{"id":268,"date":"2024-09-18T08:30:10","date_gmt":"2024-09-18T06:30:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/linguistica.info\/b\/lei\/?page_id=268"},"modified":"2025-06-27T10:47:55","modified_gmt":"2025-06-27T08:47:55","slug":"1-1-what-even-is-language","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/linguistica.info\/b\/leiwp\/toc\/1-introduction\/1-1-what-even-is-language\/","title":{"rendered":"1.1 What even is language?"},"content":{"rendered":"

As the title of this textbook tells you, it is an introduction to something called \u201clinguistics\u201d, but what does that mean? The definition that you are likely to find in a dictionary is that linguistics is the \u201cscientific study of human language\u201d. 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\u00a0 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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

In order to make sense of this definition, we must, of course, define what we mean by \u201cscientific study\u201d, and by \u201chuman language\u201d. 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.<\/p>\n

What linguists mean when they say langugage<\/em> is one of two things. Either, they mean an individual language, like English, American Sign Language (ASL), Polish, Vietnamese, Igbo, German or Deutsche Geb\u00e4rdensprache<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n

Outside of linguistics, the word language<\/em> is also used for other notions, some of which are related to human language, some of which are not. For example, if you\u2019re a programmer, you might have a section on your r\u00e9sum\u00e9 that lists the \u201cprogramming languages\u201d you know \u2014 like Python, R, C++, or Perl. Computer languages share some superficial properties with human languages \u2014 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 \u2014 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).<\/p>\n

The word\u00a0language<\/em> is also used metaphorically to refer to other human activities that may be meaningful \u2014 the language of flowers<\/em>, body language<\/em>, 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 \u201clanguage\u201d.<\/p>\n

For the moment, let\u2019s think about one particular language, because it happens to be the one we\u2019re using now \u2014 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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

And somehow, after all of that, you end up with an idea in your mind that\u2019s 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\u2019s ideas through language. We call this shared system \u201cEnglish\u201d \u2014 a very imprecise term \u2014, 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 \u2014 German, ASL, etc.<\/p>\n

Aspects of language<\/h2>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Imagine you\u2019re an alien, you\u2019ve just arrived on Earth, and you need to figure out how to understand the language used in the particular earthling community that you\u2019ve landed in. What kinds of things do you need to figure out? One of the first things you\u2019ll need to know about that language is what counts as talking. Is this language signed or vocalized? In other words, what is the modality<\/strong> of the language? Many human languages are vocalized<\/strong> (or \u201cspoken\u201d). 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<\/strong>. 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\u2019ll try to reserve the words\u00a0speaker<\/em>, speaking<\/em> and speech<\/em> for vocal languages, and refer to \u201clanguage users\u201d, \u201cusing language\u201d and \u201clanguage\u201d when we\u2019re talking about languages of any modality. In other places you might see the words \u201cspeaker\u201d, \u201cspeaking\u201d and \u201cspeech\u201d used to refer to both spoken and signed languages (as well as to written language), but some linguists now use the word\u00a0languaging<\/em>\u00a0as a verb to mean \u201cusing language in any modality\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"Eight

Figure 1.1.1 Cookies<\/p><\/div>\n

Once you\u2019ve 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\u2019ve noticed that the language users you\u2019ve encountered make the sounds \u201ccookie\u201d as they\u2019re offering you a round, sweet, delicious baked good. Or maybe you\u2019ve noticed that when that word has a z<\/em> sound at the end of it, cookies<\/em>, you\u2019re being offered more than one of them!<\/p>\n

The part of the grammar that links up these forms with meanings is the mental lexicon<\/strong>. Knowing a word in a language involves associating its form \u2014 the combination of signs or sounds or written symbols \u2014 with its meaning. These associations are language-specific \u2014 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<\/em> in German,\u00a0as\u00a0<\/span>suchar<\/em>\u00a0<\/span>in Polish and as\u00a0bisquit<\/em> in French. <\/span> We will talk about this in more detail in Chapters 2 and 7.<\/p>\n

Suppose you\u2019ve 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<\/strong> 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<\/strong>. We will talk in detail about the sounds of English and how they are produced in Chapter 3.<\/span>\u00a0For 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\u2019s <\/span>morphology<\/strong>: that\u2019s the combinations of meaningful pieces inside words (like how if you want more than one cookie you say <\/span>cookies<\/em> with a <\/span>z<\/em>). But you\u2019re probably not as conscious of things like how you use your articulators to make the sounds <\/span>k<\/em> or <\/span>z. <\/em>We will talk about phonetics in Chapter 3 and about morphology in Chapter 5. <\/span><\/p>\n

Our implicit knowledge of language also includes phonology<\/strong>, 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em>, they might offer you some more. If you say You cookies<\/em> taste very good<\/em>, they might think you consider them cookies and are going to eat them. Our implicit knowledge of how words can or can\u2019t be combined to make phrases and sentences is called syntax<\/strong>. We will discuss syntax in detail in Chapter 8.<\/p>\n

Syntax works hand in hand with semantics<\/strong> 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? <\/em> is much more likely to keep them well-disposed towards you than Give me some<\/em> cookies<\/em>. This aspect of language is called pragmatics<\/strong> and will also be discussed in Chapter 9.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s hard to observe. One of the most important jobs we\u2019re 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\u2019ll talk about this challenge more in Section 1.3 below.<\/p>\n

What about reading and writing?<\/h2>\n

I bet you\u2019re wondering why\u00a0I didn\u2019t 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\u2019t actually need to know how to read and write to have a mental grammar. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\"The

Figure 1.1.3. The word Mongol in various contemporary and historical scripts: 1. traditional, 2. folded, 3. ‘Phags-pa, 4. Todo, 5. Manchu, 6. Soyombo, 7. horizontal square, 8. Cyrillic [Source: Wikifex, CC-BY-SA 4.0<\/a>]<\/p><\/div>\n

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 \u24f5 in Figure 1.1.3) and an adaptation of the Cyrillic alphabet (see \u24f6). In the history of Mongolia, a number of other writing systems have been proposed, shown in \u24f7 to \u24fb. Speakers of Mongolian understand each other\u2019s speech no matter which script they use\u00a0 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 \u2014 signed languages like ASL (American Sign Language) or DGS (Deutsche Geb\u00e4rdensprache<\/em>, German Sign Language) don\u2019t have written forms (at least no written forms accepted by the community \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019re literate in your language, then that literacy is certainly woven into your mental grammar. But literacy isn\u2019t necessary for grammatical competence.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u2190<\/span> Previous section<\/a><\/span> Next section \u2192<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/em> by Anatol Stefanowitsch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As the title of this textbook tells you, it is an introduction to something called \u201clinguistics\u201d, but what does that mean? The definition that you are likely to find in a dictionary is that linguistics is the \u201cscientific study of human language\u201d. That definition is not wrong, although we should point out right from the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":9,"menu_order":1,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-268","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/linguistica.info\/b\/leiwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/linguistica.info\/b\/leiwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/linguistica.info\/b\/leiwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/linguistica.info\/b\/leiwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/linguistica.info\/b\/leiwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=268"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/linguistica.info\/b\/leiwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/268\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2099,"href":"https:\/\/linguistica.info\/b\/leiwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/268\/revisions\/2099"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/linguistica.info\/b\/leiwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/linguistica.info\/b\/leiwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}