As the title of this textbook tells you, it is an introduction to something called “linguistics”, but what does that mean? The definition that you are likely to find in a dictionary is that linguistics is the “scientific study of human language”. That definition is not wrong, although we should point out right from the start that linguistics is not the only discipline that studies language (or some aspect of language) scientifically. Other disciplines that do so are, for example, psychology, sociology, and some versions of literary studies. It is better to say that linguistics is the discipline that studies language scientifically in its own right, i.e., in order to understand language itself. The other disciplines I just mentioned study language as a means of understanding  the human mind, human societies, and a specific kind of human creativity, respectively. This means that researchers in these disciplines can learn from linguists and vice versa — in fact, a researcher could be both a psychologist, sociologist or literary scholar and a linguist at the same time. Still, it is useful to have a discipline focused on language for its own sake.

In order to make sense of this definition, we must, of course, define what we mean by “scientific study”, and by “human language”. Let us begin with the latter, as it does not make much sense to talk about what it means to study something scientifically until you know what that something is.

What linguists mean when they say langugage is one of two things. Either, they mean an individual language, like English, American Sign Language (ASL), Polish, Vietnamese, Igbo, German or Deutsche Gebärdensprache. Or they mean the abstract properties that all of these individual languages have in common and that distinguish them from other abilities and activities of humans or other animals.

Outside of linguistics, the word language is also used for other notions, some of which are related to human language, some of which are not. For example, if you’re a programmer, you might have a section on your résumé that lists the “programming languages” you know — like Python, R, C++, or Perl. Computer languages share some superficial properties with human languages — they have a vocabulary (often taken from English), they have a syntax (a particular way in which the vocabulary must be used in order for your program to run), and they even have something like dialects — different people will use the same programming language in different ways to achieve the same thing. However, as soon as you look beyond the surface, human languages and programming languages are completely different things and linguists do not study programming languages (unless they want to use them in order to write programs that they can use to analyze human languages, of course).

The word language is also used metaphorically to refer to other human activities that may be meaningful — the language of flowers, body language, etc. However, even as a metaphor this use of the word is extremely misleading, and while linguists may study gestures, facial expressions or even practices of flower-giving in the context of linguistic commuication, they should not be referred to as “language”.

For the moment, let’s think about one particular language, because it happens to be the one we’re using now — English. If you are reading this text, you can do so because I first thought of words and sentences, then used my fingers to hit particular keys on a keyboard in a particular order, and then saved the result in a format in which it could be transferred to you — for example, a web page or an ebook. You are looking at a copy of what I wrote and the shapes of the letters against the background produce a certain pattern of activity on your retina that is then transferred via the optical nerve to your brain. If you are listening to a recording of this text, you can do so because after typing the words, I read them out loud. This meant squeezing the air out of my lungs, vibrating my vocal folds, and manipulating parts of my mouth to produce sounds. Those sounds were captured by a microphone and recorded on my computer, and I uploaded the resulting file to the web. You are now using software to turn the file into an auditory signal again, which hits your eardrums in a certain pattern. Again, this is transferred to the brain, in this case via the cochlear nerve.

And somehow, after all of that, you end up with an idea in your mind that’s similar to the idea in mine. There must be something that we have in common to allow that to happen: some shared system that allows us to understand each other’s ideas through language. We call this shared system “English” — a very imprecise term —, and we assume that both you and I have a representation of this system in our minds that is similar enough for the process described above to result in successful communication. What linguists are interested in is to find out how this shared system works, and they are interested in the properties that this system shares with other systems we could have used — German, ASL, etc.

Aspects of language

This book will introduce you to the essentials of what linguists know about language so far. We will focus on English, but we will draw on other languages where necessary. As you will see over the ten chapters of this book, that knowledge is quite complex, because language has many different facets.

Imagine you’re an alien, you’ve just arrived on Earth, and you need to figure out how to understand the language used in the particular earthling community that you’ve landed in. What kinds of things do you need to figure out? One of the first things you’ll need to know about that language is what counts as talking. Is this language signed or vocalized? In other words, what is the modality of the language? Many human languages are vocalized (or “spoken”). In this modality, language users make sounds with their larynx, tongue, teeth and lips, and receive sounds with their ears. Other human languages are signed. Language users make signs with their fingers, hands, wrists and forearms, and receive signs by sight or by touch. Even though they have very different modalities, sign and vocal languages share many properties when it comes to other aspects of their respective systems. In this book, we’ll try to reserve the words speaker, speaking and speech for vocal languages, and refer to “language users”, “using language” and “language” when we’re talking about languages of any modality. In other places you might see the words “speaker”, “speaking” and “speech” used to refer to both spoken and signed languages (as well as to written language), but some linguists now use the word languaging as a verb to mean “using language in any modality”.

Once you’ve figured out the modality, what next? You probably need to segment the stream of auditory or visual information into meaningful units. By observing carefully, you might be able to figure out that a particular sequence of sounds or gestures recurs in this language, and that some consistent meaning is associated with that sequence. For example, maybe you’ve noticed that the language users you’ve encountered make the sounds “cookie” as they’re offering you a round, sweet, delicious baked good. Or maybe you’ve noticed that when that word has a z sound at the end of it, cookies, you’re being offered more than one of them!

The part of the grammar that links up these forms with meanings is the mental lexicon. Knowing a word in a language involves associating its form — the combination of signs or sounds or written symbols — with its meaning. These associations are language-specific — each language has its own forms to refer to a particular meaning, and not all languages have the same set of meanings. The objects depicted in Figure 1.1.1., for example, are referred to as Keks in German, as suchar in Polish and as bisquit in French. We will talk about this in more detail in Chapters 2 and 7.

Suppose you’ve figured out that cookies are delicious and you want to ask your earthling hosts for more of them. To do that, you need to figure out how to control the muscles of your mouth, tongue, and lips to speak the word for ‘cookie’, or how to use your hands, fingers, wrists and forearms to sign the word. In other words, you need to know something about the articulatory phonetics of the language. This brings up an important point about using language: when we know a language fluently, most of the knowledge that allows us to do so is unconscious, or implicit. We will talk in detail about the sounds of English and how they are produced in Chapter 3. For the languages that you know, your knowledge of the lexicon is probably fairly conscious or explicit, and probably also some of your knowledge about your language’s morphology: that’s the combinations of meaningful pieces inside words (like how if you want more than one cookie you say cookies with a z). But you’re probably not as conscious of things like how you use your articulators to make the sounds k or z. We will talk about phonetics in Chapter 3 and about morphology in Chapter 5.

Our implicit knowledge of language also includes phonology, information about how the physical units of language can be combined and how they change in different contexts. This will be discussed in Chapter 4.

Even if you have determined what the words in your earthling hosts’ language mean and how to produce them, you have to figure out how to combine them. If you say Your cookies taste very good, they might offer you some more. If you say You cookies taste very good, they might think you consider them cookies and are going to eat them. Our implicit knowledge of how words can or can’t be combined to make phrases and sentences is called syntax. We will discuss syntax in detail in Chapter 8.

Syntax works hand in hand with semantics to allow language users to figure out the meaning of complex strings of words. We will talk about semantics in Chapter 9. Finally, you need to make sure to talk to your earthling hosts not just using sentences that express the right meaning, but also sentences that have the desired effect on them. Could I have some more cookies, please? is much more likely to keep them well-disposed towards you than Give me some cookies. This aspect of language is called pragmatics and will also be discussed in Chapter 9.

All of these things are parts of what it means to know a language. But a lot of this knowledge is implicit, and the thing about implicit knowledge is that it’s hard to observe. One of the most important jobs we’re doing in this textbook is trying to be explicit about what mental grammar is like, and about what kinds of evidence we can use to figure that out. We’ll talk about this challenge more in Section 1.3 below.

What about reading and writing?

I bet you’re wondering why I didn’t include reading and writing as part of the mental grammar above. After all, as a student you probably invested a lot of time into learning how to read and write. And those skills are indeed part of the grammatical knowledge you have about your language. But language users don’t actually need to know how to read and write to have a mental grammar. It’s common for kids in Canada to start learning to read and write around age five, but they are pretty competent in the phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics of one or more languages before they ever go to school.

Furthermore, language users could start using a different writing system without changing anything else about the grammar. Mongolian, for example, presently uses two different writing systems: the traditional Mongolian script (see ⓵ in Figure 1.1.3) and an adaptation of the Cyrillic alphabet (see ⓶). In the history of Mongolia, a number of other writing systems have been proposed, shown in ⓷ to ⓻. Speakers of Mongolian understand each other’s speech no matter which script they use  to record the language in writing, and the language does not change depending on the script it is written in. Many human languages do not have written forms at all — signed languages like ASL (American Sign Language) or DGS (Deutsche Gebärdensprache, German Sign Language) don’t have written forms (at least no written forms accepted by the community — researchers may use notation systems that could be considered writing). Most signers are bilingual in their sign language and in the written form of another language.

So, because not every human language has a reading and writing system and not every language user has access to reading and writing systems, we consider these skills to be secondary parts of the mental grammar. If you’re literate in your language, then that literacy is certainly woven into your mental grammar. But literacy isn’t necessary for grammatical competence.

 

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CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0, adapted from Anderson, Catherine, Bronwyn Bjorkman, Derek Denis, Julianne Doner, Margaret Grant, Nathan Sanders, and Ai Taniguchi, Essentials of Linguistics. 2nd ed. by Anatol Stefanowitsch.