Phonetics

Hasham Raza

Phonetics
Phonetics (from the Greek (phon) "sound" or "voice") is the study of the
physical sounds of human speech. It is concerned with the physical properties of
speech sounds (phones), and the processes of their physiological production,
auditory reception, and neurophysiological perception.
Phonetics was studied as early as 2,500 years ago in ancient India, with Pini's
account of the place and manner of articulation of consonants in his 5th century
BC treatise on Sanskrit. The major Indic alphabets today order their consonants
according to Pini's classification.

Types of phonetics
Phonetics has three main branches:
articulatory phonetics is concerned with the articulation of speech: The
position, shape, and movement of articulators or speech organs, such as
the lips, tongue, and vocal folds.
acoustic phonetics is concerned with acoustics of speech: The properties
of the sound waves, such as their frequency and harmonics.
auditory phonetics is concerned with speech perception: How sound is
received by the inner ear and perceived by the brain.

Phonetics and phonology

In contrast to phonetics, phonology is the study of language-specific systems

and patterns of sound and gesture. While phonology is grounded in phonetics, it
is a distinct area of linguistics, dealing with abstract but psychologically-real
sound and gesture units (phonemes) and their variants (allophones), the
distinctive properties (features) which form the basis of meaningful contrast
between these units, and their classification into natural classes based on
shared behavior and phonological processes. Phonetics deals with the physical
properties of sounds themselves, not how they are meaningful. There are over a
hundred phones recognized as basic by the International Phonetic Association
(IPA) and transcribed by simple letters in their International Phonetic Alphabet.
Although "meaningful contrast" between phonemes forms the basis of other
discussions of meaning, the subject of semantics does not enter into this level
of linguistic analysis.

See also

List of phonetics topics

Speech processing
Acoustics
Biometric word list
Phonetics departments at universities
X-SAMPA
NATO Phonetic Alphabet

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Phonology
Phonology (Greek (phn), voice, sound + (lgos), word, speech,
subject of discussion), is a subfield of linguistics which studies the sound system
of a specific language (or languages). Whereas phonetics is about the physical
production and perception of the sounds of speech, phonology describes the
way sounds function within a given language or across languages.
An important part of phonology is studying which sounds are distinctive units
within a language. In English, for example, /p/ and /b/ are distinctive units of
sound, (i.e., they are phonemes / the difference is phonemic, or phonematic).
This can be seen from minimal pairs such as "pin" and "bin", which mean
different things, but differ only in one sound. On the other hand, /p/ is often
pronounced differently depending on its position relative to other sounds, yet
these different pronunciations are still considered by native speakers to be the
same "sound". For example, the /p/ in "pin" is aspirated while the same
phoneme in "spin" is not. In some other languages, for example Thai and
Quechua, this same difference of aspiration or non-aspiration does differentiate
phonemes.
In addition to the minimal meaningful sounds (the phonemes), phonology
studies how sounds alternate, such as the /p/ in English described above, and
topics such as syllable structure, stress, accent, and intonation.
The principles of phonological theory have also been applied to the analysis of
sign languages, even though the phonological units are not acoustic. The
principles of phonology, and for that matter, language, are independent of
modality because they stem from an abstract and innate grammar.

Representing phonemes
The vowels of modern (Standard) Arabic and (Israeli) Hebrew from the
phonological point of view. Note the intersection of the two circlesthe
distinction between short a, i and u is made by both speakers, but Arabic lacks
the mid articulation of short vowels, while Hebrew lacks the distinction of vowel
length.
The writing systems of some languages are based on the phonemic principle of
having one letter (or combination of letters) per phoneme and vice-versa.
Ideally, speakers can correctly write whatever they can say, and can correctly
read anything that is written. (In practice, this ideal is never realized.) However
in English, different spellings can be used for the same phoneme (e.g., rude and
food have the same vowel sounds), and the same letter (or combination of
letters) can represent different phonemes (e.g., the "th" consonant sounds of
thin and this are different). In order to avoid this confusion based on
orthography, phonologists represent phonemes by writing them between two
slashes: " / / " (but without the quotes). On the other hand, the actual sounds
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are enclosed by square brackets: " [ ] " (again, without quotes). While the letters
between slashes may be based on spelling conventions, the letters between
square brackets are usually the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) or some
other phonetic transcription system.

Phoneme inventories
Doing a phoneme inventory

The vowels of modern (Standard) Arabic and (Israeli) Hebrew from the phonetic
point of view. Note that the two circles are totally separatenone of the vowelsounds made by speakers of one language are made by speakers of the other.
Part of the phonological study of a language involves looking at data (phonetic
transcriptions of the speech of native speakers) and trying to deduce what the
underlying phonemes are and what the sound inventory of the language is.
Even though a language may make distinctions between a small number of
phonemes, speakers actually produce many more phonetic sounds. Thus, a
phoneme in a particular language can be pronounced in many ways.
Looking for minimal pairs forms part of the research in studying the phoneme
inventory of a language. A minimal pair is a pair of words from the same
language, that differ by only a single sound, and that are recognized by
speakers as being two different words. When there is a minimal pair, the two
sounds represent separate phonemes. However, since it is often impossible to
detect all phonemes with this method, other approaches are used as well.

Phonemic distinctions or allophones

If two similar sounds do not belong to separate phonemes, they are called
allophones of the same underlying phoneme. For instance, voiceless stops
(/p/, /t/, /k/) can be aspirated. In English, voiceless stops at the beginning of a
stressed syllable (but not after /s/) are aspirated, whereas after /s/ they are not
aspirated. This can be seen by putting the fingers right in front of the lips and
noticing the difference in breathiness in saying 'pin' versus 'spin'. There is no
English word 'pin' that starts with an unaspirated p, therefore in English,
aspirated [p] (the [] means aspirated) and unaspirated [p] are allophones of
the same phoneme /p/.
The /t/ sounds in the words 'tub', 'stub', 'but', 'butter', and 'button' are all
pronounced differently in American English, yet are all perceived as "the same
sound", therefore they constitute another example of allophones of the same
phoneme in English.
Another example: in English and many other languages, the liquids /l/ and /r/
are two separate phonemes (minimal pair 'life', 'rife'); however, in Korean these
two liquids are allophones of the same phoneme, and the general rule is that []
comes before a vowel, and [l] does not (e.g. Seoul, Korea). A native speaker will
tell you that the [l] in Seoul and the [] in Korean are in fact the same sound.
Theoretically, what happens is that a native Korean speaker's brain recognises
the underlying phoneme /l/, and, depending on the phonetic context (whether
before a vowel or not), expresses it as either [] or [l]. Another Korean speaker
will hear both sounds as the underlying phoneme and think of them as the
same sound. This is one reason why most people have a marked accent when
they attempt to speak a language that they did not grow up hearing; their
brains sort the sounds they hear in terms of the phonemes of their own native
language.
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There are different methods for determining why allophones should fall
categorically under a specified phoneme. Counter-intuitively, the principle of
phonetic similarity is not always used. This tends to make the phoneme seem
abstracted away from the phonetic realities of speech. It should be remembered
that, just because allophones can be grouped under phonemes for the purpose
of linguistic analysis, this does not necessarily mean that this is an actual
process in the way the human brain processes a language. On the other hand, it
could be pointed out that some sort of analytic notion of a language beneath
the word level is usual if the language is written alphabetically. So one could
also speak of a phonology of reading and writing.

Change of a phoneme inventory over time

The particular sounds which are phonemic in a language can change over time.
At one time, [f] and [v] were allophones in English, but these later changed into
separate phonemes. This is one of the main factors of historical change of
languages as described in historical linguistics.

Other topics in phonology

Phonology also includes topics such as assimilation, elision, epenthesis, vowel

harmony, tone, non-phonemic prosody and phonotactics. Prosody includes
topics such as stress and intonation.

Development of the field

In ancient India, the Sanskrit grammarian Pini (c. 520460 BC) in his text of
Sanskrit phonology, the Shiva Sutras, discusses something like the concepts of
the phoneme, the morpheme and the root. The Shiva Sutras describe a
phonemic notational system in the fourteen initial lines of the Adhyy. The
notational system introduces different clusters of phonemes that serve special
roles in the morphology of Sanskrit, and are referred to throughout the text.
Panini's grammar of Sanskrit had a significant influence on Ferdinand de
Saussure, the father of modern structuralism, who was a professor of Sanskrit.
The Polish scholar Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, (together with his former student
Mikoaj Kruszewski) coined the word phoneme in 1876, and his work, though
often unacknowledged, is considered to be the starting point of modern
phonology. He worked not only on the theory of the phoneme but also on
phonetic alternations (i.e., what is now called allophony and morphophonology).
His influence on Ferdinand de Saussure was also significant.
Prince Nikolai Trubetzkoy's posthumously published work, the Principles of
Phonology (1939), is considered the foundation of the Prague School of
phonology. Directly influenced by Baudouin de Courtenay, Trubetzkoy is
considered the founder of morphophonology, though morphophonology was
first recognized by Baudouin de Courtenay. Trubetzkoy split phonology into
phonemics and archiphonemics; the former has had more influence than the
latter. Another important figure in the Prague School was Roman Jakobson, who
was one of the most prominent linguists of the twentieth century.
In 1968 Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle published The Sound Pattern of
English (SPE), the basis for Generative Phonology. In this view, phonological
representations are sequences of segments made up of distinctive features.
These features were an expansion of earlier work by Roman Jakobson, Gunnar
Fant, and Morris Halle. The features describe aspects of articulation and
perception, are from a universally fixed set, and have the binary values + or -.
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There are at least two levels of representation: underlying representation and

surface phonetic representation. Ordered phonological rules govern how
underlying representation is transformed into the actual pronunciation (the so
called surface form). An important consequence of the influence SPE had on
phonological theory was the downplaying of the syllable and the emphasis on
segments. Furthermore, the Generativists folded morphophonology into
phonology, which both solved and created problems.
Natural Phonology was a theory based on the publications of its proponent
David Stampe in 1969 and (more explicitly) in 1979. In this view, phonology is
based on a set of universal phonological processes which interact with one
another; which ones are active and which are suppressed are language-specific.
Rather than acting on segments, phonological processes act on distinctive
features within prosodic groups. Prosodic groups can be as small as a part of a
syllable or as large as an entire utterance. Phonological processes are
unordered with respect to each other and apply simultaneously (though the
output of one process may be the input to another). The second-most
prominent Natural Phonologist is Stampe's wife, Patricia Donegan; there are
many Natural Phonologists in Europe, though also a few others in the U.S., such
as Geoffrey Pullum. The principles of Natural Phonology were extended to
morphology by Wolfgang U. Dressler, who founded Natural Morphology.
In 1976 John Goldsmith introduced autosegmental phonology. Phonological
phenomena are no longer seen as operating on one linear sequence of
segments, called phonemes or feature combinations, but rather as involving
some parallel sequences of features which reside on multiple tiers.
Augosegmental phonology later evolved into Feature Geometry, which became
the standard theory of representation for the theories of the organization of
phonology as different as Lexical Phonology and Optimality Theory.
Government Phonology, which originated in the early 1980s as an attempt to
unify theoretical notions of syntactic and phonological structures, is based on
the notion that all languages necessarily follow a small set of principles and
vary according to their selection of certain binary parameters. That is, all
languages' phonological structures are essentially the same, but there is
restricted variation that accounts for differences in surface realizations.
Principles are held to be inviolable, though parameters may sometimes come
into conflict. Prominent figures include Jonathan Kaye, Jean Lowenstamm, JeanRoger Vergnaud, Monik Charette, John Harris, and many others.
In a course at the LSA summer institute in 1991, Alan Prince and Paul
Smolensky developed Optimality Theory an overall architecture for
phonology according to which languages choose a pronunciation of a word that
best satisfies a list of constraints which is ordered by importance: a lowerranked constraint can be violated when the violation is necessary in order to
obey a higher-ranked constraint. The approach was soon extended to
morphology by John McCarthy and Alan Prince, and has become the dominant
trend in phonology. Though this usually goes unacknowledged, Optimality
Theory was strongly influenced by Natural Phonology; both view phonology in
terms of constraints on speakers and their production, though these constraints
are formalized in very different ways.

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Broadly speaking Government Phonology (or its descendant, strict-CV

phonology) has a greater following in the United Kingdom, whereas Optimality
Theory is predominant in North America.

See also

Absolute neutralisation
Phoneme
Morphophonology
Phonological hierarchy

Morphology (linguistics)
For other uses, see Morphology.
Morphology is the field of linguistics that studies the internal structure of
words. (Words as units in the lexicon are the subject matter of lexicology.) While
words are generally accepted as being (with clitics) the smallest units of syntax,
it is clear that in most (if not all) languages, words can be related to other words
by rules. For example, English speakers recognize that the words dog, dogs, and
dog-catcher are closely related. English speakers recognize these relations from
their tacit knowledge of the rules of word-formation in English. They intuit that
dog is to dogs as cat is to cats; similarly, dog is to dog-catcher as dish is to
dishwasher. The rules understood by the speaker reflect specific patterns (or
regularities) in the way words are formed from smaller units and how those
smaller units interact in speech. In this way, morphology is the branch of
linguistics that studies patterns of word-formation within and across languages,
and attempts to formulate rules that model the knowledge of the speakers of
those languages.

History
The history of morphological analysis dates back to the ancient Indian linguist
Pini, who formulated the 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology in the text
Adhyy by using a Constituency Grammar. The Graeco-Roman grammatical
tradition also engaged in morphological analysis.
The term morphology was coined by August Schleicher in 1859[1]

Fundamental concepts
Lexemes and word forms

The distinction between these two senses of "word" is arguably the most
important one in morphology. The first sense of "word," the one in which dog
and dogs are "the same word," is called lexeme. The second sense is called
word-form. We thus say that dog and dogs are different forms of the same
lexeme. Dog and dog-catcher, on the other hand, are different lexemes; for
example, they refer to two different kinds of entities. The form of a word that is
chosen conventionally to represent the canonical form of a word is called a
lemma, or citation form.

Prosodic word vs. morphological word

Here are examples from other languages of the failure of a single phonological
word to coincide with a single morphological word-form. In Latin, one way to
express the concept of 'NOUN-PHRASE1 and NOUN-PHRASE2' (as in "apples and
oranges") is to suffix '-que' to the second noun phrase: "apples oranges-and", as
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it were. An extreme level of this theoretical quandary posed by some

phonological words is provided by the Kwak'wala language.[2] In Kwak'wala, as
in a great many other languages, meaning relations between nouns, including
possession and "semantic case", are formulated by affixes instead of by
independent "words". The three word English phrase, "with his club", where
'with' identifies its dependent noun phrase as an instrument and 'his' denotes a
possession relation, would consist of two words or even just one word in many
languages. But affixation for semantic relations in Kwak'wala differs
dramatically (from the viewpoint of those whose language is not Kwak'wala)
from such affixation in other languages for this reason: the affixes
phonologically attach not to the lexeme they pertain to semantically, but to the
preceding lexeme. Consider the following example (in Kwakw'ala, sentences
begin with what corresponds to an English verb):[3]
kwixid-i-da
bgwanmai--a
qasa-s-isi
talwagwayu
Morpheme by morpheme translation:
kwixid-i-da = clubbed-PIVOT-DETERMINER
bgwanma--a = man-ACCUSATIVE-DETERMINER
qasa-s-is = otter-INSTRUMENTAL-3.PERSON.SINGULAR-POSSESSIVE
talwagwayu = club.
"the man clubbed the otter with his club"
(Notation notes:
1. accusative case marks an entity that something is done to.
2. determiners are words such as "the", "this", "that".
3. the concept of "pivot" is a theoretical construct that is not relevant to this
discussion.)
That is, to the speaker of Kwak'wala, the sentence does not contain the "words"
'him-the-otter' or 'with-his-club' Instead, the markers -i-da (PIVOT-'the'),
referring to man, attaches not to bgwanma ('man'), but instead to the "verb";
the markers --a (ACCUSATIVE-'the'), referring to otter, attach to bgwanma
instead of to qasa ('otter'), etc. To summarize differently: a speaker of
Kwak'wala does not perceive the sentence to consist of these phonological
words:
kwixid
i-da-bgwanma
-a-qasa
s-isi-talwagwayu
"clubbed
PIVOT-the-mani
hit-the-otter
with-hisi-club

Inflection vs. word-formation

Given the notion of a lexeme, it is possible to distinguish two kinds of

morphological rules. Some morphological rules relate different forms of the
same lexeme; while other rules relate two different lexemes. Rules of the first
kind are called inflectional rules, while those of the second kind are called
word-formation. The English plural, as illustrated by dog and dogs, is an
inflectional rule; compounds like dog-catcher or dishwasher provide an example
of a word-formation rule. Informally, word-formation rules form "new words"
(that is, new lexemes), while inflection rules yield variant forms of the "same"
word (lexeme).
There is a further distinction between two kinds of word-formation: derivation
and compounding. Compounding is a process of word-formation that involves
combining complete word-forms into a single compound form; dog-catcher is
therefore a compound, because both dog and catcher are complete word-forms
in their own right before the compounding process has been applied, and are
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subsequently treated as one form. Derivation involves affixing bound (nonindependent) forms to existing lexemes, whereby the addition of the affix
derives a new lexeme. One example of derivation is clear in this case: the word
independent is derived from the word dependent by prefixing it with the
derivational prefix in-, while dependent itself is derived from the verb depend.
The distinction between inflection and word-formation is not at all clear-cut.
There are many examples where linguists fail to agree whether a given rule is
inflection or word-formation. The next section will attempt to clarify this
distinction.

Paradigms and morphosyntax

A paradigm is the complete set of related word-forms associated with a given
lexeme. The familiar examples of paradigms are the conjugations of verbs, and
the declensions of nouns. Accordingly, the word-forms of a lexeme may be
arranged conveniently into tables, by classifying them according to shared
inflectional categories such as tense, aspect, mood, number, gender or case.
For example, the personal pronouns in English can be organized into tables,
using the categories of person (1st., 2nd., 3rd.), number (singular vs. plural),
gender (masculine, feminine, neuter), and case (subjective, objective, and
possessive). See English personal pronouns for the details.
The inflectional categories used to group word-forms into paradigms cannot be
chosen arbitrarily; they must be categories that are relevant to stating the
syntactic rules of the language. For example, person and number are categories
that can be used to define paradigms in English, because English has
grammatical agreement rules that require the verb in a sentence to appear in
an inflectional form that matches the person and number of the subject. In
other words, the syntactic rules of English care about the difference between
dog and dogs, because the choice between these two forms determines which
form of the verb is to be used. In contrast, however, no syntactic rule of English
cares about the difference between dog and dog-catcher, or dependent and
independent. The first two are just nouns, and the second two just adjectives,
and they generally behave like any other noun or adjective behaves.
An important difference between inflection and word-formation is that inflected
word-forms of lexemes are organized into paradigms, which are defined by the
requirements of syntactic rules, whereas the rules of word-formation are not
restricted by any corresponding requirements of syntax. Inflection is therefore
said to be relevant to syntax, and word-formation is not. The part of morphology
that covers the relationship between syntax and morphology is called
morphosyntax, and it concerns itself with inflection and paradigms, but not with
word-formation or compounding.

Allomorphy

In the exposition above, morphological rules are described as analogies

between word-forms: dog is to dogs as cat is to cats, and as dish is to dishes. In
this case, the analogy applies both to the form of the words and to their
meaning: in each pair, the first word means "one of X", while the second "two or
more of X", and the difference is always the plural form -s affixed to the second
word, signaling the key distinction between singular and plural entities.
One of the largest sources of complexity in morphology is that this one-to-one
correspondence between meaning and form scarcely applies to every case in
the language. In English, we have word form pairs like ox/oxen, goose/geese,
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and sheep/sheep, where the difference between the singular and the plural is
signaled in a way that departs from the regular pattern, or is not signaled at all.
Even cases considered "regular", with the final -s, are not so simple; the -s in
dogs is not pronounced the same way as the -s in cats, and in a plural like
dishes, an "extra" vowel appears before the -s. These cases, where the same
distinction is effected by alternative forms of a "word", are called allomorphy.
Phonological rules constrain which sounds can appear next to each other in a
language, and morphological rules, when applied blindly, would often violate
phonological rules, by resulting in sound sequences that are prohibited in the
language in question. For example, to form the plural of dish by simply
appending an -s to the end of the word would result in the form *[ds], which is
not permitted by the phonotactics of English. In order to "rescue" the word, a
vowel sound is inserted between the root and the plural marker, and [dz]
results. Similar rules apply to the pronunciation of the -s in dogs and cats: it
depends on the quality (voiced vs. unvoiced) of the final preceding phoneme.

Lexical morphology
Lexical morphology is the branch of morphology that deals with the lexicon,
which, morphologically conceived, is the collection of lexemes in a language. As
such, it concerns itself primarily with word-formation: derivation and
compounding.

Models of morphology

There are three principal approaches to morphology, which each try to capture
the distinctions above in different ways. These are,
Morpheme-based morphology, which makes use of an Item-andArrangement approach.
Lexeme-based morphology, which normally makes use of an Item-andProcess approach.
Word-based morphology, which normally makes use of a Word-andParadigm approach.
Note that while the associations indicated between the concepts in each item in
that list is very strong, it is not absolute.

Morpheme-based morphology
In morpheme-based morphology, word-forms are analyzed as arrangements of
morphemes. A morpheme is defined as the minimal meaningful unit of a
language. In a word like independently, we say that the morphemes are in-,
depend, -ent, and ly; depend is the root and the other morphemes are, in this
case, derivational affixes.[4] In a word like dogs, we say that dog is the root, and
that -s is an inflectional morpheme. This way of analyzing word-forms as if they
were made of morphemes put after each other like beads on a string, is called
Item-and-Arrangement.
The morpheme-based approach is the first one that beginners to morphology
usually think of, and which laymen tend to find the most obvious. This is so to
such an extent that very often beginners think that morphemes are an
inevitable, fundamental notion of morphology, and many five-minute
explanations of morphology are, in fact, five-minute explanations of morphemebased morphology. This is, however, not so. The fundamental idea of
morphology is that the words of a language are related to each other by
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different kinds of rules. Analyzing words as sequences of morphemes is a way of

describing these relations, but is not the only way. In actual academic
linguistics, morpheme-based morphology certainly has many adherents, but is
by no means the dominant approach.

Lexeme-based morphology
Lexeme-based morphology is (usually) an Item-and-Process approach. Instead
of analyzing a word-form as a set of morphemes arranged in sequence, a wordform is said to be the result of applying rules that alter a word-form or stem in
order to produce a new one. An inflectional rule takes a stem, changes it as is
required by the rule, and outputs a word-form; a derivational rule takes a stem,
changes it as per its own requirements, and outputs a derived stem; a
compounding rule takes word-forms, and similarly outputs a compound stem.

Word-based morphology

Word-based morphology is a (usually) Word-and-paradigm approach. This theory

takes paradigms as a central notion. Instead of stating rules to combine
morphemes into word-forms, or to generate word-forms from stems, word-based
morphology states generalizations that hold between the forms of inflectional
paradigms. The major point behind this approach is that many such
generalizations are hard to state with either of the other approaches. The
examples are usually drawn from fusional languages, where a given "piece" of a
word, which a morpheme-based theory would call an inflectional morpheme,
corresponds to a combination of grammatical categories, for example, "third
person plural." Morpheme-based theories usually have no problems with this
situation, since one just says that a given morpheme has two categories. Itemand-Process theories, on the other hand, often break down in cases like these,
because they all too often assume that there will be two separate rules here,
one for third person, and the other for plural, but the distinction between them
turns out to be artificial. Word-and-Paradigm approaches treat these as whole
words that are related to each other by analogical rules. Words can be
categorized based on the pattern they fit into. This applies both to existing
words and to new ones. Application of a pattern different than the one that has
been used historically can give rise to a new word, such as older replacing elder
(where older follows the normal pattern of adjectival superlatives) and cows
replacing kine (where cows fits the regular pattern of plural formation). While a
Word-and-Paradigm approach can explain this easily, other approaches have
difficulty with phenomena such as this.

Morphological typology
Main article: Morphological typology
In the 19th century, philologists devised a now classic classification of
languages according to their morphology. According to this typology, some
languages are isolating, and have little to no morphology; others are
agglutinative, and their words tend to have lots of easily-separable morphemes;
while others yet are inflectional or fusional, because their inflectional
morphemes are said to be "fused" together. This leads to one bound morpheme
conveying multiple pieces of information. The classic example of an isolating
language is Chinese; the classic example of an agglutinative language is
Turkish; both Latin and Greek are classic examples of fusional languages.
Considering the variability of the world's languages, it becomes clear that this
classification is not at all clear-cut, and many languages do not neatly fit any
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one of these types, and some fit in more than one. A continuum of complex
morphology of language may be adapted when considering languages.
The three models of morphology stem from attempts to analyze languages that
more or less match different categories in this typology. The Item-andArrangement approach fits very naturally with agglutinative languages; while
the Item-and-Process and Word-and-Paradigm approaches usually address
fusional languages.
The reader should also note that the classical typology also mostly applies to
inflectional morphology. There is very little fusion going on with word-formation.
Languages may be classified as synthetic or analytic in their word formation,
depending on the preferred way of expressing notions that are not inflectional:
either by using word-formation (synthetic), or by using syntactic phrases
(analytic).

Footnotes

1. ^ Fr die Lehre von der Wortform whle ich das Wort "Morphologie" ("for the
science of word formation, I choose the term 'morphology'", Mmoires Acad.
Impriale 7/1/7, 35)
2. ^ Formerly known as Kwakiutl, Kwak'wala belongs to the Northern branch of the
Wakashan language family. "Kwakiutl" is still used to refer to the tribe itself,
along with other terms.
3. ^ Example taken from Foley 1998, using a modified transcription. This
phenomenon of Kwak'wala was reported by Jacobsen as cited in van Valin and La
Polla 1997.
4. ^ The existence of words like appendix and pending in English does not mean
that the English word depend is analyzed into a derivational prefix de- and a root
pend. While all those were indeed once related to each other by morphological
rules, this was so only in Latin, not in English. English borrowed the words from
French and Latin, but not the morphological rules that allowed Latin speakers to
combine de- and the verb pendere 'to hang' into the derivative dependere.

See also

Affixation
Bound morpheme
Bracketing paradox
Dependent-marking language
Descriptive linguistics
Descriptive marker
Distributed morphology
Double-marking language
Head-marking language
Inflected language
Lexical markup framework
Medical terminology
Morphological typology
Morphology (folkloristics)
Nonconcatenative morphology
Noun case
Reduplication
Righthand head rule
Root morpheme
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Syntactic hierarchy
Uninflected word
Unpaired word
Zero-marking language

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Syntax
In linguistics, syntax (from Ancient Greek - syn-, together, and txis,
arrangement) are the rules of a language that show how the words of that
language are to be arranged to make a sentence of that language. The term
syntax can also be used to refer to these rules themselves, as in "the syntax of
Gaelic". Modern research in syntax attempts to describe languages in terms of
such rules, and, for many practitioners, to find general rules that apply to all
languages. Since the field of syntax attempts to explain grammatical
judgments, and not provide them, it is unconcerned with linguistic prescription.
Though all theories of syntax use humans as their object of study, there are
some significant differences in outlook. Many linguists (e.g. Noam Chomsky) see
syntax as a branch of biology, since they conceive syntax as the study of
linguistic knowledge as embodied in the human mind. Others (e.g. Gerald
Gazdar) take a more Platonistic view, regarding syntax as the study of an
abstract formal system. [1]; others also (e.g. Joseph Greenberg) consider
grammar as a taxonomical device to reach broad generalizations among
languages.

Early history
Works on grammar were of course being written long before modern syntax
came about; the Adhyy of Pini is often cited as an example of a premodern work that approaches the sophistication of a modern syntactic theory. [1]
In the West, the school of thought that came to be known as traditional
grammar began with the work of Dionysius Thrax.
For centuries, work in syntax was dominated by a framework known as
grammaire gnrale, first expounded in 1660 by Antoine Arnauld in a book of
the same title. This system took as its basic premise the assumption that
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language is a direct reflection of thought processes and hence there is a single

most natural way to express a thought. That way, coincidentally, was exactly
the way it was expressed in French.
However, in the 19th century, with the development of historical-comparative
linguistics, linguists began to realize the sheer diversity of human language, and
to question fundamental assumptions about the relation between language and
logic. It became apparent that there was no such thing as a most natural way to
express a thought, and logic could no longer be relied upon as a base for
studying the structure of language.
The Port-Royal grammar modeled the study of syntax on that of logic (indeed,
large parts of the Port-Royal Logic were copied or adapted from the Grammaire
gnrale[2]). Syntactic categories were identified with logical ones, and all
sentences were analysed into the form "Subject-Copula-Predicate". Initially, this
view was adopted even by the early comparative linguists (e.g., Bopp).
The central role of syntax within theoretical linguistics became clear only in the
last century, which could reasonably be called the "century of syntactic theory"
as far as linguistics is concerned. For a detailed and critical survey of the history
of syntax in the last two centuries see the monumental work by Graffi 2001.

Modern theories
Generative grammar

Main article: Generative grammar

Generative grammar hypothesizes that language is a mental structure of the
human mind. The goal of generative grammar is to make a complete model of
this inner-language (or i-language) which could be used to describe all human
speech, and predict the grammaticality of any given speech utterance (that is,
whether speech would sound correct to native speakers of the language). This
approach to language was pioneered by Noam Chomsky. Most generative
theories (although not all of them) assume that syntax is based in constituent
structure. Generative grammars are among the theories that focus primarily on
the form of the sentence rather than the function.
Among the many Chomskyan generative theories of linguistics are:
Transformational Grammar (TG) (now largely out of date)
Government and binding theory (GB) (common in the late 1970s and
1980s)
Minimalism (MP) (the most recent Chomskyan version of generative
grammar)
Other theories that find their origin in the generative paradigm are:
Generative semantics (now largely out of date)
Relational grammar (RG) (now largely out of date)
Arc Pair grammar
Generalised phrase structure grammar (now largely out of date)
Head-driven phrase structure grammar
Lexical-functional grammar
HPSG and LFG also fall in the category of unification grammars.

Categorial grammar
Categorial grammar is an approach that focuses on the combinatoric properties
of categories. For example, an intransitive verb has the property that it requires
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a noun phrase (NP) to complete it and the result is a sentence (S) thus the
category of such a verb is NP\S (in one notation).
Tree-adjoining grammar is a categorial grammar but adds in partial tree
structures to the categories

Dependency grammar
Dependency grammar is a different type of approach in which structure is
determined by the relation between a word (a head) and its dependents rather
than being based in constituent structure.
Some dependency-based theories of Syntax
Algebraic syntax
Word grammar
Operator Grammar

Stochastic/Probabilistic grammars/Network Theories

Theoretical approaches to syntax that are based in probability theory are known
as stochastic grammars. One common implementation of such an approach
makes use of a Neural network or Connectionism. Some theories based in this
are:
Optimality Theory
stochastic context-free grammar

Functionalist grammars
Functionalist theories, although concerned about form, are driven by
explanation based in the function of a sentence (i.e. its communicative
function). Some typical functionalist theories include:
Functional grammar (Dik)
Prague Linguistic Circle
Systemic functional grammar
Cognitive grammar
Construction grammar (CxG)
Role and reference grammar (RRG)

See also

Phrase
Phrase structure rules
Syntactic category
list of syntactic phenomena

Grammar
X-bar theory
Algebraic syntax

Lexis (linguistics)
In linguistics, lexis (in Greek = word) describes the storage of language in
our mental lexicon as prefabricated patterns (lexical units) that can be recalled
and sorted into meaningful speech and writing. Recent research in corpus
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linguistics suggests that the long-held dichotomy between grammar and

vocabulary does not exist. Lexis as a concept differs from the traditional
paradigm of grammar in that it defines probable language use, not possible
language usage. This notion contrasts starkly with the Chomskian proposition of
a Universal Grammar as the prime mover for language; grammar still plays an
integral role in lexis, of course, but it is the result of accumulated lexis, not its
generator.

Contents

1 What is the lexicon?

2 Formulaic Language
3 Context and Co-Text
o 3.1 Concordance for POSSIBILITY
4 Metaphor as an Organizational Principle for Lexis
5 Grammar
6 Register
7 References

What is the lexicon?

In short, the Lexicon is
Formulaic: it relies on partially-fixed expressions and highly probable word
combinations
Idiomatic: it follows conventions and patterns for usage
Metaphoric: concepts such as time and money, business and sex, systems
and water all share a large portion of the same vocabulary
Grammatical: it uses rules based on sampling of the Lexicon
Register-specific: it uses the same word differently and/or less frequently
in different contexts

Formulaic Language

In recent years, the compilation of language databases using real samples from
speech and writing has enabled researchers to take a fresh look at the
composition of languages. Among other things, statistical research methods
offer reliable insight into the ways in which words interact. The most interesting
findings have taken place in the dichotomy between language use (how
language is used) and language usage (how language could be used).
Language use shows which occurrences of words and their partners are most
probable. The major finding of this research is that language users rely to a very
high extent on ready-made language lexical chunks, which can be easily
combined to form sentences. This eliminates the need for the speaker to
analyze each sentence grammatically, yet deals with a situation effectively.
Typical examples include I see what you mean or Could you please hand me
the or Recent research shows that
Language usage, on the other hand, is what takes place when the ready-made
chunks do not fulfill the speakers immediate needs; in other words, a new
sentence is about to be formed and must be analyzed for correctness. Grammar
rules have been internalized by native speakers, allowing them to determine the
viability of new sentences. Language usage might be defined as a fall-back
position when all other options have been exhausted.

Context and Co-Text

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When analyzing the structure of language statistically, a useful place to start is

with high frequency context words, or so-called Key Words in Context (KWICs).
After millions of samples of spoken and written language have been stored in a
database, these KWICs can be sorted and analyzed for their co-text, or words
which commonly co-occur with them. Valuable principles with which KWICs can
be analyzed include:
Collocation: words and their co-occurrences (examples include fulfill
needs and fall-back position)
Semantic prosody: the connotation words carry (pay attention can be
neutral or remonstrative, as when a teacher says to a pupil: Pay
attention! (or else)
Colligation: the grammar words use (while I hope that suits you sounds
natural, I hope that you are suited by that does not).
Register: the text style a word is used in (President vows to support
allies is most likely found in news headlines, whereas vows in speech
most likely refer to marriages; in speech, the verb vow is most likely
used as promise).
(partially adapted from Lewis, 1997)
Once data has been collected, it can be sorted to determine the probability of
co-occurrences. One common and well-known way is with a concordance: the
KWIC is centered and shown with dozens of examples of it in use, as with the
example for possibility below.

Concordance for POSSIBILITY

bout to be put on looks a real possibility. Now that Benn is no longer
Hiett, says that remains a real possibility: As part of the PLO, the PLF
Graham added. That's a possibility as well," Whitlock admitted.
Severe pain was always a possibility. Early in the century, both
that, when possible, every other possibility, including speeches by outside
that we can, that we use every possibility, including every possibility of
could be let separately. Another possibility is `constructive vandalism'
a people reject violence and the possibility of violence can the possibility
the French vote and now enjoy the possibility of winning two seats in the
immediately investigate the possibility of criminal charges and that her
Sri Lankan sources say that the possibility of negotiating with the Tamil
Sheikhdoms too there might be the possibility of encouraging agitation.
the twelve member states on the possibility of their threatening to
Marie had already looked into the possibility of persuading the [f]
a function of dependency, but the possibility of capitalist development,
were almost defenceless. The possibility of an invasion had been apparent
oddly and are worried about the possibility of drug use, say so. Tell them
was first convened to discuss the possibility of a coup d'etat to return the
in the mi5 line and in the possibility of the state being used to smear
reasons behind the move was the possibility of a new market. Cheap terminals
be assessed individually. The possibility of genetic testing brings that
given the privilege. The other possibility, of course, is that the jaunt
All this undermines the possibility of economic reform and requires
get. (Knowing that there is no possibility of attempting coitus takes the
who was openly cynical about the possibility of achieving socialism 5
so that they can perceive the possibility of being citizens engaged in
poisoning and fire, facing the possibility of their own death just to be
hearing yesterday that the possibility of using the agency to gather
in 1903, and I don't foresee any possibility replacing that. The car we
a genetic factor at work here, a possibility supported by at least a few
refused even to entertain the possibility that any of the nations of the
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has a long history, there is the possibility that the recent upsurge in
Police are investigating the possibility that she was seen a short time
any doctors who think there is a possibility that they may have been infected
are in a store, there is a good possibility that you are wearing moisturizer
living must be made. The possibility that a young adult will be
he'd completed his account of the possibility that there was a drug-smuggling
has been devoted to exploring the possibility that so-called ancient peoples

Once such a concordance has been created, the co-occurrences of other words
with the KWIC can be analyzed. This is done by means of a t-score. If we take
for example the word stranger (comparative adjective and noun), a t-score
analysis will provide us with information such as word frequency in the corpus:
words such as no and to are not surprisingly very frequent; a word such as
controversy much less. It then calculates the occurrences of that word
together with the KWIC (joint frequency) to determine if that combination is
unusually common, in other words, if the word combination occurs significantly
more often than would be expected by its frequency alone. If so, the collocation
is considered strong, and is worth paying closer attention to.
In this example, no stranger to is a very frequent collocation; so are words
such as mysterious, handsome, and dark. This comes as no surprise. More
interesting, however, is no stranger to controversy. Perhaps the most
interesting example, though, is the idiomatic perfect stranger. Such a word
combination could not be predicted on its own, as it does not mean a stranger
who is perfect as we should expect. Its unusually high frequency shows that
the two words collocate strongly and as an expression are highly idiomatic.
The study of corpus linguistics provides us with many insights into the real
nature of language, as shown above. In essence, the lexicon seems to be built
on the premise that language use is best approached as an assembly process,
whereby the brain links together ready-made chunks. Intuitively this makes
sense: it is a natural short-cut to alleviate the burden of having to re-invent the
wheel everytime we speak. Additionally, using well-known expressions conveys
loads of information rapidly, as the listener does not need to break down an
utterance into its constituent parts. In "Words and Rules", Steven Pinker shows
this process at work with regular and irregular verbs: We collect the former,
which provide us with rules we can apply to unknown words (for example, the
-ed ending for past tense verbs allows us to decline the neologism to google
into googled). Other patterns, the irregular verbs, we store separately as
unique items to be memorized.

Metaphor as an Organizational Principle for

Lexis
Another method of effective language storage in the Lexicon includes the use of
metaphor as a storage principle. (Storage and files are good examples of
how human memory and computer memory have been linked to the same
vocabulary; this was not always the case). Lakoffs work (1980) is usually cited
as the cornerstone to studies of metaphor in the language. One example is
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quite common: time is money. We can save, spend and waste both time and
money. Another interesting example comes from business and sex: businesses
penetrate the market, attract customers, and discuss relationship
management. Business is also war: launch an ad campaign, gain a foothold in
the market, suffer losses. Systems, on the other hand, are water: a flood of
information, overflowing with people, flow of traffic. The NOA theory of Lexicon
acquisition argues that the metaphoric sorting filter helps to simplify language
storage and avoid overload.

Grammar
Computer research has revealed that grammar in the sense of its ability to
create entirely new language is avoided as far as possible. Biber and his team
working at the University of Arizona on the Cobuild GSWE noted an unusually
high frequency of word bundles that, on their own, lack meaning. But a sample
of one or two quickly suggests their function: they can be inserted as
grammatical glue without any prior analysis of form. Even a cursory observation
of examples reveals how commonplace they are in all forms of language use,
yet we are hardly aware of their existence. Research suggests that language is
heavily peppered with such bundles in all registers; two examples include "do
you want me to," commonly found in speech, or "there was no significant"
found in academic registers. Put together in speech, they can create
comprehensible sentences, such as "I'm not sure" + "if they're" + "they're
going" to form "I'm not sure if they're going." Such a sentence eases the burden
on the Lexicon as it requires no grammatical analysis whatsoever.

Register
Michael K. Halliday (1987) proposes a useful dichotomy of spoken and written
language which actually entails a shift in paradigm: while linguistic theory posits
the superiority of the spoken language over written language (as the former is
the origin, comes naturally, and thus precedes the written language), or the
written over the spoken (for the same reasons: the written language being the
highest form of rudimentary speech), Halliday states they are two entirely
different entities. In short, he claims that speech is grammatically complex
while writing is lexically dense (Halliday, 1993). In other words, a sentence such
as a cousin of mine, the one who I was talking about the other day the one
who lives in Houston, not the one in Dallas called me up yesterday to tell me
the very same story about Mary, who is most likely to be found in
conversation, not as a newspaper headline. Prime Minister vows conciliation,
on the other hand, would be a typical news headline.
Hallidays work suggests something radically different: language behaves in
registers. Biber et al working on the LGSWE worked with four (these are not
exhaustive, merely exemplary): conversation, literature, news, academic. These
four registers clearly highlight distinctions within language use which would not
be clear through a grammatical approach. Not surprisingly, each register
favors the use of different words and structures: whereas news headline stories,
for example, are grammatically simple, conversational anecdotes are full of
lexical repetition. The lexis of the news, however, can be quite dense, just as
the grammar of speech can be incredibly complicated.
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References
Biber, D et al (1999): Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English,
Longman
Halliday, M.A.K. (1987) Spoken and Written Modes of Meaning in Graddol, D.
and Boyd-Barret, O (eds) Media Texts: Authors and Readers, Clevedon,
Multilingual Matters and Open University
Lakoff, G and Johnson, M (1980). Metaphors we live by, University of Chicago
Press
Lewis, M (1997). Implementing the Lexical Approach, Language Teaching
Publications, Hove, England
Pinker, S. (1999) Words and Rules, the Ingredients of Language, Basic Books.
Wray, A. (2002) Formulaic Language and the Lexicon, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexis_%28linguistics%29"
Categories: Lexis

Semantics
Semantics (Greek semantikos significant, from semainein to signify,
mean, from sema sign, token), is the study of meaning in communication. In
linguistics it is the study of interpretation of signs as used by agents or
communities within particular circumstances and contexts.[1] It has related
meanings in several other fields.
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Semanticists differ on what constitutes meaning in an expression. For example,

in the sentence, "Zackary loves a bagel", the word bagel may refer to the object
itself, which is its literal meaning or denotation, but it may also refer to many
other figurative associations, such as how it meets Zackary's hunger, etc.,
which may be its connotation. Traditionally, the formal semantic view restricts
semantics to its literal meaning, and relegates all figurative associations to
pragmatics, but this distinction is increasingly difficult to defend[2]. The degree
to which a theorist subscribes to the literal-figurative distinction decreases as
one moves from the formal semantic, semiotic, pragmatic, to the cognitive
semantic traditions.
The word semantic in its modern sense is considered to have first appeared in
French as smantique in Michel Bral's 1897 book, Essai de smantique'. In
International Scientific Vocabulary semantics is also called semasiology. The
discipline of Semantics is distinct from Alfred Korzybsky's General Semantics,
which is a system for looking at non-immediate, or abstract meanings.

Linguistics
In linguistics, semantics is the subfield that is devoted to the study of meaning,
as inherent at the levels of words, phrases, sentences, and even larger units of
discourse (referred to as texts). The basic area of study is the meaning of signs,
and the study of relations between different linguistic units: homonymy,
synonymy, antonymy, polysemy, paronyms, hypernymy, hyponymy, meronymy,
metonymy, holonymy, exocentricity / endocentricity, linguistic compounds. A
key concern is how meaning attaches to larger chunks of text, possibly as a
result of the composition from smaller units of meaning. Traditionally, semantics
has included the study of connotative sense and denotative reference, truth
conditions, argument structure, thematic roles, discourse analysis, and the
linkage of all of these to syntax.
Formal semanticists are concerned with the modeling of meaning in terms of
the semantics of logic. Thus the sentence John loves a bagel above can be
broken down into its constituents (signs), of which the unit loves may serve as
both syntactic and semantic head.
In the late 1960s, Richard Montague proposed a system for defining semantic
entries in the lexicon in terms of lambda calculus. Thus, the syntactic parse of
the sentence above would now indicate loves as the head, and its entry in the
lexicon would point to the arguments as the agent, John, and the object, bagel,
with a special role for the article "a" (which Montague called a quantifier). This
resulted in the sentence being associated with the logical predicate loves (John,
bagel), thus linking semantics to categorial grammar models of syntax. The
logical predicate thus obtained would be elaborated further, e.g. using truth
theory models, which ultimately relate meanings to a set of Tarskiian universals,
which may lie outside the logic. The notion of such meaning atoms or primitives
are basic to the language of thought hypothesis from the 70s.
Despite its elegance, Montague grammar was limited by the context-dependent
variability in word sense, and led to several attempts at incorporating context,
such as :
situation semantics ('80s): Truth-values are incomplete, they get assigned
based on context
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lexicon ('90s): categories (types) are incomplete, and get

assigned based on context

The dynamic turn in semantics

In the Chomskian tradition in linguistics there was no mechanism for the
learning of semantic relations, and the nativist view considered all semantic
notions as inborn. Thus, even novel concepts were proposed to have been
dormant in some sense. This traditional view was also unable to address many
issues such as metaphor or associative meanings, and semantic change, where
meanings within a linguistic community change over time, and qualia or
subjective experience. Another issue not addressed by the nativist model was
how perceptual cues are combined in thought, e.g. in mental rotation[3].
This traditional view of semantics, as an innate finite meaning inherent in a
lexical unit that can be composed to generate meanings for larger chunks of
discourse, is now being fiercely debated in the emerging domain of cognitive
linguistics[4] and also in the non-Fodorian camp in Philosophy of Language[5]. The
challenge is motivated by
factors internal to language, such as the problem of resolving indexical or
anaphora (e.g. this x, him, last week). In these situations "context" serves
as the input, but the interpreted utterance also modifies the context, so it
is also the output. Thus, the interpretation is necessarily dynamic and the
meaning of sentences is viewed as context-change potentials instead of
propositions.
factors external to language, i.e. language is not a set of labels stuck on
things, but "a toolbox, the importance of whose elements lie in the way
they function rather than their attachments to things."[5] This view reflects
the position of the later Wittgenstein and his famous game example, and
is related to the positions of Quine, Davidson, and others.
A concrete example of the latter phenomenon is semantic underspecification
meanings are not complete without some elements of context. To take an
example of a single word, "red", its meaning in a phrase such as red book is
similar to many other usages, and can be viewed as compositional[6]. However,
the colours implied in phrases such as "red wine" (very dark), and "red hair"
(coppery), or "red soil", or "red skin" are very different. Indeed, these colours by
themselves would not be called "red" by native speakers. These instances are
contrastive, so "red wine" is so called only in comparison with the other kind of
wine (which also is not "white" for the same reasons). This view goes back to de
Saussure:
Each of a set of synonyms like redouter ('to dread'), craindre ('to fear'),
avoir peur ('to be afraid') has its particular value only because they stand
in contrast with one another. No word has a value that can be identified
independently of what else is in its vicinity.[7]
and may go back to earlier Indian views on language, especially the Nyaya view
of words as indicators and not carriers of meaning[8].
An attempt to defend a system based on propositional meaning for semantic
underspecification can be found in the Generative Lexicon model of James
Pustejovsky, who extends contextual operations (based on type shifting) into
the lexicon. Thus meanings are generated on the fly based on finite context.

Prototype theory
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Another set of concepts related to fuzziness in semantics is based on

prototypes. The work of Eleanor Rosch and George Lakoff in the 1970s led to a
view that natural categories are not characterizable in terms of necessary and
sufficient conditions, but are graded (fuzzy at their boundaries) and inconsistent
as to the status of their constituent members.
Systems of categories are not objectively "out there" in the world but are rooted
in people's experience. These categories evolve as learned concepts of the
world meaning is not an objective truth, but a subjective construct, learned
from experience, and language arises out of the "grounding of our conceptual
systems in shared embodiment and bodily experience"[2]. A corollary of this is
that the conceptual categories (i.e. the lexicon) will not be identical for different
cultures, or indeed, for every individual in the same culture. This leads to
another debate (see the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis or Eskimo words for snow).

Lexical semantics
Lexical semantics is a subfield of linguistics. It is the study of how and what
the words of a language denote (Pustejovsky, 1995). Words may either be taken
to denote things in the world, or concepts, depending on the particular
approach to lexical semantics.
Lexical units are the words so lexical semantics involves the meaning of each
individual word. Lexical semantics is the one area of linguistics to which we can
continually add throughout our lives, as we are always learning new words and
their meanings whereas we can only learn the rules of our native language
during the critical period when we are young.
It covers theories of the classification and decomposition of word meaning, the
differences and similarities in lexical semantic structure between different
languages, and the relationship of word meaning to sentence meaning and
syntax.
A question asked is if meaning is established by looking at the neighbourhood in
the semantic net a word is part of and by looking at the other words it occurs
with in natural sentences or if the meaning is already locally contained in a
word. Another question is how words map to concepts. As tools, lexical relations
like synonymy, antonymy (opposites), hyponymy and hypernymy are used in
this field.

See also

lexical chain
lexical markup framework
lexicology
ontology
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Statistical semantics
Statistical Semantics is the study of "how the statistical patterns of human
word usage can be used to figure out what people mean, at least to a level
sufficient for information access" (Furnas, 2006). How can we figure out what
words mean, simply by looking at patterns of words in huge collections of text?
What are the limits to this approach to understanding words?

History
The term Statistical Semantics was first used by Weaver (1955) in his wellknown paper on machine translation. He argued that word sense
disambiguation for machine translation should be based on the co-occurrence
frequency of the context words near a given target word. The underlying
assumption that "a word is characterized by the company it keeps" was
advocated by J.R. Firth (1957). This assumption is known in Linguistics as the
Distributional Hypothesis. Delavenay (1960) defined Statistical Semantics as
"Statistical study of meanings of words and their frequency and order of
recurrence." Furnas et al. (1983) is frequently cited as a foundational
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contribution to Statistical Semantics. An early success in the field was Latent

Semantic Analysis.

Applications of statistical semantics

Research in Statistical Semantics has resulted in a wide variety of algorithms
that use the Distributional Hypothesis to discover many aspects of semantics,
by applying statistical techniques to large corpora:
Measuring the similarity in word meanings (Lund et al., 1995; Landauer
and Dumais, 1997; Terra and Clarke, 2003)
Measuring the similarity in word relations (Turney, 2006)
Discovering words with a given relation (Hearst, 1992)
Classifying relations between words (Turney and Littman, 2005)
Extracting keywords from documents (Frank et al., 1999; Turney, 2000)
Measuring the cohesiveness of text (Turney, 2003)
Discovering the different senses of words (Pantel and Lin, 2002)
Distinguishing the different senses of words (Turney, 2004)
Subcognitive aspects of words (Turney, 2001)
Distinguishing praise from criticism (Turney and Littman, 2003)

Related fields

Statistical Semantics focuses on the meanings of common words and the

relations between common words, unlike Text Mining, which tends to focus on
whole documents, document collections, or named entities (names of people,
places, and organizations). Statistical Semantics is a subfield of Computational
linguistics and Natural language processing.
Many of the applications of Statistical Semantics (listed above) can also be
addressed by lexicon-based algorithms, instead of the corpus-based algorithms
of Statistical Semantics. One advantage of corpus-based algorithms is that they
are typically not as labour-intensive as lexicon-based algorithms. Another
advantage is that they are usually easier to adapt to new languages than
lexicon-based algorithms. However, the best performance on an application is
often achieved by combining the two approaches (Turney et al., 2003).

Structural semantics
Structural semantics deals with relationships between the meanings of terms
within a sentence, and how meaning can be composed from smaller elements.

See also

Principle of compositionality
Ferdinand de Saussure

Prototype Theory
Prototype Theory is a mode of graded categorization in cognitive science,
where some members of a category are more central than others. For example,
when asked to give an example of the concept furniture, chair is more
frequently cited than, say, stool. Prototype theory also plays a central role in
linguistics, as part of the mapping from phonological structure to semantics.
As formulated in the 1970s by Eleanor Rosch and others, prototype theory was
a radical departure from traditional necessary and sufficient conditions as in
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Aristotelian logic, which led to set-theoretic approaches of extensional or

intensional semantics. Thus instead of a definition based model - e.g. a bird
may be defined as elements with the features [+feathers], [+beak] and
[+ability to fly], prototype theory would consider a category like bird as
consisting of different elements which have unequal status - e.g. a robin is more
prototypical of a bird than, say a penguin. This leads to a graded notion of
categories, which is a central notion in many models of cognitive science and
cognitive semantics, e.g. in the work of George Lakoff (Women, Fire and
Dangerous Things, 1987) or Ronald Langacker (Foundations of Cognitive
Grammar, vol. 1/2 1987/1991).
The term prototype has been defined in Eleanor Rosch's study "Natural
Categories" (1973) and was first defined as a stimulus, which takes a salient
position in the formation of a category as it is the first stimulus to be associated
with that category. Later, she redefined it as the most central member of a
category.

Cognitive Representation of Semantic

Categories
In her 1975 paper, Cognitive Representation of Semantic Categories (J
Experimental Psychology v. 104:192-233), Eleanor Rosch asked 200 American
college students to rank, on a scale of 1 to 7, whether they regarded the
following items as a good example of the category furniture. The resulting ranks
are as follows:
1 chair
1 sofa
3 couch
3 table
5 easy chair
6 dresser
6 rocking chair
8 coffee table
9 rocker
10 love seat
11 chest of drawers
12 desk
13 bed
...
22 bookcase
27 cabinet
29 bench
31 lamp
32 stool
35 piano
41 mirror
42 tv
44 shelf
45 rug
46 pillow
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47 wastebasket
49 sewing machine
50 stove
54 refrigerator
60 telephone
While one may differ from this list in terms of cultural specifics, the point is that
such a graded categorization is likely to be present in all cultures. Further
evidence that some members of a category are more privileged than others
came from experiments involving:
1. Response Times: in which queries involving a prototypical members
(e.g. is a robin a bird) elicited faster response times than for nonprototypical members.
2. Priming: When primed with the higher-level (superordinate) category,
subjects were faster in identifying if two words are the same. Thus, after
flashing furniture, the equivalence of chair-chair is detected more rapidly
than stove-stove.
3. Exemplars: When asked to name a few exemplars, the more
prototypical items came up more frequently.
Subsequent to Rosch's work, prototype effects have been investigated widely in
areas such as colour cognition (Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, 1969), and also for
more abstract notions. Subjects may be asked, e.g. "to what degree is this
narrative an instance of telling a lie?" [Coleman/Kay:1981]. Similarly work has
been done on actions (verbs like look, kill, speak, walk [Pulman:83]), adjectives
like "tall" [Dirven/Taylor:88], etc.
Another aspect in which Prototype Theory departs from traditional Aristotelian
categorization is that there do not appear to be natural kind categories (bird,
dog) vs. artefacts (toys, vehicles).

Basic Level Categories

The other notion related to prototypes is that of a Basic Level in cognitive
categorization. Thus, when asked What are you sitting on?, most subjects prefer
to say chair rather than a subordinate such as kitchen chair or a superordinate
such as furniture. Basic categories are relatively homogeneous in terms of
sensori-motor affordances a chair is associated with bending of one's knees,
a fruit with picking it up and putting it in your mouth, etc. At the subordinate
level (e.g. [dentist's chairs], [kitchen chairs] etc.) hardly any significant features
can be added to that of the basic level; whereas at the superordinate level,
these conceptual similarities are hard to pinpoint. A picture of a chair is easy to
draw (or visualize), but drawing furniture would be difficult.
Rosch (1978) defines the basic level as that level that has the highest degree of
cue validity. Thus, a category like [animal] may have a prototypical member,
but no cognitive visual representation. On the other hand, basic categories in
[animal], i.e. [dog], [bird], [fish], are full of informational content and can easily
be categorised in terms of Gestalt and semantic features.
Clearly semantic models based on attribute-value pairs fail to identify privileged
levels in the hierarchy. Functionally, it is thought that basic level categories are
a decomposition of the world into maximally informative categories. Thus, they
maximize the number of attributes shared by members of the category,
and
minimize the number of attributes shared with other categories
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However, the notion of Basic Level is problematic, e.g. whereas dog as a basic
category is a species, bird or fish are at a higher level, etc. Similarly, the notion
of frequency is very closely tied to the basic level, but is hard to pinpoint.
More problems arise when the notion of a prototype is applied to lexical
categories other than the noun. Verbs, for example, seem to defy a clear
prototype: [to run] is hard to split up in more or less central members.

Distance between Concepts

The notion of prototypes is related to Wittgenstein's (later) discomfort with the
traditional notion of category. This influential theory has resulted in a view of
semantic components more as possible rather than necessary contributors to
the meaning of texts. His discursion on the category game is particularly
incisive (Philosophical Investigations 66, 1953):

Consider for example the proceedings that we call `games'. I mean board games, card
games, ball games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all? Don't say,
"There must be something common, or they would not be called `games' " - but look
and see whether there is anything common to all. For if you look at them you will not
see something common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them
at that. To repeat: don't think, but look! Look for example at board games, with their
multifarious relationships. Now pass to card games; here you find many
correspondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and others
appear. When we pass next to ball games, much that is common is retained, but much
is lost. Are they all `amusing'? Compare chess with noughts and crosses. Or is there
always winning and losing, or competition between players? Think of patience. In ball
games there is winning and losing; but when a child throws his ball at the wall and
catches it again, this feature has disappeared. Look at the parts played by skill and
luck; and at the difference between skill in chess and skill in tennis. Think now of
games like ring-a-ring-a-roses; here is the element of amusement, but how many other
characteristic features have disappeared! And we can go through the many, many
other groups of games in the same way; can see how similarities crop up and
disappear. And the result of this examination is: we see a complicated network of
similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes
similarities of detail.

Clearly, the notion of family resemblance is calling for a notion of conceptual

distance, which is closely related to the idea of graded sets, but there are
problems as well.
Recently, Peter Gardenfors (Conceptual Spaces, MIT Press 2000) has elaborated
a possible implementation to prototype theory in terms of multi-dimensional
feature spaces, where a category is defined in terms of a conceptual distance.
More central members of a category are "between" the peripheral members. He
postulates that most natural categories exhibit a convexity in conceptual space,
in that if x and y are elements of a category, and if z is between x and y, then z
is also likely to belong to the category.
However, In the notion of game above, is there a single prototype or several?
Recent linguistic data from colour studies seem to indicate that categories may
have more than one focal element - e.g. the Tsonga colour term rihlaza refers to
a green-blue continuum, but appears to have two prototypes, a focal blue, and
a focal green. Thus, it is possible to have single categories with multiple,
disconnected, prototypes, in which case they may constitute the intersection of
several convex sets rather than a single one.

Combining Categories

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All around us, we find instances where objects like tall man or small elephant
combine one or more categories. This was a problem for extensional semantics,
where the semantics of a word such as red is to be defined as the set of objects
having this property. Clearly, this does not apply so well to modifiers such as
small; a small mouse is very different from a small elephant.
These combinations pose a lesser problem in terms of prototype theory. In
situations involving adjectives (e.g. tall), one encounters the question of
whether or not the prototype of [tall] is a 6 feet tall man, or a 400 feet
skyscraper [Dirven and Taylor 1988]. The solution emerges by contextualizing
the notion of prototype in terms of the object being modified. This extends even
more radically in compounds such as red wine or red hair which are hardly red
in the prototypical sense, but the red indicates merely a shift from the
prototypical colour of wine or hair respectively. This corresponds to de
Saussure's notion of concepts as purely differential: "non pas positivement par
leur contenu, mais negativement par leurs rapports avec les autres termes du
systeme" [p.162; not positively, in terms of their content, but negatively by
contrast with other terms in the same system (tr. Harris 83)].
Other problems remain - e.g. in determining which of the constituent categories
will contribute which feature? In the example of a "pet bird" [Hampton 97], pet
provides the habitat of the compound (cage rather than the wild), whereas bird
provides the skin type (feathers rather than fur).

Pragmatics
Pragmatics is the study of the ability of natural language speakers to
communicate more than that which is explicitly stated. The ability to
understand another speaker's intended meaning is called pragmatic
competence. An utterance describing pragmatic function is described as
metapragmatic. Another perspective is that pragmatics deals with the ways we
reach our goal in communication. Suppose, a person wanted to ask someone
else to stop smoking. This can be achieved by using several utterances. The
person could simply say, 'Stop smoking, please!' which is direct and with clear
semantic meaning; alternatively, the person could say, 'Whew, this room could
use an air purifier' which implies a similar meaning but is indirect and therefore
requires pragmatic inference to derive the intended meaning.
Pragmatics is regarded as one of the most challenging aspects for language
learners to grasp, and can only truly be learned with experience.

Origins

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Pragmatics was a reaction to structuralist linguistics outlined by Ferdinand de

Saussure. In many cases, it expanded upon his idea that language has an
analyzable structure, composed of parts that can be defined in relation to
others. Pragmatics first engaged only in synchronic study, as opposed to
examining the historical development of language. However, it rejected the
notion that all meaning comes from signs existing purely in the abstract space
of langue. Meanwhile, historical pragmatics has also come into being.
While Chomskyan linguistics famously repudiated Bloomfieldian anthropological
linguistics, pragmatics continues its tradition. Also influential were Franz Boas,
Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf.

Non-referential uses of language

Roman Jakobson identified six functions of language, only one of which is the
traditional system of reference.
referential: conveys information about some real phenomenon
expressive: describes feelings of the speaker
conative: attempts to elicit some behavior from the addressee
phatic: builds a relationship between both parties in a conversation
metalingual: self-references
poetic: focuses on the text independent of reference
mile Benveniste discussed pronouns "I" and "you", arguing that they are
fundamentally distinct from other pronouns because of their role in creating the
subject.
Michael Silverstein has argued that the "non-referential index" communicates
meaning without being explicitly attached to semantic content.

Related fields
There is a considerable overlap between pragmatics and sociolinguistics, since
both share an interest in linguistic meaning as determined by usage in a speech
community. However, sociolinguists tend to be more oriented towards variations
within such communities.
According to Charles W. Morris, pragmatics tries to understand the relationship
between signs and their users, while semantics tends to focus on the actual
objects or ideas to which a word refers, and syntax (or "syntactics") examines
relationships among signs.
Semantics is the literal meaning of an idea whereas pragmatics is the implied
meaning of the given idea.
Suzette Haden Elgin has also written a number of books known of as the Gentle
Art of Verbal Self Defense series, where she extensively outlines structured
methods like those surveyed in pragmatics to defend against the use of
pejoratives in various common situations, drawing parallels between applied
linguistics and martial arts techniques.

Linguistic anthropology
Pragmatics helps anthropologists relate elements of language to broader social
phenomena; it thus pervades the field of linguistic anthropology. Because
pragmatics describes generally the forces in play for a given utterance, it
includes the study of power, gender, race, identity, and their interactions with
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individual speech acts. For example, the study of code switching directly relates
to pragmatics, since a switch in code effects a shift in pragmatic force. [1]

Pragmatics in philosophy
Jaques Derrida once remarked that some of linguistic pragmatics aligned well
with the program he outlined in Of Grammatology.
Linguistic pragmatics underpins Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity.
In Gender Trouble, she claims that gender and sex are not natural categories,
but called into being by discourse. In Excitable Speech she extends her theory
of performativity to hate speech, arguing that the designation of certain
utterances as "hate speech" affects their pragmatic function.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari discuss linguistic pragmatics in the fourth
chapter of A Thousand Plateaus ("November 20, 1923--Postulates of
Linguistics"). They draw three conclusions from Austin: (1) A performative
utterance doesn't communicate information about an act second-handit does
the act; (2) Every aspect of language ("semantics, syntactics, or even
phonematics") functionally interacts with pragmatics; (3) The distinction
between language and speech is untenable. This last conclusion attempts to
simultaneously refute Saussure's division between langue and parole and
Chomsky's distinction between surface structure and deep structure. [2]

Topics in pragmatics

Entailment
Deixis
Implicature
Practical reason
Presupposition
Speech act

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Language acquisition
Language acquisition is the process by which the language capability
develops in a human. First language acquisition concerns the development of
language in children, while second language acquisition focuses on language
development in adults as well. Historically, theorists are often divided between
emphasising either nature or nurture (see Nature versus nurture) as the most
important explanatory factor for acquisition.
One hotly debated issue is whether the biological contribution includes
capacities specific to language acquisition, often referred to as universal
grammar. For fifty years, linguists Noam Chomsky and the late Eric Lenneberg
argued for the hypothesis that children have innate, language-specific abilities
that facilitate and constrain language learning[1].
Other researchers, including Elizabeth Bates, Catherine Snow, and Michael
Tomasello, have hypothesized that language learning results only from general
cognitive abilities and the interaction between learners and their surrounding
communities. Recent work by William O'Grady proposes that complex syntactic
phenomena result from an efficiency-driven, linear computational system.
O'Grady describes his work as "nativism without Universal Grammar." One of
the most important advances in the study of language acquisition was the
creation of the CHILDES database by Brian MacWhinney and Catherine Snow.

Nativist theories
Nativist theories hold that children are born with an innate propensity for
language acquisition, and that this ability makes the task of learning a first
language easier than it would otherwise be. These "hidden assumptions" [2]
allow children to quickly figure out what is and isn't possible in the grammar of
their native language, and allow them to master that grammar by the age of
three. [3] Nativists view language as a fundamental part of the human genome,
as the trait that makes humans human, and its acquisition as a natural part of
maturation, no different from dolphins learning to swim or songbirds learning to
sing.
Chomsky originally theorized that children were born with a hard-wired
language acquisition device (LAD) in their brains [1]. He later expanded this
idea into that of Universal Grammar, a set of innate principles and adjustable
parameters that are common to all human languages. According to Chomsky,
the presence of Universal Grammar in the brains of children allow them to
deduce the structure of their native languages from "mere exposure".
Much of the nativist position is based on the early age at which children show
competency in their native grammars, as well as the ways in which they do (and
do not) make errors. Infants are born able to distinguish between phonemes in
minimal pairs, distinguishing between bah and pah, for example.[4] Young
children (under the age of three) do not speak in fully formed sentences,
instead saying things like 'want cookie' or 'my coat.' They do not, however, say
things like 'want my' or 'I cookie,' statements that would break the syntactic
structure of the Phrase, a component of universal grammar.[5] Children also
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seem remarkably immune from error correction by adults, which Nativists say
would not be the case if children were learning from their parents.[6]
The possible existence of a Critical Period for language acquisition is another
Nativist argument. Critical periods are time frames during which environmental
exposure is needed to stimulate an innate trait. Young chaffinches, for example,
must hear the song of an adult chaffinch before reaching maturity, or else
would never be able to sing. Nativists argue that if a Critical Period for language
acquisition exists (see below), then language acquisition must be spurred on by
the unfolding of the genome during maturation.[7] Linguist Eric Lenneberg stated
in 1964 that the crucial period of language acquisition ends around the age of
12 years. He claimed that if no language is learned before then, it could never
be learned in a normal and fully functional sense. This was called the "Critical
period hypothesis." Detractors[attribution needed] of the "Critical Period Hypothesis"
say that in this example and others like it (see Feral children), the child is hardly
growing up in a nurturing environment, and that the lack of language
acquisition in later life may be due to the results of a generally abusive
environment rather than being specifically due to a lack of exposure to
language. The "Critical Period" theory of brain plasticity and learning capacity
has been called into question. Other factors may account for differences in adult
and child language learning. Childrens apparently effortless and rapid language
acquisition may be explained by the fact that the environment is set up to
engage them in frequent and optimal learning opportunities. By contrast, adults
seem to have an initial advantage in their learning of vocabulary and syntax,
but may never achieve native-like pronunciation. [8] A more up-to-date view of
the Critical Period Hypothesis is represented by the University of Maryland,
College Park instructor Robert DeKeyser. DeKeyser argues that although it is
true that there is a critical period, this does not mean that adults cannot learn a
second language perfectly, at least on the syntactic level. DeKeyser talks about
the role of language aptitude as opposed to the critical period.[citation needed]
More support for the innateness of language comes from the deaf population of
Nicaragua. Until approximately 1986, Nicaragua had neither education nor a
formalized sign language for the deaf. As Nicaraguans attempted to rectify the
situation, they discovered that children past a certain age had difficulty learning
any language. Additionally, the adults observed that the younger children were
using gestures unknown to them to communicate with each other. They invited
Judy Kegl, an American linguist from MIT, to help unravel this mystery. Kegl
discovered that these children had developed their own, distinct, Nicaraguan
Sign Language with its own rules of "sign-phonology" and syntax. She also
discovered some 300 adults who, despite being raised in otherwise healthy
environments, had never acquired language, and turned out to be incapable of
learning language in any meaningful sense. While it was possible to teach
vocabulary, these individuals were unable to learn syntax.[9] Derek Bickerton's
(1981) landmark work with Hawaiian pidgin speakers studied immigrant
populations where first-generation parents spoke highly-ungrammatical "pidgin
English". Their children, Bickerton found, grew up speaking a grammatically rich
language -- neither English nor the syntax-less pidgin of their parents.
Furthermore, the language exhibited many of the underlying grammatical
features of many other natural languages. The language became "creolized",
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and is known as Hawaii Creole English. This was taken as powerful evidence for
children's innate grammar module.
Debate within the nativist position now revolves around how language evolved.
Derek Bickerton suggests a single mutation, a "big bang", linked together
previously evolved traits into full language.[10] Others like Steven Pinker argue
for a slower evolution over longer periods of time.[11]

Criticism and alternative theories

Non-nativist theories include the competition model, functionalist linguistics,
usage-based language acquisition, social interactionism and others. Socialinteractionists, like Snow, theorize that adults play an important part in
children's language acquisition. However, some researchers claim that the
empirical data on which theories of social interactionism are based have often
been over-representative of middle class American and European parent-child
interactions. Various anthropological studies of other human cultures, as well as
anecdotal evidence from western families, suggests rather that many, if not the
majority, of the world's children are not spoken to in a manner akin to
traditional language lessons, but nevertheless grow up to be fully fluent
language users. Many researchers now take this into account in their analyses.
Nevertheless, Snow's criticisms might be powerful against Chomsky's argument,
if the argument from the poverty of stimulus were indeed an argument about
degenerate stimulus, but it is not. The argument from the poverty of stimulus is
that there are principles of grammar that cannot be learned on the basis of
positive input alone, however complete and grammatical that evidence is. This
argument is not vulnerable to objection based on evidence from interaction
studies such as Snow's, but it is vulnerable to the clear evidence of the
availability of negative input given by Conversational analysis. In addition, meta
analysis has shown that there is a large amount of corrections made. [12][13] Meork
(1994) conducted a meta-analysis of 40 studies and found substantial evidence
that corrections do indeed play a role. From this work, corrections are not only
abundant but contingent on the mistakes of the child.[14] (see behavior analysis
of child development ).
Many criticisms of the basic assumptions of generative theory have been put
forth, with little response from its champions. The concept of LAD is
unsupported by evolutionary anthropology which shows a gradual adaptation of
the human body to the use of language, rather than a sudden appearance of a
complete set of binary parameters (which are common to digital computers but
not to neurological systems such as a human brain) delineating the whole
spectrum of possible grammars ever to have existed and ever to exist.
The theory has several hypothetical constructs, such as movement, empty
categories, complex underlying structures, and strict binary branching, that
cannot possibly be acquired from any amount of input. Since the theory is, in
essence, unlearnably complex, then it must be innate. A different theory of
language, however, may yield different conclusions. Examples of alternative
theories that do not utilize movement and empty categories are Head-driven
phrase structure grammar, Lexical functional grammar, and several varieties of
Construction Grammar. While all theories of language acquisition posit some
degree of innateness, a less convoluted theory might involve less innate
structure and more learning. Under such a theory of grammar, the input,
combined with both general and language-specific learning capacities, might be
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sufficient for acquisition. One such theory, Relational Frame Theory (Hayes,
Barnes-Holmes, Roche, 2001), provides a wholly selectionist/learning account of
the origin and development of language competence and complexity. Bolstered
by a significant and growing base of experimental and applied research, RFT
posits a "functional contextualist" approach to the understanding, prediction
and control of language phenomenon.

Psycholinguistics
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Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the

psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use,
and understand language. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were largely
philosophical ventures, due mainly to a lack of cohesive data on how the human
brain functioned. Modern research makes use of biology, neuroscience,
cognitive science, and information theory to study how the brain processes
language. There are a number of subdisciplines; for example, as non-invasive
techniques for studying the neurological workings of the brain become more
and more widespread, neurolinguistics has become a field in its own right.
Psycholinguistics covers the cognitive processes that make it possible to
generate a grammatical and meaningful sentence out of vocabulary and
grammatical structures, as well as the processes that make it possible to
understand utterances, words, text, etc. Developmental psycholinguistics
studies children's ability to learn language.

Areas of study
Psycholinguistics is interdisciplinary in nature and is studied by people in a
variety of fields, such as psychology, cognitive science, and linguistics. There
are several subdivisions within psycholinguistics that are based on the
components that make up human language.
Linguistic-related areas:
Phonetics and phonology are concerned with the study of speech sounds.
Within psycholinguistics, research focuses on how the brain processes
and understands these sounds.
Morphology is the study of word structures, especially the relationships
between related words (such as dog and dogs) and the formation of words
based on rules (such as plural formation).
Syntax is the study of the patterns which dictate how words are combined
together to form sentences.
Semantics deals with the meaning of words and sentences. Where syntax
is concerned with the formal structure of sentences, semantics deals with
the actual meaning of sentences.
Pragmatics is concerned with the role of context in the interpretation of
meaning.
Psychology-related areas:
The study of word recognition and reading examines the processes
involved in the extraction of orthographic, morphological, phonological,
and semantic information from patterns in printed text.
Developmental psycholinguistics studies infants' and children's ability
to learn language, usually with experimental or at least quantitative
methods (as opposed to naturalistic observations such as those made by
Jean Piaget in his research on the development of children).

Theories
Theories about how language works in the human mind attempt to account for,
among other things, how we associate meaning with the sounds (or signs) of
language and how we use syntaxthat is, how we manage to put words in the
proper order to produce and understand the strings of words we call
"sentences." The first of these itemsassociating sound with meaningis the
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least controversial and is generally held to be an area in which animal and

human communication have at least some things in common (See animal
communication). Syntax, on the other hand, is controversial, and is the focus of
the discussion that follows.
There are essentially two schools of thought as to how we manage to create
syntactic sentences: (1) syntax is an evolutionary product of increased human
intelligence over time and social factors that encouraged the development of
spoken language; (2) language exists because humans possess an innate
ability, an access to what has been called a "universal grammar." This view
holds that the human ability for syntax is "hard-wired" in the brain. This view
claims, for example, that complex syntactic features such as recursion are
beyond even the potential abilities of the most intelligent and social nonhumans. (Recursion, for example, includes the use of relative pronouns to refer
back to earlier parts of a sentence"The girl whose car is blocking my view of
the tree that I planted last year is my friend.") The innate view claims that the
ability to use syntax like that would not exist without an innate concept that
contains the underpinnings for the grammatical rules that produce recursion.
Children acquiring a language, thus, have a vast search space to explore among
possible human grammars, settling, logically, on the language(s) spoken or
signed in their own community of speakers. Such syntax is, according to the
second point of view, what defines human language and makes it different from
even the most sophisticated forms of animal communication.
The first view was prevalent until about 1960 and is well represented by the
mentalistic theories of Jean Piaget and the empiricist, Rudolf Carnap. As well,
the school of psychology known as behaviorism (see Verbal Behavior (1957) by
B.F. Skinner) puts forth the point of view that languagesyntax includedis
behavior shaped by conditioned response. The second point of viewthe
"innate" onecan fairly be said to have begun with Noam Chomsky's highly
critical review of Skinner's book in 1959 in the pages of the journal Language [1].
That review started what has been termed "the cognitive revolution" in
psychology.
The field of psycholinguistics since then has been defined by reactions to
Chomsky, pro and con. The pro view still holds that the human ability to use
syntax is qualitatively different from any sort of animal communication. That
ability might have resulted from a favorable mutation (extremely unlikely) or
(more likely) from an adaptation of skills evolved for other purposes. That is,
precise syntax might, indeed, serve group needs; better linguistic expression
might produce more cohesion, cooperation, and potential for survival, BUT
precise syntax can only have developed from rudimentaryor nosyntax,
which would have had no survival value and, thus, would not have evolved at
all. Thus, one looks for other skills, the characteristics of which might have later
been useful for syntax. In the terminology of modern evolutionary biology, these
skills would be said to be "pre-adapted" for syntax (see also exaptation). Just
what those skills might have been is the focus of recent researchor, at least,
speculation.
The con view still holds that languageincluding syntaxis an outgrowth of
hundreds of thousands of years of increasing intelligence and tens of thousands
of years of human interaction. From that view, syntax in language gradually
increased group cohesion and potential for survival. Languagesyntax and all
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is a cultural artifact. This view challenges the "innate" view as scientifically

unfalsifiable; that is to say, it can't be tested; the fact that a particular,
conceivable syntactic structure does not exist in any of the world's finite
repertoire of languages is an interesting observation, but it is not proof of a
genetic constraint on possible forms, nor does it prove that such forms couldn't
exist or couldn't be learned.
Contemporary theorists, besides Chomsky, working in the field of theories of
psycholinguistics include George Lakoff, Steven Pinker, and Michael Tomasello.

Methodologies
Much methodology in psycholinguistics takes the form of behavioral
experiments. In these types of studies, subjects are presented with some form
of linguistic input and asked to perform a task (e.g. make a judgment, reproduce
the stimulus, read a visually presented word aloud). Reaction times (usually on
the order of milliseconds) and proportion of correct responses are the most
often employed measures of performance.
Such tasks might include, for example, asking the subject to convert nouns into
verbs; e.g., "book" suggests "to write," "water" suggests "to drink," and so on.
Another experiment might present an active sentence such as "Bob threw the
ball to Bill" and a passive equivalent, "The ball was thrown to Bill by Bob" and
then ask the question, "Who threw the ball?" We might then conclude (as is the
case) that active sentences are processed more easily (faster) than passive
sentences. More interestingly, we might also find out (as is the case) that some
people are unable to understand passive sentences; we might then make some
tentative steps towards understanding certain types of language deficits
(generally grouped under the broad term, aphasia).
Until the recent advent of non-invasive medical techniques, brain surgery was
the preferred way for language researchers to discover how language works in
the brain. For example, severing the corpus callosum (the bundle of nerves that
connects the two hemispheres of the brain) was at one time a treatment for
some forms of epilepsy. Researchers could then study the ways in which the
comprehension and production of language were affected by such drastic
surgery. Where an illness made brain surgery necessary, language researchers
had an opportunity to pursue their research.
Newer, non-invasive techniques now include brain imaging by positron emission
tomography (PET); functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI); event related
potentials (ERP), Magnetoencephalography (MEG) and transcranial magnetic
stimulation (TMS). Brain imaging techniques vary in their spatial and temporal
resolutions (fMRI has a resolution of a few thousand neurons per pixel, and ERP
has millisecond accuracy). Each type of methodology presents a set of
advantages and disadvantages for studying a particular problem in
psycholinguistics.
Computational modeling - e.g. the DRC model of reading and word recognition
proposed by Coltheart and colleagues[2] - is another methodology. It refers to the
practice of setting up cognitive models in the form of executable computer
programs. Such programs are useful because they require theorists to be
explicit in their hypotheses and because they can be used to generate accurate
predictions for theoretical models that are so complex that they render
discursive analysis unreliable. One example of computational modeling is the
TRACE model of speech perception[3].
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More recently, eye tracking has been used to study online language processing.
Beginning with Rayner (1978) [4] the importance and informativity of eyemovements during reading was established. Tanenhaus et al.[5], have performed
a number of visual-world eye-tracking studies to study the cognitive processes
related to spoken language. Since eye movements are closely linked to the
current focus of attention, language processing can be studied by monitoring
eye movements while a subject is presented with linguistic input.

Issues and areas of research

Developmental

There are a number of unanswered questions in psycholinguistics. In part, they

are suggested by some of the items mentioned in the section on "theories"
(above). For example, is the human ability to use syntax based on innate
mental structures or is syntactic speech the function of intelligence and
interaction with other humans? Can we even design psycholinguistic
experiments to find that out? Research in animal communication has much to
offer here. Can some animals be taught the syntax of human language? If so,
what does that mean? If not, what does that mean?
How are infants able to learn language? Almost all healthy human infants
acquire language readily in the first few years of life. This is true across cultures
and societies. And what about children who do not learn language properly?
There is a broad field called aphasia that deals with language deficits. Can
research in psycholinguistics ever be of some therapeutic value? In addition, it
is much more difficult for adults to acquire second languages than it is for
infants to learn their first language (bilingual infants are able to learn both of
their native languages easily). Thus, critical periods may exist during which
language is able to be learned readily. A great deal of research in
psycholinguistics focuses on how this ability develops and diminishes over time.
It also seems to be the case that the more languages one knows, the easier it is
to learn more.
Also, recent research using new non-invasive imaging techniques seeks to shed
light on just where language is located in the brain. How localized is language?
How distributed is it from one hemisphere to the other? The older, traditional
descriptions of the language functions of Broca's area, Wernicke's area and
other areas of the brain will be refined as research continues.

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Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society,
including cultural norms, expectations, and context on the way language is
used. Sociolinguistics overlaps to a considerable degree with pragmatics.
It also studies how lects differ between groups separated by certain social
variables, e.g., ethnicity, religion, status, gender, level of education, etc., and
how creation and adherence to these rules is used to categorize individuals in
social class or socio-economic classes. As the usage of a language varies from
place to place (dialect), language usage varies among social classes, and it is
these sociolects that sociolinguistics studies.
The social aspects of language were in the modern sense first studied by Indian
and Japanese linguists in the 1930s, and also by Gauchat in Switzerland in the
early 1900s, but none received much attention in the West until much later. The
study of the social motivation of language change, on the other hand, has its
foundation in the wave model of the late 19th century. Sociolinguistics in the
west first appeared in the 1960s and was pioneered by linguists such as William
Labov in the US and Basil Bernstein in the UK.

Applications of sociolinguistics
For example, a sociolinguist might determine through study of social attitudes
that a particular vernacular would not be considered appropriate language use
in a business or professional setting; she or he might also study the grammar,
phonetics, vocabulary, and other aspects of this sociolect much as a
dialectologist would study the same for a regional dialect.
The study of language variation is concerned with social constraints
determining language in its contextual environment. Code-switching is the term
given to the use of different varieties of language in different social situations.
William Labov is often regarded as the founder of the study of sociolinguistics.
He is especially noted for introducing the quantitative study of language
variation and change, making the sociology of language into a scientific
discipline.
Sociolinguistics differs from sociology of language in that the focus of
sociolinguistics is the effect of the society on the language, while the latter's
focus is on the language's effect on the society.

Sociolinguistic variables

Studies in the field of sociolinguistics typically take a sample population and

interview them, assessing the realisation of certain sociolinguistic variables.
Labov specifies the ideal sociolinguistic variable to
be high in frequency,
have a certain immunity from conscious suppression,
be an integral part of larger structures, and
be easily quantified on a linear scale.
Phonetic variables tend to meet these criteria and are often used, as are
grammatical variables and, more rarely, lexical variables. Examples for phonetic
variables are: the frequency of the glottal stop, the height or backness of a
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vowel or the realisation of word-endings. An example of a grammatical variable

is the frequency of negative concord (known colloquially as a double negative).

Traditional sociolinguistic interview

Sociolinguistic interviews are an integral part of collecting data for
sociolinguistic studies. There is an interviewer, who is conducting the study, and
a subject, or informant, who is the interviewee. In order to get a grasp on a
specific linguistic form and how it is used in the dialect of the subject, a variety
of methods are used to elicit certain registers of speech. There are five different
styles, ranging from formal to casual. The most formal style would be elicited by
having the subject read a list of minimal pairs (MP). Minimal pairs are pairs of
words that differ in only one phoneme, such as cat and bat. Having the subject
read a word list (WL) will elicit a formal register, but generally not as formal as
MP. The reading passage (RP) style is next down on the formal register, and the
interview style (IS) is when an interviewer can finally get into eliciting a more
casual speech from the subject. During the IS the interviewer can converse with
the subject and try to draw out of him an even more casual sort of speech by
asking him to recall childhood memories or maybe a near death experience, in
which case the subject will get deeply involved with the story since strong
emotions are often attached to these memories. Of course, the most sought
after type of speech is the casual style (CS). This type of speech is difficult if not
impossible to elicit because of the Observer's Paradox. The closest one might
come to CS in an interview is when the subject is interrupted by a close friend
or family member, or perhaps must answer the phone. CS is used in a
completely unmonitored environment where the subject feels most comfortable
and will use their natural vernacular without overtly thinking about it.

Fundamental Concepts in Sociolinguistics

While the study of sociolinguistics is very broad, there are a few fundamental
concepts on which many sociolinguistic inquiries depend.

Speech Community
Main article: Speech community

High prestige and low prestige varieties

Crucial to sociolingusitic analysis is the concept of prestige; certain speech

habits are assigned a positive or a negative value which is then applied to the
speaker. This can operate on many levels. It can be realised on the level of the
individual sound/phoneme, as Labov discovered in investigating pronunciation
of the post-vocalic /r/ in the North-Eastern USA, or on the macro scale of
language choice, as realised in the various diglossias that exist throughout the
world, where Swiss-German/High German is perhaps most well known. An
important implication of sociolinguistic theory is that speakers 'choose' a variety
when making a speech act, whether consciously or subconsciously.

Social network
Understanding language in society means that one also has to understand the
social networks in which language is embedded. This may apply to the macro
level of a country or a city, but also to the inter-personal level of neighborhoods
or a single family. Recently, social networks have formed by the Internet,
through chat rooms, MySpace groups, organizations, and online dating services.

Internal vs. external language

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In Chomskian linguistics, a distinction is drawn between I-language (internal

language) and E-language (external language). In this context, internal
language applies to the study of syntax and semantics in language on the
abstract level; as mentally represented knowledge in a native speaker. External
language applies to language in social contexts, i.e. behavioral habits shared by
a community. Internal language analyses operate on the assumption that all
native speakers of a language are quite homogeneous in how they process and
perceive language. External language fields, such as sociolinguistics, attempt to
explain why this is in fact not the case. Many sociolinguists reject the distinction
between I- and E-language on the grounds that it is based on a mentalist view
of language. On this view, grammar is first and foremost an interactional
(social) phenomenon (e.g. Elinor Ochs, Emanuel Schegloff, Sandra Thompson).

Differences according to class

Sociolinguistics as a field distinct from dialectology was pioneered through the
study of language variation in urban areas. Whereas dialectology studies the
geographic distribution of language variation, sociolinguistics focuses on other
sources of variation, among them class. Class and occupation are among the
most important linguistic markers found in society. One of the fundamental
findings of sociolinguistics, which has been hard to disprove, is that class and
language variety are related. Members of the working class tend to speak less
standard language, while the lower, middle, and upper middle class will in turn
speak closer to the standard. However, the upper class, even members of the
upper middle class, may often speak 'less' standard than the middle class. This
is because not only class, but class aspirations, are important.

Class aspiration

Studies, such as those by William Labov in the 1960s, have shown that social
aspirations influence speech patterns. This is also true of class aspirations. In
the process of wishing to be associated with a certain class (usually the upper
class and upper middle class) people who are moving in that direction socioeconomically will adjust their speech patterns to sound like them. However, not
being native upper class speakers, they hypercorrect, and end up speaking
'more' standard than those whom they are trying to imitate. The same is true
for individuals moving down in socio-economic status.

Social language codes

Basil Bernstein, a well-known British socio-linguist, devised in his book,
'Elaborated and restricted codes: their social origins and some consequences,' a
social code system which he used to classify the various speech patterns for
different social classes. He claimed that members of the middle class have ways
of organizing their speech which are fundamentally very different from the ways
adopted by the working class.

Restricted code

In Basil Bernstein's theory, the restricted code was an example of the speech
patterns used by the working-class. He stated that this type of code allows
strong bonds between group members, who tend to behave largely on the basis
of distinctions such as 'male', 'female', 'older', and 'younger'. This social group
also uses language in a way which brings people together, and members often
do not need to be explicit about meaning, as their shared knowledge and
common understanding often bring them together in a way which other social
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language groups do not experience. The difference with the restricted code is
the emphasis on 'we' as a social group, which fosters greater solidarity than an
emphasis on 'I'.

Elaborated code

Basil Bernstein also studied what he named the 'elaborated code' explaining
that in this type of speech pattern the middle and upper classes use this
language style to gain access to education and career advancement. Bonds
within this social group are not as well defined and people achieve their social
identity largely on the basis of individual disposition and temperament. There is
no obvious division of tasks according to sex or age and generally, within this
social formation members negotiate and achieve their roles, rather than have
them there ready-made in advance. Due to the lack of solidarity the elaborated
social language code requires individual intentions and viewpoints to be made
explicit as the 'I' has a greater emphasis with this social group than the working
class.

Deviation from standard language varieties

A diagram showing variation in the English language by region (the bottom axis)
and by social class (the side axis). The higher the social class, the less variation.
The existence of differences in language between social classes can be
illustrated by the following table:
Queen
Vicky Pollard
...
Elizabeth II
I ain't done
I haven't done
...
nothing
anything
I done it yesterday ... I did it yesterday
It weren't me that
... I didn't do it
done it
Any native speaker of English would immediately be able to guess that speaker
1 was likely of a different social class than speaker 2. The differences in
grammar between the two examples of speech is referred to as differences
between social class dialects or sociolects.
It is also notable that, at least in England, the closer to standard English a
dialect gets, the less the lexicon varies by region, and vice-versa.

Covert prestige

Main article: Prestige dialect

It is generally assumed that non-standard language is low-prestige language.
However, in certain groups, such as traditional working class neighborhoods,
standard language may be considered undesirable in many contexts. This is
because the working class dialect is a powerful in-group marker, and especially
for non-mobile individuals, the use of non-standard varieties (even
exaggeratedly so) expresses neighborhood pride and group and class solidarity.
There will thus be a considerable difference in use of non-standard varieties
when going to the pub or having a neighborhood barbecue (high), and going to
the bank (lower) for the same individual.

Differences according to age groups

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There are several different types of age-based variation one may see within a
population. They are: vernacular of a subgroup with membership typically
characterized by a specific age range, age-graded variation, and indications of
linguistic change in progress.
One example of subgroup vernacular is the speech of street youth. Just as street
youth dress differently from the "norm", they also often have their own
"language". The reasons for this are the following: (1) To enhance their own
cultural identity (2) To identify with each other, (3) To exclude others, and (4) To
invoke feelings of fear or admiration from the outside world. Strictly speaking,
this is not truly age-based, since it does not apply to all individuals of that age
bracket within the community.
Age-graded variation is a stable variation which varies within a population
based on age. That is, speakers of a particular age will use a specific linguistic
form in successive generations. This is relatively rare. Chambers (1995) cites an
example from southern Ontario, Canada where the pronunciation of the letter
'Z' varies. Most of the English-speaking world pronounces it 'zed'; however, in
the United States, it is pronounced 'zee'. A linguistic survey found that in 1979
two-thirds of the 12 year olds in Toronto ended the recitation of the alphabet
with the letter 'zee' where only 8% of the adults did so. Then in 1991, (when
those 12 year olds were in their mid-20s) a survey showed only 39% of the 2025 year olds used 'zee'. In fact, the survey showed that only 12% of those over
30 used the form 'zee'. This seems to be tied to an American children's song
frequently used to teach the alphabet. In this song, the rhyme scheme matches
the letter Z with V 'vee', prompting the use of the American pronunciation. As
the individual grows older, this marked form 'zee' is dropped in favor of the
standard form 'zed'.
People tend to use linguistic forms that were prevalent when they reached
adulthood. So, in the case of linguistic change in progress, one would expect to
see variation over a broader range of ages. Bright (1997) provides an example
taken from American English where there is an on-going merger of the vowel
sounds in such pairs of words as 'caught' and 'cot'. Examining the speech across
several generations of a single family, one would find the grandparents'
generation would never or rarely merge these two vowel sounds; their children's
generation may on occasion, particularly in quick or informal speech; while their
grandchildren's generation would merge these two vowels uniformly. This is the
basis of the apparent-time hypothesis where age-based variation is taken as an
indication of linguistic change in progress.

Differences according to geography

Main article: Dialectology

Differences according to gender

Men and women, on average, tend to use slightly different language styles.
These differences tend to be quantitative rather than qualitative. That is, to say
that women make more minimal responses (see below) than men is akin to
saying that men are taller than women (i.e., men are on average taller than
women, but some women are taller than some men). The initial identification of
a women's register was by Robin Lakoff in 1975, who argued that the style of
language served to maintain women's (inferior) role in society ("female deficit
approach"). A later refinement of this argument was that gender differences in
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language reflected a power difference (O'Barr & Atkins, 1980) ("dominance

theory"). However, both these perspectives have the language style of men as
normative, implying that women's style is inferior.
More recently, Deborah Tannen has compared gender differences in language as
more similar to 'cultural' differences ("cultural difference approach"). Comparing
conversational goals, she argued that men have a report style, aiming to
communicate factual information, whereas women have a rapport style, more
concerned with building and maintaining relationships. Such differences are
pervasive across media, including face-to-face conversation (e.g., Fitzpatrick,
Mulac, & Dindia, 1995: Hannah & Murachver, 1999), written essays of primary
school children (Mulac, Studley, & Blau, 1990), email (Thomson & Murachver,
2001), and even toilet graffiti (Green, 2003).
Communication styles are always a product of context, and as such, gender
differences tend to be most pronounced in single-gender groups. One
explanation for this, is that people accommodate their language towards the
style of the person they are interacting with. Thus, in a mixed-gender group,
gender differences tend to be less pronounced. A similarly important
observation is that this accommodation is usually towards the language style,
not the gender of the person (Thomson, Murachver, & Green, 2001). That is, a
polite and empathic male will tend to be accommodated to on the basis of their
being polite and empathic, rather than their being male.

Minimal responses
One of the ways in which the communicative competence of men and women
differ is in their use of minimal responses, i.e., paralinguistic features such as
mhm and yeah, which is behaviour associated with collaborative language
use (Carli, 1990). Men, on the other hand, generally use them less frequently
and where they do, it is usually to show agreement, as Zimmerman and Wests
(1977) study of turn-taking in conversation indicates.

Questions

Men and women differ in their use of questions in conversations. For men, a
question is usually a genuine request for information whereas with women it
can often be a rhetorical means of engaging the others conversational
contribution or of acquiring attention from others conversationally involved,
techniques associated with a collaborative approach to language use (Barnes,
1971). Therefore women use questions more frequently (Fitzpatrick, et al.,
1995; Todd, 1983). In writing, however, both genders use rhetorical questions as
literary devices. For example, Mark Twain used them in "A War Prayer" to
provoke the reader to question his actions and beliefs.

Turn-taking
As the work of DeFrancisco (1991) shows, female linguistic behaviour
characteristically encompasses a desire to take turns in conversation with
others, which is opposed to mens tendency towards centering on their own
point or remaining silent when presented with such implicit offers of
conversational turn-taking as are provided by hedges such as "y know" and
"isnt it". This desire for turn-taking gives rise to complex forms of interaction in
relation to the more regimented form of turn-taking commonly exhibited by men
(Sacks et al., 1974).

Changing the topic of conversation

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According to Dorval (1990), in his study of same-sex friend interaction, males

tend to change subject more frequently than females. This difference may well
be at the root of the conception that women chatter and talk too much, and
may still trigger the same thinking in some males. In this way lowered
estimation of women may arise. Incidentally, this androcentric attitude towards
women as chatterers arguably arose from the idea that any female conversation
was too much talking according to the patriarchal consideration of silence as a
womanly virtue common to many cultures.

Self-disclosure
Female tendencies toward self-disclosure, i.e., sharing their problems and
experiences with others, often to offer sympathy (Dindia & Allen, 1992; Tannen,
1991:49), contrasts with male tendencies to non-self disclosure and professing
advice or offering a solution when confronted with anothers problems.

Verbal aggression

Men tend to be more verbally aggressive in conversing (Labov, 1972),

frequently using threats, profanities, yelling and name-calling. Women, on the
whole, deem this to disrupt the flow of conversation and not (Eders 1990) as a
means of upholding ones hierarchical status in the conversation. Incidentally,
where women swear, it is usually to demonstrate to others what is normal
behaviour for them (Eder, 1990).

Listening and attentiveness

It appears that women attach more weight than men to the importance of
listening in conversation, with its connotations of power to the listener as
confidant of the speaker. This attachment of import by women to listening is
inferred by womens normally lower rate of interruption i.e., disrupting the
flow of conversation with a topic unrelated to the previous one (Fishman, 1980)
and by their largely increased use of minimal responses in relation to men
(Zimmerman and West, 1975). Men, however, interrupt far more frequently with
non-related topics, especially in the mixed sex setting (Zimmerman and
West,1975) and, far from rendering a female speaker's responses minimal, are
apt to greet her conversational spotlights with silence, as the work of
DeFrancisco (1991) demonstrates. All of this suggests that men see
conversation as a means by which to draw attention to themselves, either by
interruption or by questionably undermining what the woman has to say by nonparalinguistic response.

Dominance versus subjection

This, in turn, suggests a dichotomy between a male desire for conversational

dominance noted by Leet-Pellegrini (1980) with reference to male experts
speaking more verbosely than their female counterparts and a female
aspiration to group conversational participation. One corollary of this is,
according to Coates (1993: 202), that males are afforded more attention in the
context of the classroom and that this can lead to their gaining more attention
in scientific and technical subjects, which in turn can lead to their achieving
better success in those areas, ultimately leading to their having more power in
a technocratic society. However, women have, on average, higher verbal
intelligence than men (Eysenck, 1966:4).

Politeness
Politeness in speech is described (Brown and Levinson, 1978) in terms of
positive and negative face: respectively, the idea of pandering to the others
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desire to be liked and admired and not to suffer imposition. Both forms,
according to Browns study of the Tzeltal language (1980), are used more
frequently by women whether in mixed or single-sex pairs, suggesting for Brown
a greater sensitivity in women than have men to the face needs of others. In
short, women are to all intents and purposes largely more polite than men.
However, negative face politeness can be potentially viewed as weak language
because of its associated hedges and tag questions, a view propounded by
OBarr and Atkins (1980) in their work on courtroom interaction.

Complimentary language
Compliments are closely linked to politeness in that, as Coates believes (1983),
they cater for positive face needs.

Linguistic anthropology
Linguistic anthropology is that branch of anthropology that brings linguistic
methods to bear on anthropological problems, linking the analysis of semiotic
and particularly linguistic forms and processes to the interpretation of
sociocultural processes.

Historical development
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As Duranti (2003) has noted (and the next paragraphs summarize his article),
three paradigms have emerged over the history of the subdiscipline.

"Anthropological linguistics"
Main article: Anthropological linguistics
The first paradigm was originally referred to as "linguistics", although as it and
its surrounding fields of study matured it came to be known as "anthropological
linguistics". The field was devoted to themes unique to the subdiscipline
linguistic documentation of languages then seen as doomed to extinction (these
were the languages of native North America on which the first members of the
subdiscipline focused) such as:
Grammatical description,
Typological classification (see typology), and
The unresolved issue of linguistic relativity (associated with Edward Sapir
and Benjamin Lee Whorf but actually developed by Franz Boas and, before
him, by a long line of European thinkers from Vico to Herder to Humboldt).
The so-called Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is perhaps a misnomer insofar as
the approach to science taken by these two differs from the positivist,
hypothesis-driven model of science. In any case, it was Harry Hoijer
(Sapir's student) who coined the term (Hoijer 1954; see also HIll and
Mannheim 1992).

"Linguistic anthropology"

Dell Hymes was largely responsible for launching the second paradigm that
fixed the name "linguistic anthropology" in the 1960s, though he also coined the
term "ethnography of speaking" (or "ethnography of communication") to
describe the agenda he envisioned for the field. It would involve taking
advantage of new developments in technology, including new forms of
mechanical recording.
A new unit of analysis was also introduced by Hymes. Whereas the first
paradigm focused on ostensibly distinct "languages" (scare quotes indicate that
contemporary linguistic anthropologists treat the concept of "a language" as an
ideal construction covering up complexities within and "across" so-called
linguistic boundaries), the unit of analysis in the second paradigm was new
the "speech event." (The speech event is an event defined by the speech
occurring in it -- a lecture, for example -- so that a dinner is not a speech event,
but a speech situation, a situation in which speech may or may not occur.) Much
attention was devoted to speech events in which performers were held
accountable for the form of their linguistic performance as such (Bauman 1977,
Hymes 1981 [1975]).
Hymes also pioneered a linguistic anthropological approach to ethnopoetics.
Hymes had hoped to link linguistic anthropology more closely with the mother
discipline. The name certainly stresses that the primary identity is with
anthropology, whereas "anthropological linguistics" conveys a sense that the
primary identity of its practitioners was with linguistics, which is a separate
academic discipline on most university campuses today (not in the days of Boas
and Sapir). However, Hymes' ambition in a sense backfired; the second
paradigm in fact marked a further distancing of the subdiscipline from the rest
of anthropology.

Anthropological issues studied via linguistic methods and data

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In the current paradigm, which has emerged since the late 1980s, instead of
continuing to pursue agendas that come from a discipline alien to anthropology,
linguistic anthropologists have systematically addressed themselves to
problems posed by the larger discipline of anthropologybut using linguistic
data and methods.

Areas of interest

Identity
So, for example, they investigate questions of sociocultural identity
*linguistically*. Linguistic anthropologist Don Kulick has done this in relation to
identity, for example, in a series of settings, first in a village called Gapun in
Papua New Guinea (Kulick 1992). Kulick explored how the use of two languages
with and around children in Gapun villagethe traditional language (Taiap) not
spoken anywhere but in their own village and thus primordially "indexical" of
Gapuner identity, and Tok Pisin (the widely circulating official language of New
Guinea). (Linguistic anthropologists use "indexical" to mean indicative, though
some indexical signs create their indexical meanings on the fly, so to speak
Silverstein 1976.) To speak the Taiap language is associated with one identity
not only local but "Backward" and also an identity based on the display of *hed*
(personal autonomy). To speak Tok Pisin is to index a modern, Christian
(Catholic) identity, based not on *hed* but on *save*, that is an identity linked
with the will and the skill to cooperate. In later work (Kulick and Klein 2003),
Kulick demonstrates that certain loud speech performances called *um
escndalo*, Brazilian travesti (roughly, 'transvestite') sex workers shame
clients. The travesti community, the argument goes, ends up at least making a
powerful attempt to transcend the shame the larger Brazilian public might try to
foist off on themagain, through loud public discourse and other modes of
performance.
Socialization
Linguistic anthropologists Elinor Ochs and Bambi Schieffelin, in a remarkable
series of studies (Ochs and Schieffelin 1984; Ochs 1988; Ochs and Taylor 2001;
Schieffelin 1990) addressed the important anthropological topic of socialization
(the process by which infants, children, and foreigners become members of a
community, learning to participate in its culture), using linguistic as well as
ethnographic methods. They discovered that the processes of enculturation and
socialization do not occur apart from the process of language acquisition, but
that children acquire language and culture together in what amounts to an
integrated process. Ochs and Schieffelin demonstrated that baby talk is not
universal, that the direction of adaptation (whether the child is made to adapt
to the ongoing situation of speech around it or vice versa) was a variable that
correlated, for example, with the direction it was held vis--vis a caregiver's
body. In many societies caregivers hold a child facing outward so as to orient it
to a network of kin whom it must learn to recognize early in life.
Ochs and Schieffelin demonstrated that members of all societies socialize
children both to and through the use of language. Ochs and Taylor uncovered
how, through naturally occurring stories told during dinners in white middle
class households in southern California, both mothers and fathers participated
in replicating male dominance (the "father knows best" syndrome) by the
distribution of participant roles such as protagonist (often a child but sometimes
mother and almost never the father) and "problematizer" (often the father, who
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raised uncomfortable questions or challenged the competence of the

protagonist). When mothers collaborated with children to get their stories told
they unwittingly set themselves up to be subject to this process.
Schieffelin's more recent research (1995, 2000, 2002, 2006) has uncovered the
socializing role of pastors and other fairly new Bosavi converts in the Southern
Highlands, Papua New Guinea community she studies. Pastors have introduced
new ways of conveying knowledge i.e. new linguistic epistemic markers
(1995)and new ways of speaking about time (2002). And they have struggled
with and largely resisted those parts of the Bible that speak of being able to
know the inner states of others (e.g. the gospel of Mark, chapter 2, verses 6-8;
Schieffelin 2006).
Ideologies
In a third example of the current (third) paradigm, since Roman Jakobson's
student, Michael Silverstein (1979) opened the way, there has been an
efflorescence of work done by linguistic anthropologists on the major
anthropological theme of ideologiesin this case "linguistic ideologies,"
sometimes defined as "shared bodies of commonsense notions about the nature
of language in the world" (Rumsey 1990:346). Silverstein (1985) has
demonstrated that these ideologies are not mere false consciousness but
actually influence the evolution of linguistic structures, including the dropping of
"thee" and "thou" from everyday English usage. Woolard (2004), in her
overview of "code switching," or the systematic practice of alternating linguistic
varieties within a conversation or even a single utterance, finds the underlying
question anthropologists ask of the practiceWhy do they do that?reflects a
dominant linguistic ideology. It is the ideology that people should "really" be
monoglot and efficiently targeted toward referential clarity rather than diverting
themselves with the messiness of multiple varieties in play at a single time.
Attitudes toward codes such as Spanish and English in the U.S. are certainly
informed by linguistic ideologies. This extends to the widespread impression,
created by statements such as that by U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander,
Republican of Tennessee (in regards to a recently passed measure making
English the "official" language of the U.S.), that English is "part of our blood." To
Horwitz, this invocation of blood implies that English reflects the deepest vein of
the nation's ancestry, i.e., the oldest language spoken in what is now the United
States. Such a claim, if made openly, would be doubly absurd, ignoring a) all of
the Native American languages severely impacted by the arrival of Europeans,
but also b) Spanish, the language of a rather sizable number of European
explorers and settlers across the length and breadth of what is now the United
States (Horwitz 2006). Thus Alexander is attempting to "naturalize" language
and national identity via the metaphor of "blood."
Much research on linguistic ideologies probes subtler influences on language,
such as the pull exerted on Tewaa Kiowa-Tanoan language spoken in certain
New Mexico Pueblos as well as on the Hopi Reservation in Arizona (Kroskrity
1998)by "kiva speech," discussed in the next section.
Social space
In a final example of this third paradigm, a group of linguistic anthropologists
has done very creative work on the idea of social space. Duranti published a
ground breaking article on Samoan greetings and their use and transformation
of social space (1992). Prior to that, Indonesianist Joseph Errington (1988)
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making use of earlier work by Indonesianists not necessarily concerned with

language issues per sebrought linguistic anthropological methods (and
semiotic theory) to bear on the notion of the "exemplary center," or the center
of political and ritual power from which emanated exemplary behavior. Errington
demonstrated how the Javanese *priyayi*, whose ancestors served at the
Javanese royal courts, became emissaries, so to speak, long after those courts
had ceased to exist, representing throughout Java the highest example of
'refined speech.' The work of Joel Kuipers further develops this theme vis-a-vis
on the island of Sumba, Indonesia. And, even though it pertains to Tewa Indians
in Arizona rather than Indonesians, Paul Kroskrity's argument that speech forms
originating in the Tewa kiva (or underground ceremonial space) forms the
dominant model for all Tewa speech can be seen as a rather direct parallel.
Silverstein (2004) tries to find the maximum theoretical significance and
applicability in this idea of exemplary centers. He feels, in fact, that the
exemplary center idea is one of linguistic anthropology's three most important
findings. He generalizes the notion in the following manner, arguing that there
are wider-scale institutional orders of interactionality, historically contingent
yet structured. Within such large-scale, macrosocial orders, in-effect ritual
centers of semiosis come to exert a structuring, value-conferring influence on
any particular event of discursive interaction with respect to the meanings and
significance of the verbal and other semiotic forms used in it (2004: 623;
compare Wilce in press). Current approaches to such classic anthropological
topics as ritual by linguistic anthropologists emphasize not static linguistic
structures but the unfolding in realtime of a "'hypertrophic' set of parallel orders
of iconicity and indexicality that seem to cause the ritual to create its own
sacred space through what appears, often, to be the magic of textual and
nontextual metricalizations, synchronized" (Wilce 2006; see Silverstein
2004:626).

Generative linguistics
Generative linguistics is a school of thought within linguistics that makes use
of the concept of a generative grammar. The term "generative grammar" is
used in different ways by different people, and the term "generative linguistics"
therefore has a range of different, though overlapping, meanings.
Formally, a generative grammar is defined as one that is fully explicit. It is a
finite set of rules that can be applied to generate all those and only those
sentences (often, but not necessarily, infinite in number) that are grammatical
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in a given language. This is the definition that is offered by Noam Chomsky, who
invented the term [1] , and by most dictionaries of linguistics. It is important to
note that generate is being used as a technical term with a particular sense. To
say that a grammar generates a sentence means that the grammar "assigns a
structural description" to the sentence.[2]
The term generative grammar is also used to label the approach to linguistics
taken by Chomsky and his followers. Chomsky's approach is characterised by
the use of transformational grammar a theory that has changed greatly since
it was first promulgated by Chomsky in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures and
by the assertion of a strong linguistic nativism (and therefore an assertion that
some set of fundamental characteristics of all human languages must be the
same). The term "generative linguistics" is often applied to the earliest version
of Chomsky's transformational grammar, which was associated with a
distinction between the "deep structure" and "surface structure" of sentences.

Cognitive linguistics
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In linguistics and cognitive science, cognitive linguistics (CL) refers to the

school of linguistics that understands language creation, learning, and usage as
best explained by reference to human cognition in general. It is characterized
by adherence to three central positions. First, it denies that there is an
autonomous linguistic faculty in the mind; second, it understands grammar in
terms of conceptualization; and third, it claims that knowledge of language
arises out of language use. [1]
Cognitive linguists deny that the mind has any module for language-acquisition
that is unique and autonomous. This stands in contrast to the work done in the
field of generative grammar. Although cognitive linguists do not necessarily
deny that part of the human linguistic ability is innate, they deny that it is
separate from the rest of cognition. Thus, they argue that knowledge of
linguistic phenomena -- i.e., phonemes, morphemes, and syntax -- is essentially
conceptual in nature. Moreover, they argue that the storage and retrieval of
linguistic data is not significantly different from the storage and retrieval of
other knowledge, and use of language in understanding employs similar
cognitive abilities as used in other non-linguistic tasks.
Departing from the tradition of truth-conditional semantics, cognitive linguists
view meaning in terms of conceptualization. Instead of viewing meaning in
terms of models of the world, they view it in terms of mental spaces.
Finally, cognitive linguistics argues that language is both embodied and situated
in a specific environment. This can be considered a moderate offshoot of the
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, in that language and cognition mutually influence one
another, and are both embedded in the experiences and environments of its
users.

Areas of study
Cognitive linguistics is divided into three main areas of study:
Cognitive semantics, dealing mainly with lexical semantics
Cognitive approaches to grammar, dealing mainly with syntax,
morphology and other traditionally more grammar-oriented areas.
Cognitive phonology.
Aspects of cognition that are of interest to cognitive linguists include:
Construction grammar and cognitive grammar.
Conceptual metaphor and conceptual blending.
Image schemas and force dynamics.
Conceptual organization: Categorization, Metonymy, Frame semantics,
and Iconicity.
Construal and Subjectivity.
Gesture and sign language.
Linguistic relativism.
Cognitive neuroscience.
Related work that interfaces with many of the above themes:
Computational models of metaphor and language acquisition.
Psycholinguistics research.
Conceptual semantics, pursued by generative linguist Ray Jackendoff is
related because of its active psychological realism and the incorporation
of prototype structure and images.
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Cognitive linguistics, more than generative linguistics, seeks to mesh together

these findings into a coherent whole. A further complication arises because the
terminology of cognitive linguistics is not entirely stable, both because it is a
relatively new field and because it interfaces with a number of other disciplines.
Insights and developments from cognitive linguistics are becoming accepted
ways of analysing literary texts, too. Cognitive Poetics, as it has become known,
has become an important part of modern stylistics. The best summary of the
discipline as it is currently stands is Peter Stockwell's Cognitive Poetics.[2]

See also

Cognitive science
Embodied philosophy
List of cognitive scientists

References
1. ^ Croft, William and D. Alan Cruse (2004). Cognitive Linguistics.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1.
2. ^ Stockwell, Peter (2002). Cognitive poetics: An Introduction. London and
New York: Routledge.
Evans, Vyvyan & Melanie Green (2006). Cognitive Linguistics: An
Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Evans, Vyvyan (2007). A Glossary of Cognitive Linguistics. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.

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Computational linguistics
Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the
statistical and/or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational
perspective. This modeling is not limited to any particular field of linguistics.
Traditionally, computational linguistics was usually performed by computer
scientists who had specialized in the application of computers to the processing
of a natural language. Recent research has shown that human language is much
more complex than previously thought, so computational linguists often work as
members of interdisciplinary teams, including linguists (specifically trained in
linguistics), language experts (persons with some level of ability in the
languages relevant to a given project), and computer scientists. In general
computational linguistics draws upon the involvement of linguists, computer
scientists, experts in artificial intelligence, cognitive psychologists,
mathematicians, and logicians, amongst others.

Origins
Computational linguistics as a field predates artificial intelligence, a field under
which it is often grouped. Computational linguistics originated with efforts in the
United States in the 1950s to use computers to automatically translate texts
from foreign languages, particularly Russian scientific journals, into English. [1]
Since computers had proven their ability to do arithmetic much faster and more
accurately than humans, it was thought to be only a short matter of time before
the technical details could be taken care of that would allow them the same
remarkable capacity to process language.
When machine translation (also known as mechanical translation) failed to yield
accurate translations right away, automated processing of human languages
was recognized as far more complex than had originally been assumed.
Computational linguistics was born as the name of the new field of study
devoted to developing algorithms and software for intelligently processing
language data. When artificial intelligence came into existence in the 1960s, the
field of computational linguistics became that sub-division of artificial
intelligence dealing with human-level comprehension and production of natural
languages.
In order to translate one language into another, it was observed that one had to
understand the grammar of both languages, including both morphology (the
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grammar of word forms) and syntax (the grammar of how words are combined
to form sentences). In order to understand syntax, one had to also understand
the semantics and the lexicon (or 'vocabulary'), and even to understand
something of the pragmatics of language use. Thus, what started as an effort to
translate between languages evolved into an entire discipline devoted to
understanding how to represent and process natural languages using
computers.

Subfields
Computational linguistics can be divided into major areas depending upon the
medium of the language being processed, whether spoken or textual; and upon
the task being performed, whether analyzing language (recognition) or
synthesizing language (generation).
Speech recognition and speech synthesis deal with how spoken language can
be understood or created using computers. Parsing and generation are subdivisions of computational linguistics dealing respectively with taking language
apart and putting it together. Machine translation remains the sub-division of
computational linguistics dealing with having computers translate between
languages.
Some of the areas of research that are studied by computational linguistics
include:
Computer aided corpus linguistics
Design of parsers or chunkers for natural languages
Design of taggers like POS-taggers (part-of-speech taggers)
Definition of specialized logics like resource logics for NLP
Research in the relation between formal and natural languages in general
Machine translation, e.g. by a translating computer
Computational complexity of natural language, largely modeled on
automata theory, with the application of context-sensitive grammar and
linearly-bounded Turing machines.
The Association for Computational Linguistics defines computational linguistics
as:
...the scientific study of language from a computational perspective.
Computational linguists are interested in providing computational models
of various kinds of linguistic phenomena.

See also

Artificial intelligence
Association for Computational
Linguistics
Collostructional analysis
Computational lexicology
Computational Linguistics
(journal)
Computational semantics
Computational semiotics

Computer-assisted
reviewing
Dialog systems
Human speechome
project
Machine translation
National Centre for Text
Mining
Natural language
processing
Semantic relatedness
Translation memory
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Descriptive linguistics
Descriptive linguistics is the work of analyzing and describing how language
is spoken (or how it was spoken in the past) by a group of people in a speech
community. All scholarly research in linguistics is descriptive; like all other
sciences, its aim is to observe the linguistic world as it is, without the bias of
preconceived ideas about how it ought to be. Modern descriptive linguistics is
based on a structural approach to language, as exemplified in the work of
Bloomfield and others.
Linguistic description is often contrasted with linguistic prescription, which is
found especially in education and in publishing. Prescription seeks to define
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standard language forms and give advice on effective language use, and can be
thought of as the attempt to present the fruits of descriptive research in a
learnable form, though it also draws on more subjective aspects of language
aesthetics. Prescription and description are essentially complementary, but
have different priorities and sometimes are seen to be in conflict.
Accurate description of real speech is a difficult problem, and linguists have
often been reduced to approximations. Almost all linguistic theory has its origin
in practical problems of descriptive linguistics. Phonology (and its theoretical
developments, such as the phoneme) deals with the function and interpretation
of sound in language. Syntax has developed to describe the rules concerning
how words relate to each other in order to form sentences. Lexicology collects
"words" and their derivations and transformations: it has not given rise to much
generalized theory.
An extreme "mentalist" viewpoint denies that the linguistic description of a
language can be done by anyone but a competent speaker. Such a speaker has
internalized something called "linguistic competence", which gives them the
ability to extrapolate correctly from their experience new but correct
expressions, and to reject unacceptable expressions.
There are tens of thousands of linguistic descriptions of thousands of languages
that were prepared by people without adequate linguistic training. Prior to 1900,
there was little academic descriptions of language.
A linguistic description is considered descriptively adequate if it achieves one or
more of the following goals of descriptive linguistics:
1. A description of the phonology of the language in question.
2. A description of the morphology of words belonging to that language.
3. A description of the syntax of well-formed sentences of that language.
4. A description of lexical derivations.
5. A documentation of the vocabulary, including at least one thousand
entries.
6. A reproduction of a few genuine texts.
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descriptive_linguistics"

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Historical linguistics
Historical linguistics (also called diachronic linguistics) is the study of
language change. It has five main concerns:
to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages;
to reconstruct the pre-history of languages and determine their
relatedness, grouping them into language families (comparative
linguistics);
to develop general theories about how and why language changes;
to describe the history of speech communities;
to study the history of words, i.e. etymology.

History and development

Modern historical linguistics dates from the late 18th century and grew out of
the earlier discipline of philology, the study of ancient texts and documents,
which goes back to antiquity.
At first historical linguistics was comparative linguistics and mainly concerned
with establishing language families and the reconstruction of prehistoric
languages, using the comparative method and internal reconstruction. The
focus was on the well-known Indo-European languages, many of which had long
written histories. But since then, significant comparative linguistic work has
been done on the Uralic languages, Austronesian languages and various
families of Native American languages, among many others. Comparative
linguistics is now, however, only a part of a more broadly conceived discipline of
historical linguistics. For the Indo-European languages comparative study is now
a highly specialised field and most research is being carried out on the
subsequent development of these languages, particularly the development of
the modern standard varieties.

Evolution into other fields

Initially, all modern linguistics was historical in orientation - even the study of
modern dialects involved looking at their origins. But Saussure drew a
distinction between synchronic and diachronic linguistics, which is fundamental
to the present day organization of the discipline. Primacy is accorded to
synchronic linguistics, and diachronic linguistics is defined as the study of
successive synchronic stages. Saussure's clear demarcation, however, is now
seen to be idealised. In practice, a purely synchronic linguistics is not possible
for any period before the invention of the gramophone: written records always
lag behind speech in reflecting linguistic developments, and in any case are
difficult to date accurately before the development of the modern title page.
Also, the work of sociolinguists on linguistic variation has shown synchronic
states are not uniform: the speech habits of older and younger speakers differ in
ways which point to language change. Synchronic variation is linguistic change
in progress.
The biological origin of language is in principle a concern of historical linguistics,
but most linguists regard it as too remote to be reliably established by standard
techniques of historical linguistics such as the comparative method. Less
standard techniques, such as mass lexical comparison, are used by some
linguists to overcome the limitations of the comparative method, but most
linguists regard them as unreliable.
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The findings of historical linguistics are often used as a basis for hypotheses
about the groupings and movements of peoples, particularly in the prehistoric
period. In practice, however, it is often unclear how to integrate the linguistic
evidence with the archaeological or genetic evidence. For example, there are a
large number of theories concerning the homeland and early movements of the
Proto-Indo-Europeans, each with their own interpretation of the archaeological
record.

Comparative linguistics
Comparative linguistics (originally comparative philology) is a branch of
historical linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages in order to
establish their historical relatedness. Languages may be related by convergence
through borrowing or by genetic descent.
Genetic relatedness implies a common origin or proto-language, and
comparative linguistics aims to construct language families, to reconstruct
proto-languages and specify the changes that have resulted in the documented
languages. In order to maintain a clear distinction between attested and
reconstructed forms, comparative linguists prefix an asterisk to any form that is
not found in surviving texts.

Methods
The fundamental technique of comparative linguistics is to compare
phonological systems, morphological systems, syntax and the lexicon of two or
more languages using a technique known as the comparative method. In
principle, every difference between two related languages should be explicable
to a high degree of plausibility, and systematic changes, for example in
phonological or morphological systems, are expected to be highly regular (ie
consistent). In practise, the comparison may be more restricted, eg just to the
lexicon. In some methods it may be possible to reconstruct an earlier protolanguage. Although the proto-languages reconstructed by the comparative
method are hypothetical, a reconstruction may have predictive power. The most
notable example of this is Saussure's proposal that the Indo-European
consonant system contained laryngeals, a type of consonant attested in no
Indo-European language known at the time. The hypothesis was vindicated with
the discovery of Hittite, which proved to have exactly the consonants Saussure
had hypothesized in the environments he had predicted.
Where languages are derived from a very distant ancestor, and are thus more
distantly related, the comparative method becomes impracticable. In particular,
attempting to relate two reconstructed proto-languages by the comparative
method has not generally produced results that have met with wide
acceptance. A number of methods based on statistical analysis of vocabulary
have been developed to overcome this limitation such as lexicostatistics and
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mass comparison. The former uses lexical cognates like the comparative
method but the latter uses only lexical similarity. The theoretical basis of such
methods is that vocabulary items can be matched without a detailed language
reconstruction and that comparing enough vocabulary items will negate
individual inaccuracies. Thus they can be used to determine relatedness but not
to determine the proto-language.

History
The earliest method of this type was the comparative method, which was
developed over many years, culminating in the nineteenth century. This uses a
long word list and detailed study. However, it has been criticized for example as
being subjective.[citation needed] The comparative method uses information from two
or more languages and allows reconstruction of the ancestral language. The
method of Internal reconstruction uses only a single language, with comparison
of word variants, to perform the same function. Internal reconstruction is more
resistant to interference but usually has a limited available base of utilizable
words and is able to reconstruct only certain changes (those that have left
traces as morfophonological variations).
In the twentieth century an alternative method, lexicostatistics, was developed,
which is mainly associated with Morris Swadesh but is based on earlier work.
This uses a short word list of basic vocabulary in the various languages for
comparisons. Swadesh used 100 (earlier 200) items that are assumed to be
cognate (on the basis of phonetic similarity) in the languages being compared,
though other lists have also been used. Distance measures are derived by
examination of language pairs but such methods reduce the information. An
outgrowth of lexicostatistics is glottochronology, initially developed in the
1950s, which proposed a mathematical formula for establishing the date when
two languages separated, based on percentage of a core vocabulary of
culturally independent words. In its simplest form a constant rate of change is
assumed, though later versions allow variance but still fail to achieve reliability.
Glottochronology has met with mounting scepticism, and is seldom applied
today. Dating estimations can now be generated by computerised methods that
have less restrictions, calculating rates from the data. However, no
mathematical means of producing proto-language split-times on the basis of
lexical retention has been proven reliable.
Another controversial method, developed by Joseph Greenberg, is mass lexical
comparison.[1] The method, which disavows any ability to date developments,
aims simply to show which languages are more and less close to each other, in
a method similar to those used in cladistics in evolutionary biology. On the one
hand, since mass comparison eschews the use of reconstruction and other
traditional tools, it is flatly rejected by the majority of historical linguists. On the
other, the method has been shown to be useful in preliminary grouping of
languages known to be related, such findings should be backed up by in-depth
comparative analysis however.
Recently computerised statistical hypothesis testing methods have been
developed which are related to both the comparative method and
lexicostatistics. .[citation needed]
Recently (since the mid 1990s) more sophisticated tree and network based
cladistic methods have been used to investigate the relationships between
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languages. These are considered by many to show promise but are not wholly
accepted by traditionalists.[citation needed]
Such vocabulary-based methods are able solely to establish degrees of
relatedness and cannot be used to derive the features of a proto-language,
apart from the fact of the shared items of compared vocabulary. These
approaches have been challenged for their methodological problems - without a
reconstruction or at least a detailed list of phonological correspondences there
can be no demonstration that two words in different languages are cognate.
[citation needed]

Other related fields

There are other branches of linguistics that involve comparing languages, which
are not, however, part of comparative linguistics:
Linguistic typology compares languages in order to classify them by their
features. Its ultimate aim is to understand the universals that govern
language, and the range of types found in the world's language is respect
of any particular feature (word order or vowel system, for example).
Typological similarity does not imply a historical relationship. However,
typological arguments can be used in comparative linguistics: one
reconstruction may be preferred to another as typologically more
plausible.
Contact linguistics examines the linguistic results of contact between the
speakers of different languages, particular as evidenced in loan words.
Any empirical study of loans is by definition historical in focus and
therefore forms part of the subject matter of historical linguistics. One of
the goals of etymology is to establish which items in a language's
vocabulary result from linguistic contact. This is also an important issue
both for the comparative method and for the lexical comparison methods,
since failure to recognize a loan may distort the findings.
Contrastive linguistics compares languages usually with the aim of
assisting language learning by identifying important differences between
the learner's native and target languages. Contrastive linguistics deals
solely with present-day languages.
There is also a wide body of publications containing language comparisons that
are considered pseudoscientific by linguists; see pseudoscientific language
comparison.

Etymology
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Etymologiae and The Etymologies (Tolkien) respectively.

Not to be confused with Entomology, the scientific study of insects.
Etymology is the study of the history of words when they entered a
language, from what source, and how their form and meaning have changed
over time.
In languages with a long detailed history, etymology makes use of philology, the
study of how words change from culture to culture over time. However,
etymologists also apply the methods of comparative linguistics to reconstruct
information about languages that are too old for any direct information (such as
writing) to be known. By analyzing related languages with a technique known as
the comparative method, linguists can make inferences, about their shared
parent language and its vocabulary. In this way, word roots have been found
which can be traced all the way back to the origin of, for instance, the IndoEuropean language family.
Even though etymological research originally grew from the philological
tradition, nowadays much etymological research is done in language families
where little or no early documentation is available, such as Uralic and
Austronesian.

Etymology of etymology
The word "etymology" itself comes from the Ancient Greek
(etumologia) < (etumon), true sense + - (-logia), study of, from
(logos), "speech, oration, discourse, word". The Greek poet Pindar (b.
approx. 522 BC) employed creative etymologies to flatter his patrons. Plutarch
employed etymologies insecurely based on fancied resemblances in sounds.
Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae was an encyclopedic tracing of "first things" that
remained uncritically in use in Europe until the fifteenth century. Etymologicum
genuinum is a grammatical encyclopedia edited at Constantinople in the ninth
century, one of several similar Byzantine works. The fourteenth-century
Legenda Aurea begins each vita of a saint with a fanciful excursus in the form of
an etymology.

Types of word origins

Etymological theory recognizes that words originate through a limited number

of basic mechanisms, the most important of which are the following:
Borrowing, i.e. the adoption of loanwords from other languages.
Word formation such as derivation and compounding.
Onomatopoeia and sound symbolism, i.e. the creation of imitative words.
While the origin of newly emerged words is often more or less transparent, it
tends to become obscured through time due to:
Sound change: for example, it is not obvious at first sight that English set
is related to sit (the former is originally a causative formation of the
latter), and even less so that bless is related to blood (the former was
originally a derivative with the meaning "to mark with blood", or the like).
Semantic change: English bead originally meant "prayer", and acquired its
modern sense through the practice of counting prayers with beads.
Most often combinations of etymological mechanisms apply. For example, the
German word bitte (please) the German word beten (to pray) and the Dutch
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word bidden (to pray) are related through sound and meaning to the English
word bead.
The combination of sound change and semantic change often creates
etymological connections that are impossible to detect by merely looking at the
modern word-forms. For instance, English lord comes from Old English hlfweard, meaning literally "bread guard". The components of this compound, in
turn, yielded modern English loaf and ward.

Methods of etymology
Etymologists apply a number of methods to study the origins of words, some of
which are:
Philological research. Changes in the form and meaning of the word can
be traced with the aid of older texts, if such are available.
Making use of dialectological data. The form or meaning of the word
might show variation between dialects, which may yield clues of its earlier
history.
The comparative method. By a systematic comparison of related
languages, etymologists can detect which words derive from their
common ancestor language and which were instead later borrowed from
another language.
The study of semantic change. Etymologists often have to make
hypotheses about changes of meaning of particular words. Such
hypotheses are tested against the general knowledge of semantic shifts.
For example, the assumption of a particular change of meaning can be
substantiated by showing that the same type of change has occurred in
many other languages as well.

English etymology
Main article: History of the English language
As a language, English is derived from the Anglo-Saxon, a West Germanic
variety, although its current vocabulary includes words from many languages.
The Anglo-Saxon roots can be seen in the similarity of numbers in English and
German, particularly seven/sieben, eight/acht, nine/neun and ten/zehn.
Pronouns are also cognate: I/ich; thou/Du; we/wir; she/sie. However, language
change has eroded many grammatical elements, such as the noun case system,
which is greatly simplified in Modern English; and certain elements of
vocabulary, much of which is borrowed from French. Though more than half of
the words in English either come from the French language or have a French
cognate, most of the common words used are still of Germanic origin. For an
example of the etymology of an English irregular verb of Germanic origin, see
the etymology of the word go.
When the Normans conquered England in 1066 (see Norman Conquest) they
brought their Norman language with them. During the Anglo-Norman period
which united insular and continental territories, the ruling class spoke AngloNorman, while the peasants spoke the English of the time. Anglo-Norman was
the conduit for the introduction of French into England, aided by the circulation
of Langue d'ol literature from France. This led to many paired words of French
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and English origin. For example, beef is cognate with the modern French buf,
meaning the meat of a cow; veal with veau, meaning calf meat; pork with porc,
meaning pig meat; and poultry with poulet, meaning chicken. This relationship
carries over into the names for farm animals where the cognate is with modern
German. For example swine/Schwein; cow/Kuh; calf/Kalb; sheep/Schafe. It has
been asserted that the reason why the foodstuff has the Norman name, and the
animal the Anglo-Saxon name, was due to the fact that the Norman rulers who
ate meat (meat was an expensive commodity and could rarely be afforded by
the Anglo-Saxons), and the Anglo-Saxons who farmed the animals. Others
dispute this.
English words of more than two syllables are likely to come from French, often
with modified terminations. For example, the French words for syllable,
modified, terminations and example are syllabe, modifi, terminaisons and
exemple. In many cases, the English form of the word is more conservative
(that is, has changed less) than the French form. Polysyllabic words in English
also carry connotations of better education or politeness.
English has proven accommodating to words from many languages. Scientific
terminology relies heavily on words of Latin and Greek origin. Spanish has
contributed many words, particularly in the southwestern United States.
Examples include buckaroo from vaquero or "cowboy", alligator from el lagarto
or "the lizard", and rodeo. Cuddle, eerie and greed come from Scots; , mosque,
muslim, apricot, adobe, alcohol, algorithm, assassin, cotton, caliber,sherif,
orange, julep, hazard, candy, cat, jar, jacket, safari, sofa and zero from Arabic;
honcho, sushi, and tsunami from Japanese; dim sum, gung ho, kowtow,
kumquat, ketchup, and typhoon from Cantonese Chinese; behemoth, hallelujah,
Satan, jubilee, and rabbi from Hebrew; taiga, sable and sputnik from Russian;
galore, whiskey, phoney and Tory from Irish; guru,karma,pandit from Sanskrit;
kampong and amok from Malay; and boondocks from the Tagalog word bundok.
See also loanword.

History of etymology
The search for meaningful origins for familiar or strange words is far older than
the modern understanding of linguistic evolution and the relationships of
languages, with its roots no deeper than the 18th century. From Antiquity
through the 17th century, from Pini to Pindar to Sir Thomas Browne,
etymology had been a form of witty wordplay, in which the supposed origins of
words were changed to satisfy contemporary requirements.

Ancient Sanskrit etymology

Main article: Nirukta

The Sanskrit linguists and grammarians of ancient India were the first to make a
comprehensive analysis of linguistics and etymology. The study of nuts Sanskrit
etymology has provided Western scholars the basis of historical linguistics and
modern etymology. Four of the most famous Sanskrit linguists are:
Yaska (c. 7th-6th century BCE)
Pini (c. 520-460 BCE)
Ktyyana (2nd century BCE)
Patajali (2nd century BCE)
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Though they are not the earliest Sanskrit grammarians, they follow a line of
more ancient grammar people of Sanskrit dating back up to several centuries
earlier. The earliest of attested etymologies can be found in Vedic literature, in
the philosophical explanations of the Brahmanas, Aranyakas and Upanishads.
The analyses of Sanskrit grammar of the previously mentioned linguists involve
extensive studies on the etymology (called Nirukta or Vyutpatti in Sanskrit) of
Sanskrit words, because the ancient Indo-Aryans considered sound and speech
itself to be sacred, and for them, the words of the sacred Vedas contained deep
encoding of the mysteries of the soul and God.

Ancient Greco-Roman etymology

One of the earliest philosophical texts of the Classical Greek period to deal with
etymology was the Socratic dialogue Cratylus (c. 360 BC) by Plato. During much
of the dialogue, Socrates makes guesses as to the origins of many words,
including the names of the gods. In his Odes Pindar spins complimentary
etymologies to flatter his patrons. Plutarch (Life of Numa Pompilius) spins an
etymology for pontifex ("bridge-builder"):

the priests, called Pontifices.... have the name of Pontifices from potens, powerful,
because they attend the service of the gods, who have power and command over all.
Others make the word refer to exceptions of impossible cases; the priests were to
perform all the duties possible to them; if any thing lay beyond their power, the
exception was not to be cavilled at. The most common opinion is the most absurd,
which derives this word from pons, and assigns the priests the title of bridge-makers.
The sacrifices performed on the bridge were amongst the most sacred and ancient, and
the keeping and repairing of the bridge attached, like any other public sacred office, to
the priesthood.

Plutarch's etymology of "syncretism", involving Cretans banding together,

rather than a parallel to concrete or accrete, is uncritically accepted even today
(see Syncretism). Degrading and insulting pseudo-etymologies were a standard
weapon of Jerome's arsenal of sarcasm. A modern false etymology claims that
ANTHROPOS, "human being," comes from ANA and OPSOMAI--"one who looks
up." This not only is an irrelevant human characteristic, but it also fails to
account for some of the letters. Better would be ANTI, "back and forth,"
RHETHEIS, "making a sound," and EPOS, "word": "a creature that speaks back."
Without doubt, the most important Roman work containing - albeit mostly
erroneous - etymologies was the famous multi-volume De Lingua Latina written
by Varro.

Medieval etymology

Isidore of Seville compiled a volume of etymologies to illuminate the triumph of

religion. Each saint's legend in Jacob de Voragine's Legenda Aurea begins with
an etymological riff on the saint's name:
Lucy is said of light, and light is beauty in beholding, after that S. Ambrose saith: The
nature of light is such, she is gracious in beholding, she spreadeth over all without lying
down, she passeth in going right without crooking by right long line; and it is without
dilation of tarrying, and therefore it is showed the blessed Lucy hath beauty of virginity
without any corruption; essence of charity without disordinate love; rightful going and
devotion to God, without squaring out of the way; right long line by continual work
without negligence of slothful tarrying. In Lucy is said, the way of light. [1].

Modern etymology

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One of the founding fathers of modern etymology was without doubt William
Jones. Young William learned Latin, Greek and Persian; later, he became a kind
of linguistic prodigy and by the end of his life, he spoke 28 languages. In 1783,
he was sent to India to serve as a judge at the Supreme Court of Bengal. As was
his custom, he almost immediately sat down and started to study a language,
this time that of the old local law books, Sanskrit. Soon, he found the following for him, astounding - similarities between Sanskrit and Latin:
Sanskrit: trayas, sapta, ashta, nava, sarpa, raja, devas - Latin: tres, septem,
octo, novem, serpens, rex, deus (English meanings: three, seven, eight, nine,
snake, king, god)
In 1786, he published "The Sanscrit Language", most probably the first book
ever to deal with Indo-European linguistics.
A little later, in the 19th century, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche used
etymological strategies (principally, and most famously, in On the Genealogy of
Morals, but also elsewhere) to argue that moral values have definite historical
(specifically cultural) origins where modulations in meaning regarding certain
concepts (such as "good" and "evil") showed how these ideas had changed over
time, according to which value-system appropriated them. Although many of
Nietzsche's etymologies are wrong, the strategy has gained popularity in the
20th century, with philosophers such as Jacques Derrida using etymologies to
indicate former meanings of words with view to decentring the "violent
hierarchies" of Western metaphysics.
Everyone", (ISBN 0-19-516147-5)

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Stylistics (linguistics)
Stylistics is the study of varieties of language whose properties position that
language in context. For example, the language of advertising, politics, religion,
individual authors, etc., or the language of a period in time, all belong in a
particular situation. In other words, they all have place.
Stylistics also attempts to establish principles capable of explaining the
particular choices made by individuals and social groups in their use of
language, such as socialisation, the production and reception of meaning,
critical discourse analysis and literary criticism.
Other features of stylistics include the use of dialogue, including regional
accents and peoples dialects, descriptive language, the use of grammar, such
as the active voice or passive voice, the distribution of sentence lengths, the
use of particular language registers, etc.
Many linguists do not like the term stylistics. The word style, itself, has
several connotations that make it difficult for the term to be defined accurately.
However, in Linguistic Criticism, Roger Fowler makes the point that, in nontheoretical usage, the word stylistics makes sense and is useful in referring to
an enormous range of literary contexts, such as John Miltons grand style, the
prose style of Henry James, the epic and ballad style of classical Greek
literature, etc. (Fowler. 1996, 185). In addition, stylistics is a distinctive term
that may be used to determine the connections between the form and effects
within a particular variety of language. Therefore, stylistics looks at what is
going on within the language; what the linguistic associations are that the
style of language reveals.

Overview
The situation in which a type of language is found can usually be seen as
appropriate or inappropriate to the style of language used. A personal love
letter would probably not be a suitable location for the language of this article.
However, within the language of a romantic correspondence there may be a
relationship between the letters style and its context. It may be the authors
intention to include a particular word, phrase or sentence that not only conveys
their sentiments of affection, but also reflects the unique environment of a
lovers romantic composition. Even so, by using so-called conventional and
seemingly appropriate language within a specific context (apparently fitting
words that correspond to the situation in which they appear) there exists the
possibility that this language may lack exact meaning and fail to accurately
convey the intended message from author to reader, thereby rendering such
language obsolete precisely because of its conventionality. In addition, any
writer wishing to convey their opinion in a variety of language that they feel is
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proper to its context could find themselves unwittingly conforming to a

particular style, which then overshadows the content of their writing.

Register
Main article: Register (linguistics)
In linguistic analysis, different styles of language are technically called register.
Register refers to properties within a language variety that associates that
language with a given situation. This is distinct from, say, professional
terminology that might only be found, for example, in a legal document or
medical journal. The linguist Michael Halliday defines register by emphasising
its semantic patterns and context. For Halliday, register is determined by what
is taking place, who is taking part and what part the language is playing.
(Halliday. 1978, 23) In Context and Language, Helen Leckie-Tarry suggests that
Hallidays theory of register aims to propose relationships between language
function, determined by situational or social factors, and language form.
(Leckie-Tarry. 1995, 6) The linguist William Downes makes the point that the
principal characteristic of register, no matter how peculiar or diverse, is that it is
obvious and immediately recognisable. (Downes. 1998, 309)
Halliday places great emphasis on the social context of register and
distinguishes register from dialect, which is a variety according to user, in the
sense that each speaker uses one variety and uses it all the time, and not, as is
register, a variety according to use, in the sense that each speaker has a range
of varieties and chooses between them at different times. (Halliday. 1964, 77)
For example, Cockney is a dialect of English that relates to a particular region of
the United Kingdom, however, Cockney rhyming slang bears a relationship
between its variety and the situation in which it appears, i.e. the ironic
definitions of the parlance within the distinctive tones of the East-End London
patois. Subsequently, register is associated with language situation and not
geographic location.

Field, tenor and mode

Halliday classifies the semiotic structure of situation as field, tenor and

mode, which, he suggests, tends to determine the selection of options in a
corresponding component of the semantics. (Halliday. 1964, 56). The linguist
David Crystal points out that Hallidays tenor stands as a roughly equivalent
term for style, which is a more specific alternative used by linguists to avoid
ambiguity. (Crystal. 1985, 292)
For an example on which to comment, here is a familiar sentence:
I swear by almighty God that the evidence I will give shall be the truth,
the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
For Halliday, the field is the activity associated with the language used, in this
case a religious oath tailored to the environment of a legal proceeding. Fowler
comments that different fields produce different language, most obviously at
the level of vocabulary (Fowler. 1996, 192) The words swear and almighty are
used instead of perhaps pledge or supreme. In addition, there is the
repetition of the word truth, which evidently triples and thereby emphasises
the seriousness of the vow taken. (Incidentally, this linguistic technique is often
employed in the language of politics, as it was for example in Prime Minister
Tony Blairs memorable Education, Education, Education speech to the Labour
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Party Conference in 2000.) The tenor of this sentence would refer to the specific
role of the participants between whom the statement is made, in this case the
person in the witness box proclaiming their intention to be honest before the
court and those in attendance, but most importantly God. Fowler also
comments that within the category of tenor there is a power relationship, which
is determined by the tenor and the intention of the speaker to persuade, inform,
etc. (Fowler. 1996, 192) In this case, the tenor is an affirmation to speak the
truth before the court by recognising the courts legal supremacy and at the risk
of retribution for not doing so from this secular court and a spiritual higher
authority. This, of course, is not directly stated within the sentence but only
implied.
Hallidays third category, mode, is what he refers to as the symbolic
organisation of the situation. Downes recognises two distinct aspects within the
category of mode and suggests that not only does it describe the relation to the
medium: written, spoken, and so on, but also describes the genre of the text.
(Downes. 1998, 316) Halliday refers to genre as pre-coded language, language
that has not simply been used before, but that predetermines the selection of
textural meanings. For instance, in the sentence above the phrase the
evidence I shall give is preferable to the possible alternatives the testimony I
will offer or even the facts that I am going to talk about.
As well as recognising different registers of language that appear to be suitable
for a particular situation, stylistics also examines language that is specifically
modified for its setting, an example being the alteration in tenor from informal
to formal, or vice versa.
Consider the quotation below:
I was proceeding on my beat when I accosted the suspect whom I had
reason to believe might wish to come down to the station and help with
enquiries in hand.
This language only belongs in a UK policemans notebook and may be read out
in a court of law. The sentence is not only formal but highly conventional for the
location in which it is found. In addition, it is also extremely ambiguous (a
common feature of so-called conventional language). Why accosted, for
example, and not arrested, collared, nabbed, nicked or even pinched?
Either of which would express more accurately what occurred in language more
suitable for the typical British bobby, rather than the pre-scripted text that is
simply being recited parrot fashion.

Literary Stylistics
In The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, Crystal observes that, in practice,
most stylistic analysis has attempted to deal with the complex and valued
language within literature, i.e. literary stylistics. He goes on to say that in such
examination the scope is sometimes narrowed to concentrate on the more
striking features of literary language, for instance, its deviant and abnormal
features, rather than the broader structures that are found in whole texts or
discourses. For example, the compact language of poetry is more likely to
reveal the secrets of its construction to the stylistician than is the language of
plays and novels. (Crystal. 1987, 71).

Rhymes vs. Poetry

As well as conventional styles of language there are the unconventional the

most obvious of which is poetry. In Practical Stylistics, HG Widdowson examines
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the traditional form of the epitaph, as found on headstones in a cemetery. For

example:
His memory is dear today
As in the hour he died.
(Ernest C. Draper Ern. Died 4.1.38)
(Widdowson. 1992, 6)
Widdowson makes the point that such sentiments are usually not very
interesting and suggests that they may even be dismissed as crude verbal
carvings (Widdowson, 3), as does the English poet Thomas Gray in his Elegy
Written in a Country Churchyard (1751), who refers to them as uncouth
rhymes. Nevertheless, Widdowson recognises that they are a very real attempt
to convey feelings of human loss and preserve affectionate recollections of a
beloved friend or family member. However, what may be seen as poetic in this
language is not so much in the formulaic phraseology but in where it appears.
The verse may be given undue reverence precisely because of the sombre
situation in which it is placed. Widdowson suggests that, unlike words set in
stone in a graveyard, poetry is unorthodox language that vibrates with intertextual implications. (Widdowson. 1992, 4)
This is by Ogden Nash:
Beneath this slab
John Brown is stowed.
He watched the ads,
And not the road.
Lather As You Go, Collected Verse (1952)
Nash is satirising the form. The epitaph is humorous but it is perhaps more
funny because of the solemn location with which this language is normally
associated.
Below is a standard rhyme that might be found inside a conventional Valentines
card:
Roses are red,
Violets are blue.
[Tum-tee tum-tee tum],
I love you.
We might ask why roses for the characteristic example of redness instead of
perhaps a British pillar box, which is considerably redder than the petals of any
rose? Or, indeed, why violets as the archetypical illustration of blueness and
not, say, the distinctive cobalt hue of the shirt worn by the tragic 1978 Scottish
World Cup squad in Argentina? Maybe because roses and violets are traditional
tokens of romance, and their association with particular colours (as not all roses
are red, nor all violets blue) reinforces the imagery: the red of a lovers lips, the
blue of their eyes, or the sea, or the sky, etc. all very romantic stuff. The
conventional symbolism of the verse is certainly appropriate for the setting of a
Valentines card, but is this poetry?

Vocabulary
Here is Alfred Lord Tennysons The Eagle (a fragment):
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
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Close to the sun in lonely lands,

Ringed with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
Poems, (1851)
As with the eagle, Tennyson leaves the reader balancing precariously on the end
of the first verse with the single word stands. Again, however, why like a
thunderbolt for an appropriate simile for the description of the eagles descent
and not, for example, a brick, or a stone, or a sack of potatoes? Perhaps the
answer lies in the words syllabic (or syllable) structure: thun-der-bolt.
Given the compact yet detailed nature of the poetic form, the poet will try to
choose the precise word for the exact context. For example, the use of
alliteration in the first line, clasps crag crooked, is preferable to the
alternatives grabs rock twisted.
Verbs in particular perhaps cause the greatest headache for the poet in their
choice of words. In the short piece above there are five: clasps stands
crawls watches falls. The simplicity of the poem is matched by the lack of
ambiguity in the definition of these verbs. However, definitions can also dictate
the position of particular words, and definitions can be easily misinterpreted. For
example, the adjective bold does not mean brave. The word arrogant is not
the same as conceited. Timid means easily frightened; apprehensive, while
shy is defined in The Concise Oxford Dictionary as diffident or uneasy in
company. Lastly, there is considerable difference between the words ignorant
and innocent, and, similarly, between reckless and foolish.
In Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics in Style in Language, Roman
Jakobson explores the concept the emotive or expressive function of the
language, a direct expression of the speakers attitude toward what they are
speaking about, which tends to produce an impression of a certain emotion.
(Jakobson. 1960, 354) The distinction here can be made between the spoken
word and writing, spoken language having a possibly greater emotive function
by emphasising aspects of the language in its pronunciation. For example, in
English stressed or unstressed words can produce a variety of meanings.
Consider the sentence I never promised you a rose garden (the title of the
autobiographical novel by Joanne Greenberg, which was written under the pen
name of Hannah Green. 1964). This has a multitude of connotations depending
on how the line is spoken. For example:
I never promised you a rose garden
I never promised you a rose garden
I never promised you a rose garden
I never promised you a rose garden
I never promised you a rose garden
I never promised you a rose garden
Or even:
I never promised you a rose garden
And there are many more besides these.

Implicature
In Poetic Effects from Literary Pragmatics, the linguist Adrian Pilkington
analyses the idea of implicature, as instigated in the previous work of Dan
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Sperber and Deirdre Wilson. Implicature may be divided into two categories:
strong and weak implicature, yet between the two extremes there are a
variety of other alternatives. The strongest implicature is what is explicitly
implied by the speaker or writer, while weaker implicatures are the wider
possibilities of meaning that the hearer or reader may conclude.
Pilkingtons poetic effects, as he terms the concept, are those that achieve
most relevance through a wide array of weak implicatures and not those
meanings that are simply read in by the hearer or reader. Yet the
distinguishing instant at which weak implicatures and the hearer or readers
conjecture of meaning diverge remains highly subjective. As Pilkington says:
there is no clear cut-off point between assumptions which the speaker certainly
endorses and assumptions derived purely on the hearers responsibility.
(Pilkington. 1991, 53) In addition, the stylistic qualities of poetry can be seen as
an accompaniment to Pilkingtons poetic effects in understanding a poem's
meaning. For example, the first verse of Andrew Marvells poem The Mowers
Song (1611) runs:
My mind was once the true survey
Of all these meadows fresh and gay,
And in the greenness of the grass
Did see its thoughts as in a glass
When Juliana came, and she,
What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me.
Miscellaneous Poems (1681)
The strong implicature that is immediately apparent is that Marvell is creating a
pastiche (distinct from parody) of the pastoral form: the narrator being the
destructive figure of Demon the Mower and not the protective character of the
traditional pastoral shepherd. The poem is also highly symbolic. In literary
criticism grass is symbolic of flesh, while the mowers scythe with which he
works represents human mortality (other examples being Old Father Time and
the Grim Reaper). Even the text on the page can be seen as a visual
representation of the Mowers agricultural equipment: the main body of each
verse is suggestive of the wooden shaft of the scythe and the last flowing line of
each verse the blade. (This visual similarity of text on the page and the poems
subject is known as concrete poetry.) However, it is the concluding phrase,
repeated in every stanza, that is most stylistically effective. This long sweeping
line that extends beyond the margins of each verse does not simply recall the
action of the scythe through the grass, but occurs at the exact moment of every
pass and further illuminates the mowers physical and emotional disquiet. These
conceits do not appear by accident and are precisely intended by the poet to
enhance to the poetic effects of the verse.
Here is another example from William Shakespeares 71, Sonnets (1609):
No longer mourn for me when I am dead,
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell:
On the face of things the poet appears to be saying: When I have died, do not
grieve for me. A full stop at the end of the first line, and nothing further, would
certainly be enough to convey and satisfactory conclude the principal
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sentiment. Yet there is not a full stop. Indeed, there is no full stop until the end
of line eight!
Looking at these first four lines, the first is a full sentence but ends with a
comma. The first and second lines taken together are not a complete sentence
and encourage the reader to continue onto the third line, which, taken with the
first and second lines, is still not a complete sentence. The fourth line concludes
the sentence but ends with a semicolon, again persuading the reader on to the
fifth line, which begins with an abrupt exclamation, reinforcing the opening
statement, and continuing to hold the readers attention:
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so,
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
Here, it appears that Shakespeare is simply paraphrasing the first three lines
with the additional fourth line showing concern for the readers emotions should
they spend too much time reminiscing over the dead poet. The contradiction is
puzzling. Why should the poet repeat what is apparently being explicitly asked
of the reader not to do? And, again, the final four lines emphasise the point,
once more beginning with the seemingly by now obligatory exclamation:
Oh, if (I say) you look upon this verse,
When I perhaps compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse;
Lest the wise world should look into your moan
And mock you with me after I am gone.
Furthermore, the poet asks the reader to not even repeat the name of the
hand that writ it, while the ending is tinged with more than a degree of false
modesty within the realm of the unsentimental wise world. What on the
surface appears to be one contention turns out to be quite the opposite.
Shakespeare, far from telling to reader to forget him following his demise, is
actually saying: Remember me! Remember me! Remember me! And he does
this through deceptively unconventional language that progresses and grows
continuously into the traditional sonnet form.

Grammar
Although language may appear fitting to its context, the stylistic qualities of
poetry also reveal themselves in many grammatical disguises. Widdowson
points out that in Samuel Taylor Coleridges poem The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner (1798), the mystery of the Mariners abrupt appearance is sustained by
an idiosyncratic use of t e n s e. (Widdowson. 1992, 40) For instance, in the
opening lines Coleridge does not say: There was ancient Mariner or There
arrived an ancient Mariner, but instead not only does he immediately place the
reader at the wedding feast, Coleridge similarly throws the Mariner abruptly into
the middle of the situation:
It is an ancient Mariner
And he stoppeth one of three.
- By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stoppst thou me?
The bridegrooms doors are opened wide,
And I am the next of kin;
The guests are met, the feast is set:
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Mayst h e a r the merry din.

Coleridges play with tense continues in stanzas four to six, as he swaps wildly
from past to present and back again.
He holds him with his skinny hand,
There was a ship, quoth he.
Hold off! Unhand me, grey-beard loon!
Eftsoons his hands dropt he.
He holds him with his glittering eye The Wedding-guests stood still,
And listens like a three years child:
The Mariner hath his will.
The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone
He cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed Mariner.
Lyrical Ballads (1798)
The Mariner holds the wedding-guest with his skinny hand in the present
tense, but releases it in the past tense; only to hold him again, this time with his
glittering eye, in the present. (Widdowson. 1992, 41) And so on, back and forth
like a temporal tennis ball but all adding to the enigma. The suggestion could be
made that Coleridge was simply careless with the composition and selected
these verb forms at random. However, the fact is that they are there in the text
of the poem, and, as Coleridge himself would recognise, everything in a poetic
text carries an implication of relevance. (Widdowson. 1992, 41)

Phraseology
Another aspect of stylistics, as in the poem I Saw a Peacock, is when the
meaning only becomes clear when the context is revealed.
I saw a peacock with a fiery tail
I saw a blazing comet drop down hail
I saw a cloud with ivy circled round
I saw a sturdy oak creep on the ground
I saw a *pismire swallow up a whale *[ant]
I saw a raging sea brim full of ale
I saw a Venice glass sixteen foot deep
I saw a well full of mens tears that weep
I saw their eyes all in a flame of fire
I saw a house as big as the moon and higher
I saw the sun even in the midst of night
I saw the man who saw this wondrous sight
A Person of Quality, Westminster Drollery (1671)
If we read the poem like this, it almost makes sense - but not quite. The reason
is, perhaps, because we as readers are conditioned to reading poetry in a
specific way, conventionally line by line. By altering the phrases in each line,
the descriptions are made coherent.
I saw a peacock
with a fiery tail I saw a blazing comet
drop down hail I saw a cloud
with ivy circled round I saw a sturdy oak
creep on the ground I saw a pismire
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swallow up a whale I saw a raging sea

brim full of ale I saw a Venice glass
sixteen foot deep I saw a well
full of mens tears that weep I saw their eyes
all in a flame of fire I saw a house
as big as the moon and higher I saw the sun
even in the midst of night
I saw the man who saw this wondrous sight
The anonymous narrator, sitting drinking by a fire and gazing at his mirror
image in the Venice glass, is commenting on the reflected images that he sees
in language that is similarly inverted.
There are, however, two important points worth mentioning with regard to the
stylisticians approach to interpreting poetry, and they are both noted by PM
Wetherill in Literary Text: An Examination of Critical Methods. The first is that
there may be an over-preoccupation with one particular feature that may well
minimise the significance of others that are equally important. (Wetherill. 1974,
133) The second is that any attempt to see a text as simply a collection of
stylistic elements will tend to ignore other ways whereby meaning is produced.
(Wetherill. 1974, 133) Nevertheless, meaning in poetry is conveyed through a
multitude of language alternatives that manifest themselves as printed words
on the page, style being one such feature. Subsequently, the stylistic elements
of poetry can be seen as important in the interpretation of unconventional
language that is beyond what is expected and customary. Poetry can be both
sublime and even ridiculous yet still transcend established social values. Poetry
is an original and unique method of communication that we use to express our
thoughts, feelings and experiences.

Orwell and Swift on writing methods

In Politics and the English Language (1946), George Orwell writes against the
use of conventional language as, in doing so, there is the danger that the
traditional style of language that is seemingly appropriate to a specific context
will eventually overpower its precise meaning. In other words, the stylistic
qualities of language will degenerate the meaning through the overuse of
jargon and familiar, hackneyed and/or clichd words and phrases. Orwell
condemns the use of metaphors such as toe the line; ride roughshod over; no
axe to grind. He suggests that these phrases are often used without thought of
their literal meaning. Orwell hits out at pretentious diction and the use of Latin
phrases like deus ex machina and even status quo. He also argues against
unnecessary clauses, such as have the effect of; play a leading part in; give
grounds for. These are all familiar phrases, but are they really useful in any
context? Orwell says that one reason we use this kind of language is because it
is easy. He writes:
It is easier - even quicker, once you have the habit - to say In my opinion
it is a not unjustifiable assumption that ... than to say I think. (Orwell.
1964, 150)
Furthermore, Orwell says:
It [modern language] consists in gumming together long strips of words
which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the
result presentable by sheer humbug. (Orwell. 1964, 150)
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In Orwells novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), the English language is distilled

and sanitised and then imposed upon a population who, out of terror, actively
conform to the process. The language is dehumanising as it does not allow for
any form of communication other than that permitted by the state. Similarly, in
the appendix to the novel, The Principles of Newspeak, more subversive
linguistic gymnastics are in evidence:
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression
for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but
to make all other modes of thought impossible. (Orwell. 1949, 305)
On the language of George Orwell, Fowler says that the rapidity and fluency are
made possible by the fact that the speaker is simply uttering strings of orthodox
jargon and is in no sense choosing the words in relation to intended meanings
or to some state of affairs in the world. (Fowler. 1995, 212)
Today we have word processor programs that will effortlessly write a letter for
any occasion. Stock phrases and paragraphs can be cut and pasted at random
to appear coherent. An extreme example of this practice is found in Jonathan
Swifts satiric novel Gullivers Travels (1726). When Lemuel Gulliver arrives at
the Grand Academy of Lagado he enters the school of writing, where a professor
has devised an enormous frame that contains every word in the language. The
machine is put into motion and the words are jumbled up, and when three or
four words are arranged into a recognisable phrase they are written down. The
phrases are then collated into sentences, the sentences into paragraphs, the
paragraphs into pages and the pages into books, which, the professor hopes,
will eventually give the world a complete body of all arts and sciences. (Swift.
1994, 105)
This method of writing is not only absurd but produces nothing original. It also
relies on both the writer and the reader interpreting what is created in exactly
the same way. And it is highly political as the writer and the reader are
indoctrinated into using a particular form of language and conditioned towards
its function and understanding. As Orwell says: A speaker who uses this kind of
phraseology has gone some distance towards turning himself into a machine.
(Orwell. 1964, 152)

The point of poetry

Widdowson notices that when the content of poetry is summarised it often
refers to very general and unimpressive observations, such as nature is
beautiful; love is great; life is lonely; time passes, and so on. (Widdowson.
1992, 9) But to say:
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end ...
William Shakespeare, 60.
Or, indeed:
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days months, which are the rags of time ...
John Donne, The Sun Rising, Poems (1633)
This language gives us a new perspective on familiar themes and allows us to
look at them without the personal or social conditioning that we unconsciously
associate with them. (Widdowson. 1992, 9) So, although we may still use the
same exhausted words and vague terms like love, heart and soul to refer to
human experience, to place these words in a new and refreshing context allows
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the poet the ability to represent humanity and communicate honestly. This, in
part, is stylistics, and this, according to Widdowson, is the point of poetry
(Widdowson. 1992, 76).

Linguistic prescription
In linguistics, prescription can refer both to the codification and the
enforcement of rules governing how a language is to be used. These rules can
cover such topics as standards for spelling and grammar or syntax; or rules for
what is deemed socially or politically correct. It includes the mechanisms for
establishing and maintaining an interregional language or a standardized
spelling system. It can also include declarations of what particular groups
consider to be good taste. If these tastes are conservative, prescription may be
(or appear to be) resistant to language change. If they are radical, prescription
may be productive of neologism. Prescription can also include recommendations
for effective language usage.
Prescription is typically contrasted with description, which observes and
records how language is used in practice, and which is the basis of all linguistic
research. Serious scholarly descriptive work is usually based on text or corpus
analysis, or on field studies, but the term "description" includes each
individual's observations of their own language usage. Unlike prescription,
descriptive linguistics eschews value judgments and makes no
recommendations.
Prescription and description are often seen as opposites, in the sense that one
declares how language should be while the other declares how language is. But
they can also be complementary, and usually exist in dynamic tension. Most
commentators on language show elements of both prescription and description
in their thinking, and popular debate on language issues frequently revolves
around the question of how to balance these.

Aims
The main aims of linguistic prescription are to define standardized language
forms either generally (what is Standard English?) or for specific purposes (what
style and register is appropriate in, for example, a legal brief?) and to formulate
these in such a way as to make them easily taught or learned.[citation needed]
Prescription can apply to most aspects of language: to spelling, grammar,
semantics, pronunciation and register. Most people would subscribe to the
consensus that in all of these areas it is meaningful to describe some kinds of
aberrations as incorrect, or at least as inappropriate in particular contexts.
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Prescription aims to draw workable guidelines for language users seeking

advice in such matters.
Standardized languages are useful for interregional communication; speakers of
divergent dialects may understand a standard language used in broadcasting
more readily than they would understand each other's. One can argue that such
a lingua franca, if needed, will evolve by itself, but the desire to formulate and
define it is very widespread in most parts of the world. Writers or
communicators who wish to use words clearly, powerfully or effectively often
use prescriptive rules, believing that these may make their communications
more widely understood and unambiguous. The vast popularity of books
providing advice on such matters shows that prescription meets a real, or at
least widely perceived need.[citation needed]

Authorities
Prescription usually presupposes an authority whose judgment may be followed
by other members of a speech community. Such an authority may be a
prominent writer or educator such as Henry Fowler, whose English Usage
defined the standard for British English for much of the 20th century. The Duden
grammar has a similar status for German. Though dictionary makers usually see
their work as purely descriptive, they are widely used as prescriptive authorities
by the community at large. Popular books such as Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots &
Leaves, which argues for stricter adherence to prescriptive punctuation rules,
have phases of fashionability and are authoritative to the degree that they
attract a significant following.
However, in some language communities, linguistic prescription can be
regulated formally. The Acadmie franaise (French Academy) in Paris is an
example of a widely respected national body whose recommendations, though
not legally enforceable. In Germany and the Netherlands, recent spelling
reforms were devised by teams of linguists commissioned by government and
were then implemented by statute. See for example German spelling reform of
1996. The Russian language was heavily prescribed during the Soviet period,
deviations from the norm being purged by the Union of Soviet Writers.
Other kinds of authorities come into play in specific settings, such as publishers
laying down a house style which, for example, may either prescribe or proscribe
a serial comma.

Origins

Historically, a number of factors are found that give rise to prescriptive

tendencies in language. Whenever a society reaches a level of complexity to
the point where it acquires a permanent system of social stratification and
hierarchy, the speech used by political and religious authorities is preserved and
admired. This speech often takes on archaic and honorific colours. The style of
language used in ritual also differs from everyday speech in many cultures.
When writing is introduced into a culture, new avenues for standards are
opened. Written language lacks voice tone and inflection, and other vocal
features that serve to disambiguate speech, and tends to compensate for these
by stricter adherence to norms. And since writers can take more time to think
about their words, new avenues of standardization open up. Thus literary
language, the specific register of written language, lends itself to prescription to
a higher degree than spoken language.
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The introduction of writing also introduces new economies into language. A

body of written texts represents a sunk cost; changes in written language
threaten to make the body of preserved texts obsolete, so writing creates an
incentive to preserve older forms. In many places, writing was introduced by
religious authorities, and serves as a vehicle for the values held to be
prestigious by those authorities. Alphabets tend to follow religions; wherever
western Christianity has spread, so has the Latin alphabet, while Eastern
Orthodoxy is associated with the Greek or Cyrillic alphabets and Judaism with
the Hebrew alphabet, and Islam and Hinduism go hand in hand with the Arabic
and Devanagari scripts respectively.[1] Similarly, the prestige of Chinese culture
has preserved the usage of Chinese characters and caused their adaptation to
the very different languages of Korea and Japan; the prestige of Chinese writing
is such that, even when the Hangul alphabet was devised for Korean, the
shapes of the letters were designed to fit the square frames of Chinese
calligraphy.[2]

Egyptian hieroglyphics from the Ptolemaic Temple of Kom Ombo preserve written norms that
date from the Middle Kingdom of Egypt, a thousand years earlier.

Bureaucracy is another factor that encourages prescriptive tendencies in

language. When government centres arise, people acquire different forms of
language which they use in dealing with the government, which may be seated
far from the locality of the governed. Standard writs and other legal forms
create a body of precedent in language that tends to be reused over
generations and centuries. In more recent times, the effects of bureaucracy
have been accelerated by the popularization of travel and telecommunications;
people grow accustomed to hearing speech from distant areas. Eventually,
these several factors encourage standards to arise; this phenomenon has been
observed since ancient Egyptian, where the spelling of the Middle Kingdom was
preserved well into the Ptolemaic period in the standard usage of Egyptian
hieroglyphics.[3]
All language in developed societies therefore tends to exist on a continuum of
styles. Privileged language is used in legal, ceremonial, and religious contexts,
and tends to be prized over local and private speech. Written styles necessarily
differ from spoken language, given the different stratagems used to
communicate in writing as opposed to speech. Where the discontinuity between
a high and a low style of language becomes marked, a state of diglossia arises:
here, the privileged language requires special study to master, and is not
instantly intelligible to the untrained. The very difficulty of the systems inspires
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a preservationist urge, since instruction in them represents a large effort. The

writer who has mastered Chinese calligraphy or English spelling has put a great
deal of time into acquiring a skill, and is likely to resist its devaluation through
simplification.[4]

Sources

The primary source of prescriptive judgments is descriptive study. [citation needed]

From the earliest attempts at prescription in classical times, grammarians have
observed what is in fact usual in a prestige variety of a language and based
their norms upon this. Modern prescription, for example in school textbooks,
draws heavily on the results of descriptive linguistic analysis. Because
prescription is generally based on description, it is very rare for a form to be
prescribed which does not already exist in the language.
However, prescription also involves conscious choices, privileging some existing
forms over others. Such choices are often strategic, aimed at maximising clarity
and precision in language use. Sometimes they may be based on entirely
subjective judgments about what constitutes good taste. Sometimes there is a
conscious decision to promote the language of one class or region within a
language community, and this can become politically controversialsee below.
Sometimes prescription is motivated by an ethical position, as with the
prohibition of swear words. The desire to avoid language which refers too
specifically to matters of sexuality or toilet hygiene may result in a sense that
the words themselves are obscene. Similar is the condemnation of expletives
which offend against religion, or more recently of language which is not
considered politically correct.
It is sometimes claimed that in centuries past, English prescription was based
on the norms of Latin grammar, but this is doubtful. Robert Lowth is frequently
cited as one who did this, but in fact he specifically condemned "forcing the
English under the rules of a foreign Language".[5] It is true that analogies with
Latin were sometimes used as substantiating arguments, but only when the
forms being thus defended were in any case the norm in the prestige form of
English. A good example is the split infinitive: supporters of the construction
frequently claim the old prohibition was based on a false analogy with Latin, but
this seems to be a straw man argument; it is difficult to find a serious writer
who ever argued against the split infinitive on the basis of such an analogy, and
the earliest authority to advise against the construction, an anonymous
American grammarian in 1834, gave a very clear statement basing his view on
descriptive observation.[6]

Education

Literacy and first language teaching in schools is traditionally prescriptive. Both

educators and parents often agree that mastery of a prestige variety of the
language is one of the goals of education. Since the 1970s there has been a
widespread trend to balance this with other priorities, such as encouraging
children to find their own forms of expression and be creative also with nonstandard speech-patterns. Nevertheless, the acquisition of spoken and written
skills in normative language varieties remains a key aim of schools around the
world.

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Foreign language teaching is necessarily prescriptive. Here the students have

no prior idiom of their own in the target language and are entirely focused on
the acquisition of norms laid down by others.

Problems
While most people would agree that some kinds of prescriptive teaching or
advice are desirable, prescription easily becomes controversial. Many linguists
are highly skeptical of the quality of advice given in many usage guides,
particularly when the authors are not qualified in languages or linguistics. Some
popular books on English usage written by journalists or novelists bring
prescription generally into disrepute by making basic errors in grammatical
analysis. Even when practiced by competent experts (as in text-books written
by language teachers), giving wise advice is not always easy, and things can go
badly wrong. A number of issues pose potential pitfalls.
One of the most serious of these is that prescription has a tendency to favour
the language of one particular region or social class over others, and thus
militates against linguistic diversity. Frequently a standard dialect is associated
with the upper class, as for example Great Britain's Received Pronunciation. RP
has now lost much of its status as the Anglophone standard, being replaced by
the dual standards of General American and British NRP (non-regional
pronunciation). While these have a more democratic base, they are still
standards which exclude large parts of the English-speaking world: speakers of
Scottish English, Hiberno-English, Australian English, or AAVE may feel the
standard is slanted against them. Thus prescription has clear political
consequences. In the past, prescription was used consciously as a political tool;
today, prescription usually attempts to avoid this pitfall, but this can be difficult
to do.
A second problem with prescription is that prescriptive rules quickly become
entrenched and it is difficult to change them when the language changes. Thus
there is a tendency for prescription to be overly conservative. When in the early
19th century, prescriptive use advised against the split infinitive, the main
reason was that this construction was not in fact a frequent feature of the
varieties of English favoured by those prescribing. Today it has become common
in most varieties of English, and a prohibition is no longer sensible. However,
the rule endured long after the justification for it had disappeared. In this way,
prescription can appear to be antithetical to natural language evolution,
although this is usually not the intention of those formulating the rules. This
problem is compounded by the fact that books which gain a following can
remain in print long after they have become dated. This is the case, for
example, with Strunk & White, which remains popular in the United States
although much of its text was formulated in the 19th century.
A further problem is the difficulty of defining legitimate criteria. Although
prescribing authorities almost invariably have clear ideas about why they make
a particular choice, and the choices are therefore seldom entirely arbitrary, they
often appear arbitrary to others who do not understand or are not in sympathy
with the criteria. Judgments which seek to resolve ambiguity or increase the
ability of the language to make subtle distinctions are easier to defend.
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Judgments based on the subjective associations of a word are more

problematic.
Finally, there is the problem of inappropriate dogmatism. While competent
authorities tend to make careful statements, popular pronouncements on
language are apt to condemn. Thus wise prescriptive advice may identify a form
as non-standard and suggest it be used with caution in some contexts; repeated
in the school room this may become a ruling that the non-standard form is
automatically wrong, a view which linguists reject. (Linguists may accept that a
form is incorrect if it fails to communicate, but not simply because it diverges
from a norm.) A classic example from 18th-century England is Robert Lowth's
tentative suggestion that preposition stranding in relative clauses sounds
colloquial; from this grew a grammatical dogma that a sentence should never
end with a preposition.

Prescription and description

Descriptive approaches

Main article: Descriptive linguistics

Linguistics has always required a process called description, which involves
observing language and creating conceptual categories for it without
establishing rules of language.[citation needed] However in the 16th and 17th
centuries, in which modern linguistics began, projects in lexicography provided
the basis for 18th and 19th century comparative workmainly on classical
languages. By the early 20th century, this focus shifted to modern languages as
the descriptive approach of analyzing speech and writings became more formal.
Despite this following appearance, the more fundamental descriptive method
was used prior to the advent of prescription, and is the key to linguistic
research. The reason for this priorhood is that linguistics, as any other branch of
science, requires observation and analysis of a natural phenomenon, such as
the order of words in communication, which may be done without prescriptive
rules. In descriptive linguistics, nonstandard varieties of language are held to be
no more or less correct than standard varieties of languages. Whether
observational methods are seen to be more objective than prescriptive
methods, the outcomes of using prescriptive methods are also subject to
description.

Prescription and description in conflict

Given any particular language controversy, prescription and description
represent quite different, though not necessarily incompatible, approaches to
thinking about it.
For example, a descriptive linguist working in English would describe the word
ain't in terms of usage, distribution, and history, observing both the growth in
its popularity but also the resistance to it in some parts of the language
community. Prescription, on the other hand, would consider whether it met
criteria of rationality, historical grammatical usage, or conformity to a
contemporary standard dialect. When a form does not conformas is the case
for ain'tthe prescriptivist will recommend avoiding it in formal contexts. These
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two approaches are not incompatible, as they attempt different tasks for
different purposes.
However, description and prescription can appear to be in conflict when
stronger statements are made on either side. When an extreme prescriptivist
wishes to condemn a very commonly used language phenomenon as solecism
or barbarism or simply as vulgar, the evidence of description may testify to the
acceptability of the form. This would be the case if someone wished to argue
that ain't should not even be used in colloquial spoken English. Prescriptive
statements will sometimes be heard which suggest that a word is inherently
ugly; a descriptive approach will deny the meaningfulness of this judgment. In
such instances of controversy, most linguists fall heavily on the descriptive side
of the argument, accepting forms as correct or acceptable when they achieve
general currency.
On the other hand, some adherents of a strongly descriptive approach may
argue that prescription is always undesirable. Sometimes they see it as
reactionary or stifling. A "pure descriptivist" would believe that no language
form can ever be incorrect and that advice on language usage is always
misplaced. However, this is a very rare position. Most of those who claim to
oppose prescription per se are in fact only inimical to those forms of prescription
not supported by current descriptive analysis.

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History of linguistics
Linguistics as a study endeavors to describe and explain the human faculty of
language and has been of scholarly interest throughout recorded history.
Contemporary linguistics is the result of a continuous European intellectual
tradition originating in ancient Greece that was later influenced by the ancient
Indian tradition of linguistics due to the study of Sanskrit grammar by European
linguists from the 18th century. China and the Middle East have also
independently produced native schools of linguistic thought.
At various stages in history, linguistics as a discipline has been in close contact
with such disciplines as philosophy, anthropology and philology. In some
cultures linguistic analysis has been applied in the service of religion,
particularly for the determination of the religiously preferred spoken and written
forms of sacred texts in Hebrew, Sanskrit and Arabic. Contemporary Western
linguistics is close to philosophy and cognitive science.

Antiquity
Across cultures, the early history of linguistics is associated with a need to
disambiguate discourse, especially for ritual texts or in arguments. This often
led to explorations of sound-meaning mappings, and the debate over
conventional versus naturalistic origins for these symbols. Finally this leads to
the processes by which larger structures were formed from units.

India
Main articles: Vyakarana and Tolkppiyam
Linguistics in ancient India derived its impetus from the need to interpret the
Vedic texts, and also to define standards of enunciation. In the Rigveda, vk
"speech" is deified. The early Sanskrit grammarian Sakatayana (c. 8th century
BCE) proposes that verbs represent ontologically prior categories, and that all
nouns are etymologically derived from actions. The etymologist Yska (c. 6th5th BCE) posits that meaning inheres in the sentence, and that word meanings
are derived based on sentential usage. He also provides four categories of
words - nouns, verbs, pre-verbs, and particles/ invariants. He also provides a
test for nouns both concrete and abstract: words which can be indicated by the
pronoun that.
Pini (4th century BC) opposes the Yska view that sentences are primary, and
proposes a grammar for composing semantics from morphemic roots.
Transcending the ritual text to consider living language, Pini specifies a
comprehensive set of about 4,000 aphoristic rules (sutras) that
1. map the semantics of verb argument structures into thematic roles,
2. provide morphosyntactic rules called karaka (similar to case) that
generate the morphology,
3. take these morphological structures and consider phonological processes
(e.g. stem modification) by which the final phonological form is obtained.
In addition, Pini also provides a lexicon of 2000 verb roots which form the
objects on which these rules are applied, and a list of 260 idiosyncratic words
(not derivable by the rules).
The extremely succinct specification of these rules and their complex
interactions led to considerable commentary and extrapolation over the coming
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centuries. The phonological structure includes defining a notion of sound

universals similar to the modern phoneme, the systematization of consonants
based on oral cavity constriction, vowels based on height and duration.
However, it is the ambition of mapping these from morpheme to semantics that
is truly remarkable in modern terms.
Grammarians following Panini include Pingala (ca. 200 BCE, prosody), Patanjali
(2nd century BCE, Pini commentary and Yoga Sutras), Katyayana (2nd century
BCE, Pini commentary and mathematics). Several debates ranged over
centuries, for example, on whether word-meaning mappings were conventional
(Vaisheshika-Nyaya) or eternal (Katyayana-Patanjali-Mimamsa).
The Nyaya Sutras (2nd century BCE) specified three types of meaning: the
individual (this cow), the type universal (cowhood), the image (draw the cow).
That the sound of a word also forms a class (sound-universal) was observed by
Bhartrihari (c. 500 AD), who also posits that language-universals are the units of
thought, close to the nominalist or even the linguistic determinism position.
Bhartrihari also considers the sentence to be ontologically primary (word
meanings are learned given their sentential use).
Of the six canonical texts or Vedangas that formed the core syllabus in
Brahminic educational from the first century AD till the eighteenth century, four
dealt with language:
Shiksha (ik): phonetics and phonology (sandhi), (Grgeya and
commentators)
Chandas (chandas): prosody or meter, (Pingala and commentators)
Vyakarana (vykaraa): grammar, (Pini and commentators)
Nirukta (nirukta): etymology, (Yska and commentators)
Bhartrihari around 500 AD introduced a philosophy of meaning with his sphoa
doctrine.
This body of work became widely known in 19th century Europe, and is thought
to have influenced early Sanskrit scholars such as Ferdinand de Saussure and
Roman Jakobson[citation needed]. In particular, many of the foundational ideas
proposed by de Saussure, who was a lecturer in Sanskrit, are thought to have
been influenced by Pini and Bhartrihari[citation needed].
The South Indian linguist Tolkppiyar (c. 1st century BC or AD) in his
Tolkppiyam, presented a grammar of Tamil, derivatives of which are still used
today.

Mediterranean
Around the same time as the Indian developments, ancient Greek philosophers
were also debating the nature and origins of language. A subject of concern was
whether language was man-made or supernatural in origin. Plato in his Cratylus
presents the naturalistic view, that word meanings emerge out of a natural
process, independent of the language user. His arguments are partly based on
examples of compounding, where the meaning of the whole is usually related to
the constituents, although by the end he admits a small role for convention.
Aristotle supports the conventional origins of meaning.
Subsequently, the text Tkhn grammatik (c. 100 BCE, Gk. gramma meant
letter, and this title means "Art of letters"), possibly written by Dionysius Thrax,
lists eight parts of speech, and lays out the broad details of Greek morphology
including the case structures. This text was intended as a pedagogic guide (as
was Panini), and also covers punctuation and some aspects of prosody. Other
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grammars by Charisius (mainly a compilation of Thrax, as well as lost texts by

Remmius Palaemon and others) and Diomedes (focusing more on prosody) were
popular in Rome as pedagogic material for teaching Greek to native Latin
speakers.
In the 4th c., Aelius Donatus compiled the Latin grammar Ars Grammatica that
was to be the defining school text through the Middle Ages. A smaller version,
Ars Minor, covered only the eight parts of speech; eventually when books came
to be printed in the 15th c., this was one of the first books to be printed.
Schoolboys subjected to all this education gave us the current meaning of
"grammar" (attested in English since 1176).

China
Similar to the Indian tradition, Chinese philology, Xiaoxue ( "elementary
studies"), began as an aid to understanding classics in the Han dynasty (c. 3d c.
BCE). Xiaoxue came to be divided into three branches: Xungu ( "exegesis"),
Wenzi ( "script [analysis]") and Yinyun ( "[study of] sounds") and
reached its golden age in the 17th. c. AD (Qing Dynasty). The glossary Erya (c.
3d c. BCE), comparable to the Indian Nighantu, is regarded as the first linguistic
work in China. Shuowen Jiezi (c. 2nd c. BCE), the first Chinese dictionary,
classifies Chinese characters by radicals, a practice that would be followed by
most subsequent lexicographers. Two more pioneering works produced during
the Han Dynasty are Fangyan, the first Chinese work concerning dialects, and
Shiming, devoted to etymology.
As in ancient Greece, early Chinese thinkers were concerned with the
relationship between names and reality. Confucius (6th c. BCE) famously
emphasized the moral commitment implicit in a name, (zhengming) saying that
the moral collapse of the pre-Qin was a result of the failure to rectify behaviour
to meet the moral commitment inherent in names: "Good government consists
in the ruler being a ruler, the minister being a minister, the father being a
father, and the son being a son... If names be not correct, language is not in
accordance with the truth of things." (Analects 12.11,13.3).
However, what is the reality implied by a name? The later Mohists or the group
known as School of Names (ming jia, 479-221 BCE), consider that ming (
"name") may refer to three kinds of shi ( "actuality"): type universals (horse),
individual (John), and unrestricted (thing). They adopt a realist position on the
name-reality connection - universals arise because "the world itself fixes the
patterns of similarity and difference by which things should be divided into
kinds".[1] The philosophical tradition is well known for conundra resembling the
sophists, e.g. when Gongsun Longzi (4th c. BCE) questions if in copula
statements (X is Y), are X and Y identical or is X a subclass of Y. This is the
famous paradox "a white horse is not a horse".
Xun Zi (3d c. BCE) revisits zhengming, but instead of rectifying behaviour to suit
the names, his emphasis is on rectifying language to correctly reflect reality.
This is consistent with a more "conventional" view of word origins (yueding
sucheng ).
The study of phonology in China began late, and was influenced by the Indian
tradition, after Buddhism had become popular in China. The rime dictionary is a
type of dictionary arranged by tone and rime, in which the pronunciations of
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characters are indicated by fanqie spellings. Rime tables were later produced to
aid the understanding of fanqie.
Philological studies flourished during the Qing Dynasty, with Duan Yucai and
Wang Niansun as the towering figures. The last great philologist of the era was
Zhang Binglin, who also helped lay the foundation of modern Chinese
linguistics. The Western comparative method was brought into China by Bernard
Karlgren, the first scholar to reconstruct Middle Chinese and Old Chinese with
Latin alphabet (not IPA). Important modern Chinese linguists include Y. R. Chao,
Luo Changpei, Li Fanggui and Wang Li.
The ancient commentators to the classics paid much attention to syntax and
the use of particles. But the first Chinese grammar, in the modern sense of the
word, was produced by Ma Jianzhong (late 19th century). His grammar was
based on the Latin (prescriptive) model.

Middle Ages
Middle East
Europe
The Modistae or "speculative grammarians" in the 13th century introduced the
notion of universal grammar.
In De vulgari eloquentia ("On the Eloquence of Vernacular"), Dante expanded
the scope of linguistic enquiry from Latin/ Greek to include the languages of the
day. Other linguistic works of the same period concerning the vernaculars
include the First Grammatical Treatise (Icelandic) or the Auraicept na n-ces
(Irish).
The Renaissance and Baroque period saw an intensified interest in linguistics,
notably for the purpose of Bible translations by the Jesuits, and also related to
philosophical speculation on philosophical languages and the origin of language.

Modern linguistics

Modern linguistics does not begin until the late 18th century, and the romantic
or animist theses of Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann Christoph Adelung
remained influential well into the 19th century.

Historical linguistics
Further information: Historical linguistics and Indo-European studies
In the eighteenth century James Burnett, Lord Monboddo analyzed numerous
primitive languages and deduced logical elements of the evolution of human
language. His thinking was interleaved with his precursive concepts of biological
evolution. Some of his early concepts have been validated and are considered
correct today. In his The Sanscrit Language (1786), Sir William Jones proposed
that Sanskrit and Persian had resemblances to classical Greek, Latin, Gothic,
and Celtic languages. From this idea sprung the field of comparative linguistics
and historical linguistics. Through the 19th century, European linguistics
centered on the comparative history of the Indo-European languages, with a
concern for finding their common roots and tracing their development.
In the 1820s, Wilhelm von Humboldt observed that human language was a rulegoverned system, anticipating a theme that was to become central in the
formal work on syntax and semantics of language in the 20th century, of this
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observation he said that it allowed language to make "infinite use of finite

means" (ber den Dualis 1827).
It was only in the late 19th century that the Neogrammarian approach of Karl
Brugmann and others introduced a rigid notion of sound law.

Descriptive linguistics
Main articles: Descriptive linguistics and structuralism
In Europe there was a parallel development of structural linguistics, influenced
most strongly by Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss professor of Indo-European
and general linguistics whose lectures on general linguistics, published
posthumously by his students, set the direction of European linguistic analysis
from the 1920s on; his approach has been widely adopted in other fields under
the broad term "Structuralism."
During the second World War, Leonard Bloomfield and several of his students
and colleagues developed teaching materials for a variety of languages whose
knowledge was needed for the war effort.
This work led to an increasing prominence of the field of linguistics, which
became a recognized discipline in most American universities only after the war.

Generative linguistics

Main article: Generative linguistics

Other subfields
Further information: linguistic turn and Linguistics Wars
From roughly 1980 onwards, pragmatic, functional, and cognitive approaches
have steadily gained ground, both in the United States and in Europe.

See also

History of grammar
History of communication

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Unsolved problems in linguistics

This article discusses currently unsolved problems in linguistics.
Some of the issues below are commonly recognized as problems per se, i.e., it is
general agreement that the solution is unknown. Others may be described as
controversies, i.e., while there is no common agreement about the answer,
there are established schools of thought that believe they have a correct
answer.

Languages

Origin of language is the major unsolved problem, despite centuries of

interest in the topic.
Unclassified languages (languages whose genetic affiliation has not been
established, mostly due to lack of reliable data)
o Special case: Language isolates
Gradient well-formedness[1], referring to intermediate linguistic
phenomena falling between complete well-formedness and complete illformedness.
Undeciphered writing systems

Psycholinguistics

Main article: Psycholinguistics#Issues and areas of research

Language emergence:
o Emergence of grammar[2]
Language acquisition:
o Controversy: infant language acquisition / first language acquisition.
How are infants able to learn language? One line of debate is
between two points of view: that of psychological nativism, i.e., the
language ability is somehow "hardwired" in the human brain, and
that of the "tabula rasa" or Blank slate, i.e., language is acquired
due to brain's interaction with environment. Another formulation of
this controversy is "Nature versus nurture".
o Is the human ability to use syntax based on innate mental
structures or is syntactic speech the function of intelligence and
interaction with other humans? The question is tightly related with
the two major problems: language emergence and language
acquisition.
o The language acquisition device: How localized is language in the
brain? Is there a particular area in the brain responsible for the
development of language abilities, or is language not localized in
the brain, or is it only partially localized?
o What fundamental reasons explain why ultimate attainment in
second language acquisition is typically some way short of the
native speaker's ability, with learners varying widely in
performance?
o Animals and language: How much language (e.g. syntax) can
animals be taught to use?
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overall issue: Can we design ethical psycholinguistic experiments to

answer the questions above?

Translation

Is there an objective gauge for the quality of translation?[3]

o Machine translation, despite successes, is a source of a large
number of unsolved problems
Pronoun resolution, Anaphora (linguistics) [4]
Nominal compound analysis [5]

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