LIN101 - The Study of Language

[0:00] Hello. Language enables us to express our thoughts, ideas and feelings to others and also to understand theirs. Linguistics is the scientific study of language of this rich and varied human ability. It seeks to answer, among others, a number of fundamental questions. For example, what is the exact nature of language?

[0:33] Another question, what are the central branches of linguistics? And furthermore, how do linguists collect data in order to support their research? This e-lecture is introductory on the one hand, but also wants to provide additional information for students with some linguistic background. Let us start with an overview of the term language. Here is a relatively old definition of the term language.

[1:07] Language is the institution whereby humans communicate and interact with each other by means of habitually used oral, auditory, arbitrary symbols. This definition contains a number of keywords allowing us to approach the topic in a didactically suitable way. So let's do that. Let's look at these keywords more closely. Here is keyword number one. Language is confined to humans.

[1:39] Well, animals certainly communicate with one another. However, all animal communication systems lack the ability to communicate about something beyond the here and now. and they do not allow novel messages to be produced or understood. Here is the next keyword, or should I say keywords, communication and interaction. Well, certainly animals communicate and interact.

[2:11] Yet, the communication systems humans use are certainly more complex than those of animals. Keyword number three, language is habitually used. Well, people use language every day, usually with little cognitive effort. Words and sentences like, you know, oh, come on, right, eh? Words and phrases like these usually flow out of the mouth in a subconscious, almost automatic way.

[2:48] Or do you normally think about all these phrases or words similar to these before uttering them? Well, probably not. Keyword number four. Language is used oral auditorily. Well, the oral auditory channel, that is communication via the mouth and the ear, is the most important mode of human communication. It is referred to as speech. And finally language makes use of arbitrary symbols Where there is no obvious relationship between the linguistic sign on the one hand that is the word or its sound shape, and the object in the real world.

[3:36] Here we have the object table, but look at these realizations in four different languages. There is no direct relationship between the linguistic sign, that is the word, and the object. So the sign has to be learned. So much for a definition of language. Let us now briefly repeat how linguists study language. Basically, the field of linguistics is subdivided into three central branches. The branch that deals with sound, a branch that deals with structure, and a branch that deals with meaning.

[4:11] Let's start with the branch that deals with sounds. It is subdivided into two central areas, phonetics and phonology. And as you know, phonetics studies human speech sounds in general from various angles. For example, we could ask the question, do these sounds, the first one sounds such as like this. And the second one is something like. Do these sounds exist or not?

[4:42] how are these sounds, if they exist in human languages, in any human language, how are they produced, how are they perceived, and how can we analyze them acoustically. Of course, some of you may know that the first one is a click, a so-called lateral click, as in a-k-a, and the second one is a velar ejective, as in a-k-a. Well, the second branch that is subsumed under the heading of sound phonology deals with questions like these. Are these elements, for example, part of the sound system of a particular language?

[5:19] Can, for example, words such as nbik be part of the English vocabulary? Well, you all know they can't because this consonantal combination at the beginning of a word, at the beginning of a syllable is impossible in English. whereas fresh, the second item, could well be a word belonging to the English language, a word that is supported by the sound system of present-day English. Let's look at the structural branch next, with the two central sub-branches morphology and syntax.

[5:54] You know that in many languages, words are not indivisible but are composed of smaller units. Morphology seeks to define how words are built from these smaller units. For example, we could ask the question, what are the component parts of an item such as nationalization? A question that is a typical one that is researched in the area of morphology. Well, and syntax is of course the study of sentence structure.

[6:26] structure. For many linguists, this is the core area of linguistics leading to the most fundamental insights about natural language. For example, you could ask, is this famous sentence, colorless green ideas sleep furiously grammatical or not I not answering this question in this e but this is a legitimate question in syntax Well and then we have the branch dealing with meaning the study of meaning more specifically the study of meaning of words, of sentences, and even larger elements.

[7:06] In word semantics, for example, an interesting question is, what are the relationships between items such as wide and narrow, between tulip and flower or what is logically strange about a sentence Mary passed her exam because she didn't work at all think about it a very strange sentence sentence semantics will help out here and then we have pragmatics the branch of linguistics that studies the use of language and its its effects it is concerned with the meanings that sentences have in particular contexts in which they are uttered.

[7:46] So what do you think about this sentence? Or this utterance to be precise? I'll come to your party. Is this a promise or a warning? Well, I leave that up to you. So linguistics can be defined as the systematic study of language. It is often defined as a science which is objective unbiased, data-oriented and reproducible. Put more simply, linguists are concerned with how language actually does work rather than with how it ought to work. And there are two approaches as as to how languages can be examined.

[8:39] One is referred to as the introspective approach, that is, data collection by means of introspection. The other one concentrates on the observation of real facts. It's the observational approach. Let us look at the introspective view first. The introspective approach concentrates on the study of competence. The main argument is that language realized in actual spoken or written form may be flawed by slips of the tongue, by false starts, by hesitations.

[9:23] It involves incorrect structures and so on and so forth. For this reason, many linguists make use of a principle which the famous linguist Ferdinand de Saussure called the conventional simplification of data. So here we have simplified data. He has not got any time. This is my book, John saw Mary in the garden. You don't really utter sentences like these, but you use them as a basis for research.

[9:56] So these are idealized examples which are regularized, which are decontextualized, which are standardized, and which completely disregard performance features. Much linguistics is based on introspection especially the Chomskyan school of grammar Over here you have Noam Chomsky born in 1927 and his school of generative grammar uses introspection that is invented sentences and often only a very small number of sentences as the basis of the development of their hypotheses and eventually theories.

[10:40] Well, and then we have the observational approach. Since the establishment of linguistics as a scientific discipline from Ferdinand de Saussure onwards, well, do you remember Ferdinand de Saussure? Do you know who I'm talking about? Well, here he is, the Swiss linguist born in the middle of the 19th century. Well, since the Saussure's time, there have been linguists who developed models of language based on observing actual language use.

[11:15] They recorded data, they inspected data, they used written data and so on and so forth. And so they observed actual language use, what is often described as parole in Saussurean terms or performance. Here are three examples. He ain't got no time. You know, this is me book. John, you know, so Mary in the garden, right? And they contain hesitations like they contain discourse elements such as you know, all right.

[11:48] They contain strange dialectal features such as this is me book versus this is my book. They contain false starts such as so and so on and so forth. following a long period of structural linguistics dominated by introspective and intuition based approaches more recently observation-based linguistics has become more popular especially when joseph greenberg who you find over here so this is joseph greenberg who was born in 1915 and unfortunately died in 2001, when Greenberg's School of Language Typology used the data of as many as possible languages to develop the theories of, well, the central approaches towards languages.

[12:49] Today, and this is due to the wealth of the material on the web, from simple data to data that is organized within specific corpora, today the observational approach can be regarded as a general reorientation in linguistics. No serious linguist would work without corpus data these days. Well, I hope this suffices as a repetition.

[13:26] You should now have a clear picture about language and linguistics, as well as how linguists deal with linguistic data. Thank you very much for your patience. you