Lecture 1

What is linguistics?
This chapter explains how linguistics differs from traditional
grammar studies, and outlines the main subdivisions of the
subject.
Most people spend an immense amount of their life talking,
listening and, in advanced societies, reading and writing. Normal
conversation uses 4,000 or 5,000 words an hour. A radio talk,
where there are fewer pauses, uses as many as 8,000 or 9,000
words per hour. A person reading at a normal speed covers
14,000 or 15,000 words per hour. So someone who chats for an
hour, listens to a radio talk for an hour and reads for an hour
possibly comes into contact with 25,000 words in that time. Per
day, the total could be as high as 100,000.
The use of language is an integral part of being human. Children
all over the world start putting words together at approximately
the same age, and follow remarkably similar paths in their speech
development. All languages are surprisingly similar in their basic
structure, whether they are found in South America, Australia or
near the North Pole. Language and abstract thought are closely
connected, and many people think that these two characteristics
above all distinguish human beings from animals.

Insight
Normal humans use language incessantly: speaking, hearing,
reading and writing. They come into contact with tens of
thousands of words each day.

An inability to use language adequately can affect someone’s

status in society, and may even alter their personality. Because of
its crucial importance in human life, every year an increasing
number of psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, teachers,
speech therapists, computer scientists and copywriters (to name
but a few professional groups) realize that they need to study
language more deeply. So it is not surprising that in recent years
one of the fastest-expanding branches of knowledge has been
linguistics – the systematic study of language.
Linguistics tries to answer the basic questions ‘What is language?’
and ‘How does language work?’. It probes into various aspects of
these problems, such as ‘What do all languages have in common?’,
‘What range of variation is found among languages?’, ‘How does
human language differ from animal communication?’, ‘How does
a child learn to speak?’, ‘How does one write down and analyse an
unwritten language?’, ‘Why do languages change?’, ‘To what
extent are social class differences reflected in language?’ and so
on.

What is a linguist?
A person who studies linguistics is usually referred to as
alinguist. The more accurate term ‘linguistician’ is too much of a
tongue-twister to become generally accepted. The word ‘linguist’
is unsatisfactory: it causes confusion, since it also refers to
someone who speaks a large number of languages. Linguists in
the sense of linguistics experts need not be fluent in languages,
though they must have a wide experience of different types of
language. It is more important for them to analyse and explain
linguistic phenomena such as the Turkish vowel system, or
German verbs, than to make themselves understood in Istanbul or
Berlin. They are skilled, objective observers rather than
participants – consumers of languages rather than producers, as
one social scientist flippantly commented.
Insight
A linguist in the sense of someone who analyses languages need
not actually speak the language(s) they are studying.

Our type of linguist is perhaps best likened to a musicologist. A

musicologist could analyse a piano concerto by pointing out the
theme and variations, harmony and counterpoint. But such a
person need not actually play the concerto, a task left to the
concert pianist. Music theory bears the same relation to actual
music as linguistics does to language.

How does linguistics differ from

traditional grammar?
One frequently meets people who think that linguistics is old
school grammar jazzed up with a few new names. But it differs in
several basic ways.
First, and most important, linguistics is descriptive, not
prescriptive. Linguists are interested in what is said, not what they
think ought to be said. They describe language in all its aspects,
but do not prescribe rules of ‘correctness’.

Insight
Those who work on linguistics describe languages; they do not
dictate how to use them.

It is a common fallacy that there is some absolute standard of

correctness which it is the duty of linguists, schoolteachers,
grammars and dictionaries to maintain. There was an uproar in
the USA when in 1961 Webster’s Third New International
Dictionary of the English Language included words such
asain’t and phrases such as ants in one’s pants. The editors were
deliberately corrupting the language – or else they were
incompetent, argued the critics. ‘Webster III has thrust upon us a
dismaying assortment of the questionable, the perverse, the
unworthy and the downright outrageous,’ raged one angry
reviewer. But if people say ain’t and ants in one’s pants, linguists
consider it important to record the fact. They are observers and
recorders, not judges.
‘I am irritated by the frequent use of the words different to on
radio and other programmes’ ran a letter to a daily paper.
‘In my schooldays of fifty years ago we were taught that things
were alike to and different from. Were our teachers so terribly
ignorant?’ This correspondent has not realized that languages are
constantly changing. And the fact that he comments on
the frequent use of different to indicates that it has as much right
to be classified as ‘correct’ as different from.
The notion of absolute and unchanging ‘correctness’ is quite
foreign to linguists. They might recognize that one type of speech
appears, through the whim of fashion, to be more socially
acceptable than others. But this does not make the socially
acceptable variety any more interesting for them than the other
varieties, or the old words any better than new ones. To linguists
the language of a pop singer is not intrinsically worse (or better)
than that of a duke. They would disagree strongly with the Daily
Telegraph writer who complained that ‘a disc jockey talking to the
latest Neanderthal pop idol is a truly shocking experience of
verbal squalor’. Nor do linguists condemn the coining of new
words. This is a natural and continuous process, not a sign of
decadence and decay. A linguist would note with interest, rather
than horror, the fact that you can have your hair washed and set
in a glamorama in North Carolina, or your car oiled at
a lubritorium in Sydney, or that you can buy apples at
a fruitique in a trendy suburb of London.
A second important way in which linguistics differs from
traditional school grammar is that linguists regard the spoken
language as primary, rather than the written. In the past,
grammarians have over-stressed the importance of the written
word, partly because of its permanence. It was difficult to cope
with fleeting utterances before the invention of sound recording.
The traditional classical education was also partly to blame.
People insisted on moulding language in accordance with the
usage of the ‘best authors’ of the ancient world, and these authors
existed only in written form. This attitude began as far back as the
second century bc, when scholars in Alexandria took the authors
of fifth-century Greece as their models. This belief in the
superiority of the written word has continued for over two
millennia.
But linguists look first at the spoken word, which preceded the
written everywhere in the world, as far as we know. Moreover,
most writing systems are derived from the vocal sounds. Although
spoken utterances and written sentences share many common
features, they also exhibit considerable differences. Linguists
therefore regard spoken and written forms as belonging to
different, though overlapping systems, which must be analysed
separately: the spoken first, then the written.

Insight
Spoken and written language need to be analysed separately. Both
are important, and neither is better than the other.

A third way in which linguistics differs from traditional grammar

studies is that it does not force languages into a Latin-based
framework. In the past, many traditional textbooks have assumed
unquestioningly that Latin provides a universal framework into
which all languages fit, and countless schoolchildren have been
confused by meaningless attempts to force English into foreign
patterns. It is sometimes claimed, for example, that a phrase such
as for John is in the ‘dative case’. But this is blatantly untrue,
since English does not have a Latin-type case system. At other
times, the influence of the Latin framework is more subtle, and so
more misleading. Many people have wrongly come to regard
certain Latin categories as being ‘natural’ ones. For example, it is
commonly assumed that the Latin tense divisions of past, present
and future are inevitable. Yet one frequently meets languages
which do not make this neat threefold distinction. In some
languages, it is more important to express the duration of an
action – whether it is a single act or a continuing process – than to
locate the action in time.
In addition, judgements on certain constructions often turn out to
have a Latin origin. For example, people frequently argue that
‘good English’ avoids ‘split infinitives’ as in the phrase to humbly
apologize, where the infinitive to apologizeis ‘split’ by humbly. A
letter to the London Evening Standardis typical of many: ‘Do split
infinitives madden your readers as much as they do me?’ asks the
correspondent. ‘Can I perhaps ask that, at least, judges and
editors make an effort to maintain the form of our language?’ The
idea that a split infinitive is wrong is based on Latin. Purists insist
that, because a Latin infinitive is only one word, its English
equivalent must be as near to one word as possible. To linguists, it
is unthinkable to judge one language by the standards of another.
Since split infinitives occur frequently in English, they are as
‘correct’ as unsplit ones.

Insight
Each language must be described separately, and must never be
forced into a framework devised for another.

In brief, linguists are opposed to the notion that any one language
can provide an adequate framework for all the others. They are
trying to set up a universal framework. And there is no reason
why this should resemble the grammar of Latin, or the grammar
of any other language arbitrarily selected from the thousands
spoken by humans.
The scope of linguistics
Linguistics covers a wide range of topics and its boundaries are difficult to
define.
A diagram in the shape of a wheel gives a rough impression of the range
covered.
In the centre is phonetics, the study of human speech sounds. A good
knowledge of phonetics is useful for a linguist. Yet it is a basic background
knowledge, rather than part of linguistics itself. Phoneticians are concerned
with the actual physical sounds, the raw material out of which language is
made. They study the position of the tongue, teeth and vocal cords during
the production of sounds, and record and analyse sound waves. Linguists,
on the other hand, are more interested in the way in which language is
patterned. They analyse the shape or form of these patterns rather than
the physical substance out of which the units of language are made. The
famous Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, expressed the difference well
when he compared language with a game of chess. The linguist is interested
in the various moves which the chessmen make and how they are aligned
on the board. It does not matter whether the chessmen are made of wood or
ivory. Their substance does not alter the rules of the game.
Figure 1.1.

Insight
The patterns of any language are more important than the
physical substance out of which they are made.

Although phonetics and linguistics are sometimes referred to

together as ‘the linguistic sciences’, phonetics is not as central to
general linguistics as the study of language patterning. For this
reason, information about phonetics has been placed in an
appendix at the end of the book.
In Figure 1.1, phonetics is surrounded by phonology (sound
patterning), then phonology is surrounded by syntax. The term
‘syntax’, used in its broadest sense, refers to both the arrangement
and the form of words. It is that part of language which links
together the sound patterns and the
meaning.Semantics (meaning) is placed outside syntax.
Phonology, syntax and semantics are the ‘bread and butter’ of
linguistics, and are a central concern of this book. Together they
constitute the grammar of a language.

Figure 1.2.
But a word of warning about differences in terminology must be
added. In some (usually older) textbooks, the word ‘grammar’ has
a more restricted use. It refers only to what we have called the
syntax. In these books, the term ‘syntax’ is restricted to the
arrangement of words, and the standard term morphology is
used for their make-up. This is not a case of one group of linguists
being right in their use of terminology, and the other wrong, but
of words gradually shifting their meaning, with the terms ‘syntax’
and ‘grammar’ extending their range.

Insight
The word grammar refers to sound patterns, word patterns and
meaning patterns combined, and not (as in some older books)
word order and word endings only.

Around the central grammatical hub comes pragmatics, which

deals with how speakers use language in ways which cannot be
predicted from linguistic knowledge alone. This fast-expanding
topic has connections both with semantics, and with the various
branches of linguistics which link language with the external
world: psycholinguistics (the study of language and
mind), sociolinguistics (the study of language and
society), applied linguistics (the application of linguistics to
language teaching), computational linguistics (the use of
computers to simulate language and its workings), stylistics (the
study of language and literature), anthropological
linguistics (the study of language in cross-cultural settings)
and philosophical linguistics (the link between language and
logical thought).
These various branches overlap to some extent, so are hard to
define clearly. Psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics and stylistics are
perhaps the ones which have expanded fastest in recent years. For
this reason, they are given chapters to themselves in this book.
Finally, there are two important aspects of linguistics which have
been omitted from the diagram. The first is historical
linguistics, the study of language change. This omission was
inevitable in a two-dimensional diagram. But if the wheel diagram
is regarded as three-dimensional, as if it were the cross-section of
a tree, then this topic can be included. A grammar can be
described at one particular point in time (a single cut across the
tree), or its development can be studied over a number of years,
by comparing a number of different cuts made across the tree-
trunk at different places.
Figure 1.3.
Because it is normally necessary to know how a system works at
any one time before one can hope to understand changes, the
analysis of language at a single point in time, or
synchronic linguistics, is usually dealt with before historical
or diachronic linguistics.
The second omission is linguistic typology, the study of
different language types. This could not be fitted in because it
spreads over several layers of the diagram, covering phonology,
syntax and semantics.
This chapter has explained how linguistics differs from traditional
grammar studies, and has outlined the main subdivisions within
the subject. The next chapter will look at the phenomenon studied
by linguistics: language.