5 Basic Concepts in Linguistics

Mr. Tariq Khan

Learning Outcomes:

On completing this module, the students would gain an insight into the key concepts of general linguistics and its various sub-fields. They would be able to identify them according to their domains, define and distinguish them in addition to providing suitable illustrations.

Introduction:

This module presents the basic concepts in Linguistics. The concepts featuring here are integral to the study of Linguistics as they frequently occur in theoretical and applied areas of language science and are important to understanding the intricacies of human language. For the purpose of systematicity, the module presents the concepts according to their relevance to various sub-domains of linguistics. References, dictionaries, glossaries and video lectures available on the Internet would be a helpful supplement for the students reading this chapter.

Basic concepts in general and applied linguistics

Language: The term language frequently occurs in our day to day interactions. It is multidimensional and can refer to a range of phenomena. Therefore, the meaning of this term specific to the present context may emerge from its comparison with other terms such as dialect, variety, code, communication, style, etc. The following points are noteworthy:

Language is an endowment that is unique to human beings. Animals, birds and other creatures may communicate, but they do not use language like humans. Hockett in the 1960s presented a host of features called the design features that separate human language from animal communication. Language is combinatorial and rule-based whereas the sounds made by animals and birds are mostly holistic expressions communicating feelings of joy or despair.
Language can be spoken or written or signed.
Language is a medium of communication. Since one of the most important roles played by language is communication, traditionally the scholars have treated language as a medium of communication.
Language also serves as a medium of cognition by shaping the ideas about the world and enabling the expression thereof.
In some functional perspectives, the term language may refer to anything from code, dialect, variety, pidgin, creole, lingua franca, etc.
In formal perspectives, language is a set of all and only grammatical sentences.

In the context of the present discussion, language refers to a system of expressions and their meanings. It serves as a means for communication and bonding with one another in a community. Arguably, the signs and gestures that mute and hearing-impaired people use, constitute sign language. The sign language differs from the spoken-written language only for modality, for everything else both are on par with each other. There are thousands of languages around the world having some common and some distinct features.

Linguistics: Linguistics is an academic pursuit that models the structure of the human language, explores how language develops in human beings and examines the intricacies involved in processing different kinds of usages. A linguist is a professional who studies languages scientifically. Linguistics has attracted the scholars and language enthusiasts across times and cultures. Needless to say, it is highly inter-disciplinary, and it has several sub-fields focussing on different aspects of speech and interaction.

Communication: The term communication can refer to a number of entities. In the present context, communication is the act of transferring message from one end to another. Communication can be verbal or non-verbal or a mix of both. Conversation, speech, debate and discussions are all acts of communication. The communication can take place at the following levels:

a) Intra-personal communication (takes place within an individual).

b) Inter-personal (takes place between individuals).

c) Mass communication (takes place among large population).

Lect, dialect and variety: Lect is a particular form of language. The term is applicable when it is not clear whether something is an independent language or a variety of it. Idiolect is the language use that is typical of an individual. It exhibits distinct and unique usages at the level pronunciation, vocabulary choice and sentence formations. Sociolect (or social dialect) is the language use that exhibits the social background and characteristics of the speakers. These speakers may belong to a particular social group including caste, class, ethnicity, etc. Arguably, it is possible to find different sociolects within the same geographical boundary. The term dialect refers to a kind of speech that is typical of a geographical region. For some scholars the terms dialect and language are coterminous, and the distinction between them is superficial. Many scholars make a distinction between language and dialect and admit that the dialects of a language are mutually intelligible. However, it is important to note that a dialect is not inferior to a language in any way and the distinction is more political than linguistic. In this connection, the term variety is neutral. The study of regional dialects is called dialectology.

Competence and performance: Following Saussure’s idea of langue and parole Chomsky suggested competence and performance to distinguish between two important aspects of the human language. Chomsky applies the term competence to refer to the underlying rules about language and performance to refer to the actual instantiations of such rules. The distinction between competence and performance became significant for the purpose of deciding what should be the object of inquiry in linguistics. Most linguists including Chomsky have favoured competence over performance. Of late, Chomsky suggested internalised language (or I-language) and externalised language (or E-language) to explicate the same distinction.

LSRW and vocabulary: LSRW is an abbreviation referring to the skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing. These are the four skills that are easily demonstrable and inter- linked. While reading and listening are comprehension skills, writing and speaking are production skills. It is important to note that the speakers of a language may be able to develop listening and speaking skills without formal instructions, but reading and writing skills require training. Vocabulary is a general term that refers to the set of words of a language. It is synonymous with lexicon that is more technical of the two. The term lexis refers to a set of all words and phrases of a particular language.

Forms and functions: The outward appearance of a linguistic entity is called form. For example, the word go can occur in in the following forms: go, goes, going, went and gone. In contrast, the term function refers to the role that a linguistic form plays in different situations. For example, go performs the function of a verb in the sentence we go to market every day.

Articulation, utterance expression and speech: The terms articulation, utterance, expression and speech are significant in the study of phonetics and phonology, and they may be perceived in the ascending order of length. The term articulation is a physical activity of the organs coming together for the production of speech. An utterance is an instance of language use that can vary in size and is isolatable and analysable. An utterance whether a word or a phrase can be either contextual (in other words context-sensitive) or free of any context (in other words context-free). The term expression signifies elements larger than individual words. The term speech is multidimensional, and it refers to a range of phenomena such as spoken communication, style, etc.

Scripts, writing systems and orthographies: Writing is technology that humans developed only after they had started communicating through speech. It tends to represent the variety that is recognised as the standard variety and therefore it is not as prone to change as speech is. Writing requires a set of symbols called script, and a convention called writing system. For instance, English is written in the Roman script which follows the alphabetic writing system. The term orthography refers to the norms for the use of script including letters, diacritics, punctuations and spelling of a language. Not all languages of the world are written, and very few speech communities have all their members able to write.

Applied linguistics, language acquisition and learning: The term applied linguistics refers to applications of ideas and theoretical postulations for the purpose of understanding problems and solving them. The term is often synonymous with language teaching; however, hybrid subfields like sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics qualify as applied linguistics. Acquisition and learning are two terms that refer to the development of language in humans. Though both the terms are synonymous and are used interchangeably there exists a fundamental difference between them. The term acquisition refers to the process by which humans, mostly children, attain the ability to use language without formal training. The term learning, in contrast, refers to the process by which humans achieve the ability to use language with the help of formal training.

Psycholinguistics: Psycholinguistics is a subfield of applied linguistics that has a regular exchange with other disciplines. Psycholinguistics is a hybrid term in which one can easily identify the participation of the terms Psychology and Linguistics. This holds true for the discipline as well. Therefore, psycholinguists utilise and integrate ideas and concepts from Psychology and Linguistics. Obviously, their primary concern is to understand the collaborative functions of language and mind/brain. Psycholinguists are interested in exploring how human beings acquire/learn a language(s), comprehend and produce their everyday speech. Arguably, storage and access of language, language/speech disorders and language therapy are quite relevant to Psycholinguistics. Language processing and aphasiology are significant concerns of Psycholinguistics. The term language processing refers to comprehension and production of language by humans or by machines. However, processing involves a continuous form of encoding & decoding, identification & and analysis and interpretation. Aphasia refers to the impairment and disorders of language use due to the disease or damage to the language representing areas of the brain. Aphasiology is the systematic study of aphasia. Aphasia can affect the ability to comprehend language or produce language or both. Lying, stuttering, lisping, stammering and garrulousness of old age do not qualify as aphasic speech because they are not the results of damage to the brain. The aphasic syndromes are sometimes recoverable through speech therapy. Language processing and linguistic aphasia operate at various levels of language.

Sociolinguistics: The term sociolinguistics refers to the study of language in society. Sociolinguistics examines the variations in a language and explains their occurrence. Arguably, it is an applied area of Linguistics, and the people who study it are known as sociolinguists. They try to reason out why people speak differently even when they speak the same language. So, they study variations in language use. Both sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics have developed their own methods while they also follow methods from other sciences and subfields of Linguistics.

Native speakers and speech community: The concept of native speakers is important in language analysis. The native speakers are competent speakers of a language and they can judge whether an utterance is possible or not in their language. Linguists mostly depend on the intuition of the native speakers when they have to analyse the grammaticality and acceptability of an utterance. An important point about the native speakers is as follows: once a native speaker, always a native speaker. The term speech community derives from the German word sprachgemeinschaft. Speech community or linguistic community is often coterminous with language. Basically, it is the community of native speakers of a language who inherit and transfer the knowledge of language across generations.

Mother tongue: The term mother tongue or first language (L1) is the language that develops in an individual before any other language. Many scholars have raised concerns for mother tongue education and education in mother tongue. In bilingual communities the mother tongue or first language can be a combination of two or more languages.

Language policy: The role of language(s) and script(s) is important in maintaining stability and conviviality at the social, regional and national levels. Therefore, there is a need for language policy. The term language policy may refer to the decisions involving language use for interpersonal and mass communication. The primary objective of a language policy is to maintain a language, elevate its status, increase its use and widen its domains. The language policy provides significant clues about the socio-political aspects and speakers strength of a speech community. It exists as an umbrella term for all kinds of language behaviour including writing and it exists at the individual level as well as at the level of the state. A related processes concerning language use at the society or nation is language planning. Language planning involves decisions regarding the choice of language for official communication and medium of instruction at schools. Language planning involves status planning, corpus planning and acquisition planning.

Basic concepts in phonetics and phonology

Phonetics and Phonology: The terms phonetics refers to the study of speech sounds while phonology concerns the patterns in which speech sounds occur in a language. For both, speech is a common concern. Speech is a form of modified breathing while speech sounds are the sounds that human beings produce through their vocal apparatus, in other words, the organs of speech. These sounds are also known as phones and they are not comparable with snapping fingers, clapping of hands, a creek of the door, etc. Phonetics has three main branches: Articulatory Phonetics, Auditory Phonetics and Acoustic Phonetics.

Articulatory phonetics concerns the production of speech sounds.
Auditory phonetics concerns the perception of speech.
Acoustic phonetics concerns the physical property of speech sounds.

The individual speech sounds, phones and phonemes, are important concepts in the study of phonetics and phonology. Following are some of the ways to classify the speech sounds: vowels and consonants, oral and nasal, ingressive and egressive. In the analysis of consonants, the following are helpful: (a) The place of articulation, (b) The manner of articulation, and (c) Voicing. The following aspects are useful in the analysis of vowel sounds: (a) Height of the tongue, (b) Position of tongue, and (c) Lip rounding.

Articulators: The term articulators refer to the parts of the vocal tract that are capable of forming a constriction for the purpose of producing a speech sound. The articulators can be either active (those that move such as lips and tongue) or passive (the ones that do not move such as hard palate).

Airstream mechanism: Airstream mechanism is the manner in which an airstream is set in motion for the purpose of speech. Speech sounds are produced with one of the three airstream mechanisms, or occasionally by a combination of two of these. The airstream mechanisms include Pulmonic (related to the lungs), Glottalic (Pharyngeal) and Velaric. Airstream mechanisms may produce ingressive (inward) or egressive (outward) airflow.

Phoneme: The speech sounds belonging to a language are called phonemes. The phoneme is the minimally distinguishable unit of speech. The phoneme is abstract, but an important concept in the study of phonology because it is not possible to divide a phoneme into smaller constituents. A phoneme can be either a vowel or a consonant and sometimes it is identical with the individual letters of the script of a language. Some phonemes can have variants known as allophones. The allophonic variants of a phoneme are in complementary distribution. Therefore, only one variant can occur in an utterance, two or more variants cannot occur together.

Syllable: Syllable is an important concept in phonology. It is the most basic unit for perception and a source for the derivation of phonemes. The presence of a vowel sound and only one vowel sound is the most distinguishing characteristics of a syllable. A syllable can be small as having just a vowel sound or medium-sized or big having a vowel and a consonant cluster.

There often exist asymmetries between the way words are written and the way they are pronounced.

CV formula: The CV formula or CV skeleton refers to the pattern in which the consonant and vowels are present in a syllable/word. For example, the syllable belt has a CVCC pattern while the word organic has a VCCVCVC pattern. CV skeletons are useful in analysing the structure of the syllables/words. They also help in counting the number of sounds and their types in the given syllable/word.

Minimal pair: The term minimal pair refers to such word forms that differ only for a single sound. For example, the words table, cable and fable differ due to variation in their first sound. Minimal pairs are useful in understanding the sound patterns of a language.

Phonological processes: Phonological processes refer to processes that result in the difference between the underlying pronunciation and the actual pronunciation. There are several processes of which the following seven are highly significant:

Assimilation refers to the process by which a sound becomes more like an adjacent sound
Dissimilation refers to two the process in which two close or adjacent sounds become less
Insertion refers to gain of a sound in the surface form though it did not exist in the underlying
Deletion refers to loss of an underlying form in the surface form,
Metathesis occurs when there is a change in the order of sounds
Strengthening or fortition refers to the process by which a sound becomes stronger by gaining a feature
Weakening or lenition refers to the process by which a sound becomes weaker by losing a feature

Transliteration and transcription: Transliteration refers to the method of mapping from one system of writing into another based on phonetic similarity. This mapping can happen from word to word or even sound to sound or letter to letter. In simple, the term transliteration means representing a text (spoken or written) in a script/writing system. It signifies the conversion of a source text from one script to another. The term transcription refers to a representation of speech sounds using phonetic symbols. Transliteration differs from transcription in the sense that it maps the sounds of one language to the letter combinations of the script of another language.

IPA: The abbreviation IPA may refer to two related entities: (a) International Phonetics Association and (b) International Phonetics Alphabet. The International Phonetic Association was formed in 1886 by a group of language teachers in France who also started a periodical titled Dhi Fonètik Tîtcer that printed its contents entirely in phonetic transcription. The International Phonetic Alphabet is a standardised set of symbols for analysing human language. It was designed to meet the practical needs of field workers such as recording the phonetic or phonemic structure of a language, furnishing the learners of foreign languages with phonetic transcription to assist them in acquiring the pronunciation, and working out orthographies for languages written in other systems or for languages hitherto unwritten. Originally, this alphabet was designed for transcribing English, French and German but later it was adopted for all written and unwritten languages.

Basic concepts in morphology and syntax

Morphology is the study of the internal structure of words and the relationship between the form and meaning. The morphological studies tend to base themselves on morphemes and words. Syntax deals with the organisation of words and phrases in well-formed sentences. The main concerns of morphology include words and word-parts while the main concern of syntax is the patterns in which words form phrases and sentences.

Words: Words are most distinguishable units of language. Words are important because they carry meaning and grammatical information such number, person, gender, tense, aspect and mood. Following are the two broad categories of words: (a) content words such as nouns, verbs, adjectives etc., and (b) function words such as determiners, prepositions, conjunctions etc. Words are formed by the inflexions, derivations and word formation processes. Inflexion refers to instances when a word produces another word by adding an affix (suffix or prefix). For example, book and books. Inflexion carries grammatical aspects. It is the final modification on the word form and usually does not cause a change in its category. Derivation, on the other hand, produces words from an existing word. For example, consider and consideration. Derivation also makes use of affixes, however, the category of the resultant word changes.

Word formation processes: The expression word formation process refers to the process by which new words are added to the language. Following are some of most commonly occurring word processing processes:

Conversion as in the words google or WhatsApp
Derivation as singer that is derived from the word sing.
Compounding as in school bus, table-fan, lamppost.
Acronyms such as UNESCO, LASER, and NATO
Abbreviations as in WHO, ILO and MOU
Initialism as in ad and doc referring to advertisement and doctor respectively.
Blending as in brunch, cyborg and bromance.
Back-formation as in the word act that has come from actor.
Coinage or invention of new words as in xerox,
Borrowing or loanword as in Zeitgeist and kindergarten

Clause: A clause is a string of words that can act as the constituent of a sentence. A clause can be either dependent or independent. A dependent clause cannot stand alone as a sentence whereas an independent clause can exist alone as a sentence. The structure of the sentence depends on the number of independent clauses it has.

Sentence: A sentence is a set of grammatically linked words and is complete in itself. It is a unit that is larger than the words, phrases and clauses. It is the main concern of a syntactic analysis. A punctuation mark such as full stop, question mark, mark of exclamation occurs at the end of a sentence. There are four major types of sentence according to the function they perform:

Declarative: A sentence that provides information. For example, this is a laptop.
Imperative: A sentence that works as a request or command. For example, Please sing a song.
Interrogative: A sentence that seeks information and has the punctuation mark ? at its end. These sentences often have a wh- word. For example, who broke the window glass?
Exclamatory: A sentence that expresses excitement and emotion such as surprise, regret etc. Such a sentence has an exclamation mark ! at its end. For example, what a nice pen!

According to the structure the sentence can be of the following types:

Simple sentence: A simple sentence has only one independent clause. For example,
The table is big.
Complex sentence: A complex sentence has at one dependent clause in addition to an independent clause. For example, Cricket is an excellent game unless you are watching it.
Compound sentence: A compound sentence has a minimum of two independent clauses joined by a conjunction. For example, Do good things and let the world be a good place to live.
Compound-complex: A compound-complex sentence has a minimum of two

independent clauses and a dependent clause. For example, consider the following: Although I like to play cricket, I have not had enough time to play it recently, and there is hardly anyone to accompany me in this game.

Word/phrase order: Words and phrases act as the constituents of the sentence. The order in which the subject (S), verb (V) and object (O) represented by words and phrases are arranged in a simple declarative sentence of the language decides the word/phrase order of the language. For instance, the word order in a simple declarative sentence of English is SVO.

Grammar: The term grammar refers to set of rules or formal models or descriptions that help in identifying and analysing the sound patterns, word parts and sentence structures. Grammar is a very fundamental aspect of human language. It exists in the minds of the speakers who can notice even minor deviations in the use of grammar of their language. It is important to note that grammar exists even if there is no written/printed book illustrating the rules and usages of the language. Sometimes scholars employ the term grammar to mainly referring to syntax, which focuses primarily on the structure of phrases, clauses and sentences. Since grammar also deals with the structure of syllables and morphemes, its scope is wider than that of syntax. Accordingly, the activity of a fieldworker who tries to document a language is called writing the grammar. Following are two diametrically opposite ways of writing the grammar of a language: prescriptive grammar and descriptive grammar. A grammar that states how the language use including word and sentence formation ideally should be is a prescriptive grammar. In contrast, a grammar that demonstrates how the language is actually being used is a descriptive grammar. There is yet another important type of grammar that Chomsky popularised in through his early writings. This grammar is known as Universal Grammar (UG). It is important to understand that UG is not the grammar of a language. According to Chomsky, human children are born with UG, which is abstract and includes such rules that are common across the languages of the world. When children grow the exposure to the language(s) in their surroundings sets the principles and parameters on UG.

Rules and notations: Rules are precise expressions of the pattern or regularity in the occurrence of linguistic phenomena. Rules are formal and conventional generalisations about the language phenomena. They involve sign and symbols and help in analysing the linguistic utterances that have occurred and are useful in predicting utterances that may occur in future.

Rules can operate at the level of sounds, word parts and sentences. The rule A → B/C D would be spelt out as following: A becomes B in the context or environment of C and D. Here, the letters A, B, C, and D represent linguistic entities. Notations are symbols that constitute a rule. They can be letters of the alphabet or mathematical symbols, brackets, punctuations and diacritics. For instance, the use of asterisk * signifies an ungrammatical, ill- formed, odd or unacceptable utterance and the hash # represents the (word) boundary. Parenthesis or slanting brackets indicate optionality, the braces or curly brackets indicate multiple possibilities. Lower case Greek letters indicate addition and deletion while the use of subscripts indicates the sequence of common elements. Accordingly, C0 would mean 0 or more Cs.

Basic concepts in semantics, pragmatics and discourse

Semantics and pragmatics are two important subfields of linguistics and are highly interrelated. Semantics refers to the study of meaning in general whereas the term pragmatics refers to the study of meaning in context or meaning in language use. Discourse deals with the meaning and arrangement of written and spoken communication at a level larger than the sentence. Hence, meaning is the key issue in semantics, pragmatics and discourse.

Discourse: Discourse deals with coherent language use such as conversation, debate, speech, discussions etc. with a focus on units larger than sentences. Discourse analysis also known as Discourse Studies refers to the practice of studying texts larger than the sentence. The units in consideration for discourse analysis are interpretable according to the context and socio- cultural conventions.

Semiotics: Semiotics is the study of signs. A sign is an entity that refers to some other entity in communication. Many scholars treat language as an organised system of signs. The term sign refers to an entity that stands for or means another entity. For example, red light at the traffic signal means stop. In the context of human language, a sign can be either oral or visual or both. Further, a sign becomes a sign either spontaneously or conventionally. According to Saussure, a sign has two components, a signifier (that is its form) and a signified (that is the concept or the entity).

Ambiguity and disambiguation: Ambiguity is a phenomenon that arises when an utterance, be it a word or a sign or a sentence, has more than one interpretations possible at the same time. Ambiguous expressions permit more than one meaning. The possible meanings that make an expression ambiguous may be slightly related or completely unrelated. Ambiguity can be either lexical or structural that is to say the multiple interpretations of an utterance arise due to either polysemous/homonymous words or ordering of phrases. Ambiguity can be lexical or structural. The lexical ambiguity occurs due to the polysemous or homonymous nature of the words. For example, consider the sentence I love walking to the bank. The word bank in this sentence may refer to the ‘water body’ as well as the ‘monetary institution.’ Alternatively, the structural ambiguity occurs when the constituents of an expression can be arranged in multiple ways leading to different interpretations. For example, consider the sentence I saw a baby with binoculars. In this utterance, either the baby or the speaker can have the binoculars. The linking of the constituent with binoculars with the rest of the utterance is resulting in ambiguity here. Ambiguity can be local or global. The language users handle the ambiguous utterances by associating it with a context. The context of an utterance is the background in which the language users interpret its meaning. The process such as associating a context to an ambiguous expression or paraphrasing it is called disambiguation.

Summary

This module presented such concepts in Linguistics that are basic and integral. This module divided these concepts according to their relevance to various subfields of Linguistics. At first the module illustrated the concepts that are pertinent to general and applied linguistics. Next, it offered the concepts relevant to phonetics and phonology. After that it discussed the concepts belonging to the areas of morphology and syntax. Finally, it presented the concepts of semantics, pragmatics and discourse.

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The Virtual Linguistics Campus accessible at https://www.youtube.com/user/LinguisticsMarburg