INTRODUCTION TO

LINGUISTICS
Definition of linguistics
 Linguistics can be defined as the scientific
or systematic study of language. It is a
science in the sense that it scientifically
studies the rules, systems and principles
of human languages.
Linguistics is guided by three canons of
science

1) exhaustiveness: it strives for thorough-goingness in the

examination of relevant materials
2) consistency, that is, there should be no contradiction
between different parts of the total statement
3) economy: other things being equal, a shorter statement
or analysis is to be preferred to one that is longer or
more complex.
Linguistics has two main
purposes
 One is that it studies the nature of language
and tries to establish a theory of language
and describes languages in the light of the
theory established.
 The other is that it examines all the forms of
language in general and seeks a scientific
understanding of the ways in which it is
organized to fulfill the needs it serves and
the functions it performs in human life.
 Linguistics and English
Language Teaching
Teachers’ knowledge on the workings of
language and language teaching are
essentially intertwined with each other. The
teachers’ competence on how a language
behaves will certainly help teachers explain to
the students how the language works, as well
as anticipate and respond appropriately to
possible learning difficulties.
 Linguistics and English
Language Teaching
1. Knowledge of linguistics, specifically phonology, may be
useful for explaining interference problems that may be
experienced by English language learners with the English
sound system. To illustrate, in the absence of the following
sounds such as /f/ and /v/ in Philippine languages, except in
Ivatan and Ibanag, Filipino English learners are likely to
use /p/ and /v/ as substitute sounds, e.g., /pæn/ for /fæn/ ‘ fan’
and /bæn/ for /væn/ ‘van’. Language teachers are advised to
remember that each language has its own inventory of
phonemes that may differ from that of another language.
Such differences may result in using sounds that only
approximate the target sounds, as shown in the aforecited
examples.
 Linguistics and English
Language Teaching
2. Language teachers need to realize that
grammatical units such as morphemes, words,
phrases and clauses behave quite differently across
languages. For example, plurality, and tense in
English are expressed through inflections as is {-s/
-es} and {-ed}. However, Tagalog plurality is
expressed as separate words as in mga bata
‘children’. Linguistically speaking, Tagalog verbs
have no tense, only aspects – perfective “kumain’
and imperfective ‘kumakain’, which may explain the
Filipinos’ problems in dealing with English tenses.
 Linguistics and English
Language Teaching
3. Helping students to discover the meaning of words by
parsing them into small parts depends heavily on the
teacher’s knowledge of morphology or word formation rules.
To exemplify, students may parse or segment the following
words, taking note of the morpheme {-ment} that recurs in
embarrassment, government, disillusionment, enhancement.
As students discover the meaning of {-ment} as ‘state or
condition’, they may be able to give the meaning of the cited
examples as: ‘state of being embarrassed’, ‘state of
governing’, ‘state of being disillusioned’, and ‘state of
enhancing’. Hence, the process of word formation such as
derivation may help learners interpret and remember
meaning of words that follow certain patterns in forming short
words into longer words.
 Linguistics and English
Language Teaching
4. Teachers’ knowledge about larger units of language use
– discourse structure – may be relevant when teaching
exchanges or conversations. The use of language for
social functions such as asking permission involves
familiarity with modals that express formality and a higher
degree of politeness when speaking with someone who is
older, who occupies a higher position, or is an authority
than the speaker. In this context appropriacy has to be
observed in selecting modals. For example, it is
appropriate to use may, not can when asking permission
from someone who is older, higher in position than the
speaker. e.g. May I use the office computer?
 Views about Language
1. The structuralists believe that language can
be described in terms of observable and
verifiable data as it is being used. They also
describe language in terms of its structure
and according to the regularities and patterns
or rules in language structure. To them,
language is a system of speech sounds,
arbitrarily assigned to the objects, states, and
concepts to which they refer, used for human
communication.
 Views about Language
· Language is primarily vocal. Language is speech,
primarily made up of vocal sounds produced by the
speech apparatus in the human body. The primary
medium of language is speech; the written record is
but a secondary representation of the language.
Writing is only the graphic representation of the
sounds of the language. While most languages have
writing systems, a number of languages continue to
exist, even today, in the spoken form only, without any
written form. Linguists claim that speech is primary,
writing secondary. Therefore, it is assumed that
speech has a priority in language teaching.
 Views about Language
· Language is a system of systems. Language is not a
disorganized or a chaotic combination of sounds. Sounds
are arranged in certain fixed or established, systematic
order to form meaningful units or words. For example, no
word in English starts with bz-, lr- or zl- combination, but
there are those that begin with spr- and str- (as in spring
and string). In like manner, words are also arranged in a
particular system to generate acceptable meaningful
sentences. The sentence “Shen bought a new novel” is
acceptable but the group of words “Shen bought new novel
a” is unacceptable, since the word order of the latter
violates the established convention in English grammar,
the Subject-Verb-Object or S-V-O word order.
 Views about Language
· Language is arbitrary. There is no inherent relation
between the words of a language and their meanings
or the ideas conveyed by them. Put another way, there
is no one to one correspondence between the
structure of a word and the thing it stands for. There is
no ‘sacred’ reason why an animal that flies is called
ibon in Filipino, pajaro in Spanish, bird in English.
Selection of these words in the languages mentioned
here is purely an accident of history that native
speakers of the languages have agreed on. Through
the years reference to such animal has become an
established convention that cannot be easily changed.
 Views about Language

· Language is a means of communication.

Language is an important means of
communicating between humans of their
ideas, beliefs, or feelings. Language gives
shape to people’s thoughts, as well as guides
and controls their activity.
 Views about Language

2. The transformationalists/ cognitivists

believe that language is a system of
knowledge made manifest in linguistic
forms but innate and, in its most abstract
form, universal.
· Language is innate. The presence of the
language acquisition device (LAD) in the
human brain predisposes all normal children
to acquire their first language in an amazingly
short time, around five years since birth.
 Views about Language
· Language is creative. It enables native speakers to produce
and understand sentences they have not heard nor used before.

· Language is a mental phenomenon. It is not mechanical.

· Language is universal. It is universal in the sense that all

normal children the world over acquire a mother tongue but it is
also universal in the sense that, at a highly abstract level, all
languages must share key features of human languages, such
as all languages have sounds; all languages have rules that
form sounds into words, words into phrases and clauses; and all
languages have transformation rules that enable speakers to
ask questions, negate sentences, issue orders, defocus the
doer of the action, etc.
 Views about Language
3. The functionalists believe that language is a dynamic
system through which members of speech community
exchange information. It is a vehicle for the expression of
functional meaning such as expressing one’s emotions,
persuading people, asking and giving information,
making people do things for others.

This view of language emphasizes the meaning and

functions rather than the grammatical characteristics of
language, and leads to a language teaching content
consisting of categories of meaning/notions and
functions rather than of elements of structure and
grammar.
 Views about Language

4. The interactionists believe that language is

a vehicle for establishing interpersonal
relations and for performing social
transactions between individuals. It is a
tool for creating and maintaining social
relations through conversations. Language
teaching content, according to this view,
may be specified and organized by
patterns of exchange and interaction.
 Acquisition of Language
1. Behaviorist learning theory. Derived
from a general theory of learning, the
behaviorist view states that the language
behavior of the individual is conditioned
by sequences of differential rewards in
his/her environment.
 Acquisition of Language
According to Littlewood (1984), the process of habit
formation includes the following:

a. The child imitates the sounds and patterns which s/he

hears around her/him.
b. People recognize the child’s attempts as being similar to
the adult models and reinforce (reward) the sounds by
approval or some other desirable reaction.
c. In order to obtain more of these rewards, the child
repeats the sounds and patterns so that these become
habits.
d. In this way the child’s verbal behavior is conditioned
(‘shaped’) until the habits coincide with the adult models.
 Acquisition of Language
The behaviorists claim that the three crucial
elements of learning are: a stimulus, which
serves to elicit behavior; a response
triggered by the stimulus, and reinforcement,
which serves to mark the response as being
appropriate (or inappropriate) and encourages
the repetition (or suppression) of the
response.
 Acquisition of Language
2. Cognitive learning theory. Chomsky argues that
language is not acquired by children by sheer imitation
and through a form of conditioning on reinforcement
and reward. He believes that all normal human beings
have an inborn biological internal mechanism that
makes language learning possible. Cognitivists/
innatists claim that the child is born with an ‘initial’
state’ about language which predisposes him/her to
acquire a grammar of that language. They maintain
that the language acquisition device (LAD) is what the
child brings to the task of language acquisition, giving
him/her an active role in language learning.
 Acquisition of Language
3. Krashen’s Monitor Model (1981). Probably this is the
most often cited among theories of second language
acquisition; considered the most comprehensive, if not
the most ambitious, consisting of five central hypotheses:

The five hypotheses are:

a. The acquisition/ learning hypothesis. It claims that

there are two ways of developing competence in L2:
Acquisition - the subconscious process that results from
informal, natural communication between people where
language is a means, not a focus nor an end, in itself.
 Acquisition of Language
Learning - the conscious process of knowing about
language and being able to talk about it, that occurs in
a more formal situation where the properties or rules of
a language are taught. Language learning has
traditionally involved grammar and vocabulary learning.

Acquisition parallels first language development in

children while learning approximates the formal
teaching of grammar in classrooms. Conscious thinking
about the rules is said to occur in second language
learning while unconscious feeling about what is
correctand appropriate occurs in language acquisition.
 Acquisition of Language
b. The natural order hypothesis. It suggests that
grammatical structures are acquired in a predictable
order for both children and adults, that is, certain
grammatical structures are acquired before others,
irrespective of the language being learned. When a
learner engages in natural communication, then the
standard order below will occur.
 Acquisition of Language
c. The monitor hypothesis. It claims that conscious
learning of grammatical rules has an extremely
limited function in language performance: as a
monitor or editor that checks output. The monitor is
an editing device that may normally operate before
language performance. Such editing may occur
before the natural output or after the output.
 Acquisition of Language
d. The input hypothesis. Krashen proposes that
when learners are exposed to grammatical features a
little beyond their current level (i.e., i + 1), those
features are ‘acquired’. Acquisition results from
comprehensible input, which is made understandable
with the help provided by the context. If learners
receive understandable input, language structures
will be naturally acquired. Ability to communicate in a
second language ‘emerges’ rather than indirectly put
in place by teaching.
 Implications for teaching:

1. Teachers must continuously deliver at a level

understandable by learners.

2. Teaching must prepare the learners for real life

communication situations. Classrooms must provide
conversational confidence so that when in the
outside world, the student can cope with and
continue learning.
 Implications for teaching:
3. Teachers must ensure that learners do not become
anxious or defensive in language learning. The
confidence of a language learner must be
encouraged in a language acquisition process.
Teachers should not insist on learners conversing
before they feel comfortable in doing so; neither
should they correct errors nor make negative
remarks that inhibit learners from learning. They
should devise specific techniques to relax learners
and protect their egos.
 Implications for teaching:
4. Teachers must create an atmosphere where learners
are not embarrassed by their errors. Errors should not
be corrected when acquisition is occurring. Error
correction is valuable when learning simple rules but
may have negative effects in terms of anxiety and
inhibitions.

5. Formal grammar teaching is of limited value because

it contributes to learning rather than acquisition. Only
simple rules should be learned.

6. Teachers should not expect learners to learn ‘late

structures’ such as third person singular early.
 Influences of Theories on
Language Teaching
1. Applied linguists claim that theories of language learning as
well as theories of language may provide the basis for a particular
teaching approach/method. To illustrate, the linking of
structuralism and behaviorism has produced the audiolingual
method (ALM), oral approach/situational language teaching,
operant conditioning approach, bottom-up text processing,
controlled-to-free writing, to cite a few. These methods underscore
the necessity of overlearning, a principle that leads to endless and
mindless mimicry and memorization (‘mim-mem’). They are also
characterized by mechanical habit-formation teaching, done
through unremitting practice: sentence patterns are repeated and
drilled until they become habitual and automatic to minimize
occurrences of mistakes. Grammar is taught through analogy,
hence, explanations of rules are not given until the students have
practiced a pattern in a variety of contexts.
 Influences of Theories on
Language Teaching
2. The cognitive learning theory has given birth to the
cognitive approach to learning that puts language
analysis before language use and instruction by the
teacher, before the students practice forms. It is
compatible with the view that learning is a thinking
process, a belief that underpins cognitive-based and
schema-enhancing strategies such as Directed
Reading Thinking Activity, Story Grammar, Think-
Aloud, to name a few.
 Influences of Theories on
Language Teaching
3. The functional view of language has resulted in
communication-based methodssuch as
Communicative Language Teaching/Communicative
Approach, Notional-Functional Approach,
Natural Approach, Task-Based Language Teaching.
These methods are learner-centered, allowing
learners to work in pairs or groups in information gap
tasks and problem-solving activities where such
communication strategies as information sharing,
negotiation of meaning, and interaction are used.
 Influences of Theories on
Language Teaching
4. The view that is both cognitive and affective has
given rise to a holistic approach to language learning
or whole-person learning which has spawned
humanistic techniques in language learning and
Community Language Learning. In these methods,
the whole person including emotions and feelings as
well as language knowledge and behavior skills
become central to teaching. The humanistic approach
equips learners “vocabulary for expressing one’s
feelings, for sharing one’s values and viewpoints with
others, and for developing a better understanding of
their feelings and needs.”
Scope of linguistics
 Microlinguistics includes phonetics,
phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and
pragmatics.
 Macrolinguistics includes sociolinguistics,
 Psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, stylistics,
discourse analysis, computational
linguistics, cognitive linguistics, applied
linguistics.
Microlinguistics
 Phonetics is the scientific study of speech sounds. It
studies how speech sounds are articulated, transmitted,
and received.
 Phonology is the study of how speech sounds function
in a language, it studies the ways speech sounds are
organized. It can be seen as the functional phonetics of
a particular language.
 Morphology is the study of the formation of words. It is a
branch of linguistics which breaks words itno
morphemes. It can be considered as the grammar of
words as syntax is the grammar of sentences.
Microlinguistics
 Syntax deals with the combination of words into phrases,
clauses and sentences. It is the grammar of sentence
construction.
 Semantics is a branch of linguistics which is concerned with the
study of meaning in all its formal aspects. Words have several
types of meanign.
 Pragmatics can bedefined as the study of language in use. It deals
with how speakers use language in ways which cannot be
predicted from lingistic knowledge alone, and how hearers arrive at
the intended meaning of speakers. PRAGMATICS =MEANING-
SEMANTICS.
Macrolinguistics
 Socilinguistics studies the relations between language and
society: how social factors influence the structure and use of
language.
 Psycholinguistics is the study of language and mind: the
mental structures and processes which are involved in the
acquistion, comprehension and production of language.
 Neurolingistics is the study of language prodessing and language
representation in the brain. It typically studies the disturbances of
language comprehension and production caused by the damage
of certain areas of the brain.
Macrolinguistics
 Stylistics is the study of how literary effects can be related to linguistic
features. It usually refers to the study of written language, including literary
text, but it also investigates spoken language sometimes.
 Discourse analysis, or text linguistics is the study of the relationship
between language and the contexts in which language is used. It deals with
how sentences ins poken and written language form larger meaningful units.
 Computational linguistics is an approach to linguistics which employs
mathematical techniques, often with the help of a computer.
 Cognitive linguistics is an approach to the analysis of natural language that
focuses on language as an instrument for organizing, processing, and
conveying information.
 Applied linguistics is primarily concerned with the application of linguistic
theories, methods and findings to the elucidation of language problems
which have arisen in other areas of experience.