UNIT 1: THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE

What is Linguistics?
• Language is the idiosyncratic trait of every human being
• Every person has an innate ability to speak a language
• Other animals? Bees
• The scientific study of language is carried out in the field of Linguistics.
• The goal of Linguistics is to describe language.
• Linguists study the structure of language.

Multidisciplinarity
• Linguistics is multidisciplinary, that is, many disciplines study language from their own
expertise:
- Psychology: interest in language as a property of the human mind; language acquisition
(PSYCHOLINGUISTICS)
- Anthropology: relationship between language and culture (ANTHROPOLOGICAL
LINGUISTICS)
- Sociology: language in society (SOCIOLINGUISTICS)
- Computer science: modelling of natural language by computers (COMPUTATIONAL
LINGUISTICS)

Basic principles
• Language is part of a larger semiotic system
• Language has a clear structure
• The modes of language: how it is transmitted

Language as part of a semiotic system

• Language is a system of communication but not the only one. Humans also communicate
through gestures, art, dress and music, for example.
• Semiotics: the study of signs
• Ferdinand de Saussure A course in General Linguistics (1916): Meaning in semiotic systems is
expressed by signs, which have a particular form (SIGNIFIER) and some meaning that the
signifier conveys (SIGNIFIED)

Relationship Signifier-Signified
• SIGNIFIER: (physical form)
- in writing h-o-r-s-e
- in speech /hɔːs/
• SIGNIFIED:(abstract)
Arbitrariness
• Saussure argued that one of the main features of the linguistic sign is its arbitrary nature.
• The word horse has no direct connection to the meaning it expresses.
• Although most linguistic signs are arbitrary, there are instances of signs that bear iconic
relationships to the meanings they express:
- Imitation: The cow mooed for hours
The bee buzzed by my ear.
- Onomatopoeic words: beep, click

The modes of language

• Mainly two: speech and writing
• A third mode: signing
• Sign languages are not gestured equivalents of spoken languages. They have their own
grammar and have to be acquired as a new language.

Speech
• Considered to be primary because all languages are spoken and only a subset of these are
written.
• All children will naturally acquire the spoken version of language if they are exposed to it in
the period of acquisition.
• Speech is highly interactive and oral, which allows us to use intonation to emphasize words
or phrases and express emotion.
Writing
• Considered to be secondary. We should rather say that speech and writing have different
but complementary roles.
• To become literate, a child needs some kind of formal schooling in reading and writing.
• Writing has punctuation but it can only express a small proportion of the features that
intonation has.

Linguistic structure
• Whether spoken, written or signed, every language has structure, which can be described by
postulating (Leech 1983):
- Rules governing the pronunciation of sounds; the ways words are put together; the
manner in which phrases, clauses and sentences are structured; and the ways that meaning
is created.
- Principles stipulating how the structures that rules create should be used.

Rules
• Rules are studied in the realm of grammar. Linguistic rules serve to describe what people
know about language: the unconscious knowledge of language people possess that is part
of what Noam Chomsky defines as our linguistic competence.
 • Rules of grammar operate at various levels.

Levels of grammar (I)

• Phonetics/Phonology:
- This level focuses on the smallest unit of linguistic analysis: the phoneme. E.g. /ðɪs/
- Phonological rules describe how sounds are pronounced in various contexts: assimilation
(broked).
• Morphology:
- This is the next level whose unit of analysis is the morpheme, the smallest unit with
meaning. E.g. unthink-able
- Rules focus on how words are structured (*Me broked it).

Levels of grammar (II)

• Syntax:

- the largest level of structure is the clause, which can be analyzed into constituents. They

are noun phrases, verb phrases, adjective phrases, and so on, which can have different

clause functions: subject, predicator, object, complement, and adverbial. We can have

main clauses and subordinate clauses.

- All languages have constraints on how constituents should be ordered. E.g. SVO

languages like English vs. SOV languages like Japanese. E.g. I broked it. *It broked I.

Levels of grammar (III)

• Semantics:
- Since meaning is the core of human communication, the study of semantics affects all
the other grammatical levels.
-However, the study of semantics is typically focused on such topics as the meaning of
individual words (lexical semantics) and the ability of words to refer to points in time or
place or individuals in the external world (deixis).
I broked it

Grammar
• Grammar has many different meanings:
- Some people think it mainly involves syntax.
- To others, it covers usage: correct and incorrect uses of language
• However, for many linguists, grammar involves the study of linguistic rules that are part of
our linguistic competence: that is, the unconscious knowledge of the rules of a language
that any fluent speaker possesses.
Language in context
• Rules are part of grammar, whereas principles have to do with the use of the structures
created by linguistic rules.
• How language is structured depends heavily on context: the social context in which
language is used as well as the linguistic context in which a particular structure occurs.
• The study of this issue is conducted within the domain of Pragmatics.
• Pragmatics is less concerned with how grammatical constructions are structured and more
with why they have the structure that they do.

Grammar and Pragmatics

• Grammar deals with structure whereas Pragmatics deals with use.
• One of the issues Pragmatics deals with is politeness.
• E.g. Bring me a bottle of water is a grammatically correct sentence but too direct to utter
to a complete stranger at a restaurant in English. It would be more appropriate to say
Could you, please, bring me a bottle of water?

Rules and principles

• Rules of grammar can be presented in fairly absolute terms.
• However, principles of politeness deal more with tendencies than absolutes: a structure
tends to be polite in context A but not in context B.
• Rules and principles also raise issues of grammaticality and acceptability.

Grammaticality vs. Acceptability

• A sentence is grammatical if its structure conforms to a rule of grammar (Meyer 2009: 11):
(a) I don’t have any money. Gr. Acc.
(b) I have no money. [Link].
(c) I ain’t got no money. Gr. Acc./Unacc.
(d) *Have I don’t money any. [Link].
• Acceptability judgements vary from speaker to speaker and reflect that we have opinions
about what we see as good and bad uses of language.

c) follows the rules in english but depends the situacion it could be acceptable or unacceptable.
Double negation means yes.
d) ungrammatical and unacceptable in any context
• Two points of view:
- Many times grammaticality and acceptability are confused, which illustrates a significant
difference between what the general public feels about language and what the average
linguist does.
- Linguists are firmly committed to the scientific study of language whereas non-linguists
typically prefer a much more subjective approach.
(the general public tends to be prescriptivism while the average linguist tends to be
descriptivism.)
Prescriptivism and descriptivism
• Within linguistics, Simon would be considered to be a prescriptivist because his goal is to
prescribe usage: identify what is so-called correct and incorrect instances of language
usage, and tell people how they should speak and write.
• Sheildlower and Aitchison, in contrast, are descriptivist, people interested in describing how
language is used, not in placing value judgements on particular instances of language
usage.

MAJOR RESEARCH TRADITIONS IN 20th c. LINGUISTICS

Major traditions
1) Structuralism
2) Formalism/Generative Linguistics
3) Functionalism

Recent developments
1) Corpus Linguistics
2) Renewed interest in historical linguistics

Background:19th c. Linguistics
• Centered on Historical Linguistics: Diachrony
• Search for regularities and laws in language change
• Search for genetic links between languages (family trees, Indo-European...)
• Reconstruction of older language periods and languages in historical-comparative
linguistics

20th c.: Century of synchrony

STRUCTURALISM
• Primacy of synchrony.
• Every language system needs to be considered by itself.
• Linguistics should solely be concerned with the systematic regularities of the abstract
language system which is shared by all members of a speech community ( langue) and not
with its concrete use by the individual (parole).
• Within any system, there are two types of relationships between linguistic units:
- PARADIGMATIC RELATIONSHIPS (choice; vertical)
- SYNTAGMATIC RELATIONSHIPS (chain; horizontal)
E.g. A man saw my horse The girl loved your cat
This visitor hit our baby
• linguistic sign= SIGNIFIED + SIGNIFIER (arbitrary relationship)
SIGNIFIER: (physical form)
 - in writing h-o-r-s-e
- in speech /hɔːs/
SIGNIFIED:(abstract)
• PEIRCE'S THEORY OF SIGNS
- SYMBOL: arbitrary relation between sign and meaning. E.g. linguistic sign.
- ICON: similarity between the sign and its meaning. E.g.
- INDEX: physical effect-cause relationhip between the sign and what it stands for. E.g.
smoke is a sign of fire.
FORMALISM/GENERATIVE LINGUISTICS
• Reaction against Behaviourism (Skinner): children enter life with a tabula rasa (blank
slate) and learn language after being exposed to it.
• Chomsky: Humans are genetically predisposed to learn language, just as it is part of our
genetic endowment to grow legs and arms.
• It is exclusively concerned with language as mental phenomenon.
• Competence (~ Saussure's langue): the entire (unconscious) mental knowledge an ideal
native speaker has at their disposal.
• Performance (~ Saussure's parole): the actual language produced by a speaker.
The aim of Linguistics is to study competence (rather than performance).
• Language is innate to humans → LANGUAGE ACQUISITION DEVICE (LAD).

What kind of information is contained in this device, common to all human beings (and
thus universal)?

LANGUAGE UNIVERSALS: invariable, highly abstract innate properties of the LAD

• Two types of Universal Grammar universals
- SUBSTANTIVE UNIVERSALS
-Grammatical categories which are universally available and necessary for analysing a
language. E.g. nouns, verbs, NPs, VPs...
- FORMAL UNIVERSALS
- Statements on the form the rules of a grammar can take.
E.g. (1) No language reverses the order of a statement to build a question ( This is
the good friend Alison met at the airport → *Airport the at met Alison friend good
the is this?)
E.g. (2) All languages have quantifiers ( some, few, every...)
• In sum: The ultimate goal of linguistic theory from a formalist point of view is to provide a
precise formal (and, by necessity, highly abstract) characterization of these and other
constitutive elements of Universal Grammar and thus to define 'a possible human
language'.

FUNCTIONALISM
• Three main questions:
 - Why is language (or a set of languages) the way it is?
- What, in a particular context, motivates the choice of native speakers between two or
more semantically equivalent constructions?
- How can communicative functions help shape language structure?
• Jakobson's functions of language (external)
WORLD E.g. It's raining
(referential)

E.g. It's bloody pissing MESSAGE E.g. It droppeth as the gentle rain
down again! (poetic) from heaven
ADDRESSER ADDRESSEE
(expressive) (appellative)

E.g. Nasy weather CONTACT E.g. Wait here till it stops raining!
again, isn't it? (phatic)

E.g. What does nasty CODE

mean? (metalingual)

INTERNAL FUNCTIONS OF LANGUAGE

• Enhance the ease and efficiency of online production and processing, for example, by
guaranteeing that a given text is coherent.
1) John smashed the bottle with a hammer.
2) a. The bottle was smashed by John with a hammer.
b. The bottle was smashed.
3) a. It was John who smashed the bottle with a hammer.
b. It was the bottle which John smashed with a hammer.
c. It was with a hammer that John smashed the bottle.
4) a. What John did was smash the bottle with a hammer.
b. What John did with the hammer was smash the bottle.
c. What John smashed was the bottle (not the glass)
• How will the different linguistic schools study this variation?
- Structuralism: Describe each of these constructions of the English grammar
- Formalism: Formulate the rules for the syntactic operations generating the constructions
- Functionalism: One step further: Find out in which contexts the individual options are
used, trying to motivate their choice
Communicative competence takes priority over grammatical competence

FUNCTIONALISM VS STRUCTURALISM
• ICONICITY (some sort of highly abstract resemblance between form and meaning).
• E.g. F. postulates some iconic relationship between cognitive and structural complexity, i.e.
the more cognitively complex a given state-of-affairs is, the more structurally complex and
often explicit the construction will be that is used to code it.
- The expression of time (after, since) is less complex than the expression of concession
 (all-though, never-the-less. Cf. Spanish aun-que) and so are the conjunctions used to
express these meanings.

FUNCTIONALISM VS FORMALISM
• 'NATURE-NATURE' debate. Is language acquisition genetic or social?
- How much weight can be attributed in child lg. ac. to genetic conditioning (i.e.
preprogramming) and to social conditioning (i.e. communicative interaction with the child's
social environment)

Functionalists will only take genetic factors to come into play when convincing 'nurture'
facts can no longer be found for explaining the lg. ac. process.

FUNCTIONALISTS?
• Only a handful of truly functionalist schools of linguistics explicitly call themselves
functional:
- Prague School: Vilem Mathesius, Nikolaj Trubezkoy, Roman Jakobson.
- Amsterdam School of Functional Grammar: Simon Dik.
- (Systemic-)Functional Grammar: M.A.K. Halliday.
- Functional Typology: Joseph Greenberg.

→ High degree of heterogeneity and pluralism.

CORPUS LINGUISTICS
• Corpus (< Latin corpus 'body, collection of facts').
• Nowadays, a corpus is a large finite body of natural texts (written and/or transcribed
spoken data) which are available in machine-readable form.
• English linguistics is the cradle of corpus linguistics: 1960s the first corpora for the study of
British and American English were compiled (LOB Corpus and Brown Corpus)
• If students of linguistics want to turn corpusliterate, they must :
- Know about the availability of corpora
- Be able to choose the appropriate corpus
- Formulate a good research question
- Choose the right research tools (concordancer, database software, statistical analysis) -
- Keep at all times a critical distance to the data
- Know a lot about the structure of English

Renewed interest in Historical Linguistics

• Three kinds of corpus-based historical studies can be distinguished:
• Truly diachronic studies investigating change in real time (e.g. using the Helsinki Corpus)
• Studies of language change in apparent time (e.g. using a huge corpus such as BNC).
• Comparative studies of different registers (or genres)
• 1980s onwards: Grammaticalization studies:
 - GRAMMATICALIZATION IS "the change whereby lexical terms and constructions come in
certain linguistic contexts to serve grammatical functions, and, once grammaticalized,
continue to develop new grammatical functions" (Hopper & Traugott 2003: 1)
• Regularity in semantic change. E.g.
- Markers of anteriority (meaning 'after', 'since') > Markers of causality: Since she left me,
I'm unhappy → ambiguous (cf. Spanish luego).
- Markers of simultaneity ('while') > Markers of contrast: While I do the dishes, she takes a
nap. VS She likes wine, while I prefer beer (cf. Spanish mientras)

UNIT 2: THE DEVELOPMENT OF ENGLISH

Genetic classifications of languages
• Languages have been traditionally classified in terms of the genetic relationships that they
exhibit.
• The term ‘genetic’ is used metaphorically to describe relationships among languages. It has
proven useful to group languages into language families.

The Indo-European family

• The Indo-European family is one of 94 top-level language families in the world and
comprises 430 actively spoken languages (444, according to Ethnologue).
• It is not the largest language family but it contains eight of the most widely spoken
languages in the world: English, Hindi, Spanish, Russian, Bengali, Portuguese, French and
German.

The Germanic family

• The Germanic family is a direct descendant of Indo-European and consists of 47 languages
(according to Ethnologue).
• The Germanic family is divided into three branches:
- West: Includes English, German, Dutch, Frisian, Yiddish among others
- North: languages commonly spoken in Scandinavia such as Danish, Swedish and
Norwegian.
 - East: only includes Gothic, a dead language

How are these trees built?

• The family-tree model of language development provides a temporal view of how languages
change over time.
• Indo-European dates back to approximately 4000 BC (perhaps earlier); Germanic to 500 BC;
and East, West and North Germanic to 350 BC.
• We can trace back the history of English, because written records of settlement patterns in
England are available and documents written in Old English have been found.
• However, we do not have such direct evidence in Indo-European or Germanic.
- They are called proto-languages: languages whose existence has been established through
the process of language reconstruction.
• How do we establish genetic relationships between languages? Comparative
method/linguistic reconstruction

Linguistic reconstruction
• Linguistic reconstruction involves examining languages for which we have surviving records
and which we know are related and then inferring what an ancestral language for these
languages might have looked like.
• Assumption underlying linguistic reconstruction: if the so-called sibling languages within a
language family all possess a specific group of words, then the parent language from which
these languages descend must have had these words too.

Evidence used in the comparative method

• The process of examining languages, grouping them into language families, and
reconstructing ancestral languages is known as the comparative method.
• We use three kinds of evidence to establish the members of the Indo-European language
family:
- Cognate vocabulary
- Grammatical similarities
- Historical/archaeological information

Cognate vocabulary
 • The comparison of cognate vocabulary is the hallmark of the comparative method.
• Cognates are words that have a common etymological origin and that are passed down the
family tree as languages change and develop. They have proven extremely important in
determining not just which languages are siblings within a language family but also what
the parent language of the siblings might have looked like.

Semantic categories where to look for cognates

• Watkins (2000) lists many semantic categories containing words that were instrumental in
developing the Indo-European family:
- Verbs of existence: e.g. be
- Qualitative adjectives: e.g. old, new, thin
- Numerals: e.g. one, two, three, etc.
- Pronouns: e.g. I, me, you, etc.
- Seasons: e.g. winter, spring, summer, autumn
- Body parts: e.g. hands, nose, feet, etc.
• This vocabulary occurs in almost any language (it is not culture-specific) and can thus be
compared across languages.

Example: the word foot

• We are going to have a look at the rendition in different languages for the word foot.
• This will provide us with evidence to group these languages within the Indo-European family
and to establish the Germanic branch as an independent subfamily.
• We will also be able to infer the form and pronunciation of foot in Proto-Germanic and
Indo-European.

Words equivalent to foot

Old English fót Mod. French pied

Mod. English foot Mod. Italian piede

Mod. German Fuß Mod. Portuguese pé

Mod. Dutch voet Mod. Spanish pie

Mod. Norwegian fot Sanskrit pāt

Mod. Danish fod Latin pēs

Mod. Swedish fot Greek peza

They start with /f/ They start with /p/

The process
• Do they belong to two different language families?
- 19th c. philologist Jacob Grimm postulated a principle of sound change: Grimm’s Law.
- Grimm’s Law: Indo-European /p/ became /f/ in Germanic. This accounts for many other
words within the semantic categories mentioned above: e.g., words for father
GRIMM'S LAW

Drei ---> verner's Law: voicing of PIE consonants: /t/ > /d/

Cognates vs Borrowings
• When doing comparisons of this nature, one has to be careful not to confuse borrowings
with cognates.
• English has words such as pedal or pedestrian, which have to do with the notion of foot. If
we had a look at these words we might think that English looks more like French and Latin
than German and Dutch.
- These words do not reach English via proto-Germanic but they are borrowed through
language contact with speakers of Latin later on.

COMPARATIVE METHOD
• We use three kinds of evidence to establish the members of the Indo-European language
family:
- Cognate vocabulary
- Grammatical similarities
- Historical/archaeological information

Grammatical similarities
• Many Indo-European languages contain inflections marking case, number and gender on
nouns, adjectives and sometimes articles.
• This system can be traced back to Proto-Indo-European but some Indo-European languages
have simplified the system to a great extent.

Case
• PIE had 8 cases: nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, ablative, dative, locative, and
instrumental
• Some Indo-European languages keep the nominative, accusative, genitive, and dative (e.g.
Mod. German and Dutch)
• Mod. English marks one case on nouns (i.e. the genitive) but 3 cases on pronouns:
 nominative (i.e. I, he), accusative (i.e. me, him) and genitive (i.e. my, his)

Number
• Proto-Indo-European distinguished three classes of number: singular, dual and plural.
• Many ancient Indo-European languages preserved this three-way-system (i.e. Sanskrit and
Ancient Greek), but most mark only singular and plural.
Remnants of the dual number:
English both (vs all), eithes (vs any)
Spanish ambos

Gender
• Proto-Indo-European had 3 genders: masculine, feminine and neuter.
• Some languages such as German, Polish, Russian and Czech exhibit all three genders.
However, the Italic family (e.g. Italian, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan) only has
masculine and feminine.
• English only displays gender in pronouns.

COMPARATIVE METHOD
• We use three kinds of evidence to establish the members of the Indo-European language
family:
- Cognate vocabulary
- Grammatical similarities
- Historical/archaeological information

Historical/archaeological information
• The comparative method relies heavily on linguistic evidence to establish genetic
relationships among languages.
• The further back in history we go, the less information we have about languages and their
speakers.
• Linguistic reconstruction has helped us learn about how Proto-Indo-Europeans lived while
we have no sound evidence about when and where these people lived.

The Kurgan hypothesis

• Marija Gimbutas (1956) proposed that the original speakers of PIE lived just north of the
Black Sea c. 6,000 years ago.
• Through a series of migrations, they spread their language all the way to Europe and other
areas.
• Archaeological evidence suggests that PIE speakers were warriors who rode horses to make
their way to Europe.

Renfrew's farming dispersal hypothesis

 • Colin Renfrew (1987) argued that PIE speakers were farmers, and the spread of farming from
Anatolia (Turkey) to Greece and eventually Europe was responsible for the spread of PIE.
• Renfrew claim that the origins of PIE trace back to 10,500 years ago.
• These dates extend beyond those for which linguistic reconstruction can be reliably
conducted.

Limitations of the comparative method

• One of the limitations is how far back in time we can go in the process of reconstructing
languages and language families.
• There have been attempts to reconstruct larger super-families which would include Proto-
Indo-European and other protolanguages <---This is a controversial issue
EURASIATIC, NOSTRATIC, PROTO-WORLD, etc.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF ENGLISH

• English is thought to have had its origins around AD 400, when the Romans ended their
occupation of England.
• After that occupation, England was inhabited by Romans, Celts and various Germanic
tribes, who had come to England during the Roman occupation.
• In the following years, more Germanic tribes from Western Europe and Scandinavia
(Angles, Saxons, and Jutes) kept coming to England.
• They pushed the Celts north and west (to Scotland and Wales) and established English as a
Germanic language in the form of Old English

Old English
• Old English preserved most of the inflections for case, number, and gender.
• During this period, English was mainly a spoken language: only monks in monasteries were
literate, after St. Augustine’s conversion of England to Christianity in the 6th c. AD
• Beowulf: it was narrated in the oral-formulaic style of this period, which was written by
some unknown scribe.

-um: masculine, dative, plural

eart, si: (subjunctive): different forms of the verb BE
ge-:prefix commonly found on participles
- an: feminine, accusative, singular

Middle English
• Important historical event: the Norman Conquest of England in 1066.
 • The Normans came from the Normandy region of France and ruled England for
approximately 300 years.
• They spoke a variety of French called Anglo-Norman (or Norman French).
• 2 significant changes to English:
- Addition of many words of French origin to the English lexicon
- Continuing decline in the number of inflections found in Old English

perced, veyne, licour, vertu: words of French origin

- (e)s: plural marking
- e:adjective ending

Early Modern English

• Shift from an oral to a print culture: Caxton printing press (1476) → literacy rates increased;
King James version of the Bible in 1611.
• Publication of dictionaries and grammars → Samuel Johnson’s dictionary (1755) and Noah
Webster’s dictionary (1806). Attempts to establish an English Academy.
• Colonization of America, its independence from England and its rise as a superpower: the
colonization of the New World in the 17th c. marked the first time the English language was
transplanted into a new geographical and social context. It was the beginning of the British
colonization.
• Great Vowel Shift

TYPOLOGICAL CLASSIFICATION OF LANGUAGES

• The comparative method involves classifying languages on the basis of linguistic and
 nonlinguistic evidence.
• On the other hand, the typological method relies exclusively on linguistic information and
uses it to classify languages according to the linguistic characteristics that they share or do
not share.
• Languages are not classified into families but into types of languages.

Typological classifications based on morphology

• Traditionally, according to morphological criteria, languages have been classified as being
agglutinative, isolating or fusional/inflectional.
• This classification has to do with the way morphemes combine in every given language.

Aggluttinative languages
• Turkish is a very agglutinative language because words have a very complex internal
structure, and all of the morphemes in them can be easily identified.

Isolating languages
• A language that is at the other end of the spectrum is considered to be an isolating
language: that is, an isolating language contains many independent units that express
various kinds of meaning.

Fusional or inflectional languages

• Fusional or inflectional languages can be classified somewhere between agglutinative and
isolating languages.
• E.g.: Latin and German are fusional because they do not have separate morphemes
marking case, number and gender. Instead, the categories of case, number, and gender
work in combination to determine the particular morpheme to be used.

Non-clear-out cases
• Although the three morphology types constitute separate classes, some languages exhibit
characteristics of more than one type.
• Old English was a typically fusional language. However, Modern English has become
increasingly isolating.
Typological classifications based on syntax
• At the level of syntax, languages can be typologically classified along many dimensions.
• One common classification is according to the dominant word orders that languages
exhibit.
• Word orders indicate the position of the subject (S), verb (V) and object (O) in the
language.

English: SVO
• In a typical sentence in English, the subject will come first, followed by the verb and then
the object:
e.g. The child broke the toy
S V O

Japanese: SVO
• However, in Japanese the same sentence would have a different order: subject first,
followed by the object, and then the verb.
e.g. Kodomo wa omocha o kowahi-ta
Child Top toy Acc break-Past
S O V‘
'The child the toy broke.’

Word order and markedness

• The most common criterion for determining word order in a language is the notion of
markedness.
• Constructions within a language that are considered common are unmarked. Those that are
rare and unusual are regarded as marked and only occurring in specific contexts.
- Unmarked: e.g. I like strawberries SVO
- Marked: e.g. Strawberries I like OSV

Variable word order due to grammatical factors

• In German, grammatical rather than contextual factors cause variable word orders.
• In main clauses: the predominant word order is SVO and deviations from this order are
grammatically motivated.
• In subordinate clauses: a grammatical rule states that the verb phrase is to occur at the
end of a clause (i.e., SOV)
e.g: Ich liebe dich, obwohl du mich nicht liebst.
S V O S O V
‘I love you, even though you do not love me.’

SUMMARY TYPOLOGICAL CLASSIFICATION OF LANGUAGES

• MORPHOLOGICALLY: Isolating, Agglutinative, Fusional
 • SYNTACTICALLY: Word Order (SVO, SOV, etc.)

Language typology and language universals

• The study of language typology is closely related to the study of language universals, i.e.
what languages in the world have in common.
• Comrie (1989) points out that linguists differ in how they use typological information to
study universals.

Generative linguistics and language universals

• Generative linguists limit the number of languages they study but put a great emphasis on
the formulation of abstract structures.
• For instance, languages can be classified according to whether they allow pro-drop: i.e., the
omission of pronouns in subject position.
- English: I bought a house. Pro-drop OFF
- Spanish: Compré una casa. Pro-drop ON

Other typologists
• Other typologists, like Greenberg, are much more interested in surveying a wide range of
languages, and extracting common features which are then postulated as language
universals.
- e.g.: Tomlin (1986)’s study on 402 languages bases its description on a wide number of
languages and then uses statistical evidence for claiming that SOV and SVO are the
dominant word orders (they account for 87% of the languages he studied)
• They do not base their accounts on a priori assumptions posited by a theoretical
framework.

UNIT 3: THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OF ENGLISH

Language in context
• This unit explores how the social context in which language is used affects human
communication.
• When we use language, we should take into account not only the meaning of the isolated
words but also the context in which they are used and the background knowledge shared by
the interlocutors.
- Pragmatics
- Sociolinguistics

PRAGMATICS
• Linguistic discipline put forward by a branch of philosophy which offers a critical perspective
on attempts at applying principles of formal logic to the analysis of natural language.
• Language philosophers: Ludwig Wittgenstein, John L. Austin, John R. Searle, Herbert Paul
Grice.
 • DEF.: the study of meaning in context. GRAMMATICAL MEANING vs PRAGMATIC MEANING

Grammatical meaning vs Pragmatic meaning

Grammatical meaning
• Example: Why don’t we bake a cake today?
• In order to understand this sentence we need to understand the grammatical meaning of
the sentence:
-We need to know the meaning of bake and cake.
- We refers to the speaker and addressee
• This information is within the domain of semantics: how words have individual meaning
(lexical semantics) and can be used to refer to entities in the external world (reference).

Pragmatic meaning
• Grammatical meaning → we need to answer why we should bake a cake or not. E.g.
Because we don't have any sugar.
• Pragmatic meaning → We need to go beyond the level of grammar to understand this
sentence. We need to understand the entire social context in which a sentence was
uttered. E.g. Excellent idea!
- PRAGMATICS explores the role that context plays in the interpretation of what people say.

Studying pragmatics or not?

• Some linguists like Chomsky do not study pragmatics because they see grammar as the
primary study of linguistic analysis.
• Others see the study of pragmatics as crucial to understanding human language:
- Dell Hyme’s (1971) notion that human communication involves not just knowledge of how
to form linguistic structures but knowledge of how to use these structures in specific
communicative contexts.
• E.g.: Learning a foreign language in the classroom and then travel to the country where the
language is spoken ---> the use among speakers in differing social contexts is more than
simply knowing the rules.

Sentence vs. utterance

• The basic unit of structure: the utterance.
• Complete sentences are not the norm in both speech and writing.
• When people are involved in speaking in real life, they do not always produce full
sentences but fragments.
• In pragmatics, linguists tend to avoid labels such as sentence, instead preferring to describe
the constructions under discussion as utterances, a category that includes not just
sentences but any construction that is meaningful in the context in which it occurs.
MOST IMPORTANT PRAGMATIC THEORIES
• SPEECH ACT THEORY (Austin & Searle)
• THEORY OF CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURES (Grice)

SPEECH ACT THEORY

• Pioneered by Austin and developed by Searle, Speech Act Theory proceeds from the
observation that everyday communication is more than an exchange of statements about
the world which are assessed in terms of truth or falsity.
- Happy birthday!
- Merry Christmas!
- A: Will you come to my party tonight?
B: I'm still fighting this flu.

• According to J.L. Austin (1962), when we speak (or write) we perform various acts:
- Locutionary acts: the words themselves (still part of grammar).
- Illocutionary acts: speakers' intentions.
-Perlocutionary acts: the effects those words have on our interlocutors.
There is a policeman at the corner.

Speakers’ intentions (illocutionary acts): Types of speech acts

• Assertives/representatives: utterances reporting statements of fact verifiable as true or
false. E.g. state, express, claim, tell describe, assert, admit something .
• Directives: utterances intended for someone to do something. E.g. give an order, ask sth. or
ask sb. to do something.
• Commissives: utterances committing one to do something. E.g. promising, threatening or
committing oneself to something.
• Declarations: utterances bringing about a change in the state of affairs. E.g. marriages,
divorces, declarations of war.
• Expressives: utterances expressing speaker attitudes. E.g. thank, greet, congratulate,
apologize complain.

SPEECH ACT VERBS vs PERFORMATIVE UTTERANCES

(1) A. Read my paper, please.
B. He urged his professor to read his paper.
(2) A. What a great performance!
B. He congratulated her on her great performance.
(3) A. There is a policeman at the corner
B. He warned his friend that there was a policeman at the corner.
The verbs underlined in the (b) examples are not used to perform the speech acts they name.
However, there are cases in which a given illocutionary act is performed by using a speech act verb.
E.g. Thank you!, I promise, I forgive you, I warn you.
THESE ARE PERFORMATIVE UTTERANCES
PERFORMATIVE UTTERANCES
• They display the form of a of a so-called “performative formula”:
- First person singular
- Present tense
- Indicative mood
- Active voice
- In very formal contexts, they may contain the adverb hereby.
WARNING!!!
• The mere fact that a certain utterance follows this pattern does not guarantee that the
primary communicative intention motivating the utterance is made explicit. Consider:
- Thank you for not smoking. → DIRECTIVE
- I'll kill you, I promise. → COMMISSIVE (THREAT)

DIRECT AND INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS

• Indirect (or implicit) speech acts:
- It's freezing in here.
- Soon I'll come and get you.
PRIMARY: Some of them are strongly conventionalized. E.g. Could you please tell me the
time?
• Direct (or explicit) speech acts:
- I order you to shut the window.
- I threaten to hurt you.
SECONDARY

THEORY OF CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURES

• GRICE
• POST-GRICEAN MODELS
- REDUCTIONIST MODELS: Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson)
- EXPANSIONIST MODELS: Politeness Principle (Leech; Brown & Levinson)

The cooperative principle

• In the 1970's Paul Grice proposed the cooperative principle to explain how conversation
involves a certain level of cooperation among interlocutors.

Maxims of the cooperative principle

• When a maxim is violated or flouted, a conversational implicature results; that is, the
utterance receives an interpretation that goes beyond the words that are uttered.
• E.g. A couple are getting ready for the evening:
Husband: How much longer will you be?
Wife: Mix yourself a drink. (from Ellis 1999)
- Shared background: One has a drink when one knows there's time to prepare it and to
enjoy it.
 - Conversational implicature: The wife will need much longer to be ready.
- Maxim: Relation/Relevance.

Problems with the cooperative principle

• Determining whether a speaker has violated or adhered to a maxim of the cooperative
principle is a matter of interpretation. That is why, different speakers will interpret the same
utterance differently.
• Criticism: why do we need four maxims? Not more, not less?
- LESS: Sperber and Wilson’s (1986) Relevance Theory.
- MORE: Leech's (1983) Politeness Principle.

RELEVANCE THEORY
• Sperber & Wilson heavily criticize Grice's model: his set of maxims can be replaced by a
single one, the Principle of Relevance.
• RELEVANCE: psychological principle which involves a kind of cost-benefit analysis:
RELEVANCE = CONTEXTUAL EFFECTS : PROCESSING EFFORT
• Utterances create the expectation that they are optimally relevant.
• A: Bet no one's understood today's pragmatics lecture .
B(1): Well, there are several students of philosophy in the class .
B(2): Well, there are several mountaneers in the class (???) .
• If A is to infer that there are students who understood the lecture, B(1) is more relevant
than B(2), which implies a greater processing effort, since A has to construct a context in
which mountaneering is related to a pragmatics lecture.
• On occasions, the context is not there right from the beginning, but has to be constructed
during the inferential process.E.g.:
• Mary: Have you read The revenge of the Black Forest?.
Peter: I never read books that win awards.
• It is absolutely possible for Mary to correctly infer that Peter has not read the book without
knowing beforehand that it won an award.

Leech's (1983) Politeness Principle

• Maxims:
• Tact maxim: “Minimize the hearer's processing effort and maximize the hearer's benefit”.
E.g. Could you please iron my shirt? (vs. Iron my shirt.)
• Modesty maxim: “Minimise praise of self and maximise dispraise of self”. E.g. Thank you is
generally used plus an attempt to minimise the accomplishments (e.g. you're welcome).
• Generosity maxim: “minimize benefit to self; maximize cost to self”. E.g. Do you think you
can lend me some money, please? I promise I’ll pay you back .
• Approbation maxim: “minimize dispraise of other; maximize praise of other”. When you
criticise something, you should also praise the good things about it. Leech's (1983) Politeness
Principle
• For Leech, the Politeness Principle is ultimately more crucial than the Cooperative Principle,
 because it is only by observing the Politeness Principle that a good and friendly social
relationship between interlocutors can be established and maintained, which in turn is a
precondition for their willingness to cooperate.
• It represents a transition from micro-pragmatics to macropragmatics, which places particular
emphasis on the social and cultural factors affecting the way we use language. → Brown
and Levinson (2002).

Brown and Levinson's (1987) Politeness

• Politeness in language is centred around the notion of face and the efforts made by
interlocutors to “maintain each other’s face”.
• Face: “the public self-image that every member wants to claim for himself” (Brown and
Levinson 1987).
• Polite usage of language comes into play whenever a speaker has the potential to produce
a face-threatening act (FTA), that is, an utterance that destroys the tacit understanding
that all language should preserve face.

Brown & Levinson's FTAs

• What determines the level of politeness that will be used to mitigate an FTA? Brown and
Levinson propose 3 considerations:
(1) The power relationships existing between speakers
(2) Their social distance
(3) The level of impoliteness that the FTA would create.

(1) Power relationships and social distance

• In any social group, people who are superordinates are higher on the power hierarchy than
subordinates. If there is no power imbalance between some people, they are equals.
Whether individuals are disparates or equals will affect how they communicate. E.g.:
- Use of honorifics: Mrs, Professor, Dr, Mister, your honour, sir, madam are found in face-
to-face conversations where speakers are disparates and the subordinate wants to show a
high degree of deference to the other.

(2) Social distance

• Social distance specifies the extent to which individuals have a close or a more distant
relationship. E.g.:
- Close intimates will often use terms of endearment: honey, sweetheart, my dear, and so
forth.
- As social distance increases, the greater the requirement for polite usage of language:
tu / vous in French; thou / you in early English.
(3) Levels of impoliteness
• To which extent is a speaker is willing to commit a facethreatening act (FTA)?
Situation: I have a guest over for dinner.
(a) You’ve been here long enough. Leave! In English, directness is usually mitigated...
 (b) I have to get up early for work tomorrow. Let’s call it a night and get together again
really soon.

SOCIOLINGUISTICS
• GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIOL. (since 19th c.)
- aka DIALECTOLOGY
• ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIOL. (since 1920s)
- Concerned with the relationship between language, culture and thought (e.g. Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis)
• VARIATIONIST SOCIOL. (since 1960s)
- Concerned with the different forms of language and the factors that determine their
structure and use.

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
• AKA Linguistic relativity → Every language is said to create its own view of the world
(speakers of different languages categorize the world in different ways). E.g. colours
• HEAVILY CRITICIZED: Despite all the differences as for where to set the boundaries, speakers
of all languages agree of the prototypical members of categories such as colour (red, green,
blue...).

SOCIOLINGUISTICS
• “The focus of sociolinguistics is on the relationship between language and society. Its aim is
to study the use of different forms or varieties of language and the social factors which
determine them.” (Kortmann 2005: 254) SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE “its main motivation for
investigating language is to increase the ability to understand social structures.”
(Kortmann 2005: 254)

TYPES OF VARIETIES
DIALECT VS LANGUAGE
• Mutual intelligibility.
- BUT: Danish, Norwegian; Chinese
• Standardization.
- Languages are usually standardized (grammars, dictionaries, etc.), while dialects,
usually, are not.
• De facto norms.
- Speakers of a language feel that there are “good” and “bad” speakers of its. Speakers of a
dialect usually don't.
• Autonomy.
- A language must be felt by its speakers to be different from other languages.
• Vitality.
- Latin dialects → Romance languages after Latin dies.

SOCIOLECTS
• Jargon: A social variety connected to a particular profession or activity. It may involve the
use of existing terms (e.g. language, by computer scientists) or the creation of new terms
(e.g. pharmacotherapy).
• Slang: A social variety used as vehicle for demanding group-membership. Very sensitive to
current styles → most words disappear after a while. Exceptionally, they may become
standardized (e.g. fan, mob).
• Genderlect: Men and women have been found to use language quite differently. E.g.

MEN WOMEN

• Frequently interrupt interlocutors • Are interrupted more frequently

• Give no or very short answers • Frequently use minimal responses to
• Frequently claim the right to speak encourage the speaker to continue (I'm
• Talk more in public settings with you, Go on...)
• Start topics and claim the • Talk more in private settings
conversational floor • Are often hesitant and indirect (I think, I
guess, perhaps...)
• Collaborate on topics with others.

REGISTER VS STYLE
• Register: A variety used in a certain communicative situation. E.g. religious English,
academic English, etc.
• Style: A variety that signals the relation among the participants involved in a
communicative situation (formal, informal...).
STYLE REGISTER

Formal Technical We obtained some sodium chloride

Formal Non technical We obtained some salt

Informal Technical We got some sodium chloride

Informal Non technical We got some salt

OTHER TERMS
• Accent: Each of the different pronunciations shown by speakers of a given variety.
Absolutely everybody speaks with an accent.
• Vernacular: Form of speech transmitted from parent to children as the primary means of
communication.
• Diglossia: Situation in which two different varieties co-occur, each having a distinct range
of social situation.
• Idiolect: Linguistic system underlying an individual’s use of language in a given time and
place (e.g. Shakespeare's English).
• Speech community: Any regionally or socially definable human group identified by a shared
linguistic system or variety.
• Language variation: Inherent to all languages. Complex communities  complex languages.
Factors: internal, historical, geographical, sociological, situational, psychological…

Ways of prompting someone to open the window

Traditional vs Modern Dialectology

TRADITIONAL MODERN

• Focus: NORMS (non-mobile urban male • Focus: urban areas.

speakers) • Aim: to study social variation at all
• Aim: to draw boundaries, so-called linguistic levels (including grammar).
isoglosses, which indicate the • Method: corpora, modern statistical
geographical spread of a certain methods
expression (mainly accent and lexicon)
on a language map.
• Method: questionnaires and interviews

The first study of Social Variation: William (Bill) Labov

• In order to carry out a sociolinguistic study, we have to identify a linguistic variable that
we could elicit from different members in a speech community.
• Our population sample could be divided into different groups according to age, gender,
social class, and so on.
• Thus we could analyse our subjects’ speech and try to look for sociolinguistic patterns:
regular patterns of linguistic use which help us identify different groups within the speech
 community.

New York City study (1966)

VARIABLE:
• Incidence of final and post-vocalic /r/
- While most American accents are rhotic, New York (and Boston) have distinctive non-
rhotic accent
- In post-Depression times, such urban accents lost prestige, and the rhotic midwest accent
emerged as standard
FACTORS:
• Social class
• Style

Method
• So as to quickly elicit possible /r/ pronunciations in both spontaneous and careful speech
- Walked around 3 NYC department stores, asking the location of departments he knew
were on the fourth floor
- By pretending not to hear, he got each informant to pronounce the two words twice, once
spontaneously, and once carefully
• 3 stores catering for distinct social groups:
- Saks (upper), Macy’s (middle), S. Klein (lower)
• Informants were shop workers at different grades, giving a further possible stratification

Ways to elicit different styles

• Spoken data:
- Free conversation
- Careful speech – when asked to talk about their language usage
• Read data:
- Read a text aloud
- Read word lists aloud
- Read minimal pairs aloud

RESULTS
• Use of [r] corresponded to higher class of store
• Furthermore, use of [r] increases in careful speech
• Similar finding with rank of employee (management, sales, shelf-stackers)

Types of prestige
• Overt vs covert
- overt prestige: seeking prestige by assimilating to the standard.
- covert prestige: choosing to differ from the standard
BRITISH VS AMERICAN ENGLISH
VOCABULARY

GRAMMAR
Verbs
• AmE has regular burn, dwell, dream, lean, learn, smell, spill, spoil , etc.
• AmE has irregular dive (dove), get (gotten), etc.
• AUXILIARIES:
- Shall: rarely used in AmE (vs. BrE).
- Should: hypothetical meaning in BrE. E.g. I should enjoy living there if I could afford so.
(vs. AmE would).
- Ought to: rarely used in AmE (should is preferred). When it is used in the negative, the to
is usually deleted.
• BrE seem, act, look and sound + an indefinite noun phrase.
AmE + preposition like (seem also followed by to be):
BrE AmE

It seemed a long time It seemed like a long time

He seems an intelligent man He seems to be an intelligent man

That sounds a bad idea That sounds like a bad idea

 • Come and go + a bare infinitive in AmE, but not so usually in BrE:
We’ll come to see you soon vs. We’ll come see you soon
Go and fix it now vs. Go fix it now
• AmE help vs. BrE help to. E.g. I’ll help mow the lawn.
• Some verbs differ in the prepositions they collocate with:
BrE AmE
To fill in to fill out
To prevent (sth.) to prevent from
To talk to to talk with / to
• AmE subjunctive (formal) is far more common than in BrE
BrE AmE (formal)
We recommend that We recommend that he be released
he should be released
If this is / should be the case If this be the case
• BrE Tag questions vs. AmE ok?, right?

Nouns
• BrE The council have decided to make further enquiries vs. AmE The council has decided…
• Use of the article with some nouns:
BrE to be in hospital AmE to be in the hospital
BrE to be at university AmE to be at the university
BrE to go to a class AmE to go to class
- Half a(n) vs. A half:
BrE: half an hour vs AmE a half hour (or half an hour)
- BrE the River Thames vs. AmE the Mississippi River
• AmE uses each other for more than two elements (vs. BrE one another)

Adjectives and adverbs

• AmE real as an adverb (e.g. a real good meal) vs. BrE really
• BrE different from vs. AmE different than
• AmE yet and already can occur with the simple past tense, vs. BrE + present perfect. E.g.
Did you eat yet?

SPELLING
Simplification
• BrE waggon vs AmE wagon
• BrE counsellor vs AmE counselor
• but
• BrE skilful vs. AmE skillful
• BrE connexion vs. AmE connection
Regularization
• BrE counsellor, senior, bachelor vs. colour, neighbour, flavour
• AmE counselor, senior, bachelor & color, neighbor, flavor
• BrE waiter, dishwasher vs. metre, centre
• AmE waiter, dishwasher & meter, center

Reflection of pronunciation
• BrE –ise (realise, analyse, paralyse) vs. AmE –ize (realize, analyze, paralyze)
• BrE compelling, repelling, travelling, marvelling
vs.
AmE: Re’pel --> re’pelled ‘travel --> ‘traveler
Com’pel --> com’pelling ‘marvel --> ‘marveling
• BrE <-gh-> to AmE <w> : BrE plough vs. AmE plow
• BrE <gh> to AmE <f> : BrE draught vs. AmE draft
• BrE <gh> to AmE Ø: BrE through vs. AmE thru (informal writing)

Individual words which differ in spelling

• BrE ensure, enclose, endorse vs. AmE insure, inclose, indorse.
• BrE café, entrée vs. AmE cafe, entree
• BrE / AmE: cheque / check, gaol / jail, jewellery / jewelry, pyjamas / pajamas

PRONUNCIATION
Differences in the phonemic inventory
• RP has 20 vowels. GenAm has 16: all RP vowels, with the exception of:

Differences in the phonetic quality of phonemes

• Dark /l/ vs. clear /l/
- GenAm tends to have dark /l/ in most position
- RP has clear /l/ before vowels (loop) and dark /l/ before consonants (help).
• RP / / əʊ vs. GenAm /o / ʊ . E.g. go

Phonotactic differences
• Rhoticity: RP /r/ + vowel (red, every); linking or intrusive r, (law officer /l :r’ f s / ɒ ɪ ə )
GenAm /r/ where the spelling indicates; no intrusive /r/.
• Intervocalic /t/: GenAm: Intervocalic /t/ and /d/ sound identical ( ladder and latter are
homophones)
• Post-nasal /t/ usually not pronounced in GenAm. Thus, winner = winter, vs. Intracity.
• Dental and alveolar consonants + /j/: /nj, tj, dj, sj, zj, lj, Ɵj/ not in GenAm. E.g. new

Individual words which differ

• Laboratory la-‘bor-a-t(o)ry ‘lab-(o)-ra-,tor-y