What is Language?

, Properties of Human Language-

Language is the most frequently used and most highly developed form of
human communication that man has possessed. It is a group of sounds
distinguishable from one another and arranged in a system by means of which
thoughts and feelings can be communicated from one person to another. (Ernest
W. Grey, A Brief Grammar of Written English).

According to the most modern linguists written language is considered as

a substitute for speech and hence it is a dialect of the ‘real’ language- Spoken
Language. This definition applies to the nearly three thousand languages of the
world. While this definition is for language in general, a single language is
defined as a system of sounds familiar and usable to a limited number of people
and unfamiliar to all others in the world. The ability to acquire a language-
verbal or sign language- is inherent in mankind. But the acquisition of a
language is earned by listening, memorising, storing and using. In other words
we can say that language is a learned activity. It is not inherently given.

Since there is no physical evidence to the existence of a spoken language,

though we suspect that some type of spoken language must have developed
between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, there have been many speculations
about the origin of human speech. The earliest speculation is of a divine source,
conventionally related to the creation of man and the mentoring done by a super
power- named God. In the Bible, the book of Genesis begins with a statement
that shows that there was ‘word’ before everything. After the creation of
‘Adam’, God tells him to name each and everything on earth. So, it is assumed
that man had been given the ‘gift’ of language when he was ‘made’ by this super
power. In Hinduism, Saraswati is the goddess of language and her blessing is
mandatory to master language. Religion has a very convenient explanation for
the origin of language while anthropologists and linguists have something
different to say about it. They speculate the origin of language in different ways.

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One of the prominent speculations is ‘Bow-wow Theory’. This theory believes
that the origin of language is based on the concept of natural sounds. According
to this, the primitive words could have been imitations of the natural sounds
which early men and women heard around them. Words that sound similar to
the noises they describe are called ‘onomatopoeic words’. In English, words
like cuckoo, splash, bang, boom, hiss, crack etc are examples for this. It has also
been suggested that the original sounds of language may have come from natural
cries of emotion such as pain, anger and joy.

Another theory on the origin of language is called ‘Yo-he-ho Theory’- a

concept which says that the sounds of a person involved in physical effort could
be the source of language. So, a group of early humans might have developed a
set of hums, grunts, groans and curses that were used when they were lifting
heavy things and this must have been the ancestors of our modern language.
This lays the origin of language in a social context and hence makes it more
reasonable considering the fact that primitive men lived in groups and worked
together. But this theory does not explain why then the great apes and other
animals that live together have not come up with such a developed language
system. This gives way to the biological explanation given to the origin of
language- physical daptation source.

The physical adaptation source explains how human brain and our unique
vocal system have contributed to the origin of speech. In the evolution of
humans, there was a gradual improvement in the size of brain and which helped
us to develop a complex but well organized language system. The human vocal
system, with two resonant chambers in the throat due to a descended larynx,
enables us to produce different sounds clearly. These biological adaptations
make man different from every other animal above all other differences
regarding the communication system of living beings.

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 This theory also is a part of the ‘Tool-making source’ of language origin,
which states that when human brain was progressed enough to make tools and
other equipment, the period when his brain actually began to ‘think’ and act
accordingly, they must have come up with a communicative system other than
mere gestures.

The biological adaptation also points to a special ‘language genes’ that

linguists believe that only humans possess, which must have been the reason
why man alone has such a grant language system. Even the deaf and dumb are
able to acquire a sign language which makes them able to communicate as
effective as the vocal language. This makes man a wonderful creature who is
different from all other living things on earth. This theory is generally known as
‘innateness hypothesis’.

As mentioned above, the possession of language makes man different from

animals. But both humans and animals can produce unintentional informative
signals (in humans- like sneeze, dishevelled hair or clothes. In animals- a long
undisturbed stare at something, or sniffing) and specific informative signals (in
humans- speaking, and in animals- barking, crying, urinating to mark the land).
Precisely speaking, there are mainly six properties that make the human
language different from the language of animals.

 Reflexivity
 Displacement
 Arbitrariness
 Productivity
 Cultural Transmission
 Duality

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I. Reflexivity

The property of reflexivity accounts for the fact that we can use language
to think and talk about language itself, making it one of the distinguishing
features of human language. Without this ability, we wouldn’t be able to reflect
on or identify any of the other distinct properties of human language.

II. Displacement.

Humans can refer to past and future time. This property if human
language is called displacement. It allows language users to talk about things
and events not present in the immediate environment. Indeed, displacement
allows us to talk about things and places like angels, fairies, Heaven and hell.
Animal communication is generally considered to lack this property.

III. Arbitrariness.

The aspect of language where there is no natural connection between linguistic

signs and objects is called arbitrariness. For example, there is no natural
connection between the word ’table’ and the object made of wood with poles to
support and a flat top. For the majority of animal signals, there does appear to be
clear connection between the conveyed message and signal used to convey it.
Example: establishing territory and mating season gestures.

IV. Productivity.

Humans are continually creating new expressions and novel utterances by

manipulating their linguistic resources to describe new objects and situations.
This property is described as productivity or ‘creativity’ or ‘open-endedness’. It
means that the potential number of utterances in any human language is infinite.

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The communication systems of animals are limited. For example Cicadas have
only four signals to convey any message. Vervet monkeys have thirty six.

V. Cultural Transmission.

The process whereby a language is passed from one generation to the next
is described as cultural transmission. For example, if an infant born in Korea is
adopted by American parents, the child will be able to speak fluent American
English in U.S while his/her physical appearances will be Korean. But this never
happens in animals. The general pattern in animal communication is that
creatures are born with a set of specific signals that are produced instinctively.
Though they can understand other animals’ signals in a vague way, they can
never adopt other animal’s signals. For example if some giraffes are in a
meadow with some zebras, when the giraffes give a warning cry if they see a
lion getting ready to attack them, zebras can understand this signal and run
away. But the zebras will never cry and communicate with giraffes as they do
among themselves.

VI. Duality.

Human language is organized at two levels or layers simultaneously. This

property is called duality or ‘double articulation’. We have a physical level at
which we can produce individual sounds line n, b and i. As individual sounds,
they don’t mean anything. But we are able to combine them into bin or nib. So
at one level we have distinct sounds, and in another level we have distinct
meanings. This is one of the economical features of human language, because
we are able to produce innumerable number of meanings with a limited number
of sounds.

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But a dog does not know when it barks ‘Bow, bow’ that it is a combination of
individual sounds b, w and a. And hence the dog cannot combine these sounds
into a wab, wab or bwa bwa.

Though animal communication is extremely inferior compared to of humans,

there were incidents where some scientists ‘trained’ some animals to produce
complicated human language.

Functions of Language -
Language must be investigated in all the variety of its functions. At the
time people talk about language functions, they are talking about the reason for
using language. At its most basic, the function of language is communication or
usually called by speech function; people use language to give and receive
messages between themselves. It is difficult to see adequately the functions of
language, because it is so deeply rooted in the whole of human behavior that it
may be suspected that there is little in the functional side of our conscious
.behavior in which language does not play its part (Newmeyer,2000:89)

I. Jakobson's Functions of Language

Roman Jakobson(1960:57) defined six functions of language (or
communication functions), according to which an effective act of verbal
communication can be described. Each of these functions has an associated
.factor

A. Phatic Function
The phatic function deals with the connection between speakers. Its
primary purpose is to attract/establish, prolong, check, confirm, or discontinue

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this connection, and may be composed of either culturally or non-culturally
bound set phrases like well, I won’t keep you ;wow !;and really. ?In addition to
strengthening the relationship between speakers, the use of the phatic function
also increases the listener’s perception of the speaker’s
. proficiency( Narcis,2017:59-60 )
The phatic function means expressing solidarity and empathy with others.
It helps to establish contact and refers to the channel of communication. It opens
the channel or checking that it is working, for social reason. This function is
used for sociability. Therefore sometimes vernacular words used in this function.
It is characterizted mainly of speech, however, in a certain types of writing it can
also be noticed as in letters for example, where the beginning Dear Sir/Madam
and ending Yours Faithfully also serve that purpose (Zegarac, and
.Clark,1999:567)
Coupland (2000:207) states that despite the growing number of
publications on phatic communication, this type of social interaction calls for
much further research on a number of issues, including the three which are
briefly outlined here. First, analyses of phatic communication are often couched
in terms of the distinction between cognitive (propositional) and social
.information
B. The Poetic Function
The poetic function is defined by Jakobson as “the attitude towards the
message itself, centering on the message itself. “ The poetic function cannot be
reduced only to poetry or to the poetic function of the message, and consists in
that it emphasizes the concrete side sign of the language, deepening the
fundamental opposition between what is intelligible and what is perceptible,
between the linguistic sign as a means of intelligible knowledge and the objects
of the reference reality (Narcis,2017:60.)
The Poetic Function, also known as the aesthetic Function, deals with
language whose primary focus is the beauty of the language itself. The richness

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of sound and texture ,and the balance that makes it a work of auditory art or
poetic utterance“ .The other functions need not be absent in poetic texts. They
merely play a subordinate role, just as in other linguistic genres, the poetic
function is not absent, but only appears in a subordinate role (in political
slogans, advertising, commemorative speeches, etc( ”).Holenstein, 1974 0 264 .)

C. The Metalingual Function

Metalingual function is used whenever the addresser and the addressee
need to check whether they use same code and when the language is used to
speak about language. For example: “What do you mean by “krill”?” , “ What is
plucked?”. In the process of language learning, the acquisition of mother tongue
includes wide use of metalingual actions; for example aphasia may be described
as a loss of capability form metalingual actions .The clearest expression of the
metalinguistic function is the metalinguistics itself, the very language of
grammar. But the metalingual function is currently present in ordinary
conversation as a means of control on the use of the same linguistic code by the
. interlocutors

D. The Emotive Function

It is also known as “expressive or affective function”. The emotive
function focuses on the„ addresser‟. This function comes out when we want to
express our emotions although one doesn‟t speak to give an information. For
example: the interjections, which are words or phrases used to express sudden
surprise, pleasure or annoyance such as : “Bah!” , “Oh!” ,
“Yuck!”“Ouch” ,”Aie”. They are not components but equivalent of sentences
.(Tribus,2017:10)

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:E. The Conative Function
The conative function is an orientation toward „addressee‟. This function
finds it purest grammatical expression in vocative and imperative sentences, and
it helps us to make people do something and it includes orders. For example:
.”“Drink!” or “Go Away
It is updated by those elements of the message that directly send to the
recipient, meaning that the speaker intended to influence, to some extent, the
listener, engaging him in a certain way in receiving the message. The most
common grammatical expression of this function is performed by direct forms
of addressing the listener with verbal forms in the imperative. The conative
function often finds its expression through spontaneous interventions of the
receiver at certain times during the message transmission making use of
formulas such as “you know”, “no offense,”etc

F. The Referential function

The referential function: corresponds to the factor of Context and
describes a situation, object or mental state. The descriptive statements of the
referential function can consist of both definite descriptions and deictic words,
e.g. "The autumn leaves have all fallen now." Similarly, the referential function
is associated with an element whose true value is under questioning especially
.when the truth value is identical in both the real and assumptive universe
The referential function of any singular term is to provide a positive
answer to the question: „which individual is being spoken of?‟, that is, to
achieve determinacy of reference. What enables a singular term to carry out this
function is the „determinant‟ of the term. Demonstration is not the determinant
of deictic terms because they can fulfil their referential function by appeal to
utterance-relative uniqueness, or by leading candidacy given the surrounding
.discourse or perceptual environment. ( Jakobson, 1960: 355)

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II. Leech’s Functions of Language
Leech states that there are six functions of language that can be illustration
further before
A. The Informative Function
The informative function of language involves information of giving and
receiving. The general assumption is that the content is believable and valuable.
For example, language is used to offer opinions, give advice, make
announcements, lecture, admonish, or news report, solicit input or ask questions.
Everyday conversations center around information sharing."Informational
function which every one tends to assume is most important" Leech( 1974:53 ).
In fact, this function concentrates on the message. It is used to give new
information. It depends on truth and value. Let us look at this example, the car is
.big, the bus is crowded (Crystal,2005:227)
According to Leech (1966:59 )the informational function can be
considered most important, since it helps us deliver messages, describe things,
and give our listener new information. Actually, message is a word that
describes this function best. The informational function is also related to such
terms as a truth and a value.There are words that are used to express attitudes
and feelings, which don‟t deliver any particular information. Obvious examples
of such words are swear words, as well as various exclamations. This function of
language is used not to deliver a message, but to express feelings and
.impressions
B. The Expressive Function
Language expresses and evokes ideas, thoughts and feelings. Expressive
language may or may not include any real information because the purpose of
expressive use of language is to convey emotion. For example, the expression
“Yuck” connotes disgust, but the word itself isn't necessarily used to inform.

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Expressive language in literature, music and the performing arts has the power
.to inspire and entertain
The speaker or writer tries to express his feelings. He or she reflexes his
or her impression. This function could give a clear image for the personality of
the speaker or writer. The best example of this kind is Poetry and literature . In
fact, this function evoke certain feelings and express feelings. Examples of this
kind are, I am very happy or I spent a wonderful vacation. One can see from the
previous examples that they reflex the feelings of the speaker or the writer
.(Hargie,2011:166)
The power of language to express our identities varies depending on the
origin of the label (self-chosen or other imposed) and the context. People are
usually comfortable with the language they use to describe their own identities
but may have issues with the labels others place on them. In terms of context,
many people express their “Irish” identity on St. Patrick‟s Day, but they may not
think much about it over the rest of the year. There are many examples of people
who have taken a label that was imposed on them, one that usually has negative
connotations, and intentionally used it in ways that counter previous
.meanings(Ibid.)

C. The Aesthetic Function

The use of language for the sake of the linguistic artifact itself, and for no
purpose. This aesthetic function can have at least as much to do with conceptual
as with affective meaning. The function is associated with the message-the
vehicle-as the poetic or aesthetic function: the sign is taken as an end in itself.
All art understood as art is taken to embody this function, and any object valued
for its beauty rather than for its ideological value or usefulness-whether a
gorgeous car, an elegant teapot, or some acreage of untouched real estate-takes
.on this function (Ibid.)

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According to Leech (1974:69) this function doesn‟t have any particular purpose.
Here words and sentences are considered as linguistic artifacts. This function
.serves neither as a request nor as a message
D. Directive Function
language is used a directive whereby we aim to influence the behavior or
attitudes of others. The most straightforward instances of the directive function
are commands and requests. This function of social control places emphasis on
the receiver's end, rather than the originator's end of the message: but it
resembles the expressive function in giving less importance, on the whole, to
conceptual meaning than to other types of meaning, particularly affective and
.connotative meaning" (Leech ,1974:216)
Language is used to establish and maintain social order. Directive use of
language establishes norms of expected behavior in certain situations. Traffic
signs, laws, rules and policies are among the common forms of directive
language that promote health and safety in society. “Eat your vegetables” is an
example of directive use of language used in informal communication (Ibid.).
According to Perrine (2005:70)the directive function of language is used to
induce certain actions or reactions. The example of such a function is a
command. Another example of this function is a request. Here affective and
situational meanings of a phrase are more important than a general meaning,
which makes this function somewhat similar to the expressive function. The
directive function is a function of social control and interpersonal interaction.
Another feature of this function is that the reaction of a listener is even more
important than a thought expressed by a speaker, since this reaction determines
.whether such a phrase achieved the target or not

E. The Phatic Function

Phatic Function is the function of keeping communication lines open, and
keeping social relationship in good repair. This language function correlates with

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the channel of communication. It is used for opening, keeping or stopping
communication line, to examine whether the communication can take place, or
to get the attention of listener and to make sure whether the listener still follows
the line of communication. In fact, the purpose of this poetic function is to keep
social relationship in good repair, or of maintaining cohesion within social
groups, in which the information is only for courteous, not the real one. The
example of this function mostly can be found in greeting (opening the
conversation), introducing, farewell and routine polite questions (Cohen ,
.2005:279)

III. Halliday’s Functions of Language

For Halliday (2002:141) language is always a resource for making
meaning, and even the infant who cannot talk is developing language, and
thereby, learning how to mean. Just as the infant can‟t walk, but is learning how
to use his body, he cannot talk either at least not in the language of his mother
tongue. Nonetheless, the child uses protolanguage (alternately referred to as
proto conversation and protosemiosis) in order to express meaning, even before
he has words in his communicative repertoire. His protolanguage, or child
tongue, is created through interactions with native speakers of the mother tongue
(i.e., caregivers, siblings, etc.). The child is learning through such occasions, and
even though his protolanguage consists of basic content/expression pairs (not yet
words, let alone higher order systems), his language nonetheless expresses
.meaning and performs concrete functions in the world
Halliday (1975:43) identifies seven functions that language has for
children in their early years. Children are motivated to acquire language because
: it serves certain purposes or functions for them. They are
A. Instrumental: This is when the child uses language to express their needs
(e.g.‟Want juice‟)

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B. Regulatory: This is where language is used to tell others what to do (e.g.
„Go away‟)
C. Interactional: Here language is used to make contact with others and form
relationships (e.g. „Love you, mummy‟)
D. Personal: This is the use of language to express feelings, opinions, and
individual identity (e.g. „Me good girl‟)
The next three functions are heuristic, imaginative, and representational, they
.helping the child to come to terms with his or her environment
E. Heuristic: This is when language is used to gain knowledge about the
‟?environment (e.g. „What the tractor doing
F. Imaginative: Here language is used to tell stories and jokes, and to create an
.imaginary environment
.G. Representational: The use of language to convey facts and information
According to Halliday, as the child moves into the mother tongue, these
functions give way to the three metafunctions of a fully tri-stratal language (one
in which there is an additional level of content inserted between the two parts of
. the Saussurean sign

Halliday‟s work represents a competing viewpoint to the formalist

approach of Noam Chomsky. Halliday‟s concern is with what he claims to be
“naturally occurring language in actual contexts of use” in a large typological
range of languages whereas Chomsky is concerned only with the formal
properties of languages such as English, which he thinks as indicative of the
. nature of what he calls Universal Grammar

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 History of Linguistics

Earlier history

Non-Western traditions

Linguistic speculation and investigation, insofar as is known, has gone on

in only a small number of societies. To the extent that Mesopotamian, Chinese,
and Arabic learning dealt with grammar, their treatments were so enmeshed in
the particularities of those languages and so little known to the European world
until recently that they have had virtually no impact on Western linguistic
tradition. Chinese linguistic and philological scholarship stretches back for more
than two millennia, but the interest of those scholars was concentrated largely
on phonetics, writing, and lexicography; their consideration of grammatical
problems was bound up closely with the study of logic.
Certainly the most interesting non-Western grammatical tradition—and the most
original and independent—is that of India, which dates back at least two and
one-half millennia and which culminates with the grammar of Panini, of the 5th
century BCE. There are three major ways in which the Sanskrit tradition has had
an impact on modern linguistic scholarship. As soon as Sanskrit became known
to the Western learned world, the unravelling of comparative Indo-European
grammar ensued, and the foundations were laid for the whole 19th-century
edifice of comparative philology and historical linguistics. But, for this, Sanskrit
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was simply a part of the data; Indian grammatical learning played almost no
direct part. Nineteenth-century workers, however, recognized that the native
tradition of phonetics in ancient India was vastly superior to Western knowledge,
and this had important consequences for the growth of the science of phonetics
in the West. Third, there is in the rules or definitions (sutras) of Panini a
remarkably subtle and penetrating account of Sanskrit grammar. The
construction of sentences, compound nouns, and the like is explained through
ordered rules operating on underlying structures in a manner strikingly similar in
part to modes of modern theory. As might be imagined, this perceptive Indian
grammatical work held great fascination for 20th-century theoretical linguists. A
study of Indian logic in relation to Paninian grammar alongside Aristotelian and
Western logic in relation to Greek grammar and its successors could
bring illuminating insights.
Whereas in ancient Chinese learning a separate field of study that might
be called grammar scarcely took root, in ancient India a sophisticated version of
this discipline developed early alongside the other sciences. Even though the
study of Sanskrit grammar may originally have had the practical aim of keeping
the sacred Vedic texts and their commentaries pure and intact, the study of
grammar in India in the 1st millennium BCE had already become
an intellectual end in itself.

Greek and Roman antiquity

The emergence of grammatical learning in Greece is less clearly known
than is sometimes implied, and the subject is more complex than is often
supposed; here only the main strands can be sampled. The term hē grammatikē
technē (“the art of letters”) had two senses. It meant the study of the values of
the letters and of accentuation and prosody and, in this sense, was an
abstract intellectual discipline; and it also meant the skill of literacy and thus
embraced applied pedagogy. This side of what was to become “grammatical”

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learning was distinctly applied, particular, and less exalted by comparison with
other pursuits. Most of the developments associated with
theoretical grammar grew out of philosophy and criticism; and in these
developments a repeated duality of themes crosses and intertwines.
Much of Greek philosophy was occupied with the distinction between that
which exists “by nature” and that which exists “by convention.” So
in language it was natural to account for words and forms as ordained by nature
(by onomatopoeia—i.e., by imitation of natural sounds) or as arrived at
arbitrarily by a social convention. This dispute regarding the origin of language
and meanings paved the way for the development of divergences between the
views of the “analogists,” who looked on language as possessing an essential
regularity as a result of the symmetries that convention can provide, and the
views of the “anomalists,” who pointed to language’s lack of regularity as one
facet of the inescapable irregularities of nature. The situation was more complex,
however, than this statement would suggest. For example, it seems that the
anomalists among the Stoics credited the irrational quality of language precisely
to the claim that language did not exactly mirror nature. In any event, the
anomalist tradition in the hands of the Stoics brought grammar the benefit of
their work in logic and rhetoric. This led to the distinction that, in modern
theory, is made with the terms signifiant (“what signifies”) and signifié (“what is
signified”) or, somewhat differently and more elaborately, with “expression” and
“content”; and it laid the groundwork of modern theories of inflection, though
by no means with the exhaustiveness and fine-grained analysis reached by the
Sanskrit grammarians.
The Alexandrians, who were analogists working largely on literary
criticism and text philology, completed the development of the classical Greek
grammatical tradition. Dionysius Thrax, in the 2nd century BCE, produced the
first systematic grammar of Western tradition; it dealt only with
word morphology. The study of sentence syntax was to wait for Apollonius

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Dyscolus, of the 2nd century CE. Dionysius called grammar “the acquaintance
with [or observation of] what is uttered by poets and writers,” using a
word meaning a less general form of knowledge than what might be called
“science.” His typically Alexandrian literary goal is suggested by the headings in
his work: pronunciation, poetic figurative language, difficult words, true and
inner meanings of words, exposition of form-classes, literary criticism.
Dionysius defined a sentence as a unit of sense or thought, but it is difficult to be
sure of his precise meaning.
The Romans, who largely took over, with mild adaptations to their highly
similar language, the total work of the Greeks, are important not as originators
but as transmitters. Aelius Donatus, of the 4th century CE, and Priscian, an
African of the 6th century, and their colleagues were slightly more systematic
than their Greek models but were essentially retrospective rather than original.
Up to this point a field that was at times called ars grammatica was a congeries
of investigations, both theoretical and practical, drawn from the work and
interests of literacy, scribeship, logic, epistemology, rhetoric, textual philosophy,
poetics, and literary criticism. Yet modern specialists in the field still share their
concerns and interests. The anomalists, who concentrated on surface irregularity
and who looked then for regularities deeper down (as the Stoics sought them in
logic) bear a resemblance to contemporary scholars of the transformationalist
school. And the philological analogists with their regularizing surface
segmentation show striking kinship of spirit with the modern school of structural
(or taxonomic or glossematic) grammatical theorists.

The European Middle Ages

It is possible that developments in grammar during the Middle
Ages constitute one of the most misunderstood areas of the field of linguistics. It
is difficult to relate this period coherently to other periods and to modern
concerns because surprisingly little is accessible and certain, let alone analyzed

18
with sophistication. By the mid-20th century the majority of the known
grammatical treatiseshad not yet been made available in full to modern
scholarship, so not even their true extent could be classified with confidence.
These works must be analyzed and studied in the light of medievallearning,
especially the learning of the schools of philosophy then current, in order to
understand their true value and place.
The field of linguistics has almost completely neglected the achievements of this
period. Students of grammar have tended to see as high points in their field the
achievements of the Greeks, the Renaissance growth and “rediscovery” of
learning (which led directly to modern school traditions), the contemporary
flowering of theoretical study (people usually find their own age important and
fascinating), and, since the mid-20th century, the astonishing monument of
Panini. Many linguists have found uncongenial the combination of
medieval Latin learning and premodern philosophy. Yet medieval scholars might
reasonably be expected to have bequeathed to modern scholarship the fruits of
more than ordinarily refined perceptions of a certain order. These scholars used,
wrote in, and studied Latin, a language that, though not their native tongue, was
one in which they were very much at home; such scholars in groups must often
have represented a highly varied linguistic background.
Some of the medieval treatises continue the tradition of grammars of late
antiquity; so there are versions based on Donatus and Priscian, often with less
incorporation of the classical poets and writers.
Another genre of writing involves simultaneous consideration of
grammatical distinctions and scholastic logic; modern linguists are probably
inadequately trained to deal with these writings.
Certainly the most obviously interesting theorizing to be found in this period is
contained in the “speculative grammar” of the modistae, who were so called
because the titles of their works were often phrased De modis significandi
tractatus (“Treatise Concerning the Modes of Signifying”). For the development

19
of the Western grammatical tradition, work of this genre was the second great
milestone after the crystallization of Greek thought with the Stoics and
Alexandrians. The scholastic philosophers were occupied with relating words
and things—i.e., the structure of sentences with the nature of the real world—
hence their preoccupation with signification. The aim of the grammarians was to
explore how a word (an element of language) matched things apprehended by
the mind and how it signified reality. Since a word cannot signify the nature of
reality directly, it must stand for the thing signified in one of its modes or
properties; it is this discrimination of modes that the study of categories
and parts of speech is all about. Thus the study of sentences should lead one to
the nature of reality by way of the modes of signifying.
The modistae did not innovate in discriminating categories and parts of
speech; they accepted those that had come down from the Greeks through
Donatus and Priscian. The great contribution of these grammarians, who
flourished between the mid-13th and mid-14th century, was their insistence on a
grammar to explicate the distinctions found by their forerunners in the languages
known to them. Whether they made the best choice in selecting
logic, metaphysics, and epistemology (as they knew them) as the fields to be
included with grammar as a basis for the grand account of universal knowledge
is less important than the breadth of their conception of the place of grammar.
Before the modistae, grammar had not been viewed as a separate discipline but
had been considered in conjunction with other studies or skills (such as
criticism, preservation of valued texts, foreign-language learning). The Greek
view of grammar was rather narrow and fragmented; the Roman view was
largely technical. The speculative medieval grammarians (who dealt with
language as a speculum, “mirror” of reality) inquired into the fundamentals
underlying language and grammar. They wondered whether grammarians or
philosophers discovered grammar, whether grammar was the same for all
languages, what the fundamental topic of grammar was, and what the basic and

20
irreducible grammatical primes are. Signification was reached by imposition of
words on things; i.e., the sign was arbitrary. Those questions sound remarkably
like current issues of linguistics, which serves to illustrate how slow and
repetitious progress in the field is. While the modistae accepted, by modern
standards, a restrictive set of categories, the acumen and sweep they brought to
their task resulted in numerous subtle and fresh syntactic observations. A
thorough study of the medieval period would greatly enrich the discussion of
current questions.

The Renaissance
It is customary to think of the Renaissance as a time of great flowering.
There is no doubt that linguistic and philological developments of this period are
interesting and significant. Two new sets of data that modern linguists tend to
take for granted became available to grammarians during this period: (1) the
newly recognized vernacular languages of Europe, for the protection and
cultivation of which there subsequently arose national academies and learned
institutions that live down to the present day; and (2) the languages of Africa,
East Asia, the New World, and, later, of Siberia, Central Asia, New Guinea,
Oceania, the Arctic, and Australia, which the voyages of discovery opened up.
Earlier, the only non-Indo-European grammar at all widely accessible was that
of the Hebrews (and to some extent Arabic); Semitic in fact shares many
categories with Indo-European in its grammar. Indeed, for many of the exotic
languages, scholarship barely passed beyond the most rudimentary initial
collection of word lists; grammatical analysis was scarcely approached.
In the field of grammar, the Renaissance did not produce notable innovation or
advance. Generally speaking, there was a strong rejection of speculative
grammar and a relatively uncritical resumption of late Roman views (as stated
by Priscian). This was somewhat understandable in the case of Latin or Greek
grammars, since here the task was less evidently that of intellectual inquiry and

21
more that of the schools, with the practical aim of gaining access to the newly
discovered ancients. But, aside from the fact that, beginning in the 15th century,
serious grammars of European vernaculars were actually written, it is only in
particular cases and for specific details (e.g., a mild alteration in the number of
parts of speech or cases of nouns) that real departures from Roman grammar can
be noted. Likewise, until the end of the 19th century, grammars of the exotic
languages, written largely by missionaries and traders, were cast almost entirely
in the Roman model, to which the Renaissance had added a limited medieval
syntactic ingredient.
From time to time a degree of boldness may be seen in France: Petrus
Ramus, a 16th-century logician, worked within a taxonomic framework of the
surface shapes of words and inflections, such work entailing some of the
attendant trivialities that modern linguistics has experienced (e.g., by dividing
up Latin nouns on the basis of equivalence of syllable count among their case
forms). In the 17th century a group of Jansenists (followers of the Flemish
Roman Catholic reformer Cornelius Otto Jansen) associated with the abbey
of Port-Royal in France produced a grammar that has exerted noteworthy
continuing influence, even in contemporary theoretical discussion. Drawing
their basic view from scholastic logic as modified by rationalism, these people
aimed to produce a philosophical grammar that would capture what was
common to the grammars of languages—a general grammar, but not
aprioristically universalist. This grammar attracted attention from the mid-20th
century because it employs certain syntactic formulations that resemble rules of
modern transformational grammar.
Roughly from the 15th century to World War II, however, the version of
grammar available to the Western public (together with its colonial expansion)
remained basically that of Priscian with only occasional and subsidiary
modifications, and the knowledge of new languages brought only minor
adjustments to the serious study of grammar. As education became more

22
broadly disseminated throughout society by the schools, attention shifted from
theoretical or technical grammar as an intellectual preoccupation
to prescriptive grammar suited to pedagogical purposes, which started with
Renaissance vernacular nationalism. Grammar increasingly parted company
with its older fellow disciplines within philosophy as they moved over to the
domain known as natural science, and technical academic grammatical study
increasingly became involved with issues represented by empiricism versus
rationalism and their successor manifestations on the academic scene.

Nearly down to the present day, the grammar of the schools has had only
tangential connections with the studies pursued by professional linguists; for
most people prescriptive grammar has become synonymous with “grammar,”
and the prevailing view held by educated people regards grammar as an item of
folk knowledge open to speculation by all, and in nowise a formal science
requiring adequate preparation such as is assumed for chemistry.

The 19th century

Development of the comparative method

It is generally agreed that the most outstanding achievement of linguistic
scholarship in the 19th century was the development of the comparative method,
which comprised a set of principles whereby languages could be systematically
compared with respect to their sound systems, grammatical structure, and
vocabulary and shown to be “genealogically” related. As French, Italian,
Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, and the other Romance languages had evolved
from Latin, so Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit as well as the Celtic, Germanic,
and Slavic languages and many other languages of Europe and Asia had evolved
from some earlier language, to which the name Indo-European or Proto-Indo-
European is now customarily applied. That all the Romance languages were

23
descended from Latin and thus constituted one “family” had been known for
centuries; but the existence of the Indo-European family of languages and the
nature of their genealogical relationship was first demonstrated by the 19th-
century comparative philologists. (The term philology in this context is not
restricted to the study of literary languages.)
The main impetus for the development of comparative philologycame toward
the end of the 18th century, when it was discovered that Sanskrit bore a number
of striking resemblances to Greek and Latin. An English orientalist, Sir William
Jones, though he was not the first to observe these resemblances, is generally
given the credit for bringing them to the attention of the scholarly world and
putting forward the hypothesis, in 1786, that all three languages must have
“sprung from some common source, which perhaps no longer exists.” By this
time, a number of texts and glossaries of the older Germanic
languages (Gothic, Old High German, and Old Norse) had been published, and
Jones realized that Germanic as well as Old Persian and perhaps Celtic had
evolved from the same “common source.” The next important step came in
1822, when the German scholar Jacob Grimm, following the Danish
linguist Rasmus Rask (whose work, being written in Danish, was less accessible
to most European scholars), pointed out in the second edition of his comparative
grammar of Germanic that there were a number of systematic correspondences
between the sounds of Germanic and the sounds of Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit in
related words. Grimm noted, for example, that where Gothic (the oldest
surviving Germanic language) had an f, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit frequently
had a p (e.g., Gothic fotus, Latin pedis, Greek podós, Sanskrit padás,
all meaning “foot”); when Gothic had a p, the non-Germanic languages had a b;
when Gothic had a b, the non-Germanic languages had what Grimm called an
“aspirate” (Latin f, Greek ph, Sanskrit bh). In order to account for these
correspondences he postulated a cyclical “soundshift” (Lautverschiebung) in the
prehistory of Germanic, in which the original “aspirates” became voiced

24
unaspirated stops (bh became b, etc.), the original voiced unaspirated stops
became voiceless (b became p, etc.), and the original voiceless (unaspirated)
stops became “aspirates” (p became f). Grimm’s term, “aspirate,” it will be
noted, covered such phonetically distinct categories as aspirated stops (bh, ph),
produced with an accompanying audible puff of breath, and fricatives (f ),
produced with audible friction as a result of incomplete closure in the vocal
tract.
In the work of the next 50 years the idea of sound change was made more
precise, and, in the 1870s, a group of scholars known collectively as
the Junggrammatiker (“young grammarians,” or Neogrammarians) put forward
the thesis that all changes in the sound system of a language as it developed
through time were subject to the operation of regular sound laws. Though the
thesis that sound laws were absolutely regular in their operation (unless they
were inhibited in particular instances by the influence of analogy) was at first
regarded as most controversial, by the end of the 19th century it was quite
generally accepted and had become the cornerstone of the comparative method.
Using the principle of regular sound change, scholars were able to reconstruct
“ancestral” common forms from which the later forms found in particular
languages could be derived. By convention, such reconstructed forms are
marked in the literature with an asterisk. Thus, from the reconstructed Proto-
Indo-European word for “ten,” *dekm, it was possible to derive Sanskrit daśa,
Greek déka, Latin decem, and Gothic taihun by postulating a number of
different sound laws that operated independently in the different branches of the
Indo-European family. The question of sound change is dealt with in greater
detail in the section entitled Historical (diachronic) linguistics.

The role of analogy

Analogy has been mentioned in connection with its inhibition of the
regular operation of sound laws in particular word forms. This was how the

25
Neogrammarians thought of it. In the course of the 20th century, however, it
came to be recognized that analogy, taken in its most general sense, plays a far
more important role in the development of languages than simply that of
sporadically preventing what would otherwise be a completely regular
transformation of the sound system of a language. When a child learns to speak
he tends to regularize the anomalous, or irregular, forms by analogy with the
more regular and productive patterns of formation in the language; e.g., he will
tend to say “comed” rather than “came,” “dived” rather than “dove,” and so on,
just as he will say “talked,” “loved,” and so forth. The fact that the child does
this is evidence that he has learned or is learning the regularities or rules of his
language. He will go on to “unlearn” some of the analogical forms and substitute
for them the anomalous forms current in the speech of the previous generation.
But in some cases, he will keep a “new” analogical form (e.g., “dived” rather
than “dove”), and this may then become the recognized and accepted form.

Other 19th-century theories and development

Inner and outer form

One of the most original, if not one of the most immediately influential,
linguists of the 19th century was the learned Prussian statesman Wilhelm von
Humboldt (died 1835). His interests, unlike those of most of his contemporaries,
were not exclusively historical. Following the German philosopher Johann
Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), he stressed the connection between national
languages and national character: this was but a commonplace of romanticism.
More original was Humboldt’s theory of “inner” and “outer” form in language.
The outer form of language was the raw material (the sounds) from which
different languages were fashioned; the inner form was the pattern, or structure,

26
of grammar and meaning that was imposed upon this raw material
and differentiated one language from another. This “structural” conception of
language was to become dominant, for a time at least, in many of the major
centres of linguistics by the middle of the 20th century. Another of Humboldt’s
ideas was that language was something dynamic, rather than static, and was an
activity itself rather than the product of activity. A language was not a set of
actual utterances produced by speakers but the underlying principles or rules
that made it possible for speakers to produce such utterances and, moreover, an
unlimited number of them. This idea was taken up by a German
philologist, Heymann Steinthal, and, what is more important, by the physiologist
and psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, and thus influenced late 19th- and early 20th-
century theories of the psychology of language. Its influence, like that of the
distinction of inner and outer form, can also be seen in the thought of Ferdinand
de Saussure, a Swiss linguist. But its full implications were probably not
perceived and made precise until the middle of the 20th century, when the U.S.
linguist Noam Chomsky re-emphasized it and made it one of the basic notions
of generative grammar

Phonetics and dialectology

Many other interesting and important developments occurred in 19th-
century linguistic research, among them work in the areas of phonetics
and dialectology. Research in both these fields was promoted by the
Neogrammarians’ concern with sound change and by their insistence that
prehistoric developments in languages were of the same kind as developments
taking place in the languages and dialects currently spoken. The development of
phonetics in the West was also strongly influenced at this period, as were many
of the details of the more philological analysis of the Indo-European languages,
by the discovery of the works of the Indian grammarians who, from the time of
the Sanskrit grammarian Panini, if not before, had arrived at a much

27
more comprehensiveand scientific theory of phonetics, phonology,
and morphology than anything achieved in the West until the modern period.

The 20th century

Structuralism
The term structuralism was used as a slogan and rallying cry by a number
of different schools of linguistics, and it is necessary to realize that it has
somewhat different implications according to the context in which it is
employed. It is convenient first to draw a broad distinction between European
and American structuralism and then to treat them separately.

Structural linguistics in Europe

Structural linguistics in Europe is generally said to have begun in 1916

with the posthumous publication of the Cours de Linguistique Générale (Course
in General Linguistics) of Ferdinand de Saussure. Much of what is now
considered as Saussurean can be seen, though less clearly, in the earlier work of
Humboldt, and the general structural principles that Saussure was to develop
with respect to synchronic linguistics in the Cours had been applied almost 40
years before (1879) by Saussure himself in a reconstruction of the Indo-
European vowel system. The full significance of the work was not appreciated at
the time. Saussure’s structuralism can be summed up in two dichotomies (which
jointly cover what Humboldt referred to in terms of his own distinction of inner
and outer form): (1) langue versus parole and (2) form versus substance.
By langue, best translated in its technical Saussurean sense as language system,

28
is meant the totality of regularities and patterns of formation that underlie the
utterances of a language; by parole, which can be translated as language
behaviour, is meant the actual utterances themselves. Just as two performances
of a piece of music given by different orchestras on different occasions will
differ in a variety of details and yet be identifiable as performances of the same
piece, so two utterances may differ in various ways and yet be recognized as
instances, in some sense, of the same utterance. What the two musical
performances and the two utterances have in common is an identity of form, and
this form, or structure, or pattern, is in principle independent of the substance, or
“raw material,” upon which it is imposed. “Structuralism,” in the European
sense then, refers to the view that there is an abstract relational structure that
underlies and is to be distinguished from actual utterances—a system underlying
actual behaviour—and that this is the primary object of study for the linguist.

Ferdinand de Saussure, c. 1900.

Two important points arise here: first, that the structural approach is not in
principle restricted to synchronic linguistics; second, that the study of meaning,
as well as the study of phonology and grammar, can be structural in orientation.
In both cases “structuralism” is opposed to “atomism” in the European literature.
It was Saussure who drew the terminological distinction between synchronic
and diachronic linguistics in the Cours; despite the undoubtedly structural
orientation of his own early work in the historical and comparative field, he
maintained that, whereas synchronic linguistics should deal with the structure of
a language system at a given point in time, diachronic linguistics should be
concerned with the historical development of isolated elements—it should be
atomistic. Whatever the reasons that led Saussure to take this rather paradoxical
view, his teaching on this point was not generally accepted, and scholars soon
began to apply structural concepts to the diachronic study of languages. The
most important of the various schools of structural linguistics to be found in
29
Europe in the first half of the 20th century included the Prague school, most
notably represented by Nikolay Sergeyevich Trubetskoy (died 1938) and Roman
Jakobson (died 1982), both Russian émigrés, and the Copenhagen (or
glossematic) school, centred around Louis Hjelmslev (died 1965). John Rupert
Firth (died 1960) and his followers, sometimes referred to as the London school,
were less Saussurean in their approach, but, in a general sense of the term, their
approach may also be described appropriately as structural linguistics.

Structural linguistics in America

American and European structuralism shared a number of features. In

insisting upon the necessity of treating each language as a more or
less coherent and integrated system, both European and American linguists of
this period tended to emphasize, if not to exaggerate, the structural uniqueness
of individual languages. There was especially good reason to take this point of
view given the conditions in which American linguistics developed from the end
of the 19th century. There were hundreds of indigenous American Indian
languages that had never been previously described. Many of these were spoken
by only a handful of speakers and, if they were not recorded before they became
extinct, would be permanently inaccessible. Under these circumstances, such
linguists as Franz Boas (died 1942) were less concerned with the construction of
a general theory of the structure of human language than they were with
prescribing sound methodological principles for the analysis of unfamiliar
languages. They were also fearful that the description of these languages would
be distorted by analyzing them in terms of categories derived from the analysis
of the more familiar Indo-European languages.

Franz Boas, 1941.AP

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 After Boas, the two most influential American linguists were Edward
Sapir (died 1939) and Leonard Bloomfield (died 1949). Like his teacher Boas,
Sapir was equally at home in anthropology and linguistics, the alliance of
which disciplines has endured to the present day in many American universities.
Boas and Sapir were both attracted by the Humboldtian view of the relationship
between language and thought, but it was left to one of Sapir’s pupils, Benjamin
Lee Whorf, to present it in a sufficiently challenging form to attract widespread
scholarly attention. Since the republication of Whorf’s more important papers in
1956, the thesis that language determines perception and thought has come to be
known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or the theory of linguistic relativity.
Sapir’s work has always held an attraction for the more anthropologically
inclined American linguists. But it was Bloomfieldwho prepared the way for the
later phase of what is now thought of as the most distinctive manifestation of
American “structuralism.” When he published his first book in 1914, Bloomfield
was strongly influenced by Wundt’s psychology of language. In 1933, however,
he published a drastically revised and expanded version with the new
title Language; this book dominated the field for the next 30 years. In it
Bloomfield explicitly adopted a behaviouristic approach to the study of
language, eschewing in the name of scientific objectivity all reference to mental
or conceptual categories. Of particular consequence was his adoption of the
behaviouristic theory of semantics according to which meaning is simply the
relationship between a stimulus and a verbal response. Because science was still
a long way from being able to give a comprehensive account of most stimuli, no
significant or interesting results could be expected from the study of meaning for
some considerable time, and it was preferable, as far as possible, to avoid basing
the grammatical analysis of a language on semantic considerations. Bloomfield’s
followers pushed even further the attempt to develop methods of linguistic
analysis that were not based on meaning. One of the most characteristic features

31
of “post-Bloomfieldian” American structuralism, then, was its almost complete
neglect of semantics.
Another characteristic feature, one that was to be much criticized by
Chomsky, was its attempt to formulate a set of “discovery procedures”—
procedures that could be applied more or less mechanically to texts and could be
guaranteed to yield an appropriate phonological and grammatical description of
the language of the texts. Structuralism, in this narrower sense of the term, is
represented, with differences of emphasis or detail, in the major American
textbooks published during the 1950s.

Transformational-generative grammar
The most significant development in linguistic theory and research in the
20th century was the rise of generative grammar, and, more especially, of
transformational-generative grammar, or transformational grammar, as it came
to be known. Two versions of transformational grammar were put forward in the
mid-1950s, the first by Zellig S. Harris and the second by Noam Chomsky, his
pupil. It was Chomsky’s system that attracted the most attention. As first
presented by Chomsky in Syntactic Structures (1957), transformational grammar
can be seen partly as a reaction against post-Bloomfieldian structuralism and
partly as a continuation of it. What Chomsky reacted against most strongly was
the post-Bloomfieldian concern with discovery procedures. In his opinion,
linguistics should set itself the more modest and more realistic goal of
formulating criteria for evaluating alternative descriptions of a language without
regard to the question of how these descriptions had been arrived at. The
statements made by linguists in describing a language should, however, be cast
within the framework of a far more precise theory of grammar than had hitherto
been the case, and this theory should be formalized in terms of modern
mathematical notions. Within a few years, Chomsky had broken with the post-
Bloomfieldians on a number of other points also. He had adopted what he called

32
a “mentalistic” theory of language, by which term he implied that the linguist
should be concerned with the speaker’s creative linguistic competence and not
his performance, the actual utterances produced. He had challenged the post-
Bloomfieldian concept of the phoneme (see below), which many scholars
regarded as the most solid and enduring result of the previous generation’s work.
And he had challenged the structuralists’ insistence upon the uniqueness of
every language, claiming instead that all languages were, to a considerable
degree, cut to the same pattern—they shared a certain number of formal
and substantive universals.

Structural linguistics

This section is concerned mainly with a version of structuralism(which

may also be called descriptive linguistics) developed by scholars working in a
post-Bloomfieldian tradition.
Phonology
With the great progress made in phonetics in the late 19th century, it had
become clear that the question whether two speech sounds were the same or not
was more complex than might appear at first sight. Two utterances of what was
taken to be the same word might differ quite perceptibly from one occasion of
utterance to the next. Some of this variation could be attributed to a difference
of dialector accent and is of no concern here. But even two utterances of the
same word by the same speaker might vary from one occasion to the next.
Variation of this kind, though it is generally less obvious and would normally
pass unnoticed, is often clear enough to the trained phonetician and is
measurable instrumentally. It is known that the “same” word is being uttered,
even if the physical signal produced is variable, in part, because the different
pronunciations of the same word will cluster around some acoustically

33
identifiable norm. But this is not the whole answer, because it is actually
impossible to determine norms of pronunciation in purely acoustic terms. Once
it has been decided what counts as “sameness” of sound from the linguistic point
of view, the permissible range of variation for particular sounds in
particular contexts can be measured, and, within certain limits, the acoustic cues
for the identification of utterances as “the same” can be determined.
What is at issue is the difference between phonetic and phonological (or
phonemic) identity, and for these purposes it will be sufficient to define phonetic
identity in terms solely of acoustic “sameness.” Absolute phonetic identity is a
theoretical ideal never fully realized. From a purely phonetic point of view,
sounds are more or less similar, rather than absolutely the same or absolutely
different. Speech sounds considered as units of phonetic analysis in this article
are called phones, and, following the normal convention, are represented by
enclosing the appropriate alphabetic symbol in square brackets. Thus, [p] will
refer to a p sound (i.e., what is described more technically as a voiceless, bilabial
stop); and [pit] will refer to a complex of three phones—a p sound, followed by
an isound, followed by a t sound. A phonetic transcription may be relatively
broad (omitting much of the acoustic detail) or relatively narrow (putting in
rather more of the detail), according to the purpose for which it is intended. A
very broad transcription will be used in this article except when finer phonetic
differences must be shown.
Phonological, or phonemic, identity was referred to above as “sameness
of sound from the linguistic point of view.” Considered as phonological units—
i.e., from the point of view of their function in the language—sounds are
described as phonemes and are distinguished from phones by enclosing their
appropriate symbol (normally, but not necessarily, an alphabetic one) between
two slash marks. Thus, /p/ refers to a phoneme that may be realized on different
occasions of utterance or in different contexts by a variety of more or less
different phones. Phonological identity, unlike phonetic similarity, is absolute:

34
two phonemes are either the same or different, they cannot be more or less
similar. For example, the English words “bit” and “pit” differ phonemically in
that the first has the phoneme /b/ and the second has the phoneme /p/ in initial
position. As the words are normally pronounced, the phonetic realization of /b/
will differ from the phonetic realization of /p/ in a number of different ways: it
will be at least partially voiced (i.e., there will be some vibration of the vocal
cords), it will be without aspiration (i.e., there will be no accompanying slight
puff of air, as there will be in the case of the phone realizing /p/), and it will be
pronounced with less muscular tension. It is possible to vary any one or all of
these contributory differences, making the phones in question more or less
similar, and it is possible to reduce the phonetic differences to the point that the
hearer cannot be certain which word, “bit” or “pit,” has been uttered. But it must
be either one or the other; there is no word with an initial sound formed in the
same manner as /p/ or /b/ that is halfway between the two. This is what is meant
by saying that phonemes are absolutely distinct from one another—they are
discrete rather than continuously variable.
How it is known whether two phones realize the same phoneme or not is
dealt with differently by different schools of linguists. The “orthodox” post-
Bloomfieldian school regards the first criterion to be phonetic similarity. Two
phones are not said to realize the same phoneme unless they are sufficiently
similar. What is meant by “sufficiently similar” is rather vague, but it must be
granted that for every phoneme there is a permissible range of variation in the
phones that realize it. As far as occurrence in the same context goes, there are no
serious problems. More critical is the question of whether two phones occurring
in different contexts can be said to realize the same phoneme or not. To take a
standard example from English: the phone that occurs at the beginning of the
word “pit” differs from the phone that occurs after the initial /s/ of “spit.” The
“psound” occurring after the /s/ is unaspirated (i.e., it is pronounced without any
accompanying slight puff of air). The aspirated and unaspirated “p sounds” may

35
be symbolized rather more narrowly as [ph] and [p] respectively. The question
then is whether [ph] and [p] realize the same phoneme /p/ or whether each
realizes a different phoneme. They satisfy the criterion of phonetic similarity,
but this, though a necessary condition of phonemic identity, is not a sufficient
one.
The next question is whether there is any pair of words in which the two
phones are in minimal contrast (or opposition); that is, whether there is any
context in English in which the occurrence of the one rather than the other has
the effect of distinguishing two or more words (in the way that [p h] versus [b]
distinguishes the so-called minimal pairs “pit” and “bit,” “pan” and “ban,” and
so on). If there is, it can be said that, despite their phonetic similarity, the two
phones realize (or “belong to”) different phonemes—that the difference between
them is phonemic. If there is no context in which the two phones are in contrast
(or opposition) in this sense, it can be said that they are variants of the same
phoneme—that the difference between them is nonphonemic. Thus, the
difference between [ph] and [p] in English is nonphonemic; the two sounds
realize, or belong to, the same phoneme, namely /p/. In several other languages
—e.g., Hindi—the contrast between such sounds as [p h] and [p] is phonemic,
however. The question is rather more complicated than it has been represented
here. In particular, it should be noted that [p] is phonetically similar to [b] as
well as to [ph] and that, although [ph] and [b] are in contrast, [p] and [b] are not.
It would thus be possible to regard [p] and [b] as variants of the same phoneme.
Most linguists, however, have taken the alternative view, assigning [p] to the
same phoneme as [ph]. Here it will suffice to note that the criteria of phonetic
similarity and lack of contrast do not always uniquely determine the assignment
of phones to phonemes. Various supplementary criteria may then be invoked.
Phones that can occur and do not contrast in the same context are said to
be in free variation in that context, and, as has been shown, there is a permissible
range of variation for the phonetic realization of all phonemes. More important

36
than free variation in the same context, however, is systematically determined
variation according to the context in which a given phoneme occurs. To return to
the example used above: [p] and [ph], though they do not contrast, are not in free
variation either. Each of them has its own characteristic positions of occurrence,
and neither occurs, in normal English pronunciation, in any context
characteristic for the other (e.g., only [p h] occurs at the beginning of a word, and
only [p] occurs after s). This is expressed by saying that they are in
complementary distribution. (The distribution of an element is the whole range
of contexts in which it can occur.) Granted that [p] and [ph] are variants of the
same phoneme /p/, it can be said that they are contextually, or positionally,
determined variants of it. To use the technical term, they are allophones of /p/.
The allophones of a phoneme, then, are its contextually determined variants and
they are in complementary distribution.
The post-Bloomfieldians made the assignment of phones to phonemes
subject to what is now generally referred to as the principle of bi-uniqueness.
The phonemic specification of a word or utterance was held to determine
uniquely its phonetic realization (except for free variation), and, conversely, the
phonetic description of a word or utterance was held to determine uniquely its
phonemic analysis. Thus, if two words or utterances are pronounced alike, then
they must receive the same phonemic description; conversely, two words or
utterances that have been given the same phonemic analysis must be pronounced
alike. The principle of bi-uniqueness was also held to imply that, if a given
phone was assigned to a particular phoneme in one position of occurrence, then
it must be assigned to the same phoneme in all its other positions of occurrence;
it could not be the allophone of one phoneme in one context and of another
phoneme in other contexts.
A second important principle of the post-Bloomfieldian approach was its
insistence that phonemic analysis should be carried out prior to and
independently of grammatical analysis. Neither this principle nor that of bi-

37
uniqueness was at all widely accepted outside the post-Bloomfieldian school,
and they have been abandoned by the generative phonologists (see below).
Phonemes of the kind referred to so far are segmental; they are realized by
consonantal or vocalic (vowel) segments of words, and they can be said to occur
in a certain order relative to one another. For example, in the phonemic
representation of the word “bit,” the phoneme /b/ precedes /i/, which precedes
/t/. But nonsegmental, or suprasegmental, aspects of the phonemic realization of
words and utterances may also be functional in a language. In English, for
example, the noun “import” differs from the verb “import” in that the former is
accented on the first and the latter on the second syllable. This is called
a stress accent: the accented syllable is pronounced with greater force or
intensity. Many other languages distinguish words suprasegmentally by tone.
For example, in Mandarin Chinese the words haò “day” and haǒ “good” are
distinguished from one another in that the first has a falling toneand the second a
falling-rising tone; these are realized, respectively, as (1) a fall in the pitch of the
syllable from high to low and (2) a change in the pitch of the syllable from
medium to low and back to medium. Stress and tone are suprasegmental in the
sense that they are “superimposed” upon the sequence of segmental phonemes.
The term tone is conventionally restricted by linguists to phonologically relevant
variations of pitch at the level of words. Intonation, which is found in all
languages, is the variation in the pitch contour or pitch pattern of whole
utterances, of the kind that distinguishes (either of itself or in combination with
some other difference) statements from questions or indicates the mood or
attitude of the speaker (as hesitant, surprised, angry, and so forth). Stress, tone,
and intonation do not exhaust the phonologically relevant suprasegmental
features found in various languages, but they are among the most important.
A complete phonological description of a language includes all the segmental
phonemes and specifies which allophones occur in which contexts. It also
indicates which sequences of phonemes are possible in the language and which

38
are not: it will indicate, for example, that the sequences /bl/ and /br/ are possible
at the beginning of English words but not /bn/ or /bm/. A phonological
description also identifies and states the distribution of the suprasegmental
features. Just how this is to be done, however, has been rather more
controversial in the post-Bloomfieldian tradition. Differences between the post-
Bloomfieldian approach to phonologyand approaches characteristic of other
schools of structural linguistics will be treated below.

Morphology
The grammatical description of many, if not all, languages is conveniently
divided into two complementary sections: morphologyand syntax. The
relationship between them, as generally stated, is as follows: morphology
accounts for the internal structure of words, and syntax describes how words are
combined to form phrases, clauses, and sentences.
There are many words in English that are fairly obviously analyzable into
smaller grammatical units. For example, the word “unacceptability” can be
divided into un-, accept, abil-, and -ity (abil-being a variant of -able). Of these,
at least three are minimal grammatical units, in the sense that they cannot be
analyzed into yet smaller grammatical units—un-, abil-, and ity. The status
of accept, from this point of view, is somewhat uncertain. Given the existence of
such forms as accede and accuse, on the one hand, and of except, exceed,
and excuse, on the other, one might be inclined to analyze accept into ac- (which
might subsequently be recognized as a variant of ad-) and -cept. The question is
left open. Minimal grammatical units like un-, abil-, and -ity are what
Bloomfield called morphemes; he defined them in terms of the “partial
phonetic-semantic resemblance” holding within sets of words. For example,
“unacceptable,” “untrue,” and “ungracious” are phonetically (or, phonologically)

39
similar as far as the first syllable is concerned and are similar in meaning in that
each of them is negative by contrast with a corresponding positive adjective
(“acceptable,” “true,” “gracious”). This “partial phonetic-semantic resemblance”
is accounted for by noting that the words in question contain the
same morpheme (namely, un-) and that this morpheme has a certain
phonological form and a certain meaning.
Bloomfield’s definition of the morpheme in terms of “partial phonetic-
semantic resemblance” was considerably modified and, eventually, abandoned
entirely by some of his followers. Whereas Bloomfield took the morpheme to be
an actual segment of a word, others defined it as being a purely abstract unit,
and the term morph was introduced to refer to the actual word segments. The
distinction between morpheme and morph (which is, in certain respects, parallel
to the distinction between phoneme and phone) may be explained by means of
an example. If a morpheme in English is posited with the function of accounting
for the grammatical difference between singular and plural nouns, it may be
symbolized by enclosing the term plural within brace brackets. Now the
morpheme [plural] is represented in a number of different ways. Most plural
nouns in English differ from the corresponding singular forms in that they have
an additional final segment. In the written forms of these words, it is either -
s or -es (e.g., “cat” : “cats”; “dog” : “dogs”; “fish” : “fishes”). The word
segments written -s or -esare morphs. So also is the word segment written -en in
“oxen.” All these morphs represent the same morpheme. But there are other
plural nouns in English that differ from the corresponding singular forms in
other ways (e.g., “mouse” : “mice”; “criterion” : “criteria”; and so on) or not at
all (e.g., “this sheep” : “these sheep”). Within the post-Bloomfieldian framework
no very satisfactory account of the formation of these nouns could be given. But
it was clear that they contained (in some sense) the same morpheme as the more
regular plurals.

40
 Morphs that are in complementary distribution and represent the same
morpheme are said to be allomorphs of that morpheme. For example, the regular
plurals of English nouns are formed by adding one of three morphs on to the
form of the singular: /s/, /z/, or /iz/ (in the corresponding written forms both /s/
and /z/ are written -s and /iz/ is written -es). Their distribution is determined by
the following principle: if the morph to which they are to be added ends in a
“sibilant” sound (e.g., s, z, sh, ch), then the syllabic allomorph /iz/ is selected
(e.g., fish-es /fiš-iz/, match-es /mač-iz/); otherwise the nonsyllabic allomorphs
are selected, the voiceless allomorph /s/ with morphs ending in a
voiceless consonant (e.g., cat-s /kat-s/) and the voiced allomorph /z/ with
morphs ending in a vowel or voiced consonant (e.g., flea-s /fli-z/, dog-s /dog-z/).
These three allomorphs, it will be evident, are in complementary distribution,
and the alternation between them is determined by the phonological structure of
the preceding morph. Thus the choice is phonologically conditioned.
Very similar is the alternation between the three principal allomorphs of the past
participle ending, /id/, /t/, and /d/, all of which correspond to the -ed of the
written forms. If the preceding morph ends with /t/ or /d/, then the syllabic
allomorph /id/ is selected (e.g., wait-ed /weit-id/). Otherwise, if the preceding
morph ends with a voiceless consonant, one of the nonsyllabic allomorphs is
selected—the voiceless allomorph /t/ when the preceding morph ends with a
voiceless consonant (e.g., pack-ed /pak-t/) and the voiced allomorph /d/ when
the preceding morph ends with a vowel or voiced consonant (e.g., row-ed /rou-
d/; tame-d /teim-d/). This is another instance of phonological conditioning.
Phonological conditioning may be contrasted with the principle that determines
the selection of yet another allomorph of the past participle morpheme. The final
/n/ of show-n or see-n (which marks them as past participles) is not determined
by the phonological structure of the morphs show and see. For each English
word that is similar to “show” and “see” in this respect, it must be stated as a
synchronically inexplicable fact that it selects the /n/ allomorph. This is

41
called grammatical conditioning. There are various kinds of grammatical
conditioning.

Alternation of the kind illustrated above for the allomorphs of the plural
morpheme and the /id/, /d/, and /t/ allomorphs of the past participle is frequently
referred to as morphophonemic. Some linguists have suggested that it should be
accounted for not by setting up three allomorphs each with a distinct phonemic
form but by setting up a single morph in an intermediate morphophonemic
representation. Thus, the regular plural morph might be said to be composed of
the morphophoneme /Z/ and the most common past-participle morph of the
morphophoneme /D/. General rules of morphophonemic interpretation would
then convert /Z/ and /D/ to their appropriate phonetic form according to context.
This treatment of the question foreshadows, on the one hand, the stratificational
treatment and, on the other, the generative approach, though they differ
considerably in other respects.

An important concept in grammar and, more particularly, in morphology

is that of free and bound forms. A bound form is one that cannot occur alone as a
complete utterance (in some normal context of use). For example, -ing is bound
in this sense, whereas wait is not, nor is waiting. Any form that is not bound is
free. Bloomfield based his definition of the word on this distinction between
bound and free forms. Any free form consisting entirely of two or more smaller
free forms was said to be a phrase (e.g., “poor John” or “ran away”), and phrases
were to be handled within syntax. Any free form that was not a phrase was
defined to be a word and to fall within the scope of morphology. One of the
consequences of Bloomfield’s definition of the word was that morphology
became the study of constructions involving bound forms. The so-called
isolating languages, which make no use of bound forms (e.g., Vietnamese),
would have no morphology.

42
The principal division within morphology is
between inflection and derivation (or word formation). Roughly speaking,
inflectional constructions can be defined as yielding sets of forms that are all
grammatically distinct forms of single vocabulary items, whereas derivational
constructions yield distinct vocabulary items. For example, “sings,” “singing,”
“sang,” and “sung” are all inflectional forms of the vocabulary item traditionally
referred to as “the verb to sing”; but “singer,” which is formed from “sing” by
the addition of the morph -er (just as “singing” is formed by the addition of -
ing), is one of the forms of a different vocabulary item. When this rough
distinction between derivation and inflection is made more precise, problems
occur. The principal consideration, undoubtedly, is that inflection is more
closely integrated with and determined by syntax. But the various formal criteria
that have been proposed to give effect to this general principle are not
uncommonly in conflict in particular instances, and it probably must be admitted
that the distinction between derivation and inflection, though clear enough in
most cases, is in the last resort somewhat arbitrary.
Bloomfield and most other linguists have discussed morphological
constructions in terms of processes. Of these, the most widespread throughout
the languages of the world is affixation; i.e., the attachment of an affix to a base.
For example, the word “singing” can be described as resulting from the
affixation of -ing to the base sing. (If the affix is put in front of the base, it is a
prefix; if it is put after the base, it is a suffix; and if it is inserted within the base,
splitting it into two discontinuous parts, it is an infix.) Other morphological
processes recognized by linguists need not be mentioned here, but reference may
be made to the fact that many of Bloomfield’s followers from the mid-1940s
were dissatisfied with the whole notion of morphological processes. Instead of
saying that -ing was affixed to sing they preferred to say that sing and -ing co-
occurred in a particular pattern or arrangement, thereby avoiding

43
the implication that sing is in some sense prior to or more basic than -ing. The
distinction of morpheme and morph (and the notion of allomorphs) was
developed in order to make possible the description of the morphology and
syntax of a language in terms of “arrangements” of items rather than in terms of
“processes” operating upon more basic items. Nowadays, the opposition to
“processes” is, except among the stratificationalists, almost extinct. It has
proved to be cumbersome, if not impossible, to describe the relationship
between certain linguistic forms without deriving one from the other or both
from some common underlying form, and most linguists no longer feel that this
is in any way reprehensible.

Syntax
Syntax, for Bloomfield, was the study of free forms that were composed
entirely of free forms. Central to his theory of syntax were the notions of form
classes and constituent structure. (These notions were also relevant, though less
central, in the theory of morphology.) Bloomfield defined form classes, rather
imprecisely, in terms of some common “recognizable phonetic or grammatical
feature” shared by all the members. He gave as examples the form class
consisting of “personal substantive expressions” in English (defined as “the
forms that, when spoken with exclamatory final pitch, are calls for a person’s
presence or attention”—e.g., “John,” “Boy,” “Mr. Smith”); the form class
consisting of “infinitive expressions” (defined as “forms which, when spoken
with exclamatory final pitch, have the meaning of a command”—e.g., “run,”
“jump,” “come here”); the form class of “nominative substantive expressions”
(e.g., “John,” “the boys”); and so on. It should be clear from these examples that
form classes are similar to, though not identical with, the traditional parts of
speech and that one and the same form can belong to more than one form class.

44
What Bloomfield had in mind as the criterion for form class membership (and
therefore of syntactic equivalence) may best be expressed in terms of
substitutability. Form classes are sets of forms (whether simple or complex, free
or bound), any one of which may be substituted for any other in a given
construction or set of constructions throughout the sentences of the language.
The smaller forms into which a larger form may be analyzed are its constituents,
and the larger form is a construction. For example, the phrase “poor John” is a
construction analyzable into, or composed of, the constituents “poor” and
“John.” Because there is no intermediate unit of which “poor” and “John” are
constituents that is itself a constituent of the construction “poor John,” the forms
“poor” and “John” may be described not only as constituents but also
as immediate constituents of “poor John.” Similarly, the phrase “lost his watch”
is composed of three word forms—“lost,” “his,” and “watch”—all of which may
be described as constituents of the construction. Not all of them, however, are its
immediate constituents. The forms “his” and “watch” combine to make the
intermediate construction “his watch”; it is this intermediate unit that combines
with “lost” to form the larger phrase “lost his watch.” The immediate
constituents of “lost his watch” are “lost” and “his watch”; the immediate
constituents of “his watch” are the forms “his” and “watch.” By the constituent
structure of a phrase or sentence is meant the hierarchical organization of the
smallest forms of which it is composed (its ultimate constituents) into layers of
successively more inclusive units. Viewed in this way, the sentence “Poor John
lost his watch” is more than simply a sequence of five word forms associated
with a particular intonation pattern. It is analyzable into the immediate
constituents “poor John” and “lost his watch,” and each of these phrases is
analyzable into its own immediate constituents and so on, until, at the last stage
of the analysis, the ultimate constituents of the sentence are reached. The
constituent structure of the whole sentence is represented by means of a tree
diagram in Figure 1.

45
Figure 1: The constituent structure of a simple sentence (see text).Encyclopædia
Britannica, Inc.

Each form, whether it is simple or composite, belongs to a certain form class.

Using arbitrarily selected letters to denote the form classes of English, “poor”
may be a member of the form class A, “John” of the class B, “lost” of the
class C, “his” of the class D, and “watch” of the class E. Because “poor John” is
syntactically equivalent to (i.e., substitutable for) “John,” it is to be classified as
a member of A. So too, it can be assumed, is “his watch.” In the case of “lost his
watch” there is a problem. There are very many forms—including “lost,” “ate,”
and “stole”—that can occur, as here, in constructions with a member of B and
can also occur alone; for example, “lost” is substitutable for “stole the money,”
as “stole” is substitutable for either or for “lost his watch.” This being so, one
might decide to classify constructions like “lost his watch” as members of C. On
the other hand, there are forms that—though they are substitutable for “lost,”
“ate,” “stole,” and so on when these forms occur alone—cannot be used in
combination with a following member of B (compare “died,” “existed”); and
there are forms that, though they may be used in combination with a following
member of B, cannot occur alone (compare “enjoyed”). The question is whether
one respects the traditional distinction between transitiveand intransitive
verb forms. It may be decided, then, that “lost,” “stole,” “ate” and so forth
belong to one class, C (the class to which “enjoyed” belongs), when they occur
“transitively” (i.e., with a following member of B as their object) but to a
different class, F (the class to which “died” belongs), when they occur

46
“intransitively.” Finally, it can be said that the whole sentence “Poor John lost
his watch” is a member of the form class G. Thus, the constituent structure not
only of “Poor John lost his watch” but of a whole set of English sentences can
be represented by means of the tree diagram given in Figure 2. New sentences of
the same type can be constructed by substituting actual forms for the class
labels.

Figure 2: The constituent structure of a class of simple sentences with arbitrary

letters used to represent the form class of each constituent (see
text).Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Any construction that belongs to the same form class as at least one of its
immediate constituents is described as endocentric; the only endocentric
construction in the model sentence above is “poor John.” All the other
constructions, according to the analysis, are exocentric. This is clear from the
fact that in Figure 2 the letters at the nodes above every phrase other than the
phrase A + B (i.e., “poor John,” “old Harry,” and so on) are different from any of
the letters at the ends of the lower branches connected directly to these nodes.
For example, the phrase D + E (i.e., “his watch,” “the money,” and so forth) has
immediately above it a node labelled B, rather than either D or E. Endocentric
constructions fall into two types: subordinating and coordinating. If attention is
confined, for simplicity, to constructions composed of no more than two
immediate constituents, it can be said that subordinating constructions are those
in which only one immediate constituent is of the same form class as the whole
construction, whereas coordinating constructions are those in which both

47
constituents are of the same form class as the whole construction. In a
subordinating construction (e.g., “poor John”), the constituent that is
syntactically equivalent to the whole construction is described as the head, and
its partner is described as the modifier: thus, in “poor John,” the form “John” is
the head, and “poor” is its modifier. An example of a coordinating construction
is “men and women,” in which, it may be assumed, the immediate constituents
are the word “men” and the word “women,” each of which is syntactically
equivalent to “men and women.” (It is here implied that the conjunction “and” is
not a constituent, properly so called, but an element that, like the relative order
of the constituents, indicates the nature of the construction involved. Not all
linguists have held this view.)
One reason for giving theoretical recognition to the notion of constituent
is that it helps to account for the ambiguity of certain constructions. A classic
example is the phrase “old men and women,” which may be interpreted in two
different ways according to whether one associates “old” with “men and
women” or just with “men.” Under the first of the two interpretations, the
immediate constituents are “old” and “men and women”; under the second, they
are “old men” and “women.” The difference in meaning cannot be attributed to
any one of the ultimate constituents but results from a difference in the way in
which they are associated with one another. Ambiguity of this kind is referred to
as syntactic ambiguity. Not all syntactic ambiguity is satisfactorily accounted for
in terms of constituent structure.

Semantics
Bloomfield thought that semantics, or the study of meaning, was the weak
point in the scientific investigation of language and would necessarily remain so
until the other sciences whose task it was to describe the universe and
humanity’s place in it had advanced beyond their present state. In his
textbook Language (1933), he had himself adopted a behaviouristic theory

48
of meaning, defining the meaning of a linguistic form as “the situation in which
the speaker utters it and the response which it calls forth in the hearer.”
Furthermore, he subscribed, in principle at least, to a physicalistthesis, according
to which all science should be modelled upon the so-called exact sciences and
all scientific knowledge should be reducible, ultimately, to statements made
about the properties of the physical world. The reason for his pessimism
concerning the prospects for the study of meaning was his feeling that it would
be a long time before a complete scientific description of the situations in which
utterances were produced and the responses they called forth in their hearers
would be available. At the time that Bloomfield was writing, physicalism was
more widely held than it is today, and it was perhaps reasonable for him to
believe that linguistics should eschew mentalism and concentrate upon the
directly observable. As a result, for some 30 years after the publication of
Bloomfield’s textbook, the study of meaning was almost wholly neglected by his
followers; most American linguists who received their training during this
period had no knowledge of, still less any interest in, the work being done
elsewhere in semantics.
Two groups of scholars may be seen to have constituted an exception to
this generalization: anthropologically minded linguists and linguists concerned
with Bible translation. Much of the description of the indigenous languages of
America has been carried out since the days of Boas and his most notable pupil
Sapir by scholars who were equally proficient both in anthropology and in
descriptive linguistics; such scholars have frequently added to their grammatical
analyses of languages some discussion of the meaning of the grammatical
categories and of the correlations between the structure of the vocabularies and
the cultures in which the languages operated. It has already been pointed out that
Boas and Sapir and, following them, Whorf were attracted by Humboldt’s view
of the interdependence of language and culture and of language and thought.
This view was quite widely held by American anthropological linguists

49
(although many of them would not go as far as Whorf in asserting the
dependence of thought and conceptualization upon language).
Also of considerable importance in the description of the indigenous languages
of America has been the work of linguists trained by the American Bible
Society and the Summer Institute of Linguistics, a group of Protestant
missionary linguists. Because their principal aim is to produce translations of the
Bible, they have necessarily been concerned with meaning as well as with
grammar and phonology. This has tempered the otherwise fairly orthodox
Bloomfieldian approach characteristic of the group.
The two most important developments in semantics in the mid-20th
century were, first, the application of the structural approach to the study of
meaning and, second, a better appreciation of the relationship between grammar
and semantics. The second of these developments will be treated in the
following section, on Transformational-generative grammar. The first, structural
semantics, goes back to the period preceding World War II and is exemplified in
a large number of publications, mainly by German scholars—Jost Trier, Leo
Weisgerber, and their collaborators.
The structural approach to semantics is best explained by contrasting it
with the more traditional “atomistic” approach, according to which the meaning
of each word in the language is described, in principle, independently of the
meaning of all other words. The structuralist takes the view that the meaning of
a word is a function of the relationships it contracts with other words in a
particular lexical field, or subsystem, and that it cannot be adequately described
except in terms of these relationships. For example, the colour terms in
particular languages constitute a lexical field, and the meaning of each term
depends upon the place it occupies in the field. Although the denotation of each
of the words “green,” “blue,” and “yellow” in English is somewhat imprecise at
the boundaries, the position that each of them occupies relative to the other
terms in the system is fixed: “green” is between “blue” and “yellow,” so that the

50
phrases “greenish yellow” or “yellowish green” and “bluish green” or “greenish
blue” are used to refer to the boundary areas. Knowing the meaning of the word
“green” implies knowing what cannot as well as what can be properly described
as green (and knowing of the borderline cases that they are borderline cases).
Languages differ considerably as to the number of basic colour terms that they
recognize, and they draw boundaries within the psychophysical continuum of
colour at different places. Blue, green, yellow, and so on do not exist as distinct
colours in nature, waiting to be labelled differently, as it were, by different
languages; they come into existence, for the speakers of particular languages, by
virtue of the fact that those languages impose structure upon the continuum of
colour and assign to three of the areas thus recognized the words “blue,”
“green,” “yellow.”
The language of any society is an integral part of the culture of that
society, and the meanings recognized within the vocabulary of the language are
learned by the child as part of the process of acquiring the culture of the society
in which he is brought up. Many of the structural differences found in the
vocabularies of different languages are to be accounted for in terms of cultural
differences. This is especially clear in the vocabulary of kinship (to which a
considerable amount of attention has been given by anthropologists and
linguists), but it holds true of many other semantic fields also. A consequence of
the structural differences that exist between the vocabularies of different
languages is that, in many instances, it is in principle impossible to translate a
sentence “literally” from one language to another.
It is important, nevertheless, not to overemphasize the semantic
incommensurability of languages. Presumably, there are many physiological and
psychological constraints that, in part at least, determine one’s perception and
categorization of the world. It may be assumed that, when one is learning the
denotation of the more basic words in the vocabulary of one’s native language,
attention is drawn first to what might be called the naturally salient features of

51
the environment and that one is, to this degree at least, predisposed to identify
and group objects in one way rather than another. It may also be that human
beings are genetically endowed with rather more specific and linguistically
relevant principles of categorization. It is possible that, although languages
differ in the number of basic colour categories that they distinguish, there is a
limited number of hierarchically ordered basic colour categories from which
each language makes its selection and that what counts as a typical instance, or
focus, of these universal colour categories is fixed and does not vary from one
language to another. If this hypothesis is correct, then it is false to say, as many
structural semanticists have said, that languages divide the continuum of colour
in a quite arbitrary manner. But the general thesis of structuralism is unaffected,
for it still remains true that each language has its own unique semantic structure
even though the total structure is, in each case, built upon a substructure of
universal distinctions.

Transformational-generative grammar
A generative grammar, in the sense in which Noam Chomsky used the
term, is a rule system formalized with mathematical precision that generates,
without need of any information that is not represented explicitly in the system,
the grammatical sentences of the language that it describes, or characterizes, and
assigns to each sentence a structural description, or grammatical analysis. All the
concepts introduced in this definition of “generative” grammar will be explained
and exemplified in the course of this section. Generative grammars fall into
several types; this exposition is concerned mainly with the type known as
transformational (or, more fully, transformational-generative). Transformational
grammar was initiated by Zellig S. Harris in the course of work on what he
called discourse analysis (the formal analysis of the structure of continuous
text). It was further developed and given a somewhat different theoretical basis
by Chomsky.

52
Harris’s grammar

Harris distinguished within the total set of grammatical sentences in a

particular language (for example, English) two complementary subsets: kernel
sentences (the set of kernel sentences being described as the kernel of the
grammar) and nonkernel sentences. The difference between these two subsets
lies in nonkernel sentences being derived from kernel sentences by means of
transformational rules. For example, “The workers rejected the ultimatum” is a
kernel sentence that may be transformed into the nonkernel sentences “The
ultimatum was rejected by the workers” or “Did the workers reject the
ultimatum?” Each of these may be described as a transform of the kernel
sentence from which it is derived. The transformational relationship between
corresponding active and passive sentences (e.g., “The workers rejected the
ultimatum” and “The ultimatum was rejected by the workers”) is conventionally
symbolized by the rule N1 V N2 → N2 be V + en by N1, in which N stands for
any noun or noun phrase, V for any transitive verb, en for the past participle
morpheme, and the arrow (→) instructs one to rewrite the construction to its left
as the construction to the right. (There has been some simplification of the rule
as it was formulated by Harris.) This rule may be taken as typical of the whole
class of transformational rules in Harris’s system: it rearranges constituents
(what was the first nominal, or noun, N1, in the kernel sentence is moved to the
end of the transform, and what was the second nominal, N 2, in the kernel
sentence is moved to initial position in the transform), and it adds various
elements in specified positions (be, en, and by). Other operations carried out by
transformational rules include the deletion of constituents; e.g., the entire phrase
“by the workers” is removed from the sentence “The ultimatum was rejected by
the workers” by a rule symbolized as N2be V+en by N1 → N2 be V+en. This

53
transforms the construction on the left side of the arrow (which resulted from the
passive transformation) by dropping the by-phrase, thus producing “The
ultimatum was rejected.”

Chomsky’s grammar

Chomsky’s system of transformational grammar, though it was developed

on the basis of his work with Harris, differed from Harris’s in a number of
respects. It was Chomsky’s system that attracted the most attention and received
the most extensive exemplification and further development. As outlined
in Syntactic Structures (1957), it comprised three sections, or components:
the phrase-structurecomponent, the transformational component, and the
morphophonemic component. Each of these components consisted of
a set of rules operating upon a certain “input” to yield a certain “output.” The
notion of phrase structure may be dealt with independently of its incorporation
in the larger system. In the following system of rules, S stands for Sentence, NP
for Noun Phrase, VP for Verb Phrase, Det for Determiner, Aux
for Auxiliary (verb), N for Noun, and V for Verb stem.

This is a simple phrase-structure grammar. It generates and thereby defines as

grammatical such sentences as “The man will hit the ball,” and it assigns to each
sentence that it generates a structural description. The kind of structural

54
description assigned by a phrase-structure grammar is, in fact,
a constituent structure analysis of the sentence.
In these rules, the arrow can be interpreted as an instruction to rewrite (this is to
be taken as a technical term) whatever symbolappears to the left of the arrow as
the symbol or string of symbols that appears to the right of the arrow. For
example, rule (2) rewrites the symbol VP as the string of symbols Verb + NP,
and it thereby defines Verb + NP to be a construction of the type VP. Or,
alternatively and equivalently, it says that constructions of the type VP may have
as their immediate constituents constructions of the type Verb and NP (combined
in that order). Rule (2) can be thought of as creating or being associated with the
tree structure in Figure 3.

Figure 3: The constituent structure, or phrase structure, assigned by the rule VP

→ Verb + NP (see text).

Rules (1)–(8) do not operate in isolation but constitute an integratedsystem. The

symbol S (standing mnemonically for “sentence”) is designated as the initial
symbol. This information is not given in the rules (1)–(8), but it can be assumed
either that it is given in a kind of protocol statement preceding the grammatical
rules or that there is a universal convention according to which S is always the
initial symbol. It is necessary to begin with a rule that has the initial symbol on
the left. Thereafter any rule may be applied in any order until no further rule is
applicable; in doing so, a derivation can be constructed of one of the sentences
generated by the grammar. If the rules are applied in the following order: (1),
(2), (3), (3), (4), (5), (5), (6), (6), (7), (8), then assuming that “the” is selected on
both applications of (5), “man” on one application of (6), and “ball” on the

55
other, “will” on the application of (7), and “hit” on the application of (8), the
following derivation of the sentence “The man will hit the ball” will have been
constructed:

Many other derivations of this sentence are possible, depending on the

order in which the rules are applied. The important point is that all these
different derivations are equivalent in that they can be reduced to the same tree
diagram; namely, the one shown in Figure 4. If this is compared with the system
of rules, it will be seen that each application of each rule creates or is associated
with a portion (or subtree) of the tree. The tree diagram, or phrase marker, may
now be considered as a structural description of the sentence “The man hit the
ball.” It is a description of the constituent structure, or phrase structure, of the
sentence, and it is assigned by the rules that generate the sentence.

56
Figure 4: Structural description of the sentence “The man will hit the ball,”
assigned by the rules of a simple phrase-structure grammar (see
text).Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

It is important to interpret the term generate in a static, rather than

a dynamic, sense. The statement that the grammar generates a particular
sentence means that the sentence is one of the totality of sentences that the
grammar defines to be grammatical or well formed. All the sentences are
generated, as it were, simultaneously. The notion of generation must be
interpreted as would be a mathematical formula containing variables. For
example, in evaluating the formula y 2 + y for different values of y, one does not
say that the formula itself generates these various resultant values (2, when y =
1; 5, when y = 2; etc.) one after another or at different times; one says that the
formula generates them all simultaneously or, better still perhaps, timelessly.
The situation is similar for a generative grammar. Although one sentence rather
than another can be derived on some particular occasion by making one choice
rather than another at particular places in the grammar, the grammar must be
thought of as generating all sentences statically or timelessly.
It has been noted that, whereas a phrase-structure grammar is one that
consists entirely of phrase-structure rules, a transformational grammar (as
formalized by Chomsky) includes both phrase-structure and transformational
rules (as well as morphophonemic rules). The transformational rules depend
upon the prior application of the phrase-structure rules and have the effect of
converting, or transforming, one phrase marker into another. What is meant by
this statement may be clarified first with reference to a purely abstract and very
simple transformational grammar, in which the letters stand for constituents of a
sentence (and S stands for “sentence”):

57
The first five rules are phrase-structure rules (PS rules); rule (6) is a
transformational rule (T rule). The output of rules (1)–(5) is the terminal
string a + b + c + e + f + d + g + h, which has associated with it the structural
description indicated by the phrase marker shown in Figure 5 (left). Rule (6)
applies to this terminal string of the PS rules and the associated phrase marker. It
has the effect of deleting C (and the constituents of C) and permuting A and D
(together with their constituents). The result is the string of
symbols d + g + h + a + b, with the associated phrase marker shown in Figure
5 (right).

Figure 5: Phrase markers.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

The phrase marker shown in Figure 5 (left) may be described as underlying, and
the phrase marker shown in Figure 5 (right) as derived with respect to rule (6).
One of the principal characteristics of a transformational rule is its
transformation of an underlying phrase marker into a derived phrase marker in

58
this way. Transformational rules, in contrast with phrase-structure rules, are also
formally more heterogeneous and may have more than one symbol on the left-
hand side of the arrow. The linguistic importance of these abstract
considerations may be explained with reference to the relationship that holds in
English between active and passive sentences.
Chomsky’s rule for relating active and passive sentences (as given in Syntactic
Structures) is very similar, at first sight, to Harris’s, discussed above. Chomsky’s
rule is:

This rule, called the passive transformation, presupposes and depends upon the
prior application of a set of phrase-structure rules. For simplicity, the passive
transformation may first be considered in relation to the set of terminal strings
generated by the phrase-structure rules (1)–(8) given earlier. The string “the +
man + will + hit + the + ball” (with its associated phrase marker, as shown
in Figure 4) can be treated not as an actual sentence but as the structure
underlying both the active sentence “The man will hit the ball” and the
corresponding passive “The ball will be hit by the man.” The passive
transformation is applicable under the condition that the underlying, or “input,”
string is analyzable in terms of its phrase structure as NP - Aux - V - NP (the use
of subscript numerals to distinguish the two NPs in the formulation of the rule is
an informal device for indicating the operation of permutation). In the phrase
marker in Figure 4, “the” + “man” are constituents of NP, “will” is a constituent
of Aux, “hit” is a constituent of V, and “the” + “ball” are constituents of NP. The
whole string is therefore analyzable in the appropriate sense, and the passive
transformation converts it into the string “the + ball + will + be + en + hit + by +
the + man.” A subsequent transformational rule will permute “en + hit” to yield

59
“hit + en,” and one of the morphophonemic rules will then convert “hit + en” to
“hit” (as “ride + en” will be converted to “ridden”; “open + en” to “opened,” and
so on).
Every transformational rule has the effect of converting an underlying phrase
marker into a derived phrase marker. The manner in which the transformational
rules assign derived constituent structure to their input strings is one of the
major theoretical problems in the formalization of transformational grammar.
Here it can be assumed not only that “be + en” is attached to Aux and “by” to
NP (as indicated by the plus signs in the rule as it has been formulated above)
but also that the rest of the derived structure is as shown in Figure 6. The phrase
marker in Figure 6formalizes the fact, among others, that “the ball” is the
subject of the passive sentence “The ball will be hit by the man,” whereas “the
man” is the subject of the corresponding active “The man will hit the ball”
(compare Figure 4).

Figure 6: A possible derived phrase marker for a passive sentence (see

text).Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Although the example above is a very simple one, and only a single
transformational rule has been considered independently of other
transformational rules in the same system, the passive transformation must
operate, not only upon simple noun phrases like “the man” or “the ball,” but

60
upon noun phrases that contain adjectives (“the old man”), modifying phrases
(“the man in the corner”), relative clauses (“the man who checked in last
night”), and so forth. The incorporation, or embedding, of these other structures
with the noun phrase will be brought about by the prior application of other
transformational rules. It should also be clear that the phrase-structure rules
require extension to allow for the various forms of the verb (“is hitting,” “hit,”
“was hitting,” “has hit,” “has been hitting,” etc.) and for the distinction of
singular and plural.

It is important to note that, unlike Harris’s, Chomsky’s system of

transformational grammar does not convert one sentence into another: the
transformational rules operate upon the structures underlying sentences and not
upon actual sentences. A further point is that even the simplest sentences
(i.e., kernel sentences) require the application of at least some transformational
rules. Corresponding active and passive sentences, affirmative and negative
sentences, declarative and interrogative sentences, and so on are formally related
by deriving them from the same underlying terminal string of the phrase-
structure component. The difference between kernel sentences and nonkernel
sentences in Syntactic Structures (in a later system of Chomsky the category of
kernel sentences is not given formal recognition at all) resides in the fact that
kernel sentences are generated without the application of any optional
transformations. Nonkernel sentences require the application of both optional
and obligatory transformations, and they differ one from another in that a
different selection of optional transformations is made.

Modifications in Chomsky’s grammar

61
 Chomsky’s system of transformational grammar was substantially
modified in 1965. Perhaps the most important modification was the
incorporation, within the system, of a semantic component, in addition to the
syntactic component and phonological component. (The phonological
component may be thought of as replacing the morphophonemic component
of Syntactic Structures.) The rules of the syntactic component generate the
sentences of the languageand assign to each not one but two structural analyses:
a deep structure analysis as represented by the underlying phrase marker, and
a surface structure analysis, as represented by the final derived phrase marker.
The underlying phrase marker is assigned by rules of the base (roughly
equivalent to the PS [Phrase-Structure] rules of the earlier system); the derived
phrase marker is assigned by the transformational rules. The interrelationship of
the four sets of rules is shown diagrammatically in Figure 7. The meaning of the
sentence is derived (mainly, if not wholly) from the deep structure by means of
the rules of semantic interpretation; the phonetic realization of the sentence is
derived from its surface structure by means of the rules of the phonological
component. The grammar (“grammar” is now to be understood as
covering semantics and phonology, as well as syntax) is thus an integrated
system of rules for relating the pronunciation of a sentence to its meaning.
The syntax, and more particularly the base, is at the “heart” of the system, as it
were: it is the base component (as the arrows in the diagram indicate) that
generates the infinite class of structures underlying the well-formed sentences of
a language. These structures are then given a semantic and phonetic
“interpretation” by the other components.

62
Figure 7: Diagrammatic representation of a transformational grammar (see
text).Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

The base consists of two parts: a set of categorial rules and a lexicon. Taken
together, they fulfill a similar function to that fulfilled by the phrase-structure
rules of the earlier system. But there are many differences of detail. Among the
most important is that the lexicon (which may be thought of as a dictionary of
the language cast in a particular form) lists, in principle, all the vocabulary
words in the language and associates with each all the syntactic, semantic, and
phonological information required for the correct operation of the rules. This
information is represented in terms of what are called features. For example, the
entry for “boy” might say that it has the syntactic features: [+ Noun], [+ Count],
[+ Common], [+ Animate], and [+ Human]. The categorial rules generate a set of
phrase markers that have in them, as it were, a number of “slots” to be filled
with items from the lexicon. With each such “slot” there is associated a set of
features that define the kind of item that can fill the “slot.” If a phrase marker is
generated with a “slot” for the head of a noun phrase specified as requiring an
animate noun (i.e., a noun having the feature [+ Animate]), the item “boy”
would be recognized as being compatible with this specification and could be
inserted in the “slot” by the rule of lexical substitution. Similarly, it could be
inserted in “slots” specified as requiring a common noun, a human noun, or a
countable noun, but it would be excluded from positions that require an abstract

63
noun (e.g., “sincerity”) or an uncountable noun (e.g., “water”). By drawing upon
the syntactic information coded in feature notation in the lexicon, the categorial
rules might permit such sentences as “The boy died,” while excluding (and
thereby defining as ungrammatical) such nonsentences as “The boy elapsed.”
One of the most controversial topics in the development of transformational
grammar was the relationship between syntax and semantics. Scholars working
in the field agreed that there is a considerable degree of interdependence
between the two, and the problem was how to formalize this interdependence.
One school of linguists, called generative semanticists, accepted the general
principles of transformational grammar but challenged Chomsky’s conception of
deep structure as a separate and identifiable level of syntactic representation. In
their opinion, the basic component of the grammar should consist of a set of
rules for the generation of well-formed semantic representations. These would
then be converted by a succession of transformational rules into strings of words
with an assigned surface-structure syntactic analysis, there being no place in the
passage from semantic representation to surface structure identifiable as
Chomsky’s deep structure. Chomsky himself denied that there is any real
difference between the two points of view and has maintained that the issue is
purely one of notation. That this argument could be put forward by one party to
the controversy and rejected by the other is perhaps a sufficient indication of the
uncertainty of the evidence. Of greater importance than the overt issues, in so far
as they are clear, was the fact that linguists were now studying much more
intensively than they had in the past the complexities of the interdependence of
syntax, on the one hand, and semantics and logic, on the other.
The role of the phonological component of a generative grammar of the type
outlined by Chomsky is to assign a phonetic “interpretation” to the strings of
words generated by the syntactic component. These strings of words are
represented in a phonological notation (taken from the lexicon) and have been
provided with a surface-structure analysis by the transformational rules

64
(see Figure 7). The phonological elements out of which the word forms are
composed are segments consisting of what are referred to technically as
distinctive features (following the usage of the Prague school, see below The
Prague school). For example, the word form “man,” represented phonologically,
is composed of three segments: the first consists of the features [+ consonantal],
[+ bilabial], [+ nasal], etc.; the second of the features [+ vocalic], [+ front], [+
open], etc.; and the third of the features [+ consonantal], [+ alveolar], [+ nasal],
etc. (These features should be taken as purely illustrative; there is some doubt
about the definitive list of distinctive features.) Although these segments may be
referred to as the “phonemes” /m/, /a/, and /n/, they should not be identified
theoretically with units of the kind discussed in the section on Phonology under
Structural linguistics. They are closer to what many American structural
linguists called “morphophonemes” or the Prague school linguists labelled
“archiphonemes,” being unspecified for any feature that is
contextually redundant or predictable. For instance, the first segment of the
phonological representation of “man” will not include the feature [+ voice];
because nasal consonants are always phonetically voiced in this position in
English, the feature [+ voice] can be added to the phonetic specification by a
rule of the phonological component.
One further important aspect of generative phonology (i.e., phonology carried
out within the framework of an integrated generative grammar) should be
mentioned: its dependence upon syntax. Most American structural phonologists
made it a point of principle that the phonemic analysis of an utterance should be
carried out without regard to its grammatical structure. This principle was
controversial among American linguists and was not generally accepted outside
America. Not only was the principle rejected by the generative grammarians, but
they made the phonological description of a language much more dependent
upon its syntactic analysis than has any other school of linguists. They claimed,
for example, that the phonological rules that assign different degrees of stress to

65
the vowels in English words and phrases and alter the quality of the relatively
unstressed vowelconcomitantly must make reference to the derived constituent
structure of sentences and not merely to the form class of the individual words
or the places in which the word boundaries occur.

Historical (Diachronic) Linguistics

Historical linguistics, also called Diachronic Linguistics, the branch
of linguistics concerned with the study of phonological, grammatical, and
semantic changes, the reconstruction of earlier stages of languages, and the
discovery and application of the methods by which genetic relationships among
languages can be demonstrated. Historical linguistics had its roots in the
etymological speculations of classical and medieval times, in the comparative
study of Greek and Latin developed during the Renaissance, and in the
speculations of scholars as to the language from which the other languages of
the world were descended. It was only in the 19th century, however, that more

66
scientific methods of language comparison and sufficient data on the early Indo-
European languages combined to establish the principles now used by historical
linguists. The theories of the Neogrammarians, a group of German historical
linguists and classical scholars who first gained prominence in the 1870s, were
especially important because of the rigorous manner in which they
formulated soundcorrespondences in the Indo-European languages. In the 20th
century, historical linguists have successfully extended the application of the
theories and methods of the 19th century to the classification and historical
study of non-Indo-European languages. Historical linguistics, when contrasted
with synchronic linguistics, the study of a language at a particular point in time,
is often called diachronic linguistics.

Linguistic change
All languages change in the course of time. Written records make it clear
that 15th-century English is quite noticeably different from 21st-century
English, as is 15th-century French or German from modern French or German.
It was the principal achievement of the 19th-century linguists not only to realize
more clearly than their predecessors the ubiquity of linguistic change but also to
put its scientific investigation on a sound footing by means of the comparative
method (see above History of linguistics: The 19th century). This will be treated
in greater detail in the following section. Here various kinds, or categories, of
linguistic change will be listed and exemplified.
Sound change
Since the beginning of the 19th century, when scholars observed that there were
a number of systematic correspondences in related words between the sounds of
the Germanic languages and the sounds of what were later recognized as
other Indo-European languages, particular attention has been paid in diachronic
linguistics to changes in the sound systems of languages.

67
Certain common types of sound change, most notably assimilationand
dissimilation, can be explained, at least partially, in terms of syntagmatic, or
contextual, conditioning. By assimilation is meant the process by which one
sound is made similar in its place or manner of articulation to a neighbouring
sound. For example, the word “cupboard” was presumably once pronounced, as
the spelling indicates, with the consonant cluster pb in the middle.
The p was assimilated to b in manner of articulation (i.e., voicing was
maintained throughout the cluster), and subsequently the resultant double
consonant bb was simplified. With a single b in the middle and an unstressed
second syllable, the word “cupboard,” as it is pronounced nowadays, is no
longer so evidently a compound of “cup” and “board” as its spelling still shows
it to have been. The Italian words notte “night”
and otto “eight” manifest assimilation of the first consonant to the second
consonant of the cluster in place of articulation (compare Latin nocte[m], octo).
Assimilation is also responsible for the phenomenon referred to as umlaut in the
Germanic languages. The high front vowel i of suffixes had the effect of fronting
and raising preceding back vowels and, in particular, of converting an a sound
into an e sound. In Modern German this is still a morphologically productive
process (compareMann “man” : Männer “men”). In English it has left its mark
in such irregular forms as “men” (from *manniz), “feet” (from *fotiz), and
“length” (from *langa).
Dissimilation refers to the process by which one sound becomes different from a
neighbouring sound. For example, the word “pilgrim” (French pèlerin) derives
ultimately from the Latin peregrinus; the l sound results from dissimilation of
the first r under the influence of the second r. A special case of dissimilation
is haplology, in which the second of the two identical or similar syllables is
dropped. Examples include the standard modern British pronunciations of
“Worcester” and “Gloucester” with two syllables rather than three and the
common pronunciation of “library” as if it were written “libry.” Both

68
assimilation and dissimilation are commonly subsumed under the principle of
“ease of articulation.” This is clearly applicable in typical instances of
assimilation. It is less obvious how or why a succession of unlike sounds
in contiguoussyllables should be easier to pronounce than a succession of
identical or similar sounds. But a better understanding of this phenomenon, as of
other “slips of the tongue,” may result from current work in the physiological
and neurological aspects of speech production.
Not all sound change is to be accounted for in terms of syntagmatic
conditioning. The change of p, t, and k to f, θ (the th sound in “thin”), and h or
of b, d, g to p, t, and k in early Germanic cannot be explained in these terms. Nor
can the so-called Great Vowel Shift in English, which, in the 15th century,
modified the quality of all the long vowels (compare “profane” : “profanity”;
“divine” : “divinity”; and others). Attempts have been made to develop a general
theory of sound change, notably by the French linguist André Martinet. But no
such theory has yet won universal acceptance, and it is likely that the causes of
sound change are multiple.
Sound change is not necessarily phonological; it may be merely phonetic (see
above Structural linguistics: Phonology). The pronunciation of one or more of
the phones realizing a particular phoneme may change slightly without affecting
any of the previously existing phonological distinctions; this no doubt happens
quite frequently as a language is transmitted from one generation to the next.
Two diachronically distinct states of the language would differ in this respect in
the same way as two coexistent but geographically or socially distinct accents of
the same language might differ. It is only when two previously
distinct phonemes are merged or a unitary phoneme splits into two (typically
when allophonic variation becomes phonemic) that sound change must
definitely be considered as phonological. For example, the sound change
of p to f, t to θ (th), and k to h, on the one hand, and of b to p, d to t, and g to k,
on the other, in early Germanic had the effect of changing the phonological

69
system. The voiceless stops did not become fricatives in all positions; they
remained as voiceless stops after s. Consequently, the p sound that was
preserved after smerged with the p that derived by sound change from b. (It is
here assumed that the aspirated p sound and the unaspirated p sound are to be
regarded as allophones of the same phoneme). Prior to the Germanic sound shift
the phoneme to be found at the beginning of the words for “five” or “father”
also occurred after s in words for “spit” or “spew”; after the change this was no
longer the case.

Grammatical change

A language can acquire a grammatical distinction that it did not have

previously, as when English developed the progressive (“He is running”) in
contrast to the simple present (“He runs”). It can also lose a distinction; e.g.,
modern spoken French has lost the distinction between the simple past (Il
marcha “he walked”) and the perfect (Il a marché “he has walked”). What was
expressed by means of one grammatical device may come to be expressed by
means of another. For example, in the older Indo-European languages the
syntactic function of the nouns and noun phrases in a sentence was expressed
primarily by means of case endings (the subject of the sentence being in the
nominative case, the object in the accusative case, and so on); in most of the
modern Indo-European languages these functions are expressed by means of
word order and the use of prepositions. It is arguable, although it can hardly be
said to have been satisfactorily demonstrated yet, that the grammatical changes
that take place in a language in the course of time generally leave its deep
structure unaffected and tend to modify the ways in which the deeper syntactic
functions and distinctions are expressed (whether morphologically, by word
order, by the use of prepositions and auxiliary verbs, or otherwise), without

70
affecting the functions and distinctions themselves. Many grammatical changes
are traditionally accounted for in terms of analogy.

Semantic change

Near the end of the 19th century, a French scholar, Michel Bréal, setout to
determine the laws that govern changes in the meaning of words. This was the
task that dominated semantic research until the 1930s, when scholars began to
turn their attention to the synchronic study of meaning. Many systems for the
classification of changes of meaning have been proposed, and a variety of
explanatory principles have been suggested. So far no “laws” of semantic
change comparable to the phonologist’s sound laws have been discovered. It
seems that changes of meaning can be brought about by a variety of causes.
Most important, perhaps, and the factor that has been emphasized particularly by
the so-called words-and-things movement in historical semantics is the change
undergone in the course of time by the objects or institutions that words denote.
For example, the English word “car” goes back through Latin carrus to a Celtic
word for a four-wheeled wagon. It now denotes a very different sort of vehicle;
confronted with a model of a Celtic wagon in a museum, one would not describe
it as a car.
Some changes in the meaning of words are caused by their habitual use in
particular contexts. The word “starve” once meant “to die” (compare Old
English steorfan, German sterben); in most dialects of English, it now has the
more restricted meaning “to die of hunger,” though in the north of England “He
was starving” can also mean “He was very cold” (i.e., “dying” of cold, rather
than hunger). Similarly, the word “deer” has acquired a more specialized
meaning than the meaning “wild animal” that it once bore
(compare German Tier); and “meat,” which originally meant food in general

71
(hence, “sweetmeats” and the archaic phrase “meat and drink”) now denotes the
flesh of an animal treated as food. In all such cases, the narrower meaning has
developed from the constant use of the word in a more specialized context, and
the contextual presuppositions of the word have in time become part of its
meaning.

Borrowing
Languages borrow words freely from one another. Usually this happens
when some new object or institution is developed for which the borrowing
language has no word of its own. For example, the large number of words
denoting financial institutions and operations borrowed from Italian by the other
western European languages at the time of the Renaissance testifies to the
importance of the Italian bankers in that period. (The word “bank” itself, in this
sense, comes through French from the Italian banca). Words now pass from one
language to another on a scale that is probably unprecedented, partly because of
the enormous number of new inventions that have been made in the 20th and
21st centuries and partly because international communications are now so
much more rapid and important. The vocabulary of modern science and
technology is very largely international.
The comparative method
The comparative method in historical linguistics is concerned with the
reconstruction of an earlier language or earlier state of a language on the basis of
a comparison of related words and expressions in different languages
or dialects derived from it. The comparative method was developed in the course
of the 19th century for the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European and was
subsequently applied to the study of other language families. It depends upon
the principle of regular sound change—a principle that, as explained above, met
with violent opposition when it was introduced into linguistics by the
Neogrammarians in the 1870s but by the end of the century had become part of

72
what might be fairly described as the orthodox approach to historical linguistics.
Changes in the phonological systems of languages through time were accounted
for in terms of sound laws.
Grimm’s law
The most famous of the sound laws is Grimm’s law (though Jacob Grimm
himself did not use the term law). Some of the correspondences accounted for
by Grimm’s law are given in

Table 1.
It will be observed that when other Indo-European languages, including Latin
and Greek, have a voiced unaspirated stop (b, d ), Gothic has the corresponding
voiceless unaspirated stop (p, t) and that when other Indo-European languages
have a voiceless unaspirated stop, Gothic has a voiceless fricative (f, θ). The
simplest explanation would seem to be that, under the operation of what is now
called Grimm’s law, in some prehistoric period of Germanic (before the
development of a number of distinct Germanic languages), the voiced stops
inherited from Proto-Indo-Europeanbecame voiceless and the voiceless stops
became fricatives. The situation with respect to the sounds corresponding to the
Germanic voiced stops is more complex. Here there is considerable
disagreement between the other languages: Greek has voiceless aspirates (ph,

73
th), Sanskrit has voiced aspirates (bh, dh), Latin has voiceless fricatives in word-
initial position (f) and voiced stops in medial position (b, d), Slavic has voiced
stops (b, d), and so on. The generally accepted hypothesis is that the Proto-Indo-
European sounds from which the Germanic voiced stops developed were voiced
aspirates and that they are preserved in Sanskrit but were changed in the other
Indo-European languages by the loss of either voice or aspiration. (Latin, having
lost the voice in initial position, subsequently changed both of the resultant
voiceless aspirates into the fricative f, and it lost the aspiration in medial
position.) It is easy to see that this hypothesis yields a simpler account of the
correspondences than any of the alternatives. It is also in accord with the fact
that voiced aspirates are rare in the languages of the world and, unless they are
supported by the coexistence in the same language of phonologically distinct
voiceless aspirates (as they are in Hindi and other north Indian languages),
appear to be inherently unstable.

Proto-Indo-European reconstruction

Reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European labial stops (made with the lips) and dental stops
(made with the tip of the tongue touching the teeth) is fairly straightforward. More controversial is
the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European sounds underlying the correspondences shown
in Table 2.

Velar and palatal stops in the Indo-European languages

Greek Latin Gothic Sanskrit Slavic

K k h sh s

G g k j z

Kh h/g/f g h z

p/t/k qu wh k k

74
Velar and palatal stops in the Indo-European languages

b/d/g v/gu q g g

ph/th/kh f/v/gu w gh g
According to the most generally accepted hypothesis, there were in Proto-Indo-
European at least two distinct series of velar (or “guttural”) consonants: simple
velars (or palatals), symbolized as *k, *g, and *gh, and labiovelars, symbolized
as *kw, *gw, and *gwh. The labiovelars may be thought of as velar
stops articulated with simultaneous lip-rounding. In one group of languages, the
labial component is assumed to have been lost, and in another group the velar
component; it is only in the Latin reflex of the voiceless *kw that both labiality
and velarity are retained (compare Latin quis from *kwi-). It is notable that the
languages that have a velar for the Proto-Indo-European labiovelar stops (e.g.,
Sanskrit and Slavic) have a sibilant or palatal sound (s or ś) for the Proto-Indo-
European simple velars. Earlier scholars attached great significance to this fact
and thought that it represented a fundamental division of the Indo-European
family into a western and an eastern group. The western group—comprising
Celtic, Germanic, Italic, and Greek—is commonly referred to as the centum
group; the eastern group—comprising Sanskrit, Iranian, Slavic, and others—is
called the satem (satəm) group. (The words centum and satem come from Latin
and Iranian, respectively, and mean “hundred.” They exemplify, with their
initial consonant, the two different treatments of the Proto-Indo-European
simple velars.) Nowadays less importance is attached to the centum–satem
distinction. But it is still generally held that in an early period of Indo-European,
there was a sound law operative in the dialect or dialects from which Sanskrit,
Iranian, Slavic and the other so-called satem languages developed that had the
effect of palatalizing the original Proto-Indo-European velars and eventually
converting them to sibilants.

75
Steps in the comparative method

The information given in the previous paragraphs is intended to illustrate

what is meant by a sound law and to indicate the kind of considerations that are
taken into account in the application of the comparative method. The first step is
to find sets of cognate or putatively cognate forms in the languages or dialects
being compared: for example, Latin decem = Greek deka = Sanskrit daśa =
Gothic taihun, all meaning “ten.” From sets of cognate forms such as these, sets
of phonological correspondences can be extracted; e.g., (1) Latin d = Greek d =
Sanskrit d = Gothic t; (2) Latin e = Greek e = Sanskrit a = Gothic ai (in the
Gothic orthography this represents an e sound); (3) Latin c (i.e., a k sound) =
Greek k = Sanskrit ś = Gothic h; (4) Latin em = Greek a = Sanskrit a =
Gothic un. A set of “reconstructed” phonemes can be postulated (marked with
an asterisk by the standard convention) to which the phonemes in the attested
languages can be systematically related by means of sound laws. The
reconstructed Proto-Indo-European word for “ten” is *dekm. From this form the
Latin word can be derived by means of a single sound change, *m changes
to em (usually symbolized as *m > em); the Greek by means of the sound
change *m > a (i.e., vocalization of the syllabic nasal and loss of nasality); the
Sanskrit by means of the palatalizing sound law, *k > ś and the sound change
*m > a (whether this is assumed to be independent of the law operative in Greek
or not); and the Gothic by means of Grimm’s law (*d > t, *k > h) and the sound
change *m > un.
Most 19th-century linguists took it for granted that they were reconstructing the
actual word forms of some earlier language, that *dekm, for example, was a
pronounceable Proto-Indo-European word. Many of their successors have been
more skeptical about the phonetic reality of reconstructed starred forms like
*dekm. They have said that they are no more than formulae summarizing the
correspondences observed to hold between attested forms in particular

76
languages and that they are, in principle, unpronounceable. From this point of
view, it would be a matter of arbitrary decision which letter is used to refer to the
correspondences: Latin d = Greek d = Sanskrit d = Gothic t, and so on.
Any symbol would do, provided that a distinct symbol is used for each distinct
set of correspondences. The difficulty with this view of reconstruction is that it
seems to deny the very raison d’être of historical and comparative linguistics.
Linguists want to know, if possible, not only that Latin decem, Greek deka, and
so on are related, but also the nature of their historical relationship—how they
have developed from common ancestral form. They also wish to construct,
if feasible, some general theory of sound change. This can be done only if some
kind of phonetic interpretation can be given to the starred forms. The important
point is that the confidence with which a phonetic interpretation is assigned to
the phonemes that are reconstructed will vary from one phoneme to another. It
should be clear from the discussion above, for example, that the interpretation of
*d as a voiced dental or alveolar stop is more certain than the interpretation of
*k as a voiceless velar stop. The starred forms are not all on an equal footing
from a phonetic point of view.

The Prague school

What is now generally referred to as the Prague school comprised a fairly
large group of scholars, mainly European, who, though they may not themselves
have been members of the Linguistic Circle of Prague, derived their inspiration
from the work of Vilém Mathesius, Nikolay Trubetskoy, Roman Jakobson and
other scholars based in Prague in the decade preceding World War II.
1. Combination of structuralism and functionalism

77
 The most characteristic feature of the Prague school approach is its
combination of structuralism with functionalism. The latter term (like
“structuralism”) has been used in a variety of senses in linguistics. Here it is to
be understood as implying an appreciation of the diversity of functions fulfilled
by language and a theoretical recognition that the structure of languages is in
large part determined by their characteristic functions. Functionalism, taken in
this sense, manifests itself in many of the more particular tenets of Prague
school doctrine.
One very famous functional analysis of language, which, though it did not
originate in Prague, was very influential there, was that of the German
psychologist Karl Bühler, who recognized three general kinds of function
fulfilled by language: Darstellungsfunktion, Kundgabefunktion,
and Appelfunktion. These terms may be translated, in the present context, as
the cognitive, the expressive, and the conative (or instrumental) functions.
The cognitive function of language refers to its employment for the transmission
of factual information; by expressive function is meant the indication of the
mood or attitude of the speaker (or writer); and by the conative function of
language is meant its use for influencing the person one is addressing or for
bringing about some practical effect. A number of scholars working in the
Prague tradition suggested that these three functions correlate in many
languages, at least partly, with the grammatical categories of mood and person.
The cognitive function is fulfilled characteristically by 3rd-person nonmodal
utterances (i.e., utterances in the indicative mood, making no use of modal
verbs); the expressive function by 1st-person utterances in the subjunctive or
optative mood; and the conative function by 2nd-person utterances in
the imperative. The functional distinction of the cognitive and the expressive
aspects of language was also applied by Prague school linguists in their work
on stylistics and literary criticism. One of their key principles was that language
is being used poetically or aesthetically when the expressive aspect is

78
predominant, and that it is typical of the expressive function of language that
this should be manifest in the form of an utterance and not merely in the
meanings of the component words.

Phonological contributions

The Prague school was best known for its work on phonology. Unlike the
American phonologists, Trubetskoy and his followers did not take
the phoneme to be the minimal unit of analysis. Instead, they
defined phonemes as sets of distinctive features. For example, in English, /b/
differs from /p/ in the same way that /d/ differs from /t/ and /g/ from /k/. Just
how they differ in terms of their articulation is a complex question. For
simplicity, it may be said that there is just one feature, the presence of which
distinguishes /b/, /d/, and /g/ from /p/, /t/, and /k/, and that this feature is voicing
(vibration of the vocal cords). Similarly, the feature of labiality can be extracted
from /p/ and /b/ by comparing them with /t/, /d/, /k/, and /g/; the feature of
nasality from /n/ and /m/ by comparing them with /t/ and /d/, on the one hand,
and with /p/ and /b/, on the other. Each phoneme, then, is composed of a number
of articulatory features and is distinguished by the presence or absence of at
least one feature from every other phoneme in the language.
The distinctive function of phonemes, which depends upon and supports
the principle of the duality of structure, can be related to the cognitive function
of language. This distinctive feature analysis of Prague school phonology as
developed by Jakobson became part of the generally accepted framework for
generative phonology (see above).
Two other kinds of phonologically relevant function were also recognized
by linguists of the Prague school: expressive and demarcative. The former term
is employed here in the sense in which it was employed above (i.e., in

79
opposition to “cognitive”); it is characteristic of stress, intonation, and other
suprasegmental aspects of language that they are frequently expressive of the
mood and attitude of the speaker in this sense. The term demarcative is applied
to those elements or features that in particular languages serve to indicate the
occurrence of the boundaries of words and phrases and, presumably, make it
easier to identify such grammatical units in the stream of speech. There are, for
example, many languages in which the set of phonemes that can occur at the
beginning of a word differs from the set of phonemes that can occur at the end
of a word. These and other devices were described by the Prague school
phonologists as having demarcative function: they are boundary signals that
reinforce the identity and syntagmatic unity of words and phrases.
Theory of markedness
The notion of markedness was first developed in Prague school phonology but
was subsequently extended to morphology and syntax. When two phonemes are
distinguished by the presence or absence of a single distinctive feature, one of
them is said to be marked and the other unmarked for the feature in question.
For example, /b/ is marked and /p/ unmarked with respect to voicing. Similarly,
in morphology, the regular English verb can be said to be marked for past tense
(by the suffixation of -ed) but to be unmarked in the present (compare “jumped”
versus “jump”). It is often the case that a morphologically unmarked form has a
wider range of occurrences and a less definite meaning than a morphologically
marked form. It can be argued, for example, that, whereas the past tense form in
English (in simple sentences or the main clause of complex sentences) definitely
refers to the past, the so-called present tense form is more neutral with respect to
temporal reference: it is nonpast in the sense that it fails to mark the time as past,
but it does not mark it as present. There is also a more abstract sense of
markedness, which is independent of the presence or absence of an overt feature
or affix. The words “dog” and “bitch” provide examples of markedness of this
kind on the level of vocabulary. Whereas the use of the word “bitch” is restricted

80
to females of the species, “dog” is applicable to both males and females. “Bitch”
is the marked and “dog” the unmarked term, and, as is commonly the case, the
unmarked term can be neutral or negative according to context (compare “That
dog over there is a bitch” versus “It’s not a dog; it’s a bitch”). The principle of
markedness, understood in this more general or more abstract sense, came to be
quite widely accepted by linguists of many different schools, and it was applied
at all levels of linguistic analysis.

Later contributions

Later Prague school work remained characteristically functional in the

sense in which this term was interpreted in the pre-World War II period. The
most valuable contribution made by the postwar Prague school was probably the
distinction between theme and rheme and the notion of “functional sentence
perspective” or “communicative dynamism.” By the theme of a sentence is
meant that part that refers to what is already known or given in the context
(sometimes called, by other scholars, the topic or psychological subject); by the
rheme, the part that conveys new information (the comment or psychological
predicate). It has been pointed out that, in languages with a free word order
(such as Czech or Latin), the theme tends to precede the rheme, regardless of
whether the theme or the rheme is the grammatical subject, and that this
principle may still operate, in a more limited way, in languages, like English,
with a relatively fixed word order (compare “That book I haven’t seen before”).
But other devices may also be used to distinguish theme and rheme. The rheme
may be stressed (“Jóhn saw Mary”) or made the complement of the verb “to be”
in the main clause of what is now commonly called a cleft sentence (“It’s Jóhn
who saw Mary”).

81
The general principle that guided research in “functional sentence perspective”
is that the syntactic structure of a sentence is in part determined by the
communicative function of its various constituents and the way in which they
relate to the context of utterance. A somewhat different but related aspect of
functionalism in syntax is seen in work in what is called case grammar. Case
grammar is based upon a small set of syntactic functions (agentive, locative,
benefactive, instrumental, and so on) that are variously expressed in different
languages but that are held to determine the grammatical structure of sentences.
Although case grammar does not derive directly from the work of the Prague
school, it is very similar in inspiration.

J. R. Firth
John Rupert Firth commonly known as J. R. Firth (June 17, 1890 –
December 14, 1960) was an English linguist, the first professor of general
linguistics in Great Britain. He was the originator of the London School of
Linguistics and played important role in the foundation of linguistics as an
autonomous discipline. He is famous for his ideas on phonology and the study of
meaning.

Firth worked on prosody, the study of rhythm, intonation, and related

attributes in speech. The theory of the “context of the situation” became central
to his approach to linguistics. He held that language was not to be studied as an
isolated mental system, but as a response to the context of particular situations.
Firth and his ideas achieved prominence in Britain, with his London School, and
his student Michael Halliday developed his systemic linguistics by elaborating
on the foundations laid by Firth. Firth's work is thus a significant contribution to
our understanding of human language, one of the key cognitive achievements of
82
human beings that support the development of society, culture, science,
literature, and all forms of knowledge.

Life

J. R. Firth was born in Keighley, Yorkshire, England on June 17, 1890.

He attended the local grammar school, after which he studied at Leeds
University, obtaining his BA and MA in history. He also briefly taught history at
a Leeds teacher training college.

In 1914, Firth went to India to work for the Indian Education Service. As World
War I had just started, Firth joined the military service, serving in
India, Afghanistan, and Africa. After the war he was named professor of English
at the University of Punjab. There he became interested in languages and started
his life-long journey into linguistics.

In 1926, Firth briefly returned to Britain, staying for a year. He returned again in
1928, when he received a position in the Department of Phonetics at University
College London. At the same time, he also taught at the London School of
Economics (LSE) and at Oxford University. At LSE, he met Bronislaw
Malinowski who influenced some of his later ideas.

Firth published his two famous works, Speech (1930) and Tongues of
Men (1937) while staying at the University College London. He also published
several smaller works on the phonology of languages such as Burmese and
Tamil.

Firth spent 15 months (in the period between 1937 and 1938) on a research
fellowship in India, where he studied languages such as Gujarati and Telugu. In
1938, he returned to London, receiving a position in the Department of
Phonetics and Linguistics at London University’s School of Oriental and African
Studies. He was made a reader in 1940, and head of department in 1941.

83
With the start of World War II, Firth ran intensive training courses in Japanese
language for the soldiers to be sent to the Pacific front. Firth was awarded the
Order of the British Empire in 1946 for this work.

In 1944, Firth became Professor of General Linguistics at London University’s

School of Oriental and African Studies, the first such position in Great Britain.
He held that position until his retirement in 1956.

While at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies,

Firth developed his ideas on phonology, which are regarded as his greatest
contribution to linguistics. With a group of colleagues, he formed a “London
School of Linguistics,” which was based on Firth’s particular ideas in this area.
Firth died suddenly on December 14, 1960 in Lindfield, Sussex, England.

Work

Firth’s two most famous works are Speech (1930) and Tongues of Men,
written in 1937. Targeting a wide audience, Firth used simple language in
describing what later became recognized as Firthian linguistics. Firth wanted to
promote linguistics as an independent science, and thus he concluded both
works with a call for establishment of linguistic institutes. In Speech, Firth wrote
that Britain needed to invest more in the study of English language, as well as
other languages of the British Empire.

Context of situation

Firth is noted for drawing attention to the context-dependent nature of

meaning with his notion of "context of situation." The theory of the “context of
the situation” became central to his approach to linguistics. For Firth, language
was not to be studied as a mental system. Rather, in the spirit
of positivism and behaviorism, he argued that language represents a set of events
which speakers uttered—an action one learned in doing things. He believed that
whatever anyone said must be understood in the context of the situation. Thus,

84
beside linguistic factors, factors like the status and personal history of the
speaker, as well as the social character of the situation, must also be taken into
account. Firth described the "typical" context of situation as the occasions where
we use ready-made, socially-prescribed phrases such as “How do you do?”

Prosodic Analysis

Firth also greatly contributed to prosody, the study of rhythm, intonation,

and related attributes in speech. He first set out his phonological ideas on
prosody in his Sounds and Prosodies (1948). Firth rejected purely phonemic
analysis, as practiced by leading phonologists at the time (such as Nikolai S.
Trubetzkoy and Leonard Bloomfield). Firth argued that there was a clear
separation between phonetics and phonology. Furthermore, phonematic units
and prosodies are not assumed to have obvious phonetic content, and must be
accompanied by "exponency" statements explaining how a particular piece of
phonological structure maps onto the phonetics. With such assumptions,
Firthians were able to combine an abstract phonology with detailed phonetic
description.

Firth’s work on which he emphasized at the expense of the phonemic principle

prefigured later work in autosegmental phonology.

Phonestheme

The term "phonestheme" (or "phonaestheme" in British English) was

coined in 1930 by Firth (from the Greek phone = "sound," and aisthanomai =
"perceive") to label the systematic pairing of form and meaning in a language. In
the case of phonesthemes, the internal structure of the word is non-
compositional; a word with a phonestheme in it has other material in it that is
not itself a morpheme. For example, the English phonaestheme "gl-" can be
found in words relating to light or vision, such as glow, glitter, glare, glisten,
85
gleam, and so forth. The remainder of each word (-ow, -itter, -are, -isten, -eam)
however is not itself a morpheme and does not make meaningful contribution to
the words. Other examples of phonesthemes include "sn-," (related to the mouth
or nose, as in snarl, snout, snicker, snack, and so on), and "sl-" (appears in words
denoting frictionless motion, like slide, slick, sled, and so on.)

Firth also studied phonological features of speech such as intonation, stress, and
nasalization. He noticed that they differ considerably across languages.

Legacy

As a teacher in the University of London for more than 20 years, Firth

influenced a generation of British linguists. The popularity of his ideas among
contemporaries gave rise to what was known as the London School of
Linguistics. Among Firth's students, the so-called neo-Firthians were
exemplified by Michael Halliday, who was professor of general linguistics in the
University of London from 1965 until 1970. At the time of his death, Firth was
recognized as the utmost leader of British linguistics.

Outside of Great Britain however, Firth’s influence was limited. Although

he lectured abroad, especially in the United States, he never gained any
significant support for his views. In the U.S. it was Kenneth L. Pike who
acknowledged Firth’s ideas.

In the 1960s and 1970s, many of Firthian ideas were challenged by

general generative linguistics and overtaken by the work of Morris Halle and
Noam Chomsky. Some basic ideas of Firth, however, survived and were taken
up by his student Michael Halliday, who founded Systemic Functional
Linguistics. Also, the theory that the autonomous phoneme is an untenable
object can be traced to Firthian linguistics.

86
Speech Act Theory

The theory of speech acts has been initiated as a reaction to many earlier
linguistic theories which disregarded language as action. This theory had its
origin in the British philosophy. It was initiated as a theory of thinking by the
British philosopher J.L. Austin (1911-1960). It has been modified and developed
in the course of time to be known as "speech act theory", and later adopted and
further developed by the American philosopher Searle (1969) in his influential
book entitled Speech Act. (See Mey, 1993:109-10)

The term "speech act' has originally come as a translation of the German
term Sprechakt of Buhler 1934 (Lyons, 1977:726)(1). It was adopted and utilized
by Austin in his theory in a series of lectures delivered in 1955 which were
published in a book after his death in 1962, entitled How to Do Things with
Words. Austin's theory has since been developed and modified in a way that has
made it attract the attention of many contemporary scholars from different fields
of knowledge: anthropologists (eg, Malinowski, 1922), linguists (eg, Firth,
1957), sociologists (eg, Mead, 1934), sociolinguists (eg, Hymes, 1971),
pragmaticists (eg, Bach and Harnish, 1979; Levinson,1983; Leech,1983;
Verschueren, 1987 and Yule, 1996), literary pragmaticists (eg, van Dijk, 1976
and Pratt, 1977), stylists (eg, Leech, 1969; Hickey, 1989), applied linguists (eg,
Bates, 1976 and Traugott & Pratt, 1980), generative transformationalists (eg,
Chomsky, 1965), semanticists (eg, Katz, 1977; Lyons, 1977; Palmer, 1981 and
Saeed, 1997) and Philosophers (eg, Strawson, 1950; Austin, 1962; Searle 1969;

1
() However, the ideological and methodological roots of speech act theory in Western
thought dates back to the pre-Socratic philosophers and the Old Testament. It has also a
powerful force in the margins of the dominant Platonic Christian scientific intellectual
tradition (Robinson, 1997:1).
87
Sadock, 1974 and Grice, 1975). (See al-Sulaimaan,
1997:4)

The most essential motivation leading to the discovery of the speech act
theory is that the limitation of semantic analysis based on truth-condition; the
restriction of semantic treatment to a mere class of sentences, the so called
"statements" or declaratives whose existence requires that a sentence be verified
as true or false according to certain truths about the world. If one says:

41. It's cold outside.,

we can verify the truth or falsity of this sentence by going outside and checking
whether it is true or not. But we cannot do so in:

42. Have a nice time.

We cannot talk in (42) about the truth or falsity of this utterance as we realize
that the speaker is not here stating something, nevertheless, he wants to express
his feeling or wish towards a particular person or persons (Adams, 1985: 4).

Further, Austin (1962:12) argues that the speaker in example (42) above
intends to express his wish by using such words or expressions, or as he puts it
"to say something is to do something". Moreover, he adds that we often do
things with words when we use them to perform actions such as promising,
welcoming, boasting, affirming, advising, and so on.

This suggests that in addition to the particular class of statements, there

are other types of utterances that are issued to perform certain actions in the
world which constitute an integral part of how language is used in a
communitysuch lists of sentences are speech acts since their occurrence
requires performing or doing things. (See also Mey, 1993:110).

In a related direction, Yule (1996a:47) observes that the powerful speaker

who says:

88
43. You're fired,

is performing the act of ending an employment of the addressee, as his

communicative intention is recognized by the hearer. Here, both the speaker and
hearer are involved in this action that is surrounded by certain circumstances. He
calls (ibid) such circumstances the speech event, illustrating that it is "the speech
event that determines the interpretation of an utterance as performing a
particular speech act". For instance, the speaker, on a wintry day, who utters:

44. This tea is really cold.,

is showing a "complaint" ,whereas the same utterance is taken to be a praise, if it

is uttered in a really hot summer day. In short, the same utterance is interpreted
as two distinct kinds of speech act (complaint and praise) since it occurs in two
different circumstances (ie, different speech events).

The successful performance of a specific speech act is determined by two

conditions: Interactivity and context dependence as suggested by Saeed
(1997:204). The former indicates that "communicating functions involve the
speaker in a coordinated activity with other language users". For example, the
speech act of "betting" only comes into existence when the participants interact
with each other. One can not be sure that:

45. I bet you five pounds he doesn't get elected.

is taken to be a bet unless the other party (hearer) responds with.

46. You're on.

Yet, not all speech acts require such explicit responses, for example greeting,
requesting and promising do not need the hearer to reply in this way.

By context dependence, we mean the social conventions utilized to

support the issuance of speech acts. I sentence you to hang by the neck until

89
dead must be said by a judge in the court as he directs his utterance towards the
criminal in the cage. This speech act of sentencing can only be performed by the
relevant person (judge) in the right situation (court). This act is also governed by
social laws and conventions. (ibid.: 205).

As the interpretation of speech act is often governed by the fact that the
speaker intends to achieve a certain effect on the hearer by utilizing the social
conventions, Adams (1985:46) distinguishes between intentional and
conventional speech acts, affirming that most speech acts are intentional in the
sense that they are communicative. In making a promise, for example, a speaker
intends to obligate himself to the future act. It is his intention rather than
convention that obligates him to the future act, whereas conventional speech acts
are greatly influenced by the circumstances in which speech acts occur. They are
often not difficult to understand, ie, we can make promises to people in different
situations, but we only fire certain people under certain circumstances. He (ibid.)
cites the following examples to clarify the above distinction, that is, each of the
following exhibits a different interpretation:

47. You'll be fired.

48. You are fired.

Adams (ibid.) argues that (47) is considered an intentional speech act

since it is open to interpretation and misunderstanding ,whereas (48) which is a
conventional speech act, uttered under the appropriate circumstances, is not
open to such interpretation and misunderstanding. The hearer in (48), as said by
that angry boss, recognizes that he is fired. Thus conventional speech acts must
often be defined in terms of the contexts in which they are exploited.

Searle stresses the significance and importance of the analysis of speech

acts, since all linguistic communication implies linguistic acts. To use Searle's
words, "speaking a language is performing speech acts", such as promising,

90
swearing, commanding, requesting, etc. In this respect, Searle's theory of speech
acts seems to be based on the principle that:

The unit of linguistic communication is not as has generally been

supposed, the symbol, word or sentence, or even the token of the symbol,
word or sentence, but rather the production or issuance of the symbol or
word or sentence in the performance of the speech act… particularly, the
production or issuance of a sentence token under certain conditions is a
speech act, and speech acts, are the basic or minimal units of linguistic
communication. (Searle, 1969:16 & 1971: 39)

To sum up, a speech act theory is a theory that involves a communicative

activity achieved in relation to the speaker's intention and the hearer's
interpretation in a certain situation under certain social conventions or rules.

3.3 Austin (1962)

J.L. Austin was the first to draw attention to utterances by which the
speaker not only says something but also performs something. He (1962:6) calls
such a type of utterances performatives, as they do not describe or constate
information but rather perform action. He proceeds to refute the traditional
philosophical view that focuses merely on the class of statements used to
describe some state of affairs or to state some facts that can be either true or
false. He (ibid.:3) calls such a type of utterances constatives. Constatives (in
Wardhaugh's 1976:96 words) are propositions which can be stated positively or
negatively, ie, are statements of facts which could be either right or wrong, as
shown in the examples:

49. He's Fred's Cousin.

50. The sun will rise at seven tomorrow.

91
One can assess the truth or falsity of these sentences in reference to the
information in the world.

In contrast to constatives, Austin (ibid.:5) remarks that performtives are

formulated, under appropriate conditions, not to describe something but to
achieve something. For instance, by saying:

51. I bequeath my car to my brother.

52. I bet you six pence it will rain.,

the speaker is not stating some facts about the world, but rather he is performing
the act of bequeathing and betting.

In illustrating the difference between constatives (or declaratives) and

performatives, Levin (1976:142) claims that the difference between:

53. I like the red one.

and

54. I choose the red one.

is that the speaker in (53) is stating some information about himself or his
preference but not performing the act of liking, whereas in (54), he is
performing the act of choosing.

Being interested in perfomatives, Austin (pp.14-15) seeks to find the

adequate circumstances under which a performative utterance goes happy
(felicitous). He specifies the required conditions for the successful performance
of an utterance, calling them the felicity conditions, which include:

(i) There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain

conventional effect.
(ii) The persons and circumstances for a certain speech act must be
appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked.
92
 (iii) The procedure must be executed by all participants both correctly and
completely.
Violation of any of these conditions will render the speech act infelicitous.

Accordingly, the utterance of the sentence I now pronounce you

husband and wife would be rendered happy if it is uttered by a priest to a pair
of man and woman in the church, as people all gather for celebrating the
wedding ceremony. The whole action must be taken seriously by the participants
(priest and the couple); otherwise, the speech act of pronouncing would go
unhappy (infelicitous). If an act fails to conform to the required conventions, it
would be described as (in Austin's 1962: 16 word) misfire and if it is carried out
insincerely by the participants, it would be described as abuse (ibid.).

During his investigation of performatives, Austin (1962: 69) draws

attention to the distinction between implicit (primary) and explicit
performatives. The act of promising in English, for instance, can be shown in
two ways:

55. I'll be there at two o'clock. (Primary performative)

56. I promise to be there at two o'clock. (Explicit performative)

Lyons (1977:728) postulates that the first sentence is a primary

performative as it is commonly exploited to indicate a speech act of promise and
that no other interpretation may be accepted. The second sentence is clearly seen
as an explicit performative as it contains the performative verb promise in the
simple present indicative with the first person subject. Although both sentences
(55) and (56) are used to perform the same speech act (of promising) the second
(containing an explicit perfomrative) seems to be more specific in meaning than
the first.

Affirming that person and voice are not necessary in establishing

performative utterances, Austin (p. 57) points out that performative sentences
93
can also occur in the passive and with the second or third person (singular or
plural):

57. You are hereby authorized to pay …

58. Passengers are warned to cross the track by the bridge only.

59. Notice is hereby given that trespassers will be prosecuted. (ibid.)

As Austin went on in his investigation, he noticed that the sharp

distinction between constatives and performatives should be abandoned. He
observed that many declarative sentences are exploited in certain circumstances
not to describe a state of affairs but as a part of the action. Although the sentence
I state that there is life on earth has been already deemed as an example of the
constatives, it shows a strong tendency towards the performatives. Similarly, the
verbs: assert, declare, claim, mention, etc, seem to bear all the hallmarks of a
performative verb (Levin, 1976: 143).

What supports the view that there is no clear-cut distinction between

performatives and constatives (statements), is the examples that Quirk et al.
(1985: 804) offer, in which a statement is used to make an assertion in (60), to
make a prediction in (61) or to give an apology in (62):

60. Engineers are building massive hydroelectric project in China.

61. It's going to rain any minute now.

62. I'm sorry about the delay.

Further support stems from the fact that there are a certain group of
utterances containing performative verbs, in certain cases, cannot be described
as performing the relevant speech acts. Consider the following examples:

63. I kick old ladies in the shins.

64. Ed won't promise not to tell anyone.

94
The utterance of (63) does not constitute an act of old-lady-kicking; neither does
the utterance of (64) constitute an act of promising. Thus, these two sentences
would normally be treated as statements rather than performatives (Partridge,
1982: 15 and Huddleston, 1984: 358).

3.3.1 Locution, Illocution and Perlocution

Abandoning the dichotomy of constative / performative, Austin explains

that in issuing an utterance, a speaker can perform three acts simultaneously,
namely: locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts: (p.101ff).

The locutionary act is simply an act of uttering words that correspond to

the phonological, syntactic and semantic rules of language. In other words, a
locutionary act involves three sub-acts (i) the act of vocal noises (the phonetic
act), (ii) the act of words conforming to the lexicogrammtical rules (the phatic
act) and (iii) the act of using these words with certain sense and reference (the
rhetic act). Since an act is meaningful, it can be called a locutionary act.

The illocutionary act is an act that has a certain force in saying something.
It is the act of doing something in uttering something, thus it is identified with
reference to the communicative intention of the speaker to do a particular thing
or things by uttering his words. Austin is interested in the illocutionary act as the
term 'speech act' is taken to mean an illocutionary act. By uttering certain words,
a speaker can state, request, apologize, promise, approve, welcome, etc. By
saying, for example, Get out, the speaker is performing the act of ordering
someone to get out.

To draw a distinction between locutionary and illocutionary act, Austin

(1962: 98) clarifies that to perform a locutionary act in general is to perform an
illocutionary act, but the interpretation of the former is associated with meaning,

95
whereas the interpretation of the latter is associated with force(2) (Coulthard,
1985: 18).

Of course, illocutionary acts are bound with physical or psychological

effects on the hearer or listener; such effects are pragmatically known as
perlouctions. Thus, perlocoutionary act simply refers to the consequential effects
of uttering something on the audience or listener, such effects being unique to
the relevant circumstances. These effects, in Austin's (p.118) view, consist of the
achievement of perlocutionary object, perlocutionary sequent or both.

To account for the distinction between locutionary, illocutionary and

perlocutionary acts, let us consider Austin's (p.102) example: You can't do it.
The locutionary act represents the uttering of "you can't do it", the illocutionary
act is that of protesting (ie, I protested against your doing it) and the
perlocutionary act is the effect on saying this sentence on the hearer (ie, I might
stop him, annoy him or persuade him).

(See also Bates, 1976: 14f ; Levin, 1976: 144-5 ; L evinson, 1983: 236f and
Saeed, 1997: 212)

The distinction between an illocutionary act and a perlocutionary act lies

in the fact that the latter requires the former to be successful. If the speaker is
able to successfully issue the act of ordering by saying stop her, this utterance
could bring about the required perlocution by getting the hearer to stop her.
Therefore, it is to be noted that the conditions required for the successful
perlocutionary act involve both what the speaker says and its effect on the hearer
(Wardhaugh, 1976: 96)

3.3.2 Classification of Illouctionary Acts

2
()Allan distinguishes between an illocutionary act and an illocutionary force, stating that
the former refers to what the speaker does in uttering an utterance to the hearer in the
appropriate context, whereas an illocutionary force refers to the property of the utterance
that the speaker issues in performing the illocutionary act (1986: 175).
96
 Several attempts have been made to classify illocutionary acts into a
limited number of types. But such classifications often seem to be difficult to
carry out since there are a lot of potential illocutionary acts, verb-meanings are
often not easy to predict, and speakers' intentions are also not always obvious.
However, Austin (1962: 151), in terms of their illocutionary forces, distinguishes
five different groups of performative relying on the characteristic verb. They can
be:

1. Verdictives
This class of verbs is used to give verdicts, findings or judgements, such
as estimate, value, assess, appreciate, characterize, grade, etc. for example, the
umpire's Out; the jury's Guilty and the appraiser's:

65 I estimate forty dollars.

2. Excercitives

This class of verbs shows exercise of powers, rights or influence such as

order, dedicate, dismiss, appoint, name, sentence, claim, etc. For example, the
judge's I sentence you to five years; the employer's You are fired; and the
lawyer's I advise you to say nothing.

3. Commissives

This class indicates commitment or promises of different kinds or the

taking on of an obligation or states an intention. Verbs, such as promise (as
typical), guarantee, plan, swear, bet, etc, commit the speaker to doing
something. For example:

66. I promise to come earlier tomorrow.

67. I plan to leave by train.

4. Behabitives

97
 This class involves a miscellaneous group embracing expressions of
attitude and social behaviour, verbs like congratulate, compliment, welcome,
apologize; statements like I'm sorry and expressions of approval like Thank
you. Examples are:

68. I apologize for being late.

69. Thank you for offering me a cup of tea.

5. Expositives

This class of verbs is difficult to define (Austin, 1962: 152). Such verbs
keep discussion and argument going by providing different kinds of
clarification, verbs like ask, assume, concede, hypothesize, remark, expect, etc.
for example:

70. I expect it will rain soon.

Wardhaugh (1976:97) argues that the verbs of this class are not clear cut; they
often overlap but the general performative nature of individual utterances is
often quite clear.

3.4 Searle (1969)

Being interested in the philosophy of language(3), the American

philosopher, John Searle, published his Speech Acts (1969) as an analytical
modification and systematization of Austin's theory in connection with a single
speech act (ie, promising). He attempted to postulate the necessary and sufficient
conditions for the performance of the speech act of "promise" in the hope that
this would be taken as a practical step in the way that setting a pattern for

3
() The philosophy of language aims at giving illuminating philosophical analyses of
certain general features of language such as reference, truth, meaning and necessity. (See
Searle, 1969: 4)
98
analyzing other kinds of speech acts in general, to be followed by extracting the
corresponding semantic and syntactic rules which mark the utterance as an
illocutionary act of a certain type (Searle, 1971: 40). Broadly speaking, he
intended to generalize the idea of speech acts to cover all the utterances of the
English language.

Searle's model rests upon the idea that speaking a language is engaging in
a rule-governed form of behaviour. This means that in the production of
utterances, speaker performs illocutionary acts, such as asking questions,
making statements, giving commands, making promises, etc. These acts are
performed according to the rules of language. Thus, as he affirms "an adequate
study of speech act is a study of langue rather than of parole (Searle, 1969:17).

Meanwhile, he concedes that focus on the study and investigation of

speech acts stems from the view that "all linguistic communication involves
linguistic acts" (p.16). In other words, speech acts are the basic units of
linguistic communication, as the production of an utterance under certain
conditions constitutes issuing a speech act. A theory of language, according to
Searle's view, must be treated as part of a theory of action.

From a pragmasemantic point of view, because we often mean more than

we actually say, Searle points to the notion of 'expressibility' which indicates
that "whatever can be meant can be said" (p.19). He elaborates by stating that it
is not often possible to determine what type of speech act is performed in a
certain utterance in terms of the meaning of the sentence employed, for a
speaker often means more than what actually says, although, in principle, he can
say exactly what he means (p.18). For example, in saying:

71. Would you like a cup of tea? ,

the speaker intends his utterance to mean an offer rather than a question with a
yes/no answer.

99
 Semantically, the illocutionary force of an utterance can be expressed
through the "illocutionary force indicating devices"(or IFIDs) which imply
word-order, stress, intonation contour, and punctuation, the mood of the verb as
well as the use of a performative verb. In this connection, Leech (1983: 177)
criticizes Searle affirming that "in practice, the use of devices other than
performatives is not developed or illustrated in his [Searle's] work". To make his
point clearer, consider Searle's (p.30) example:

72. I promise that I will come.

The illocutionary force of this utterance is syntactically marked by the indicator

of illocutionary force (which reveals what illocutionary force the utterance is to
have) "I promise" and the indicator of propositional content "that I will come".
But this is not always the case, for there are a lot of English sentences in which
the illocutionary force is marked by a variety of devices, particularly those of
rather syntactically complicated structures(4).

3.4.1 Felicity Conditions

Establishing a satisfactory analysis of an illocuationary act requires that

certain necessary and sufficient conditions must be fulfilled if the performance
of an act is to be achieved happily and successfully.

Not fully convinced with Austin's felicity conditions (as accounting for
only ritual and ceremonial speech acts, such as; naming a ship, bequeathing a
watch, etc), Searle (1969: 57ff) sets up four kinds of conditions which govern
the happy execution of an illocuationary act, so that the violation of any of them
would render the act infelicitous.

1. Propositional content conditions

4
() Compare the utterance "I promise to come" with (72).
100
 These conditions specify restrictions on the content of the speaker's
utterance expressed in a sentence (declarative, imperative, interrogative, etc).
For example, in the speech act of request: come here, please, the propositional
content condition requires a future act of the hearer.

2. Preparatory Conditions

These conditions designate the real world prerequisites to each

illocutionary act. That is, they have to do with the status of the speaker
performing the act who has the right or authority to do so. They also match the
appropriate utterance to the related illocutionary act. For example, the
preparatory conditions for the speech act of request state that (i) the speaker
believes that the hearer can do the act, and (ii) it is not obvious that the hearer
would do the act without being asked.

101
3. Sincerity Conditions

They indicate the essential beliefs, feelings and intentions of the speaker,
being appropriate to the type of illocutionary act in question. If the speaker is
without the appropriate beliefs or desires, the act will be considered as abuse (in
Austin's (1962: 16) term). For example, for a request, the sincerity condition
involves that the speaker wants the hearer to do the act of request.

4. Essential conditions

They are the constitutive rules which govern the issuance of a certain
illocutionary act(5). In other words, they represent the syntactic and semantic
rules required for building up an utterance relating to a given speech act. For
example, in case of request, the utterance must count as an attempt to get the
hearer to do the act.

Levinson (1983:245) illustrates that saying that taking these conditions

altogether, one can specify the context in which a specific speech act is
performed, and moreover can provide a more abstract and principled
classification of illocutionary acts in terms of these conditions, because they can
jointly identify and constitute the nature of a particular speech act.

(For more information on these conditions, see Lyons, 1977: 733f;

Schiffrin, 1994: 65 and Saeed, 1997: 213)

3.4.2 Speech Act Components

5
() Searle (1969:33ff) distinguishes between two different but related types of rules:
regulative and constitutive. Regulative rules regulate or control antecedently the existing
activity, eg, traffic regulations, whereas constitutive rules create or constitute the activity
itself. (see also Levinson, 1983: 238)
102
 For Searle (1969: 24f), a speech act is composed of four sub actssimilar
to these proposed by Austin but rather more elaborate (i) utterance act, (ii)
propositional act, (iii) illocutionary act, and (iv) perlocutionary act.

An utterance act (which is an amalgamation of both Austin's phonetic and

phatic acts) is simply "the act of uttering sounds, syllables, words, phrases and
sentences from a language" (Akmajian et al., 2001: 394). The propositional act
expresses the propositional content of the utterance(6).In performing an utterance
act we usually perform an illocutionary act. The effect of an utterance on the
addressee is the perlocutionary act.

The most important point is that these inseparable acts occur

simultaneously and that the execution of illocutionary acts implies the
performance of both the propositional acts and utterance acts.

But, sometimes the same propositional act can be used to refer to different
illocutionary acts. Let us consider Searle's examples (p.22):

73. a. Sam smokes habitually.

b. Does Sam smoke habitually ?

c. Sam, smoke habitually !

d. Would that Sam smoked habitually ?

Although the above utterances in (73) have the same propositional content (the
same subject "Sam" and the same predicate "smokes habitually"), they designate
different illocutionary acts (speech acts). In uttering (a), the speaker makes an
assertion, in (b) asks a question, in (c) gives an order, and in (d) expresses a wish
or desire.

6
() A proposition is the unit of meaning that identifies the subject matter of a statement:
it describes some state of affairs, and takes the form of a declarative sentence as in John
likes Mary (Crystal, 1997: 107).
103
3.4.3 Searle's (1979) Classification of Speech Acts

Searle (1979) criticizes Austin's taxonomy of illocutionary acts as it is

based on overlapping criteria. According to Searle, this taxonomy does not show
the difference between speech act verbs and speech acts, and moreover ignores
the fact that the existence and non-existence of each of them does not
necessarily require the existence or non-existence of the other.

He also notes that "there is a great deal of overlap from one category to
another and a great deal of heterogeneity within some of the categories" (p.10).
In other words, some verbs can be found in more than one category. For
example the verb "describe" is placed according to Austin's taxonomy into both
Verdictives and Expositives. Likewise, some categories contain verbs that do not
satisfy the definition of the category itself. For example, the verb "nominate",
"appoint" and "excommunicate" do not designate the "giving of a decision in
favour of or against a certain course of action" (p.11).

Furthermore, Austin's claim that there is an explicit performative verb

(such as "to sentence", "to baptize","to name" and so on) corresponding to every
illocutionary act seems to be defective and unconvincing, for two reasons. First,
there are a lot of speech acts in language that are not expressed by the use of the
performative verbs, such as "Out" , "Hush", etc. Second, this claim motivates
Austin to base his taxonomy on the institutional and ceremonial speech act verbs
(christening, finding guilty, naming a ship, and the like) which do not constitute
the whole number of the verbs in English.

(For more details on criticizing Austin's view, see Mey, 1993:11 and Yusuf ,
1997: 22 ).

104
 As a result, Searle (1979:12-7) proposes an alternative taxonomy based on
felicity conditions (which he has established) in which illocutionary acts are
grouped under five basic categories.

Before embarking on a discussion of the categories of speech acts, it is

important to know the dimensions on which Searle depends in distinguishing
between these five classes. Although he lists twelve, in fact, he relies on four of
them in his classification(7).

1. Illocutionary Point

The illocutionary point of a request is to get the hearer to do something,

whereas for promise, it is an undertaking of an obligation by the speaker to do
something.

2. Direction of Fit

It refers to the way the words match the world. For example, both
commissives and directives are based on a world-to-words direction of fit. To
fulfill his request, the world must be changed according to the speaker's words.

3. Expressed Psychological State

The psychological state of commissives, for example, is intention,

whereas the psychological state expressed by representatives is belief.

4. Propositional Content

7
() The twelve dimensions which Searle (1979) relies on are: (1) Illocutionary point, (2)
Direction of fit, (3) Expressed psychological state, (4) Force or strength (5) Social status,
(6) Interest of the speaker or hearer, (7) Discourse-related functions, (8) Propositional
content, (9) Speech acts or speech act verb, (10) Societal institutions and speech acts, (11)
Speech acts and performatives, (12) Style.
105
 This principle is connected with the "differences in propositional content
that are determined by illocutionary force indicating devices" (Searle, 1979:5)
Thus, "promising" differs from "reporting" because the former is about future,
whereas the latter can be about past or present.

The five classes of speech acts are:

1. Assertives (Representatives)

The point or goal of this class of speech acts is to "commit the speaker (in
varying degrees) to something's being the case, to the truth of the expressed
proposition" (p.12). Assertives have a word-to-world direction of fit, ie, the
speaker fits his words to the world in order to express a belief through the
established proposition. This class includes verbs such as assert, complain,
state, affirm, report, conclude, etc.

Searle notes that this category contains most of Austin's Expositives and
Verdictives, as they denote the same illocutionary point but different
illocutionary force. The simplest test for representatives is that they can be
verified as true or false. In other words, they indicate what the speaker believes
to be the case or not, as in the examples:

74. The earth is round.

75. Milton wrote religious poems.

2. Directives

The illocutionary point is to direct the hearer towards doing (or not doing)
something; therefore, they designate a world-to-words direction of fit. The
speaker wishes or wants the hearer to do (or not to do) something. Directives
include verbs such as; ask, order, request, demand, advise, warn, etc .The
speaker uses the following utterances to get someone else to do something:

106
76. Give me some water.

77. Don’t touch that loose wire.

3. Commissives

Commissives are speech acts in which the speaker is committed to some

future course of action. The promiser attempts to make the world fit his words.
The issuer of a promise intends to do something by uttering his words. Verbs
denoting commissives are as such; promise, vow, commit, threaten, pledge, etc.
In the following utterances, the speaker commits himself to a certain course of
action:

78. I'll be here tomorrow.

79. We won't do it again.

4. Expressives

Expressives are speech acts that express "the psychological state specified
in the sincerity condition about a state of affairs specified in the propositional
content." In other words, they express the speaker's psychological state:
pleasure, pain, likes, dislikes or sorrow, as clearly shown in the examples:

80. I'm so sorry.

81. Congratulations!

The have no direction of fit in which a wide range of feelings and

attitudes can be expressed through the propositional content. This class
comprises verbs such as apologize, thank, congratulate, welcome, condole etc.

5. Declarations

This class of illocutions brings into existence the state described in the
proposition. They have both a words-to-world and a world-to-words direction of

107
fit; therefore, they change the world via their utterance. There is no
psychological state expressed by declaration. Verbs denoting declarations are:
quit, nominate, appoint, declare, name, etc. many of them are Austin's earlier
performative utterances as in:

82. Judge : We find Joe guilty.

83. Priest : I now pronounce you husband and wife.

Saeed (1997:214) observes that the assumption underlying those

classification systems (Austin's and Searle's) is that they are all based on the
correlation between form (of the verb) and function (of speech act). This means
that a sentence type is first specified and then a speech act is assigned to it.

Particularly, Verschueren (1999: 24) explains that Searle's taxonomy has

faced two points of difficulty. First, the categories are by no means mutually
exclusive. He notes that the actual language use implies many types of acts that
are hybrids, for example "threats of the type If I ever see you with my sister
again, I'll kill you" can be grouped under both directives and commissives.
Second, he (ibid.) explains that Searle's classification is entirely based on the
three dimensions of variation of psychological state, direction of fit and
illocutionary point. This means that when other dimensions are selected as a
starting point (such as relative strength or differences in the status relation
between speaker and hearer) then one would end up with a different
classification.

In his discussion of speech acts, van Dijk (1977:198) asserts that all
illocutionary acts require at least two persons: Speaker and Hearer. This is a
socially determined context in which a hearer is present and "in which a change
is brought about in the hearer, conventionally in accordance with the
intentions/purposes of the speaker". This is why no promise is made if no hearer

108
is assumed to be present, simply by making an utterance which would have been
a promise if such a hearer would have been present.

Unlike Austin, who considers the speech act unhappy if its intended
perlocution is not realized, van Dijk differentiates between I-successful and p-
successful speech acts. I-success is defined in that the result of the illocutionary
act is not some utterance product, but some intended state brought about by the
understanding of the utterance in the hearer. Fully I-successful illocutionary acts
are those that succeed in making the hearer know what speech act is involved.
Partially I-successful speech acts are those in which the hearer fails to
understand the illocutionary intentions of the speaker, although understanding
what is said (ibid.).

P-successful speech acts are those whose purposes are realized in terms of
bringing about some change in the hearer as a consequence of the illocutionary
act. Thus, an advice is P-successful if the hearer follows the advice or acts upon
it as "purposed by the speaker and as a consequence of the recognition of the I-
successful illocutionary act"(ibid.:199).

109