Phonetics

includes the description and classification of the actual sounds that speakers produce. A
phonetic analysis, for example, will describe how the position of the lips differs when
producing the i and u sounds and how the t sound in tar differs from the t in star. In the latter
case, if a person holds a tissue before his lips and says tar, the paper will move. It should not
move when star is pronounced. There is a puff of air after the t in tar that English speakers do
not think of or hear when speaking.

This type of description is called articulatory phonetics because it covers the way the vocal
organs articulate, or form, the sounds of language. Acoustic phonetics deals with the sound
waves of speech and their measurement on instruments such as the sound spectrograph and
the oscilloscope.

Phonology

concerns itself with those sounds that can convey different meanings as well as how sounds
combine with other sounds. The sounds that distinguish meaning are called phonemes. The
vowels in sit, sat, and set in the frame s-t each make a difference in meaning. They are
phonemes. The two t sounds in tar and star, however, do not make a difference in meaning
and are therefore heard as one sound, or phoneme. The tar, star comparison provides a simple
example of what linguistics might uncover: The t with the puff of air always occurs at the
beginning of a syllable, and the t without a puff of air always occurs elsewhere.

Morphology

is the study of how words are formed. Words are said to be made up of morphemes, the
smallest units of meaning in a language. Morphemes can be words that stand alone like fish,
girl, and dark as well as word particles like -ed, -s, -ness, and pre- that are attached to words
to modify their meaning in some way. Internal sound changes—as in ring, rang, and rung or
mouse and mice—are also included in a language's morphology.

Syntax

covers how words—along with their endings, prefixes, and internal changes—combine into
phrases and sentences.

Grammar
is a term that often includes only the studies of morphology and syntax. This is usually what
is meant by “traditional Latin grammar” or “traditional English grammar.” Some people use
the word grammar to include phonology and semantics as well (see grammar).

Semantics

is concerned with the meanings of words, word particles, and sentences. A semanticist might
discover, for example, that in English the -ing ending on verbs means a process that continues
in time or takes some time to do (like riding, drinking, knitting). It cannot, therefore, be
added to verbs such as know or want, which do not convey the idea of moving through time.
It does not make sense to say John is knowing the answer or Mary is wanting the book.

Historical linguistics

focuses on language change and how languages are related. The tools of analysis developed
by historical linguists enabled scholars to begin classifying the world's languages into related
families and branches. Dialectology, the study of dialects, also is of importance to language
classification.

History of Linguistic Analysis

Throughout history individuals have tried to describe their own languages in ways that make
the workings of these languages appear more meaningful and orderly. Panini, a 5th-century
BC Indian grammarian, described the sounds and construction of sentences of the Sanskrit
language in great detail.

The ancient Greeks and Romans were also curious about their languages and wrote
grammatical descriptions, frequently from a philosophical or literary point of view. The
writings of two Greek grammarians, Dionysius Thrax in the 2nd century BC and Appollonius
Dyscolus in the 2nd century AD, strongly influenced the Roman view of language. The works
of Donatus, a 4th-century AD Roman, and the 6th-century Latin grammarian Priscian adapted
Greek thinking to the Latin language. They had a profound influence on Western thought
about language. Until recent times the grammar of Priscian in particular served as a model for
the description of medieval and modern European languages, including English. Such
concepts as parts of speech (nouns, verbs, and adverbs) and case (nominative, accusative,
genitive) stem from Priscian's work.

In the late 18th century the English scholar Sir William Jones noticed similarities between
Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin. He suggested that the three languages might have developed from
a common source. He also discovered that Gothic, Old High German, Old Norse, Old
Persian, and Celtic showed similarities to the other three.
In the early 19th century the scholars Jacob Grimm, a German, and Rasmus Rask, a Dane,
noted that a number of consistent sound correspondences existed between Gothic, Latin, and
Greek in words with similar meanings. For example, where Gothic had a t sound (taihun,
“ten”), Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit had a d sound in the same position (Greek déka, Latin
decem, and Sanskrit dasa, all meaning “ten”). This technique of comparing words became
known as the comparative method. It was used to show that certain languages are related, like
siblings, and to help construct parent languages from which the modern languages could have
evolved. Thus English, modern German, Dutch, and the Scandinavian languages were
described as having developed from an ancestor called Old Germanic. Old Germanic in turn
developed from an even older ancestor called Indo-European.

In the early 20th century in the United States, a strong interest in discovering and describing
native American Indian languages arose. Anthropological linguists analyzed Indian languages
in terms that differed radically from those of traditional European grammars. This type of
language analysis, known as structural linguistics, was developed by the American linguists
Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, Benjamin Lee Whorf, and Leonard Bloomfield, among others. It
placed much emphasis on phonetics, phonology, and new grammatical categories, and above
all on discovery procedures—the techniques needed to discover the significant sounds and
units of meaning of a language. In describing languages the structuralists proceeded from
smaller to larger units: from the sounds of language to the distinctive sounds (phonemes) and
from the smallest units that mean something (morphemes) to phrases.

Modern Linguistics
In the mid-1950s another United States scholar, Noam Chomsky, looked at language in yet
another way. Chomsky tried to explain rather than describe languages. He did this by
designing a more mathematically precise model of languages, one that tried to generate or
predict all the grammatical sentences and rule out all the ungrammatical ones. This type of
linguistics has been called transformational, generative, or transformational-generative
grammar.

As a starting point Chomsky reasoned that a structural approach to the following sentences
would show them to have the same structure even though there is a great difference in their
meanings.

John is eager to please.

John is easy to please.

In both of these sentences the part of speech of each word is the same, and the main verb, is, has
the same subject, John. But there is another verb in these sentences, to please. In some deep sense
John is the subject of to please in the first sentence but the object of to please in the second.
Chomsky explained the difference in meaning of these sentences by setting up an underlying, or
deep, structure and a surface structure. The underlying structure—which is the actual meaning of a
phrase, or close to it—is changed into the surface structure, or what a person really says, by a series
of rules called transformations. Thus, in the two examples above, the relation between John and to
please is different, but transformations change them both into the same surface structure.
Chomsky also introduced a distinction between competence and performance. Performance is
what a speaker actually says when talking. Competence, on the other hand, is what a person
actually knows about a language, possibly an unconscious knowledge. In the area of syntax,
competence refers to the ability to recognize both grammatical and ungrammatical word
orders. For example, all speakers of English would agree that I am going to the store is
grammatical. They would also agree that To store the am going I is not proper English even if
they can guess what it means. This knowledge is known as competence. People also have
competence to choose between correct and incorrect combinations of sounds.

One result of looking at languages as basic underlying forms, or ideas, that are changed—
transformed—into phrases that people actually say is that languages appear more similar than
they did in structural or traditional grammars. The underlying structures, or meanings, of
different languages may be remarkably alike. This emphasizes the possibility of a universal
grammar; that is, a grammar that is the same for all human languages. Such an idea is of great
interest to psychologists and philosophers.

Linguistics Related to Other Areas

The subject of linguistics overlaps with such other areas as sociology, psychology, and
computer science. Sociolinguistics is concerned with the social aspects of language usage; for
example, how different dialects and language styles reflect the background of the speaker and
his position in society. Topics in psycholinguistics include language processes and the brain;
the acquisition of languages by children; aphasia, a condition in which the loss of speech
occurs; and perception of speech. Computational linguistics includes the use of computers to
quickly translate languages as well as the design of machines to recognize and produce
human-sounding speech.

Recommended for further reading are ‘An Introduction to Language' by Victoria Fromkin
and Robert Rodman, 4th ed. (Holt, 1988); ‘Linguistics for Non-linguists' by Frank Parker,
2nd ed. (published by Allyn and Bacon in 1994); and ‘The Story of Language' by Mario Pei,
rev. ed. (NAL-Dutton, 1984). (See also Chomsky, Noam; language.)

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