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What is Linguistics

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Title: What is Linguistics


1
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

4
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.

6
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.

7
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

8
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

9
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

10
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?

11
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

12
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)
13
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

14
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

15
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

16
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.

17
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

18
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

19
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

20
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

21
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.

22
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.

23
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)

24
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

25
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.

26
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)

27
Metaphor of the chess game
  • c

28
Diachronic view previous state
  • More chess

29
Change in time
  • This is

30
Structures of the system
  • c

31
Changes in the structure
  • This is

32
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)

33
Structuralism
  • Claude Levi-Strauss
  • Edmund Leach
  • Rodney Needham
  • Dual oppositions
  • Structures need not be pairs. Can be triads
    (Turner) or encompassing hierarchies (Dumont)
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