Chapter 1: Language and

Linguistics

Language: Its Structure and Use

 How Many Languages?

• Enumerating them is not a straightforward

task
– Dialects vs. different languages
– Newly discovered languages
– Languages die
– Languages are born

• The Ethnologue lists 6909 languages

Language: Its Structure and Use
 Official Language of USA?

Federal Election Commission

Language: Its Structure and Use
 Official Language of USA?
• English is not the official language of the
United States

• Nearly 47 million U.S. residents speak a

home language other than English

• 176 living languages are spoken in the

United States today
Language: Its Structure and Use
Human Language

Language: Its Structure and Use

 Human Language
• Expression: words, phrases, and
sentences, including intonation and
stress
• Meaning: the senses and referents of
expressions
• Context: the social situation in which
expressions are uttered

Language: Its Structure and Use

 Signs
• Arbitrary signs: no inherent connection
between the sign and what it indicates
– Language is a system of arbitrary signs
• The associations between signs and meanings
are established by convention

• Representational signs: the sign may

suggest its meaning

Language: Its Structure and Use

 Grammatical Competence
• Rules are the observable patterns that
languages follow

• Grammatical competence allows

people to use rules to create and
comprehend an infinite number of
utterances

Language: Its Structure and Use

 Languages as Patterned
Structures
• Discreteness: words are made up of discrete
elemental sounds
• Duality: language is comprised of meaningless
parts that combine to make meaningful parts
• Displacement: language can be used to discuss
things and events that are not present
• Productivity: the ability to create and
understand an infinite number of sentences
– Recursion
Language: Its Structure and Use
Communicative Competence
• Grammatical competence: a person’s
knowledge of vocabulary, pronunciation,
sentence structure, and meaning

• Communicative competence: the ability

to use language appropriately in context

Language: Its Structure and Use

 Languages and Dialects
• Everyone speaks a dialect
– Regional dialects: dialects differ geographically
– Social dialect: dialects may also differ across age
groups, ethnic groups, and socioeconomic
boundaries

• Different dialects vs. different languages

– Romance languages
– Chinese
– Hindi and Urdu
Language: Its Structure and Use
 Languages and Dialects
• Standard varieties
– are used in public discourse
– have been encoded in reference works
– are no better or worse than any other
variety
– are usually the local dialects of centers of
commerce and government

Language: Its Structure and Use

 Languages and Dialects
• Is there a right and wrong way to use
English?
– Grammar is a description of how language
behaves
• An ungrammatical sentence then, is a sentence nobody would
say or write
– Prescriptive rules say how people “should” talk
– There is no linguistic justification for claiming that
there is one right way to speak a language

Language: Its Structure and Use

 Modes of Linguistic
Communication
• Speaking: Primary mode of human language
• Writing: Represents the spoken words, not the
entities and activities themselves
• Signing: Sign languages such as ASL combine
hand shape, hand location, and hand
movement in a system of grammatical rules
– The grammar of ASL is not related to English grammar
– Sign languages have dialects
Language: Its Structure and Use
 Do Humans Alone Have
Language?
• All animals no doubt have systems of
communication to signal danger, etc.
• But these systems lack creativity and are
based on nonarbitrary signs
– Example: honeybees have elaborate dances to
convey information to the hive about a food
source
• The dance tells other bees the distance and direction
of a food source
• But, bees can only use their communication system for
a very limited range of meanings
Language: Its Structure and Use
 Can Chimpanzees Learn a
Human Language?
• Vicki
– After seven years, she could utter four spoken
words with difficulty

• Washoe
– Raised as a human child and taught ASL
– She could make 132 signs and understood
many more
– She was able to identify classes of objects and
combined signs to make complex utterances
Language: Its Structure and Use
 Can Chimpanzees Learn a
Human Language?
• Project Nim
– The study: a 5-year experiment to teach a chimp sign
language in a controlled environment
– Conclusion: chimps cannot learn language as humans
do
– Critics: how similar are the learning environments for
chimps and children?

• The general consensus among psychologists

and linguists is that animal communication is
fundamentally different from human language
Language: Its Structure and Use
 The Origin of Human
Languages
• Some people believe that language began in a
pristine state but has been polluted by “impurities”
– Linguists see no problem with these “impurities”

• People also have different views on why

languages are different and why they change
– Linguists see both the number of languages and
language change as being natural results of changing
communicative needs and contact between peoples
Language: Its Structure and Use
 The Origin of Human
Languages
• Investigating the origin of human
language requires examining three
timelines:
• The development of language in a human being
– About a decade
• The development of a particular language
– Centuries or millennia
• The development of the brain and vocal apparatus
to enable human language
– Hundreds of thousands of years
Language: Its Structure and Use
 What Is Linguistics?
• Linguistics: Systematic inquiry into
human language

• The scope of linguistics includes:

– Language structure (and its underlying grammatical
competence) and language use (and its underlying
communicative competence)
– The relationship between language structure and use
– The development and acquisition of language
– Language as social action
Language: Its Structure and Use
 What Is Linguistics?
• The many branches of linguistics focus on:
• Grammar (phonetics, phonology, morphology,
syntax, semantics)
• Pragmatics (the relationship between
expression & meaning and context &
interpretation)
• Language variation (cognitive or social focus)
• Applications of linguistics (education, clinical
research, forensic analysis, language policy)
Language: Its Structure and Use
 Computers and Linguistics
• Corpus linguistics is the term used for
compiling collections of texts and using them
to probe language use

• A corpus is a representative body of texts

• Corpora are very useful for dictionaries,

speech recognition, and artificial intelligence

Language: Its Structure and Use