MODULAR LEARNING

MATERIALS 2
BSED ENGLISH 1

INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS
 BACHELOR OF SECONDARY EDUCATION MAJOR IN
Course
ENGLISH (BSED ENGLISH)

Subject INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS

Instructor Jojo L. Deterala

Module Title THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE

SOUTHERN LUZON TECHNOLOGICAL COLLEGE

FOUNDATION PIODURAN, INC.
Pioduran, Albay
BACHELOR OF SECONDARY EDUCATION MAJOR IN ENGLISH
(BSED ENGLISH)
MODULAR LEARNING MATERIALS

SUBJECT CODE MC LINGUIS 1

SUBJECT DESCRIPTION INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS

SUBJECT UNIT 3 UNITS

LIST OF MODULES

NO MODULE TITLE

1 LANGUAGE

2 THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE

3 PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY, THE STUDY OF SOUNDS

4 MORPHOLOGY, THE STUDY OF MORPHEMES AND WORDS

 HOW TO USE THIS MODULE

Welcome to the Module “The Study of

Language”. This module contains lessons and activities
for you to complete.

The desired learning outcome "The Study of

Language" contains the knowledge, skills and attitudes
required for the subject. It is one of the required subject
under BACHELOR OF SECONDARY EDUCATION MAJOR IN
ENGLISH (BSED ENGLISH).
You are required to go through a series of learning
activities in order to complete each desired learning
outcomes of the module. In each desired learning outcome
there are Lessons, Activities, Assignments, Projects
and Additional Resource (Reference Materials for further
reading to help you better understand the required
activities. Follow these activities on your own and answer
the Quiz at the end of each desired learning outcome. You
may remove a blank Answer Sheet at the end of each
module to write your answers for each self-check. If you
have questions, don’t hesitate to ask your teacher /
facilitator for assistance.
 DESIRED LEARNING OUTCOME 2
THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE
CONTENT COURSE/ SUBJECT MATTER:

1.Language: Externalised and Internalised

2.Components of language
3.Linguistics and its branches
4.Traditional Grammar
5.Comparative Philology
6.The Beginnings of Modern +Linguistics in Europe, Saussure
7.The Beginnings of Modern Linguistics in America, the Sapir- Whorf
hypothesis
TEXBOOKS / REFERENCES:

1. http://seas3.elte.hu/coursematerial/VargaLaszlo/ICEL-2010.pdf

TEACHING AND LEARNING ACTIVITIES (TLA):

1. Let Students access and browse learning materials, videos and

related links in Google Classroom
2. Compare answers to answer keys
3. Self-pace use of Modular Learning Materials

ASSESSMENT OF TASK (AT):

1. Activity 2-1 5. Activity 10-1

2. Activity 4-1 6. Activity 12-1

3. Activity 6-1 7. Activity 14-1

4. Activity 8-1 8. Activity 16-1

RESOURCE MATERIALS:

1. Modular Learning Materials (Module 1: Contemporary Arts)

2. Computer with internet connection
3. Online platform
TIME TABLE:

3 HOURS
 LESSON 2
THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE
MODULE LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

After reading the lesson, you should be able to:

1. Acquire deeper understanding of the basic concepts in the six core areas of
Linguistics; pragmatics, semantics, syntax, morphology, phonetics, and
phonology and the interaction between them

2. Learn about Linguistics and its branches

3. Analyze the modes of language

The Study of Language

2.1 Language: Externalised and internalised
A language is a linguistic code, which its speakers know and use, and which
manifests itself in its speakers’ linguistic knowledge and in the actual
utterances that its speakers make in linguistic communication.
Consequently, language can be regarded as existing in essentially two
modes. On the one hand it can be looked upon as a body of objective facts
(strings of sounds or letters) produced and perceived by its users in linguistic
communication. On the other hand it can be regarded as the language users’
knowledge which makes linguistic communication possible, an internal
property of the human mind. One of the greatest figures in modern
linguistics, Noam Chomsky, has called these two modes of language
Externalised Language (E-language) and Internalised Language (I-
language), respectively. The dominant kind of language study in the first half
of the 20th century, viz. Structuralist Linguistics (see Unit 3), concentrated
on E-language. It aimed at collecting samples of E-language, i.e. samples of
the actual products of linguistic communication, as objects independent of
the mind, and then describing the regularities (patterns, structures) found in
those samples. Since then, however, the interest and emphasis of language
study has shifted to Ilanguage, i.e. to the knowledge that native speakers of
a language possess and use when they communicate linguistically.
Generative Linguistics (see Unit 3) aims at modelling the I-language of the
native speaker, i.e. his/her linguistic knowledge or internal grammar.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Human language,

understood as a systematic use of speech sounds, signs, and written
symbols for communication among people, is a very complicated system,
which can be analysed on different levels and from various points of view.
Modern linguists often adopt different perspectives on language depending
on the goals of their research. It is common to distinguish between language
as an individual act of speaking or writing in a particular context at a given
moment or in a certain social context, and language as the abstract linguistic
system underlying the linguistic behaviour of a whole community of
speakers. In addition, a number of separate, though often closely
interrelated, branches of linguistics can be distinguished.

General or theoretical linguistics tries to determine universal

principles for studying languages and to describe the general features of
language.

Contrastive linguistics concentrates upon the differences between

languages. Its findings are often applied in the context of language teaching.

Comparative linguistics studies different languages looking for

similar characteristics. These languages may have common historical origin
though the main emphasis of the analysis is usually placed on the structural
correspondences between languages under investigation.

Historical linguistics analyses the development of language in time,

registering the changes that have taken place in it.

Applied linguistics is concerned with the application of linguistic

theories and their findings in solving various language problem, mostly in the
teaching of foreign languages, studying language disorders, in translation,
lexicography, and stylistics.

Sociolinguistics studies the relationship between language and

society, taking into consideration standard and non-standard forms of
language, regional and social varieties with reference to such concepts as
ethnicity, social status, sex, age, etc.

Psycholinguistics is a branch of linguistics which studies the

relationship between linguistic behaviour and the mental processes. It is
interested in how mental processes influence the production and perception
of speech.
 Computational linguistics uses computer techniques and applies
them in automatic translation and speech analysis using corpora for large-
scale statistical investigation and computational processing of spoken and
written texts.

Developmental linguistics is concerned with the study of the

acquisition of language by children, describing the stages and patterns of
development and explaining the typical features and variations.
Anthropological linguistics studies language variation and usage in relation
to culture. Emphasis is often placed on the analysis of the socalled non-
Western languages.

The above-mentioned branches do not exhaust all the approaches to

language that can be distinguished in modern linguistics, which is a
vigorously developing science.

2.2 Components of language

A natural language (whether we look upon it as E-language or I-

language) has several components. The central ones are phonology,
morphology, syntax, and semantics.

• Phonology includes the phonemes (basic sounds) and the discrete

suprasegmental elements (stress patterns, tones, intonation) in the
language. The phonological component also contains rules that regulate how
phonemes can be combined in morphemes and words. For example, the
sequences /kQt/and /tQk/ are phonologically well-formed in English, but
*/ktQ/ or */tkQ/ are phonologically ill-formed.
• Another component is morphology. This includes the morphemes
and the rules for combining them to derive and inflect words in a particular
language. (For the time being we define morphemes as the smallest
meaningful units of a language. We will make this definition more precise in
Unit 5.) In English, for instance, the morpheme -ion can be added to the verb
elect (which is a vocabulary item) and the result is the noun election (which
is a new vocabulary item derived from the former one). In a similar way, the
plural morpheme -s can be added to the noun election to obtain the plural
form of the same noun: elections (which is not a new vocabulary item but the
inflected variant of an already existing one). The morphological rules of
English tell us that the sequence un-friend-li-ness is a morphologically well-
formed word, while *friend-li-un-ness is not.
 • Syntax is the component of language that contains the rules for
putting together words in phrases and phrases in sentences. For example,
the English sentence He went to London. is syntactically well-formed,
whereas *To he London went. is syntactically ill-formed.

• Finally, languages also contain a system of meanings: this

component is known as semantics. The semantic rules specify which
sentences are semantically normal and which are semantically anomalous.
For instance, This woman is the mother of three girls. is semantically normal
but !This woman is the father of three oil-wells. is anomalous.

In addition, we can also separate a special component in which all the

central components may play a role, viz. a lexicon. This is a list of the
vocabulary items of a language and it contains all idiosyncratic information
about those vocabulary items (such as the unpredictable aspects of their
phonology, morphology, syntactic behaviour, and meaning). Words, once
formed and established as vocabulary items, are stored in the lexicon, from
where they can be retrieved as wholes and do not have to be put together
again from their constituent morphemes every time they are used by a
speaker. Native speakers of a language have linguistic knowledge: they
know their language. They possess I-language, they have an internal
grammar. They know the elements and the rules in the various components
of their language, after all they use those elements and obey those rules all
the time and, on the basis of this knowledge, they can tell whether a string
of words in their language is grammatical or not. But most speakers are
unable to explain to their children or to their foreign friends why one string of
words is grammatical in their language and another is not. This is because
their linguistic knowledge (internal grammar) is intuitive (subconscious), and
they cannot express it explicitly (i.e. clearly and definitely).

2.3 Linguistics and its branches

If we want to obtain explicit knowledge about language, we must study
language systematically and objectively, i.e. we must deal with linguistics.
Linguistics seeks explicit knowledge about language, by submitting it to
systematic and objective study. A study that is systematic, objective, and
seeks explicit knowledge is scientific.
Linguistics is the scientific study of language (i.e. E-language and/or I-
language). The product of linguistics is an objective, systematic, and explicit
account of (some aspect of) language, i.e. an explicit grammar.
 A linguist is a person who is professionally engaged in the scientific
study of some aspect of language (i.e. of one particular language or of
several languages or of human language in general). From this definition it
follows that someone who knows a number of languages (i.e. a polyglot) is
not necessarily a linguist, and a linguist is not necessarily someone who
knows a number of languages. Linguistics, or its product, a grammar, has
branches corresponding to the central components of language. Phonology
is the study of the phonemes and their combinations in words and
morphemes, and also of the discrete suprasegmental elements in words and
sentences. Morphology is the study of word derivation and word inflection
in terms of constituent morphemes. Syntax is the study of sentence
formation. Semantics is the study of the meaning of words and sentences.
Lexicology is the study of the lexicon, i.e. the phonological, morphological,
syntactic, and semantic properties of vocabulary items.

Moreover, all these can be studied from a synchronic point of view

(how they constitute a particular state of language at a particular point of
time),or from a diachronic (historical) point of view (how they change
through time).
In a somewhat broader concept of linguistics there are phonetic and
pragmatic components, too. Phonetics is closely related to phonology, it is
the study of the production, physical properties and perception of the actual
sounds realising the phonemes and of the suprasegmental elements of
speech. Pragmatics is close to semantics and the difference is not always
quite clear. We can say that while semantics examines what sentences and
words mean in themselves, pragmatics studies the ways in which they obtain
different interpretations when uttered in different situations. For instance, if I
put the question Can you play the piano? to a person I am interviewing in a
room where there is no piano, my utterance will count as a real yes-or-no
question. But if I say the same utterance to a person who is known to be a
good pianist, and I point towards a piano at the same time, my utterance will
count as a request to play.
The scope of linguistics can be extended further. It can include
sociolinguistics. This is an interdisciplinary branch of study (relevant to both
linguistics and sociology), studying the different varieties of a language used
by different geographical and socio-cultural subsections of a community, or
varieties used by the same group of speakers in different social situations.
Psycholinguistics, another interdisciplinary subject, deals with areas such
as the mental processes that take place when we produce and receive
linguistic messages, or the processes of native language acquisition. And
finally, linguistics can be put in the service of a large number of other fields,
some more practical, some more theoretical, such as e.g. foreign-language
teaching, speech therapy, successful advertising, literary criticism, stylistics,
etc. These involve various kinds of applied linguistics. For example, when a
doctor wants to cure a patient who suffers from aphasia (i.e. who has lost –
partly or completely – the ability to use language), the doctor will have to
know about the language system. In such cases linguistics helps the doctor
in his/her work.

2.4 Traditional Grammar

Languages began to be studied a very long time ago: in the 5th
century BC or earlier, but it is only since the 19th century that we can speak
about linguistics. It was in the 19th century that historical language study
began to meet the criteria of scientificness and only in the 20th century that
the study of contemporary languages became scientific in today’s sense of
the word.
Earlier language study can be called Traditional Grammar. In principle,
this kind of language study dealt with the contemporary state of languages
but it often mixed its synchronic statements with diachronic ones.
Traditional Grammar was not sufficiently scientific. (a) It was not
explicit enough: it was often too vague in its statements and its definitions
were often too loose. For example, the noun was defined as “the name of a
person, place or thing”, although there are lots of words that we intuitively
feel to be nouns even though they are not the names of persons, places or
things, e.g. reflection. (b) It was not systematic enough: it ignored spoken
language and was preoccupied with written language, especially with the
written language of older literary works. (c) It was not objective enough: it
was often prescriptive and puristic rather than descriptive, i.e. instead of
recording what the language examined was like, traditional grammarians
often tried to prescribe what it should be like. In these attempts they relied
on their subjective wishes and speculations and on historical, logical and
aesthetic arguments, and on analogy with Latin. For example, they argued
that the split infinitive, which is quite common in English, was incorrect: “You
shouldn’t say to humbly apologize, you should say: to apologize humbly”.
The idea that the split infinitive was wrong was based on Latin. It was
believed that, since a Latin infinitive was only one word, its English
equivalent should also be as near to one word as possible. Traditional
grammarians thought that language change was harmful and they fought
against it.
With all its weaknesses, however, Traditional Grammar accumulated a
great number of facts about individual languages and elaborated linguistic
terminology. Modern linguistics would not have been born if there had been
no Traditional Grammar to prepare the way for it.

2.5 Comparative Philology

Comparative Philology was the dominant kind of language study in
the 19th century. It was scientific in several respects. However, it narrowed
down the concept of language study to a study of the history and genetical
relationships of languages and of the written records that were available.

This kind of linguistics emerged after the discovery that Sanskrit was
related to Latin and Greek. The discovery was made in 1786, by a British
government official working in India, Sir William Jones. Throughout the 19th
century, language scholars tried to establish genetical relationships between
languages. That was the time when the various language families and
branches were discovered, for example the Germanic branch (of which
English is a member) and a Proto-Indo-European parent language was
reconstructed. In Comparative Philology the study of language was beginning
to develop towards an autonomous, independent branch of study. Language
began to be studied for its own sake. Besides, this kind of language study
had an objective method: it was based on textual evidence, i.e. E-language
facts, found in earlier written records of language, and it also tried to show
language change in a systematic way, as a process determined by rules. (In
the last quarter of the 19th century, a group of scholars in and around
Leipzig, nicknamed the Neogrammarians, claimed that language changes
were not just accidental events or optional tendencies, but “laws”.)
Meanwhile, the study of the contemporary state of languages went on
in the non-scientific (or not sufficiently scientific) framework of Traditional
Grammar.

2.6 The Beginnings of Modern Linguistics in Europe,

Saussure
Modern linguistics emerged almost simultaneously in Europe and the
USA in the early decades of the 20th century. In Europe the study of
language at the beginning of the 20th century was characterized by two
features: the inheritance of a long period of Traditional Grammar, and the
predominantly historical interest of 19th century Comparative Philology.
Modern linguistics appeared as a kind of revolt against this background. The
first great figure of modern linguistics in Europe, Ferdinand de Saussure, a
Swiss scholar, was a comparative philologist himself (a professor of Sanskrit
at the University of Geneva), but his ideas about language and language
study went far beyond the limitations of Comparative Philology.
• He was the first to emphasize the difference between (a) language
as an abstract system, residing in the collective consciousness of the
community (which he called la langue) and (b) language as the realization
of that system (which he called la parole).
• He separated the synchronic and diachronic aspects of language
study, and argued for the primacy of the former by saying that the
synchronic aspect deals with language as a collection of simultaneous facts,
existing as a state at a particular point of time, whereas the diachronic
regards language as a succession of states, so it is the states that have to
described first.
• According to Saussure, linguistic signs enter into two kinds of
relationship: syntagmatic and paradigmatic. The syntagmatic
relationship is a linear (horizontal, chain) relationship, which exists
between the signs that follow one another in a complex unit. For example,
the four words in This coffee is strong. are in a syntagmatic relationship: they
are placed one after the other along the syntagmatic axis, and each of the
words has a particular environment or CONTEXT which consists of the other
words on its left and right. The paradigmatic relationship is a vertical
(choice) relationship, which exists between a sign present in a particular
environment and all the other signs that could replace it while still yielding a
well-formed complex unit. For instance, coffee in the above sentence is in a
paradigmatic relationship with tea, student, girl, wall, light, whisky, cigar,
etc., see (2).
 2.7 The Beginnings of Modern Linguistics in America, the
Sapir—Whorf Hypothesis
Linguistic research in the USA also began in the early decades of the
20th century, but with a different motivation. Here it was found that the
languages of the American Indian population (the Amerindian languages)
were threatened with extinction and so the main aim was to describe these
languages as quickly and accurately as possible. Modern American linguistics
in the first half of the 20th century was usually called structural(ist) or
descriptive linguistics.

The Amerindian languages did not make a traditional approach

possible. They existed only in a spoken form, they had no earlier written
records, they were very different from most of the languages studied until
then, and the linguists who wanted to describe them did not speak them, so
no prescriptive and puristic statements could be made about them. Briefly:
these languages forced language scholars to adopt a non-traditional
approach to language, based on objectivity, systematicness and explicitness.

American descriptivists tried to describe each language in its own

terms and they emphasised (even exaggerated) the differences between
languages. One of them, Martin Joos, said: “Languages differ from one
another without limit and in unpredictable ways.” This is the essence of
linguistic relativism. Linguistic relativism is the assumption that any
natural language can be totally different from other natural languages.

But some linguists went even further. Sapir and especially Whorf
thought that languages not only differed from one another without limit but
also that the language of a community determined the way in which that
community saw the world. This latter view is called linguistic determinism.
The combination of linguistic relativism and linguistic determinism became
known as the Sapir— Whorf hypothesis. According to the strong version of
the hypothesis the individual is not free in his experience of the world,
because the vocabulary and grammatical categories of his native language
determine the ways in which he can interpret his experience. For instance,
the American linguist Boas discovered that in Eskimo there are several
different words for different kinds of snow, whereas in English there is only
one generic term: snow. Other linguists collected similar facts from other
languages. (For instance, the Navajo language has no separate words for
blue and green but has two separate words for different shades of black; the
Hopi language does not distinguish present, past and future tenses; in
Kwakiutl the distinction between singular and plural number is not
obligatory, etc.) On the basis of such examples the conclusion was drawn
that people belonging to different cultural-linguistic groups not only spoke
differently but also thought differently: i.e. each cultural-linguistic community
lived in the “prison” of its language. This conclusion, however, cannot be
accepted. It is true that different languages cut up reality in different ways,
but this is because different communities find different things important in
their life. The fact that the English have no separate words for different kinds
of snow does not mean that they cannot see these differences, only that
they are not significant to them. When these differences do become
important, the English can paraphrase and say “falling snow”, “hard packed
snow”, “powdery snow”, etc. The main counter-argument against the strong
form of linguistic determinism is the possibility of translation. Translation is
possible for most of the time and although we cannot always translate
everything with the same ease, we are nevertheless usually able at least to
paraphrase or explain what we mean in any language.

However, the weak form of the Sapir―Whorf hypothesis, according to

which language influences thought, seems to be correct. Certain things are
less codable (i.e. less expressible) in some languages than in others. The
codability of an aspect of reality in a particular language means having a
word for it, or at least the possibility of a simple paraphrase. People tend to
notice and remember the things that are codable in their language better
than things that are not codable. But differences in codability between
languages are of secondary importance: it is only the less basic, culture-
specific concepts that may present codability problems. The essential things
are equally codable because they are equally relevant to all cultures.
 Quiz No. 2

1. What do we mean by E-language and I-language?

2. Define morphology, syntax, phonology, and semantics. Cite at least 10
examples each.
3. What do we mean by the lexicon?
4. Why do we say that most native speakers’ knowledge of their language is
intuitive?
5. What makes a study scientific?
6. How do we define linguistics?
7. What is a linguist?
8. What is the difference between synchronic linguistics and diachronic
Linguistic s?
9. What are phonemes?
10. What is the difference between the descriptive and prescriptive
approaches
to the investigation of language?