María del Carmen Boya Romero 2º Estudios ingleses

Chapter one. The study of language

1. WHAT IS LINGUISITICS?

Linguistic is the scientific study of language, the systematic study of language. It is a

discipline which describes language in all its aspects and formulates theories as to how
it works. We could say that linguistic cares for how language is crafted, how language is
physically generated, how language sounds, how language means, how we do things to
others through language, etc.

All this “hows” previously mentioned corresponds to one of the particular fields of interest
in linguistics as an empirical science.

Napkin and serviette

Both of these words share an essentially similar meaning. They are both nouns and they
behave as such in more complex structures, they have distinct pronunciation and are
regarded as near-synonyms. This type of information is what synchronic linguistics is
concerned with. It cares for the use of language at the present time.

Diachronic linguistics is concerned with the use and evolution of languages over the
years and centuries. For instance, the way the use of napkin and serviette has varied
over the last few centuries.

Serviette is used solely in British English while it definitely sounds exotic in American
English, this is a sociolinguistic approach, which is concerned with the use people give
to the language. It is the study of language in relation to social factors, including
differences of regional, class, and occupational dialect, gender differences, and
bilingualism.

Critical linguistics study the ideological background of language, it is an approach to

the study of language which stresses the close connection between language (linguistic
structure) and society (social structure). In this case, this field would be interested in the
connection of the words napkin and serviette with the degree of formality in the contexts
where they are used or the status of speaker who uses them.

Applied linguistics is the branch of linguistics concerned with practical applications of

language studies, for example language teaching, translation, and speech therapy. It
looks at how linguistics can help understand real-life problems in areas such as
psychology, sociology, and education.

Neurolinguistics is the field dealing with the relationship between language and the
structure and functioning of the brain, studying the biological and psychological process
to produce language.

Linguistic criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature while

stylistics is a branch of linguistics concerned with the study of characteristic choices in
the use of language, especially literary language, as regards sound, form, or vocabulary,
made by different individuals or social groups in different situations of use.

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Etymology is concerned with the different origin of the words, French for serviette and
Anglo-Norman for napkin.

1.1 KNOWING A LANGUAGE VS. KNOWING ABOUT A LANGUAGE

Knowing a language refers to the native speaker’s capacity of acquiring their first
language or any speaker’s capacity for learning a second language whilst knowing
about a language refers to the scientific possibility of describing how language works.

Knowing a language relates to language acquisition, learning and competence.

However, knowing about a language relates to language description. We can thus say
that knowing about a language is the realm of linguistics as a discipline.

What makes linguistics different from other scientific disciplines is the fact that language
is what linguistics aims to describe by using language to do so. It is the only discipline
where the object of study and the code used to describe it are one and the same
thing, namely language.

There are three fundamental methodological attitudes to bear in mind in any activity as
a linguist: explicitness, the adoption of clear assumptions for any linguistic project;
systematicity, the need to design a highly organised model which permit establishing
patterns of behaviour and defining generalizations from our observations;
objectiveness, the search for empirical evidence about any of our original assumptions.

1.2 PRESCRIPTION VS. DESCRIPTION

Grammatical rules, spelling rules, or rules about how to pronounce certain words, this is
known as “prescriptive linguistics”. It stands for the view that knowing about how a
language works implies dictating a set of rules to be followed when writing and speaking
correctly. Descriptive linguistics portrays the task of the linguistic as that of “recording”
how linguistic structures work. Descriptive rules are related to the communicative
effectiveness of a given structure. Thus, description is said to be connected with
adequacy rather than with appropriateness. Mothern linguistics understand that knowing
about a language implies description rather than prescription.

For descriptive linguists, language is not just a collection of rules or syntactic structures,
but rather a functional tool that humans use to communicate with each other. The
evaluation of linguistic adequacy needs to consider not only grammatical rules to build
“correct” linguistic structures, but also aspects such as the relationship between
speakers and listeners (tenor), the medium used to transmit the message (mode) or
how the topic of a communicative determines or conditions certain linguistic choices
(field). The more adequate a linguistic structure is, the more effectively it will
communicate.

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1.3 LINGUISTIC LEVELS OF STUDY

Language “sounds”, language “means”, language “creates” new realities through new
words, language grows by fitting very small structures into more complex ones. To
account for all these properties in a systematic way, the study of language is traditionally
organised in five levels of description (the fields of linguistics are its areas while the levels
of its study are the units/parts in which language is divided. A single field might study all
the levels):

Phonetics and phonology aim to describe language as sound. Their focus is on

language as a phonic medium and the distribution of speech sounds. The central unit of
study is the phoneme. Particularly, phonology deals with the linguistic properties of
speech sounds, e.g., how speech sounds combine with each other or how they are
distributed in the syllable. The focus of phonetics lies on the physical properties of
linguistic sounds (articulatory, perceptual, and transmission properties), thus, from a
phonetic point of view the words book and took are very similar and only differ in the first
consonant (voiced bilabial/ voiceless alveolar)

Morphology deals with the internal structure of words. The central unit of study is the
morpheme, the smallest meaningful grammatical unit. Derivational morphology
(lexical) focuses on the description of how new words are formed, e.g., workaholic or
whatsappaholic. Inflectional morphology (grammatical) focuses on the formal
variations by means of which a word expresses different grammatical meanings, e.g.,
study-studies-studied-studying / table-tables / like-likes-liked / happy-happier. It doesn’t
create new words.

Syntax is devoted to the studies of how words combine to form larger units and the
roles they play within those units. The scope of the study covers three different levels of
syntactic description: phrases, clauses, and sentences. Thus, syntax describes how
words combine to make up phrases, where they typically function as Heads or as
Dependents; clauses, where they function as Subject, Predicator, Objects,
Complements and Adverbials; and sentences.

Semantics is the area of linguistic devoted to the study of meaning and its relation to
language structure. Different kinds of meaning can be established. For instance, lexical
meaning refers to the kind of meaning typically expressed by member of the main word-
classes such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. The central units in this case are
lexemes and lexical units. Grammatical meaning refers to the kinds of meanings
expressed by grammatical elements such as word order, inflectional morphemes, or
function words. Finally, sentence meaning relates meaning to the different constituents
of clause structure. The semantic functions of these constituents are known as semantic
roles.

Pragmatics focuses on the crafting of language meaning in particular communicative

situations. Its central unit of description is the utterance (a piece of language in a
particular sentence, the use of language -phrases and sentences- in a particular context).
In order to know how a message “means” we must take into account not only linguistic
elements, but also the addresser, the addressee, and the context in which the message

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is produced. For grammar Would you mind closing the door? is an interrogative
sentence. However, pragmatics will explain that speakers typically use this pattern as a
kind of directive utterance or polite request to get the addressee to act in a particular
way.

2. GRAMMAR WITHIN THE SCOPE OF LINGUISTICS

Broadly speaking, grammar encompasses the mechanisms according to which

language works when it is used to communicate effectively with other people. In a more
specific sense, however, grammar represent just one level of linguistic analysis. The
study of grammar brings together the fields of morphology and syntax. The description
of the grammar of a language relies on the identification and definition of a set of
grammatical units which are hierarchically organised in a rankscale according to their
degree of complexity.

SENTENCE We use recyclable wrapping although it is more expensive.

CLAUSE We use recyclable wrapping.

PHRASE Recyclable wrapping

WORD Recyclable
MORPHEME Re- cycl(e)- able

It is true that very frequently a unit of a given rank functions as a constituent of a unit of
the same rank or even of a unit which is one step down the rankscale, a phenomenon
technically known as rankshift or subordination. Thus, clauses may contain not only
phrases, but also other clauses and even sentences (1), and phrases may content not
only words but also other phrases and even clauses (2):

1. You know that I love you and I will never leave you.

2. She is a very bright student who is writing a PhD thesis on Proto-Indoeuropean.

If we view a grammatical unit as an element with particular formal characteristics that it

shares with other units of the same kind, we are concerned with the category or class
to which it belongs; if we view it as an element that plays its role in a larger syntactic
structure, we are concerned with its function.

The identification of grammatical units is based on a number of formal, functional, and

distributional criteria.