1

WHAT IS
LINGUISTICS?
Most people spend an immense amount of their life talking, listening, and, in
advanced societies, reading and writing. Normal conversation uses 4,000 or 5,000
words an hour. A radio talk, where there are fewer pauses, uses as many as 8,000 or
9,000 words per hour. A person reading at a normal speed covers 14,000 or 15,000
words per hour. So someone who chats for an hour, listens to a radio talk for an hour
and reads for an hour possibly comes into contact with 25,000 words in that time.
Per day, the total could be as high as 100,000.
The use of language is an integral part of being human. Children all over the
world start putting words together at approximately the same age, and follow
remarkably similar paths in their speech development.
All languages are surprisingly similar in their basic structure, whether they are found
in South America, Australia or near the North Pole. Language-and abstract thought
are closely connected, and many people think that these two characteristics above all
distinguish human beings from animals.
An inability to .use language adequately can affect someone’s status in society,
and may even alter their personality. Because of its crucial importance in human life,
every year an increasing number of psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists,
teachers, speech therapists, computer scientists and copywriters (to name but a few
professional groups) realize that they need to study language more deeply. So it is
not surprising that in recent years one of the fastest-expanding branches of
knowledge has been linguistics – the systematic study of language.
Linguistics tries to answer the the basic question ‘What is language?’ and ‘How
does language work?’. It probes into various aspects of
 these problems, such as ‘What do all languages have in common?’, It is a common fallacy that there is some absolute standard of cor-
‘What range of variation is found among languages?’. 'How does rectness which it is the duty of linguists, schoolmasters, grammars and
human language differ from animal communication?'. 'How does a dictionaries to maintain. There was an uproar in America when in 1961
child learn to speak?’, ‘How does one write down and analyse an Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language
unwritten language?’, 'Why do languages change?’ ‘To what extent are included words such as ain't and phrases such as ants in one's pants. The
social class differences reflected in language?’ and so on. editors were deliberately corrupting the language -or else they were
incompetent, argued the critics. "Webster III has thrust upon us a
dismaying assortment of the questionable, the perverse, the unworthy
----------------- What is a linguist? ------------------- and the downright outrageous', said one angry reviewer. But if people
A person who studies linguistics is usually referred to as a linguist. say ain't and ants in one's pants, linguists consider it important to record
The more accurate term 'linguistician' is too much of a tongue-twister to the fact. They are observers and recorders, not judges.
become generally accepted. The word 'linguist' is unsatisfactory: it causes 'I am irritated by the frequent use of the words different to on radio
confusion, since it also refers to someone who speaks a large number of and other programmes' ran a letter to a daily paper. 'In my schooldays of
languages. Linguists in the sense of linguistics experts need not be fluent fifty years ago we were taught that things were alike to and different
in languages, though they must have a wide experience of different types from. Were our teachers so terribly ignorant?' This correspondent has not
of languages. It is more important for them to analyse and explain realized that languages are constantly changing. And the fact that he
linguistic phenomena such as the Turkish vowel system, or German verbs, comments on the frequent use of different to indicates that it has as much
than to make themselves understood in Istanbul or Berlin. They are skilled, right to be classified as 'correct' as different from.
objective observers rather than participants – consumers of languages The notion of absolute and unchanging 'correctness' is quite foreign to
rather than producers, as one social scientist flippantly commented. linguists. They might recognize that one type of speech appears, through
Our type of linguist is perhaps best likened to a musicologist. A the whim of fashion, to be more socially acceptable than others. But this
musicologist could analyse a piano concerto by pointing out the theme and does not make the socially acceptable variety any more interesting for
variations, harmony and counterpoint. But such a person need not actually them than the other varieties, or the old words any better than new ones.
play the concerto, a task left to the concert pianist. Music theory bears the To linguists the language of a pop singer is not intrinsically worse (or
same relation to actual music as linguistics does to language. better) than that of a duke. They would disagree strongly with the Daily
Telegraph writer who complained that 'a disc jockey talking to the latest
____ How does linguistics differ ______ Neanderthal pop idol js a truly shocking experience of verbal squalor'.
Nor do linguists condemn the coining of new words. This is a natural
from traditional grammar? and continuous process, not a sign of decadence and decay. A linguist
would note with interest, rather than horror, the fact that you can have
your hair washed and set in a glamorama in North Carolina, or your car
One frequently meets people who think that linguistics is old school
grammar jazzed up with a few new names. But it differs in several basic oiled at a lubritorium in Sydney, or that you can buy apples at a fruitique
ways. in a trendy suburb of London.
First, and most important, linguistics is descriptive; not prescriptive. A second important way in which linguistics differs from traditional
Linguists are interested in what is said, not what they think ought to be school grammar is that linguists regard the spoken language as primary,
said. They describe language in all its aspects, but do not prescribe rules of not the written. In the past, grammarians have over-stressed the
‘correctness’. importance of the written word, partly because of its permanence. It was
difficult to cope with fleeting utterances before the invention of sound
recording. The traditional classical education was also partly to blame. Purists insist that, because a Latin infinitive is only one word, its English
People insisted on moulding language in accordance with the usage of the equivalent must be as near to one word as possible. To linguists, it is
'best authors' of classical times, and these authors existed only in written unthinkable to judge one language by the standards of another. Since
form. This attitude began as far back as the 2nd century B.C. when scholars split infinitives occur frequently in English, they are as 'correct' as
in Alexandria took the authors of 5th-century Greece as their models. This unsplit ones.
belief in the superiority of the written word has continued for over two In brief, linguists are opposed to the notion that any one language can
millennia. provide an adequate framework for all the others. They are trying to set
But linguists look first at the spoken word, which preceded the written up a universal framework. And there is no reason why this should
everywhere in the world, as far as we know. Moreover, most writing resemble the grammar of Latin, or the grammar of any other language
systems are derived from the vocal sounds. Although spoken utterances arbitrarily selected from the thousands spoken by humans.
and written sentences share many common features, they also exhibit
considerable differences. Linguists therefore regard spoken and written
forms as belonging to different, though overlapping systems, which must
------------The scope of linguistics -----------------
be analysed separately: the spoken first, then the written.
A third way in which linguistics differs from traditional grammar Linguistics covers a wide range of topics and its boundaries are difficult
studies is that it does not force languages into a Latin-based framework. In to define.
the past, many traditional textbooks have assumed unquestioningly that A diagram in the shape of a wheel gives a rough impression of the
Latin provides a universal framework into which all languages fit, and range covered (Figure 1).
countless schoolchildren have been confused by meaningless attempts to In the centre is phonetics, the study of human speech sounds.
force English into foreign patterns. It is sometimes claimed, for example,
that a phrase such as for John is in the 'dative case'. But this is blatantly
untrue, since English does not have a Latin-type case system. At other
times, the influence of the Latin framework is more subtle, and so more
misleading. Many people have wrongly come to regard certain Latin
categories as being 'natural' ones. For example, it is commonly assumed
that the Latin tense divisions of past, present and future are inevitable: Yet
one frequently meets languages which do not make this neat threefold
distinction. In some languages, it is more important to express the duration
of an action - whether it is a single act or a continuing process - than to
locate the action in time.
In addition, judgements on certain constructions often turn out to have a
Latin origin. For example, people frequently argue that 'good English'
avoids 'split infinitives' as in the phrase to humbly apologize, where the
infinitive to apologize is 'split' by humbly. A letter to the London Evening
Standard is typical of many: 'Do split infinitives madden your readers as
much as they do me?' asks the correspondent. 'Can I perhaps ask that, at
least, judges and editors make an effort to maintain the form of our
language?' The idea that a split infinitive is wrong is based on Latin.

Fig.1. 11 1
A good knowledge of phonetics is useful for a linguist. Yet it is a basic wrong, but of words gradually shifting their meaning, with the terms
background knowledge, rather than part of linguistics itself. Phoneticians ‘syntax’ and ‘grammar’ extending their range.
are concerned with the actual physical sounds, the raw material out of Around the central grammatical hub comes pragmatics, which deals
which language is made. They study the position of the tongue, teeth and with how speakers use language in ways which cannot be predicted from
vocal cords during the production of sounds, and record and analyse sound linguistic knowledge alone. This relatively new arid fast expanding topic
waves. Linguists, on the other hand, are more interested in the way in has connections both with semantics, and with the various branches of
which language is patterned. They analyse the shape or form of these linguistics which link language with the external world:
patterns rather than the physical substance out of which the units of psycholinguistics (the study of language and mind), socio-linguistics
language are made. The famous Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, (the study of language and society), applied linguistics (the application
expressed the difference well when he compared language with a game of of linguistics to language teaching), computational linguistics (the use
chess. The linguist is interested in the various moves which the chessmen of computers to simulate language and its workings), stylistics (the
make and how they are aligned on the board. It does not matter whether study of language and literature), anthropological linguistics (the study
the chessmen are made of wood or ivory. Their substance does not alter of language in cross-cultural settings), philosophical linguistics (the
the rules of the game. link between language and logical thought).
Although phonetics and linguistics are sometimes referred to together as These various branches overlap to some extent, so are hard to define
'the linguistic sciences', phonetics is not as central to general linguistics as clearly. Psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics are perhaps the ones
the study of language patterning. For this reason, information about which have expanded fastest in recent years. For this reason, they are
phonetics has been placed in an appendix at the end of the book. given chapters to themselves in this book.
In Figure 1, phonetics is surrounded by phonology (sound patterning), Finally, there are two important aspects of linguistics which have been
then phonology is surrounded by syntax. The term 'syntax', used in its omitted from the diagram. The first is historical linguistics, the study of
broadest sense, refers to both the arrangement and the form of words. It is language change. This omission was inevitable in a two-dimensional
that part of language which links together the sound patterns and the diagram. But if the wheel diagram is regarded as three-dimensional, as if
meaning. Semantics (meaning) is placed outside syntax. Phonology, it were the cross-section of a tree, then we can include this topic. We can
syntax and semantics are the 'bread and butter' of linguistics, and are a either look at a grammar at one particular point in time (a single cut
central concern of this book. Together they constitute the grammar of a across the tree), or we can study its development over a number of years,
language (Figure 2). by comparing a number of different cuts made across the tree trunk at
GRAMMAR different places (Figure 3).
Because it is normally necessary to know how a system works at any
one time before one can hope to understand changes, the analysis
PHONOLOGY SYNTAX SEMANTICS

Fig. 2
But a word of warning about differences in terminology must be added.
In some (usually older) textbooks, the word 'grammar' has a more
restricted use. It refers only to what we have called the syntax. In these
books, the term 'syntax' is restricted to the arrangement of words, and the
standard term morphology is used for their make-up. This is not a case of
one group of linguists being right in their use of terminology, and the other

Fig.
33
of language at a single point in time, or synchronic linguistics, is usually
dealt with before historical or diachronic linguistics.
The second omission is linguistic typology, the study of different
language types. This could not be fitted in because it spreads over several
layers of the diagram, covering phonology, syntax, and semantics.
This chapter has explained how linguistics differs from traditional
grammar studies, and has outlined the main subdivisions within the
subject. The next chapter will look at the phenomenon studied by lin-
guistics, language.

QUESTIONS

Test yourself on what you have read in Chapter 1 by answering the