Introducing Linguistics E-Book

R. L. Trask

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Introducing...
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 105

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Covering thinkers from Aristotle to Saussure and Chomsky, "Introducing Linguistics" reveals the rules and beauty that underlie language, our most human skill.

Leseprobe

Published by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39-41 North Road, London N7 9DP email: [email protected]

ISBN: 978-184831-771-0

Text and illustrations copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd

The author and artist have asserted their moral rights.

Originating editor: Richard Appignanesi

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

A Brief History of Linguistics

An Indian Linguist

The Greek Origins of Linguistics

Grammar or Parts of Speech

Latin Grammar

Traditional Grammar

The Port-Royal Grammar

Historical Linguistics

Ferdinand de Saussure

Saussure’s Lectures on General Linguistics

Saussure’s Structuralism

An Example from English

An Example from Spanish

Synchronic and Diachronic Structures

Trubetzkoy’s Phonology

Jakobson’s Work on Linguistics

Jakobson and Semiotics

The Origins of American Linguistics

Sapir’s General Linguistics

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

Example of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

A Pioneer of American Structuralism

Post-Bloomfieldian Structruralists

The Formalism of Zellig Harris

Chomsky’s Generative Grammar

Transformational Grammar

Chomsky’s Programme

Paradox of the TG Programme

The Functional Approach

What Does “Function” Communicate?

Systemic Functional Linguistics: Texts

Cognitive Linguistics

Gendering Nouns

Dyirbal Noun Genders

Language Perception Differences

Greek Perception of Time

Metaphor

What is Language?

Natural Language

Our Language Faculty

What’s Special About Human Languages?

What do all Languages Have in Common?

Linguistic Abilities

Language Media

Units of Writing

Duality of Patterning

Sign Languages

Nicaraguan Sign Language

Grammar and Word Order

Different Examples of Word Order and Location

Tense and Time

Grammatical Differences

Sign Language Grammar

The Written Record of Language

And Further Back …

… to Old English

The Never-ending Story

Conservative Prescriptivism

Historical Perspectives

Explaining Systemic Correspondence

The Indo-European Family and PIE

The Remote Origins of English

Eastern Ancestors of PIE

The Saussurean Paradox

Sociolinguistic Studies of Variation

Male-versus-Female Speech

Variation and Social Context

Semantics

Meanings Occur in Connections

Pragmatics

Pragmatic Issues

Extending Pragmatics

Where Does Language Come From?

Skinner’s Thesis Attacked by Chomsky

Children Construct Rules

Example of Active Construction

Creating a Language

Pidgin

Creoles

Chomsky’s Universal Grammar

What is the Rule?

Linguistic Nativism

Obstacles to Confirming UG

Respectively, with Respect

Innate or Acquired?

Language Planning

Engineering Basque

Standard English

Sexism in Language

Sexist Attitudes

Descriptivism

Disordered Language

Wernicke’s Aphasia

Neurolinguistics

Specific Language Impairment

Williams Syndrome

A Psycholinguistic View of Language

A Problem of Faulty Genes

How Did Language Originate?

What Do We Know Today?

When Did Language Begin?

The Gradualist Theory

The Catastrophic Theory

Criticism of the Gradualist View

Bickerton’s Conclusion

Another Cognitive Example

Differences of Metaphor

Conflicting Speculations

The Purposes of Language

Further Reading

Index

Biographies

A Brief History of Linguistics

Human beings have probably been speaking for as long as we have existed, but it was only around 3,000 years ago that anybody began to be curious about language and to start examining it. This happened independently in two places.

GRAMMATICAL ANALYSIS DEVELOPED VERY EARLY IN ANCIENT INDIA. A DESCRIPTION OF GRAMMAR ALSO APPEARED AMONG ANCIENT GREEKS.

We might begin with an example from the Indian tradition.

An Indian Linguist

Pāini’s life (circa 5th century BC) is unknown, but his work, the Astādhayāyī, is a culmination of earlier studies in phonology and grammar.

Pāini’s approach to grammar requires that the pieces of words should first be glued together in order. Rules should then be applied to convert these sequences into the correct surface forms. Pānini worked on Sanskrit, but we can illustrate his method very well with English. Consider the verb

penetrate

and its related adjective

impenetrable

meaning “not able to be penetrated”. This consists of the negative prefix

in – (as in insane),

the stem penetrate

and the suffix – ble

So, to start with, we have

in-penetrate-ble

Now we need some rules, which we will apply to pronunciation, not necessarily to spelling.

First, if a verb-stem ends in -ate immediately followed by another consonant (like b), drop the t of the verb-stem.

Second, if we now have a long A sound followed by the suffix -ble, change this long A to the weak vowel found in the last syllable of circus and carrot.

Third, if an n is immediately followed by a consonant pronounced with the lips, like b, change the n to m.

These rules produce the required result:

impenetrable

Pāini’s formal style of phonological analysis looks ahead 2,000 years to Noam Chomsky’s approach in the 1960s – and, in fact, Chomsky has acknowledged his tribute to the Indian grammarian.

I’LL BE DOING SOMETHING LIKE THIS … BUT MUCH, MUCH LATER!

The Greek Origins of Linguistics

Even though the Indian tradition was much the more sophisticated of the two, it was the Greeks who founded the European tradition.

The great Greek scholar Aristotle (384–322 BC) took the first step.

I DIVIDED THE SENTENCE INTO TWO PARTS CALLED THE SUBJECT AND THE PREDICATE.

Grammar or Parts of Speech

The Greek work culminated in the writings of Apollonius Dyscolus (110–175 AD) and Dionysius Thrax (second to first centuries BC). It was Thrax who produced the first complete grammar of Greek, only parts of which survive today. Ancient Greek was a language in which most words could take lots and lots of different endings for grammatical purposes.

By looking at the behaviour of Greek words, and especially at these endings, Thrax concluded that Greek words fell into just eight classes, which we call the parts of speech.

MY CLASSES WERE NOUNS, VERBS, ARTICLES, PRONOUNS, PREPOSITIONS, CONJUNCTIONS, ADVERBS AND PARTICIPLES.

Thrax’s description of Greek would become the basis of all grammatical description in Europe until well into the 20th century, even though his eight classes were later modified.

Latin Grammar

After the Roman conquest of Greece in the mid-2nd century BC, Roman scholars learned of the Greek work, and they began to apply the same analysis to their own language, Latin.

THIS COPYING DIDN’T TURN OUT TOO BADLY, BECAUSE LATIN WAS RATHER SIMILAR TO GREEK IN ITS STRUCTURE.

The Graeco-Latin tradition was ultimately synthesized in the work of the most influential Roman grammarian, Priscian, who wrote in the 6th century AD. Priscian’s description of Latin is still what we find in most school textbooks of Latin today.

When Europeans finally began to be interested in writing descriptions of their own languages in the 14th and 15th centuries, they mostly tried to impose Priscian’s account of Latin onto their own languages.

THIS WAS SOMEWHAT UNFORTUNATE, SINCE SPANISH, FRENCH, GERMAN AND ITALIAN ARE NOT ALWAYS VERY SIMILAR TO LATIN. WHILE ENGLISH IS VERY DIFFERENT INDEED.

Traditional Grammar

Nevertheless, this traditional Graeco-Roman grammar has continued to be taught in European schools down to the present day.

Except that, in the English-speaking countries, the teaching of English grammar was largely discontinued in the 1960s…

IN THE BELIEF THAT GRAMMAR WAS TOO BORING TO ENGAGE THE ATTENTION OF SCHOOL PUPILS.

The Port-Royal Grammar

The 17th-century French scholars, known as the Port-Royal Circle, put together a remarkably original “universal” grammar of French, one which largely broke free from the Priscianic tradition. Here is a typical example of their analyses.

The invisible God created the visible world.

This sentence is analysed as…

God, who is invisible, created the world, which is visible

… which in turn is decomposed into the three propositions…

THIS ANALYSIS IS STRIKINGLY SIMILAR TO MY EARLIEST 1950s VERSION OF TRANSFORMATIONAL GRAMMAR.

The German polymath Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), brother of the famous explorer Alexander von Humboldt, likewise tried to develop a universalist and philosophical approach to the study of languages.

The central fact of language is that speakers can make infinite use of the finite resources provided by their language. Though the capacity for language is universal, the individuality of each language is a property of the people who speak it. Every language has its innere Sprachform, or internal structure, which determines its outer form and which is the reflection of its speakers’ minds. The language and the thought of a people are thus inseparable.

A PEOPLE’S SPEECH IS THEIR SPIRIT, AND THEIR SPIRIT IS THEIR SPEECH.

Although Humboldt’s work excited a good deal of attention, it too failed to establish a continuing tradition.

Historical Linguistics

Toward the close of the 18th century, European linguists began to realize that certain languages exhibited such striking systematic resemblances that they must be derived from a single common ancestor, from which they had diverged by a long series of changes. Scholars like Franz Bopp (1791–1867), Rasmus Rask (1787–1832) and Jakob Grimm (1785–1863) were able to show that almost all of the languages of Europe and many languages of Asia were all related in this way.

As a result of these astonishing discoveries, the study of language change and of the prehistories of languages, called historical linguistics, came to be by far the most important way of studying languages, and other approaches were temporarily submerged.

THIS FAMILY OF LANGUAGES, CALLED THE INDO-EUROPEAN FAMILY, IS ULTIMATELY DESCENDED FROM A REMOTE ANCESTOR … WHICH WE CALL PROTO-INDO-EUROPEAN.

The Origins of General Linguistics

Only toward the end of the 19th century did the non-historical study of language structure begin to reassert itself. Pioneers like the German Georg von der Gabelentz (1840–93) and the Poles Jan Baudouin de Courtenay (1845–1929) and Mikofai Kruszewski (1851–87) published important observations about word structure and sound structure in languages.

This kind of work we now call general linguistics: the study of how languages are put together and how they work.

Ferdinand de Saussure

But the single most influential figure in the development of general linguistics was, at this time, working in some obscurity in the Swiss city of Geneva. Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) had been trained as a historical linguist, and in fact he had made important contributions to the understanding of Proto-Indo-European. Saussure applied the technique of internal reconstruction to Proto-Indo-European (PIE) to explain certain irregularities in the forms of some roots. Most PIE roots have the form CeC-, where C means “any consonant”. For instance …

BUT SOME ARE DIFFERENT. THE VOWEL IS A OR O INSTEAD OF E. THE FIRST OR THE LAST CONSONANT IS MISSING. AND, WHEN THE LAST CONSONANT IS MISSING, THE VOWEL IS LONG (MARKED BY A COLON);

Saussure proposed that these irregular roots had earlier been perfectly regular, but that they had happened to contain certain consonants which had disappeared. We now call these consonants laryngeals.

Saussure’s Lectures on General Linguistics

Most people reduce language to a list of terms corresponding to a list of things. For instance, in Latin …

A LINGUISTIC SIGN IS NOT A LINK BETWEEN A THING AND A NAME, BUT BETWEEN A CONCEPT AND A SOUND-PATTERN. THE SOUND PATTERN IS NOT ACTUALLY A SOUND, FOR A SOUND IS SOMETHING PHYSICAL. A SOUND PATTERN IS THE HEARER’S PSYCHOLOGICAL IMPRESSION OF A SOUND.

BUT WE POOLED AND EDITED OUR LECTURE NOTES AND PUBLISHED, IN 1916, A VOLUME WITH SAUSSURE’S NAME ON IT …

In the early years of the 20th century, Saussure began lecturing on general linguistics at the University of Geneva. Saussure’s highly original ideas captured the imagination of his students. Saussure died without ever publishing his ideas.

Saussure’s Structuralism

Before Saussure, most linguists had taken an atomistic approach to language structure. That is, they perceived a language as primarily a collection of objects, such as speech sounds, words and grammatical endings.

I ARGUED INSTEAD THAT A LANGUAGE WAS BEST REGARDED AS A STRUCTURED SYSTEM OF ELEMENTS, IN WHICH THE PLACE OF EACH ELEMENT IS DEFINED CHIEFLY BY HOW IT RELATES TO OTHER ELEMENTS.

This novel approach quickly came to be called structuralism, and, since Saussure’s work, virtually all important work on languages has been structuralist in this sense.

An Example from English

Here is an example of structuralist analysis. Among the speech sounds found in English are two which we represent as [ d ] and as [ð].

The sound [ d ] occurs at the beginning of the word den,

while the sound [ ð ] occurs at the beginning of the word then.

Since these words are otherwise identical in pronunciation, and since they have different meanings, we may therefore conclude that these two sounds “count” as different in English. That is, they behave as two different structural units for the purpose of building English words. We therefore say that [ d ] and [ ð ] belong, in English, to two different structural units, or phonemes, which we represent as /d/ and /ð/, so that den and then are represented phonemically as /den/ and /ðen/.

An Example from Spanish

In contrast, the sounds [ d ] and [ ð ] exist also in Spanish, but their behaviour is different there. In Spanish, [ ð ] can occur only in certain positions, notably between vowels, as in [deðo] “finger”, while [ d ] can never occur in these positions.

Note, for example, [dama] “lady”, with [ d ], but [la ðama] “the lady”, with [ ð ] between vowels.

In Spanish, therefore, the two sounds do not “count” as different, and we assign them both to a single phoneme [d]. The correctness of this analysis is recognized by the Spanish spelling system, which writes dedo, “finger”, dama, “lady” and la dama, “the lady”.

Both English and Spanish possess the speech sounds [ d ] and [ ð