Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Linguists try to answer questions about language, such as how languages change and why words mean what they mean. Linguists study both their own languages and languages they do not speak.
When linguists study a modern language, they analyze the speech of one or more native speakers of that language. They call such a person an informant. Many languages have no written form. Therefore, linguists must often use a set of symbols called a phonetic alphabet to write down the speech sounds of an informant. Linguists also study dead languages to trace the development of modern ones.
Linguists gather data, form theories and test them, and then establish facts about language. These experts believe they know extremely little about even the most familiar languages. They hope to record and study unfamiliar tongues before such languages become extinct. There are two chief fields of linguistics, descriptive linguistics and comparative and historical linguistics.
Descriptive linguistics
Descriptive linguistics studies the language of a single place and period. It is sometimes called synchronic linguistics. A linguist in this field tries to describe a language as it is acquired by the children of a community and used by the adults there. Such a study focuses on the ability of these people to speak and understand their language. Linguists use the term linguistic performance for any utterances people make.
Constructing a grammar.
A descriptive linguist records the words and sentences of informants. From this record, the linguist constructs a grammar, a description of the ability of people to use their native language. This ability is called linguistic competence. The linguist often relies on the judgment of native speakers for help in constructing a grammar.
All languages have a creative aspect. It consists of the ability of native speakers to produce and understand sentences that they have never encountered before. The number of sentences in a language is infinite, and so no language could be described by listing these sentences. Instead, the linguist devises a grammar that tells, step by step, how to construct any sentence in the language.
The grammar performs its function by telling how to build new sentences out of old ones. For example, the sentence The astronomer counted the stars could be substituted for it in the sentence The queen believed it. This substitution would produce a new sentence, The queen believed the astronomer counted the stars.
A grammar may be used prescriptively as well as descriptively. Such a grammar attempts to tell people how they should use language. For example, the grammar might suggest using the sentence I do not have any money instead of I do not have no money. However, the rules of a particular grammar may not reflect the language as it is actually spoken. In addition, people often express their meaning well even if they follow different rules.
The components of a grammar.
The grammar of a language has three components: (1) the phonological component, (2) the semantic component, and (3) the syntactic component.
The phonological component
consists of rules that tell how to pronounce words and sentences. The phonology (sound system) of one language may differ greatly from that of another. For example, Spanish phonology does not distinguish the pronunciation of the two English vowels in the words sheep and ship. On the other hand, the Thai language distinguishes the sound of the t‘s in steam and team, but English does not.
The semantic component
tells what sentences mean. It tells whether one sentence means the same thing as another and whether one sentence implies another. For example, The student managed to pass the test implies The student passed the test. However, the sentence The student tried to pass the test does not imply The student passed the test.
The syntactic component
shows the relationship between the meaning of a sentence and the arrangement of the words in the sentence. It may show that two or more arrangements of words have a single meaning. For example, the two sentences The waitress gave the sandwich to the tallest girl and The waitress gave the tallest girl the sandwich mean the same thing. Linguists say that such sentences paraphrase each other.
The syntactic component may also show that a single arrangement of words has more than one meaning. For example, the sentence The farmer thought the chicken was too hot to eat has two possible meanings. Either the farmer thought that his dinner was too warm, or he thought that the chicken refused to eat because of the heat. A sentence that has more than one meaning is ambiguous.
Comparative and historical linguistics
Comparative linguistics is the study of language as it varies from place to place, from speaker to speaker, and from one period to another. This field is sometimes called diachronic linguistics.
Some comparative linguists attempt to formulate universally valid statements about language structure and language change. This area of study is called linguistic typology.
Comparative linguists would like to be able to state how language first developed and to describe the conditions that led to its invention. But written records are relatively recent because human beings have had systems of word writing for only about 5,000 years. People have used spoken languages far longer. As far as linguists can tell, all cultures of today have equally complex languages. For these reasons, almost nothing is known about the origin of language.
Comparative linguists use two chief procedures in their study of language. These procedures are called internal reconstruction and comparative reconstruction.
Internal reconstruction
involves using one stage in the development of a language to explain certain characteristics of an earlier stage. For example, a linguist may notice that the sound of e in the words keep and kept varies with the number of consonants that follow the vowel. The linguist may then hypothesize that the sound of e in the two words had been the same in earlier English. The linguist further hypothesizes that a sound change has altered the sound of the vowel in different ways, depending on the number of consonants that follow. Such a change is called a sound shift. The same relationship involving the sound of e occurs in many other words, including sleep and slept and deep and depth.
Comparative reconstruction
is a procedure in which a linguist uses several similar languages to reconstruct a hypothetical language, which is called a protolanguage. The linguist assumes that the protolanguage was the ancestor of the languages from which it is reconstructed.
A linguist might note that some words that start with a certain letter in various languages start with a different letter in English. For example, the English word feather begins with an f. The Greek and Latin words for feather—pteron and penna–begin with a p. Likewise, the English word thaw begins with th, and the Greek and Latin versions of the word—tekein and tabes–begin with t. Similarly, the English word hide begins with an h. The Greek and Latin words for hide begin with a k or k-like sound—kutos and cutis.
The linguist could hypothesize that Greek and Latin contain the consonants of the protolanguage. As a result, the expert concludes that English underwent a sound shift that systematically replaced some consonants with others. This sound shift characterizes the Germanic languages, which include English, German, and Dutch.
Linguistics and other fields of study
Many linguists study aspects of language that involve other fields. For example, anthropological linguists study the influences that language and other elements of culture exert on one another. Sociolinguists try to find out how language varies with differences in age, sex, and economic and social status. Psycholinguists seek regularities in the ways people acquire and use language. They also study diseases and injuries that affect the ability to use language. Mathematical linguists are interested in the relation between human languages and the artificial languages used in computer programming. Experts in applied linguistics attempt to use linguistic principles to improve the teaching of reading and foreign languages.
History
Comparative and historical research.
For hundreds of years, people have been curious about various aspects of language. The comparativists began their studies during the late 1700’s. At that time, British politicians and merchants who had lived in India introduced Sanskrit, the ancient language of India, to European scholars. These scholars found grammatical similarities among the Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin languages. They concluded that all three languages, and perhaps others as well, came from a single earlier parent language.
The term comparative grammar was first used by the German scholar Friedrich Schlegel in 1808. That concept stimulated modern comparative and historical linguistics. Among the first comparativists was German scholar Jakob Grimm, one of the two brothers known for their collection of fairy tales. Grimm proved that English, German, Dutch, and Scandinavian languages were related to each other and to Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin.
During the 1800’s, linguists identified languages that belonged to a family of languages called Indo-European—that is, languages located primarily in India and Europe. Linguists compared archaic words of modern languages and analyzed vowel changes and word endings. As a result, they established the origin of words that came from Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Germanic, Greek, Indo-Iranian, and Latin. Today, the Indo-European family has eight branches: Germanic, Romance, Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian, Greek, Celtic, Albanian, and Armenian.
During the 1800’s, linguists also began a reconstruction of an earlier language known as Proto-Indo-European (PIE). No written record of it exists. By 1861, a German linguist named August Schleicher compiled a grammar of PIE. For many years, linguists and anthropologists have searched for the origin of Proto-Indo-European. Since 1945, their research has linked speakers of Proto-Indo-European with a prehistoric culture that developed as early as 5000 B.C. in southeastern Europe, north of the Black Sea. The culture was named Kurgan, meaning barrow, from the practice of placing mounds of dirt over individual graves.
Structuralism
arose in the early 1900’s. The structuralists viewed languages as systems composed of patterns of sounds and words. They studied these patterns to learn about the structure of a language. They believed each language has a distinct structure that cannot be compared with that of any other language. A Swiss linguist named Ferdinand de Saussure became the first leader of the structuralists. American structuralists included Leonard Bloomfield and Edward Sapir.
The generative theory of language
began during the 1950’s with Noam Chomsky, an American linguist. Generative linguists believe that a grammar of a language consists of certain rules for the construction of an infinite number of sentences. Generativists have shown that certain structuralist conceptions of grammar are inadequate for the description of languages.
According to generative linguists, grammatical devices called grammatical transformations relate sentences to one another. These transformations are necessary for a complete description of many sentences. This kind of rule had no role in structuralist theory. Beginning in the 1960’s, Chomsky’s ideas sparked a number of competing theories. There is much disagreement among generative linguists about the basic and universal characteristics of languages.
