Linguistics An Essential Introduction (Version 1.5)

Linguistics is the scientific investigation of language in this sense of the word. Using language is not the only way in which humans communicate — other ways of doing so include using gestures like tugging at someone’s sleeve and pointing at something, using pictograms like one of those in Figure 1.1.1 (road signs indicating a ‘picnic area’) or giving someone flowers.

We do not usually call such behaviours “language” (although some people may metaphorically refer to the act of giving flowers or other gifts as their “love language”), and they are not a primary object of investigation in linguistics. However, since they can be used to communicate, they may be of interest to linguists when they are used in combination with language. There is one class of human behaviours referred to as “language” that are not of interest to linguists at all — programming languages, such as Python, C++ or COBOL. Their function is too different from that of language as we understand the term here to be studied using the same tools (in fact, since they were intentionally created by humans based on well-understood mathematical and technical concepts, their properties are fully known, we do not need to investigate them scientifically at all).

There are also non-human ways of communicating — those used by animals. These are of interest to linguists only insofar as we can use them as a standard of comparison to work out the unique properties of human language (but of course, they are a fascinating area of investigation in their own right).

So, linguists investigate individual languages, such as English, French, Polish, Turkish, Arabic or Vietnamese as well as the abstract principles that underlie all human languages — the properties that make them human languages. We will discuss the most important of these properties in broad terms in the next section , and in more detail throughout this book, but very generally they include the following: languages have stable associations of sound and meaning (“words” like tree) and rules by which these can be combined into larger units (for example apple tree, the tree outside our apartment or Let’s climb that tree!).

Because individual languages are just different manifestations of the same underlying human skill, they are translatable into each other. So, if you are unsure whether a particular human (or other animal) behavior is a “language” or not, try translating it to English and try to take an English sentence and translate it into that behaviour. This will work flawlessly for French, Polish, Turkish, Arabic, Vietnamese, etc. (although it may require some thought), but not for gestures, traffic signs, flower bouquets or animal behaviours. For the latter, you may be able to paraphrase their general meaning in English, but trying the same thing in the opposite direction will not work.

Earlier, we mentioned gesture as a human behaviour that is different from language, but that is an oversimplification. It is true for gestures like tugging at someone’s sleeve or pointing — gestures that are likely to accompany the use of language. However, there are also gestures that are language. For example, Figure 1.1.3 shows the word for ‘tree’ in American Sign Language. It consists of starting with the “gesture” depicted, and then twisting the right upper arm a quarter turn clockwise, a quarter turn anti-clockwise and a quarter turn clockwise again. This is a word, not a gesture imitating the shape of a tree (although you may note a relationship of similarity) — to distinguish such words from the types of gestures mentioned before, they are referred to as signs and languages consisting of such signs are referred to as sign languages (or signed languages). Except for their mode of expression (gesture instead of sound), sign languages are just like other languages, with words that are combined into larger units according to language-specific rules.

The existence of sign languages illustrates another important property of human language: it is independent of a particular modality. The same general principles underlie spoken and signed languages, and anything expressed in English (or another spoken language) can also be expressed in American Sign Language (or another signed language) and vice versa.

Modality independence is also the reason why the same language may be expressed in different media. All spoken languages can be represented in the visual mode we call “writing” — the practice of using particular shapes to represent speech sounds (depending on the writing system these are called graphemes or syllabograms) and/or word meanings (these are called logograms). Not all spoken languages (and no signed languages) are regularly or systematically expressed in this way, but many spoken languages are. These tend to have a conventional way of doing so — something called an orthography that makes use of a particular writing system. For example, English is traditionally written using a variant of the Latin alphabet, with an orthography that, for historical reasons, does not have a very close relationship to the sound of words.

The use of a particular writing system and orthography often has cultural relevance for the members of a language community. From a linguistic perspective, however, speech (for spoken languages) and signing (for signed languages) are the main focus of interest, while orthography and writing systems are of relatively little importance. The reason for this is that speech and signing are primary modes of expression, while writing is a secondary mode:

This does not mean that linguists ignore written language — they do investigate it (sometimes consciously, sometimes subconsciously). In large, literate language communities, written language plays an important role — in fact, there are media and social domains where it is the main medium of communication—, and understanding how it is used in that role is an important part of understanding how language works. However, it means that linguists always keep in mind (or at least try to keep in mind) that it is a secondary mode that is ultimately based on spoken/signed language. There are other secondary modes, by the way — some languages can be represented by whistling or drumming in a particular way. There are even tertiary modes of language, that represent writing in a different medium — for example, Morse code, which represents graphemes as sequences of short and long sounds, or semaphore, which represents graphemes as configurations of flags showing different colored patterns.

Due to its central role in human societies, at least some aspects of language are relevant to all disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, but there are some where is a major focus of interest. These include, among others, psycholinguistics (a subfield of psychology concerned with language acquisition, production and comprehension), neurolinguistics (a subfield of neurology concerned with the way language is represented in the brain), language pedagogy (an interdisciplinary area of research concerned with issues of foreign-language teaching and learning), sociolinguistics (an interdisciplinary area of research concerned with the relationship between language and social factors such as class, gender, subculture, migration, etc.), and literary studies (concerned with a specific type of culturally relevant linguistic products — literary texts). Linguistics shares research interests and methods with all of these disciplines. What makes it special is that its focus in on the properties of language itself, the principles that make them languages in the first place. This textbook introduces these principles, mostly using the example of English, but occasionally bringing other languages into the discussion.

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