What is Linguistics?

Linguistics is the study of human language, rather than an attempt to learn languages or change how people express themselves through language. It is a science that, in its current form, has existed only for the post 200 years. A great many things about language that seem apparent in fact are quite otherwise upon examination, and this is what makes linguistics a fascinating field.

I. People outside of the field of linguistics are often unclear on just what linguistics is.

A. People often suppose that a language is essentially just its words, but you could know all of a language's words and still be unable to communicate above the level of a one-year-old; linguists are interested in the mechanisms via which we put the words together.

B. It is also commonly supposed that grammar is a mere matter of classifying words according to which of eight "official" parts of speech they represent. This, however, is a highly approximate representation of what grammar consists of.

1. For example, take the sentence: She kept on popping in and out of the office all afternoon.

2. What is the verb in that sentence: kept or popping? You may have learned about auxiliary verbs, like have and be - is kept one? What tense is this sentence in? In kept on, what part of speech is on?

II. Linguistics is a scientific analysis of language, as opposed to understandable but impressionistic analyses of language.

A. There is a science of how sounds work in languages.

1.

Singin'

is not a shorter word than singing.

No "letter" has been left off of 'singin ',

because the final -ng of singing represents not two sounds, n and g, but a single sound with no letter of its own in the English alphabet.

2.

Writing is as approximate a representation of speech as the drawing style of The Simpsons is an approximation of how human beings actually look.

B. There is a science of what concepts are the core of language as opposed to incidental trills.

1. English is a much stranger language, as languages go, than we are aware.

A. In the vast majority of the world's languages, there is no word for the or a.
In the vast majority of the world's languages, there is no verb have; instead you say that things are "to you."

B. In all of the world, the only languages that have to use do in negative sentences and
questions ("You do not knit," "Do you knit?) are English, Welsh, Breton (spoken across the English Channel, in France), and a small number of tiny Italian dialects.

2. Linguists have found that a great many aspects of language that feel essential to humans
depending on what language they speak are actually incidentals, that certain incidental features tend to appear in a language only if other ones do, and that ordering like this may well be a result of how our brains are configured to learn language as infants.

3. Consider this analogy: There are basic principles as to how ingredients in food preparation
interact in combination and according to conditions such as temperature and aging. People of some regions have access to certain ingredients unavailable in other areas, but all people cook according to certain fundamental chemical principles. Linguists are interested in those principles, rather than assuming that the human ability to cook is something as local as the cuisine of Italy or Thailand

C. From this scientific perspective, much of what we naturally feel as "wrong" renditions of our language are simply random variations not analyzable as "mistakes. In the 1800s, many grammarians considered the following extremely declasse: all the time, born in, washtub, standpoint, have a look and the house is being built, as well as saying "stacked" instead of "stacked.

III. Linguists are not translators. A. The word linguist is occasionally used that way but not to refer to practitioners in the field of linguistics. B. Linguists are also not language police. The attitude of Henry Higgins in George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion toward vernacular English is not one that any modem linguist would share. C. We study language, rather than teach it or fix it.

IV. Here, we will experience how linguists study language.

A. We will first examine how linguists analyze the basic building blocks of language. The main areas will be the study of sounds, the construction o f words, the structure of sentences, and how sentences express meaning through all of these factors.

B. These basic tools o f analysis are used by researchers in several subfields of linguistics, which we will examine in turn. These will be how languages change over time (historical linguistics), how children learn to speak (language acquisition), how the use of language varies according to social and sociological factors (sociolinguistics), noted perspectives on the nature of human language (philosophy of language), and how writing emerged.

C. In two lectures near the end, you will encounter two languages that you have never encountered before and will experience analyzing them as a linguist would.

D. We will finish with a look at modem theories on how the language faculty evolved in humans.

E. You may have taken following previous Teaching Company course on language. The Story of Human Language.

1. That was a course about one aspect of how language has existed since it evolved namely, that one original language became several, which overgrew with "incidentals" while mixing madly with one another, with brand new languages often emerging in the process.

2. Within the framework of this course, The Story of Human Language was about certain aspects of historical linguistics, with some sociolinguistics mixed in. This course will introduce you to the larger scientific principles that the perspective of that course was based on.

V. Modern linguistics is new.

A. Linguistics in the modern sense has existed only since the early 19 century. 1. Before this there was a rich tradition of the study of language, but not in the sense of what is today considered linguistics. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle examined the relationship between speech and the thoughts that it communicated, terming humans' gift of language logos.

th

2. Today such inquiry is classified as philosophy of language.

B. The first grammatical descriptions of individual languages date back two millennia, with the Indian grammarian Panini's description of Sanskrit around the 4 century B.C.E. and Dionysius the Thracian's Techne Grammatike from the 2nd century B.C.E. However, because travel was so limited in the ancient world, Greek analysts of language thought of Greek as the quintessence of language and even thought of Latin as a strange kind of Greek (because there were so many words in common).

C. As Europeans started encountering other people while exploring the world, missionaries and others wrote descriptions of the languages of the people they encountered. D. Yet most of these people were hampered by an understandable assumption that "language" was, essentially, the way European languages worked.

1. For example, Bishop John Wilkins (1614-1672) devised a writing system designed to express human thought irrespective of the differences between languages. 2. However, he was unaware how different languages can be. For example, in Japanese, a normal way to say "I like Pam" is "Pant ga suki "Pam likeableness." 3. Wilkins's system looked pretty much like English sentences written word by word in pictures. 4. From a modem linguist's perspective, the utterance "I like Pam" contains three concepts; the / who is speaking, the issue of liking, and Pam.

5. It is a core feature of language to have a subject, but depending on the language either / or Pam can be the subject. In Japanese, Pam is. The like aspect can be expressed as a verb but also as another "part of speech," such as in Japanese, where it is a noun. 6. A language might also have a word or prefix or suffix that shows that the subject is a subjectlike Japanese's ga or it might not, as in English.

7. Even the / can be left to context, as in Japanese; languages differ on what gets left to context and what must be said, and some have even hypothesized that this affects how a language's speaker processes the world.

E. When we are finished, you will find yourself looking at and listening to language in ways that likely never occurred to you before. Certainly you will understand that there is more to a language than a collection of words and what parts of speech they classify as.