CEBU INTERNATIONAL DISTANCE EDUCATION COLLEGE

#22280 J. Seno Street, Mabolo, Cebu City, Cebu, Philippines 6000

Tel. Nos.: +63(032)231-8800 /+63(032)266-5551 /+63(032)234-4508
E-mail: info@cidec-edu.com / FB Page: Cidec Edu
www.cidec-edu.com

Introduction to the English Language System

Module 1

Name:
Subject
Course & year:
Teacher:
Course Name: Introduction to the English Language System
Course Description: This course explains the nature and essential features of
a language. It Provides an overview of the phonological system, morphological
system, syntactic system, and semantic system of the English Language. It gives
an introduction to discourse as well as language acquisition and language
change.

Learning outcomes: The students should be able to:

 Explain the nature of language
 Define the discipline of linguistics and its major subfields
 Describe and analyze the essential features of the English Language
System, and
 Explain how knowledge of the English Language System leads to its
effective learning and use.

Lesson
1
Introduction

The study of Language

“History is universal and basic,” a history professor said during a faculty meeting, “It’s about
every event that involves all people at all times and in all places.” “Yes,” observed his colleague from
linguistics, “but how would you record and interpret that history without language?” Indeed, it is hard to
imagine how there could even be history without language, without a means to pass a record of what has
happened from one generation to the next through retold stories and sagas, even before written records.
Much of the history (and prehistory) of the human species consists of the development and adaptation of
various tools to meet a broad range of needs: think of the wheel, the domestication of animals, the steam
engine, computers and the internet. The development and refinement of these and all other tools could not
have been accomplished without language.

The human capacity for self-awareness and abstract thought is facilitated by language, if not dependent upon
it. The ability to transfer complex information, to discuss the meaning of events and possible outcomes of
alternative actions, to share feelings and ideas – all these are impossible without language. The origins of
language are shrouded in obscurity, but archaeological records suggest that communication with language
emerged about 200,000 years ago. The ability for an individual to model the world for him/herself and to
communicate using language was probably the single most advantageous evolutionary adaptation of the
human species.

Universal properties of language

Over thousands of years of evolution, the human species developed a vocal tract flexible enough to make
a wide range of distinguishable sounds and the ability to perceive differences among those sounds. But most
important, the human species developed the ability to use these sounds in systems which could communicate
meaning. No one knows just how this happened. Perhaps mental capacities that had evolved for a variety of
other adaptive purposes (like fine motor hand–eye coordination) were “re-purposed” to support a complex
symbolic and communicative system. Perhaps some mental capacities are exclusively dedicated to language
and evolved more gradually along with the increasing complexity of human communication. Or perhaps once
they reached a certain level of neurological and cognitive complexity, the synapses of the brain “reorganized”
themselves, making the development of language possible. In any case, language is a distinctive attribute of
the human species.

Although languages differ in many ways, they are all made possible by the same genetic information,
they are all processed by the brain in basically the same ways, and, not surprisingly, they all share certain
fundamental “design features” and structural characteristics that enable them to work the way they do. For
example, although different languages use different sets of sounds, their sounds are organized and combined
according to just a few principles. If there were no shared, universal features of language, we would expect
the sounds of languages and their combinations to vary randomly. Instead, the sounds of languages and their
combinations are limited and systematic. Likewise, all languages follow similar constraints on how they can
combine words into phrases and sentences.

Understanding and explaining the properties which are universal to all languages – as well as those
which vary across languages – is the fundamental job of the linguist.

Modularity
Most linguists believe that language is a modular system. That is, people produce and interpret language using
a set of component subsystems (or modules) in a coordinated way. Each module is responsible for a part of
the total job; it takes the output of other modules as its input and distributes its own output to those other
modules. Neurolinguistic studies show that different regions of the brain are associated with different aspects
of language processing and, as the following chapters show, dividing language into modules facilitates
linguistic analyses greatly.

Some modules have been central to linguistics for a long time. Phonetics is about production and
interpretation of speech sounds. Phonology studies the organization of raw phonetics in language in general
and in individual languages in particular. Larger linguistic units are the domain of morphology, the study of
structure within words – and of syntax, the study of the structure of sentences. Interacting with these
modules is the lexicon, the repository of linguistic elements with their meanings and structural properties. In
recent decades, philosophers have developed the formal study of semantics (the detailed analysis of literal
meaning), and linguistics has incorporated and added to semantics as another module of language. Still more
recently, discourse – organization of language above and beyond the sentence – has been recognized by most
linguists as another important subsystem of language.

Constituency and recursion

All languages are organized into constituents, allowing more complex units to enter structures where simpler
ones are also possible. So, we can say in English, “She sat down,” “The smart woman sat down,” “The tall,
darkhaired, smart woman with the bright red sweater and pearl necklace sat down.” Being composed of
constituents gives language a balance of structure and flexibility. Constituents can be replaced by other
constituents, but you can’t replace a constituent with a series of words that is not a constituent. So, you can’t
replace she with smart with the bright red sweater (“Smart with the bright red sweater sat down” doesn’t
work). Constituents can be moved, but you can only move a complete constituent. She is very smart is
possible and so is Very smart, she is, but not Smart, she is very.

Being composed of constituents also allows languages to be recursive. Recursion is the property of language
which allows grammatical processes to be applied repeatedly, combining constituents to produce an infinite
variety of sentences of indefinite length. Recursion is what allows someone to expand a short sentence like
He was tall into longer sentences like He was tall and strong and handsome and thoughtful and a good listener
and . . . or to embed clauses, as in This is the mouse that nibbled the cheese that lay in the house that Jack
built. The recursiveness of language has profound implications. It means that no one can learn a language by
memorizing all the sentences of that language, so there must be some other explanation for how human
beings are able to learn them. The human brain is finite, but recursiveness means that it is capable of
producing and understanding an infinite number of sentences.
 Discreteness
Another property of all languages is discreteness. The range of sounds that human beings can make is
continuous, like a slide whistle. For example, you can slide from a high “long e” sound (as in feed) all the way
down to a low “short a” sound (as in bat) and then slide back to a “long o” sound (as in poke) – all in one
continuous glide. But all languages divide that continuous space of sound into discrete, incremental
territories, just as most western music divides the continuous range of pitch into discrete steps in a scale.
Sounds that are discrete in one language may not be discrete in another. In English, for example, we
distinguish “short a” from “short e,” so that pat and pet are different words. The same is not true in German,
so German speakers have trouble hearing any difference between pet and pat. At the same time, German has
a vowel that is like the English “long a,” but with rounded lips, spelled ö and called “o-umlaut.” The distinction
between the vowel that is like English “long a” and this rounded vowel is responsible for the meaning
difference between Sehne (‘tendon’) and Söhne (‘sons’). This distinction is as easy for German speakers as the
pet and pat distinction is for English speakers, but it is hard for English speakers. Precisely what is discrete
varies from one language to another, but all languages have the property of discreteness.

Discreteness also shows itself in other modules of language, for example, meaning. The color spectrum is a
clear example. Color variation is a continuum – red shades through red-orange to orange to yellow-orange to
yellow and so on through the spectrum. But all languages divide the color spectrum into discrete categories,
although languages differ in how they divide those continua into words. In some languages there are only two
basic color terms, roughly meaning ‘light’ and ‘dark;’ others add red, yellow, and green, whereas still others,
including English, have developed words for many more colors. Likewise, although the claim that Eskimos
have hundreds of terms for snow is overstated, the languages of Native Americans living in the far north do
distinguish more kinds of snow than do languages which have developed to meet the needs of peoples living
in warmer climates. Similarly, American English has a range of words for different types of automotive vehicles
(sedan, sports utility vehicle, minivan, convertible, wagon, sports car, for example) related to the importance
of the automobile in that culture.

Language is composed of separate sounds, words, sentences and other utterance units. The fact that we
hear speech as a sequence of individual sounds, words, and sentences is actually an incredible
accomplishment (and all the more incredible for how instantaneously and unconsciously we do it).
Acoustically sounds and words blend into each other. (If you have tried to learn a second language as an adult,
you know how hard it can be to separate words spoken at a normal conversational pace.) Remarkably, babies
only a few weeks old are able to distinguish even closely related sounds in the language of their home from
each other and to distinguish the sounds that belong to the language they are learning from the sounds in
other languages at a very early age. Furthermore, children in the first year or two of life learn to pick out
words from the stream of speech with no instruction.

Productivity
Another key feature of language is productivity. When people hear a word for the first time, they often
ask, “Is that a word?” If they ask a linguist, the answer is likely to be, “It is now.” If the novel word is formed
according to the morphological and phonological rules of its language and it is understandable in context, it is
a bona fide word, even if it’s not found in a dictionary. Languages can systematically combine the minimal
units of meaning, called morphemes, into novel words, whose meaning is nonetheless deducible from the
interaction of its morphemic components. Imagine each speaker in the world coining just one new word, and
you’ll have some idea of just how productive a language can be. Most of these spontaneous coinings –
inspired by a particular context – are not used frequently enough to ever make it into a dictionary, but some
coinings do become part of the lexicon because they meet a new need. Productivity is one way in which
languages change to meet the changing communicative needs of their speakers.

The productivity of language comes from more than just the ability of speakers to coin new words.
Sentences can become indefinitely long, by adding modifiers (A great big huge beautifully designed, skillfully
constructed, well-located new building . . .) or by including one sentence in another, over and over again (He
said that she said that I said that they believe that you told us that . . . .). Since languages place no limits on the
use of these recursive processes, all languages are potentially infinitely productive.

Arbitrariness
The productivity of languages derives, in large part, from the fact that they are organized around a finite
set of principles which systematically constrain the ways in which sounds, morphemes, words, phrases, and
sentences may be combined. A native speaker of a language unconsciously “knows” these principles and can
use them to produce and interpret an infinite variety of utterances. Another fundamental property of
language is its arbitrariness. With few exceptions, words have no principled or systematic connection with
what they mean. In English, the first three numbers are one, two, three – but in Chinese they are yi, er, san.
Neither language has the “right” word for the numerals or for anything else, because there is no such thing
(Bolton, 1982: 5). Even onomatopoetic words for sounds, like ding-dong and click, that are supposed to sound
like the noise they name, actually vary from language to language. The linguist Catherine Ball has created a
website listing the sounds various animals make in different languages around the world
(http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/ ballc/animals/dog.html). In English, for example, a dog says bow wow
or maybe woof woof, but in Hindi it says bho: bho:. Greek dogs say gav and Korean dogs say mung mung.
People perceive these sounds through the arbitrary “sound filters” of their respective languages, so even
something as seemingly objective as a dog’s bark is in fact represented arbitrarily in language.

Even the speech sounds of a language are arbitrary. English is spoken using only 36 different sounds (a few
more or less, depending on how the English sound system is analyzed). But, as you will learn in detail in
Chapter 1, the sounds used in English are not all the same as the sounds needed to speak other languages, nor
are they put together in the same way. These 36 sounds are in turn arbitrarily represented by 26 letters, some
of which stand for two or more sounds (like g in gin and in gimp) while other sounds are spelled in two or
more different ways (consider c in center and s in sender or c in cup, k in kelp, and qu in quiche). The patterns
into which words and sounds are arranged are also arbitrary. We know perfectly well what tax means but any
English speaker knows without a doubt that there is no such word as xat. Adjectives go before nouns in
English – so it’s fat man; in French nouns go before adjectives, making it homme gros. Arbitrariness is a
property of sign languages as well as spoken language. Some visual signs in sign languages are iconic – they
look like what they mean – but most signs give not the slightest clue to their meaning.

It’s important to remember that arbitrariness doesn’t mean randomness. It means that, for example, the
sounds that one language uses and the principles by which they are combined are inherently no better or
worse than those of any another language. Likewise, it means that the principles of one language for
arranging words are inherently no better or worse than those of another.

Reliance on context
A corollary of arbitrariness – of association between sound sequences and meanings or in the order of words
in phrases – is duality. Because there is nothing about the pronunciation of the word one (transcribed
phonetically – as it sounds – it would be [wn]) that necessarily associates it with the numeral 1, that same
sequence of sounds (but spelled won) can also be used to mean something entirely different, the past tense of
the verb win (Bolton, 1982: 5). But if the same sequence of sounds can represent different concepts in the
same language, how are you able to figure out which meaning I intend when I say [wn]? The answer – which is
as complex as it is obvious – is that you rely on its context. If I say [wn] before a noun, as in “[wn] dog,” your
knowledge of English grammar will lead you to guess that I mean one. On the other hand, if I say [wn] after a
noun (or pronoun), as in “Mary [wn],” that same knowledge will lead you to guess that I mean the past tense
of win.

Reliance on context is a crucial property of languages, not just in figuring out the meaning of words like one
and won, but in interpreting the meaning of entire utterances. The meaning of a sentence depends crucially
on the context in which it is uttered. That context could be the sentence or sentences that immediately
precede it, or it could be the broader physical or social circumstances in which the sentence it uttered. If
someone says “One,” the meaning of that utterance is only clear in the context of a preceding utterance – for
example, “Do you want one lump of sugar or two?” Similarly, “It’s cold in here” could be a complaint, a
request to close a window, or even a compliment (about a freezer, perhaps). Who or what a given pronoun
(like she, it, us, or them) refers to may rely on prior sentences or the immediate physical environment.
Languages rely on the connection between form (what is said) and context (when, where, by whom, and to
whom it is said) to communicate much more than is contained in a sequence of words.

Variability
Although all languages share some universal characteristics, languages also differ in many ways. The
language that people use varies depending on who’s speaking and the situation in which they’re speaking. In
fact, variability is one of the most important – and admirable – properties of language. Variation (also known
as difference and diversity) is the essence of information. Without variation in light frequencies, there would
be no sight; without variation in sound frequencies, there would be no language and no music. (And as we are
beginning to realize, without a certain minimum level of genetic diversity, our ecosystem is threatened.)
Variability in language allows people to communicate far more than the semantic content of the words and
sentences they utter. The variability of language is indexical. Speakers vary the language they use to signal
their social identities (geographical, social status, ethnicity, and even gender), and also to define the
immediate speech situation.

People let the world know who they are by the variety of their language that they use. They reveal their
geographical and social status origins after saying just a few words. People also use their variety of language
to signal membership in a range of overlapping social groups – as male or female, as a teenager or an adult, as
a member of a particular ethnic group. They keep their speech, often despite the best efforts of teachers to
change it, because at an unconscious level, maintaining their ties to their origin is more important than any
reason to change.

People also use language variation to communicate the situation and purpose in which they are talking, as
well as the roles they are playing in those situations. A priest uses different forms of language during a sermon
than during the social hour after a church service, playing different roles (and projecting different roles on the
churchgoers he addresses). At work, people speak differently to subordinates than to superiors, and
differently during coffee breaks than in meetings. Parents speak differently to their children than to other
adults (or even to other people’s children). The language used in writing typically differs from the language
used in speaking, reflecting and communicating the different conditions under which language is produced
and its various purposes.

A large part of a speech community’s culture is transacted through the medium of language variation.
Norms of appropriate language use help speakers to construct and negotiate their relations to each other. The
unwritten and unconsciously applied rules for the various forms and uses of language can vary from one
cultural milieu to another, within and between societies, and even between genders. This raises the risk of
misunderstanding when speakers unknowingly are behaving according to different cultural norms, but
enriches our ways of seeing the world when those differences are understood.

The descriptive approach

The fact that language is a universal characteristic of human beings means that all languages (and language
varieties) are equal. That is, they all come from the same genetic blueprint, and they all are equally “human.”
Language varieties differ because over time they have adapted to the differing needs of their speech
communities. Each language does things differently: some languages morphologically mark several verb
tenses (English marks only two); some languages organize nouns into many “gender” categories (English does
not). Each language is equally “functional” at meeting the communicative needs of its own speech
community. But sometimes when two or more speech communities come into contact, one group will have
more power, status or economic resources than the others. Not surprisingly, the language variety of that
dominant group is often perceived as having higher status as well, especially if speaking it affords increased
access to power or wealth. By comparison, the language varieties spoken by the less powerful groups often
are stigmatized as “incorrect” or “bad” language.

Linguists approach language in the same way that astronomers approach the study of the universe or that
anthropologists approach the study of human cultural systems. It would be ridiculous for astronomers to
speak about planets orbiting stars “incorrectly” and inappropriate for anthropologists to declare a culture
“degenerate” simply because it differs from their own. Similarly, linguists take language as they find it, rather
than attempting to regulate it in the direction of preconceived criteria. Linguists are equally curious about all
the forms of language that they encounter, no matter what the education or social standing of their speakers
might be.
 The fact that, in most societies, some varieties of language are perceived as “correct” while others are
considered “incorrect” is, for linguists, a social phenomenon – an aspect of language use to be explored
scientifically. Since “correct” language is inherently no better or worse than the varieties that are considered
“incorrect,” linguists eagerly seek to discover the reasons for the conviction that some part of language
variability is superior to the rest, and to examine the consequences of those beliefs.

One consequence of these kinds of language attitudes – in which one language variety is considered better
than others – is the corollary belief that speakers of “incorrect” varieties are somehow inferior, because they
will not or cannot speak “correctly.” Their “incorrect” language is then used to justify further discrimination –
in education and in employment, for example. Discrimination on the basis of language use is based on two
false propositions: that one variety of language is inherently better than others, and that people can be taught
to speak the “correct” variety. However, so powerful are the natural forces that guide how a person learns
and uses spoken language that explicit teaching on how to speak is virtually irrelevant. If a person is not very
good at mathematics, we are probably justified in assuming that he or she did not learn mathematics in
school. The same may well be true of reading and writing; if someone cannot read or write, it is likely that
something went wrong with that person’s schooling. But the same is not true with spoken language. A person
who uses double negatives, as in She can’t find nothing (negative concord, as linguists call it), or says knowed
for knew, may have received the best instruction in the rules of traditional grammar from the most skilled
teachers available. However, just knowing what the rules are, or even practicing them for a few minutes a day
in school, will be as effective in influencing how someone speaks as a meter-high pine tree would be in
stopping an avalanche. The most powerful feature influencing spoken language is its ability to mark a person’s
identity as a member of the group closest to him/her in everyday life. This power trumps grammar instruction
in classrooms every time.

Even the best-educated speakers of American English will not say “For what did you do that?” (which is
formally correct); they’ll say “What did you do that for?” Nor will they say “Whom did you see today?”;
instead it will be “Who did you see today?” For exactly the same reason, a speaker of nonstandard English will
say “I ain’t got none,” knowing that “I don’t have any” is considered correct – in either case, to use “correct
grammar” would make the speaker sound posh or snobbish and cost him/her the approval of his/her peers.
There is an enormous disincentive to use language in a way that makes it seem that you are separating
yourself from the people who are most important to you.

In fact, people who speak in close to the approved way did not learn to do so in school. They are just
fortunate to come from the segment of society that sets the standards for correct speech. This segment of
society also controls its schools – and the language variety used and taught in its schools. Ironically, when
children learn to use the socially approved variety of spoken language in school, it is not from what their
teachers explicitly teach in class, but rather from adjusting their speech to match the speech of the other
children in the halls, on the playground, and outside of school, and thus gain their approval.

Defining language
A precise definition of language is not easy to provide, because the language phenomenon is complex. Slightly
modifying a definition provided by Finegan and Besnier (1989), we might define language as a finite system of
elements and principles that make it possible for speakers to construct sentences to do particular
communicative jobs. The part of the system that allows speakers to produce and interpret grammatical
sentences is called grammatical competence. It includes the knowledge of what speech sounds are part of a
given language and how they may and may not be strung together. Grammatical competence also includes
knowing the meanings signified by different sound sequences in a language and how to combine those units
of meaning into words, phrases and sentences. Grammatical competence is what allows a speaker of English
to string together 21 sounds that sound something like “The dog chased the cat up the tree” and allows
another speaker of English to understand what dogs, cats, and trees are, what chasing is, and which way is up.
Further, grammatical competence is what allows these speakers of English to share the understanding that it
was the dog doing the chasing and that it was the cat that went up the tree. Of course this does not apply only
to English. Grammatical competence contributes similarly to comprehension in all human languages.

But people use language to do far more than just communicate the literal meanings of grammatical
sentences. The sentence “The dog chased the cat up the tree” might be used to accomplish a wide variety of
jobs: to narrate part of a story, to complain to the dog’s owner, to help the cat’s owner find his pet. The
second part of the definition, “to do particular communicative jobs,” refers to the notion communicative
competence. The most frequent “job” that people do with language is communicating with other people.

Grammatical competence is almost useless for human interaction without communicative competence. In
fact, a lot of the actual use of language is not in sentences at all, but in discourse units larger and smaller than
sentences, some grammatical (in the technical sense used in formal linguistics), some not. To be effective,
speakers have to combine grammatical competence with the knowledge of how to use grammatical sentences
(and other pieces of linguistic structure) appropriately to the purpose and context at hand. The two taken
together comprise communicative competence. Communicative competence – the knowledge included in
grammatical competence plus the ability to use that knowledge to accomplish a wide range of communicative
jobs – constitutes language.