This document provides an overview of the field of linguistics. It discusses what linguistics is, including definitions of language from influential linguists. It outlines some myths and fundamental views about language. The key branches of linguistics are summarized, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. It also briefly discusses the origin of language theories, macro linguistics, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics. The goal of linguistics is to scientifically study human language through describing language competence, acquisition, and performance.

1. What is Linguistics?

2. 1. Why Study Language?

3. 1.1 Some myths about language
 Language is only a means of communication.
 Language has a form-meaning correspondence.
 The function of language is to exchange
information.
 English is more difficult to learn than Chinese.
 Black English is not standard and should be
reformed.

4. 1.2 Some fundamental views about
Language
 Children learn their native language swiftly,
efficiently and without instruction.
 Language operates by rules.
 All languages have three major components a
sound system, a system of lexicogrammar and a
system of semantics.
 Everyone speaks a dialect.
 Language slowly changes.

5. 1.2 Some fundamental views about
Language
 Speakers of all languages employ a range of
styles and a set of jargons.
 Languages are intimately related to the societies
and individuals who use them.
 Writing is derivative of speech.

6. What is Language?
 Language is not to be confused with human
speech, of which it is only a definite part,
though certainly an essential one. It is both a
social product of the faculty of speech and a
collection of necessary conventions that have
been adopted by a social body to permit
individuals to exercise that faculty.
 --Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) Course in
General Linguistics (1916)

7. What is Language?
 Language is a purely human and non-instinctive
method of communicating ideas, emotions and
desires by means of voluntarily produced
symbols.
 --Edward Sapir (1884-1939)
 Language An Introduction to the
 Study of Speech (1921)

8. What is Language?
 A language is a system of arbitrary vocal
symbols by means of which a social group
co-operates.
 --Bernard Bloch (1907-1965) George Trager
(1906-1992) Outline of Linguistic Analysis
(1942)
 A language is a system of arbitrary vocal
symbols by means of which the members of a
society interact in terms of their total
culture.
 --George Trager The Field of Linguistics (1949)

9. What is Language?
 From now on I will consider language to be a set
(finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in
length and constructed out of a finite set of
elements.
 --Noam Chomsky (1928- ) Syntactic Structures
(1957)
 Language is the institution whereby humans
communicate and interact with each other by means
of habitually used oral-auditory arbitrary
symbols.
 --Robert A. Hall (1911-1997) Introductory
Linguistics (1964)
 Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols
used for human communication.
 --Ronald Wardhaugh Introduction to Linguistics
(1977)

10. What is Language?
 The question What is language?
 is comparable
with -- and, some would say, hardly less profound
than -- What is life?, the presuppositions of
which circumscribe and unify the biological
sciences... it is not so much the question itself
as the particular interpretation that the
biologist puts upon it and the unravelling of its
more detailed implications within some currently
accepted theoretical framework that nourish the
biologist's day-to-day speculations and research.
So it is for the linguist in relation to the
question What is language??
 --John Lyons (1932- ) Language and Linguistics
(1981)

11. What is Language?
 ... in a sense all definitions of language
are, by themselves, inadequate, since, if they
are to be more than trivial and uninformative,
they must presuppose ... some general theory of
language and of linguistic analysis.
 --R. H. Robins (1921-2000) General Linguistics
(1989)
 Language is a form of human communication by
means of a system of symbols principally
transmitted by vocal sounds.
 --Stuart C. Poole An Introduction to Linguistics
(1999)

12. What is Language?
 Language is a means of verbal communication.
 It is instrumental in that communicating by
speaking or writing is a purposeful act.
 It is social and conventional in that language is
a social semiotic and communication can only take
place effectively if all the users share a broad
understanding of human interaction including such
associated factors as nonverbal cues, motivation,
and socio-cultural roles.
 -- Our textbook (2006)

13. Design Features of Language
 Language distinguishes human beings from animals
in that it is far more sophisticated than any
animal communication system.
 Human language is unique
 Arbitrariness
 Duality
 Creativity
 Displacement

14. Arbitrarines
 Saussure the forms of linguistic signs bear no
natural relationship to their meaning
 Arbitrary relationship between the sound of a
morpheme and its meaning, even with onomatopoeic
words
 The dog barks wow wow in English but ??? in
Chinese.
 Arbitrariness at the syntactic level language is
not arbitrary at the syntactic level.
 He came in and sat down.
 He sat down and came in.
 He sat down after he came in.
 The link between a linguistic sign and its
meaning is a matter of convention.

15. Duality
 The property of having two levels of structures,
such that units of the primary level are composed
of elements of the secondary level and each of
the two levels has its own principles of
organization
 Primary units words (meaningful) consist of
secondary units sounds (meaningless).
 Hierarchy of language stratification as the
infinite use of finite means.
 Sounds gt syllables gt morphemes gt words gt phrases
gt clauses gt sentences/utterances gt
texts/discourses

16. Creativity
 Language is resourceful because of its duality
and its recursiveness. We can use it to create
new meanings.
 Words can be used in new ways to mean new things,
and can be instantly understood by people who
have never come across that usage before.
 Birds, bees, crabs, spiders, and most other
creatures communicate in some way, but the
information imparted is severely limited and
confined to a small set of messages.

17. Creativity
 Because of duality the human speaker is able to
combine the basic linguistic units to form an
infinite set of sentences, most of which are
never before produced or heard.
 The recursive nature of language provides a
potential to create an infinite number of
sentences. For instance
 He bought a book which was written by a teacher
who taught in a school which was known for its
graduates who ...

18. Displacement
 Human languages enable their users to symbolize
objects, events and concepts which are not
present (in time and space) at the moment of
communication.
 Thus, we can refer to Confucius, or the North
Pole, even though the first has been dead for
over 2550 years and the second is situated far
away from us.
 Animal communication is normally under immediate
stimulus control. For instance, a warning cry of
a bird instantly announces danger.
 Human language is stimulus-free. What we are
talking about need not be triggered by any
external stimulus in the world or any internal
state.

19. Displacement
 The honeybee's dance exhibits displacement a
little bit he can refer to a source of food,
which is remote in time and space when he reports
on it.
 A dog cannot tell people that its master will be
home in a few days.
 Our language enables us to communicate about
things that do not exist or do not yet exist.
 Displacement benefits human beings by giving us
the power to handle generalizations and
abstractions. Once we can talk about physically
distant thing, we acquire the ability to
understand concepts which denote non-things,
such as truth and beauty.

20. Origin of language
 The Divine origin
 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was
with God, and the Word was God.
 (Gospel, John 1 1)
 And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one,
and they have all one language and this they
begin to do and now nothing will be restrained
from them, which they have imagined to do.
(Genesis, 11 6)

21. Origin of language
 The bow-wow theory
 In primitive times people imitated the sounds of
the animal calls in the wild environment they
lived and speech developed from that.
 Onomatopoeic words seem to be a convenient
evidence for this theory. But they are very
different in the degree of resemblance they
express with the natural sounds.
 This theory lacks supportive evidence.

22. Origin of language
 The pooh-pooh theory
 In the hard life of our primitive ancestors, they
utter instinctive sounds of pain, anger and joy.
As for evidence, we can only cite the universal
use of sounds as interjections.
 What makes the theory problematic is that there
is only a limited number of interjections in
almost all languages.
 Besides, interjections such as Oh, Ah, Oops bear
little relationship with the sound system of a
language and therefore are not good evidence.

23. Origin of language
 The yo-he-ho theory
 As primitive people worked together, they
produced some rhythmic grunts which gradually
developed into chants and then into language.
 We do have prosodic use of rhythms in languages,
but rhythmic grunts are far different from
language in its present sense. The theory is
again at most a speculation.
 The by-now fruitless search for the origin of
languages reflects people's concern with the
origin of humanity and may come up with
enlightening findings in future.
 One thing we can say for certain is that language
evolves within specific historical, social and
cultural contexts.

24. What is Linguistics?
 The scientific study of human language
 Aims of linguistic theory
 What is knowledge of language? (Competence)
 How is knowledge of language acquired?
(Acquisition)
 How is knowledge of language put to use?
(Performance/language processing)

25. What is Linguistics?
 A grammar includes everything one knows about the
structure of ones language
 Phonetics and Phonology (the sounds and the sound
system or patterns)
 Lexicon (the words or vocabulary in the mental
dictionary)
 Morphology (the structure of words)
 Syntax (the structure of phrases and sentences
and the constraints on well-formedness of
sentences)
 Semantics (the meaning of words and sentences)

26. Main branches of linguistics
 Phonetics
 Phonology
 Morphology
 Syntax
 Semantics
 Pragmatics

27. Phonetics
 Phonetics studies speech sounds, including the
production of speech, that is how speech sounds
are actually made, transmitted and received, the
description and classification of speech sounds,
words and connected speech, etc.
 We can approach it on various levels.
 At one level, speech is a matter of anatomy and
physiology. We can study organs such as tongue
and larynx and their functions in the production
of speech.
 At another level, we can focus on the speech
sounds produced by these organs by identifying
and classifying the individual sounds. This is
the domain of articulatory phonetics.

28. Phonetics
 We can also investigate the properties of the
sound waves acoustic phonetics.
 As speech is intended to be heard or perceived,
it is therefore possible to focus on the way in
which a listener analyses or processes a sound
wave auditory phonetics.

29. Phonology
 Phonology studies the rules governing the
structure, distribution, and sequencing of speech
sounds and the shape of syllables. It deals with
the sound system of a language by treating
phoneme as the point of departure.
 A phoneme is the smallest linguistic unit of
sound that can signal a difference in meaning.

30. Morphology
 Morphology is concerned with the internal
organization of words. It studies the minimal
units of meaning morphemes and word-formation
processes.
 Although many people think of words as the basic
meaningful elements of a language,many words can
be broken down into still smaller units, called
morphemes.

31. Morphology
 Morphemes serve different purposes. Some derive
new words by changing the meaning or the part of
speech, others only refine and give extra
grammatical information about the already
existing meaning of a word.
 As morphemes are pairings of sounds with
meanings, there are many complexities involved,
forming a new field by the name morphophonology.

32. Syntax
 Syntax is about principles of forming and
understanding correct sentences.
 The form or structure of a sentence is governed
by the rules of syntax, which specify word order,
sentence organization, and the relationships
between words, word classes and other sentence
elements.
 We know that words are organized into structures
more than just word order.
 The children watched the firework from the hill
.
 The children watched the firework from the
hill .
 The chicken is too hot to eat.

33. Semantics
 Semantics examines how meaning is encoded in a
language.
 It is not only concerned with meanings of words
as lexical items, but also with levels of
language below the word and above it, e.g.
meaning of morphemes and sentences.
 The following are what the key concepts look
like
 semantic components
 denotation of words
 sense relations between words such as antonymy
and synonymy
 sense relations between sentences such as
entailment and presupposition and others.

34. Pragmatics
 Pragmatics is the study of meaning in context. It
deals with particular utterances in particular
situations and is especially concerned with the
various ways in which the many social contexts of
language performance can influence
interpretation.
 In other words, pragmatics is concerned with the
way language is used to communicate rather than
with the way language is internally structured.

35. Pragmatics
 It regards speech performance as primarily a
social act ruled by various social conventions.
 Some key concepts such as reference, force,
effect, and cooperative principles may appear
commonsensical, yet pragmatics is just about one
of the most promising fields of linguistic
studies.

36. Pragmatics
 Take conversation for example.
 Since language is transmitted primarily via the
speech mode, pragmatic rules govern a number of
conversational interactions, such as sequential
organization, repair of errors, role and speech
acts.
 Organization of conversations includes taking
turns, opening, maintaining and closing a
conversation, establishing and maintaining a
topic etc.

37. Macro linguistics
 Linguistics is not the only field concerned with
language.
 Other disciplines such as psychology, sociology,
ethnography, the science of law and artificial
intelligence etc. are also preoccupied with
language.
 Although Saussure's goal was to establish the
autonomy of linguistics, giving it a well-defined
subject of study and freeing it from reliance on
other disciplines, with its coming of age
linguistics is developing interactive links with
other sciences.
 The central goal of describing the underlying
system remains this is the province of general,
descriptive linguistics

38. Macro linguistics
 But since language has both individual and social
aspects, it is naturally of interest to
psychologists and sociologists among others.
 Therefore it is not surprising that we have some
branches of macrolinguistics that show an
interdisciplinary nature from their very names

39. Psycholinguistics
 Psycholinguistics investigates the interrelation
of language and mind, for example, in processing
and producing utterances and in language
acquisition.
 It also studies language development in the
child, such as the theories of language
acquisition, biological foundations of language,
and a profound aspectthe relationship between
language and cognition.

40. Sociolinguistics
 Sociolinguistics is the study of the
characteristics of language varieties, the
characteristics of their functions, and the
characteristics of their speakers as these three
constantly interact and change within a speech
community.
 An umbrella term which covers a variety of
different interests in language and society,
including the social functions of language and
the social characteristics of its users.

41. Anthropological linguistics
 Anthropology and linguistics became closely
associated in the early days of anthropological
fieldwork when anthropologists enlisted the help
of linguists to study unwritten languages.
 In contrast with other linguists, then,
anthropological linguists are interested
primarily in the history and structure of
formerly unwritten languages.

42. Anthropological linguistics
 Because an unwritten language must be heard in
order to be studied, it does not leave any traces
once its speakers died off.
 Anthropological linguists must begin in the
present, with comparisons of contemporary
languages.
 Then they may draw inferences about the kinds of
change in language that may have occurred in the
past and that may account for similarities and
differences observed in the present.

43. Computational linguistics
 Computational linguistics centers around the use
of computers to process or produce human language
(also known as natural language, to distinguish
it from computer languages).
 To this field, linguistics contributes an
understanding of the special properties of
language data, and provides theories and
descriptions of language structure and use

44. Computational linguistics
 Some current application areas include
translating from one language to another (Machine
Translation), storing and finding relevant
documents in large collections of text (Corpus
Linguistics and Information Retrieval), and
carrying out various forms of computer mediated
communication.

45. Important distinctions in linguistics
 Descriptive vs. prescriptive
 Synchronic vs. diachronic
 Langue parole
 Competence and performance

46. Descriptive vs. prescriptive
 Don't say X.
 People don't say X.
 The first is a prescriptive command, while the
second is a descriptive statement.
 The distinction lies in prescribing how things
ought to be and describing how things are.
 The reason why present-day linguists are so
insistent about the distinction between the two
types of rules is simply that traditional grammar
was very strongly normative in character, e.g.
 You should never use a double-negative
 You should not split the infinitive etc.

47. Humorous grammar rules
 Never end a sentence with a preposition.
 And don't start a sentence with a conjunction.
 It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
 Avoid cliches like the plague. (They're old hat.)
 Also, always avoid annoying alliteration.
 No sentence fragments.

48. Humorous grammar rules
 In the 18th century, all the main European
languages were studied prescriptively.
 The grammarians tried to lay down rules for the
correct use of language and settle the disputes
over usage once and for all.
 Some usages were prescribed to be learned by
heart, followed accurately or avoided altogether.
It was a matter of black or white, right or wrong.
 These attitudes are still with us, though people
realize nowadays the facts of usage count more
than the authority-made standards.
 The nature of linguistics as a science determines
its preoccupation with description instead of
prescription.

49. Synchronic vs. diachronic
 A synchronic description takes a fixed instant
(usually, but not necessarily, the present) as
its point of observation. Most grammars are of
this kind.
 Diachronic linguistics is the study of a language
through the course of its history.

50. Langue parole
 Saussure distinguished the linguistic competence
of the speaker and the actual phenomena or data
of linguistics (utterances) as langue and parole.
 While parole constitutes the immediately
accessible data, the linguist's proper object is
the langue of each community, the lexicon,
grammar, and phonology implanted in each
individual by his upbringing in society and on
the basis of which he speaks and understands his
language.

51. Competence and performance
 This fundamental distinction is discussed by
Chomsky in his Aspects of the Theory of Syntax
(1965).
 A language user's underlying knowledge about the
system of rules is called his linguistic
competence.
 Performance refers to the actual use of language
in concrete situations.

52. Competence and performance
 Chomsky points out that this distinction is
related to the langue-parole distinction of
Saussure but he does not accept the view of
seeing langue as a mere systematic inventory of
items.
 Competence is closer to the famous German
linguist Humboldt's conception, that is, it
should refer to the underlying competence as a
system of generative processes.