23/01/2024

F U N D A M E N TA L S O F L A N G U AG E A N D
LINGUISTICS Nguyen Thanh Loan

AN OVERVIEW ED - HANU

COURSE ROADMAP

In-class (tentative):
­ W1: Introduction to language and linguistics

­ W2: Phonetics & Phonology

­ W3: Morphology

­ W4: Semantics

­ W5: Syntax

­ W6: Language and the brain

­ W7: Language in social contexts

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ASSESSMENT TASKS

Midterm test: 30%

Final test: 60%
Attendance AND participation (10%)

WORKING WITH THE SLIDES

Definitions or Key points will always be presented in blue.

Notes will be in red.
Suggestive answer to a problem will be in purple.
Examples will be presented in italics.
When terms appear in bold, this is a first mention.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Overview of Language and Linguistics

• Language
• Linguistics
• The origins of language
• Properties of human language

• Language classification

DISCUSSION

How many living languages are there on Earth?

Name some branches of linguistics that you know.

What is the difference between a language user and a linguist?

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DOES ANY OF THESE TERMS

RING A BELL TO YOU?
Homo
Primates sapiens

Vocal
Syntax
tract

Indo-
European S-V-O

Original
language
Pharynx

LANGUAGE
AND
LINGUISTICS
“When we study human language,
we are approaching what some
might call the “human essence,” the
distinctive qualities of mind that are,
so far as we know, unique to man.”

(NOAM CHOMSKY, Language and

Mind, 1968)

Image source: Vox

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LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS

Language

Language is at the heart of all things human. Language is not just a part of us;
language defines us.

We use language when we’re talking, listening, reading, writing, and thinking.

Language underpins social relationships and communities;

Language forges the emotional bond between parent and child; it’s the vehicle
for literature and poetry.

The possession of language distinguishes humans from other animals.

Language is a creative system

Language allows for creativity, giving us the freedom to produce and
understand new words and sentences as the need arises.
We can be innovative in our use of language, but there are rules to such
innovation, and those rules are an integral part of our knowledge of language.
e.g., We can create verbs from nouns:
­ put the wine in bottles à bottle the wine
but a new verb is rarely coined if a word with the intended meaning already
exists:
­ jail the robber but not prison the robber
or we can say:
I summered in Paris but not I midnighted in Paris.

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Similarly, there are also rules for the combination of sounds in a language.

1. Consider the followings:

a. psapr
b. prasp
c. flib
d. bfli
e. ftra

Which words do you think look more like English words? Why?

2. The name of a former president of Ghana: Nkrumah. In English, this was

changed to Nekrumah or Enkrumah. Why?

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Human beings can understand sentences/ utterances never seen nor heard
before without difficulties.

However, the sentences must be arranged in a the right order.

E.g.,

* Frightened dog this cat the that chased mouse a.

à This dog frightened the cat that chased a mouse.

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When you know a language, it means you have the capacity to:
• know the sound system of a language, know what sounds (or signs) are in a
language and what sounds are not.
• know that certain sequences of sounds signify certain concepts or meanings.
• produce and understand an unlimited number of utterances, including many
that are novel and unfamiliar.

à The capacity to understand such knowledge of language is called linguistic

competence.

When investigating linguistic competence, linguists focus on the mental system

that allows human beings to form and interpret the sounds, words, and
sentences of their language. This system is called grammar.

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Grammar is the intricate network of knowledge that underlies human’s

ability to use language.
Components of a grammar

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Interdisciplinary
linguistics
Linguistics

Linguistics is the study of how language

works – how it is used, how it is
acquired, how it changes over time,
how it is represented in the brain, and
so on.

A person who studies linguistics is

called a linguist.

Phonology, syntax and semantics are

the “bread and butter” of linguistics.

Theoretical
linguistics

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Theoretical linguistics involves the construction of a general theory of the

structure of language or of a general theoretical framework for the description
of languages.
• Phonetics:
• Phonology:
• Morphology:
• Syntax:
• Semantics:
• Pragmatics:

Applied linguistics aims at applying the findings and techniques of theoretical

linguistics to practical tasks, including language teaching, translation and
interpreting, forensics, etc.

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LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS:

SUMMARY

Human language is characterized by creativity.

• Speakers of a language have access to a grammar – a mental system that

governs the articulation, perception, and patterning of speech sounds; the
formation of words and sentences; and the interpretation of utterances.

• Linguistics is the systematic study of language. Linguistics tries to answer

the basic questions “What is language?” and “How does language work?”

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HOW LANGUAGE DEVELOPS

How language originated is unknown.

Homo sapiens made its appearance 100 000 to 200 000 years ago

It is suspected that the first “type” of spoken language developed between

100,000 – 50,000 years ago, long before written language.

Hundreds of thousands of years of evolution created a special capacity for

language in humans that is not found in any other species.

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The dual functions of the speech organs

Survival function Speech function
Lungs to exchange carbon dioxide and to supply air for speech
oxygen
Vocal cords to create a seal over the passage to produce vibrations for speech
(folds) to the lungs sounds
Tongue to move food to the teeth and to articulate vowels and
back into the throat consonants
Teeth to break up food to provide a place of articulation
for consonants
Lips to seal the oral cavity to articulate vowels and
consonants
Nose to assist in breathing and to provide nasal resonance
smelling during speech

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THE ORIGINS OF LANGUAGE

Many theories have been developed to explain the origin of language.

Notable hypotheses:
oThe divine source
oThe natural sound source
oThe “bow-wow” theory
oThe ”pooh-pooh” theory
oThe musical source
oThe social interaction source
oThe physical adaptation source
oThe tool making source
oThe genetic source

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THE DIVINE
SOURCE
In most religions, there appears to be a divine
source who provides humans with language.
• The book of Genesis (2:19): “whatsoever
Adam called every living creature, that was
the name thereof.”
• In the Hindu tradition: Language came from
Saraswati, wife of Brahma, creator of the
Universe.

Some experiments were carried out to

rediscover the original divine language, where
babies were raised in silence.

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Hypothesis: If human infants were allowed to grow up without

hearing any language around them, then they would
spontaneously begin using the original God-given language.

• 2,500 years ago – Egypt – pharaoh Psamtik I, as retold by the

Greek writer Herodotus: first word heard was bekos (“bread”
in Phrygian) à Phrygian was the original language.

• c.1500 CE – Scotland – King James IV of Scotland à Hebrew

• c.1600 CE – Mughal Empire – emperor Akbar the Great à

children produced no speech at all

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THE NATURAL SOUND

SOURCE
The “bow-wow” theory

Hypothesis: Primitive words derive from imitations of the natural sounds

that early men and women heard around them (onomatopoeic words).

The ”pooh-pooh” theory

Hypothesis: Speech developed from the instinctive sounds people make in
emotional circumstances, i.e, language came from cries of emotion like
pain, anger and joy.

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THE MUSICAL SOURCE

Newborn babies can manipulate and recognize intonation of their mother’s

voice & language.

Infants’ ability to create melody develops before other aspects of language.

Human can control the vibration of the vocal fold, and the respiratory
system.
It is suggested that early humans may have learned and used melody to
express themselves before adding words to their songs.

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THE SOCIAL INTERACTION

SOURCE
Also known as the “yo-he-ho” theory by linguist Otto Jespersen (1922).

Hypothesis: Sounds may have developed from grunts or curses made by early
humans while engaging in a heavy physical activity, e.g.: the lifting and
carrying large trees or a mammoth.

This theory places the development of human language in a social context

(emphasizes the social interaction).

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THE PHYSICAL ADAPTATION

SOURCE
The physical adaptation for language:

Major transitions:
• in human posture: upright with bipedal
locomotion.
à breath rhythm changes
• in the vocal tract (teeth and lips, mouth
and tongue, larynx and pharynx) – become
highly specialized for language.
• the brain becomes more complex – with
highly developed network of neural
pathways that controls the speech organs
during speech production.

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Change of the lips and teeth

• Teeth: upright, smaller, more even in height, not
slanting outwards like apes’ teeth;
Ø chewing and grinding easier
Ø producing f, v easier
• Lips & tongue: more complex muscles
Ø more flexible (producing p, b, m easier)
• Larynx dropped lower, pharynx became longer
Ø more vocal power (more sounds created)
Ø BUT, easy to choke

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THE TOOL-MAKING SOURCE

c. 2 million years ago, human evidently became capable of making stone

tools.

The brain became larger and lateralized (specializing functions in each of

the two hemispheres).
­ Areas for complex vocalization (speaking) and object manipulation
(making or using tools) both locate in the left hemisphere, and very close
to each other.

A 2010 study by University of Liverpool – 10 expert stone tool makers were

asked to:
­ craft a stone tool
­ silently think of particular words

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In both tasks, the blood flow pattern to the brain was

similar à they both use the same area of the brain.

Conclusion:
­

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THE GENETIC SOURCE

The innateness hypothesis: One (or more) crucial genetic mutation

occurred, allowing humans to create language.

The investigation of the origin of language turns into a search for the
special “language gene” that only humans possess.

The KE family (Britain): 15 relatives, across 3 generations, had language

disorders & impaired language production and comprehension.

à they carry a mutated gene later found to be responsible for speech

production & development – FOXP2.

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COMMUNICATIVE VS.
INFORMATIVE SIGNALS
Both human and animals communicate in some way.
Humans Animals
Communicative talk and/ or use make calls and/ or
signals (intentional) gestures move their bodies
Informative signals blush, shiver (from the flee from danger, etc.
(unintentional) cold), etc.

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PROPERTIES OF HUMAN
LANGUAGE
Human languages have the following properties:

• Reflexivity

• Displacement

• Arbitrariness

• Productivity

• Cultural transmission

• Duality

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PROPERTIES OF HUMAN
LANGUAGE
1. Reflexivity: human can use language to think and talk about itself.

e.g.: We can think back about one’s speech (e.g.: Why did he use so many
technical terms?)

2. Displacement: human can use language to talk about things not present
in the immediate environment.
Animal communication seem to be designed only for the here and now.

Displacement allows human to refer to the past, present and future, ), or

location not at the time of talking (e.g.: last night, next week, in the park)

Displacement allows human to talk about things and places with uncertain
existence (e.g.: angels, Heaven, Santa Claus, Tom & Jerry).

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3. Arbitrariness

Generally, there’s no connection between a linguistic form and its meaning

à the relation between words and objects is arbitrary.

e.g.: fleur (French), Blume (German), Blüte (Dutch), fiore (Italian), hoa
(Vietnamese) = flower (English)
Arbitrariness allows human to make words “fit” the concept they indicate.

In animal communication:
• There is a clear connection between the conveyed message and signal.
• Animals have limited (finite) set of vocal or gestural forms, mainly used in
specific situation or at particular times.

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4. Cultural transmission
Many animals automatically know how to
communicate without learning. Their systems of
communication are genetically inbuilt.
E.g.: A cat will meow regardless of where it is
raised.
Human acquire language in a culture with other
people, not from parental gene.
The process whereby a language is passed on
from one generation to the next is called cultural
transmission.
E.g.: A Korean girl born in Korea but is adopted
and raised in the US will eventually speak
English.

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5. Productivity (creativity/ open-endedness): human can create new

expressions by manipulating their linguistic resources to describe new
objects and situations.

à humans have infinite number of utterances

Animals have fixed reference à almost completely lack of this property.

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6. Duality (double articulation)

Each language has a stock of sound units (phoneme).

It becomes meaningful only when it is combined with other phonemes.

Human language is organized at two levels simultaneously.

• Level 1: distinct sounds (e.g.: b, n, i)
• Level 2: combine sounds to create distinct meanings (e.g.: bin, nib)

Duality is highly productive: limited sounds à infinite number of words.

A communication system with duality is considerably more flexible than

one without it (far greater number of messages can be sent).

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LANGUAGE CLASSIFICATION

Within the field of linguistics, there are 3 different approaches to language

classification:

• Linguistic typology:

• Genetic classification:

• Areal classification:

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LINGUISTIC CLASSIFICATION
TYPOLOGICAL CLASSIFICATION

Languages are classified according to their structural characteristics, e.g.,

syntactic patterns, morphological structure, and/or phonological systems.
1. MORPHOLOGICAL CRITERION

Based on morphology, languages can be classified as being isolating,

agglutinative, fusional or polysynthetic.
o Isolating (analytical) languages avoid affixes, using free forms to express
notions such as tense and number.
Example languages: Vietnamese, Khmer, Cantonese, Laotian.

e.g.: In Vietnamese, the morpheme for past tense (roughly) is a word rather
than an affix and can appear in more than one position in the sentence.
• Minh ăn cơm rồi. “Minh ate the meal PAST.”
• Minh đã ăn cơm. “Minh PAST ate the meal.”

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o Agglutinative (agglutinating) languages make widespread use of affixes,

each of which typically expresses a single piece of grammatical
information.
Example agglutinative languages: Turkish, Finnish, Hungarian, the Bantu
languages of Africa, etc.

E.g., The Turkish word for “house”:

­ ev -“house”

­ ev-ler (ev -“house” + ler-PLURAL) “houses”

­ ev-ler-den (ev-“house” + ler-PLURAL + den-”from”) “from the houses”

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o Fusional or Inflectional languages can also consist of root + affix

combinations. However, the affixes in fusional languages often express several
bits of grammatical information simultaneously.

Example languages: Latin, English, German, Russian

E.g.:
­ Latin word taurus (“bull”): morpheme -us indicates that (1) it is masculine, (2)
singular, and (3) the subject of the sentence.

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o Polysynthetic languages combine multiple stems and other morphemes

into a single continuous word.

E.g.1: Swahili language

nitakupenda “I will love you.”

ni- ta- ku- penda
i will you love
E.g.2: Inuktitut language (spoken in Canada)

iglujjualiulauqtuq “He/she made a big house.”

iglu- -jjua -liu -lauq -tuq

house big make PAST DEC.3SG

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2. SYNTACTIC CRITERION (WORD-ORDER CRITERION)

Based on syntax, languages can be classified along many dimensions, the most
common of which is word order.

The most usual preliminary classification is in terms of subject, verb, object.

Type Example Example languages

SOV The dog the mouse killed Japanese, Latin, Turkish, Bengali, Korean
SVO The dog killed the mouse English, French, Malay, Portuguese, Mandarin,
Vietnamese, Russian,
VSO Killed the dog the mouse Hebrew, Irish, Aramaic
VOS Killed the mouse the dog Aneityan, Baure
OVS The mouse killed the dog Apalai, Arecua, Hixkaryana
OSV The mouse the dog killed very few languages in S. America

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LANGUAGE CLASSIFICATION
GENETIC CLASSIFICATION
Languages can be grouped into
language families based on evidence
of a common ancestral language.

Notable language families: Indo-

European, Afro-Asiatic, Austronesian,
Sino-Tibetan, Niger-Congo, and
others.
Languages can be “parents” of other
languages, “siblings” of one another,
and so forth.
Some language families contain many
hundreds of languages, some contain
just one language. Some even
become extinct.

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English belongs to the Indo-European language family, home to nearly 500

languages spoken in Europe.
­ Specifically, English belongs to the West Germanic branch (41 languages) of
the Germanic group (47 languages) of the Indo-European family.

English ranks 3rd in “Language with the most native speakers” (373 million) and
1st in and first in “Languages with the most speakers” (1,080 million) (2022).

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LANGUAGE CLASSIFICATION
ARIAL CLASSIFICATION
Arial classification identifies characteristics shared by languages that are in
geographical contact.
Languages which come into contact with one another often take over some of
the linguistic features of their neighbors.
à they start to resemble each other, even though they may not be genetically
related.
E.g.:
• Vietnamese, Thai and Chinese all have contour tones although they are
unrelated.
• Several Balkan languages (Albanian, Bulgarian, Romanian, etc.) show
similarities which appear to be due to proximity (known as the Balkan
Sprachbund).
• In India, languages with quite different origins have all developed a particular
type of sound, known as a “retroflex”.

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THE BALKAN SPRACHBUND

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PRESCRIPTIVE VS.
DESCRIPTIVE GRAMMARS
PRESCRIPTIVE GRAMMAR
Not all grammarians, past or present, share the view that all grammars are
equal.
Language “purists” believe:
­ some versions of a language are better than others
­ there are certain “correct” forms that all educated people should use
­ language change is corruption.
à such view gave rise to the writing of prescriptive grammar.
Many of these prescriptive rules were based on Latin grammar and made little
sense for English, e.g.:
­ “two negatives make a positive” à one should say I don’t have any;
­ you should be followed by the plural were, even when is singular.

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­ do not end a sentence with a preposition.

­ split infinitives must be avoided à one should say to apologize humbly, not to
humbly apologize
DESCRIPTIVE GRAMMAR
It is important to note that 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”.
Linguists regard the spoken language as primary, rather than the written.
All human languages and dialects are fully expressive, complete, and logical.
Descriptive grammar dictates that each language must be described separately,
does not force languages into another language’s framework.

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Next week:
Phonetics and Phonology

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