Ling 101 – Understanding Language Professor Jochen Zeller

Understanding Language

Welcome to our first-year course Understanding Language!

In this course, we will talk about what is perhaps the most amazing ability of human beings:
Language. We use language all the time. Speaking, listening, reading, writing – these
activities are totally normal for us, so much so that we completely take language for
granted, without appreciating what a wonderful and truly astonishing ability it is.

Just think about it for a moment. When some speaks to you, all they do is push air out of
their lungs, and modify this stream of air with their lips, their tongue, their teeth etc. to
produce different sounds. These sounds travel through the air as waves, reach your ear –
and miraculously, you suddenly understand what the speaker wants to communicate. You
have access to somebody else's thoughts! For example, when someone says to you
"Yesterday I saw an elephant on the freeway.", you can't help but imagine such a weird
scenario, with an elephant on the freeway, creating havoc. Language creates new thoughts,
ideas and pictures in our minds and allows us to participate in somebody else's mental life
and imagination.

Producing and comprehending language are completely smooth and automatic processes.
The linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker has called the ability of humans to use
language an instinct; something that is part of our biology, our genetic make-up, and which
is fundamental to what makes us human. Pinker compared this language instinct to the
ability of spiders to spin webs. Spiders know how to spin webs because this is "what spiders
do"; spiders have spider genes and spider brains, and as a result, they know how to spin
webs. Similarly, Pinker argues, language is a human instinct, part of our genes, and
therefore, every (healthy) human being will be able to speak and understand at least one
(and often more than one) language.

Hm, okay … but if language is part of biology, and if every human being
has language, why are there so many different languages (around 7000, or
even more, according to some counts)?

In this course, we look at language from the perspective of linguists – people who study and
analyze the language instinct scientifically, and who try to gain a better understanding of
this amazing phenomenon we call "language". Therefore, in this first week of the course, we
introduce you to the scientific field called Linguistics.

The following notes accompany the PowerPoint slides that you can find as pdfs on Moodle. You
should go through the slides one-by-one, and read and study the content of each slide together with
these notes. If you decide to watch the online PowerPoint lectures, you can also use these notes for
learning and repetition. The notes will not repeat everything that is on the slides, but provide
additional and necessary explanations, with the most important information summarized in yellow
text boxes. Also included are links to websites which illustrate, or provide further information about,
a particular topic, and references to the video clips that are on Moodle or online.

Enjoy!

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Ling 101 – Understanding Language Professor Jochen Zeller

Part 1, Episode 1: What is Linguistics? - I

The course Understanding Language is offered by the Linguistics department at UKZN.

Linguistics is one of the disciplines in the School of Arts, and it can be studied as a major
towards a BA or a BSocSci.

So what is Linguistics? As stated on Slide 2, Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The
adjective "scientific" is important, because it emphasizes that linguists use the common
approaches, methods of investigation and processes of analysis that are also applied in
other scientific fields. Typically, we start
Linguistics: the scientific study of language. with an observation about language (for
example, something that strikes us as
interesting or curious about a property of
language or language use). We think about this observation and construct a theory that can
potentially explain it. Based on this theory, we then come up with a hypothesis about what
other properties of language are predicted to occur if our theory is correct. We can then test
this hypothesis through an experiment. Experiments lead to new observations, which may
force us to modify or revise, or even abandon, our initial hypothesis. But eventually, we will
have a theory that is confirmed by experiments and can successfully explain some aspect of
language.

By the way, a "linguistic experiment" can, but does not have to be, an experiment
conducted in a laboratory by a person in a white coat. It can take on different forms –
ranging from collecting data on how young children speak when they acquire language, to
conducting interviews with adult speakers about their attitude towards their language, to
asking native speakers of a language whether a particular sentence is acceptable or not. It
may even involve examining one’s own knowledge about one’s language that we have in
our heads, a process called introspection.

Here is a link to a short Youtube-clip which explains Linguistics as a science, and also talks
about linguistic methods and the professional fields for which a major in Linguistics is
relevant.

This video on Moodle shows is the first of an online

course in Linguistics. It presents a nice introduction
to Linguistics and already mentions some of the
topics we will also talk about in this course.

Since language is such an important phenomenon, about which we can ask many different
kinds of questions, there are many different fields of Linguistics in which these questions are
explored. On the slide, you see the names of some of these fields. You can think of them as
specialized sub-disciplines of Linguistics. These sub-disciplines themselves can be divided
further into smaller specialized areas, and there are probably more fields of Linguistics than
those shown on the slide, but the ones you can see there cover a good range of fields in
Linguistics. Most of these areas will be discussed in the following weeks, but in this first
week of the course, we want to give you a broad introduction to these areas.

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Ling 101 – Understanding Language Professor Jochen Zeller

Slide 3: Let's start with Sociolinguistics,

which is concerned with the social Sociolinguistics: the study of how aspects of
dimensions of language. society affect and determine language use.
Sociolinguistics explores how society
shapes language use and which role language plays in society (the study of the effect of
language on society is also known as the "sociology of language").

The riddle you see on the slide illustrates in a very simplistic way how society can influence
language. Can you solve the riddle? (The answer may come very quickly to some of you, but
I admit that, when I first saw the riddle, I couldn't figure it out.) The puzzle with this short
story arises if we think of the surgeon as a man: If the son's father is also injured, how then
can the person on the operating table be the surgeon's son?

The solution to the puzzle is of course that the surgeon is the person's mother.

The story is a riddle only because many of us imagine a surgeon to be male. But there is
nothing about the word "surgeon" that determines that it can only be used to refer to a
male person (it's not like "bachelor", or "father", words whose meanings are fixed as
referring only to male persons). The word "surgeon" is innocent; it can't be accused of
sexism. What makes us interpret this word in a particular sexist way is the world we live in,
which (unfortunately) is still a world in which female surgeons are much rarer than male
surgeons. This shows that aspects of society may influence the way we understand and use
words, and therefore language.

Slide 4 describes a more dramatic example of how society influences language use. In
traditional Zulu, Xhosa or Sotho culture, a woman should avoid using the name of her
husband or other male relatives, and also must not use words that include a part of the
names of her male relatives. This is seen as a sign of respect, and the custom is known as
hlonipha (the isiZulu/isiXhosa word for "respect").

Slide 5: Not surprisingly, this traditional practice of hlonipha has forced women to come up
with many new words to replace the original words that they have to avoid. What resulted
from this is a new set of words, a new vocabulary. This "language of respect" is known as
isiHlonipho, and it is entirely the result of a cultural practice in a particular part of society. In
KZN, the hlonipha-custom is no longer very common, and most young urban isiZulu-
speakers are not familiar with it, but you may still find women in rural areas where
traditions are kept who know isiHlonipho (ask your grandmother!).

Some words whose origin is from this "language of respect" have found their way into the
regular vocabulary of many isiZulu speakers – if you look at the table on the slide, many of
you will be familiar with some of the isiHlonipho words on the right, but you may not have
known that their origin lies in the cultural practice of hlonipha.

You will hear more about Sociolinguistics in the two weeks of Understanding Language that
are dedicated to this field.

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Ling 101 – Understanding Language Professor Jochen Zeller

Let's move on to Theoretical Linguistics. Theoretical Linguistics is concerned with the

description and theoretical analysis of grammatical aspects of language. Of course, linguists
working in other areas of Linguistics also analyze language and develop theories, but the
label "Theoretical Linguistics" is typically used to refer to the area of Linguistics where
grammatical properties of
Theoretical Linguistics: the study of subsystems of language are analyzed, mainly
language, such as sound, structure, and meaning. those that concern the sound,
structure and meaning of
language.

The major sub-fields of Theoretical Linguistics are described on Slide 6. These fields describe
various aspects of language (we return to them in Part 2, when we talk about universal
properties of language), but they also define the linguistic research areas where these
properties are investigated (so some linguists call themselves "syntacticians" or
"semanticists" etc.)

Part 1, Episode 2: What is Linguistics? - II

The tools and methods of Theoretical Linguistics are the topic of our second-semester
course (LING 102 Introduction to Language Study), and we won't discuss them in great detail
in this course. But just to illustrate with two examples, I have added slides 2 and 3. Slide 2
illustrates morphology, which is the analysis of the structure of words. In isiZulu, words have
a very rich structure. For example, the isiZulu word angisakuboni translates as "I do not see
you anymore" – an English sentence with six words can be expressed by one word in isiZulu!
The different meanings corresponding to English words are expressed by smaller linguistic
units in isiZulu, called roots and affixes, and these roots and affixes can combine to form
complex words according to the morphological rules of isiZulu. IsiZulu is a great language to
study if you are interested in morphology, because the structure of isiZulu words is very rich
and complex.

Slide 3 shows that the syntactic structure of a sentence can be represented through tree
diagrams. The tree diagram on the slide illustrates that in the English sentence Mary
watched a movie, the verb combines with what is called a noun phrase (NP) to form a verb
phrase (VP). The NP itself is formed by combining a determiner (DET) with a noun (N). The
VP can combine with another NP to form a sentence (S). The tree diagram therefore shows
the structure of an English sentence, its syntax.

Another sub-discipline of Linguistics is closely related to psychology. Psycholinguistics

(introduced on Slide 4) investigates how language is processed. It examines the mental
properties of our language ability and how it interacts with, and is constrained by, other
cognitive phenomena such as memory or
attention. Psycholinguistics: the study of how
language is processed in the
Some of the methods of psycholinguists are mind/brain of a speaker or listener.
similar to methods used in experimental
psychology, just that the experiments are about language. For example, in a so-called lexical
decision experiment, participants are shown words on a screen, and they have to decide as

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quickly as possible whether the word they see is a real word in their language, by pushing
one of two buttons (YES or NO). For example, hospital is a word in English, so when they see
this word, they push YES, but dispital is not, so they must push NO. Psycholinguists then
measure the time it takes for the participant to make a decision.

One interesting finding is that an existing word is recognized faster when it follows another
existing word to which it is related in meaning. For example, hospital is recognized faster
when it follows e.g. nurse than when it follows purse. Psycholinguists say that the word
nurse "primes" the word hospital. From this priming-effect, psycholinguists have learned
something about the organization of that part of our memory where words are stored
(which linguists call the "mental lexicon"). They concluded that words in the mental lexicon
form a network; words are connected with other words that belong to the same semantic
domain. Therefore, when we read or hear a word from a particular domain, the other words
from that domain are automatically activated as well. They are therefore recognized faster
when they are subsequently presented in a lexical decision task.

Psycholinguists also examine mistakes people make when speaking, so-called speech errors
("slips of the tongue"). For example, when someone wants to say "big feet", but accidentally
says "fig beet", this is called a sound exchange error. Sound exchange errors tell
psycholinguists something about language production: evidently, during language
production, words are retrieved from the mental lexicon not as unanalyzable units, but are
composed from smaller speech segments. When producing one word, the language
production system already pre-plans the next word – but sometimes things go wrong, and
the initial sound of the anticipated word (e.g. the sound [f]) accidentally slips into the
composition of the current word (so big becomes fig).

This is a short informative article on the different types of speech errors that exist and what
psycholinguists can learn from them:

[Link]

You will learn more about Psycholinguistics and models of language processing in the
relevant section of this course.

Slide 5: An area closely related to Psycholinguistics is Neurolinguistics, which explores the

relation between language and the brain. As noted earlier, language is part of human
biology, encoded in our genes, and located in our
Neurolinguistics: the study of brains. It is therefore not surprising that there are
language and the brain. dedicated brain areas and neural networks that
specialize for language.

With the help of modern brain imaging techniques, neuroscientists can produce images of
the brain like the one on the left side of the slide. This image was created by measuring the
activity in someone's brain who was performing a language task. It shows the left side of the
brain (also called the left hemisphere), and the areas colored in red are areas which showed

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Ling 101 – Understanding Language Professor Jochen Zeller

stronger activation during this language task compared to a control condition. These are the
most important major language regions in the human brain, called Broca's area and
Wernicke's area (demarcated in the image on the right).

There are many important questions about language and the brain that neurolinguists
explore. Are there specific brain areas dedicated to specific language functions (for example,
is there a dedicated brain area for syntax? For phonology?) How are language abilities
affected by brain damage? Is the brain of a bilingual (or multilingual) person different from
that of a monolingual person? In the Neurolinguistics-section of Understanding Language
we will address some of these questions.

Another sub-discipline of Linguistics is Applied Linguistics. Applied Linguistics is a field in

which methods of linguistic analysis, or insights gained through linguistic research, are put
to use in areas of language practice. Slide 6 lists a few areas of Applied Linguistics.

One subject, which describes both a discipline and a specific method of linguistic analysis,
and which has gained popularity in recent years is Corpus Linguistics. Corpus Linguistics is
the (computer-aided) analysis of large bodies of
Applied Linguistics: a field in which machine-readable text (so-called corpora). This
insights gained through linguistic method makes it possible to analyze and process
research are used to solve “real- texts that are too large to be examined by hand
life” problems related to language. and eye alone, and to discover "hidden"
regularities and generalisations about language
use that can only be revealed through the
statistical analysis of "Big Data". Corpus Linguistics is relevant for many of the applied fields
of language practice; for example, it is very important in AI and natural language processing
and for the development of smart machines that can communicate with users by using
human language (think ChatGPT, Siri, Alexa, Microsoft Copilot…).

Other areas of Applied Linguistics are closely related to Sociolinguistics, and we will also
discuss some Applied Linguistics topics, such as language policy and language planning in a
multilingual country like South Africa, in the next section of this course ("Languages in South
Africa").

And finally, there is Historical Linguistics, a field which explores how languages change over
time. Everyone who has tried to read the English used by Shakespeare or Chaucer knows
that older forms of a language often look and
sound very different from its present-day Historical Linguistics: the study of
counterpart. Historical linguists study old and how languages change over time.
ancient languages and their relation to the
languages spoken today.

Some languages are in fact the "ancestors" of many different modern varieties. For
example, Latin (which was spoken by the ancient Romans) was the ancestor language of
modern Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese and Romanian (these languages are therefore
called "Romance languages"). There are often no written records of extinct ancestor
languages, and historical linguists have to reconstruct the properties of these putative

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Ling 101 – Understanding Language Professor Jochen Zeller

ancestor languages on the basis of similarities between their contemporary descendants.

Based on these similarities, languages can be grouped together into families (for example,
the Romance languages form a language family), and it is assumed that languages from the
same family are historically related to the same ancestor language.

One of the largest language families in Africa is the Bantu family of languages (it includes
between 440 and 680 languages, depending on what you count as a separate language –
which is an interesting question in and of itself). The indigenous official languages spoken in
South Africa all belong to the Bantu family. Based on similarities between the words and
grammars of many Bantu languages, historical linguists have been able to reconstruct a
hypothetical ancestor language from which the Bantu languages spoken in Africa are
derived. This language is known as Ur-Bantu, or Proto-Bantu, and was presumably spoken
more than 4000 years ago, by people who lived in West Africa (in the area of present-day
Cameroon and Nigeria).

Slide 7 shows some of the similarities between certain words in different Bantu languages
(Kiswahili, which is spoken in Kenya and Tanzania and other parts of East Africa; ChiBemba,
which is spoken in Zambia, and isiZulu). These similar words are called "cognates", and
cognates are an important tool for historical linguists to reconstruct the relation between
different languages.

As you will notice, the words for 'three' and 'fire place' look very similar across the three
languages. Historical linguists therefore assume that these words resemble the form of the
"original" words from the ancestor language (Proto-Bantu). In fact, based on independent
evidence from the comparison of many other Bantu languages, the hypothetical Proto-
Bantu words have been reconstructed as *yîko and *-tatu (the * signals that these are
hypothetical words). The ChiBemba and isiZulu words for 'fire' are also similar (umlilo and
umulilo) and can be linked to Proto-Bantu *lilo, but the Kiswahili word for fire is different
(moto). However, this can be explained as well, because the Proto-Bantu word for 'burn' has
been reconstructed as *-lota, and the modern Kiswahili word for ‘fire’ is related to that
word.

You will hear more about language families, and the Bantu language family in particular, in
the section of the course that deals with "Languages in South Africa".

End of Part 1.