Introduction to English Linguistics

Remember the questions we talked about in class last week? Here are brief answers both to the questions that we discussed and to those that we didn’t get to, based on your ideas and the linguistic viewpoint. Note that you aren’t expected to memorize the answers, but thinking about how the scientific approach often differs from the popular opinion will help you understand both language and linguistics a little better.

1. Q: The website languagemonitor.com claims that there are 995,112 words in the English language, but less than 100,000 in French. Do you think that this claim is realistic?
   A: Firstly, it is impossible to count the words in a language without first agreeing on what exactly a word is. Some languages have “words” that would equate to an entire sentence in English or German. Is something a word if we make a pause before and after it in speech? If it has an entry in the dictionary? You can easily make up new names for things (and this is done all the time in advertising), making it quite impossible to come up with a definite number of words for any language. While English has borrowed a lot of foreign terms throughout its history, speakers of French can certainly talk about the same things - they might simply use a phrase instead of a single word to describe something, or come up with other communicative strategies. While it’s a fun idea, languagemonitor.com’s numbers are essentially bogus.

2. Q: Would you describe the following lines from song lyrics as wrong or instances of bad English?
   “I dunno why / I can’t function” (Blood Red Shoes, You Bring Me Down)
   “Am I not always be wanting this?” (Digitalism, I Want I Want)
   “Hey boy / Why you didn’t call me?” (The Blow, Hey Boy)
   A: Again, it depends on how you define “wrong” and “bad”. The first sentence has a contraction (don’t know -> dunno) that many people would consider “non-standard”, meaning that it’s not how we conventionally write in English. Note the word conventional here - there’s no higher power that makes dunno objectively wrong or incorrect. It is regarded as “wrong” only because people agree that one shouldn’t use it - and this is only true for written language. Native speakers use contractions all the time when they talk because it saves time (always remember: people are lazy!). In music, poetry and other forms of art language often doesn’t adhere to the standard, both because it may not look or sound as good and because rebelling against conventions is what art is best at.
   (Just in case you are unsure about exactly what’s wrong in the second and third example: “Am I not always be wanting this” makes unnecessary use of the auxiliary verb be and has an unusual occurrence of want in the progressive form. In example no. 3 the question is not inverted, i.e. it should be “why didn’t you call me” instead of “why you didn’t call me”.)

3. Q: There is a group on the social networking service StudiVZ called zank you for trevveling wiz deutsche bahn. good bye! What (if anything) is funny about the name? Do you think the correct spelling of the words is more logical?
   A: The spelling of the words mirrors their pronunciation by a German speaker who doesn’t speak English very well (which understandably holds true for many people at Deutsche Bahn). For example, zank makes us think of someone who can’t pronounce a th. It is important to notice that we recognize this purely by the spelling, especially when you contrast it with the way words are correctly written in English (which is anything but logical - see question 11). We constantly ascribe characteristics to people based on their dialect, accent and pronunciation and this is on top of things like vocabulary (think of how you perceive someone who uses a lot of Latin words in contrast to a person who ends every sentence with “Alter”). Many popular stereotypes relate to how people use language and we apply them virtually all the time, whether we are conscious of it or not.

4. Q: Linguist Ray Jackendoff makes a distinction between animal communication systems and language. Do you agree with him that only humans have language?
   A: Once more: it depends on your definition of language (notice a pattern?). Most linguists agree that there are certain properties of human language that set it apart from how animals communicate. For example, different human languages have different signs for the same thing (take Hund, dog and chien) whereas we can assume that cats don’t meow differently in German, English and French. Furthermore, we assume that cats can’t talk about future events (that party next weekend) or fictional characters (Santa Claus, Dumbledore, Jason Bourne). There also seem to be strict limits on how many signs they can combine (think about how long and complicated an English or German sentence can be) and how they learn new signs. And finally, cats don’t need to learn how to meow, while an American child doesn’t genetically inherit English from it’s parents - it has to be exposed to the language in order to acquire it.

5. Q: Many people - in this country and elsewhere - think that importing words from other languages (especially English!) is bad and should be closely regulated by law, or even banned. Do you agree?
   A: Languages change all the time and have the nasty tendency not to stick to laws and regulations. Regulating what languages people are allowed to speak and how they should speak them has been a hot topic probably for as long as language itself has been around. Linguists look at language as it is, not as some people think it should be, therefore you’ll have a very hard time finding a serious linguist who is upset about the decline of the genitive in German or about “Denglisch“.

6. Q: I recently came across the suggestion that learning foreign languages is silly because eventually everyone will speak English anyway. Do you think that having just a single global language would be a good thing?
   A: Most people feel that language is an important part of a country’s culture (which is precisely why people get so upset about “bad” language, importing foreign words, swearing etc). While it certainly has advantages to have a lingua franca it does not mean that people are likely to give up their native language. There is no objective answer to this question, but it is important to note that to most people the native tongue is an important part of their identity.

7. Q: A popular myth about the Inuit language family is that it has over 40 words for snow. This is not true. Most experts agree that there are really quite few words for snow in Inuit, but due to the structure of the language it is possible to form very long words (a bit like Bahntrassenhalterungsträgerschadenkontrolleursgattin in German). Where do you think does the idea come from that the Inuit have so many words for snow?
   A: When the idea that the Inuit have countless words for snow first arose, it was widely believe that language, perception and culture are extremely closely related, almost to the point of being identical. The line of thought was basically: “the Inuit’s many words for snow demonstrate that they perceive that aspect of the world more keenly than we do”. Today most linguists believe this to be false - language and thought are assumed to be separate in the sense that while there are different words for describing the world, the mental concepts which exist between the words and the physical reality they describe are universal. In other words, the sounds, grammatical structure, or number of words in a language do not tell us anything about how its speakers think. At the same time it is certainly possible to find reflections of social or cultural aspects in a language - it’s quite likely that the Inuit talk more about snow than we do.

8. Q: Some people argue that a double negative (as in I can’t get no satisfaction or I ain’t got no money) makes a positive, following the logic that if you don’t not have something, you actually have it. What do you think about this claim?
   A: Languages don’t follow rigorous mathematical logic but have a practical use: communication. When you want to express that something is not the case, you usually want to make sure the person you are talking to gets the difference (think about I love you vs. I don’t love you or John is alive vs. John isn’t alive). Multiple negation does exactly that and is perfect standard use in many languages (take something like the French Je ne sait pas - literally I no know not). In Black Vernacular English negative concord (I don’t know nothing about nobody) is normal and Geoffrey Chaucer frequently used multiple negations in The Canterbury Tales - at the time this simply wasn’t considered “wrong” in English.

9. Q: A speaker of Warlpiri (spoken in northern Australia) once made the remark to a linguist that “we don’t really have grammar… we just talk”. What do you make of this description?
   A: Once more it depends of the definition of grammar. Linguists understand grammar as the mental set of rules that every native speaker has in his head and that allows him to form sentences that other speakers can understand. An example would be a sentence like eats popcorn Mike. In English, the order of words in that sentence is simply wrong, but in Austronesian languages such a sequence is perfectly correct (or, as a linguist would say, it is grammatical). A native speaker knows this “rule” (what is the basic word order in my language) and countless others subconsciously and applies them every single time he opens his mouth. In the linguistic sense, every language has grammar and something is only ungrammatical when it violates these rules.

10. Q: Groucho Marx famously said that “time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana”. What (if anything) is funny about this sentence?
    A: Linguists call this structural ambiguity. In Groucho’s sentence it’s caused by the fact that the words flies and like both have several meanings and can take on different roles. In the first part of the sentence time flies like an arrow (meaning minutes, hours and days go by as fast as an arrow can fly) whereas in the second part fruit flies like bananas (little buzzing insects prefer to snack on a yellow, curved fruit). The fact that we are likely to misread the sentence at first and think the wrong parts belong together makes it funny, because bananas flying in the same way that fruit does is simply not plausible. We are able to identify the correct meaning because only one of the alternatives makes sense.

11. Q: Have a look at these word pairs: right - site, buy - high, cough - scoff, tired - tickled. What’s odd about English spelling?
    A: The first three pairs all end with the same corresponding sound (say them aloud together to test it for yourself). But the spelling doesn’t reflect this - it’s different inside each pair. In the case of high there simply is no sound at all associated with the gh at the end of the word. The last pair has a similar discrepancy regarding the letter i. English i can sound essentially like the German ei (as in heiter) or i (as in Himmel), but this finds no reflection in English spelling. In fact ei in English (as in their) is yet again pronounced differently. The thing to keep in mind: English spelling says everything about a word’s history and very little about how to pronounce it.

12. Q: Jewish linguist Max Weinreich is often cited for his observation that “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy”. Can you imagine what he meant?
    A: What Weinreich meant was that linguistic differences are not the only factors that decide whether we consider something a language or a dialect. For example, Scots can be considered a dialect of English or an language in its own right, depending on your point of view. Often political considerations play a role and language has been (and is) used as a symbol of national identity in countries around the world. There are often bitter conflicts that revolve around language and identity, for example with languages such as Kurdish or Basque.

13. Q: In his paper, Ray Jackendoff mentions the recently discovered “language gene” FOXP2. He asks: “are individuals afflicted with this mutation [a damaged FOXP2 gene] really language-impaired or do they just have trouble speaking?” What do you think is the difference between being “language-impaired” and “having trouble speaking”?
    A: The crucial difference is where exactly we locate the source of the problem. Only if it affects the brain itself would the result be true language impairment. By contrast, if the mutation “just” hampers speech, this would mean that an affected person has the necessary mental capacity for language, but trouble with physically producing speech sounds. People who are unable to produce or hear speech sounds are still capable of using sign language, which is structurally remarkably similar to spoken language (it also has grammar).