You are on page 1of 68

FOUNDATION OF LINGUISTICS

Course description

This course introduces the student to a general description of the study of language and
its implication for the TEFL/TESL classroom. The course introduces approaches to the
study of language, the use of language in communication, aspects of linguistics, and
other disciplines related to linguistics. This course is also designed to introduce aspects
of the English language, the patterns and development of the language, and other
‘Englishes’, esp. American English. It provides students also with insights into the
classification of languages and history of linguistics.

CONTENTS
A. Language and Linguistics
1. What language is
Language as system ◊ arbitrary ◊ vocal ◊ symbol ◊ human ◊
communication
2. Other definitions
B. Language in Communication
1. Nonlinguistic human communication
Paralanguage ◊ Kinesics ◊ Proxemics
2. The design features of human language
C. Aspects of Linguistics
1. Phonetics and phonology
2. Morphology
3. Syntax
4. Semantics
D. Linguistics and Other Disciplines
1. Psycholinguistics
Language Acquisition ◊ Speech perception ◊ Aphasia and
Neurolinguistics
2. Sociolinguistics
Social dimensions
3. Other Relationships
Anthropological linguistics ◊ Computational linguistics ◊
Mathematical linguistics
Stylistics ◊ Philosophy of language ◊ Applied linguistics
E. The English Language
1. Aspects of the Language
Vocabulary ◊ Spelling Phonemes ◊ Stress, Pitches, and Juncture ◊
Inflection
2. Development of the Language
Old English ◊ Middle English ◊ Modern English ◊ 20th-Century
English Periods
3. American/Canadian English
Patterns of American English ◊ Regional Dialects ◊ Social/Cultural
Dialects ◊ Black English ◊ Development of American English
4. Other Englishes
Australian and New Zealand English ◊ India-Pakistan ◊ African
English
F. Languages of the World
1. Language Classification
Indo-European ◊ Asian and Pacific ◊ African ◊ the Americas ◊
Pidgin and Creole
2. International Languages
G. History of linguistics
1. Earlier History
Non-Western traditions ◊ Greek and Roman antiquity ◊ The
European Middle Ages
2. The 19th Century
Development of the comparative method ◊ The role of analogy
3. The 20th Century
Structuralism ◊ Transformational grammar ◊ Tagmemic,
stratificational, and others

Foundation of Linguistics

A. Language and linguistics

L inguistics is the scientific study of language. The word was first used in
the middle of the 19th century to emphasize the difference between a
newer approach to the study of language that was then developing and the
more traditional approach of philology. The differences were and are largely
matters of attitude, emphasis, and purpose. The philologist is concerned
primarily with the historical development of languages as it is manifest in
written texts and in the context of the associated literature and culture. The
linguist, though he may be interested in written texts and in the development of
languages through time, tends to give priority to spoken languages and to the
problems of analyzing them as they operate at a given point in time.

The field of linguistics may be divided in terms of three dichotomies:


synchronic versus diachronic, theoretical versus applied, microlinguistics
versus macrolinguistics. Languages may be studied as they exist at a specific
time; an example might be Parisian French in the 1980s. This is called a
synchronic approach. In contrast, a diachronic, or historical, approach
considers changes in a language over an extended time period. The study of
the development of Latin into the modern Romance languages is an example of
diachronic linguistics. Linguistics in the 20th century encompasses studies
from both the diachronic and synchronic points of view; 19th -century language
studies usually focused on a diachronic approach.

Theoretical linguistics is concerned with building language models or the


construction of a general theory of the structure of language or of a general
theoretical framework for the description of languages. Applied linguistics, on
the other hand, uses the findings of scientific language study and the
application of the findings and techniques of the scientific study of language to
practical tasks, especially to the elaboration of improved method s of language
teaching, dictionary preparation, or speech therapy. One area that has proved
fruitful for applied linguistics in the late 20th century is computerized machine
translation and automatic speech recognition.

The terms microlinguistics and macrolinguistics are not yet well established,
and they are, in fact, used here purely for convenience. The former refers to a
narrower and the latter to a much broader view of the scope of linguistics.
According to the microlinguistic view, languages should be analyzed for their
own sake and without reference to their social function, to the manner in which
they are acquired by children, to the psychological mechanisms that underlie
the production and reception of speech, to the literary and the aesthetic or
communicative function of language, and so on. In contrast, macrolinguistics
embraces all of these aspects of language. Various areas within
macrolinguistics have been given terminological recognition: psycholinguistics,
sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, dialectology, mathematical and
computational linguistics, and stylistics.

1. What language is

Linguists are in broad agreement about some of the important characteristics


of human language and one definition of language widely associated with
linguistics may be used to illustrate areas of agreement. This particular
definition states that language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for
human communication. The definition is rather imprecise in that it contains
considerably redundancy, particularly in employing both the terms system and
arbitrary, some redundancy is perhaps excusable, however, for it allows certain
points to be more heavily emphasized than they would otherwise have been.

Language as system

The key term in the above definition is system. It is also the most difficult term
to discuss. We may observe that a language must be systematic, for otherwise
it could not be learned or used consistently. However, we must also ask in
what ways a language is systematic. A very basic observation is that each
language contains two systems rather than one, a system of sounds and a
system of meanings. Only certain sounds are used by speakers of any
language and only certain combinations of these sounds are poss ible. The
sound system of a language allows a small number of sounds to be used over
and over again in various combinations to form units of meaning. The meaning
system allows these units of meaning to be arranged in an infinite number of
ways to express both simple and complicated ideas.

All languages have dual system of sounds and meanings. Linguists concern
themselves not only with characteristics of the two systems but also with how
the systems relate to each other within one overall linguistic system f or a
particular language.

Language as arbitrary

The term arbitrary in the definition does not mean that everything about
language is unpredictable, for languages do not vary in every possible way. It
means that we cannot predict exactly which specific feat ures we will find in a
particular language if we unfamiliar with that language or a related language.
There will be no way of predicting what a word means just from hearing it of
knowing in advance whether or how nouns will be inflected. If languages were
completely unpredictable in their systems, we could not even talk about nouns,
verbs, vowels, etc. at all. Linguistic systems are not completely unpredictable.

The process of deletion, e.g., I could have gone and Peter could have gone
too; I could have gone and Peter could have too; I could have gone and Peter
too., will also be found in all languages, but a particular variation will depend
on the language. All languages will have devices for negation. Language is
unpredictable only in the sense that the variations of the processes that are
employed are unpredictable.

The things which are predictable about all languages are called linguistic
universals. For example, all languages seem to be characterized as systems of
rules of certain kinds. All have nouns and verbs. All have consonants and
vowels. The specifics for each language are however largely unpredictable and
therefore arbitrary.

Language as vocal

The term vocal in the definition refers to the fact that the primary medium of
language is sound, and it is sound for all languages, no matter how well
developed are their writing systems. All the evidence we have confirms the fact
that writing is based on speaking. Writing systems are attempts to capture
sounds and meanings on paper.
Writing undeniably influences speaking. An insistence on the vocal basis of
language is an insistence on the importance of the historical and
developmental primacy of speech over writing and therefore a denial of the
common misunderstanding that speech is a spoken form of writing .

Language as symbol

The term of symbol refers to the fact that there is no connection or at least in a
few cases only a minimal connection between the sounds that people use and
the objects to which these sounds refer. Language is a symbolic system, a
system in which words are associated with objects, ideas, and actions by
convention. In only a few cases is there some direct representational
connection between a word and some phenomenon in the real world.
Onomatopoeic words like bang, crash, and roar are examples from English,
although the meanings of these words would not be at all obvious to speakers
of other languages. Some writers claimed that English words beginning with sl
and sn as in slime, slut, snarl, snob are used to denote a variety of unpleasant
things. In much the same way the vowel sound in twig and bit is said to be
associated with small things and the sounds in huge and moose with large
things. However, once again we are in an area of subjectivity, as
counterexamples are not difficult to find, e.g., sleep, snug, hill, and spoon.

Language as human

The term human refers to the fact that the kind of system that interests us is
possessed only by human beings and is very different from the communication
systems that other forms of life possess. Language is uniquely human in
another aspect. People can perform acts with language just as they can with
objects of different kinds. A sentence like I pronounce you husband and wife
can all be acts (performatives) because saying something in the right
circumstances is also doing something beyond making noises.

Language as communication

Language is used for communication, allowing people to sa y things to each


other and express their communicative need. Language is the cement of
society, allowing people to live, work, and play together, to tell the truth or lies.

The communication of most interest us is of course the communication of


meaning. A language allows its speakers to talk about anything within their
realm of knowledge.

2. Other definitions
Language is a system of arbitrary, vocal symbols which permits all people in a given
culture, or other people who have learned the system of that culture, to communicate or
to interact. (Finocchiaro 1974: 3)

Language is system of communication by sound, i.e., through the organs of


speech and hearing, among human beings of a certain group or community,
using vocal symbols possessing arbitrary conventiona l meanings. (Pei &
Gaynor 1954: 119)

Language is a potentially self-reflexive, structured system of symbols which


catalog the objects, events, and relations in the world. (DeVito 1970: 7)

Language is defined as the set of all possible sentences and the grammar of a
language as the rules which distinguish between sentences and non -
sentences. (Green 1972: 25)

Language is a systematic means of communicating ideas or feeling by the use


of conventionalized signs, sounds, gestures, or marks having understood
meanings. (Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary 1981: 641)

Speech is human activity that varies without assignable limit as we pass from
social group, because it is a purely historical heritage of the group, the product
of long-continued social usage. It varies as all creative effort varies – not as
consciously, perhaps, but none the less as truly as do the religions, the beliefs,
the customs, and the arts of different peoples. Walking is an organic, and
instinctive, function (not, of course, itself an instinct); speech is a non -
instinctive, acquired, “cultural” function. (Sapir 1921:4)

Language is a set (finite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed


out of a finite set of elements. (Chomsky 1957: 13)

Linguistics has but one proper subject -- the language system viewed in its
own light and for its own sake. (Allen and Corder, ed., 1975:148)

Linguistics is the study of human speech including the units, nature, structure,
and modification of language. (Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary 1981:664)

Linguistics is the science of language, e.g. of its struct ure, acquisition,


relationship to other forms of communication. (Oxford Advanced Learner’s
Dictionary 1980:494)

Linguistics is the science that describes and classifies languages. The linguist
identifies and describes the units and patterns of the sound sy stem, the words
and morphemes and the phrases and sentences, that is, the structure of a
language. (Lado 1964:18)
Linguistics is the field of study the subject of which is language. Linguists
study language as man’s ability to communicate, as individual ex pression, as
the common heritage of a speech community, as spoken sound, as written text,
etc. (Hartman & Stork 1972:132)

B. Language in Communication

anguage is the principal means used by human beings to communicate with


L one another. Language is primarily spoken, although it can be transferred to
other media, such as writing. If the spoken means of communication is
unavailable, as may be the case among the deaf, visual means such as sign
language can be used. A prominent characteristic of language is t hat the
relation between a linguistic sign and its meaning is arbitrary: There is no
reason other than convention among speakers of English that a dog should be
called dog, and indeed other languages have different names (for example,
Spanish perro, Russian sobaka, Japanese inu). Language can be used to
discuss a wide range of topics, a characteristic that distinguishes it from
animal communication. The dances of honey bees, for example, can be used
only to communicate the location of food sources. While the language-learning
abilities of apes have surprised many—and there continues to be controversy
over the precise limits of these abilities—scientists and scholars generally
agree that apes do not progress beyond the linguistic abilities of a two -year-old
child.

1. Nonlinguistic Human Communication

Paralanguage

Those who have worked on problems of communication claim to have


discovered what they call a system of paralanguage. The paralinguistic system
is composed of various scales and we assume that in normal communication
utterances fall near the center point of each scale.

The first scale is a loudness-to-softness scale. Most utterances do not draw


attention to themselves on this scale, but appear to be uttered with just the
right intensity of sound. However, an occasional utterance will strike us as
being overloud whereas another will appear oversoft. Sometimes overloudness
is a necessary characteristic o certain types of communication, as when the
carnival barker shouts: Roll up! Roll up! See this beautiful young lady shot 60
feet up in the air from the cannon! Oversoftness too may on occasion be used
to invoke suspense in a story, as in And then what do you think happened to
the little girl when she got lost in the woods and that big bad wolf found he r?
A second scale is the pitch scale, that is, how high or how low the voice is
pitched in speaking. Extrahigh pitch is usually interpreted to indicate strain or
excitement, whereas extralow pitch is taken as a sign of displeasure,
disappointment, or weariness.

A third scale is one of rasping-to-openness. Rasping refers to the presence of


an unusual amount of friction in an utterance, as in the Ugh! of Ugh! Another
assignment! Openness is associated with certain types of speakers’
particularly political and religious orators who speak to huge crowds in large
and often unenclosed spaces during some kinds of ritual. Using impressionistic
terms, the speeches are also likely to make use of a variety of other devices,
e.g. metaphors: Let us put our backs to the wall, turn our faces to the future,
stand feet firm on the ground, and resolve never to submit .

A fourth scale is one of drawling-to-clipping. A drawled Ye-a-h! or W-e-l-l! can


indicate insolence or reservation, whereas a clipped Nope! or Certainly not! we
take to indicate sharpness or irritation. Drawling or clipping can be used to
change the literal meaning of an utterance, even to give it a diametrically
opposed meaning, as in a drawled You’re really a real friend!

A fifth scale is one of a tempo of an utterance. We have all observed the


smooth tempos of certain salesmen and some of us the tempo of the student
with the obvious rehearsed story, as in So I went to the Dean and I said to him
that I just didn’t like the course and he called Professor smith and they
discussed my problem and then I met the chairman and we talked about the
college’s philosophy, and … We can contrast such a tempo with a spat out:
Now - you – just – listen – to – me – I’m – having – no – more – of – this – silly
– nonsense – out – of – you. These two utterances are near the opposite ends
of any tempo scale.

Kinesics

Alongside the paralinguistic system of voice modulation exists another system,


a system of gestures. The study of gestures is called kinesics. The gestures
may be as small as eyebrow movements, facial twitches, and changes in
positioning the feet, or they may be larger gestures involving uses of the hands
and shrugs of the shoulders. Again, the correct uses of gestures must be
learned and like linguistic usages, they vary widely among cultures and within
cultures.

In North American culture, they move their heads up and down to agree and
sideways to disagree. In the Semang people thrust the head forward expresses
agreement, and in the Ovibundu people shake a hand in front of the face with
the forefinger extended expresses negation. When the American meet people,
they greet them by nodding, shaking hands, clasping arms, kissing, or
embracing. They do not greet each other by buffeting the other’s head with a
fist like the Copper Eskimo, or with the backslapping routine of Spanish
American, or with the embracing and mutual back-rubbing of certain
Polynesian peoples.

Proxemics

Proxemics is the study of how people use the space between speakers and
listeners in the process of communication. Comfortable distances exists for
various activities and these distances must be learned. There are appropriate
distances for talking to friends, for communicating with strangers, for
addressing superiors.

Any complete understanding of language use requires knowledge of the


peripheral systems of human communication: paralanguage, kinesics, and
proxemics. Just as the language system itself must be learned, so these other
systems of communication must be learned. People must learn to walk and
carry themselves in certain ways, to gesture and l augh appropriately. They
must acquire control of these things while learning the language.

2. The Design Features of Human Language

The linguist and anthropologist Charles Hockett has pointed out that human
language has certain design features that no syst em of animal communication
possesses. The features are as follows:

1. Duality, the fact that it contains two subsystems, one of sounds and the
other of meanings;
2. Productivity, the fact that language provides opportunities for sending and
receiving messages that have never been sent/received before and for
understanding novel messages;
3. Arbitrariness, the fact that there is almost no predictability in many of its
characteristics and there is almost never any connection between symbol
and object;
4. Interchangeability, the fact that any human being can be both a producers
and a receiver of messages;
5. Displacement, the fact that language can be used to refer to real or
imagined matters in the past, present, or future. It can even be used to talk
about language itself;
6. Specialization, the fact that communicating organisms should not have a
total physical involvement in the act of communication. They should not
have to stop what they are doing to make a response, nor should the
response be totally determined by stimulus. Human beings can talk while
engaged in activities totally unrelated to the subject under discussion;
7. Cultural transmission, the fact that the details of linguistic system must be
learned anew by each speaker. They are not biologically transmitted from
generation to generation;
8. Discreteness, the fact that language makes use of discrete elements, e.g .,
phonemes and morphemes, not continuous waves – it is digital, not analog;
9. Reflexiveness, the fact that we can use language to talk about language –
language is its own metalanguage;

10. Semanticity, the fact that language is about something – it is not just
“sound and fury” but has a content; and

11. Prevarication, the fact that language can be used to tell falsehoods.

C. Aspects of Linguistics

here are many different ways to examine and describe individual languages
T and changes in languages. Nevertheless, each approach usually takes into
account a language's sounds (phonetics and phonology), sound sequences
(morphology, or the makeup of words), and relations among words in a
sentence (syntax). Most analyses also treat vocabulary and the semantics
(meaning) of a language.

1. Phonetics and Phonology

Phonetics is the study of all speech sounds and the ways in which they are
produced. Phonology is the study and identification of the meaningful sounds
of a language.

Phonetics is a branch of linguistics concerned with the production, physical


nature, and perception of speech sounds. The main fields of study are
experimental phonetics, articulatory phonetics, phonemics, acoustical
phonetics, and auditory phonetics. Auditory phonetics is the field involved in
determining how speech sounds are perceived by the human ear.

Experimental Phonetics
This is the physical science that collects measurable data about the
articulatory, acoustic, and auditory properties of vocal sounds, using
instruments such as the kymograph, which traces curves of pressure, and the
X ray. The amount of detail in the measurement of vocal sounds is limited only
by the precision of the instrument. Differences are found in every vocal sound.

Articulatory Phonetics

This describes speech sounds genetically—that is, with respect to the ways by
which the vocal organs modify the air stream in the mouth, nose, and throat in
order to produce a sound. All the vocal activities involved in a sound need not
be described, but only a selection of them , such as the place and manner of
articulation. Phonetic symbols and their articulatory definitions are abbreviated
descriptions of these selected activities. The symbols most commonly used are
those adopted by the International Phonetic Association (IPA) and are written
in brackets.

The organs of articulation are either movable or stationary. Movable organs


such as lips, jaws, tongue, or vocal chords are called articulators. By means of
them a speaker modifies the surge of air from the lungs. Stationary pa rts
include the teeth, the alveolar arch behind them, the hard palate, and the
softer velum behind it. Sounds made by touching two articulators —for example,
the bilabial p, which requires both lips—or those made by an articulator and a
stationary part of the vocal apparatus are named from the organs that make
the juncture, which is called the point of articulation. Reference to the tongue,
when it is an articulator, is not expressed—for example, the t sound, which is
produced by the alveolar arch touched by the tongue, is called alveolar.

The manner of articulation is determined by the way in which the speaker


affects the air stream with the movable organs. This action may consist of
stopping the air completely (plosive); leaving the nasal passage open durin g
the stopping (nasal); making contact with the tongue but leaving space on
either side of it (lateral); making merely a momentary light contact (flap);
leaving just enough space to allow a continuing stream of air to produce
friction as it passes through (fricative); or permitting the air stream to pass over
the center of the tongue without oral friction (vocal). The speaker produces
vowels of different quality by varying the position of his or her tongue on its
vertical axis (high, mid, low) and on its ho rizontal axis (front, central, back).
For example, a speaker moves the tongue from low to high in pronouncing the
first two vowels of Aïda, and from back to front in pronouncing successively the
vowel sounds in who and he. The tongue positions for the vowels u, i, and a
are the cardinal points on the so-called vowel triangle uai. The vowel ¶ has the
most neutral position. The quality of a vowel also depends on whether the
speaker keeps the lips rounded or unrounded, keeps the jaws close together or
open, or holds the tip of the tongue flat or curled up (retroflex). At the same
time the speaker may move the tongue gradually upward and to the front, or
upward and to the back, making diphthongal off -glides.

Other modifications may also affect the quality of the sounds. For example,
nasals rather than vowels may be made the prominent part of the syllable, and
certain typical vowel formations, called semivowels, may be nonsyllabic. The
quality of certain sounds is also affected by whether the speaker keeps the
speech organs tense or lax. The vocal cords are vibrated to produce sounds
that are voiced. Vowels are voiced, and in English, lax consonants are more or
less voiced. When the speaker gives a strong puff of air after the contact, this
is called aspiration. If the hand is placed before the lips, aspiration may be
observed in the ph sound produced at the beginning of the word pie. The
accompanying charts of the International Phonetic Alphabet, using standard
transcriptions in brackets, presents a schematic descr iption of these activities
in English, although not all the modifications are included. An accurate
phonetic transcription of all would describe even regional accents.

Acoustical Phonetics

This is the study of speech waves as the output of a resonator —that is, the
vocal tract coupled to other sources. Sound waves are closer than articulations
to the essence of communication, because the same auditory impression can
be produced by a normal articulation and by an entirely different sound
apparatus, like that of parrots. A spectrograph may be used to record
significant characteristics of speech waves and to determine the effect of
articulatory activities. Parts of this record of speech waves can be cut out
experimentally and the rest played back as sound in or der to determine which
features suffice to identify the sounds of a language.

Phonology or Phonemics

This is a study of the sounds of speech in their primary function, which is to


make vocal signs that refer to different things sound different. The phonem es
of a particular language are those minimal distinct units of sound that can
distinguish meaning in that language. In English, the p sound is a phoneme
because it is the smallest unit of sound that can make a difference of meaning
if, for example, it replaces the initial sound of bill, till, or dill, making the word
pill. The vowel sound of pill is also a phoneme because its distinctness in
sound makes pill, which means one thing, sound different from pal, which
means another. Two different sounds, reflecting distinct articulatory activities,
may represent two phonemes in one language but only a single phoneme in
another. Thus phonetic r and l are distinct phonemes in English, whereas these
sounds represent a single phoneme in Japanese, just as ph and p in pie and
spy, respectively, represent a single phoneme in English although these
sounds are phonetically distinct.

Phonemes are not letters; they refer to the sound of a spoken utterance. For
example, flocks and phlox have exactly the same five phonemes. Similarly, bill
and Bill are identical phonemically, regardless of the difference in meaning.
Each language has its own inventory of phonetic differences that it treats as
phonemic—that is, as necessary to distinguish meaning. For practical
purposes, the total number of phonemes for a language is the least number of
different symbols adequate to make an unambiguous graphic representation of
its speech that any native could read if given a sound value for each symbol,
and that any foreigner could pronounce correctly if given additional rules
covering nondistinctive phonetic variations that the native makes automatically.
For convenience, each phoneme of language may be given a symbol.

2. Morphology

The grammatical description of many, if not all, languages is conveniently


divided into two complementary sections: morphology and syntax. The
relationship between them, as generally stated, is as follows: morphology
accounts for the internal structure of words, and syntax describes how words
are combined to form phrases, clauses, and sentences.

Morphology is concerned with the units, called morphemes, that carry meaning
in a language. These may be word roots (as the English cran-, in cranberry) or
individual words (in English, bird, ask, charm); word endings (as the English -s
for plural: birds, -ed for past tense: asked, -ing for present participle:
charming); prefixes and suffixes (e.g., English pre- , as in preadmission, or -
ness, in openness); and even internal alterations indicating such grammatical
categories as tense (English sing-sang), number (English mouse-mice), or
case.

There are many words in English that are fairly obviously analyzable into
smaller grammatical units. For example, the word "unacceptability" can be
divided into un-, accept, abil-, and -ity (abil- being a variant of -able). Of these,
at least three are minimal grammatical units, in the sense that they cannot be
analyzed into yet smaller grammatical units--un-, abil-, and ity. The status of
accept, from this point of view, is somewhat uncertain. Given the existence of
such forms as accede and accuse, on the one hand, and of except, exceed,
and excuse, on the other, one might be inclined to analyze accept into ac-
(which might subsequently be recognized as a variant of ad-) and -cept. The
question is left open. Minimal grammatical units like un-, abil-, and -ity are
what Bloomfield called morphemes; he defined them in terms of the "partial
phonetic-semantic resemblance" holding within sets of words. For example,
"unacceptable," "untrue," and "ungracious" are phonetically (or, phonologically)
similar as far as the first syllable is concerned and are similar in meaning in
that each of them is negative by contrast with a corresponding positive
adjective ("acceptable," "true," "gracious"). This " partial phonetic-semantic
resemblance" is accounted for by noting that the words in question contain the
same morpheme (namely, un-) and that this morpheme has a certain
phonological form and a certain meaning.

Bloomfield's definition of the morpheme in terms of "partial phonetic-semantic


resemblance" was considerably modified and, eventually, abandoned entirely
by some of his followers. Whereas Bloomfield took the morpheme to be an
actual segment of a word, others defined it as being a purely abstract unit, and
the term morph was introduced to refer to the actual word segments. The
distinction between morpheme and morph (which is, in certain respects,
parallel to the distinction between phoneme and phone) may be explained by
means of an example. If a morpheme in English is posited with the function of
accounting for the grammatical difference between singular and plural nouns, it
may be symbolized by enclosing the term plural within brace brackets. Now the
morpheme [plural] is represented in a number of different ways. Most plural
nouns in English differ from the corresponding singular forms in that they have
an additional final segment. In the written forms of these words, it is either -s
or -es (e.g., "cat" : "cats"; "dog" : "dogs"; "fish" : "fishes"). The word segments
written -s or -es are morphs. So also is the word segment written -en in "oxen."
All these morphs represent the same morpheme. But there are other plural
nouns in English that differ from the corresponding singular forms in other
ways (e.g., "mouse" : "mice"; "criterion" : "criteria"; and so on) or not at all
(e.g., "this sheep" : "these sheep"). Within the post -Bloomfieldian framework no
very satisfactory account of the formation of these nouns could be given. But it
was clear that they contained (in some sense) the same morpheme as the
more regular plurals.

Morphs that are in complementary distribution and repr esent the same
morpheme are said to be allomorphs of that morpheme. For example, the
regular plurals of English nouns are formed by adding one of three morphs on
to the form of the singular: /s/, /z/, or /iz/ (in the corresponding written forms
both /s/ and /z/ are written -s and /iz/ is written -es). Their distribution is
determined by the following principle: if the morph to which they are to be
added ends in a "sibilant" sound (e.g., s, z, sh, ch), then the syllabic allomorph
/iz/ is selected (e.g., fish-es /fis-iz/, match-es /mac-iz/); otherwise the
nonsyllabic allomorphs are selected, the voiceless allomorph /s/ with morphs
ending in a voiceless consonant (e.g., cat-s /kat-s/) and the voiced allomorph
/z/ with morphs ending in a vowel or voiced consonant ( e.g., flea-s /fli-z/, dog-s
/dog-z/). These three allomorphs, it will be evident, are in complementary
distribution, and the alternation between them is determined by the
phonological structure of the preceding morph. Thus the choice is
phonologically conditioned.

Very similar is the alternation between the three principal allomorphs of the
past participle ending, /id/, /t/, and /d/, all of which correspond to the -ed of the
written forms. If the preceding morph ends with /t/ or /d/, then the syllabic
allomorph /id/ is selected (e.g., wait-ed /weit-id/). Otherwise, if the preceding
morph ends with a voiceless consonant, one of the nonsyllabic allomorphs is
selected--the voiceless allomorph /t/ when the preceding morph ends with a
voiceless consonant (e.g., pack-ed /pak-t/) and the voiced allomorph /d/ when
the preceding morph ends with a vowel or voiced consonant (e.g., row-ed /rou-
d/; tame-d /teim-d/). This is another instance of phonological conditioning.
Phonological conditioning may be contrasted with the principle that determines
the selection of yet another allomorph of the past participle morpheme. The
final /n/ of show-n or see-n (which marks them as past participles) is not
determined by the phonological structure of the morphs show and see. For
each English word that is similar to "show" and "s ee" in this respect, it must be
stated as a synchronically inexplicable fact that it selects the /n/ allomorph.
This is called grammatical conditioning. There are various kinds of grammatical
conditioning.

Alternation of the kind illustrated above for the allomorphs of the plural
morpheme and the /id/, /d/, and /t/ allomorphs of the past participle is
frequently referred to as morphophonemic. Some linguists have suggested that
it should be accounted for not by setting up three allomorphs each with a
distinct phonemic form but by setting up a single morph in an intermediate
morphophonemic representation. Thus, the regular plural morph might be said
to be composed of the morphophoneme /Z/ and the most common past -
participle morph of the morphophoneme /D/. Gen eral rules of morphophonemic
interpretation would then convert /Z/ and /D/ to their appropriate phonetic form
according to context. This treatment of the question foreshadows, on the one
hand, the stratificational treatment and, on the other, the generativ e approach,
though they differ considerably in other respects.

An important concept in grammar and, more particularly, in morphology is that


of free and bound forms. A bound form is one that cannot occur alone as a
complete utterance (in some normal context of use). For example, -ing is
bound in this sense, whereas wait is not, nor is waiting. Any form that is not
bound is free. Bloomfield based his definition of the word on this distinction
between bound and free forms. Any free form consisting entirely of two or more
smaller free forms was said to be a phrase (e.g., "poor John" or "ran away"),
and phrases were to be handled within syntax. Any free form that was not a
phrase was defined to be a word and to fall within the scope of morphology.
One of the consequences of Bloomfield's definition of the word was that
morphology became the study of constructions involving bound form s. The so-
called isolating languages, which make no use of bound forms ( e.g.,
Vietnamese), would have no morphology.

The principal division within morphology is between inflection and derivation


(or word formation). Roughly speaking, inflectional constructions can be
defined as yielding sets of forms that are all grammatically distinct forms of
single vocabulary items, whereas derivational constructions yield distinct
vocabulary items. For example, "sings," "singing," "sang, " and "sung" are all
inflectional forms of the vocabulary item traditionally referred to as "the verb to
sing"; but "singer," which is formed from "sing" by the addition of the morph -er
(just as "singing" is formed by the addition of -ing), is one of the forms of a
different vocabulary item. When this rough distinction between derivation and
inflection is made more precise, problems occur. The principal consideration,
undoubtedly, is that inflection is more closely integrated with and determined
by syntax. But the various formal criteria that have been proposed to give
effect to this general principle are not uncommonly in conflict in particular
instances, and it probably must be admitted that the distinction between
derivation and inflection, though clear enough in most cases, is in the last
resort somewhat arbitrary.

Bloomfield and most linguists have discussed morphological constructions in


terms of processes. Of these, the most widespread throughout the languages
of the world is affixation; i.e., the attachment of an affix to a base. For
example, the word "singing" can be described as resulting from the affixation of
-ing to the base sing. (If the affix is put in front of the base, it is a prefix; if it is
put after the base, it is a suffix; and if it is inserted within the base, splitting it
into two discontinuous parts, it is an infix.) Other morphological processes
recognized by linguists need not be mentioned here, but reference may be
made to the fact that many of Bloomfield's followers from the mid -1940s were
dissatisfied with the whole notion of morphological processes. Instead of
saying that -ing was affixed to sing they preferred to say that sing and -ing co-
occurred in a particular pattern or arrangement, thereby avoiding the
implication that sing is in some sense prior to or more basic than -ing. The
distinction of morpheme and morph (and the notion of allomorphs) was
developed in order to make possible the description of the morphology and
syntax of a language in terms of "arrangements" of items rather than in terms
of "processes" operating upon more basic items. Nowadays, the opposition to
"processes" is, except among the stratificationalists, almost extinct. It has
proved to be cumbersome, if not impossible, to describe the relationship
between certain linguistic forms without deriving one from the other or both
from some common underlying form, and most linguists no longer feel that this
is in any way reprehensible.

3. Syntax

Syntax refers to the relations among word elements in a sentence. For


example, English word order is most commonly subject-verb-object: Mary
baked pies. The order pies baked Mary is not meaningful English syntax.

Syntax, for Bloomfield, was the study of free forms that were composed
entirely of free forms. Central to his theory of syntax were the notions of form
classes and constituent structure. (These notions were also relevant, though
less central, in the theory of morphology.) Bloomfield defined form classes,
rather imprecisely, in terms of some common "recognizable phonetic or
grammatical feature" shared by all the members. He gave as examples the
form class consisting of "personal substantive expressions" in English (defined
as "the forms that, when spoken with exclamatory final pitch, are calls for a
person's presence or attention"--e.g., "John," "Boy," "Mr. Smith"); the form
class consisting of "infinitive expressions" (defi ned as "forms which, when
spoken with exclamatory final pitch, have the meaning of a command" --e.g.,
"run," "jump," "come here"); the form class of "nominative substantive
expressions" (e.g., "John," "the boys"); and so on. It should be clear from these
examples that form classes are similar to, though not identical with, the
traditional parts of speech and that one and the same form can belong to more
than one form class.

What Bloomfield had in mind as the criterion for form class membership (and
therefore of syntactic equivalence) may best be expressed in terms of
substitutability. Form classes are sets of forms (whether simple or complex,
free or bound), any one of which may be substituted for any other in a given
construction or set of constructions throughout the sentences of the language.

The smaller forms into which a larger form may be analyzed are its
constituents, and the larger form is a construction. For example, the phrase
"poor John" is a construction analyzable into, or composed of, the constituents
"poor" and "John." Because there is no intermediate unit of which "poor" and
"John" are constituents that is itself a constituent of the construction "poor
John," the forms "poor" and "John" may be described not only as constituents
but also as immediate constituents of "poor John." Similarly, the phrase "lost
his watch" is composed of three word forms--"lost," "his," and "watch"--all of
which may be described as constituents of the construction. Not all of them,
however, are its immediate constituents. The forms "his" and "watch" combine
to make the intermediate construction "his watch"; it is this intermediate unit
that combines with "lost" to form the larger phrase "lost his watch." The
immediate constituents of "lost his watch" are "lost" a nd "his watch"; the
immediate constituents of "his watch" are the forms "his" and "watch." By the
constituent structure of a phrase or sentence is meant the hierarchical
organization of the smallest forms of which it is composed (its ultimate
constituents) into layers of successively more inclusive units. Viewed in this
way, the sentence "Poor John lost his watch" is more than simply a sequence
of five word forms associated with a particular intonation pattern. It is
analyzable into the immediate constituents "poor John" and "lost his watch,"
and each of these phrases is analyzable into its own immediate constituents
and so on, until, at the last stage of the analysis, the ultimate constituents of
the sentence are reached. The constituent structure of the wh ole sentence is
represented by means of a tree diagram.

Each form, whether it is simple or composite, belongs to a certain form class.


Using arbitrarily selected letters to denote the form classes of English, "poor"
may be a member of the form class A, "John" of the class B, "lost" of the class
C, "his" of the class D, and "watch" of the class E. Because "poor John" is
syntactically equivalent to (i.e., substitutable for) "John," it is to be classified
as a member of A. So too, it can be assumed, is "his watch." In the case of
"lost his watch" there is a problem. There are very many forms --including
"lost," "ate," and "stole"--that can occur, as here, in constructions with a
member of B and can also occur alone; for example, "lost" is substitutable for
"stole the money," as "stole" is substitutable for either or for "lost his watch."
This being so, one might decide to classify constructions like "lost his watch"
as members of C. On the other hand, there are forms that--though they are
substitutable for "lost," "ate," "stole," and so on when these forms occur alone --
cannot be used in combination with a following member of B (cf. "died,"
"existed"); and there are forms that, though they may be used in combination
with a following member of B, cannot occur alone (cf. "enjoyed"). The question
is whether one respects the traditional distinction between transitive and
intransitive verb forms. It may be decided, then, that "lost," "stole," "ate" and
so forth belong to one class, C (the class to which "enjoyed" belongs), when
they occur "transitively" (i.e., with a following member of B as their object) but
to a different class, F (the class to which "died" belongs), when they occur
"intransitively." Finally, it can be said that the whole sentence "Poor John lost
his watch" is a member of the form class G. Thus the constituent structure not
only of "Poor John lost his watch" but of a whole set of English sentences can
be represented by means of the tree diagram given in the above figu re. New
sentences of the same type can be constructed by substituting actual forms for
the class labels.

Any construction that belongs to the same form class as at least one of its
immediate constituents is described as endocentric; the only endocentric
construction in the model sentence above is "poor John." All the other
constructions, according to the analysis, are exocentric. This is clear from the
fact that the letters at the nodes above every phrase other than the phrase A +
B (i.e., "poor John," "old Harry," and so on) are different from any of the letters
at the ends of the lower branches connected directly to these nodes. For
example, the phrase D + E (i.e., "his watch," "the money," and so forth) has
immediately above it a node labelled B, rather than either D or E. Endocentric
constructions fall into two types: subordinating and coordinating. If attention is
confined, for simplicity, to constructions composed of no more than two
immediate constituents, it can be said that subordinating constructio ns are
those in which only one immediate constituent is of the same form class as the
whole construction, whereas coordinating constructions are those in which both
constituents are of the same form class as the whole construction. In a
subordinating construction (e.g., "poor John"), the constituent that is
syntactically equivalent to the whole construction is described as the head, and
its partner is described as the modifier: thus, in "poor John," the form "John" is
the head, and "poor" is its modifier. An example of a coordinating construction
is "men and women," in which, it may be assumed, the immediate constituents
are the word "men" and the word "women," each of which is syntactically
equivalent to "men and women." (It is here implied that the conjunction "and"
is not a constituent, properly so called, but an element that, like the relative
order of the constituents, indicates the nature of the construction involved. Not
all linguists have held this view.)

One reason for giving theoretical recognition to the notion of constituent is that
it helps to account for the ambiguity of certain constructions. A classic
example is the phrase "old men and women," which may be interpreted in two
different ways according to whether one associates "old" with "men and
women" or just with "men." Under the first of the two interpretations, the
immediate constituents are "old" and "men and women"; under the second,
they are "old men" and "women." The difference in meaning cannot be
attributed to any one of the ultimate constituents but results from a difference
in the way in which they are associated with one another. Ambiguity of this
kind is referred to as syntactic ambiguity. Not all syntactic ambiguity is
satisfactorily accounted for in terms of constituent structure.

4. Semantics

Bloomfield thought that semantics, or the study of meaning, was the weak point
in the scientific investigation of language and would necessarily remain so until
the other sciences whose task it was to describe the universe and man's place
in it had advanced beyond their present state. In his textbook Language
(1933), he had himself adopted a behaviouristic theory of meaning, defining
the meaning of a linguistic form as "the situation in which the speaker utters it
and the response which it calls forth in the hearer." Furthermore, he
subscribed, in principle at least, to a physicalist thesis, according to which all
science should be modelled upon the so-called exact sciences and all scientific
knowledge should be reducible, ultimately, to statements made about the
properties of the physical world. The reason for his pessimism concernin g the
prospects for the study of meaning was his feeling that it would be a long time
before a complete scientific description of the situations in which utterances
were produced and the responses they called forth in their hearers would be
available. At the time that Bloomfield was writing, physicalism was more widely
held than it is today, and it was perhaps reasonable for him to believe that
linguistics should eschew mentalism and concentrate upon the directly
observable. As a result, for some 30 years after the publication of Bloomfield's
textbook, the study of meaning was almost wholly neglected by his followers;
most American linguists who received their training during this period had no
knowledge of, still less any interest in, the work being done el sewhere in
semantics.

Two groups of scholars may be seen to have constituted an exception to this


generalization: anthropologically minded linguists and linguists concerned with
Bible translation. Much of the description of the indigenous languages of
America has been carried out since the days of Boas and his most notable
pupil Sapir by scholars who were equally proficient both in anthropology and in
descriptive linguistics; such scholars have frequently added to their
grammatical analyses of languages some discussion of the meaning of the
grammatical categories and of the correlations between the structure of the
vocabularies and the cultures in which the languages operated. It has already
been pointed out that Boas and Sapir and, following them, Whorf we re
attracted by Humboldt's view of the interdependence of language and culture
and of language and thought. This view was quite widely held by American
anthropological linguists (athough many of them would not go as far as Whorf
in asserting the dependence of thought and conceptualization upon language).

Also of considerable importance in the description of the indigenous languages


of America has been the work of linguists trained by the American Bible
Society and the Summer Institute of Linguistics, a group of Protestant
missionary linguists. Because their principal aim is to produce translations of
the Bible, they have necessarily been concerned with meaning as well as with
grammar and phonology. This has tempered the otherwise fairly orthodox
Bloomfieldian approach characteristic of the group.

The two most important developments evident in recent work in semantics are,
first, the application of the structural approach to the study of meaning and,
second, a better appreciation of the relationship between grammar and
semantics. The second of these developments will be treated in the following
section on Transformational-generative grammar. The first, structural
semantics, goes back to the period preceding World War II and is exemplified
in a large number of publications, mainly by German scholars --Jost Trier, Leo
Weisgerber, and their collaborators.

The structural approach to semantics is best explained by contrasting it with


the more traditional "atomistic" approach, according to which the meaning of
each word in the language is described, in principle, independently of the
meaning of all other words. The structuralist takes the view that the meaning of
a word is a function of the relationships it contracts with other words in a
particular lexical field, or subsystem, and that it cannot be adequately
described except in terms of these relationships. For example, the colour
terms in particular languages constitute a lexical field, and the meaning of
each term depends upon the place it occupies in the field. Although the
denotation of each of the words "green," "blue," and "yellow" in English is
somewhat imprecise at the boundaries, the position that each of them occupies
relative to the other terms in the system is fixed: "green" is between "blue" and
"yellow," so that the phrases "greenish yellow" or "yellowish green" and "bluish
green" or "greenish blue" are used to refer to the boundary areas. Knowing the
meaning of the word "green" implies knowing what cannot as well as what can
be properly described as green (and knowing of the borderline cases that they
are borderline cases). Languages differ considerably as to the number of b asic
colour terms that they recognize, and they draw boundaries within the
psychophysical continuum of colour at different places. Blue, green, yellow,
and so on do not exist as distinct colours in nature, waiting to be labelled
differently, as it were, by different languages; they come into existence, for the
speakers of particular languages, by virtue of the fact that those languages
impose structure upon the continuum of colour and assign to three of the areas
thus recognized the words "blue," "green," " yellow."

The language of any society is an integral part of the culture of that society,
and the meanings recognized within the vocabulary of the language are
learned by the child as part of the process of acquiring the culture of the
society in which he is brought up. Many of the structural differences found in
the vocabularies of different languages are to be accounted for in terms of
cultural differences. This is especially clear in the vocabulary of kinship (to
which a considerable amount of attention has been given by anthropologists
and linguists), but it holds true of many other semantic fields also. A
consequence of the structural differences that exist between the vocabularies
of different languages is that, in many instances, it is in principle im possible to
translate a sentence "literally" from one language to another.

It is important, nevertheless, not to overemph asize the semantic


incommensurability of languages. Presumably, there are many physiological
and psychological constraints that, in part at least, determine one's perception
and categorization of the world. It may be assumed that, when one is learning
the denotation of the more basic words in the vocabulary of one's native
language, attention is drawn first to what might be called the naturally salient
features of the environment and that one is, to this degree at least,
predisposed to identify and group objects in one way rather than another. It
may also be that human beings are genetically endowed with rather more
specific and linguistically relevant principles of categorization. It is possible
that, although languages differ in the number of basic colour categories that
they distinguish, there is a limited number of hierarchically ordered basic
colour categories from which each language makes its selection and that what
counts as a typical instance, or focus, of these universal colour categories is
fixed and does not vary from one language to another. If this hypothesis is
correct, then it is false to say, as many structural semanticists have said, that
languages divide the continuum of colour in a quite arbitrary manner. But the
general thesis of structuralism is unaffected, for it still remains true that each
language has its own unique semantic structure even though the total structure
is, in each case, built upon a substructure of universal distinctions.

D. Linguistics and Other Disciplines

1. Psycholinguistics

The term psycholinguistics was coined in the 1940s and came into more
general use after the publication of Charles E. Osgood and Thomas A.
Sebeok's Psycholinguistics: A Survey of Theory and Research Problems
(1954), which reported the proceedings of a seminar sponsored in the United
States by the Social Science Research Council's Committee on Linguistics and
Psychology.

The boundary between linguistics (in the narrower sense of the term: see the
introduction of this article) and psycholinguistics is difficult, perhaps
impossible, to draw. So too is the boundary between psycholinguistics and
psychology. What characterizes psycholinguistics as it is practiced today as a
more or less distinguishable field of research is its concentration upon a
certain set of topics connected with language and its bringing to bear upon
them the findings and theoretical principles of both linguistics and psychology.
The range of topics that would be generally held to fall within th e field of
psycholinguistics nowadays is rather narrower, however, than that covered in
the survey by Osgood and Sebeok.

Language Acquisition

One of the topics most central to psycholinguistic research is the acquisition of


language by children. The term acquisition is preferred to "learning," because
"learning" tends to be used by psychologists in a narrowly technical sense, and
many psycholinguists believe that no psychological theory of learning, as
currently formulated, is capable of accounting for the process whereby
children, in a relatively short time, come to achieve a fluent control of their
native language. Since the beginning of the 1960s, research on language
acquisition has been strongly influenced by Chomsky's theory of generative
grammar, and the main problem to which it has addressed itself has been how
it is possible for young children to infer the grammatical rules underlying the
speech they hear and then to use these rules for the construction of utterances
that they have never heard before. It is Chomsky's conviction, shared by a
number of psycholinguists, that children are born with a knowledge of the
formal principles that determine the grammatical structure of all languages,
and that it is this innate knowledge that explains the success and speed of
language acquisition. Others have argued that it is not grammatical
competence as such that is innate but more general cognitive principles and
that the application of these to language utterances in particular situations
ultimately yields grammatical competence. Many recent works have stressed
that all children go through the same stages of language development
regardless of the language they are acquiring. It has also been asserted that
the same basic semantic categories and grammatical functions can be found in
the earliest speech of children in a number of different languages operating in
quite different cultures in various parts of the world.
Although Chomsky was careful to stress in his earliest writings that generative
grammar does not provide a model for the production or reception of language
utterances, there has been a good deal of psycholinguistic research directed
toward validating the psychological reality of the units and processes
postulated by generative grammarians in their descriptions of languages.
Experimental work in the early 1960s appeared to show that nonkernel
sentences took longer to process than kernel sentences and, even more
interestingly, that the processing time increased proportionately with the
number of optional transformations involved. More recent work has cast doubt
on these findings, and most psycholinguists are now more cautious about using
grammars produced by linguists as models of language processing.
Nevertheless, generative grammar continues to be a valuable source of
psycholinguistic experimentation, and the formal properties of language,
discovered or more adequately discussed by generative grammarians than they
have been by others, are generally recognized to have important implications
for the investigation of short-term and long-term memory and perceptual
strategies.

Speech perception

Another important area of psycholinguistic research that has been strongly


influenced by recent theoretical advances in linguistics and, more especially,
by the development of generative grammar is speech perception. It has long
been realized that the identification of speech soun ds and of the word forms
composed of them depends upon the context in which they occur and upon the
hearer's having mastered, usually as a child, the appropriate phonological and
grammatical system. Throughout the 1950s, work on speech perception was
dominated (as was psycholinguistics in general) by information theory,
according to which the occurrence of each sound in a word and each word in
an utterance is statistically determined by the preceding sounds and words.
Information theory is no longer as generally accepted as it was a few years
ago, and more recent research has shown that in speech perception the cues
provided by the acoustic input are interpreted, unconsciously and very rapidly,
with reference not only to the phonological structure of the language but also
to the more abstract levels of grammatical organization.

Other areas of research in Psycholinguistics

Other areas of psycholinguistics that should be briefly mentioned are the study
of aphasia and neurolinguistics. The term aphasia is used to refer to various
kinds of language disorders; recent work has sought to relate these, on the one
hand, to particular kinds of brain injury and, on the other, to psychological
theories of the storage and processing of different kinds of linguistic
information. One linguist has put forward the theory that the most basic
distinctions in language are those that are acquired first by children and are
subsequently most resistant to disruption and loss in aphasia. This, though not
disproved, is still regarded as controversial. Two kinds of aphasia are
commonly distinguished. In motor aphasia the patient manifests difficulty in the
articulation of speech or in writing and may produce utterances wi th a
simplified grammatical structure, but his comprehension is not affected. In
sensory aphasia the patient's fluency may be unaffected, but his
comprehension will be impaired and his utterances will often be incoherent.

Neurolinguistics should perhaps be regarded as an independent field of


research rather than as part of psycholinguistics. In 1864 it was shown that
motor aphasia is produced by lesions in the third frontal convolution of the left
hemisphere of the brain. Shortly after the connection had been established
between motor aphasia and damage to this area (known as Broca's area), the
source of sensory aphasia was localized in lesions of the posterior part of the
left temporal lobe. More recent work has confirmed these findings. The
technique of electrically stimulating the cortex in conscious patients has
enabled brain surgeons to induce temporary aphasia and so to identify a
"speech area" in the brain. It is no longer generally believed that there are
highly specialized "centres" within the speech area, each with its own
particular function; but the existence of such a speech area in the dominant
hemisphere of the brain (which for most people is the left hemisphere) seems
to be well established. The posterior part of this area is involved more in the
comprehension of speech and the construction of grammatically and
semantically coherent utterances, and the anterior part is concerned with the
articulation of speech and with writing. Little is yet known about the operation
of the neurological mechanisms underlying the storage and processing of
language.

2. Sociolinguistics

Just as it is difficult to draw the boundary between linguistics and


psycholinguistics and between psychology and psycholinguistics, so it is
difficult to distinguish sharply between linguistics and sociolinguistics and
between sociolinguistics and sociology. There is the further difficulty that,
because the boundary between sociology and anthropology is also unclear,
sociolinguistics merges with anthropological linguistics (see below).

It is frequently suggested that there is a conflict between the sociolinguistic


and the psycholinguistic approach to the study of language, and it is certainly
the case that two distinct points of view are discernible in the literature at th e
present time. Chomsky has described linguistics as a branch of cognitive
psychology, and neither he nor most of his followers have yet shown much
interest in the relationship between language and its social and cultural matrix.
On the other hand, many modern schools of linguistics that have been very
much concerned with the role of language in society would tend to relate
linguistics more closely to sociology and anthropology than to any other
discipline. It would seem that the opposition between the psyc holinguistic and
the sociolinguistic viewpoint must ultimately be transcended. The acquisition of
language, a topic of central concern to psycholinguists, is in part dependent
upon and in part itself determines the process of socialization; and the ability
to use one's native language correctly in the numerous socially prescribed
situations of daily life is as characteristic a feature of linguistic competence, in
the broad sense of this term, as is the ability to produce grammatical
utterances. Some of the most recent work in sociolinguistics and
psycholinguistics has sought to widen the notion of linguistic competence in
this way. So far, however, sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics tend to be
regarded as relatively independent areas of research.

Social dimensions

Language is probably the most important instrument of socialization that exists


in all human societies and cultures. It is largely by means of language that one
generation passes on to the next its myths, laws, customs, and beliefs, and it
is largely by means of language that the child comes to appreciate the
structure of the society into which he is born and his own place in that society.

As a social force, language serves both to strengthen the links that bind the
members of the same group and to differentiate the members of one group
from those of another. In many countries there are social dialects as well as
regional dialects, so that it is possible to tell from a person's speech not only
where he comes from but what class he belongs to. In some instances social
dialects can transcend regional dialects. This is notable in England, where
standard English in the so-called Received Pronunciation (RP) can be heard
from members of the upper class and upper middle class in all parts of the
country. The example of England is but an extreme manifestation of a tendency
that is found in all countries: there is less regional variation in the speech of
the higher than in that of the lower socioeconomic classes. In Britain and the
United States and in most of the other English-speaking countries, people will
almost always use the same dialect, regional or social, however formal or
informal the situation and regardless of whether their listeners speak the same
dialect or not. (Relatively minor adjustments of vocabulary may, however, be
made: an Englishman speaking to an American may employ the word "elevator"
rather than "lift" and so on.) In many communities throughout the world, it is
common for members to speak two or more different dialects and to use one
dialect rather than another in particular social situations. This is commonly
referred to as code-switching. Code-switching may operate between two
distinct languages (e.g., Spanish and English among Puerto Ricans in New
York) as well as between two dialects of the same language. The term
diglossia (rather than bilingualism) is frequently used by sociolinguists to refer
to this by no means uncommon phenomenon.

In every situation, what one says and how one says it depends upon the nature
of that situation, the social role being played at the time, one's status vis -à-vis
that of the person addressed, one's attitude towards him, and so on. Language
interacts with nonverbal behaviour in social situations and serves to clarify and
reinforce the various roles and relationships important in a particular culture.
Sociolinguistics is far from having satisfactorily analyzed or even identified all
the factors involved in the selection of one language feature rather than
another in particular situations. Among those that have been discussed in
relation to various languages are: the formality or informality of the situation;
power and solidarity relationships between the participants; differences of sex,
age, occupation, socioeconomic class, and educational background; and
personal or transactional situations. Terms such as style and register (as well
as a variety of others) are employed by many linguists to refer to the socially
relevant dimensions of phonological, grammatical, and lexical variation within
one language. So far there is very little agreement as to the precise application
of such terms.

3. Other Relationships

Anthropological linguistics

The fundamental concern of anthropological linguistics is to investigate the


relationship between language and culture. To what extent the structure of a
particular language is determined by or determines the form and content of the
culture with which it is associated remains a controversial question. Vocabul ary
differences between languages correlate obviously enough with cultural
differences, but even here the interdependence of language and culture is not
so strong that one can argue from the presence or absence of a corresponding
cultural difference. For example, from the fact that English--unlike French,
German, Russian, and many other languages--distinguishes lexically between
monkeys and apes, one cannot conclude that there is an associated difference
in the cultural significance attached to these animal s by English-speaking
societies. Some of the major grammatical distinctions in certain languages may
have originated in culturally important categories ( e.g., the distinction between
an animate and an inanimate gender). But they seem to endure independentl y
of any continuing cultural significance. The "Whorfian hypothesis" (the thesis
that one's thought and even perception are determined by the language one
happens to speak), in its strong form at least, is no longer debated as
vigorously as it was a few years ago. Anthropologists continue to draw upon
linguistics for the assistance it can give them in the analysis of such topic s as
the structure of kinship. A more recent development, but one that has not so
far produced any very substantial results, is the application of notions derived
from generative grammar to the analysis of ritual and other kinds of culturally
prescribed behaviour.

Computational linguistics

By computational linguistics is meant no more than the use of electronic


digital computers in linguistic research. At a theoretically trivial level,
computers are employed to scan texts and to produce, more rapidly and more
reliably than was possible in the past, such valuable aids t o linguistic and
stylistic research as word lists, frequency counts, and concordances.
Theoretically more interesting, though much more difficult, is the automatic
grammatical analysis of texts by computer. Considerable progress was made in
this area by research groups working on machine translation and information
retrieval in the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, France, and a
few other countries in the decade between the mid -1950s and the mid-1960s.
But much of the original impetus for this work disappeared, for a time at least,
in part because of the realization that the theoretical problems involved in
machine translation are much more difficult than they were at first thought to
be and in part as a consequence of a loss of interest among linguists in the
development of discovery procedures. Whether automatic syntactic analysis
and fully automatic high-quality machine translation are even feasible in
principle remains a controversial question.

Mathematical linguistics

What is commonly referred to as mathematical linguistics comprises two areas


of research: the study of the statistical structure of texts and the construction
of mathematical models of the phonological and grammatical structure of
languages. These two branches of mathematical linguistics, which may be
termed statistical and algebraic linguistics, respectively, are typically distinct.
Attempts have been made to derive the grammatical rules of languages from
the statistical structure of texts written in those languages, but such attempts
are generally thought to have been not only unsuccessful so far in practice but
also, in principle, doomed to failure. That languages have a statistical structure
is a fact well known to cryptographers. Within linguistics, it is of considerable
typological interest to compare languages from a statistical point of view (the
ratio of consonants to vowels, of nouns to verbs, and so on). Statistical
considerations are also of value in stylistics (see below).

Algebraic linguistics derives principally from the work of Noam Chomsky in the
field of generative grammar (see above Chomsky's grammar). In his earliest
work Chomsky described three different models of grammar--finite-state
grammar, phrase-structure grammar, and transformational grammar--and
compared them in terms of their capacity to generate all and only the
sentences of natural languages and, in doing so, to refle ct in an intuitively
satisfying manner the underlying formal principles and processes. Other
models have also been investigated, and it has been shown that certain
different models are equivalent in generative power to phrase -structure
grammars. The problem is to construct a model that has all the formal
properties required to handle the processes found to be operative in languages
but that prohibits rules that are not required for linguistic description. It is an
open question whether such a model, or one that approximates more closely to
this ideal than current models do, will be a transformational grammar or a
grammar of some radically different character.

Stylistics

The term stylistics is employed in a variety of senses by different linguists. In


its widest interpretation it is understood to deal with every kind of synchronic
variation in language other than what can be ascribed to differences of regional
dialect. At its narrowest interpretation it refers to the linguistic analysis of
literary texts. One of the aims of stylistics in this sense is to identify those
features of a text that give it its individual stamp and mark it as the work of a
particular author. Another is to identify the linguistic features of the text that
produce a certain aesthetic response in the reader. The aims of stylistics are
the traditional aims of literary criticism. What distinguishes stylistics as a
branch of linguistics (for those who regard it as such) is the fact that it draws
upon the methodological and theoretical principles of modern linguistics.

Philosophy of language

The analysis of language has always been a subject of particular concern to


philosophers, and traditional grammar was strongly influenced by the dominant
philosophical attitudes of the day. Modern linguistics and modern philosophical
theories have so far had little influence on one another. Some philosophers
have shown an interest in Chomsky's controversial suggestion that work in
generative grammar lends support to the rationalists in their long -standing
dispute about the source of human knowledge. Potentially more fruitful,
perhaps, is the interest shown by a number of linguists in philosophical
treatments of reference, quantification, and presupposition, in systems of
modal logic, and in the work of the so-called philosophers of ordinary
language.

Applied linguistics

In the sense in which the term applied linguistics is most commonly used
nowadays it is restricted to the application of linguistics to language teaching.
Much of the recent expansion of linguistics as a subject of teaching an d
research in the universities in many countries has come about because of its
value, actual and potential, for writing better language textbooks and devising
more efficient methods of teaching languages. Linguistics is also widely held to
be relevant to the training of teachers of the deaf and speech therapists.
Outside the field of education in the narrower sense, applied linguistics (and,
more particularly, applied sociolinguistics) has an important part to play in what
is called language planning; i.e., in advising governments, especially in recent
created states, as to which language or dialect should be made the official
language of the country and how it should be standardized.

E. The English Language

he English language is a chief medium of communication of people in the


T United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South
Africa, and numerous other countries. It is the official language of many
nations in the Commonwealth of Nations and is widely understood and used in
all of them. It is spoken in more parts of the world than any other language and
by more people than any other tongue except Chinese.

English belongs to the Anglo-Frisian group within the western branch of the
Germanic languages, a subfamily of the Indo-European languages. It is related
most closely to the Frisian language, to a lesser extent to Netherlandic (Dutch -
Flemish) and the Low German (Plattdeutsch) dialects, and more distantly to
Modern High German.

Vocabulary

The English vocabulary has increased greatly in more than 1500 years of
development. The most nearly complete dictionary of the language, the Oxford
English Dictionary (13 vol., 1933), a revised edition of A New English
Dictionary on Historical Principles (10 vol., 1884-1933; supplements), contains
500,000 words. It has been estimated, however, that the present English
vocabulary consists of more than 1 million words, including slang and dialect
expressions and scientific and technical terms, many of which only came into
use after the middle of the 20th century. The English vocabulary is more
extensive than that of any other language in the world, although some other
languages—Chinese, for example—have a word-building capacity equal to that
of English.

Extensive, constant borrowing from every major language, especially from


Latin, Greek, French, and the Scandinavian languages, and from numerous
minor languages, accounts for the great number of words in the English
vocabulary. In addition, certain processes ha ve led to the creation of many new
words as well as to the establishment of patterns for further expansion. Among
these processes are onomatopoeia, or the imitation of natural sounds, which
has created such words as burp and clink; affixation, or the addition of prefixes
and suffixes, either native, such as mis- and -ness, or borrowed, such as ex-
and -ist; the combination of parts of words, such as in brunch, composed of
parts of breakfast and lunch; the free formation of compounds, such as
bonehead and downpour; back formation, or the formation of words from
previously existing words, the forms of which suggest that the later words were
derived from the earlier ones—for example, to jell, formed from jelly; and
functional change, or the use of one part of speech as if it were another, for
example, the noun shower used as a verb, to shower. The processes that have
probably added the largest number of words are affixation and especially
functional change, which is facilitated by the peculiarities of English sy ntactical
structure.

Spelling

English is said to have one of the most difficult spelling systems in the world.
The written representation of English is not phonetically exact for two main
reasons. First, the spelling of words has changed to a lesser exten t than their
sounds; for example, the k in knife and the gh in right were formerly
pronounced (see Middle English Period below). Second, certain spelling
conventions acquired from foreign sources have been perpetuated; for
example, during the 16th century the b was inserted in doubt (formerly spelled
doute) on the authority of dubitare, the Latin source of the word. Outstanding
examples of discrepancies between spelling and pronunciation are the six
different pronunciations of ough, as in bough, cough, thorough, thought,
through, and rough; the spellings are kept from a time when the gh represented
a back fricative consonant that was pronounced in these words. Other obvious
discrepancies are the 14 different spellings of the sh sound, for example, as in
anxious, fission, fuchsia, and ocean.

Role of Phonemes
Theoretically, the spelling of phonemes, the simplest sound elements used to
distinguish one word from another, should indicate precisely the sound
characteristics of the language. For example, in English, at contains two
phonemes, mat three, and mast four. Very frequently, however, the spelling of
English words does not conform to the number of phonemes. Enough, for
example, which has four phonemes (enuf), is spelled with six letters, as is
breath, which also has four phonemes (breu) and six letters.

The main vowel phonemes in English include those represented by the


italicized letters in the following words: b it, beat, bet, bate, bat, but, botany,
bought, boat, boot, book, and burr. These phonemes are distinguished from
one another by the position of articulation in the mouth. Four vowel sounds, or
complex nuclei, of English are diphthongs formed by gliding from a low position
of articulation to a higher one. These diphthongs are the i of bite (a glide from
o of botany to ea of beat), the ou of bout (from o of botany to oo of boot), the
oy of boy (from ou of bought to ea of beat), and the u of butte (from ea of beat
to oo of boot). The exact starting point and ending point of the glide varies
within the English-speaking world.

Stress, Pitches, and Juncture

Other means to phonemic differentiation in English, apart from the


pronunciation of distinct vowels and consonants, are stress, pitch, and
juncture. Stress is the sound difference achieved by pronouncing one syllable
more forcefully than another, for example, the difference between rec¢ ord
(noun) and re cord¢ (verb). Pitch is, for example, the difference between the
pronunciation of John and John? Juncture or disjuncture of words causes such
differences in sound as that created by the pronunciation of blackbird (one
word) and black bird (two words). English employs four degrees of stress and
four kinds of juncture for differentiating words and phrases.

Inflection

Modern English is a relatively uninflected language. Nouns have separate


endings only in the possessive case and the plural number. Verbs have both a
strong conjugation—shown in older words—with internal vowel change, for
example, sing, sang, sung, and a weak conjugation with dental suffixes
indicating past tense, as in play, played. The latter is the predominant type.
Only 66 verbs of the strong type are in use; newer verbs invariably follow the
weak pattern. The third person singular has an -s ending, as in does. The
structure of English verbs is thus fairly simple, compared with that of verbs in
similar languages, and includes only a few other endings, such as -ing or -en;
but verb structure does involve the use of numerous auxiliaries such as have,
can, may, or must. Monosyllabic and some disyllabic adjectives are inflected
for degree of comparison, such as larger or happiest; other adjectives express
the same distinction by compounding with more and most. Pronouns, the most
heavily inflected parts of speech in English, have objective case forms, such as
me or her, in addition to the nominative (I, he, we) and possessive forms (my,
his, hers, our).

Parts of Speech

Although many grammarians still cling to the Greco -Latin tradition of dividing
words into eight parts of speech, efforts have recently been made to reclassify
English words on a different basis. The American linguist Charles Carpenter
Fries, in his work The Structure of English (1952), divided most English words
into four great form classes that generally correspond to the noun, verb,
adjective, and adverb in the standard classification. He classified 154 other
words as function words, or words that connect the main words of a sentence
and show their relations to one another. In the standard classification, many of
these function words are considered pronouns, prepositions, and conjunction s;
others are considered adverbs, adjectives, or verbs.

2. Development of the Language

Three main stages are usually recognized in the history of the development of
the English language. Old English, known formerly as Anglo -Saxon, dates from
AD 449 to 1066 or 1100. Middle English dates from 1066 or 1100 to 1450 or
1500. Modern English dates from about 1450 or 1500 and is subdivided into
Early Modern English, from about 1500 to 1660, and Late Modern English, from
about 1660 to the present time.

Old English Period

Old English, a variant of West Germanic, was spoken by certain Germanic


peoples (Angles, Saxons, and Jutes) of the regions comprising present -day
southern Denmark and northern Germany who invaded Britain in the 5th
century AD; the Jutes were the first to arrive, in 449, according to tradition.
Settling in Britain, the invaders drove the indigenous Celtic -speaking peoples,
notably the Britons, to the north and west. As time went on, Old English
evolved further from the original Continental form, and regional dialects
developed. The four major dialects recognized in Old English are Kentish,
originally the dialect spoken by the Jutes; West Saxon, a branch of the dialect
spoken by the Saxons; and Northumbrian and Mercian, subdivisions of the
dialects spoken by the Angles. By the 9th century, partly through the influence
of Alfred, king of the West Saxons and the first ruler of all England, West
Saxon became prevalent in prose literature. A Mercian mixed dialect, however,
was primarily used for the greatest poetry, such as the anonymous 8th -century
epic poem Beowulf and the contemporary elegiac poems.

Old English was an inflected language characterized by strong and weak


verbs; a dual number for pronouns (for example, a form for “we two” as well as
“we”), two different declensions of adjectives, four declensions of nouns, and
grammatical distinctions of gender. Although rich in word -building possibilities,
Old English was sparse in vocabulary. It borrowed few proper nouns from the
language of the conquered Celts, primarily those such as Aberdeen (“mouth of
the Dee”) and Inchcape (“island cape”) that describe geographical features.
Scholars believe that ten common nouns in Old English are of Celtic origin;
among these are bannock, cart, down, and mattock. Although other Celtic
words not preserved in literature may have been in use during the Old English
period, most Modern English words of Celtic origin, that is, those derived from
Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, or Irish, are comparatively recent borrowings .

The number of Latin words, many of them derived from the Greek, that were
introduced during the Old English period has been estimated at 140. Typical of
these words are altar, mass, priest, psalm, temple, kitchen, palm, and pear. A
few were probably introduced through the Celtic; others were brought to Britain
by the Germanic invaders, who previously had come into contact with Roman
culture. By far the largest number of Latin words was introduced as a result of
the spread of Christianity. Such words inclu ded not only ecclesiastical terms
but many others of less specialized significance.

About 40 Scandinavian (Old Norse) words were introduced into Old English by
the Norsemen, or Vikings, who invaded Britain periodically from the late 8th
century on. Introduced first were words pertaining to the sea and battle, but
shortly after the initial invasions other words used in the Scandinavian social
and administrative system—for example, the word law—entered the language,
as well as the verb form are and such widely used words as take, cut, both, ill,
and ugly.

Middle English Period

At the beginning of the Middle English period, which dates from the Norman
Conquest of 1066, the language was still inflectional; at the end of the period
the relationship between the elements of the sentence depended basically on
word order. As early as 1200 the three or four grammatical case forms of
nouns in the singular had been reduced to two, and to denote the plural the
noun ending -es had been adopted.

The declension of the noun was simplified further by dropping the final n from
five cases of the fourth, or weak, declension; by neutralizing all vowel endings
to e (sounded like the a in Modern English sofa), and by extending the
masculine, nominative, and accusative plural ending -as, later neutralized also
to -es, to other declensions and other cases. Only one example of a weak
plural ending, oxen, survives in Modern English; kine and brethren are later
formations. Several representatives of the Old English modification of the roo t
vowel in the plural, such as man, men, and foot, feet, survive also.

With the leveling of inflections, the distinctions of grammatical gender in


English were replaced by those of natural gender. During this period the dual
number fell into disuse, and the dative and accusative of pronouns were
reduced to a common form. Furthermore, the Scandinavian they, them were
substituted for the original hie, hem of the third person plural, and who, which,
and that acquired their present relative functions. The conjugation of verbs was
simplified by the omission of endings and by the use of a common form for the
singular and plural of the past tense of strong verbs.

In the early period of Middle English, a number of utilitarian words, such as


egg, sky, sister, window, and get, came into the language from Old Norse. The
Normans brought other additions to the vocabulary. Before 1250 about 900
new words had appeared in English, mainly words, such as baron, noble, and
feast, that the Anglo-Saxon lower classes required in their dealings with the
Norman-French nobility. Eventually the Norman nobility and clergy, although
they had learned English, introduced from the French words pertaining to the
government, the church, the army, and the fashions of the court, in addition to
others proper to the arts, scholarship, and medicine.

Midland, the dialect of Middle English derived from the Mercian dialect of Old
English, became important during the 14th century, when the counties in which
it was spoken developed into centers of university, economic, and courtly life.
East Midland, one of the subdivisions of Midland, had by that time become the
speech of the entire metropolitan area of the capital, London, and probably had
spread south of the Thames River into Kent and Surrey. The influence of East
Midland was strengthened by its use in the government off ices of London, by
its literary dissemination in the works of the 14th -century poets Geoffrey
Chaucer, John Gower, and John Lydgate, and ultimately by its adoption for
printed works by William Caxton. These and other circumstances gradually
contributed to the direct development of the East Midland dialect into the
Modern English language.

During the period of this linguistic transformation the other Middle English
dialects continued to exist, and dialects descending from them are still spoken
in the 20th century. Lowland Scottish, for example, is a development of the
Northern dialect.
The Great Vowel Shift

The transition from Middle English to Modern English was marked by a major
change in the pronunciation of vowels during the 15th and 16th centuries. This
change, termed the Great Vowel Shift by the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen,
consisted of a shift in the articulation of vowels with respect to the positions
assumed by the tongue and the lips. The Great Vowel Shift changed the
pronunciation of 18 of the 20 distinctive vowels and diphthongs of Middle
English. Spelling, however, remained unchanged and was preserved from then
on as a result of the advent of printing in England about 1475, during the shift.
(In general, Middle English orthography was much more phonetic than Modern
English; all consonants, for example, were pronounced, whereas now letters
such as the l preserved in walking are silent).

All long vowels, with the exception of /ì/ (pronounced in Middle English
somewhat like ee in need) and /u/ (pronounced in Middle English like oo in
food), came to be pronounced with the jaw position one degree higher.
Pronounced previously in the highest possible position, the/ì/ became
diphthongized to “ah-ee,” and the/u/ to “ee-oo.” The Great Vowel Shift, which is
still in progress, caused the pronunciation in English of the letters a, e, i, o,
and u to differ from that used in most other languages of Western Europe. The
approximate date when words were borrowed from other languages can be
ascertained by means of these and other sound changes. Thus it is known that
the old French word dame was borrowed before the shift, since its vowel
shifted with the Middle English /a/ from a pronunciation like that of the vowel in
calm to that of the vowel in name.

Modern English Period

In the early part of the Modern English period the vocabulary was enlarged by
the widespread use of one part of speech for another and by increased
borrowings from other languages. The revival of interest in Latin and Greek
during the Renaissance brought new words into English from those languages.
Other words were introduced by English travelers and merchants after their
return from journeys on the Continent. From Italian came cameo, stanza, and
violin; from Spanish and Portuguese, alligator, peccadillo, and sombrero.
During its development, Modern English borrowed words from more than 50
different languages.

In the late 17th century and during the 18th century, certain important
grammatical changes occurred. The formal rules of English grammar we re
established during that period. The pronoun its came into use, replacing the
genitive form his, which was the only form used by the translators of the King
James Bible (1611). The progressive tenses developed from the use of the
participle as a noun preceded by the preposition on; the preposition gradually
weakened to a and finally disappeared. Thereafter only the simple ing form of
the verb remained in use. After the 18th century this process of development
culminated in the creation of the progressive passive form, for example, “The
job is being done.”

The most important development begun during this period and continued
without interruption throughout the 19th and 20th centuries concerned
vocabulary. As a result of colonial expansion, notably in North America but
also in other areas of the world, many new words entered the English
language. From the indigenous peoples of North America, the words raccoon
and wigwam were borrowed; from Peru, llama and quinine; from the West
Indies, barbecue and cannibal; from Africa, chimpanzee and zebra; from India,
bandanna, curry, and punch; and from Australia, kangaroo and boomerang. In
addition, thousands of scientific terms were developed to denote new
concepts, discoveries, and inventions. Many of these terms, such as neutron,
penicillin, and supersonic, were formed from Greek and Latin roots; others
were borrowed from modern languages, as with blitzkrieg from German and
sputnik from Russian.

20th-Century English

In Great Britain at present the speech of educated persons is known as


Received Standard English. A class dialect rather than a regional dialect, it is
based on the type of speech cultivated at such schools as Eton and Harrow
and at such of the older universities as Oxford and Cambridge. Many English
people who speak regional dialects in their childhood acquire Received
Standard English while attending school and university. Its influence has
become even stronger in recent years because of its use by such public media
as the British Broadcasting Corp.

Widely differing regional and local dialects are still employed in the various
counties of Great Britain. Other important regional dialects have developed
also; for example, the English language in Ireland has retained certain
individual peculiarities of pronunciation, such as the pronunciation of lave for
leave and fluther for flutter; certain syntactical peculiarities, such as the u se of
after following forms of the verb be; and certain differences in vocabulary,
including the use of archaic words such as adown (for down) and Celtic
borrowings such as banshee. The Lowland Scottish dialect, sometimes called
Lallans, first made known throughout the English-speaking world by the songs
of the 18th-century Scottish poet Robert Burns, contains differences in
pronunciation also, such as neebour (“neighbor”) and guid (“good”), and words
of Scandinavian origin peculiar to the dialect, such as braw and bairn. The
English spoken in Australia, with its marked diphthongization of vowels, also
makes use of special words, retained from English regional dialect usages, or
taken over from indigenous Australian terms.

Basic English

A simplified form of the English language based on 850 key words was
developed in the late 1920s by the English psychologist Charles Kay Ogden
and publicized by the English educator I. A. Richards. Known as Basic English,
it was used mainly to teach English to non-English-speaking persons and
promoted as an international language. The complexities of English spelling
and grammar, however, were major hindrances to the adoption of Basic
English as a second language.

The fundamental principle of Basic English was that any idea, h owever
complex, may be reduced to simple units of thought and expressed clearly by a
limited number of everyday words. The 850-word primary vocabulary was
composed of 600 nouns (representing things or events), 150 adjectives (for
qualities and properties), and 100 general “operational” words, mainly verbs
and prepositions. Almost all the words were in common use in English -
speaking countries; more than 60 percent were one -syllable words. The
abbreviated vocabulary was created in part by eliminating numerous synonyms
and by extending the use of 18 “basic” verbs, such as make, get, do, have, and
be. These verbs were generally combined with prepositions, such as up,
among, under, in, and forward. For example, a Basic English student would
use the expression “go up” instead of “ascend.”

Pidgin English

English also enters into a number of simplified languages that arose among
non-English-speaking peoples. Pidgin English (see Pidgin), spoken in the
Melanesian islands, New Guinea, Australia, the Philippines, and Ha waii and on
the Asian shores of the Pacific Ocean, developed as a means of
communication between Chinese and English traders. The Chinese adopted
many English words and a few indispensable non -English words and created a
means of discourse, using a simple grammatical apparatus. Bêche-de-Mer, a
pidgin spoken in the southern and western Pacific islands, is predominantly
English in structure, although it includes many Polynesian words. Chinook
Jargon, used as a lingua franca by the Native Americans, French, an d English
on the North American Pacific coast, contains English, French, and Native
American words; its grammatical structure is based on that of the Chinook
language. The use of pidgin is growing in Africa, notably in Cameroon, Sierra
Leone, and East Africa.

Future of the English Language

The influence of the mass media appears likely to result in standardized


pronunciation, more uniform spelling, and eventually a spelling closer to actual
pronunciation. Despite the likelihood of such standardization, a u nique feature
of the English language remains its tendency to grow and change. Despite the
warnings of linguistic purists, new words are constantly being coined and
usages modified to express new concepts. Its vocabulary is constantly
enriched by linguistic borrowings, particularly by cross-fertilizations from
American English. Because it is capable of infinite possibilities of
communication, the English language has become the chief international
language.

3. American/Canadian English

n important development of English outside Great Britain occurred with the


A colonization of North America. American English may be considered to
include the English spoken in Canada, although the Canadian variety retains
some features of British pronunciation, spelling, and vocabulary. The most
distinguishing differences between American English and British English are in
pronunciation and vocabulary. There are slighter differences in spelling, pitch,
and stress as well. Written American English also has a tendency to b e more
rigid in matters of grammar and syntax, but at the same time appears to be
more tolerant of the use of neologisms. Despite these differences, it is often
difficult to determine—apart from context—whether serious literary works have
been written in Great Britain or the U.S./Canada—or, for that matter, in
Australia, New Zealand, or South Africa.

It differs from English spoken elsewhere in the world not so much in particulars
as in the total configuration. That is, the dialects of what is termed Standar d
American English share enough characteristics so that the language as a
whole can be distinguished from Received Standard (British) English or, for
example, Australian English.

The differences in pronunciation and cadence between spoken American


English and other varieties of the language are easily discernible. In the written
form, however, despite minor differences in vocabulary, spelling, and syntax,
and apart from context, it is often difficult to determine whether a work was
written in England, the United States, or any other part of the English -speaking
world.
American lexicographer Noah Webster was among the first to recognize the
growing divergence of American and British usages. His work An American
Dictionary of the English Language (1828) marked this difference with its
inclusion of many new American words, indigenous meanings attached to old
words, changes in pronunciation, and a series of spelling reforms that he
devised (-er instead of British -re, -or to replace-our, check instead of cheque).
Webster went so far as to predict that the American language would one day
become a distinct language. Some later commentators, notably H. L. Mencken,
compiler of The American Language (3 volumes, 1936-1948), have also argued
that it is a separate language, but most authorities today agree that it is a
dialect of British English.

Patterns of American English

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the study of American English was
concerned mainly with identifying Americanisms and giving the etymologies of
Americanisms in the vocabulary: words borrowed from Native American
languages (mugwump, caucus); words retained after having been given up in
Great Britain (bug, to mean insects in general rather than bed bug specifically,
as in Great Britain); or words that developed a new significance in the New
World (corn, to designate what the British call maize, rather than grain in
general). Large numbers of American terms (elevator, truck, hood [of an
automobile], windshield, garbage collector, drugstore) were shown to differ
from their British counterparts (respectively: lift, lorry, bonnet, windscreen,
dustman, chemist's). Such lexical differences between Standard American and
British English still exist, but, as a result of modern communications, speak ers
of English everywhere have no trouble in understanding one another. More
recently, linguistic researchers have turned their attention to the study of
variation patterns in American English and to the social and historical sources
of these patterns.

Regional Dialects

Regionally oriented research before 1940 distinguished three main regional


dialects of Standard American English, each of which has several subdialects.
The Northern (or New England) dialect is spoken in New England and New
York State; one of its subdialects is the “New Yorkese” of New York City. The
Midland (or General American) dialect is heard along the coast from New
Jersey to Delaware, with variants spoken in an area bounded by the Upper
Ohio Valley, West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and eastern Tennessee. The
Southern dialect, with its varieties, is spoken from Delaware to South Carolina.
From their respective focal points these dialects, according to this theory, have
spread and mingled across the rest of the country.
Social/Cultural Dialects

Social/cultural dialects vary both the vocabulary and grammar of Standard


American English and are not always intelligible to speakers of the standard
language. The most distinctive variety of American English, in terms of
vocabulary and grammar, is the social/cultural dialect known as Gullah,
actually a contact language, or creole, spoken by blacks in the Georgia -South
Carolina low country but also as far away as southeast Texas. Gullah,
combining 17th- and 18th-century Black English and several West African
languages, has given to American English such words as goober (peanut),
gumbo (okra), and voodoo. It is the dialect used in the novel Porgy (1925) by
American writer DuBose Heyward. “Me beena shum” (I was seeing him/her/it)
is barely intelligible to a speaker of Standard American English, and almost all
Gullah speakers shift to more standard usage when conversing with outsiders.

Pennsylvania Dutch, another distinguishable dialect, is actually English heavily


influenced by literal translations from the original German language of settlers
in Pennsylvania. In this dialect such a construction as “He may come back
bothsides, ain't?” (He might come back on either side, mightn't he?) is
possible. Most Pennsylvania Dutch speakers also readily adapt thems elves to
standard usage.

Black English

Until the 19th century, most blacks throughout the country spoke a creole
similar to Gullah and West Indian English. Change in the direction of Standard
American English vocabulary and syntax, particularly in the 20t h century, has
been rapid but never complete. The Black English of the inner cities
characteristically retains such locutions as “He busy” (He is busy) as opposed
to “He be busy” (He is busy indefinitely) and “She been said that” to express
action markedly in the past (she had said that). In the 1960s Black English
became a topic of linguistic controversy in educational circles because of its
supposed deficiencies and ultimately was the subject of legislative action
under the Bilingual Education Act (1968). Nevertheless, Black English has
made contributions to American English vocabulary, especially through jazz —
from the word jazz itself to such terms as nitty-gritty and uptight.

Development of American English

English commentators in the 18th century note d the “astounding uniformity” of


the language spoken in the American colonies, excepting the language spoken
by the slaves. (Subvarieties of English, however, were spoken by Native
Americans and other non-British groups.) The reason for this uniformity is that
the first colonists came not as regional but as social groups from all parts of
England, so that dialect leveling was the dominant force.

Grammatical Formality

Against this background of uniformity, deviations from Standard American


English have frequently met with disapproval from those who promulgate
“correct” English. Grammatical formality is the most notable feature of
Standard American English, and particular stigma is attached to the use of
nonstandard verb forms. Rigidity in grammar and syntax in written Standard
American English is greater than in British English in part because large
numbers of immigrants acquired English as a second language according to
formal rules. Also, social mobility in the United States has produced certain
anxieties and confusion about “correct” usage as an indication of status. What
is considered Standard American English is today spoken for business and
professional purposes by people in all parts of the country, many of whom
speak very differently in private. In writing, however, many feel constrained to
use formal, Latinate locutions even when addressing close friends.

Regional Variations

In earlier times, the dialect of New England, with its British form of
pronunciation (ah for a in path, dance; loss of the r sound in barn, park), was
considered prestigious, but such pronunciations failed to inspire nationwide
emulation. Indeed, no single regional characteristic has ever been able to
dominate the language. (One of the reasons that some linguists define Black
English as a language rather than a dialect is that its vocabulary,
pronunciation, and syntax are similar in all parts of the country, rural and
urban.)

Today, the concept of so-called Network Standard, promoted by radio and


television, provokes some argument from dialectologists, who champion
diversity and richness of speech, but regional variations have by no means
been obliterated. The Midland (or General American) distinct r sound persists
(car), and even educated speakers in the South do not differentia te pen from
pin.

Growth of the American Vocabulary

The uniformity of the English spoken by the British colonists until about 1780
was soon disrupted by non-English influences. First, many Native American
words were taken over directly to describe indigenous flora and fauna
(sassafras, raccoon), food (hominy), ceremonies (powwow), and, of course,
geographic names (Massachusetts, Susquehanna). Phrasal compounds,
translated or adapted from the Native American, were also added to English:
warpath, peace pipe, bury the hatchet, fire water. Other borrowings came in
time from the Dutch (boss, poppycock, spook), German (liverwurst, noodle,
cole slaw, semester), French (levee, chowder, prairie), Spanish (hoosegow,
from juzgado, “courtroom”; mesa, ranch[o]; tortilla), and Finnish (sauna).

Other modifications in vocabulary came about presumably because of lack of


education or because of confusion on the part of explorers and settlers who
applied incorrect names to things encountered in the New World —for example,
partridge, used indiscriminately for quail, grouse, or other game birds, and
buffalo, applied to the American bison.

American English vocabulary has been and still is enriched with jargon, terms
coming from trades and professions. Slang, argot, and even certain
euphemisms have also been a constant source of language enrichment,
although some terms die out before they are admitted to the standard
vocabulary. In the 19th century prudishness influenced the language: legs were
called “limbs,” and pregnant “in the family way.”

As might be expected in a nation originating from 13 maritime colonies, a great


admixture of nautical expressions has been in the language since early times:
freight (used as a verb), slush fund, shove off, hail from. Baseball took over
skipper (to mean manager), on deck, and in the hole (originally hold) from the
nautical vocabulary and contributed many of its own colorful idiomatic
expressions to the general language (for example, get to first base).

Influence on British English

Spread by motion pictures, books, and television, Americanisms —especially


American slang—have in large numbers found their way to Great Britain, more
and more blurring the distinctions between the two forms of the English
language. Although nonstandard phrases, such as “met up with” or “try out” (in
the sense of test), may still encounter objections from purists, the very force of
their objections shows how influential such words have been on everyday
British English speech.

American English dictionary

(1828), two-volume dictionary by the American lexicographer Noah Webster.


He began work on it in 1807 and completed it in France and England in 1824 -
25, producing a two-volume lexicon containing 12,000 words and 30,000 to
40,000 definitions that had not appeared in any earlier dictionary. Because it
was based on the principle that word usage should evolve from the spoken
language, the work was attacked for its "Americanism," or unconventional
preferences in spelling and usage, as well as for its inclusion of nonliterary
words, especially technical terms in the arts and sciences . Despite harsh
criticism, the work sold out, 2,500 copies in the United States and 3,000 in
England, in little over a year. It was relatively unpopular thereafter, however,
despite the appearance of the second, corrected edition in 1840; and the rights
were sold in 1843 by the Webster estate to George and Charles Merriam.

4. Other Englishes

Australian and New Zealand English

Unlike Canada, Australia has few speakers of European languages other than
English within its borders. There are still many Aborigin al languages, though
they are spoken by only a few hundred speakers each and their continued
existence is threatened. More than 80 percent of the population is British. By
the mid-20th century, with rapid decline of its Aboriginal tongues, English was
without rivals in Australia.

During colonial times the new settlers had to find names for a fauna and flora
(e.g., banksia, iron bark, whee whee) different from anything previously known
to them: trees that shed bark instead of leaves and cherries with extern al
stones. The words brush, bush, creek, paddock, and scrub acquired wider
senses, whereas the terms brook, dale, field, forest, and meadow were seldom
used. A creek leading out of a river and entering it again downstream was
called an anastomizing branch (a term from anatomy), or an anabranch,
whereas a creek coming to a dead end was called by its native name, a
billabong. The giant kingfisher with its raucous bray was long referred to as a
laughing jackass, later as a bushman's clock, but now it is a kook aburra. Cattle
so intractable that only roping could control them were said to be ropable, a
term now used as a synonym for "angry" or "extremely annoyed."

A deadbeat was a penniless "sundowner" at the very end of his tether, and a
no-hoper was an incompetent fellow, hopeless and helpless. An offsider
(strictly, the offside driver of a bullock team) was any assistant or partner. A
rouseabout was first an odd-job man on a sheep station and then any kind of
handyman. He was, in fact, the "down-under" counterpart of the wharf labourer,
or roustabout, on the Mississippi River. Both words originated in Cornwall, and
many other terms, now exclusively Australian, came ultimately from British
dialects. "Dinkum," for instance, meaning "true, authentic, genuine," ech oed
the "fair dinkum," or fair deal, of Lincolnshire dialect. "Fossicking" about for
surface gold, and then rummaging about in general, perpetuated the term
fossick ("to elicit information, ferret out the facts") from the Cornish dialect of
English. To "barrack," or jeer noisily, recalled Irish "barrack" ("to brag, boast"),
whereas "skerrick" in the phrase "not a skerrick left" was obviously identical
with the "skerrick" meaning "small fragment, particle," still heard in English
dialects from Westmorland to Hampshire.

Some Australian English terms came from Aboriginal speech: the words
boomerang, corroboree (warlike dance and then any large and noisy
gathering), dingo (reddish-brown half-domesticated dog), galah (cockatoo),
gunyah (bush hut), kangaroo, karri (dark-red eucalyptus tree), nonda
(rosaceous tree yielding edible fruit), pokutukawa (evergreen bearing brilliant
blossom), wallaby (small marsupial), and wallaroo (large rock kangaroo).
Australian English has slower rhythms and flatter intonations than RP.
Although there is remarkably little regional variation throughout the entire
continent, there is significant social variation. The neutral vowel / / (as the a in
"sofa") is frequently used, as in London Cockney: "arches" and "archers" are
both pronounced [a:t z], and the pronunciations of RP "day" and "go" are,
respectively, [d i] and [g u].

Although New Zealand lies over 1,000 miles away, much of the English spoken
there is similar to that of Australia. The blanket term Austral English is
sometimes used to cover the language of the whole of Australasia, or Southern
Asia, but this term is far from popular with Ne w Zealanders because it makes
no reference to New Zealand and gives all the prominence, so they feel, to
Australia. Between North and South Islands there are observable differences.
For one thing, Maori, which is still a living language (related to Tahitia n,
Hawaiian, and the other Austronesian [Malayo -Polynesian] languages), has a
greater number of speakers and more influence in North Island.

The English of India-Pakistan

In 1950 India became a federal republic within the Commonwealth of Nations,


and Hindi was declared the first national language. English, it was stated,
would "continue to be used for all official purposes until 1965." In 1967,
however, by the terms of the English Language Amendment Bill, English was
proclaimed "an alternative official or associate language with Hindi until such
time as all non-Hindi states had agreed to its being dropped." English is
therefore acknowledged to be indispensable. It is the only practicable means of
day-to-day communication between the central government at Ne w Delhi and
states with non-Hindi speaking populations, especially with the Deccan, or
"South," where millions speak Dravidian (non -Indo-European) languages--
Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam. English is widely used in business,
and, although its use as a medium in higher education is decreasing, it remains
the principal language of scientific research.

In 1956 Pakistan became an autonomous republic comprising two states, East


and West. Bengali and Urdu were made the national languages of East and
West Pakistan, respectively, but English was adopted as a third official
language and functioned as the medium of interstate comm unication. (In 1971
East Pakistan broke away from its western partner and became the
independent state of Bangladesh.)

African English

Africa is the most multilingual area in the world, if people are measured against
languages. Upon a large number of indigenous languages rests a slowly
changing superstructure of world languages (Arabic, English, French, and
Portuguese). The problems of language are everywhere linked with political,
social, economic, and educational factors.

The Republic of South Africa, the oldest British settlement in the continent,
resembles Canada in having two recognized European languages within its
borders: English and Afrikaans, or Cape Dutch. Both British and Dutch traders
followed in the wake of 15th-century Portuguese explorers and have lived in
widely varying war-and-peace relationships ever since. Although the Union of
South Africa, comprising Cape Province, Transvaal, Natal, and Orange Free
State, was for more than a half century (1910 -61) a member of the British
Empire and Commonwealth, its four prime ministers (Botha, Smuts, Hertzog,
and Malan) were all Dutchmen. In the early 1980s Afrikaners outn umbered
Britishers by three to two. The Afrikaans language began to diverge seriously
from European Dutch in the late 18th century and has gradually come to be
recognized as a separate language. Although the English spoken in South
Africa differs in some respects from standard British English, its speakers do
not regard the language as a separate one. They have naturally come to use
many Afrikanerisms, such as kloof, kopje, krans, veld, and vlei, to denote
features of the landscape and occasionally employ African names to designate
local animals and plants. The words trek and commando, notorious in South
African history, have acquired almost worldwide currency.

Elsewhere in Africa, English helps to answer the needs of wider


communication. It functions as an official language of administration in
Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland and in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi,
Uganda, and Kenya. It is the language of instruction at Makerere University in
Kampala, Uganda; at the University of Nairobi, Kenya; and at the University of
Dar es Salaam, in Tanzania.

The West African states of The Gambia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Nigeria,
independent members of the Commonwealth, have English as their official
language. They are all multilingual. The official language of Liberia is also
English, although its tribal communities constitute four different linguistic
groups. Its leading citizens regard themselves as Americo -Liberians, being
descendants of those freed blacks whose first contingents arrived in West
Africa in 1822. South of the Sahara indigenous lan guages are extending their
domains and are competing healthily and vigorously with French and English.

F. Languages of the World

stimates of the number of languages spoken in the world today vary


E depending on where the dividing line between language a nd dialect is drawn.
For instance, linguists disagree over whether Chinese should be considered a
single language because of its speakers' shared cultural and literary tradition,
or whether it should be considered several different languages because of the
mutual unintelligibility of, for example, the Mandarin spoken in Beijing and the
Cantonese spoken in Hong Kong. If mutual intelligibility is the basic criterion,
current estimates indicate that there are about 6000 languages spoken in the
world today. However, many languages with a smaller number of speakers are
in danger of being replaced by languages with large numbers of speakers. In
fact, some scholars believe that perhaps 90 percent of the languages spoken
in the 1990s will be extinct or doomed to extinction by the end of the 21st
century. The 12 most widely spoken languages, with approximate numbers of
native speakers, are as follows: Mandarin Chinese, 836 million; Hindi, 333
million; Spanish, 332 million; English, 322 million; Bengali, 189 million; A rabic,
186 million; Russian, 170 million; Portuguese, 170 million; Japanese, 125
million; German, 98 million; French, 72 million; Malay, 50 million. If second -
language speakers are included in these figures, English is the second most
widely spoken language, with 418 million speakers.

1. Language Classification

Linguists classify languages using two main classification systems: typological


and genetic. A typological classification system organizes languages according
to the similarities and differences in their structures. Languages that share the
same structure belong to the same type, while languages with different
structures belong to different types. For example, despite the great differences
between the two languages in other respects, Mandarin Chinese and English
belong to the same type, grouped by word-order typology. Both languages
have a basic word order of subject-verb-object.

A genetic classification of languages divides them into families on the basis of


their historical development: A group of languages that descend historically
from the same common ancestor form a language family. For example, the
Romance languages form a language family because they all descended from
the Latin language. Latin, in turn, belongs to a larger language family, Indo -
European, the ancestor language of which is called Proto -Indo-European.
Some genetic groupings are universally accepted. However, because
documents attesting to the form of most ancestor languages, including Proto -
Indo-European, have not survived, much controversy surrounds the more wide-
ranging genetic groupings. A conservative survey of the world's language
families follows.

Indo-European Language Family

The Indo-European languages are the most widely spoken languages in


Europe, and they also extend into western and southern Asia. The family
consists of a number of subfamilies or branches (groups of languages that
descended from a common ancestor, which in turn is a member of a larger
group of languages that descended from a common ancestor). Most of the
people in northwestern Europe speak Germanic languages, which include
English, German, and Dutch as well as the Scandinavian languages, such as
Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. The Celtic languages, such as Welsh and
Gaelic, once covered a large part of Europe but are now restricted to its
western fringes. The Romance languages, all descended from Latin, are the
only survivors of a somewhat more extensive family, Italic, which includes, in
addition to Latin, a number of now extinct languages of Italy. Langu ages of the
Baltic and Slavic (Slavonic) branches are closely related. Only two of the Baltic
languages survive: Lithuanian and Latvian. The Slavic languages, which cover
much of eastern and central Europe, include Russian, Ukrainian, Polish,
Czech, Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian. In the Balkan Peninsula, two branches
of Indo-European exist that each consist of a single language —namely the
Greek language and the Albanian language. Farther east, in Caucasia, the
Armenian language constitutes another single -language branch of Indo-
European.

The other main surviving branch of the Indo-European family is Indo-Iranian. It


has two subbranches, Iranian and Indo-Aryan (Indic). Iranian languages are
spoken mainly in southwestern Asia and include Persian, Pashto (spoke n in
Afghanistan), and Kurdish. Indo-Aryan languages are spoken in the northern
part of South Asia (Pakistan, northern India, Nepal, and Bangladesh) and also
in most of Sri Lanka (see Indian Languages). This branch includes Hindi-Urdu,
Bengali, Nepali, and Sinhalese (the language spoken by the majority of people
in Sri Lanka). Historical documents attest to other, now extinct, branches of
Indo-European, such as the Anatolian languages, which were once spoken in
what is now Turkey and include the ancient Hittite language.

Other European Language Families


The Uralic languages constitute the other main language family of Europe.
They are spoken mostly in the northeastern part of the conti nent, spilling over
into northwestern Asia; one language, Hungarian, is spoken in central Europe.
Most Uralic languages belong to the family's Finno -Ugric branch. This branch
includes (in addition to Hungarian) Finnish, Estonian, and Saami. Europe also
has one language isolate (a language not known to be related to any other
language): Basque, which is spoken in the Pyrenees. At the boundary between
southeastern Europe and Asia lie the Caucasus Mountains. Since ancient
times the region has contained a large number of languages, including two
groups of languages that have not been definitively related to any other
language families. The South Caucasian, or Kartvelian, languages are spoken
in Georgia and include the Georgian language. The North Caucasian
languages fall into North-West Caucasian, North-Central Caucasian, and
North-East Caucasian subgroups. The genetic relation of North -West
Caucasian to the other subgroups is not universally agreed upon. The North -
West Caucasian languages include Abkhaz, the North-Central Caucasian
languages include Chechen, and the North-East Caucasian languages include
the Avar language.

Asian and Pacific Language Families

South Asia contains, in addition to the Indo -Aryan branch of Indo-European,


two other large language families. The Dravidian family is dominant in southern
India and includes Tamil and Telugu. The Munda languages represent the
Austro-Asiatic language family in India and contain many languages, each with
relatively small numbers of speakers. The Austro -Asiatic family also spreads
into Southeast Asia, where it includes the Khmer (Cambodian) and Vietnamese
languages. South Asia contains at least one language isolate, Burushaski,
spoken in a remote part of northern Pakistan.

A number of linguists believe that many of the languages of central, northern,


and eastern Asia form a single Altaic language family, although others consider
Turkic, Tungusic, and Mongolic to be separate, unrelated language families.
The Turkic languages include Turkish and a number of languag es of the former
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), such as Uzbek and Tatar. The
Tungusic languages are spoken mainly by small population groups in Siberia
and Manchuria. This family includes the nearly extinct Manchu language. The
main language of the Mongolic family is Mongolian. Some linguists also assign
Korean and Japanese to the Altaic family, although others regard these
languages as isolates. In northern Asia there are a number of languages that
appear either to form small, independent families or to be language isolates,
such as the Chukotko-Kamchatkan language family of the Chukot and
Kamchatka peninsulas in the far east of Russia. These languages are often
referred to collectively as Paleo-Siberian (Paleo-Asiatic), but this is a
geographic, not a genetic, grouping.

The Sino-Tibetan language family covers not only most of China, but also
much of the Himalayas and parts of Southeast Asia. The family's major
languages are Chinese, Tibetan, and Myanmar. The Tai languages constitute
another important language family of Southeast Asia. They are spoken in
Thailand, Laos, and southern China and include the Thai language. The Miao -
Yao, or Hmong-Mien, languages are spoken in isolated areas of southern
China and northern Southeast Asia. The Austron esian languages, formerly
called Malayo-Polynesian, cover the Malay Peninsula and most islands to the
southeast of Asia and are spoken as far west as Madagascar and throughout
the Pacific islands as far east as Easter Island. The Austronesian languages
include Malay (called Bahasa Malaysia in Malaysia, and Bahasa Indonesia in
Indonesia), Javanese, Hawaiian, and Maori (the language of the aboriginal
people of New Zealand).

Although the inhabitants of some of the coastal areas and offshore islands of
New Guinea speak Austronesian languages, most of the main island's
inhabitants, as well as some inhabitants of nearby islands, speak languages
unrelated to Austronesian. Linguists collectively refer to these languages as
Papuan languages, although this is a geographical term covering about 60
different language families. The languages of the Australian Aborigines
constitute another unrelated group, and it is debatable whether all Australian
languages form a single family.

African Language Families

The languages of Africa may belong to as few as four families: Afro -Asiatic,
Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Congo, and Khoisan, although the genetic unity of Nilo -
Saharan and Khoisan is still disputed. Afro-Asiatic languages occupy most of
North Africa and also large parts of southwestern Asia. The family consists of
several branches. The Semitic branch includes Arabic, Hebrew, and many
languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea, including Amharic, the dominant language of
Ethiopia. The Chadic branch, spoken mainly in northern Nigeria and adj acent
areas, includes Hausa, one of the two most widely spoken languages of sub -
Saharan Africa (the other being Swahili). Other subfamilies of Afro -Asiatic are
Berber, Cushitic, and the single-language branch Egyptian, which contains the
now-extinct language of the ancient Egyptians.

The Niger-Congo family covers most of sub-Saharan Africa and includes such
widely spoken West African languages as Yoruba and Fulani, as well as the
Bantu languages of eastern and southern Africa, which include Swahili and
Zulu. The Nilo-Saharan languages are spoken mainly in eastern Africa, in an
area between those covered by the Afro-Asiatic and the Niger-Congo
languages. The best-known Nilo-Saharan language is Masai, spoken by the
Masai people in Kenya and Tanzania. The Khoisan languages are spoken in
the southwestern corner of Africa and include the Nama language (formerly
called Hottentot).

Language Families of the Americas

Some linguists group all indigenous languages of the Americas into just three
families, while most separate them into a large number of families and isolates.
Well-established families include Eskimo-Aleut. The family stretches from the
eastern edge of Siberia to the Aleutian Islands, and across Alaska and
northern Canada to Greenland, where one variety o f the Inuit (Eskimo)
language, Greenlandic, is an official language. The Na -Dené languages, the
main branch of which comprises the Athabaskan languages, occupies much of
northwestern North America. The Athabaskan languages also include,
however, a group of languages in the southwestern United States, one of which
is Navajo. Languages of the Algonquian and Iroquoian families constitute the
major indigenous languages of northeastern North America, while the Siouan
family is one of the main families of central North America.

The Uto-Aztecan family extends from the southwestern United States into
Central America and includes Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec civilization
and its modern descendants. The Mayan languages are spoken mainly in
southern Mexico and Guatemala. Major language families of South America
include Carib and Arawak in the north, and Macro -Gê and Tupian in the east.
Guaraní, recognized as a national language in Paraguay alongside the official
language, Spanish, is an important member of the Tup ian family. In the Andes
Mountains region, the dominant indigenous languages are Quechua and
Aymara; the genetic relation of these languages to each other and to other
languages remains controversial.

Pidgin and Creole Languages

Individual pidgin and creole languages pose a particular problem for genetic
classification because the vocabulary and grammar of each comes from
different sources. Consequently, many linguists do not try to classify them
genetically. Pidgin and creole languages are found in many p arts of the world,
but there are particular concentrations in the Caribbean, West Africa, and the
islands of the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific. English -based creoles such
as Jamaican Creole and Guyanese Creole, and French -based creoles such as
Haitian Creole, can be found in the Caribbean. English -based creoles are
widespread in West Africa. About 10 percent of the population of Sierra Leone
speaks Krio as a native language, and an additional 85 percent speaks it as a
second language. The creoles of the Indian Ocean islands, such as Mauritius,
are French-based. An English-based pidgin, Tok Pisin, is spoken by more than
2 million people in Papua New Guinea, making it the most widely spoken
auxiliary language of that country. The inhabitants of the Solomo n Islands and
Vanuatu speak similar varieties of Tok Pisin, called Pijin and Bislama,
respectively.

2. International Languages

International language is any of several languages, natural or deliberately


constructed, used to facilitate communications among peoples with different
native languages.

From time to time different natural languages have been used as universal
tongues. As a result of conquest or colonialism, subjugated nations have been
forced to abandon their own languages or have gradually adopte d the language
of the conqueror; conversely, occupying forces have often gradually
assimilated the languages of the conquered, as was the case of the Normans
in England. In other cases, peoples neighboring on a commercially, culturally,
or politically preeminent nation have voluntarily, although usually only partly,
adopted the language of that nation as auxiliary to their own. By such means
the Latin language came closest of all native languages to becoming a truly
universal tongue. Similarly, French from the 18th to the 19th century and
English in the 20th century enjoyed relative universality in diplomatic,
scientific, and commercial circles.

Other attempts at universal means of communication have been made by the


use of a lingua franca or pidgin, or by simplifying existing languages; an
example of the last is Basic English, devised between 1925 and 1930. The use
of living native languages has generally, however, proved to be impracticable
because of difficulties in learning them or because of nationalisti c prejudices.

For these reasons, many attempts have been made to construct artificial
universal languages, based on elements of natural languages with
simplifications of grammar and spelling. Volapük, devised in 1880 by the
German bishop Johann Martin Schleyer, and Esperanto, invented in 1887 by a
Polish physician, Dr. Ludwik L. Zamenhof, were both based on a combination
of Latin, the Romance languages, and the Germanic languages. Volapük
eventually proved too difficult to learn and to use; Esperanto is sti ll the most
widely spoken of the artificial languages. Interlingua, created in 1951 by the
International Auxiliary Language Association, is derived from English and the
Romance languages; it has primarily been used in international scientific and
technological journals, thus eliminating the need for costly multiple
translations.

International languages include both existing languages that have become


international means of communication and languages artificially constructed to
serve this purpose. The most famous and widespread artificial international
language is Esperanto; however, the most widespread international languages
are not artificial. In medieval Europe, Latin was the principal international
language. Today, English is used in more countries as a n official language or
as the main means of international communication than any other language.
French is the second most widely used language, largely due to the substantial
number of African countries with French as their official language. Other
languages have more restricted regional use, such as Spanish in Spain and
Latin America, Arabic in the Middle East, and Russian in the republics of the
former USSR.

G. History of linguistics

1. Earlier History

Non-Western traditions

Linguistic speculation and investigation, insofar as is known, has gone on in


only a small number of societies. To the extent that Mesopotamian, Chinese,
and Arabic learning dealt with grammar, their treatments were so enmeshed in
the particularities of those languages and so little known to the European world
until recently that they have had virtually no impact on Western ling uistic
tradition. Chinese linguistic and philological scholarship stretches back for
more than two millennia, but the interest of those scholars was concentrated
largely on phonetics, writing, and lexicography; their consideration of
grammatical problems was bound up closely with the study of logic.

Certainly the most interesting non-Western grammatical tradition--and the most


original and independent--is that of India, which dates back at least two and
one-half millennia and which culminates with the grammar of Panini, of the 5th
century BC. There are three major ways in which the Sanskrit tradition has had
an impact on modern linguistic scholarship. As soon as Sanskrit became
known to the Western learned world the unravelling of comparative Indo -
European grammar ensued and the foundations were laid for the whole 19th -
century edifice of comparative philology and historical linguistics. But, for this,
Sanskrit was simply a part of the data; Indian grammatical learning played
almost no direct part. Nineteenth-century workers, however, recognized that
the native tradition of phonetics in ancient India was vastly superior to Western
knowledge; and this had important consequences for the growth of the science
of phonetics in the West. Thirdly, there is in the rules or definitions (sutras) of
Panini a remarkably subtle and penetrating account of Sanskrit grammar. The
construction of sentences, compound nouns, and the like is explained thro ugh
ordered rules operating on underlying structures in a manner strikingly similar
in part to modes of contemporary theory. As might be imagined, this perceptive
Indian grammatical work has held great fascination for 20th -century theoretical
linguists. A study of Indian logic in relation to Paninian grammar alongside
Aristotelian and Western logic in relation to Greek grammar and its successors
could bring illuminating insights.

Whereas in ancient Chinese learning a separate field of study that might be


called grammar scarcely took root, in ancient India a sophisticated version of
this discipline developed early alongside the other sciences. Even though the
study of Sanskrit grammar may originally have had the practical aim of keeping
the sacred Vedic texts and their commentaries pure and intact, the study of
grammar in India in the 1st millennium BC had already become an intellectual
end in itself.

Greek and Roman antiquity

The emergence of grammatical learning in Greece is less clearly known than is


sometimes implied, and the subject is more complex than is often supposed;
here only the main strands can be sampled. The term he grammatike techne
("the art of letters") had two senses. It meant the study of the values of the
letters and of accentuation and prosody and, in this sense, was an abstract
intellectual discipline; and it also meant the skill of literacy and thus embraced
applied pedagogy. This side of what was to become "grammatical" learning
was distinctly applied, particular, and less exalted by comparison with other
pursuits. Most of the developments associated with theoretical grammar grew
out of philosophy and criticism; and in these developments a repeated duality
of themes crosses and intertwines.

Much of Greek philosophy was occupied with the distincti on between that
which exists "by nature" and that which exists "by convention." So in language
it was natural to account for words and forms as ordained by nature (by
onomatopoeia--i.e., by imitation of natural sounds) or as arrived at arbitrarily
by a social convention. This dispute regarding the origin of language and
meanings paved the way for the development of divergences between the
views of the "analogists," who looked on language as possessing an essential
regularity as a result of the symmetries that convention can provide, and the
views of the "anomalists," who pointed to language's lack of regularity as one
facet of the inescapable irregularities of nature. The situation was more
complex, however, than this statement would suggest. For example, it seems
that the anomalists among the Stoics credited the irrational quality of language
precisely to the claim that language did not exactly mirror nature. In any event,
the anomalist tradition in the hands of the Stoics brought grammar the benefit
of their work in logic and rhetoric. This led to the distinction that, in modern
theory, is made with the terms signifiant ("what signifies") and signifié ("what is
signified") or, somewhat differently and more elaborately, with "expression"
and "content"; and it laid the groundwork of modern theories of inflection,
though by no means with the exhaustiveness and fine -grained analysis
reached by the Sanskrit grammarians.

The Alexandrians, who were analogists working largely on literary criticism and
text philology, completed the development of the classical Greek grammatical
tradition. Dionysius Thrax, in the 2nd century BC, produced the first
systematic grammar of Western tradition; it dealt only with word morphology.
The study of sentence syntax was to wait for Apollonius Dyscolus, of the 2nd
century AD. Dionysius called grammar "the acquaintance with [or observation
of] what is uttered by poets and writers," using a word meaning a less general
form of knowledge than what might be called "science." His typically
Alexandrian literary goal is suggested by the headings in his work:
pronunciation, poetic figurative language, difficult words, true and inner
meanings of words, exposition of form-classes, literary criticism. Dionysius
defined a sentence as a unit of sense or thought, but i t is difficult to be sure of
his precise meaning.

The Romans, who largely took over, with mild adaptations to their highly
similar language, the total work of the Greeks, are important not as originators
but as transmitters. Aelius Donatus, of the 4th century AD, and Priscian, an
African of the 6th century, and their colleagues were slightly more systematic
than their Greek models but were essentially retrospective rather than original.
Up to this point a field that was at times called ars grammatica was a congeries
of investigations, both theoretical and practical, drawn from the work and
interests of literacy, scribeship, logic, epistemology, rhetoric, textual
philosophy, poetics, and literary criticism. Yet modern specialists in the field
still share their concerns and interests. The anomalists, who concentrated on
surface irregularity and who looked then for regularities deeper down (as the
Stoics sought them in logic) bear a resemblance to contemporary scholars of
the transformationalist school. And the philological analogists with their
regularizing surface segmentation show striking kinship of spirit with the
modern school of structural (or taxonomic or glossematic) grammatical
theorists.

The European Middle Ages


It is possible that developments in grammar during the Middle Ages constitute
one of the most misunderstood areas of the field of linguistics. It is diff icult to
relate this period coherently to other periods and to modern concerns because
surprisingly little is accessible and certain, let alone analyzed with
sophistication. In the early 1970s the majority of the known grammatical
treatises had not yet been made available in full to modern scholarship, so that
not even their true extent could be classified with confidence. These works
must be analyzed and studied in the light of medieval learning, especially the
learning of the schools of philosophy then cu rrent, in order to understand their
true value and place.

The field of linguistics has almost completely neglected the achievements of


this period. Students of grammar have tended to see as high points in their
field the achievements of the Greeks, the Re naissance growth and
"rediscovery" of learning (which led directly to modern school traditions), the
contemporary flowering of theoretical study (men usually find their own age
important and fascinating), and, in recent decades, the astonishing monument
of Panini. Many linguists have found uncongenial the combination of medieval
Latin learning and premodern philosophy. Yet medieval scholars might
reasonably be expected to have bequeathed to modern scholarship the fruits of
more than ordinarily refined perceptions of a certain order. These scholars
used, wrote in, and studied Latin, a language that, though not their native
tongue, was one in which they were very much at home; such scholars in
groups must often have represented a highly varied linguistic backg round.

Some of the medieval treatises continue the tradition of grammars of late


antiquity; so there are versions based on Donatus and Priscian, often with less
incorporation of the classical poets and writers. Another genre of writing
involves simultaneous consideration of grammatical distinctions and scholastic
logic; modern linguists are probably inadequately trained to deal with these
writings.

Certainly the most obviously interesting theorizing to be found in this period is


contained in the "speculative grammar" of the modistae, who were so called
because the titles of their works were often phrased De modis significandi
tractatus ("Treatise Concerning the Modes of Signifying"). For the development
of the Western grammatical tradition, work of this genre was the second great
milestone after the crystallization of Greek thought with the Stoics and
Alexandrians. The scholastic philosophers were occupied with relating words
and things--i.e., the structure of sentences with the nature of the real world --
hence their preoccupation with signification. The aim of the grammarians was
to explore how a word (an element of language) matched th ings apprehended
by the mind and how it signified reality. Since a word cannot signify the nature
of reality directly, it must stand for the thing signified in one of its modes or
properties; it is this discrimination of modes that the study of categories and
parts of speech is all about. Thus the study of sentences should lead one to
the nature of reality by way of the modes of signifying.

The modistae did not innovate in discriminating categories and parts of


speech; they accepted those that had come down from the Greeks through
Donatus and Priscian. The great contribution of these grammarians, who
flourished between the mid-13th and mid-14th century, was their insistence on
a grammar to explicate the distinctions found by their forerunners in the
languages known to them. Whether they made the best choice in selecting
logic, metaphysics, and epistemology (as they knew them) as the fields to be
included with grammar as a basis for the grand account of universal knowledge
is less important than the breadth of their conception of the place of grammar.
Before the modistae, grammar had not been viewed as a separate discipline
but had been considered in conjunction with other studies or skills (such as
criticism, preservation of valued texts, foreign -language learning). The Greek
view of grammar was rather narrow and fragmented; the Roman view was
largely technical. The speculative medieval grammarians (who dealt with
language as a speculum, "mirror" of reality) inquired into the fundamentals
underlying language and grammar. They wondered whether grammarians or
philosophers discovered grammar, whether grammar was the same for all
languages, what the fundamental topic of grammar was, and what the basic
and irreducible grammatical primes are. Signification was reached by
imposition of words on things; i.e., the sign was arbitrary. Those questions
sound remarkably like current issues of linguistics, which serves to illustrate
how slow and repetitious progress in the field is. While the modistae accepted,
by modern standards, a restrictive set of categories, the acumen and sweep
they brought to their task resulted in numerous subtle and fres h syntactic
observations. A thorough study of the medieval period would greatly enrich the
discussion of current questions.

The Renaissance

It is customary to think of the Renaissance as a time of great flowering. There


is no doubt that linguistic and philological developments of this period are
interesting and significant. Two new sets of data that modern linguists tend to
take for granted became available to grammarians during this period: (1) the
newly recognized vernacular languages of Europe, for the protection and
cultivation of which there subsequently arose national academies and learned
institutions that live down to the present day; and (2) the exotic languages of
Africa, the Orient, the New World, and, later, of Siberia, Inner Asia, Papua,
Oceania, the Arctic, and Australia, which the voyages of discovery opened up.
Earlier, the only non-Indo-European grammar at all widely accessible was that
of the Hebrews (and to some extent Arabic); and Semitic in fact shares many
categories with Indo-European in its grammar. Indeed, for many of the exotic
languages scholarship barely passed beyond the most rudimentary initial
collection of word lists; grammatical analysis was scarcely approached.

In the field of grammar, the Renaissance did not produce notable innovation or
advance. Generally speaking, there was a strong rejection of speculative
grammar and a relatively uncritical resumption of late Roman views (as stated
by Priscian). This was somewhat understandable in the case of Latin or Greek
grammars, since here the task was less evidently that of intel lectual inquiry
and more that of the schools, with the practical aim of gaining access to the
newly discovered ancients. But, aside from the fact that, beginning in the 15th
century, serious grammars of European vernaculars were actually written, it is
only in particular cases and for specific details (e.g., a mild alteration in the
number of parts of speech or cases of nouns) that real departures from Roman
grammar can be noted. Likewise, until the end of the 19th century, grammars
of the exotic languages, written largely by missionaries and traders, were cast
almost entirely in the Roman model, to which the Renaissance had added a
limited medieval syntactic ingredient.

From time to time a degree of boldness may be seen in France: Petrus


Ramus, a 16th-century logician, worked within a taxonomic framework of the
surface shapes of words and inflections, such work entailing some o f the
attendant trivialities that modern linguistics has experienced ( e.g., by dividing
up Latin nouns on the basis of equivalence of syllable count among their case
forms). In the 17th century, members of Solitaires (a group of hermits who
lived in the deserted abbey of Port-Royal in France) produced a grammar that
has exerted noteworthy continuing influence, even in contempo rary theoretical
discussion. Drawing their basic view from scholastic logic as modified by
rationalism, these people aimed to produce a philosophical grammar that would
capture what was common to the grammars of languages --a general grammar,
but not aprioristically universalist. This grammar has attracted recent attention
because it employs certain syntactic formulations that resemble in detail
contemporary transformational rules, which formulate the relationship between
the various elements of a sentence.

Roughly from the 15th century to World War II, however, the version of
grammar available to the Western public (together with its colonial expansion)
remained basically that of Priscian with only occasional and subsidiary
modifications, and the knowledge of new languages brought only minor
adjustments to the serious study of grammar. As education has become more
broadly disseminated throughout society by the schools, attention has shifted
from theoretical or technical grammar as an intellectual preoccupati on to
prescriptive grammar suited to pedagogical purposes, which started with
Renaissance vernacular nationalism. Grammar increasingly parted company
with its older fellow disciplines within philosophy as they moved over to the
domain known as natural science, and technical academic grammatical study
has increasingly become involved with issues represented by empiricism
versus rationalism and their successor manifestations on the academic scene.

Nearly down to the present day, the grammar of the schools ha s had only
tangential connections with the studies pursued by professional linguists; for
most people prescriptive grammar has become synonymous with "grammar,"
and the prevailing view held by educated people regards grammar as an item
of folk knowledge open to speculation by all, and in nowise a formal science
requiring adequate preparation such as is assumed for chemistry.

2. The 19th Century

Development of the comparative method

It is generally agreed that the most outstanding achievement of linguistic


scholarship in the 19th century was the development of the comparative
method, which comprised a set of principles whereby languages could be
systematically compared with respect to their sound systems, grammatical
structure, and vocabulary and shown to be "genealogically" related. As French,
Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, and the other Romance languages
had evolved from Latin, so Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit as well as the Celtic,
Germanic, and Slavic languages and many other languages of Europe and
Asia had evolved from some earlier language, to which the name Indo-
European or Proto-Indo-European is now customarily applied. That all the
Romance languages were descended from Latin and thus constituted one
"family" had been known for centuries; but the existence of the Indo -European
family of languages and the nature of their genealogical relationship was first
demonstrated by the 19th-century comparative philologists. (The term
philology in this context is not restricted to the study of literary languages.)

The main impetus for the development of comparative philology cam e toward
the end of the 18th century, when it was discovered that Sanskrit bore a
number of striking resemblances to Greek and Latin. An English orientalist, Sir
William Jones, though he was not the first to observe these resemblances, is
generally given the credit for bringing them to the attention of the scholarly
world and putting forward the hypothesis, in 1786, that all t hree languages
must have "sprung from some common source, which perhaps no longer
exists." By this time, a number of texts and glossaries of the older Germanic
languages (Gothic, Old High German, and Old Norse) had been published, and
Jones realized that Germanic as well as Old Persian and perhaps Celtic had
evolved from the same "common source." The next important step came in
1822, when the German scholar Jacob Grimm, following the Danish linguist
Rasmus Rask (whose work, being written in Danish, was less accessible to
most European scholars), pointed out in the second edition of his comparative
grammar of Germanic that there were a number of systematic correspondences
between the sounds of Germanic and the sounds of Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit
in related words. Grimm noted, for example, that where Gothic (the oldest
surviving Germanic language) had an f, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit frequently
had a p (e.g., Gothic fotus, Latin pedis, Greek podós, Sanskrit padás, all
meaning "foot"); when Gothic had a p, the non-Germanic languages had a b;
when Gothic had a b, the non-Germanic languages had what Grimm called an
"aspirate" (Latin f, Greek ph, Sanskrit bh). In order to account for these
correspondences he postulated a cyclical "soundshift" (Lautverschiebung) in
the prehistory of Germanic, in which the original "aspirates" became voiced
unaspirated stops (bh became b, etc.), the original voiced unaspirated stops
became voiceless (b became p, etc.), and the original voiceless (unaspirated)
stops became "aspirates" (p became f ). Grimm's term, "aspirate," it will be
noted, covered such phonetically distinct categories as aspirated stops (bh,
ph), produced with an accompanying audible puff of breath, and fricatives ( f ),
produced with audible friction as a result of incomplete closure in the vocal
tract.

In the work of the next 50 years the idea of sound change was made more
precise, and, in the 1870s, a group of scholars known collectively as the
Junggrammatiker ("young grammarians," or Neogrammarians) put forward the
thesis that all changes in the sound system of a language as it developed
through time were subject to the operation of regular sound laws. Though the
thesis that sound laws were absolutely regular in their operation (unless they
were inhibited in particular instances by the influence of analogy) was at first
regarded as most controversial, by the end of the 19th century it was quite
generally accepted and had become the cornerstone of the comparative
method. Using the principle of regular sound change, scholars were able to
reconstruct "ancestral" common forms from which the later forms found in
particular languages could be derived. By convention, such reconstructed
forms are marked in the literature with an asterisk. Thus, from the
reconstructed Proto-Indo-European word for "ten," *dekm, it was possible to
derive Sanskrit dasha, Greek déka, Latin decem, and Gothic taihun by
postulating a number of different sound laws that operated independently in the
different branches of the Indo-European family.

The role of analogy


Analogy has been mentioned in connection with its inhibition of the regular
operation of sound laws in particular word forms. This was how the
Neogrammarians thought of it. In the course of the 20th century, however, it
has come to be recognized that analogy, taken in its most general sense, plays
a far more important role in the development of languages than simply that of
sporadically preventing what would otherwise be a completely regular
transformation of the sound system of a language. When a child learns to
speak he tends to regularize the anomalous, or irregular, forms by analogy with
the more regular and productive patterns of formation in the language; e.g., he
will tend to say "comed" rather than "came," "dived" rather than "dove," and so
on, just as he will say "talked," "loved," and so forth. The fact that the child
does this is evidence that he has learned or is learning the regularities or rules
of his language. He will go on to "unlearn" some of the analogical forms and
substitute for them the anomalous forms current in the speech of the previous
generation. But in some cases, he will keep a "new" analogical form ( e.g.,
"dived" rather than "dove"), and this may then become the recognized and
accepted form.

Other 19th-century theories and development

Inner and outer form

One of the most original, if not one of the most immediately influential, linguists
of the 19th century was the learned Prussian statesman, Wilhelm von
Humboldt (died 1835). His interests, unlike those of most of his
contemporaries, were not exclusively historical. Following the German
philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744 -1803), he stressed the
connection between national languages and national character: this was but a
commonplace of romanticism. More original was Humboldt's theory of "inner"
and "outer" form in language. The outer form of language was the raw material
(the sounds) from which different languages were fashioned; the inner form
was the pattern, or structure, of grammar and meaning that was imposed upon
this raw material and differentiated one language from another. This
"structural" conception of language was to become dominant, for a time at
least, in many of the major centres of linguistics by the middle of the 20th
century. Another of Humboldt's ideas was that language was something
dynamic, rather than static, and was an activity itself rather than the product of
activity. A language was not a set of actual utterances produced by speakers
but the underlying principles or rules that made it possible for speakers to
produce such utterances and, moreover, an unlimited number of them. This
idea was taken up by a German philologist, Heymann Steinthal, and, what is
more important, by the physiologist and psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, and thus
influenced late 19th- and early 20th-century theories of the psychology of
language. Its influence, like that of the distinction of inner and outer form, can
also be seen in the thought of Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist. But
its full implications were probably not perceived and made precise until the
middle of the 20th century, when the U.S. linguist Noam Chomsky re-
emphasized it and made it one of the basic notions of generative grammar.

Phonetics and dialectology

Many other interesting and important developments occurred in 19th -century


linguistic research, among them work in the areas of phonetics and
dialectology. Research in both these fields was promoted by the
Neogrammarians' concern with sound change and by their insistence that
prehistoric developments in languages were of the same kind as developments
taking place in the languages and dialects currently spoken. The development
of phonetics in the West was also strongly influe nced at this period, as were
many of the details of the more philological analysis of the Indo -European
languages, by the discovery of the works of the Indian grammarians who, from
the time of the Sanskrit grammarian Panini (5th or 6th century BC), if not
before, had arrived at a much more comprehensive and scientific theory of
phonetics, phonology, and morphology than anything achieved in the West until
the modern period.

3. The 20th Century

Structuralism

The term structuralism has been used as a slogan and rallying cry by a
number of different schools of linguistics, and it is necessary to realize that it
has somewhat different implications according to the context in which it is
employed. It is convenient to draw first a broad distinction between European
and American structuralism and, then, to treat them separately.

Structural linguistics in Europe

Structural linguistics in Europe is generally said to have begun in 1916 with the
posthumous publication of the Cours de Linguistique Générale (Course in
General Linguistics) of Ferdinand de Saussure. Much of what is now
considered as Saussurean can be seen, though less clearly, in the earlier work
of Humboldt, and the general structural principles that Saussure was to
develop with respect to synchronic linguistics in the Cours had been applied
almost 40 years before (1879) by Saussure himself in a reconstruction of the
Indo-European vowel system. The full significance of the work was not
appreciated at the time. Saussure's structuralism can be summed up in two
dichotomies (which jointly cover what Humboldt referred to in terms of his own
distinction of inner and outer form): (1) langue versus parole and (2) form
versus substance. By langue, best translated in its technical Saussurean sense
as language system, is meant the totality of regularities and patterns of
formation that underlie the utterances of a language; by parole, which can be
translated as language behaviour, is meant the actual utterances themselves.
Just as two performances of a piece of music given by different orchestras on
different occasions will differ in a variety of details and yet be identifiable as
performances of the same piece, so two utterances may differ in various ways
and yet be recognized as instances, in some sense, of the same utterance.
What the two musical performances and the two utterances have in common is
an identity of form, and this form, or structure, or pattern, is in principle
independent of the substance, or "raw material," upon which it is imposed.
"Structuralism," in the European sense then, refers to the view that there is an
abstract relational structure that underlies and is to be distinguished from
actual utterances--a system underlying actual behaviour--and that this is the
primary object of study for the linguist.

Two important points arise here: first, that the structural approach is not in
principle restricted to synchronic linguistics; second, that the study of meaning,
as well as the study of phonology and grammar, can be structural in
orientation. In both cases "structuralism" is opposed to "atomism" in the
European literature. It was Saussure who drew the terminological distinction
between synchronic and diachronic linguistics in the Cours; despite the
undoubtedly structural orientation of his own early work in the historical and
comparative field, he maintained that, whereas synchronic linguistics should
deal with the structure of a language system at a given point in time,
diachronic linguistics should be concerned with the historical development of
isolated elements--it should be atomistic. Whatever the reasons that led
Saussure to take this rather paradoxical view, his teaching on this point was
not generally accepted, and scholars soon began to apply structural concepts
to the diachronic study of languages. The most important of the various
schools of structural linguistics to be found in Europe in the first half of the
20th century have included the Prague school, most notably represen ted by
Nikolay Sergeyevich Trubetskoy (died 1938) and Roman Jakobson (born
1896), both Russian émigrés, and the Copenhagen (or glossematic) school,
centred around Louis Hjelmslev (died 1965). John Rupert Firth (died 1960) and
his followers, sometimes referred to as the London school, were less
Saussurean in their approach, but, in a general sense of the term, their
approach may also be described appropriately as structural linguistics.

Structural linguistics in America


American and European structuralism shared a number of features. In insisting
upon the necessity of treating each language as a more or less coherent and
integrated system, both European and American linguists of this period tended
to emphasize, if not to exaggerate, the structural uniqueness of individual
languages. There was especially good reason to take this point of view given
the conditions in which American linguistics developed from the end of the 19th
century. There were hundreds of indigenous American Indian languages that
had never been previously described. Many of these were spoken by only a
handful of speakers and, if they were not recorded before they became extinct,
would be permanently inaccessible. Under these circumstances, such linguists
as Franz Boas (died 1942) were less concerned with the construction of a
general theory of the structure of human language than they were with
prescribing sound methodological principles for the analysis of unfamiliar
languages. They were also fearful that the description of these languages
would be distorted by analyzing them in terms of categories derived from the
analysis of the more familiar Indo-European languages.

After Boas, the two most influential American linguists were Edward Sapir
(died 1939) and Leonard Bloomfield (died 1949). Like his teacher Boas, Sapir
was equally at home in anthropology and linguistics, the alliance of which
disciplines has endured to the present day in many American universities.
Boas and Sapir were both attracted by the Humboldtian view of the relationship
between language and thought, but it was left to one of Sapir's pupils,
Benjamin Lee Whorf, to present it in a sufficiently challenging form to attract
widespread scholarly attention. Since the republication of Whorf's more
important papers in 1956, the thesis that language determines perception and
thought has come to be known as the Whorfian hypothesis.

Sapir's work has always held an attraction for the more anthropologically
inclined American linguists. But it was Bloomfield who prepared the way for
the later phase of what is now thought of as the most distinctive manifestation
of American "structuralism." When he published his first book in 1914,
Bloomfield was strongly influenced by Wundt's psychology of language. In
1933, however, he published a drastically revised and expanded version with
the new title Language; this book dominated the field for the next 30 years. In
it Bloomfield explicitly adopted a behaviouristic approach to the study of
language, eschewing in the name of scientific objectivity all reference to
mental or conceptual categories. Of particular consequence was his adoption
of the behaviouristic theory of semantics according to which meaning is simply
the relationship between a stimulus and a verbal response. Because science
was still a long way from being able to give a comprehensive account of most
stimuli, no significant or interesting results could be expected from the study of
meaning for some considerable time, and it was preferable, as far as possible,
to avoid basing the grammatical analysis of a language on semantic
considerations. Bloomfield's followers pushed even further the attempt to
develop methods of linguistic analysis that were not based on meaning. One of
the most characteristic features of "post-Bloomfieldian" American structuralism,
then, was its almost complete neglect of semantics.

Another characteristic feature, one that was to be much criticized by Chomsky,


was its attempt to formulate a set of "discovery procedures" --procedures that
could be applied more or less mechanically to texts and could be guaranteed to
yield an appropriate phonological and grammatical description of the language
of the texts. Structuralism, in this narrower sense of the term, is represented,
with differences of emphasis or detail, in the major American textbooks
published during the 1950s.

Transformational grammar

The most significant development in linguistic theory and research in re cent


years was the rise of generative grammar, and, more especially, of
transformational-generative grammar, or transformational grammar, as it
came to be known. Two versions of transformational grammar were put forward
in the mid-1950s, the first by Zellig S. Harris and the second by Noam
Chomsky, his pupil. It is Chomsky's system that has attracted the most
attention so far. As first presented by Chomsky in Syntactic Structures
(1957), transformational grammar can be seen partly as a reaction against
post-Bloomfieldian structuralism and partly as a continuation of it. What
Chomsky reacted against most strongly was the post -Bloomfieldian concern
with discovery procedures. In his opinion, linguistics should set itself the more
modest and more realistic goal of formulating criteria for evaluating alternative
descriptions of a language without regard to the question of how these
descriptions had been arrived at. The statements made by linguists in
describing a language should, however, be cast within the framework of a far
more precise theory of grammar than had hitherto been the case, and this
theory should be formalized in terms of modern mathematical notions. Within a
few years, Chomsky had broken with the post-Bloomfieldians on a number of
other points also. He had adopted what he called a "mentalistic" theory of
language, by which term he implied that the linguist should be concerned with
the speaker's creative linguistic competence and not his performance, the
actual utterances produced. He had challenged the post -Bloomfieldian concept
of the phoneme (see below), which many scholars regarded as the most solid
and enduring result of the previous generation's work. And he had challenged
the structuralists' insistence upon the uniqueness of every language, claiming
instead that all languages were, to a considerable degree, cut to the same
pattern--they shared a certain number of formal and substantive universals.
Tagmemic, stratificational, and other approaches

The effect of Chomsky's ideas has been phenomenal. It is hardly an


exaggeration to say that there is no major theoretical issue in linguistics today
that is debated in terms other than those in which he has chosen to define it,
and every school of linguistics tends to define its position in relation to his.
Among the rival schools are tagmemics, stratificational grammar, and the
Prague school. Tagmemics is the system of linguistic analysis developed by
the U.S. linguist Kenneth L. Pike and his associates in connection with their
work as Bible translators. Its foundations were laid during the 1950s, when
Pike differed from the post-Bloomfieldian structuralists on a number of
principles, and it has been further elaborated since then. Tagmemic analysis
has been used for analyzing a great many previously unrecorded languages,
especially in Central and South America and in West Africa. Stratificational
grammar, developed by a U.S. linguist, Sydney M. Lamb, has been seen by
some linguists as an alternative to transformational grammar. Not yet fully
expounded or widely exemplified in the analysis of different languages,
stratificational grammar is perhaps best characterized as a radical modification
of post-Bloomfieldian linguistics, but it has many features that link it with
European structuralism. The Prague school has been mentioned above for its
importance in the period immediately following the publication of Saussure's
Cours. Many of its characteristic ideas (in particular, the notion of distinctive
features in phonology) have been taken up by other schools. But there has
been further development in Prague of the functional approach to syntax (see
below). The work of M.A.K. Halliday in England derived mu ch of its original
inspiration from Firth (above), but Halliday provided a more systematic and
comprehensive theory of the structure of language than Firth had, and it has
been quite extensively illustrated.

The Father of Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), Swiss


linguist, whose ideas about language structure influenced the development of
the linguistic theory known as structuralism. He was born in Geneva, and
attended science classes for a year at the University of Geneva before
turning to language studies at the University of Leipzig in 1876. As a student
he published his only book, Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans
les langues indo-européennes (Memoir on the Original Vowel System in the
Indo-European Languages, 1879), an important work on the vowel system of
Proto-Indo-European, considered the parent language from which the Indo -
European languages descended.

Saussure's scholarship in the early part of his career focused on philology,


the study of language history, but he later shifted his attention to the study of
general linguistics. He taught at the École des Hautes Études in Paris from
1881 to 1891 and then became a professor of Sanskrit and Comparative
Grammar at the University of Geneva. Although Saussure never wrote
another book, his teaching proved highly influential. After his death two of his
students compiled his lecture notes and other materials into a seminal work,
Cours de linguistique générale (1916; Course in General Linguistics, 1959).
The book explained his structural approach to language and established a
series of theoretical distinctions that have become basic to the study of
linguistics. In addition to linguistics, Saussure's work has affected disciplines
such as anthropology, history, and literary crit icism.

Structural linguist, Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949), American linguist


and founder of structural linguistics. Born in Chicago, Bloomfield graduated
with a bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1906 and received his doctorate
from the University of Chicago in 1909. In 1917 he extensively researched
Tagalog and other Austronesian languages, and in the 1920s he worked on
grouping Native American languages. He played a key role in the founding
of the Linguistic Society of America in 1924. Bloomfield is best known for his
commitment to linguistics as an independent science and his insistence on
using scientific procedures. Early in his career he was influenced by
behaviorism, a school of psychology based on the objective study of
behavior. He based his work, especially his approach to meaning, on
behavioristic principles. His major work, Language (1933) is regarded as the
classic text of structural linguistics, also called structuralism. The book
synthesized the theory and practice of linguistic analysis.
Generative-transformational linguist, Noam Chomsky (1928- ), American
linguist, educator, and political activist, educated at the University of
Pennsylvania. He is regarded as the founder of transformational -generative
grammar, a system that revolutionized linguistics. Chomsky believes that
language is the result of an innate human faculty. His analyses of language
start with basic sentences, from which are developed an endless variety of
syntactic combinations by means of a set of rules that he formulates. At t he
end of a chain of syntactic rules are phonological rules governing
pronunciation.
Chomsky joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in
1955 and became known not only as a teacher and writer but as an
articulate opponent of American involvement in the Vietnam War. His major
linguistic publications are Syntactic Structures (1957), Aspects of the
Theory of Syntax (1965), The Sound Pattern of English (1968; with Morris
Halle, 1923- ), Language and Mind (1972), The Logical Structure of
Linguistic Theory and Reflections on Language (both 1975). Language and
Responsibility (1979) links language and politics; Chomsky's political
writings include American Power and the New Mandarins (1969) and The
Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians (1983).

Bibliography

Akmajian, Adrian, Richard A. Demers, & Robert M. Harnish. 1986. Linguistics: An


Introduction to Language and Communication. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Campbell, George L. 1991. Compendium of the World’s Languages. New York:
Routledge.
Crystal, David. 1993. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Durand, Jacques. 1990. Generative Non-linear Phonology. New York: Longman.
Encarta 1997.
Encyclopaedia Britannica. 1994-1998.
Jeffers, Robert J. & Ilse Lehiste. 1984. Principles and Methods for Historical linguistics.
Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Grimes, Barbara F. (eds.). 1988. Ethnologue: The Languages of the World. Dallas:
Summer Institute of Linguistics.
Harris, Randy Allen. 1993. The Linguistics Wars. New York: Oxford University Press.
Kent, Ray D., & Charles Read. 1992. The Acoustic Analysis of Speech. San Diego:
Singular Publishing Group, Inc.
Kridalaksana, Harimurti. 1985. Kamus Linguistik. Jakarta: Gramedia.
Ladefoged, Peter. 1982. A Course in Phonetics. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
Inc.
O'Grady, William, Michael Dobrovolsky, & Mark Aronoff. 1989. Contemporary
Linguistics: An Introduction. New York: St. Martin's Press.
Yule, George. 1989. The Study of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Yusuf, Suhendra. 1993. Sundanese Vowel Sounds: A Spectrographic Study. Ohio
University, Athens, Ohio.
Yusuf, Suhendra. 1998. Fonetik dan fonologi. Gramedia.
Diposkan oleh Literacy Institute di 13:23
Beranda

You might also like