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LINGUISTICS

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

Some of the earliest linguistic activities can be recalled from Iron Age

India with the analysis of Sanskrit. The Pratishakhyas (from ca. the 8th

century BC) constitute as it were a proto-linguistic ad hoc collection of

observations about mutations to a given corpus particular to a given Vedic

school. Systematic study of these texts gives rise to the Vedanga

discipline of Vyakarana, the earliest surviving account of which is the

work of Pānini (c. 520 – 460 BC), who, however, looks back on what are

probably several generations of grammarians, whose opinions he

occasionally refers to. Pānini formulates close to 4,000 rules which

together form a compact generative grammar of Sanskrit. Inherent in his

analytic approach are the concepts of the phoneme, the morpheme and the

root. Due to its focus on brevity, his grammar has a highly unintuitive

structure, reminiscent of contemporary "machine language" (as opposed to

"human readable" programming languages).

Indian linguistics maintained a high level for several centuries;

Patanjali in the 2nd century BC still actively criticizes Panini. In the

later centuries BC, however, Panini's grammar came to be seen as

prescriptive, and commentators came to be fully dependent on it.

Bhartrihari (c. 450 – 510) theorized the act of speech as being made up of

four stages: first, conceptualization of an idea, second, its

verbalization and sequencing (articulation) and third, delivery of speech

into atmospheric air, the interpretation of speech by the listener, the

interpreter.

Western linguistics begins in Classical Antiquity with grammatical

speculation such as Plato's Cratylus. The first important advancement of

the Greeks was the creation of the alphabet. As a result of the

introduction of writing, poetry such as the Homeric poems became written

and several editions were created and commented, forming the basis of

philology and critic. The sophists and Socrates introduced dialectics as a

new text genre. Aristotle defined the logic of speech and the argument.

Furthermore Aristotle works on rhetoric and poetics were of utmost

importance for the understating of tragedy, poetry, public discussions

etc. as text genres.

One of the greatest of the Greek grammarians was Apollonius

Dyscolus.Apollonius wrote more than thirty treatises on questions of

syntax, semantics, morphology, prosody, orthography, dialectology, and

more. In the 4th c., Aelius Donatus compiled the Latin grammar Ars

Grammatica that was to be the defining school text through the Middle

Ages. In De vulgari eloquentia ("On the Eloquence of Vernacular"), Dante

Alighieri expanded the scope of linguistic enquiry from the traditional

languages of antiquity to include the language of the day.

In the Middle East, the Persian linguist Sibawayh made a detailed and

professional description of Arabic in 760, in his monumental work, Al-

kitab fi al-nahw (The Book on Grammar), bringing many linguistic aspects

of language to light. In his book he distinguished phonetics from

phonology.

Sir William Jones noted that Sanskrit shared many common features with

classical Latin and Greek, notably verb roots and grammatical structures,

such as the case system. This led to the theory that all languages sprung

from a common source and to the discovery of the Indo-European language

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family. He began the study of comparative linguistics, which would uncover

more language families and branches.

In 19th century Europe the study of linguistics was largely from the

perspective of philology (or historical linguistics). Some early-19th-

century linguists were Jakob Grimm, who devised a principle of consonantal

shifts in pronunciation – known as Grimm's Law – in 1822; Karl Verner, who

formulated Verner's Law; August Schleicher, who created the

"Stammbaumtheorie" ("family tree"); and Johannes Schmidt, who developed

the "Wellentheorie" ("wave model") in 1872.

Ferdinand de Saussure was the founder of modern structural linguistics,

with an emphasis on synchronic (i.e. non-historical) explanations for

language form.

In North America, the structuralist tradition grew out of a combination of

missionary linguistics (whose goal was to translate the bible) and

Anthropology. While originally regarded as a sub-field of anthropology in

the United State, linguistics is now considered a separate scientific

discipline in the US, Australia and much of Europe.

Edward Sapir, a leader in American structural linguistics, was one of the

first who explored the relations between language studies and

anthropology. His methodology had strong influence on all his successors.

Noam Chomsky's formal model of language, transformational-generative

grammar, developed under the influence of his teacher Zellig Harris, who

was in turn strongly influenced by Leonard Bloomfield, has been the

dominant model since the 1960s.

The structural linguistics period was largely superseded in North America

by generative grammar in the 1950s and 60s. This paradigm views language

as a mental object, and emphasizes the role of the formal modeling of

universal and language specific rules. Noam Chomsky remains an important

but controversial linguistic figure. Generative grammar gave rise to such

frameworks such as Transformational grammar, Generative Semantics,

Relational Grammar, Generalized Phrase-structure Grammar, Head-Driven

Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) and Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG).

Other linguists working in Optimality Theory state generalizations in

terms of violable constraints that interact with each other, and abandon

the traditional rule-based formalism first pioneered by early work in

generativist linguistics.

Functionalist linguists working in functional grammar and Cognitive

Linguistics tend to stress the non-autonomy of linguistic knowledge and

the non-universality of linguistic structures, thus differing

significantly from the formal approaches.

Written and Composed By:

Prof. A. R. Somroo

M.A. English, M.A. Education

Cell Phone:03339971417

3

LINGUISTICS

GENERAL LINGUISTICS

Linguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics

encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is

between the study of language structure (grammar) and the study of meaning

(semantics). Grammar encompasses morphology (the formation and composition

of words), syntax (the rules that determine how words combine into phrases

and sentences) and phonology (the study of sound systems and abstract

sound units). Phonetics is a related branch of linguistics concerned with

the actual properties of speech sounds (phones), non-speech sounds, and

how they are produced and perceived. Other sub-disciplines of linguistics

include the following: evolutionary linguistics, which considers the

origins of language; historical linguistics, which explores language

change; sociolinguistics, which looks at the relation between linguistic

variation and social structures; psycholinguistics, which explores the

representation and functioning of language in the mind; neurolinguistics,

which looks at the representation of language in the brain; language

acquisition, which considers how children acquire their first language and

how children and adults acquire and learn their second and subsequent

languages; and discourse analysis, which is concerned with the structure

of texts and conversations, and pragmatics with how meaning is transmitted

based on a combination of linguistic competence, non-linguistic knowledge,

and the context of the speech act.

Linguistics is narrowly defined as the scientific approach to the study of

language, but language can, of course, be approached from a variety of

directions, and a number of other intellectual disciplines are relevant to

it and influence its study. Semiotics, for example, is a related field

concerned with the general study of signs and symbols both in language and

outside of it. Literary theorists study the use of language in artistic

literature. Linguistics additionally draws on work from such diverse

fields as psychology, speech-language pathology, informatics, computer

science, philosophy, biology, human anatomy, neuroscience, sociology,

anthropology, and acoustics.

Within the field, linguist is used to describe someone who either studies

the field or uses linguistic methodologies to study groups of languages or

particular languages. Outside the field, this term is commonly used to

refer to people who speak many languages or have a great vocabulary.

Names for the discipline

Before the twentieth century, the term "philology", first attested in

1716, was commonly used to refer to the science of language, which was

then predominantly historical in focus. Since Ferdinand de Saussure’s

insistence on the importance of synchronic analysis, however, this focus

has shifted

and the term "philology" is now generally used for the "study

of a language's grammar, history and literary tradition," especially in

the United States,where it was never as popular as it was elsewhere (in

the sense of the "science of language").

Although the term "linguist" in the sense of "a student of language" dates

from 1641,the term "linguistics" is first attested in 1847. It is now the

usual academic term in English for the scientific study of language.

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SELECTED SUB-FIELDS OF LINGUISTICS

Historical linguistics

Historical linguistics studies the history and evolution of languages

through the comparative method. Often the aim of historical linguistics is

to classify languages in language families descending from a common

ancestor. This evolves comparison of elements in different languages to

detect possible cognates in order to be able to reconstruct how different

languages have changed over time. This also involves the study of

etymology, the study of the history of single words. Historical

linguistics is also called "diachronic linguistics" and is opposed to

"synchronic linguistics" that study languages in a given moment in time

without regarding its previous stages.In universities in the United

States, the historic perspective is often out of fashion. Historical

linguistics was among the first linguistic disciplines to emerge and was

the most widely practiced form of linguistics in the late 19th century.

The shift in focus to a synchronic perspective started with Saussure and

became predominant in western linguistics with Noam Chomskys emphasis on

the study of the synchronic and universal aspects of language.

Semiotics

Semiotics is the study of sign processes (semiosis), or signification and

communication, signs and symbols, both individually and grouped into sign

systems, including the study of how meaning is constructed and understood.

Semioticians often do not restrict themselves to linguistic communication

when studying the use of signs but extend the meaning of "sign" to cover

all kinds of cultural symbols. Nonetheless semiotic disciplines closely

related to linguistics are literary studies, discourse analysis, text

linguistics, and philosophy of language.

Descriptive linguistics and language documentation

Since the inception of the discipline of linguistics linguists have been

concerned with describing and documenting languages previously unknown to

science. Starting with Franz Boas in the early 1900s descriptive

linguistics became the main strand within American linguistics until the

rise of formal structural linguistics in the mid 20th century. The rise of

American descriptive linguistics was caused by the concern with describing

the languages of indigenous peoples that were (and are) rapidly moving

towards extinction. The ethnographic focus of the original Boasian type of

descriptive linguistics occasioned the development of disciplines such as

Sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, and linguistic

anthropology, disciplines that investigate the relations between language,

culture and society.

The emphasis on linguistic description and documentation has since become

more important outside of North America as well, as the documentation of

rapidly dying indigenous languages has become a primary focus in many of

the worlds' linguistics programs. Language description is a work intensive

endeavour usually requiring years of field work for the linguist to learn

a language sufficiently well to write a reference grammar of it. The

further task of language documentation requires the linguist to collect a

preferably large corpus of texts and recordings of sound and video in the

language, and to arrange for its storage in accessible formats in open

repositories where it may be of the best use for further research by other

researchers.

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LINGUISTICS

THEORATICAL LINGUISTICS

Theoretical linguistics is the branch of linguistics that is most

concerned with developing models of linguistic knowledge. The fields that

are generally considered the core of theoretical linguistics are syntax,

phonology, morphology, and semantics. Although phonetics often informs

phonology, it is often excluded from the purview of theoretical

linguistics, along with psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics.

Theoretical linguistics also involves the search for an explanation of

linguistic universals, that is, properties all languages have in common.

Linguistics concerns itself with describing and explaining the nature of

human language. Relevant to this are the questions of what is universal to

language, how language can vary, and how human beings come to know

languages. All humans (setting aside extremely pathological cases) achieve

competence in whatever language is spoken (or signed, in the case of

signed languages) around them when growing up, with apparently little need

for explicit conscious instruction. While non-humans acquire their own

communication systems, they do not acquire human language in this way

(although many non-human animals can learn to respond to language, or can

even be trained to use it to a degree). Therefore, linguists assume, the

ability to acquire and use language is an innate, biologically-based

potential of modern human beings, similar to the ability to walk. There is

no consensus, however, as to the extent of this innate potential, or its

domain-specificity (the degree to which such innate abilities are specific

to language), with some theorists claiming that there is a very large set

of highly abstract and specific binary settings coded into the human

brain, while others claim that the ability to learn language is a product

of general human cognition. It is, however, generally agreed that there

are no strong genetic differences underlying the differences between

languages: an individual will acquire whatever language(s) he or she is

exposed to as a child, regardless of parentage or ethnic origin.

Linguistic structures are pairings of meaning and form; such pairings are

known as Saussurean signs. In this sense, form may consist of sound

patterns, movements of the hands, written symbols, and so on. There are

many levels of linguistics concerned with particular aspects of linguistic

structure, ranging from those focused primarily on form to those focused

primarily on meaning:

Phonetics, the study of the physical properties of speech (or signed)

production and perception

Phonology, the study of sounds (or signs) as discrete, abstract

elements in the speaker's mind that distinguish meaning

Morphology, the study of internal structures of words and how they

can be modified

Syntax, the study of how words combine to form grammatical sentences

Semantics, the study of the meaning of words (lexical semantics) and

fixed word combinations (phraseology), and how these combine to form

the meanings of sentences

Pragmatics, the study of how utterances are used in communicative

acts and the role played by context and non-linguistic knowledge in

the transmission of meaning

Discourse analysis, the analysis of language use in texts (spoken,

written, or signed)

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Phonetics

Phonetics is the study of speech sounds with concentration on three main

points :

Articulation : the production of speech sounds in human speech

organs.

Perception : the way human ears respond to speech signals, how the

human brain analyses them.

Acoustic features : physical characteristics of speech sounds such as

color, loudness, amplitude, frequency etc.

According to this definition, phonetics can also be called linguistic

analysis of human speech at the surface level. That is one obvious

difference from phonology, which concerns the structure and organisation

of speech sounds in natural languages, and furthermore has a theoretical

and abstract nature. One example can be made to illustrate this

distinction: In English, the suffix -s can represent either [s], [z] or

can be silent (symbolised as ø) depending on context.

Articulatory phonetics

The field of articulatory phonetics is a subfield of phonetics. In

studying articulation, phoneticians attempt to document how humans produce

speech sounds (vowels and consonants). That is, articulatory phoneticians

are interested in how the different structures of the vocal tract, called

the articulators (tongue, lips, jaw, palate, teeth etc.), interact to

create the specific sounds.

Auditory phonetics

Auditory phonetics is a branch of phonetics concerned with the hearing,

acquisition and comprehension of phonetic sounds of words of a language.

As articulatory phonetics explores the methods of sound production,

auditory phonetics explores the methods of reception--the ear to the

brain, and those processes.

Acoustic phonetics

Acoustic phonetics is a subfield of phonetics which deals with acoustic

aspects of speech sounds. Acoustic phonetics investigates properties like

the mean squared amplitude of a waveform, its duration, its fundamental

frequency, or other properties of its frequency spectrum, and the

relationship of these properties to other branches of phonetics (e.g.

articulatory or auditory phonetics), and to abstract linguistic concepts

like phones, phrases, or utterances.

Phonology

Phonology is the study of language sounds

.

Phonology is divided into two

separate studies, phonetics and phonemics. Phonetics is what depicts the

sounds we hear. It calls attention to the smallest details in language

sounds. There are three kinds of phonetics: acoustic phonetics, auditory

phonetics, and articulatory phonetics. Acoustic phonetics deals with the

physical properties of sound, what sounds exactly are coming from the

person speaking. Auditory phonetics deals with how the sounds are

perceived, exactly what the person hearing the sounds is perceiving.

Finally, articulatory phonetics studies how the speech sounds are

produced. This is what describes the actual sounds in detail. It is also

known as descriptive phonetics.

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Phonemics studies how the sounds are used. It analyzes the way sounds are

arranged in languages and helps you to hear what sounds are important in a

language

.

The unit of analysis for phonemics is called phonemes. "A phoneme

is a sound that functions to distinguish one word from another in a

language."For example, how we distinguish the English word tie from the

word die. The sounds that differentiates two words are [t] and [d].

Morphology

Morphology is the study of word structure. For example, in the sentences

The dog runs and The dogs run, the word forms runs and dogs have an affix

-s added, distinguishing them from the bare forms dog and run. Adding this

suffix to a nominal stem gives plural forms, adding it to verbal stems

restricts the subject to third person singular. Some morphological

theories operate with two distinct suffixes -s, called allomorphs of the

morphemes Plural and Third person singular, respectively. Languages differ

with respect to their morphological structure. Along one axis, we may

distinguish analytic languages, with few or no affixes or other

morphological processes from synthetic languages with many affixes. Along

another axis, we may distinguish agglutinative languages, where affixes

express one grammatical property each, and are added neatly one after

another, from fusional languages, with non-concatenative morphological

processes (infixation, umlaut, ablaut, etc.) and/or with less clear-cut

affix boundaries.

Syntax

Syntax is the study of language structure and word order. It is concerned

with the relationship between units at the level of words or morphology.

Syntax seeks to delineate exactly all and only those sentences which make

up a given language, using native speaker intuition. Syntax seeks to

describe formally exactly how structural relations between elements

(lexical items/words and operators) in a sentence contribute to its

interpretation. Syntax uses principles of formal logic and Set Theory to

formalize and represent accurately the hierarchical relationship between

elements in a sentence. Abstract syntax trees are often used to illustrate

the hierarchical structures that are posited. Thus, in active declarative

sentences in English the subject is followed by the main verb which in

turn is followed by the object (SVO). This order of elements is crucial to

its correct interpretation and it is exactly this which syntacticians try

to capture. They argue that there must be such a formal computational

component contained within the language faculty of normal speakers of a

language and seek to describe it.

Semantics

Semantics is the study of intensive meaning in words and

sentences.Semantics can be expressed through diction (word choice) and

inflexion. Inflexion may be conveyed through an author's tone in writing

and a speaker's tone of voice, changing pitch and stress of words to

influence meaning.

Pragmatics

Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics which studies the ways in which

context contributes to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory,

conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to

language behavior in philosophy, sociology, and linguistics. It studies

how the transmission of meaning depends not only on the linguistic

knowledge (e.g. grammar, lexicon etc.) of the speaker and listener, but

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also on the context of the utterance, knowledge about the status of those

involved, the inferred intent of the speaker, and so on. In this respect,

pragmatics explains how language users are able to overcome apparent

ambiguity, since meaning relies on the manner, place, time etc. of an

utterance. The ability to understand another speaker's intended meaning is

called pragmatic competence. An utterance describing pragmatic function is

described as metapragmatic. Pragmatic awareness is regarded as one of the

most challenging aspects of language learning, and comes only through

experience.

Discourse Analysis

Discourse analysis (DA), or discourse studies, is a general term for a

number of approaches to analyzing written, spoken or signed language use.

The objects of discourse analysis—discourse, writing, talk, conversation,

communicative event, etc.—are variously defined in terms of coherent

sequences of sentences, propositions, speech acts or turns-at-talk.

Contrary to much of traditional linguistics, discourse analysts not only

study language use 'beyond the sentence boundary', but also prefer to

analyze 'naturally occurring' language use, and not invented examples.

This is known as corpus linguistics; text linguistics is related.

Discourse analysis has been taken up in a variety of social science

disciplines, including linguistics, sociology, anthropology, social work,

cognitive psychology, social psychology, international relations, human

geography, communication studies and translation studies, each of which is

subject to its own assumptions, dimensions of analysis, and methodologies.

Written and Composed By

Prof. A. R. Somroo

M.A. English, M.A. Education

Phone:03339971417

9

BRANCHES OF LINGUISTICS

SOCIOLINGUISTICS:

Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of

society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way

language is used. Sociolinguistics differs from sociology of language in

that the focus of sociolinguistics is the effect of the society on the

language, while the latter's focus is on the language's effect on the

society. Sociolinguistics overlaps to a considerable degree with

pragmatics.

It also studies how language varieties differ between groups separated by

certain social variables, e.g., ethnicity, religion, status, gender, level

of education, age, etc., and how creation and adherence to these rules is

used to categorize individuals in social or socioeconomic classes. As the

usage of a language varies from place to place (dialect), language usage

varies among social classes, and it is these sociolects that

sociolinguistics studies.

The social aspects of language were in the modern sense first studied by

Indian and Japanese linguists in the 1930s, and also by Gauchat in

Switzerland in the early 1900s, but none received much attention in the

West until much later. The study of the social motivation of language

change, on the other hand, has its foundation in the wave model of the

late 19th century. Sociolinguistics in the West first appeared in the

1960s and was pioneered by linguists such as William Labov in the US and

Basil Bernstein in the UK.

Applications of Sociolinguistics

For example, a sociolinguist might determine through study of social

attitudes that a particular vernacular would not be considered appropriate

language use in a business or professional setting. Sociolinguists might

also study the grammar, phonetics, vocabulary, and other aspects of this

sociolect much as dialectologists would study the same for a regional

dialect.

The study of language variation is concerned with social constraints

determining language in its contextual environment. Code-switching is the

term given to the use of different varieties of language in different

social situations.

William Labov is often regarded as the founder of the study of

sociolinguistics. He is especially noted for introducing the quantitative

study of language variation and change, making the sociology of language

into a scientific discipline.

Sociolinguistic variables

Studies in the field of sociolinguistics typically take a sample

population and interview them, assessing the realisation of certain

sociolinguistic variables. Labov specifies the ideal sociolinguistic

variable to

be high in frequency,

have a certain immunity from conscious suppression,

be an integral part of larger structures, and

be easily quantified on a linear scale.

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Phonetic variables tend to meet these criteria and are often used, as are

grammatical variables and, more rarely, lexical variables. Examples for

phonetic variables are: the frequency of the glottal stop, the height or

backness of a vowel or the realisation of word-endings. An example of a

grammatical variable is the frequency of negative concord (known

colloquially as a double negative).

Fundamental Concepts in Sociolinguistics

While the study of sociolinguistics is very broad, there are a few

fundamental concepts on which many sociolinguistic inquiries depend.

Speech Community

Speech community is a concept in sociolinguistics that describes a more or

less discrete group of people who use language in a unique and mutually

accepted way among themselves.

Speech communities can be members of a profession with a specialized

jargon, distinct social groups like high school students or hip hop fans,

or even tight-knit groups like families and friends. Members of speech

communities will often develop slang or jargon to serve the group's

special purposes and priorities.

High prestige and low prestige varieties

Crucial to sociolinguistic analysis is the concept of prestige; certain

speech habits are assigned a positive or a negative value which is then

applied to the speaker. This can operate on many levels. It can be

realised on the level of the individual sound/phoneme, as Labov discovered

in investigating pronunciation of the post-vocalic /r/ in the North-

Eastern USA, or on the macro scale of language choice, as realised in the

various diglossias that exist throughout the world, where Swiss-

German/High German is perhaps most well known. An important implication of

sociolinguistic theory is that speakers 'choose' a variety when making a

speech act, whether consciously or subconsciously.

Social network

Understanding language in society means that one also has to understand

the social networks in which language is embedded. A social network is

another way of describing a particular speech community in terms of

relations between individual members in a community. A network could be

loose or tight depending on how members interact with each other.For

instance, an office or factory may be considered a tight community because

all members interact with each other. A large course with 100+ students be

a looser community because students may only interact with the instructor

and maybe 1-2 other students. A multiplex community is one in which

members have multiple relationships with each other.For instance, in some

neighborhoods, members may live on the same street, work for the same

employer and even intermarry.

The looseness or tightness of a social network may affect speech patterns

adopted by a speaker. For instance, Dubois and Hovarth (1998:254) found

that speakers in one Cajun Louisiana community were more likely to

pronounce English "th" [θ] as [t] (or [ð] as [d]) if they participated in

a relatively dense social network (i.e. had strong local ties and

interacted with many other speakers in the community), and less likely if

their networks were looser (i.e. fewer local ties).

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A social network may apply to the macro level of a country or a city, but

also to the inter-personal level of neighborhoods or a single family.

Recently, social networks have been formed by the Internet, through chat

rooms, MySpace groups, organizations, and online dating services.

Internal vs. external language

In Chomskian linguistics, a distinction is drawn between I-language

(internal language) and E-language (external language). In this context,

internal language applies to the study of syntax and semantics in language

on the abstract level; as mentally represented knowledge in a native

speaker. External language applies to language in social contexts, i.e.

behavioral habits shared by a community. Internal language analyses

operate on the assumption that all native speakers of a language are quite

homogeneous in how they process and perceive language. External language

fields, such as sociolinguistics, attempt to explain why this is in fact

not the case. Many sociolinguists reject the distinction between I- and E-

language on the grounds that it is based on a mentalist view of language.

On this view, grammar is first and foremost an interactional (social)

phenomenon (e.g. Elinor Ochs, Emanuel Schegloff, Sandra Thompson).

Written and Composed By:

Prof. A.R. Somroo

M.A. English, M.A. Education

Cell Phone: 03339971417

12

BRANCHES OF LINGUISTICS

PSYCHOLINGUISTICS:

Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the

psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire,

use, comprehend and produce language. Initial forays into

psycholinguistics were largely philosophical ventures, due mainly to a

lack of cohesive data on how the human brain functioned. Modern research

makes use of biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and information

theory to study how the brain processes language. There are a number of

subdisciplines; for example, as non-invasive techniques for studying the

neurological workings of the brain become more and more widespread,

neurolinguistics has become a field in its own right.

Psycholinguistics covers the cognitive processes that make it possible to

generate a grammatical and meaningful sentence out of vocabulary and

grammatical structures, as well as the processes that make it possible to

understand utterances, words, text, etc. Developmental psycholinguistics

studies children's ability to learn language.

Areas of study

Psycholinguistics is interdisciplinary in nature and is studied by people

in a variety of fields, such as psychology, cognitive science, and

linguistics. There are several subdivisions within psycholinguistics that

are based on the components that make up human language.

Linguistic-related areas:

Phonetics and phonology are concerned with the study of speech

sounds. Within psycholinguistics, research focuses on how the brain

processes and understands these sounds.

Morphology is the study of word structures, especially the

relationships between related words (such as dog and dogs) and the

formation of words based on rules (such as plural formation).

Syntax is the study of the patterns which dictate how words are

combined together to form sentences.

Semantics deals with the meaning of words and sentences. Where syntax

is concerned with the formal structure of sentences, semantics deals

with the actual meaning of sentences.

Pragmatics is concerned with the role of context in the

interpretation of meaning.

Psychology-related areas:

The study of word recognition and reading examines the processes

involved in the extraction of orthographic, morphological,

phonological, and semantic information from patterns in printed text.

Developmental psycholinguistics studies infants' and children's

ability to learn language, usually with experimental or at least

quantitative methods (as opposed to naturalistic observations such as

those made by Jean Piaget in his research on the development of

children).

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Theories

Theories about how language works in the human mind attempt to account

for, among other things, how we associate meaning with the sounds (or

signs) of language and how we use syntax—that is, how we manage to put

words in the proper order to produce and understand the strings of words

we call "sentences." The first of these items—associating sound with

meaning—is the least controversial and is generally held to be an area in

which animal and human communication have at least some things in common.

Syntax, on the other hand, is controversial, and is the focus of the

discussion that follows.

There are essentially two schools of thought as to how we manage to create

syntactic sentences: (1) syntax is an evolutionary product of increased

human intelligence over time and social factors that encouraged the

development of spoken language; (2) language exists because humans possess

an innate ability, an access to what has been called a "universal

grammar." This view holds that the human ability for syntax is "hard-

wired" in the brain. This view claims, for example, that complex syntactic

features such as recursion are beyond even the potential abilities of the

most intelligent and social non-humans. (Recursion, for example, includes

the use of relative pronouns to refer back to earlier parts of a sentence—

"The girl whose car is blocking my view of the tree that I planted last

year is my friend.") The innate view claims that the ability to use syntax

like that would not exist without an innate concept that contains the

underpinnings for the grammatical rules that produce recursion. Children

acquiring a language, thus, have a vast search space to explore among

possible human grammars, settling, logically, on the language(s) spoken or

signed in their own community of speakers. Such syntax is, according to

the second point of view, what defines human language and makes it

different from even the most sophisticated forms of animal communication.

The first view was prevalent until about 1960 and is well represented by

the mentalistic theories of Jean Piaget and the empiricist Rudolf Carnap.

As well, the school of psychology known as behaviorism puts forth the

point of view that language is behavior shaped by conditioned response.

The second point of view (the "innate" one) can fairly be said to have

begun with Noam Chomsky’s highly critical review of Skinner's book in 1959

in the pages of the journal Language. That review started what has been

termed "the cognitive revolution" in psychology.

The field of psycholinguistics since then has been defined by reactions to

Chomsky, pro and con. The pro view still holds that the human ability to

use syntax is qualitatively different from any sort of animal

communication. That ability might have resulted from a favorable mutation

(extremely unlikely) or (more likely) from an adaptation of skills evolved

for other purposes. That is, precise syntax might, indeed, serve group

needs; better linguistic expression might produce more cohesion,

cooperation, and potential for survival, BUT precise syntax can only have

developed from rudimentary—or no—syntax, which would have had no survival

value and, thus, would not have evolved at all. Thus, one looks for other

skills, the characteristics of which might have later been useful for

syntax. In the terminology of modern evolutionary biology, these skills

would be said to be "pre-adapted" for syntax .Just what those skills might

have been is the focus of recent research—or, at least, speculation.

14

BRANCHES OF LINGUISTICS

APPLIED LINGUISTICS:

Applied linguistics is an interdisciplinary field of study that

identifies, investigates, and offers solutions to language-related real-

life problems. Some of the academic fields related to applied linguistics

are education, linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and sociology

Major branches of applied linguistics include bilingualism and

multilingualism, computer-mediated communication (CMC), conversation

analysis, contrastive linguistics, language assessment, literacies,

discourse analysis, language pedagogy, second language acquisition,

lexicography, language planning and policies, pragmatics, forensic

linguistics, and translation.

The tradition of applied linguistics established itself in part as a

response to the narrowing of focus in linguistics with the advent in the

late 1950s of generative linguistics, and has always maintained a socially

accountable role, demonstrated by its central interest in language

problems.

Linguists are largely concerned with finding and describing the

generalities and varieties both within particular languages and among all

language. Applied linguistics takes the result of those findings and

"applies" them to other areas. The term "applied linguistics" is often

used to refer to the use of linguistic research in language teaching only

but results of linguistic research are used in many other areas as well,

such as lexicography and translation. "Applied linguistics" has been

argued to be something of a misnomer

since applied linguists focus on

making sense of and engineering solutions for real-world linguistic

problems, not simply "applying" existing technical knowledge from

linguistics; moreover, they commonly apply technical knowledge from

multiple sources, such as sociology (e.g. conversation analysis) and

anthropology.

Today, computers are widely used in many areas of applied linguistics.

Speech synthesis and speech recognition use phonetic and phonemic

knowledge to provide voice interfaces to computers. Applications of

computational linguistics in machine translation, computer-assisted

translation, and natural language processing are areas of applied

linguistics which have come to the forefront. Their influence has had an

effect on theories of syntax and semantics, as modeling syntactic and

semantic theories on computers constraints.

Linguistic analysis is a subdiscipline of applied linguistics used by many

governments to verify the claimed nationality of people seeking asylum who

do not hold the necessary documentation to prove their claim. This often

takes the form of an interview by personnel in an immigration department.

Depending on the country, this interview is conducted in either the asylum

seeker's native language through an interpreter, or in an international

lingua franca like English. Australia uses the former method, while

Germany employs the latter; the Netherlands uses either method depending

on the languages involved.Tape recordings of the interview then undergo

language analysis, which can be done by either private contractors or

within a department of the government. In this analysis, linguistic

features of the asylum seeker are used by analysts to make a determination

about the speaker's nationality. The reported findings of the linguistic

analysis can play a critical role in the government's decision on the

refugee status of the asylum seeker.

15

LINGUISTICS

LINGUISTICS V/S TRADITIONAL GRAMMAR

In linguistics, traditional grammar is a theory of the structure of

language based on ideas Western societies inherited from ancient Greek and

Roman sources. The term is mainly used to distinguish these ideas from

those of contemporary linguistics. In the English-speaking world at least,

traditional grammar is still widely taught in elementary schools.

Traditional grammar distinguishes between the grammar of the elements that

constitute a sentence (i.e. inter-elemental) and the grammar within

sentence elements (i.e. intra-elemental).

Concepts of inter-elemental grammar for the English language

Subject,predicate,object,predicative (aka complement),adverbial and

adjunct,sentence,clause,phrase

Concepts of intra-elemental grammar for the English language

Noun,adjective,determiner,verb,adverb,preposition,conjunction,pronoun

Controversy

The term is mainly used to distinguish these ideas from those of

contemporary linguistics, which are intended to apply to a much broader

range of languages, and to correct a number of errors in traditional

grammar.

Although modern linguistics has exposed the limitations of traditional

grammar, it is still the backbone of the grammar instruction given to the

general population in Western countries. As such, while very few people

have encountered linguistics, nearly everybody in a modern Western culture

encounters traditional grammar. This is one of the big difficulties that

linguists face when they try to explain their ideas to the general public.

Modern linguistics owes a very large debt to traditional grammar, but it

departs from it quite a lot, in the following ways (among others):

Linguistics aims to be general, and to provide an appropriate way of

analysing all languages, and comparing them to each other.

traditional grammar is usually concerned with one language, and when

it has been applied to non-European languages, it has very often

proved very inappropriate.

Linguistics has broader influences than traditional grammar has. For

example, modern linguistics owes as much of a debt to Panini's

grammar of Sanskrit as it does to Latin and Greek grammar.

Linguistics is in many ways more descriptively rigorous, because it

goes after accurate description as its own end. In traditional

grammar, description is often only a means towards formulating usage

advice.

While there is a large overlap between traditional grammar and

prescriptive grammar, they are not entirely the same thing. Traditional

grammar is best thought of as the set of descriptive concepts used by

nearly all prescriptive works on grammar. Linguists' critiques of

prescriptive grammar often take the form of pointing out that the usage

prohibition in question is stated in terms of a concept from traditional

grammar that modern linguistics has rejected

16

LINGUISTICS

HUMAN AND ANIMAL COMMUNICATION

Most animals have inter and intra-species communication systems to

communicate with one another. They cry,hoot, bleat, dance and coo, and to

some degree these noises and acts accomplish the same purposes as human

language. They make instinctive noises. Animals, some scholars believe,

have both the discrete and non-discrete system of communication. For

example non-discrete in the case of the bees who communicate among among

themselves through a dance, and discrete in the case of verbal monkeys who

communicate through a bark, lip-smacking, ‘aarr’ sounds, etc., but their

message as well as symbols are limited in quantity and dimension. Human

languages, on the other hand, are much more interestingly unlimited.

Animal communication, thus, is devoid of the complexity, novelty,

multiplicity and creativity of human language. Animal communication is a

closed system; it is unextendable and unmodifiable. The bees and the

monkeys use even now-a-day the same communication system which they used,

say five thousand years ago. Here animal communication lacks the variety

of the human communication. The number of sentences in any natural

language is inexhaustible. There is no limit to the number of conceptual

units in the human language, nor to the number of posssible symbols. Human

language is extendable and modifiable.

Human communication is structurally complex while the animal communication

is not. The former is conditioned by time and geography, the latter is

not, for example,the dogs of all the countries have the same system of

message and symbols. Humanbeings, on the other hand, use a variety of

symbols which differ from one geographical nation or region to another.

Human language is much more acquired by effort and is the result of social

interaction. Animal communication differs in this respect too. If a human

child is kept away from human society for a long time, and is conditioned

to live in the communit, say of wolves, in all probability, he will not be

able to acquire human language. In other words, animal system of

communication is instinctive and inherited; human language is not such.

Human language has a much wider range of flexibility, modification,

change, variety, creativity, etc. than animal communication. In human

language, the element of mimicry is more than it is in the animal

communication. The organ of speech by which human produce sounds are a

rare gift of Nature to man. No other species except apes and monkeys has

been endowed with this gift.

We can summarize the Human VS Animal communication system as under:

Human Language Animal Communcation

1 Unlimited and infinite Limited and finite 2 Open system Closed System 3 Extendable, modifiable Unextendable, unmodifiable 4 Flexible and full of variety Inflexible and without variety 5 Non-instinctive Instinctive 6 Acquired Inherited 7 Conditioned by geography Not conditioned by Geography 8 Full of novelty and creativity Bereft of Novelty and creativity 9 Recurrent Repititive 10 Grammatical Non-grammatical 11 Copgnitive as well as behavioral Only Behavioral 12 Descriptive and Narrative Non-descriptive and non-narrative

17

LINGUISTICS

THE PRODUCTION OF SPEECH

An effective act of speech is an exceedingly complex operation involving a

number of operations. The first stage is psychological, the second is

physiological and the third is physical. First of all a concept is

formulated in in the speaker’s brain, and human nervous system transmits

this linguistic message to the so called organs of speech. The organs of

speech are thus set in motion and their movements creat disturbance in the

air, and these sound waves are received by the listener’s ears. At the

listener’s end, first of all the ears receive the linguistic codification,

his nervous system passes this linguistic message to the brain, where the

linguistic interpretation of the message takes place.

The linguistic message conveyed to the organs of speech by the nervous

system activates the lungs, larynx and the cavities above in such a way

that they perform a series of movements to produce a particular pattern of

sound. For the production of speech, we need an air-stream mechanism.

Generally all speech sounds are made by an egressive pulmonic air stream

on out going breath.

In this way the speech sound is produced by the articulatory movements in

the chest, throat, mouth ands nose.There are four areas:

1. Larynx containing the vocal cords. 2. The oral cavity (Mouth). 3. The pharyngeal cavity(Throat) 4. The nasal cavity(Nose)

The air stream coming from the lungs may be modified in any of these areas

in a variety of ways. The role of each speech organ is as under:

(A) The Diaphram and Lungs

The diaphram is situated in the human body below the lungs and controls

the expansion and contraction of the lungs in breathing.It is involved

in the production of chest pulses on which the division of syllables is

based. The lungs serve for a source of air, which passes upward through

the wind pipe and larynx consisting of the vocal cords on to the mouth

or both, and comes outwards. The source of energy for the production of

speech is generally the air-stream coming out of the lungs.

(B) The Larynx and Vocal Cords

The larynx is the little box that is popularly called the Adam’s apple.

It is casing formed of cartilage and muscles, a bony box like structure

in the front of the throat, situated in the upper part of the wind pipe

or the trachea, containing a valve like opening consisting of two

membranous tissues, the vocal cords. The vocal cords are like a pair of

lips placed horizontally from front to back. The opening between them is

called glottis. When we breath in and out, the glottis is open. This is

the position of production of the breathed or voiceless sounds, for

example /f,o,s,h/ as in the english words fan, think, sell, hell.

The major role of the vocal cords is that of a vibrator in the

production of of voice, or phonation. The vocal cords vibrate many times

in a second with the pressure of the air coming through them. This

vibration produces a musical note called voice, and sounds produced in

18

this way are called voice-sounds. For example, all vowel sounds, and

the consonants /v,z,m,n/ as in englisg words Valley,zero,mad, nail are

voiced.

(C) The soft Palate

The roof of the mouth has three parts: the hard convex surface justy

behind the upper front teeth called the alveolar or teeth ridge, theb

hard concave surface behind it called the hard palate and the soft

palate at the back, with the uvula at its end.

The soft palate can be moved up to block the passage into the nose. The

from the lungs then has to come out through the mouth only and the

sounds produced in this way are called the oral sounds.All english

sounds except /m,n,ּת/ are oral sounds. If the soft palate is lowered and

passage through the mouth is closed, the air from the lungs come out

through the nose only. Sounds produced in this manner are called nasal

sounds.For example, /m,n,ּת/ in English words man,nun and song.

(D) The Tongue

Of all the movable organs within the mouth, tongue is by far the most

fleecy and is capable of assuming a great variety of positions in the

articulation of both vowels and consonants. The tongue for the

convenience of description has four parts: the tip, the blade, the front

and the back. It is the position of the tongue which is largely

responsible for the difference in in the sounds of various vowels. The

external end of the tongue is called the tip. The part opposite the hard

palate is called the front. The part opposite to the alveolar ridge is

called the blade and the part opposite the volume is called the back.

(E) The Lips

The position of lips affects very considerably the shape of the total

cavity.They may be shut or held apart in various ways. When they are

held tightly shut, they form a complete obstruction to produce bilabial

stops, e.g. /p,b/.If they are held apart,they assume various positions

to utter different words.

Written and Composed BY;

Prof. A.R. Somroo

M.A. English, M.A. Education

Phone: 03339971417