GENERAL LINGUISTICS

1. The Nature of language 2. The Scope of Linguistics 3. Principles and Levels of Analysis 4. Areas of Enquiry: Focus on Form 5. Areas of Enquiry: Focus on Meaning 6. Current Issues

1. The Nature of Language

Linguistics is the discipline which studies human language. But, what is human language?

It serves as a means of cognition and communication

It enables us to think for ourselves and to cooperate with other people

1. The Nature of Language

Language seems to be a feature of our essential humanity.

It is clearly essential to humankind and has served to extend control of other creatures, but it is not easy to specify what exactly makes it distinctive.

1. The Nature of Language

Other species communicate after fashion. It means they lack the essential flexibility of human language which enables us to be proactive, to create new meanings and shape our own reality unconstrained by the immediate context.

1. The Nature of Language

Design features of language: 1. Arbitrariness: the form of linguistic signs bear no

natural resemblance to their meaning. The link between them is a matter of convention, and conventions differ radically across languages.

2. Duality: Human language operates on two levels of structure. At one level are elements which have no meanings in themselves but which combine to form units at another level which have meaning.

1. The Nature of Language

Human language: endowment or accomplishment? Chomsky: Language is innate, that is why children

acquire their own language easily. They acquire grammar which goes well beyond imitation of any utterances they may hear. There must exist some kind of innate, genetically programmed Language Acquisition Device (LAD) which directs the process whrereby children infer rules from the language data they are exposed to.

1. The Nature of Language

LAD provides a closed set of common principles of grammatical organization, or UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR (UG), which is then variously realized in different languages, depending on which one of the child is actually exposed to in its environment.

1. The Nature of Language

Language, mind and social life. From the UG perspective, the essential nature of language is congitive. It is seen as a psychological phenomenon: what is of primary interest is what the form of language reveals about the human mind. But it is not only that, crucially, it functions as a means of communication and social control.

1. The Nature of Language

Language is internalized in the mind as abstract knowledge, but in order for this to happen it must also be experienced in the external world as actual behavior.

Michael Halliday: “Language as social semiotic”, language is a system of signs which are socially motivated or informed in that they have been developed to express social meanings

1. The Nature of Language

SOCIAL VIEW OF LANGUAGE: The emphasis here is on language not as a genetic endowment, but as generic endowment.

It has evolved not with the biological evolution of the species but with the sociocultural evolution of human communities.

Language should provide the means for people to interact upon their environment. Halliday “language has to have an ideational function and and interactional function as well.

1. The Nature of Language

Conclusion. Language can be seen as distinctive because of its intricate association with the human mind and with human society. It is related to both cognition and communication, it is both abstract knowledge and actual behavior. Its features are: its arbitrariness and duality, the fact that it is context-independent, operates across different media and at different levels of organization (sounds, words, sentences) and so on.

2. THE SCOPE OF LINGUISTICS

EXPERIENCE AND EXPLANATION : Language does not just reflect or record reality, but creates it. It provides us with an explanation of experience.

Linguistics uses the abstracting potential of language to categorize and explain language itself.

2. THE SCOPE OF LINGUISTICS

MODELS AND MAPS. The purpose of linguistics is to provide some explanation of this complexity by abstracting from it what seems to be of essential significance. Abstraction involves the idealization of actual data, as part of the process of constructing models of linguistic description.

2. THE SCOPE OF LINGUISTICS

Dimensions of idealization: From one perspective, language is a very general and abstract phenomenon. It is a shared and stable body of knowledge of linguistic forms and their function which is established by convention in a community

Langue and parole: Ferdinand de Saussure, established the principles of modern linguistics. He proposed that linguistics should concern itself with the shared social code, the abstract system, which he called LANGUE, leaving aside the particular actualities of individual utterances, which he called PAROLE.

2. THE SCOPE OF LINGUISTICS

Saussure : Language is necessarily and essentially dynamic.It’s a process, not a state, and changes over time to accommodate the needs of its users.

Diachronic dimension of language: changes of language over time

Synchronic dimension: changes at a specific time

2. THE SCOPE OF LINGUISTICS

Competence and performance: Chomsky distinguished competence, the knowledge that native speakers have of their language as a system of abstract formal relations, and performance, their actual behavior. Performance is particular, variable, dependent on circumstances. It may offer evidence of competence, but it is circumstantial evidence and not to be relied on.

2. THE SCOPE OF LINGUISTICS

Langue and parole – competence and performance Langue and competence can both be glossed in terms

of abstract knowledge, the nature of knowledge is conceived of in different ways. Saussure thinks it as socially shared, common knowledge: his image is of langue as a book, printed in multiple copies and distributed throughout a community. But for Chomsky, competence is not a social but a psychological phenomenon, a genetic endowment in each individual.

2. THE SCOPE OF LINGUISTICS

Chomsky’s distinction leads to a definition of linguistics as principally concerned with the universals of the human mind. Chomsky’s definition of competence as the proper concern of linguistics is much further along the continuum of abstraction than is Saussure`s definition of langue, in that it leaves social considerations out of entirely.

2. THE SCOPE OF LINGUISTICS

Knowledge and ability: Knowing a language involves more than knowing what form it takes:it involves knowing how it functions too. An this implies knowing about words, not just as formal items, constituents of sentences, but as units of meaning which interact with syntax in complex ways.

2. THE SCOPE OF LINGUISTICS

Competence is not knowledge in the abstract, but also ability to put knowledge to use according to convention.

3. PRINCIPLES AND LEVELS OF ANALYSIS

Types and tokens: Linguistic description deals in generalities, in abstract types of language element of which particular instances are actual tokens.

Principles of classification:It considers the duality of language between sounds, and words, words and sentences and all the levels of linguistic analysis

Dimensions of analysis: Syntagmatic (elements combine with others along a horizontal dimension) and paradigmatic relationships (association of elements along the vertical dimension)

Levels of analysis: graphology, morphology, syntax…

4. AREAS OF ENQUIRY: FOCUS ON FORM

Phonetics: studies how the sounds of speech are actually made .

Phonology :describes the way sounds function within a given language or across languages.

Morphology is the study of words. Syntax deals with the way words are combined

in sentences.

5. AREAS OF ENQUIRY: FOCUS ON MEANING

Semantics studies how meaning is encoded in a language. It is concerned with what language means.

Pragmatics studies the practical use of signs by agents or communities of interpretation in particular circumstances and contexts

6. CURRENT ISSUES

The scope of linguistics: psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, functional linguistics, formal linguistics

The data of linguistics: corpus linguistics, prototypes The relevance of linguistics: descriptive linguistics,

applied linguistics (contrastive analysis, discourse analysis, error analysis, interlanguage, second language acquisition), critical discourse analysis, stylistics, forensic linguistics