Riassunto esame Linguistica Inglese II, prof Dore, libro consigliato: Understanding Language Structure, Interaction and Variation, Brown, Attardo, S, Vigliotti, (2014) 3rd edition, The University of Michigan Press"

What is linguistics?

Linguistics is the science that studies language. The person who studies linguistics is a linguist (do not confuse this with polyglot, someone who knows many languages). Linguists need to follow certain procedures to make sure that their conclusions are appropriate: this is the scientific method, and it consists essentially of:

• Formulating hypotheses on the basis of the available data
• Checking the validity of these hypotheses against new data.

If the data do not match the hypothesis, the first one is proven wrong, and the linguist will need to formulate a new hypothesis. This implies that a theory can be proven right but that it can be proven wrong any time a new observation contradicts it (principle of falsification).

Languages share some general organizational mechanisms that distinguish them from other forms of communication (e.g. the system of communication developed by animals and insects).

Eight design features of languages

Subfields of linguistics

• Phonetics: Deals with the sounds of language
• Phonology: Deals with how the sounds are organized
• Morphology: Deals with how sounds are put together to form words
• Syntax: Deals with how sentences are formed
• Semantics: Deals with the meanings of words, sentences, and texts
• Pragmatics: Deals with how sentences and texts are used in the world (i.e. in context)
• Text linguistics: Deals with units larger than sentences, such as paragraphs and texts (any message, large or small, simple or complex, expressed through language)

But remember, linguistics is an interdisciplinary field: e.g. Sociolinguistics deals with language in society. Several other fields within linguistics that look at language from the perspective of another discipline include: sociolinguistics (language in society), psycholinguistics (psychology of language), anthropological linguistics, historical linguistics, neurolinguistics, language pedagogy, computational linguistics, forensic linguistics, translation, etc.

How to approach language?

We can look at language from two points of view:

Prescriptive approach

The prescriptive approach consists of stating what is right or wrong in language. It passes judgment (for example, splitting infinitives is wrong: “to boldly go where no one has gone before” is a bad sentence because it splits the infinitive “to go”). It mainly seeks to impose rules but also tries to protect the language itself (language planning, campaigns against sexist language). For example, postponed preposition: What are you looking at? What fine mess you got us into! He is impossible to work with (emphasis on “impossible”). What prescriptivists say is often not supported by linguistic data: for example, a common claim of prescriptivists is that the “double negative” (“I don’t want no fish”) should be banned (even if English has always had the double negative, already in Shakespeare). Many people get so upset about prescriptivism perhaps because following certain grammatical rules is a social “Shibboleth”, meaning that it provides information about the group to which individuals belong to.

Descriptive approach

The descriptive approach consists of describing the facts and drawing conclusions. Even if a common misunderstanding is that descriptivists “have no rules”, this kind of linguistics is dedicated to describing the rules of the language, and language is seen as essentially rule-governed. Prescriptivists and descriptivists disagree deeply, as the former seek to impose arbitrary rules that come from outside the language and/or seek to preserve a stage of the language that has been left behind by the evolution of the language itself, while the latter seek to find the rules that govern the languages spoken by people.

Linguistic usage helps gather information about someone: if you do or say something in a certain way, you belong to a certain group. Following or not following certain linguistic forms may be used to identify a social class or ethnic group, for example, African-American Vernacular English eliminates the copula in certain syntactic constructions: this and other features of AAVE may be perceived as unprofessional or as ignorant while in fact they are signs of a speaker speaking a different dialect. It is a dialect but it is also considered as less prestigious than others for historical reasons, so speakers will associate negative impressions, such as those noted, with it. In other words, the dialect a speaker uses marks him or her socially, and therefore the use of a particular dialect, or some features of a dialect, may be used as a social shibboleth.

The most egregious examples of prescriptivism

Double negatives

This “rule” was invented in 1762 by Robert Lowth, who stated the rule that two negatives affirm (I am not unaware = I am aware). This rule is not true, and English has always had double negatives, and despite the success of his grammar book, this rule never made it past written English (double and triple negatives are found in spoken English, but they are not tolerated in written English, which is typically more formal). In addition to not making sense historically, it doesn’t always apply where it should (on occasion, even in written English, we use double negatives that do not affirm: he couldn’t sleep, not even with a sedative).

Split infinitives

This rule states that one should not put something between the “to” and the rest of the verb in an infinitive, but we must split infinitives in some cases when necessary.

Postponed prepositions

If the indirect or direct object is moved to the beginning of the sentence to form a wh-question, a preposition ends up being left at the end of the sentence (a question such as “what are you looking at?” comes from the rough form of “you are looking at what?”). Wh-questions, relative clauses, and exclamations will always have postponed prepositions. Infinitive clauses are also difficult to change: shifting from “he is impossible to work with” to “it is impossible to work with him” would shift the emphasis from “he” to “impossible”.

Language planning

Language planning is when the government, or any public body, decides which languages will be taught in schools or which languages public employees must know. A good example is the revival of biblical Hebrew in modern Israel, which had been a dead language for centuries, but with the new Israeli state underway the government needed to decide on a language. Other examples are the campaign against sexist language, and government and school board decisions about which languages should be used for instruction, which books to use, and so on.

Diachronic vs synchronic

Linguistics may focus either on the history of the language or how it functions at any given point in time.

The diachronic view

This view studies how language changes through time, traces a word back to its origins (etymology), and reconstructs languages that are no longer spoken by comparing several languages that descend from them (comparative method).

The synchronic view

This view studies how language functions at any given moment in time and is not concerned with the origin of words or languages. Remember both views can overlap; the distinction between the two approaches is not absolute. In each generation, new words are created or already existing words change their meaning (and are perceived by people as neologisms or new words) and at the same time old words die or are no longer used (archaisms) and eventually they are no longer understood and are forgotten.

Competence vs performance

There are two ways of looking at language synchronically:

• We can look at the actual sentences that a speaker says or writes or signs
• We can try to abstract away from the actual production of a given speaker at any given time and try to describe the speaker’s knowledge about his or her language.

Competence

Competence is the ability to produce a word (or a sentence) and what you know about a word (or a sentence) (you want to be competent speakers of your L1 or L2 or L3, etc.; language becomes part of you and it is in your brains). Competence is not what speakers know about their language but the skills they have acquired, without having an explicit understanding of what they know, and in general, it is what speakers know when they know how to speak a language. Recently, competence has been referred to as i-language (for internalized language or internalized grammar), which is language that speakers have in their brain.

Performance

Performance is the way a word or a sentence is actually said (the sounds you actually articulate and make!). It is what speakers actually do. Competence is the idealization of performance: the competence of a speaker is his or her performance not affected by factors such as fatigue, need to eat, etc. It would be hard to write a grammar that included all the possible mistakes and false starts that speakers may produce when saying a sentence, and all of those are idealized away by competence.

Sounds and meanings

Phonemes are the mental representations of sounds (aka phones). Phonemes are pronounced differently depending on the position in a word; the different ways a phoneme is articulated are called allophones (for example, the “unreleased [p]”, articulated without releasing the air flow, and the aspirated [p], followed by a vowel of air pronounced with a puff of air following). Our brain recognizes phonemes by matching the allophones it actually hears (sounds) to mental images of sounds (phonemes) and then compensating for the differences. Phonemes are (also) the smallest units of a language that help distinguish meaning, e.g. the dog [dɔg] can be separated into each item, each of which is a phoneme. These small units don’t have to have a meaning, but they must cause a difference in meaning. (dog/doc)

Minimal pairs are two words of different meaning that differ for just one phoneme, dog [dɔg] vs doc [dɔk]. They are important because they allow us to identify the phonemes of a language: if we find a minimal pair in the words of a language, we know that the two sounds involved in the minimal pair are the allophones of two different phonemes.

Morphemes and words

Morphemes are units made of phonemes; e.g. [dɔg]; it is the smallest unit of language with a distinct meaning. So, it can be also [dɔg] or [-z] for dogs as [-z] helps us distinguish between singular and plural so the word dogs is made of two morphemes. Linguistics decided to use the word morpheme to indicate any unit of meaning that cannot be broken down any further (phrasal verbs and idioms consist of more than one “word” but can be broken).

Lexemes are entries in the lexicon (i.e. vocabulary) of a speaker or language. They can be plurimorphemic.

Types of morphemes

• Free morphemes (also called root morphemes or stems) can occur alone in discourse, e.g. god, cat, criminal, etc.
• Bound morphemes cannot stand alone e.g. "s" is a morpheme to make plurality: dogs, cats, criminals.
• Affixes are morphemes that are attached to the root morpheme. They are classified according to their position:
  • Prefixes if they occur before the root (un-believable)
  • Suffixes if they occur after the root (proud-ly; love-s)
  • Infixes if they occur in the middle of the root (un-f**king-believable) (very rare in English but extremely common in other languages)

Inflectional vs derivational morphemes

Derivational morphemes

Derivational morphemes are used to create new words from old ones (they change the meaning or part of speech) e.g. to buy → buyer; to sell → seller; quick → quickly.

Characteristics: they change the meaning or part of the speech, they are not required by syntax rules, are less productive than inflectional morphemes, they are located closer to the root, and they can be prefixes, suffixes, and rarely infixes. Moreover, they are the only way to get new words from old ones.

Inflectional morphemes

Inflectional morphemes mark grammatical categories (do not change the meaning or part of speech) e.g. tall → taller; work → worked.

Characteristics: they don’t change the meaning or the part of speech, they are required by syntax rules, they are more productive than derivational morphemes, they are located at the end of the word, and they can only be suffixes.

Creativity in language

In English, almost any noun can be verbed:

• By affixation: She (Margaret Thatcher) handbagged her European counterparts.
• By functional conversion (e.g. from noun to verb): I decided to toothbrush my way into the bathroom.

Creating new words

• Derivation: The process of forming a new word from an existing word, often by adding a prefix or suffix, such as -ness or un-. For example, happiness and unhappy derive from the root word hap.
• Compounding: Morphological operation that—in general—puts together two free forms and gives rise to a new word, as in railway or department store.
• Clipping: The word formation process which consists in the reduction of a word to one of its parts, for example, exam(ination), math(ematics).
• Acronyms: A word or name formed as an abbreviation from the initial components in a phrase or a word, usually individual letters (as in NATO or laser) and sometimes syllables.
• Blends: A word formed from parts of two or more other words, and these parts are sometimes, but not always, morphemes (motel = motor + hotel).
• Backformation: The process of creating a new lexeme, usually by removing actual or supposed affixes. The resulting neologism is called a back-formation. From the word “inflammable” came “flammable” when people perceived in- as the negation morpheme, and from “burglar” came “burgle” (this phenomenon is also known as reanalysis or folk etymology). (“alcohol-ic: choco-holic”).
• Invention: Speakers can invent new words from scratch (e.g. “googol”, meaning a very large number”). This is often done in advertising. Sometimes words start out as proper nouns and end up being used as common nouns.
• Borrowing: Languages in contact borrow words from each other. It may be that one language doesn’t have a word for a new product or concept (when coffee became popular in Europe, the Arabic word kawatin was used in various forms such as coffee, cafe, etc.). Borrowing is a two-way street: English gave French “weekend” and took “bon vivant”.
• Calque: A word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal, word-for-word, or root-for-root translation (while the borrowing is not translated). Examples: fernsprecher, German for telephone that means distant speaker, as telephone is from the Greek tele (distant) and phone (voice).

How sentences are formed

Double articulation of language is based on:

• First articulation: Sentences are broken down into morphemes.
• Second articulation: Morphemes are broken down into phonemes.

The reason the two articulations of language are so important is that they allow us to express an infinite number of thoughts, in an infinite number of different sentences, with a finite and in fact quite small number of sounds (there are roughly 43 different sounds in English). Using sounds, which are not associated with any given meaning, to make morphemes, which are given a meaning, is a way to get around the problem of associating a sound with an idea.

Every day we may produce sentences that we have never produced before: if we only had the second articulation of language, we would be stuck with however many morphemes we would have produced. By putting together morphemes to form sentences (first articulation), we acquire the power to produce an infinite number of sentences that are capable of accommodating any needs for communication that might arise.

Syntax

Syntax covers the area of putting together morphemes to form sentences. It is based on grammaticality (a sentence is said to be grammatical if the speakers of the language agree that it is a sentence that they would produce under the appropriate circumstances) and allows second articulation: “the book is on the table” vs “table the on is book”.

The goal of syntax is to describe all the grammatical sentences of English, or any other language, and show why the ungrammatical sentences aren’t acceptable (accordingly, the ungrammatical sentence is marked with an asterisk). By doing so, syntax eventually hopes to explain how people’s capacity to use language works.

The grammar of a language is instead the entire description of the language, not just its syntax as some believe, and grammaticality of sentences is only part of the overall grammar and shouldn’t be confused with the grammar of a language.

Immediate constituents

Example: Bob eats broccoli

• Constituent #1: Noun Phrase (any group of words that functions as a constituent): Bob
• Noun Phrases: Mary; the woman; the smart woman; the very smart woman
• Clause: A full sentence that has a subject and a verb, e.g. It rains
• Constituent #2: Verb Phrase
• Constituent #3: Direct Object

One of the ways we can express complex ideas and sets of relations is to use sentences containing the major word categories:

(Mary) (kissed) (John) (passionately)

• N V N ADV
• Sentences clauses: However, in spoken language, sentences can be even more complex since they can be filled by groups of two words, phrases, or more, which are called constituents (but they function exactly the same way as single words):
• (The beautiful woman) (kissed) (the hopeful man) (very passionately)
• Noun Phrase (NP) + Verb Phrase (VP) + Noun Phrase (NP) + Adverb Phrase (AdvP)
• (The girl) (was becoming) (extremely amorous) (quickly)
• Adverb Phrase (AdvP) + Noun Phrase (NP) + Verb Phrase (VP) + Adjective Phrase (AdjP)

Note that the words in bold are defined as head words (they must be always present while the rest is optional).

We have learned that...