Linguistics An Essential Introduction

It seems self-evident that the main purpose of language is communication, in a very broad sense: it enables us humans to coordinate our thoughts with each other (at least to a certain extent). For example, I am thinking about a tree at the moment of writing this — and now, so are you.

How is this possible? After all, neither of us is telepathic (as far as I know), nor are we standing next to each other with me tugging at your sleeve and pointing to a tree. In fact, the me writing this and the you reading it are removed from each other in both space and time.

The reason we are both thinking about a tree — me at the time of writing and you at the time of reading — is, of course, that I used the word tree. In doing so, I made use of the fact that both you and I have, at some point in the past, learnt to associate a particular sequence of sounds (in the case of spoken language) or shapes (in the case of written language) with a particular meaning.

We can represent this state of affairs as shown in Figure 2.1.1, borrowed from the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913).

This representation is simple (too simple, we will see much later in this book), but it helps us understand the basic properties of a fundamental unit of language that we call the linguistic sign:

Let us look at these properties in a bit more detail.

The meaning of a sign is not, of course, a picture. Since a tree is a fairly concrete type of entity, hearing the word may evoke an image before your inner eye, but that image is not the meaning of the word either. Instead, the meaning of a sign is a concept — a mental representation of our knowledge of what it means to be a tree. We will talk about meaning in much more detail in Chapter 6, but for now, let us simply describe it in the way dictionaries do. For the word tree, this description would be something like ‘a relatively large plant with a thick wooden stem and lateral branches that start at some distance from the ground and either have green leaf- or needle-shaped growths attached to them for at least part of the year’.

Note that in linguistics, orthographic representations of words (or other units of linguistic structure) are always shown in italics, and descriptions of their meaning are always shown in quotation marks (typically single), as you have just seen.

Likewise, the form of a sign is not a sequence of shapes on a page or a screen, nor is it a sequence of sounds loosely represented by these shapes or, in signed languages, a particular gesture. Instead, it is also a mental representation — in this case, of our knowledge of what the word tree sounds like and how we must manipulate our vocal chords and our tongue to produce the necessary speech sounds (we will discuss this aspect in detail in Chapter 3). Language users who can read will also have a mental representation of the shapes (“letters”) that are used to represent the word tree — for example, different combinations of lines and curves in visual alphabets or configurations of raised dots in tactile alphabets like the Braille system. If they can write, they will also have a concept of how to manipulate their hands and different types of devices (pens, typewriters, computer keyboards) to produce these shapes. Those who use sign language will have a concept of the gestures that signify ’tree’.

Finally, the association between the mental representation of the meaning and the mental representation of the form is, itself, a mental phenomenon. Put simply, each representation can activate the other: we can see a tree or think of a tree, and this will activate the representation of a particular sequence of sounds (or shapes), which we can then, if we choose to do so, say out loud or write down. Or we can perceive this sequence of sounds (or shapes), and this will activate our representation of what a tree is. Depending on the situation, we may then make a connection between that mental representation and a particular object in the real world (see further Section 2.3).

The association between the form and the meaning of linguistic signs has an interesting property that you may have noticed at times but that we do not usually think about as users of a language: it is arbitrary. There is no natural or logical reason that our knowledge of plants with thick wooden stems and lateral branches must be associated with the sounds corresponding to t, r and ee in particular. We can easily see this by looking at the sound sequences that users of other languages associate with the same concept. Some examples are Baum (German), arbre (French), træ (Danish), drzewa (Polish), ağaç (Turkish), or cây (Vietnamese).

You may not know how these words are pronounced, and orthography does not necessarily provide a good hint, but you can safely assume that most of these words do not sound alike at all. Speakers of these different languages associate these sound sequences with the concept TREE only because they have observed that other speakers in their language community make this association (using uppercase letters, as I did for TREE, is another way to indicate that we are talking about the meaning of a word, typically used when we want to refer to a complex concept as a whole).

In other words, the association between form and meaning is based on conventions that are specific to particular communities of language users — it is arbitrary. Now you may object: the English word tree and the Danish word træ look suspiciously similar in writing, and in fact, they also sound similar (the Danish word sounds a bit like the word tray, with the r pronounced as in German and the vowel pronounced with a very short duration). The reason for this is not, however, that there is any natural association between this sound sequence and large wooden plants, but that the two languages share a common ancestor — Proto Germanic —, where the form *trewam was associated with the concept TREE, and the words in both languages are derived from that original word. German, which shares the same ancestor, derives its word from a different Proto-Germanic word, *baumaz, which also meant ‘tree’, and which is also the source of the English word beam. Once a conventional association between a form and a meaning has been made, it can be passed down from generation to generation for thousands of years with slight variations, but that does not change the fact that it is arbitrary — we could call trees something else.

You may be thinking right now that at least some words are not arbitrary — for example, the word for ‘a brownish-gray medium-sized bird with a long tail that lays its eggs in the nests of other birds’ (see Figure 2.1.3). The form associated with the concept of this bird is cuckoo in English, Kuckuck in German, coucou in French, and kukułka in Polish, guguk in Turkish and cu cu in Vietnamese. You can guess that these words all sound very similar, which suggests that the association cannot be completely random. We will come back to this question at the end of Section 2.3.

For now, note that the arbitrariness of form-meaning associations is somewhat limited within languages. In any given language, simple words are combined into complex words according to relatively systematic rules, and this often leads to a certain internal logic in the vocabulary of these languages. For example, in English the sound sequences associated with the concepts for specific trees usually contain the sound sequence associated with the word tree: oak tree, pine tree, maple tree, apple tree, pear tree, cherry tree, etc. This is due to the fact that English compound words are formed in such a way that the second part refers to the larger category to which the concept belongs (actually, that is a bit of a simplification, we will discuss compounds in more detail in Chapter 5). In this way, arbitrariness is reduced within English: if you see a word that ends in tree, you can be fairly sure that it is associated with the concept for a type of tree, and if you go looking for the word for a particular type of tree, you should not be surprised if it contains the word tree. However, the words are still arbitrary when we look at them from outside the language: first, because there is no reason why the form tree and the concept TREE are associated in the first place, and second, because we can never be sure that the vocabulary of a particular language is motivated in this way. Even in English, speakers typically call the first three trees mentioned above oak, pine, and maple and other languages do not use compounds at all.

There is a second way in which the association between form and meaning is arbitrary: different languages divide up their conceptual space in different ways before associating meanings with the resulting divisions. Table 2.1.4 shows the English, French, Danish and German words for various concepts related to TREE.

As you can see, the conceptual space of trees, the groups in which they occur in natural settings, the material they consist of and the uses that humans make of these materials is divided in different ways in the four languages. For example, English and French use the same sound sequences for small groups of trees and for the material that trees consist of (wood and bois respectively), and they have a different word for large groups of trees (forest and forêt; which, by the way, sound similar only because the English language community borrowed the word from French). In contrast, Danish and German use the same word for large and small groups of trees (skov in Danish and Wald in German, which also has Wäldchen, a transparent diminutive of Wald). Danish uses the same word for trees and the material of which they consist, which none of the other languages do, and so on.

The way that languages divide up the conceptual space is not completely random, of course. It is to a certain extent motivated by the relations of concepts within this space — it would be very odd to find a language that used the same word for the concepts TREE and HOODIE, or for FOREST and COOKIE. But the precise divisions vary even in the languages of closely related cultures, and thus they are fundamentally arbitrary.

CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0. Written by Anatol Stefanowitsch