Introduction to English Linguistics

Try to imagine - just for one moment - a single aspect of your daily life that is not affected by how you or the people around you use language. While such areas do exist, basically any time we interact with each other it is extremely likely that language will be used to communicate, be it in spoken or written form. Language can be used to chat, complain, argue, promise, flirt and swear and from our earliest childhood onwards we use it on a daily basis for all of these activities and countless others. Not all communication is language - for example, you can communicate that you are happy by smiling or that you disagree with something by shaking your head - but whenever we want to communicate complex information we are bound to use words and sentences. Language is arguably a specialized and highly developed form of communication that is apparently unique to human beings.

The question of what exactly language is and how it works has been relevant to mankind for thousands of years, yet compared to other areas of investigation quite a few things about language are still unknown or under fierce debate. Not only that, the term language can also mean a number of things, depending on the context it is used in. The very first distinction that we need to make when we talk about it is whether we mean

• one concrete human language (such as English, German or Chinese) or
• the innate ability to learn and use language in general that all humans have.

Concrete languages have a history that allows us to explain the family relations between them and the origins of words - for example, we can tell that the English word father and the German Vater have a common ancestry. We can track changes over hundreds and even thousands of years and get a fairly good idea of what English may have sounded like around 1,300 years ago. You’ll learn everything about that in the Introduction to Medieval English Studies.

But where does language as an ability come from and how does it work?

The origin of our ability to use language lies in the brain, especially in those sections known as Broca’s and Wernicke’s area.

Studies have shown that when these areas of the brain are damaged, an individual can lose her ability to form either coherent or meaningful sentences. Such a loss of language is referred to as aphasia (or, in cases of partial loss, dysphasia).

Language is a distinctly human trait. We cannot make any absolutely definite claims about the mental states of animals (whether or not they “think” in some sense of the word) but we can claim that only humans use language. That doesn’t mean that animals don’t communicate. When your cat meows, it can mean that it is hungry or wants to be cuddled. A bee can signal its hive about a food source and even communicate information such as distance and location (except for velocity). But as far as we know no animal can tell a joke, swear an oath or answer a question - all perfectly common human activities that most of us engage in every day. In other words, while animals are quite capable of communicating with each other and with us, they are not capable of learning or using language in the same that way we are.

Language as an ability has specific properties that set it apart from sets of signs as bees, dolphins or other animals use them. The following design features of language are considered to be integral by most linguists:

1. Displacement. The ability to refer to things far removed in time and place. You can talk about what you did last summer or where you’ll live next year, but your cat can only communicate that it wants to fed right now.
2. Arbitrariness. Human language uses symbols. There is no inherent connection between the word “dog” and the animal that it stands for. “Dog”, “Hund” and “chien” all sound completely different, but refer to exactly the same creature - an indicator that the symbols we use are arbitrary. Some words can be onomatopoetic like “pop” and “cuckoo”, but these are rare.
3. Productivity (also called openness or creativity). The ability to generate new utterances. We constantly make up new words and phrases, even though people are not always in agreement if and how they should be used.
4. Cultural transmission (also called tradition). Language is passed on from one generation to another. We all learn the language of our parents and of the people around us, regardless of our genetic origin.
5. Duality (also called double-articulation). Language has two layers - a layer of sound and a layer of meaning. The sounds “d”, “o” and “g” have no meaning in isolation, but become meaningful when used in sequence (”dog”). Combining the same sounds in another sequence (e.g. “g”, “o”, “d” = “god”) would give you a different meaning, demonstrating that a limited repertoire of sounds makes a number of different meanings possible.

Reference: Yule, George. The Study of Language (2006). This list is based on a longer one originally developed by Charles Hockett.

What, then, is linguistics? While different academic schools of thought have slightly different definitions, most linguists would probably agree that linguistics can be described as the scientific inquiry into human language. This includes two aspects

• how language works (structure)
• what we do with language (use)

It is important that by scientific inquiry we mean that our goal is to describe these things, not to tell people how to do them in the “right” way. Because linguistics is a science, it is descriptive - it seeks to objectively describe language, not prescribe how it should be used. Telling people that slang is bad or that you shouldn’t use foreign words is not what linguists do, because that would be like a physicist arguing that gravity is bad or a biologist claiming that chickens are evil.

While general linguistics (Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft) tends to put a particularly strong emphasis on the innate ability that makes learning and understanding any language possible for us, English linguistics is concerned both with the specific description of English and with these underlying mechanics. Generally, when we say that someone is a linguist we mean that they are knowledgeable about those mechanics, not necessarily that they speak a dozen languages.

Studying how languages change over time falls into the domain of diachronic linguistics. For example, if you wanted to find out why the pronoun thou has been replaced by you in today’s English, that would be a diachronic study. Conversely, if you wanted to study fuzzy grammar or the language of blogs that would be a synchronic study - you would be researching language at a specific point in time (today). The first of these two research questions (fuzzy grammar) is an example for examining language structure, while the second (teenage blogging) deals with language use. Those areas of linguistics dealing with solving concrete problems, such as writing dictionaries, improving language teaching or machine translation are applied, while those that are concerned purely with understanding the structure or use of language better for scientific curiosity’s sake are theoretical.

Key Terms

• language - communication
• individual languages - language as an innate ability
• language and the brain, Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas
• design features of language: displacement, arbitrariness, productivity, cultural transmission, duality
• language structure - language use
• linguistics
  • descriptive - prescriptive
  • synchronic - diachronic
  • applied - theoretical

Further Reading
How did Language begin? (Ray Jackendoff)