting logic, metaphysics, and epistemology (as they knew them) as the fields to be
included with grammar as a basis for the grand account of universal knowledge is less
important than the breadth of their conception of the place of grammar. Before the
modistae, grammar had not been viewed as a separate discipline but had been
considered in conjunction with other studies or skills (such as criticism, preservation of
valued texts, foreign-language learning). The Greek view of grammar was rather narrow
and fragmented; the Roman view was largely technical. The speculative medieval
grammarians (who dealt with language as a speculum, "mirror" of reality) inquired into
the fundamentals underlying language and grammar. They wondered whether
grammarians or philosophers discovered grammar, whether grammar was the same for
all languages, what the fundamental topic of grammar was, and what the basic and
irreducible grammatical primes are. Signification was reached by imposition of words
on things; i.e., the sign was arbitrary. Those questions sound remarkably like current
issues of linguistics, which serves to illustrate how slow and repetitious progress in the
field is. While the modistae accepted, by modern standards, a restrictive set of
categories, the acumen and sweep they brought to their task resulted in numerous subtle
and fresh syntactic observations. A thorough study of the medieval period would greatly
enrich the discussion of current questions.
The Renaissance
In the field of grammar, the Renaissance did not produce notable innovation or advance.
Generally speaking, there was a strong rejection of speculative grammar and a relatively
uncritical resumption of late Roman views (as stated by Priscian). This was somewhat
understandable in the case of Latin or Greek grammars, since here the task was less
evidently that of intellectual inquiry and more that of the schools, with the practical aim
of gaining access to the newly discovered ancients. But, aside from the fact that,
beginning in the 15th century, serious grammars of European vernaculars were actually
written, it is only in particular cases and for specific details (e.g., a mild alteration in
the number of parts of speech or cases of nouns) that real departures from Roman
grammar can be noted. Likewise, until the end of the 19th century, grammars of the
exotic languages, written largely by missionaries and traders, were cast almost entirely
in the Roman model, to which the Renaissance had added a limited medieval syntactic
ingredient.
From time to time a degree of boldness may be seen in France: Petrus Ramus , a 16th-
century logician, worked within a taxonomic framework of the surface shapes of words
and inflections, such work entailing some of the attendant trivialities that modern
linguistics has experienced (e.g., by dividing up Latin nouns on the basis of equivalence
of syllable count among their case forms). In the 17th century, members of Solitaires (a
group of hermits who lived in the deserted abbey of Port-Royal in France) produced a
grammar that has exerted noteworthy continuing influence, even in contemporary
theoretical discussion. Drawing their basic view from scholastic logic as modified by
rationalism, these people aimed to produce a philosophical grammar that would capture
what was common to the grammars of languages--a general grammar, but not
aprioristically universalist. This grammar has attracted recent attention because it
employs certain syntactic formulations that resemble in detail contemporary
transformational rules, which formulate the relationship between the various elements
of a sentence.
Roughly from the 15th century to World War II, however, the version of grammar
available to the Western public (together with its colonial expansion) remained
basically that of Priscian with only occasional and subsidiary modifications, and the
knowledge of new languages brought only minor adjustments to the serious study of
grammar. As education has become more broadly disseminated throughout society by
the schools, attention has shifted from theoretical or technical grammar as an
intellectual preoccupation to prescriptive grammar suited to pedagogical purposes,
which started with Renaissance vernacular nationalism. Grammar increasingly parted
company with its older fellow disciplines within philosophy as they moved over to the
domain known as natural science, and technical academic grammatical study has
increasingly become involved with issues represented by empiricism versus rationalism
and their successor manifestations on the academic scene.
Nearly down to the present day, the grammar of the schools has had only tangential
connections with the studies pursued by professional linguists; for most people
prescriptive grammar has become synonymous with "grammar," and the prevailing view
held by educated people regards grammar as an item of folk knowledge open to
speculation by all, and in nowise a formal science requiring adequate preparation such
as is assumed for chemistry.
The main impetus for the development of comparative philology came toward the end of
the 18th century, when it was discovered that Sanskrit bore a number of striking
resemblances to Greek and Latin. An English orientalist, Sir William Jones , though he
was not the first to observe these resemblances, is generally given the credit for
bringing them to the attention of the scholarly world and putting forward the
hypothesis, in 1786, that all three languages must have "sprung from some common
source, which perhaps no longer exists." By this time, a number of texts and glossaries
of the older Germanic languages (Gothic, Old High German, and Old Norse) had been
published, and Jones realized that Germanic as well as Old Persian and perhaps Celtic
had evolved from the same "common source." The next important step came in 1822,
when the German scholar Jacob Grimm , following the Danish linguist Rasmus Rask
(whose work, being written in Danish, was less accessible to most European scholars),
pointed out in the second edition of his comparative grammar of Germanic that there
were a number of systematic correspondences between the sounds of Germanic and the
sounds of Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit in related words. Grimm noted, for example, that
where Gothic (the oldest surviving Germanic language) had an f, Latin, Greek, and
Sanskrit frequently had a p (e.g., Gothic fotus, Latin pedis, Greek podós, Sanskrit
padás, all meaning "foot"); when Gothic had a p, the non-Germanic languages had a b;
when Gothic had a b, the non-Germanic languages had what Grimm called an "aspirate"
(Latin f, Greek ph, Sanskrit bh). In order to account for these correspondences he
postulated a cyclical "soundshift" (Lautverschiebung) in the prehistory of Germanic,
in which the original "aspirates" became voiced unaspirated stops (bh became b, etc.),
the original voiced unaspirated stops became voiceless (b became p, etc.), and the
original voiceless (unaspirated) stops became "aspirates" (p became f ). Grimm's term,
"aspirate," it will be noted, covered such phonetically distinct categories as aspirated
stops (bh, ph), produced with an accompanying audible puff of breath, and fricatives
(f ), produced with audible friction as a result of incomplete closure in the vocal tract.
In the work of the next 50 years the idea of sound change was made more precise, and,
in the 1870s, a group of scholars known collectively as the Junggrammatiker ("young
grammarians," or Neogrammarians ) put forward the thesis that all changes in the
sound system of a language as it developed through time were subject to the operation
of regular sound laws. Though the thesis that sound laws were absolutely regular in
their operation (unless they were inhibited in particular instances by the influence of
analogy) was at first regarded as most controversial, by the end of the 19th century it
was quite generally accepted and had become the cornerstone of the comparative
method. Using the principle of regular sound change, scholars were able to reconstruct
"ancestral" common forms from which the later forms found in particular languages
could be derived. By convention, such reconstructed forms are marked in the literature
with an asterisk. Thus, from the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European word for "ten,"
*dekm, it was possible to derive Sanskrit dasha, Greek déka, Latin decem, and Gothic
taihun by postulating a number of different sound laws that operated independently in
the different branches of the Indo-European family.
Analogy has been mentioned in connection with its inhibition of the regular operation
of sound laws in particular word forms. This was how the Neogrammarians thought of
it. In the course of the 20th century, however, it has come to be recognized that
analogy, taken in its most general sense, plays a far more important role in the
development of languages than simply that of sporadically preventing what would
otherwise be a completely regular transformation of the sound system of a language.
When a child learns to speak he tends to regularize the anomalous, or irregular, forms
by analogy with the more regular and productive patterns of formation in the language;
e.g., he will tend to say "comed" rather than "came," "dived" rather than "dove," and so
on, just as he will say "talked," "loved," and so forth. The fact that the child does this is
evidence that he has learned or is learning the regularities or rules of his language. He
will go on to "unlearn" some of the analogical forms and substitute for them the
anomalous forms current in the speech of the previous generation. But in some cases, he
will keep a "new" analogical form (e.g., "dived" rather than "dove"), and this may then
become the recognized and accepted form.
One of the most original, if not one of the most immediately influential, linguists of the
19th century was the learned Prussian statesman, Wilhelm von Humboldt (died 1835).
His interests, unlike those of most of his contemporaries, were not exclusively
historical. Following the German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-
1803), he stressed the connection between national languages and national character:
this was but a commonplace of romanticism. More original was Humboldt's theory of
"inner" and "outer" form in language. The outer form of language was the raw material
(the sounds) from which different languages were fashioned; the inner form was the
pattern, or structure, of grammar and meaning that was imposed upon this raw material
and differentiated one language from another. This "structural" conception of language
was to become dominant, for a time at least, in many of the major centres of linguistics
by the middle of the 20th century. Another of Humboldt's ideas was that language was
something dynamic, rather than static, and was an activity itself rather than the product
of activity. A language was not a set of actual utterances produced by speakers but the
underlying principles or rules that made it possible for speakers to produce such
utterances and, moreover, an unlimited number of them. This idea was taken up by a
German philologist, Heymann Steinthal , and, what is more important, by the
physiologist and psychologist Wilhelm Wundt , and thus influenced late 19th- and early
20th-century theories of the psychology of language. Its influence, like that of the
distinction of inner and outer form, can also be seen in the thought of Ferdinand de
Saussure , a Swiss linguist. But its full implications were probably not perceived and
made precise until the middle of the 20th century, when the U.S. linguist Noam
Chomsky re-emphasized it and made it one of the basic notions of generative grammar.
Structuralism
The term structuralism has been used as a slogan and rallying cry by a number of
different schools of linguistics, and it is necessary to realize that it has somewhat
different implications according to the context in which it is employed. It is convenient
to draw first a broad distinction between European and American structuralism and,
then, to treat them separately.
Structural linguistics in Europe is generally said to have begun in 1916 with the
posthumous publication of the Cours de Linguistique Générale (Course in General
Linguistics) of Ferdinand de Saussure. Much of what is now considered as Saussurean
can be seen, though less clearly, in the earlier work of Humboldt, and the general
structural principles that Saussure was to develop with respect to synchronic linguistics
in the Cours had been applied almost 40 years before (1879) by Saussure himself in a
reconstruction of the Indo-European vowel system. The full significance of the work
was not appreciated at the time. Saussure's structuralism can be summed up in two
dichotomies (which jointly cover what Humboldt referred to in terms of his own
distinction of inner and outer form): (1) langue versus parole and (2) form versus
substance. By langue, best translated in its technical Saussurean sense as language
system, is meant the totality of regularities and patterns of formation that underlie the
utterances of a language; by parole, which can be translated as language behaviour, is
meant the actual utterances themselves. Just as two performances of a piece of music
given by different orchestras on different occasions will differ in a variety of details
and yet be identifiable as performances of the same piece, so two utterances may differ
in various ways and yet be recognized as instances, in some sense, of the same
utterance. What the two musical performances and the two utterances have in common
is an identity of form, and this form, or structure, or pattern, is in principle independent
of the substance, or "raw material," upon which it is imposed. "Structuralism," in the
European sense then, refers to the view that there is an abstract relational structure that
underlies and is to be distinguished from actual utterances--a system underlying actual
behaviour--and that this is the primary object of study for the linguist.
Two important points arise here: first, that the structural approach is not in principle
restricted to synchronic linguistics; second, that the study of meaning, as well as the
study of phonology and grammar, can be structural in orientation. In both cases
"structuralism" is opposed to "atomism" in the European literature. It was Saussure who
drew the terminological distinction between synchronic and diachronic linguistics in the
Cours; despite the undoubtedly structural orientation of his own early work in the
historical and comparative field, he maintained that, whereas synchronic linguistics
should deal with the structure of a language system at a given point in time, diachronic
linguistics should be concerned with the historical development of isolated elements--it
should be atomistic. Whatever the reasons that led Saussure to take this rather
paradoxical view, his teaching on this point was not generally accepted, and scholars
soon began to apply structural concepts to the diachronic study of languages. The most
important of the various schools of structural linguistics to be found in Europe in the
first half of the 20th century have included the Prague school, most notably represented
by Nikolay Sergeyevich Trubetskoy (died 1938) and Roman Jakobson (born 1896), both
Russian émigrés, and the Copenhagen (or glossematic) school, centred around Louis
Hjelmslev (died 1965). John Rupert Firth (died 1960) and his followers, sometimes
referred to as the London school, were less Saussurean in their approach, but, in a
general sense of the term, their approach may also be described appropriately as
structural linguistics.
American and European structuralism shared a number of features. In insisting upon the
necessity of treating each language as a more or less coherent and integrated system,
both European and American linguists of this period tended to emphasize, if not to
exaggerate, the structural uniqueness of individual languages. There was especially
good reason to take this point of view given the conditions in which American
linguistics developed from the end of the 19th century. There were hundreds of
indigenous American Indian languages that had never been previously described.
Many of these were spoken by only a handful of speakers and, if they were not recorded
before they became extinct, would be permanently inaccessible. Under these
circumstances, such linguists as Franz Boas (died 1942) were less concerned with the
construction of a general theory of the structure of human language than they were with
prescribing sound methodological principles for the analysis of unfamiliar languages.
They were also fearful that the description of these languages would be distorted by
analyzing them in terms of categories derived from the analysis of the more familiar
Indo-European languages.
After Boas, the two most influential American linguists were Edward Sapir (died
1939) and Leonard Bloomfield (died 1949). Like his teacher Boas, Sapir was equally at
home in anthropology and linguistics, the alliance of which disciplines has endured to
the present day in many American universities. Boas and Sapir were both attracted by
the Humboldtian view of the relationship between language and thought, but it was left
to one of Sapir's pupils, Benjamin Lee Whorf , to present it in a sufficiently
challenging form to attract widespread scholarly attention. Since the republication of
Whorf's more important papers in 1956, the thesis that language determines perception
and thought has come to be known as the Whorfian hypothesis .
Sapir's work has always held an attraction for the more anthropologically inclined
American linguists. But it was Bloomfield who prepared the way for the later phase of
what is now thought of as the most distinctive manifestation of American
"structuralism." When he published his first book in 1914, Bloomfield was strongly
influenced by Wundt's psychology of language. In 1933, however, he published a
drastically revised and expanded version with the new title Language ; this book
dominated the field for the next 30 years. In it Bloomfield explicitly adopted a
behaviouristic approach to the study of language, eschewing in the name of scientific
objectivity all reference to mental or conceptual categories. Of particular consequence
was his adoption of the behaviouristic theory of semantics according to which meaning
is simply the relationship between a stimulus and a verbal response. Because science
was still a long way from being able to give a comprehensive account of most stimuli,
no significant or interesting results could be expected from the study of meaning for
some considerable time, and it was preferable, as far as possible, to avoid basing the
grammatical analysis of a language on semantic considerations. Bloomfield's followers
pushed even further the attempt to develop methods of linguistic analysis that were not
based on meaning. One of the most characteristic features of "post-Bloomfieldian"
American structuralism, then, was its almost complete neglect of semantics.
Another characteristic feature, one that was to be much criticized by Chomsky, was its
attempt to formulate a set of "discovery procedures"--procedures that could be applied
more or less mechanically to texts and could be guaranteed to yield an appropriate
phonological and grammatical description of the language of the texts. Structuralism, in
this narrower sense of the term, is represented, with differences of emphasis or detail,
in the major American textbooks published during the 1950s.
Transformational grammar
The most significant development in linguistic theory and research in recent years was
the rise of generative grammar , and, more especially, of transformational-generative
grammar , or transformational grammar, as it came to be known. Two versions of
transformational grammar were put forward in the mid-1950s, the first by Zellig S.
Harris and the second by Noam Chomsky, his pupil. It is Chomsky's system that has
attracted the most attention so far. As first presented by Chomsky in Syntactic
Structures (1957), transformational grammar can be seen partly as a reaction against
post-Bloomfieldian structuralism and partly as a continuation of it. What Chomsky
reacted against most strongly was the post-Bloomfieldian concern with discovery
procedures. In his opinion, linguistics should set itself the more modest and more
realistic goal of formulating criteria for evaluating alternative descriptions of a
language without regard to the question of how these descriptions had been arrived at.
The statements made by linguists in describing a language should, however, be cast
within the framework of a far more precise theory of grammar than had hitherto been
the case, and this theory should be formalized in terms of modern mathematical notions.
Within a few years, Chomsky had broken with the post-Bloomfieldians on a number of
other points also. He had adopted what he called a "mentalistic" theory of language, by
which term he implied that the linguist should be concerned with the speaker's creative
linguistic competence and not his performance, the actual utterances produced. He had
challenged the post-Bloomfieldian concept of the phoneme (see below), which many
scholars regarded as the most solid and enduring result of the previous generation's
work. And he had challenged the structuralists' insistence upon the uniqueness of every
language, claiming instead that all languages were, to a considerable degree, cut to the
same pattern--they shared a certain number of formal and substantive universals.
The effect of Chomsky's ideas has been phenomenal. It is hardly an exaggeration to say
that there is no major theoretical issue in linguistics today that is debated in terms other
than those in which he has chosen to define it, and every school of linguistics tends to
define its position in relation to his. Among the rival schools are tagmemics ,
stratificational grammar, and the Prague school. Tagmemics is the system of linguistic
analysis developed by the U.S. linguist Kenneth L. Pike and his associates in
connection with their work as Bible translators. Its foundations were laid during the
1950s, when Pike differed from the post-Bloomfieldian structuralists on a number of
principles, and it has been further elaborated since then. Tagmemic analysis has been
used for analyzing a great many previously unrecorded languages, especially in Central
and South America and in West Africa. Stratificational grammar , developed by a U.S.
linguist, Sydney M. Lamb , has been seen by some linguists as an alternative to
transformational grammar. Not yet fully expounded or widely exemplified in the
analysis of different languages, stratificational grammar is perhaps best characterized as
a radical modification of post-Bloomfieldian linguistics, but it has many features that
link it with European structuralism. The Prague school has been mentioned above for its
importance in the period immediately following the publication of Saussure's Cours.
Many of its characteristic ideas (in particular, the notion of distinctive features in
phonology) have been taken up by other schools. But there has been further
development in Prague of the functional approach to syntax (see below). The work of
M.A.K. Halliday in England derived much of its original inspiration from Firth (above),
but Halliday provided a more systematic and comprehensive theory of the structure of
language than Firth had, and it has been quite extensively illustrated.
Saussure's scholarship in the early part of his career focused on philology, the study
of language history, but he later shifted his attention to the study of general
linguistics. He taught at the École des Hautes Études in Paris from 1881 to 1891 and
then became a professor of Sanskrit and Comparative Grammar at the University of
Geneva. Although Saussure never wrote another book, his teaching proved highly
influential. After his death two of his students compiled his lecture notes and other
materials into a seminal work, Cours de linguistique générale (1916; Course in
General Linguistics, 1959). The book explained his structural approach to language
and established a series of theoretical distinctions that have become basic to the study
of linguistics. In addition to linguistics, Saussure's work has affected disciplines such
as anthropology, history, and literary criticism.
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