What is Linguistics

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What is Linguistics?

• Anthropology studies human beings in the round
• Linguistics studies language in all its forms.
• Description of languages
• Theory of Language
• Historical connections from Grammar, philology
• Has many contemporary connections
• Philosophy, history, archeology, literature,
  anthropology, sociology, psychology,
  neuropsychology, biology, physics, mathematics,
  computer programming

2
What is Language?

• Something we do all the time without reflection.
• Teaching our language to someone who doesnt know
  it is hard
• Competence this hidden knowledge
• Performance what we can see people doing

3
What is Language?

• A dialect with an army.
• The Americas 1,013
• Africa 2,058
• Europe 230
• Asia 2,197
• The Pacific 1,311
• TOTAL 6,809

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What is the origin of Language?

• Best guess seems that language developed in
  parallel with the species.
• We dont know and we can never know.
• Bad question.
• Origins dont necessarily explain whats going on

5
Some definitions of Language

• Sapir a purely human and non-instinctive method
  of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by
  means of voluntarily produced symbols.
• Bloch Trager a system of arbitrary vocal
  symbols by means of which a social group
  cooperates.
• Hall the institution whereby humans communicate
  and interact with each other by means of
  habitually used oral-auditory arbitrary symbols.
• Chomsky a set (finite or infinite) of
  sentences, each finite in length and constructed
  out of a finite set of elements.

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Semiotic point of view system of signs

• An open-ended, arbitrary symbol system
• A signal is transmitted from a sender to a
  receiver (or group of receivers) along a channel
  of communication. The signal will have a
  particular form and will convey a particular
  meaning (or message). The connection between form
  and meaning constitutes a code.

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Communication Systems

• All 1. A mode of communication
• 2. Semanticity/Meaning
• 3. Pragmatic function
• Some 4. Interchangeability
• 5. Cultural transmission
• 6. Arbitrariness
• 7. Discreteness
• Human 8. Displacement
• Language 9. Productivity

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Language is primarily a communication system

• Can do other things besides communication
• Organize thought, establish social order, etc.

• A mode of communication
• Semanticity/Meaning
• Pragmatic function

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Some communication systems

• 4. Interchangeability Both send and receive
• 5. Cultural transmission learned through
  communicative interaction
• 6. Arbitrariness relationship between signal and
  meaning is not motivated.
• (dog, perro, at-un)
• 7. Discreteness complex messages are built up
  out of smaller units
• duality

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Animal communication systems

• Bees communicating how to get to food
• round, sickle, and tail-wagging dances
• Apes chimpanzees and gorillas
• cant talk, but some can sign (ASL)
• But when an ape uses a sign, does he know what it
  means?

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Human Language does seem unique

• 8. Displacement can communicate about things not
  present or not true
• 9. Productivity open-ended system, creative
  ability to express novel ideas

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Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913 )

• Swiss linguist, working on Indo-European
  philology came to reinvent the system, the way
  language is theorized.
• Course in General Linguistics posthumously
  compiled from notes and lecture notes of his
  students.

Modern structuralism - rules of relations among
elements Semiology (semiotics)
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Competence and Performance

• Language is more than rules.
• Not just vocabulary and grammar.
• Saussures langue and parole
• Language and speaking
• Language is a social system, shared by a speech
  community
• Speaking always happens in a context

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Study Language (langue) not speech (parole)

• The subject matter of linguistics comprises all
  manifestations of human speech, whether that of
  savages or civilized nations, or of archaic,
  classical or decadent periods.
• Describe all observable languages
• Trace their histories (families), reconstruction
• Determine permanent, universal forces, deduce
  general laws
• Delimit and define the discipline

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Saussurian Duality of Language

• 1) Oral - aural pairing
• 2) Union of sound-image and concept
• 3) individual and social
• 4) Synchronic and diachronic realities
• An established system on the one hand
• Always a product of the past

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Langue is the true object of study

• Parole (speech, speaking, articulation) is messy,
  heterogeneous, variable, based in the individual
• Langue (language, competence)
• is both a social product of the faculty of
  speech and a collection of necessary conventions
  that have been adopted by a social body to permit
  individuals to exercise that faculty.

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Social crystallization of langue

• Among all the individuals that are linked
  together by speech, some sort of average will be
  set up all will reproducenot exactly of course,
  but approximatelythe same signs united with the
  same concepts.
• The social, the essential
• Not the individual, accidental, accessory

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langue is no less concrete than parole

• Whereas speech is heterogeneous, language, as
  defined is homogeneous. It is a system of signs
  in which the only essential thing is the union of
  meanings and sound-images, and in which both
  parts of the sign are psychological.
• linguistic signs are not abstractions

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Science of signs - semiology

• studies the life of signs within society
• shows what constitute signs, what laws govern
  them
• language is the prototypical semiological system

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Two modes of analysis

• Synchronic - description of the state of a
  language at a particular moment
• Diachronic - change through time, comes from
  comparing sequences of synchronic analyses
• Antecedents are not origins

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Linguistics as a model for general semiology

• Language is comparable to a symphony in that
  what the symphony actually is stands completely
  apart from how it is performed the mistakes that
  musicians make in playing the symphony do not
  compromise this fact.

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Emile Benveniste explanation of Structuralism

• Saussure never uses the word structure
• Language is a system that has its own
  arrangement.
• The system is an interdependent whole.
• If one part is modified, the whole system is
  affected because it remains coherent.

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Saussurian principles

• Language is form, not substance
• Units of language can only be defined by their
  relationships
• Structuralism first enunciated by Prague School
  of Linguists following these principles
• (Roman Jakobson, Nikolay Trubetskoy)

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Structuralism

• Trubetskoy
• One cannot determine the place of a word in a
  lexical system until one has studied the
  structure of the said system.
• A science of the whole - system of relations
• system is formed of units that mutually affect
  one another
• distinguished from other systems by the internal
  arrangements of these units
• arrangement is structure

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French structuralism

• Benveniste
• The structuralist doctrine teaches the
  predominance of the system over the elements, and
  aims to define the structure of the system
  through the relationships among the elements, in
  the spoken chain as well as in formal paradigms,
  and shows the organic character of the changes to
  which language is subject.

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Arbitrariness

• Benveniste, Nature of the Linguistic Sign
• Arbitrariness of the sign is when analyzed across
  systems
• The linguistic sign is non-arbitrary (necessary)
  within the system.
• Cant say just anything and be speaking English.
• Natural logic of the system (Whorf)

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Metaphor of the chess game

• c

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Diachronic view previous state

• More chess

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Change in time

• This is

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Structures of the system

• c

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Changes in the structure

• This is

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Speech and communication

• Speech is one-dimensional, sequence of signs
• Communication includes gestures and other signals
• Operates in parallel to speech
• Reinforcing ideas
• Contradicting (mixed signals)

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Structuralism

• Claude Levi-Strauss
• Edmund Leach
• Rodney Needham
• Dual oppositions
• Structures need not be pairs. Can be triads
  (Turner) or encompassing hierarchies (Dumont)