SUHENDRA YUSUF

Instructor : Dr. Suhendra Yusuf, M.A. 08181-yusuf/98783

suhendrayusuf@uninus.ac.id. hendrayusuf@yahoo.com

Time and Place : Tues 10.20 – 12.00 am, Building D-9/10

Office hours : Weds 1:00-3:00 p.m., and by appointment

Course description

This course introduces the student to a general description of the study of language and its implication for the TEFL/TESL classroom. The course introduces approaches to the study of language, the use of language in communication, aspects of linguistics, and other disciplines related to linguistics. This course is also designed to introduce aspects of the English language, the patterns and development of the language, and other ‘Englishes’, esp. American English. It provides students also with insights into the classification of languages and history of linguistics.

Textbooks

There is no assigned textbook for the course. Lectures and course materials – taken from the various sources as listed in the bibliography – will comprise the basic material.

Assignments

1. Individual assignment will be a resume/summary of course materials in Bahasa Indonesia.

2. Group assignment will be a report of relevant course materials available on the websites worldwide. The keywords are: linguistics, general-linguistics, introduction-to-linguistics.

Evaluation

There will be two evaluations and two quizzes. Each one will assume that all the materials previously covered is known and so the basic focus will be on the new materials. The final grade will be determined by the total number of points earned (10 pts for attendance, 20 pts assignment, 30 pts mid test + quiz-1, and 40 pts final exam + quiz-2).

Topics to be covered by week

Week-1	Course description and ‘rules of the game’: introduction to the study of language, approaches to the study of language
Week-2	Language as system and other definitions
Week-3	Language in communication, nonlinguistic communication, design features of human language
Week-4	Quiz-1; Aspects of Linguistics: Phonetics and Phonology
Week-5	Aspects of Linguistics: Morphology, Syntax, Semantics
Week-6	Linguistics and other disciplines: Psycholinguistics & Sociolinguistics
Week-7	Other relationships: Anthropolinguistics etc.
Week-8	Mid-test
Week-9	The English Language: Some aspects of the language, development of English
Week-10	American/Canadian English: patterns and developent of AmEnglish
Week-11	Other Englishes
Week-12	Quiz-2; Languages of the world: Indo-European
Week-13	Languages of the world: Asian and Pacific, African, and American
Week-14	Languages of the world: pidgin and creole; international languages
Week-15	History of Linguistics
Week-16	Final test

A.	Language and Linguistics

	1.	What language is
		Language as system ◊ arbitrary ◊ vocal ◊ symbol ◊ human ◊ communication

	2.	Other definitions

B.	Language in Communication

	1.	Nonlinguistic human communication
		Paralanguage ◊ Kinesics ◊ Proxemics

	2.	The design features of human language

C.	Aspects of Linguistics

	1.	Phonetics and phonology
	2.	Morphology
	3.	Syntax
	4.	Semantics

D.	Linguistics and Other Disciplines

	1.	Psycholinguistics
		Language Acquisition ◊ Speech perception ◊ Aphasia and Neurolinguistics

	2.	Sociolinguistics
		Social dimensions

	3.	Other Relationships
		Anthropological linguistics ◊ Computational linguistics ◊ Mathematical linguistics
		Stylistics ◊ Philosophy of language ◊ Applied linguistics

E.	The English Language

	1.	Aspects of the Language
		Vocabulary ◊ Spelling Phonemes ◊ Stress, Pitches, and Juncture ◊ Inflection

	2.	Development of the Language
		Old English ◊ Middle English ◊ Modern English ◊ 20th-Century English Periods

	3.	American/Canadian English
		Patterns of American English ◊ Regional Dialects ◊ Social/Cultural Dialects ◊ Black English ◊ Development of American English

	4.	Other Englishes
		Australian and New Zealand English ◊ India-Pakistan ◊ African English

F.	Languages of the World

	1.	Language Classification
		Indo-European ◊ Asian and Pacific ◊ African ◊ the Americas ◊ Pidgin and Creole

	2.	International Languages

G.	History of linguistics

	1.	Earlier History
		Non-Western traditions ◊ Greek and Roman antiquity ◊ The European Middle Ages

	2.	The 19th Century
		Development of the comparative method ◊ The role of analogy

	3.	The 20th Century
		Structuralism ◊ Transformational grammar ◊ Tagmemic, stratificational, and others

Foundation of Linguistics

A. Language and linguistics

inguistics is the scientific study of language. The word was first used in the middle of the 19th century to emphasize the difference between a newer approach to the study of language that was then developing and the more traditional approach of philology. The differences were and are largely matters of attitude, emphasis, and purpose. The philologist is concerned primarily with the historical development of languages as it is manifest in written texts and in the context of the associated literature and culture. The linguist, though he may be interested in written texts and in the development of languages through time, tends to give priority to spoken languages and to the problems of analyzing them as they operate at a given point in time.

The field of linguistics may be divided in terms of three dichotomies: synchronic versus diachronic, theoretical versus applied, microlinguistics versus macrolinguistics. Languages may be studied as they exist at a specific time; an example might be Parisian French in the 1980s. This is called a synchronic approach. In contrast, a diachronic, or historical, approach considers changes in a language over an extended time period. The study of the development of Latin into the modern Romance languages is an example of diachronic linguistics. Linguistics in the 20th century encompasses studies from both the diachronic and synchronic points of view; 19th-century language studies usually focused on a diachronic approach.

Theoretical linguistics is concerned with building language models or the construction of a general theory of the structure of language or of a general theoretical framework for the description of languages. Applied linguistics, on the other hand, uses the findings of scientific language study and the application of the findings and techniques of the scientific study of language to practical tasks, especially to the elaboration of improved methods of language teaching, dictionary preparation, or speech therapy. One area that has proved fruitful for applied linguistics in the late 20th century is computerized machine translation and automatic speech recognition.

The terms microlinguistics and macrolinguistics are not yet well established, and they are, in fact, used here purely for convenience. The former refers to a narrower and the latter to a much broader view of the scope of linguistics. According to the microlinguistic view, languages should be analyzed for their own sake and without reference to their social function, to the manner in which they are acquired by children, to the psychological mechanisms that underlie the production and reception of speech, to the literary and the aesthetic or communicative function of language, and so on. In contrast, macrolinguistics embraces all of these aspects of language. Various areas within macrolinguistics have been given terminological recognition: psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, dialectology, mathematical and computational linguistics, and stylistics.

1. What language is

Linguists are in broad agreement about some of the important characteristics of human language and one definition of language widely associated with linguistics may be used to illustrate areas of agreement. This particular definition states that language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication. The definition is rather imprecise in that it contains considerably redundancy, particularly in employing both the terms system and arbitrary, some redundancy is perhaps excusable, however, for it allows certain points to be more heavily emphasized than they would otherwise have been.

Language as system

The key term in the above definition is system. It is also the most difficult term to discuss. We may observe that a language must be systematic, for otherwise it could not be learned or used consistently. However, we must also ask in what ways a language is systematic. A very basic observation is that each language contains two systems rather than one, a system of sounds and a system of meanings. Only certain sounds are used by speakers of any language and only certain combinations of these sounds are possible. The sound system of a language allows a small number of sounds to be used over and over again in various combinations to form units of meaning. The meaning system allows these units of meaning to be arranged in an infinite number of ways to express both simple and complicated ideas.

All languages have dual system of sounds and meanings. Linguists concern themselves not only with characteristics of the two systems but also with how the systems relate to each other within one overall linguistic system for a particular language.

Language as arbitrary

The term arbitrary in the definition does not mean that everything about language is unpredictable, for languages do not vary in every possible way. It means that we cannot predict exactly which specific features we will find in a particular language if we unfamiliar with that language or a related language. There will be no way of predicting what a word means just from hearing it of knowing in advance whether or how nouns will be inflected. If languages were completely unpredictable in their systems, we could not even talk about nouns, verbs, vowels, etc. at all. Linguistic systems are not completely unpredictable.

The process of deletion, e.g., I could have gone and Peter could have gone too; I could have gone and Peter could have too; I could have gone and Peter too., will also be found in all languages, but a particular variation will depend on the language. All languages will have devices for negation. Language is unpredictable only in the sense that the variations of the processes that are employed are unpredictable.

The things which are predictable about all languages are called linguistic universals. For example, all languages seem to be characterized as systems of rules of certain kinds. All have nouns and verbs. All have consonants and vowels. The specifics for each language are however largely unpredictable and therefore arbitrary.

Language as vocal

The term vocal in the definition refers to the fact that the primary medium of language is sound, and it is sound for all languages, no matter how well developed are their writing systems. All the evidence we have confirms the fact that writing is based on speaking. Writing systems are attempts to capture sounds and meanings on paper.

Writing undeniably influences speaking. An insistence on the vocal basis of language is an insistence on the importance of the historical and developmental primacy of speech over writing and therefore a denial of the common misunderstanding that speech is a spoken form of writing.

Language as symbol

The term of symbol refers to the fact that there is no connection or at least in a few cases only a minimal connection between the sounds that people use and the objects to which these sounds refer. Language is a symbolic system, a system in which words are associated with objects, ideas, and actions by convention. In only a few cases is there some direct representational connection between a word and some phenomenon in the real world. Onomatopoeic words like bang, crash, and roar are examples from English, although the meanings of these words would not be at all obvious to speakers of other languages. Some writers claimed that English words beginning with sl and sn as in slime, slut, snarl, snob are used to denote a variety of unpleasant things. In much the same way the vowel sound in twig and bit is said to be associated with small things and the sounds in huge and moose with large things. However, once again we are in an area of subjectivity, as counterexamples are not difficult to find, e.g., sleep, snug, hill, and spoon.

Language as human

The term human refers to the fact that the kind of system that interests us is possessed only by human beings and is very different from the communication systems that other forms of life possess. Language is uniquely human in another aspect. People can perform acts with language just as they can with objects of different kinds. A sentence like I pronounce you husband and wife can all be acts (performatives) because saying something in the right circumstances is also doing something beyond making noises.

Language as communication

Language is used for communication, allowing people to say things to each other and express their communicative need. Language is the cement of society, allowing people to live, work, and play together, to tell the truth or lies.

The communication of most interest us is of course the communication of meaning. A language allows its speakers to talk about anything within their realm of knowledge.

2. Other definitions

Language is a system of arbitrary, vocal symbols which permits all people in a given culture, or other people who have learned the system of that culture, to communicate or to interact. (Finocchiaro 1974: 3)

Language is system of communication by sound, i.e., through the organs of speech and hearing, among human beings of a certain group or community, using vocal symbols possessing arbitrary conventional meanings. (Pei & Gaynor 1954: 119)

Language is a potentially self-reflexive, structured system of symbols which catalog the objects, events, and relations in the world. (DeVito 1970: 7)

Language is defined as the set of all possible sentences and the grammar of a language as the rules which distinguish between sentences and non-sentences. (Green 1972: 25)

Language is a systematic means of communicating ideas or feeling by the use of conventionalized signs, sounds, gestures, or marks having understood meanings. (Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary 1981: 641)

Speech is human activity that varies without assignable limit as we pass from social group, because it is a purely historical heritage of the group, the product of long-continued social usage. It varies as all creative effort varies – not as consciously, perhaps, but none the less as truly as do the religions, the beliefs, the customs, and the arts of different peoples. Walking is an organic, and instinctive, function (not, of course, itself an instinct); speech is a non-instinctive, acquired, “cultural” function. (Sapir 1921:4)

Language is a set (finite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out of a finite set of elements. (Chomsky 1957: 13)

Linguistics has but one proper subject -- the language system viewed in its own light and for its own sake. (Allen and Corder, ed., 1975:148)

Linguistics is the study of human speech including the units, nature, structure, and modification of language. (Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary 1981:664)

Linguistics is the science of language, e.g. of its structure, acquisition, relationship to other forms of communication. (Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary 1980:494)

Linguistics is the science that describes and classifies languages. The linguist identifies and describes the units and patterns of the sound system, the words and morphemes and the phrases and sentences, that is, the structure of a language. (Lado 1964:18)

Linguistics is the field of study the subject of which is language. Linguists study language as man’s ability to communicate, as individual expression, as the common heritage of a speech community, as spoken sound, as written text, etc. (Hartman & Stork 1972:132)

B. Language in Communication

anguage is the principal means used by human beings to communicate with one another. Language is primarily spoken, although it can be transferred to other media, such as writing. If the spoken means of communication is unavailable, as may be the case among the deaf, visual means such as sign language can be used. A prominent characteristic of language is that the relation between a linguistic sign and its meaning is arbitrary: There is no reason other than convention among speakers of English that a dog should be called dog, and indeed other languages have different names (for example, Spanish perro, Russian sobaka, Japanese inu). Language can be used to discuss a wide range of topics, a characteristic that distinguishes it from animal communication. The dances of honey bees, for example, can be used only to communicate the location of food sources. While the language-learning abilities of apes have surprised many—and there continues to be controversy over the precise limits of these abilities—scientists and scholars generally agree that apes do not progress beyond the linguistic abilities of a two-year-old child.

1. Nonlinguistic Human Communication

Paralanguage

Those who have worked on problems of communication claim to have discovered what they call a system of paralanguage. The paralinguistic system is composed of various scales and we assume that in normal communication utterances fall near the center point of each scale.

The first scale is a loudness-to-softness scale. Most utterances do not draw attention to themselves on this scale, but appear to be uttered with just the right intensity of sound. However, an occasional utterance will strike us as being overloud whereas another will appear oversoft. Sometimes overloudness is a necessary characteristic o certain types of communication, as when the carnival barker shouts: Roll up! Roll up! See this beautiful young lady shot 60 feet up in the air from the cannon! Oversoftness too may on occasion be used to invoke suspense in a story, as in And then what do you think happened to the little girl when she got lost in the woods and that big bad wolf found her?

A second scale is the pitch scale, that is, how high or how low the voice is pitched in speaking. Extrahigh pitch is usually interpreted to indicate strain or excitement, whereas extralow pitch is taken as a sign of displeasure, disappointment, or weariness.

A third scale is one of rasping-to-openness. Rasping refers to the presence of an unusual amount of friction in an utterance, as in the Ugh! of Ugh! Another assignment! Openness is associated with certain types of speakers’ particularly political and religious orators who speak to huge crowds in large and often unenclosed spaces during some kinds of ritual. Using impressionistic terms, the speeches are also likely to make use of a variety of other devices, e.g. metaphors: Let us put our backs to the wall, turn our faces to the future, stand feet firm on the ground, and resolve never to submit.

A fourth scale is one of drawling-to-clipping. A drawled Ye-a-h! or W-e-l-l! can indicate insolence or reservation, whereas a clipped Nope! or Certainly not! we take to indicate sharpness or irritation. Drawling or clipping can be used to change the literal meaning of an utterance, even to give it a diametrically opposed meaning, as in a drawled You’re really a real friend!

A fifth scale is one of a tempo of an utterance. We have all observed the smooth tempos of certain salesmen and some of us the tempo of the student with the obvious rehearsed story, as in So I went to the Dean and I said to him that I just didn’t like the course and he called Professor smith and they discussed my problem and then I met the chairman and we talked about the college’s philosophy, and … We can contrast such a tempo with a spat out: Now - you – just – listen – to – me – I’m – having – no – more – of – this – silly – nonsense – out – of – you. These two utterances are near the opposite ends of any tempo scale.

Kinesics

Alongside the paralinguistic system of voice modulation exists another system, a system of gestures. The study of gestures is called kinesics. The gestures may be as small as eyebrow movements, facial twitches, and changes in positioning the feet, or they may be larger gestures involving uses of the hands and shrugs of the shoulders. Again, the correct uses of gestures must be learned and like linguistic usages, they vary widely among cultures and within cultures.

In North American culture, they move their heads up and down to agree and sideways to disagree. In the Semang people thrust the head forward expresses agreement, and in the Ovibundu people shake a hand in front of the face with the forefinger extended expresses negation. When the American meet people, they greet them by nodding, shaking hands, clasping arms, kissing, or embracing. They do not greet each other by buffeting the other’s head with a fist like the Copper Eskimo, or with the backslapping routine of Spanish American, or with the embracing and mutual back-rubbing of certain Polynesian peoples.

Proxemics

Proxemics is the study of how people use the space between speakers and listeners in the process of communication. Comfortable distances exists for various activities and these distances must be learned. There are appropriate distances for talking to friends, for communicating with strangers, for addressing superiors.

Any complete understanding of language use requires knowledge of the peripheral systems of human communication: paralanguage, kinesics, and proxemics. Just as the language system itself must be learned, so these other systems of communication must be learned. People must learn to walk and carry themselves in certain ways, to gesture and laugh appropriately. They must acquire control of these things while learning the language.

2. The Design Features of Human Language

The linguist and anthropologist Charles Hockett has pointed out that human language has certain design features that no system of animal communication possesses. The features are as follows:

1. Duality, the fact that it contains two subsystems, one of sounds and the other of meanings;

2. Productivity, the fact that language provides opportunities for sending and receiving messages that have never been sent/received before and for understanding novel messages;

3. Arbitrariness, the fact that there is almost no predictability in many of its characteristics and there is almost never any connection between symbol and object;

4. Interchangeability, the fact that any human being can be both a producers and a receiver of messages;

5. Displacement, the fact that language can be used to refer to real or imagined matters in the past, present, or future. It can even be used to talk about language itself;

6. Specialization, the fact that communicating organisms should not have a total physical involvement in the act of communication. They should not have to stop what they are doing to make a response, nor should the response be totally determined by stimulus. Human beings can talk while engaged in activities totally unrelated to the subject under discussion;

7. Cultural transmission, the fact that the details of linguistic system must be learned anew by each speaker. They are not biologically transmitted from generation to generation;

8. Discreteness, the fact that language makes use of discrete elements, e.g., phonemes and morphemes, not continuous waves – it is digital, not analog;

9. Reflexiveness, the fact that we can use language to talk about language – language is its own metalanguage;

10. Semanticity, the fact that language is about something – it is not just “sound and fury” but has a content; and

11. Prevarication, the fact that language can be used to tell falsehoods.

C. Aspects of Linguistics

here are many different ways to examine and describe individual languages and changes in languages. Nevertheless, each approach usually takes into account a language's sounds (phonetics and phonology), sound sequences (morphology, or the makeup of words), and relations among words in a sentence (syntax). Most analyses also treat vocabulary and the semantics (meaning) of a language.

1. Phonetics and Phonology

Phonetics is the study of all speech sounds and the ways in which they are produced. Phonology is the study and identification of the meaningful sounds of a language.

Phonetics is a branch of linguistics concerned with the production, physical nature, and perception of speech sounds. The main fields of study are experimental phonetics, articulatory phonetics, phonemics, acoustical phonetics, and auditory phonetics. Auditory phonetics is the field involved in determining how speech sounds are perceived by the human ear.

Experimental Phonetics

This is the physical science that collects measurable data about the articulatory, acoustic, and auditory properties of vocal sounds, using instruments such as the kymograph, which traces curves of pressure, and the X ray. The amount of detail in the measurement of vocal sounds is limited only by the precision of the instrument. Differences are found in every vocal sound.

Articulatory Phonetics

This describes speech sounds genetically—that is, with respect to the ways by which the vocal organs modify the air stream in the mouth, nose, and throat in order to produce a sound. All the vocal activities involved in a sound need not be described, but only a selection of them, such as the place and manner of articulation. Phonetic symbols and their articulatory definitions are abbreviated descriptions of these selected activities. The symbols most commonly used are those adopted by the International Phonetic Association (IPA) and are written in brackets.

The organs of articulation are either movable or stationary. Movable organs such as lips, jaws, tongue, or vocal chords are called articulators. By means of them a speaker modifies the surge of air from the lungs. Stationary parts include the teeth, the alveolar arch behind them, the hard palate, and the softer velum behind it. Sounds made by touching two articulators—for example, the bilabial p, which requires both lips—or those made by an articulator and a stationary part of the vocal apparatus are named from the organs that make the juncture, which is called the point of articulation. Reference to the tongue, when it is an articulator, is not expressed—for example, the t sound, which is produced by the alveolar arch touched by the tongue, is called alveolar.

The manner of articulation is determined by the way in which the speaker affects the air stream with the movable organs. This action may consist of stopping the air completely (plosive); leaving the nasal passage open during the stopping (nasal); making contact with the tongue but leaving space on either side of it (lateral); making merely a momentary light contact (flap); leaving just enough space to allow a continuing stream of air to produce friction as it passes through (fricative); or permitting the air stream to pass over the center of the tongue without oral friction (vocal). The speaker produces vowels of different quality by varying the position of his or her tongue on its vertical axis (high, mid, low) and on its horizontal axis (front, central, back). For example, a speaker moves the tongue from low to high in pronouncing the first two vowels of Aïda, and from back to front in pronouncing successively the vowel sounds in who and he. The tongue positions for the vowels u, i, and a are the cardinal points on the so-called vowel triangle uai. The vowel ¶ has the most neutral position. The quality of a vowel also depends on whether the speaker keeps the lips rounded or unrounded, keeps the jaws close together or open, or holds the tip of the tongue flat or curled up (retroflex). At the same time the speaker may move the tongue gradually upward and to the front, or upward and to the back, making diphthongal off-glides.

Other modifications may also affect the quality of the sounds. For example, nasals rather than vowels may be made the prominent part of the syllable, and certain typical vowel formations, called semivowels, may be nonsyllabic. The quality of certain sounds is also affected by whether the speaker keeps the speech organs tense or lax. The vocal cords are vibrated to produce sounds that are voiced. Vowels are voiced, and in English, lax consonants are more or less voiced. When the speaker gives a strong puff of air after the contact, this is called aspiration. If the hand is placed before the lips, aspiration may be observed in the ph sound produced at the beginning of the word pie. The accompanying charts of the International Phonetic Alphabet, using standard transcriptions in brackets, presents a schematic description of these activities in English, although not all the modifications are included. An accurate phonetic transcription of all would describe even regional accents.

Acoustical Phonetics

This is the study of speech waves as the output of a resonator—that is, the vocal tract coupled to other sources. Sound waves are closer than articulations to the essence of communication, because the same auditory impression can be produced by a normal articulation and by an entirely different sound apparatus, like that of parrots. A spectrograph may be used to record significant characteristics of speech waves and to determine the effect of articulatory activities. Parts of this record of speech waves can be cut out experimentally and the rest played back as sound in order to determine which features suffice to identify the sounds of a language.

Phonology or Phonemics

This is a study of the sounds of speech in their primary function, which is to make vocal signs that refer to different things sound different. The phonemes of a particular language are those minimal distinct units of sound that can distinguish meaning in that language. In English, the p sound is a phoneme because it is the smallest unit of sound that can make a difference of meaning if, for example, it replaces the initial sound of bill, till, or dill, making the word pill. The vowel sound of pill is also a phoneme because its distinctness in sound makes pill, which means one thing, sound different from pal, which means another. Two different sounds, reflecting distinct articulatory activities, may represent two phonemes in one language but only a single phoneme in another. Thus phonetic r and l are distinct phonemes in English, whereas these sounds represent a single phoneme in Japanese, just as ph and p in pie and spy, respectively, represent a single phoneme in English although these sounds are phonetically distinct.

Phonemes are not letters; they refer to the sound of a spoken utterance. For example, flocks and phlox have exactly the same five phonemes. Similarly, bill and Bill are identical phonemically, regardless of the difference in meaning. Each language has its own inventory of phonetic differences that it treats as phonemic—that is, as necessary to distinguish meaning. For practical purposes, the total number of phonemes for a language is the least number of different symbols adequate to make an unambiguous graphic representation of its speech that any native could read if given a sound value for each symbol, and that any foreigner could pronounce correctly if given additional rules covering nondistinctive phonetic variations that the native makes automatically. For convenience, each phoneme of language may be given a symbol.

2. Morphology

The grammatical description of many, if not all, languages is conveniently divided into two complementary sections: morphology and syntax. The relationship between them, as generally stated, is as follows: morphology accounts for the internal structure of words, and syntax describes how words are combined to form phrases, clauses, and sentences.

Morphology is concerned with the units, called morphemes, that carry meaning in a language. These may be word roots (as the English cran-, in cranberry) or individual words (in English, bird, ask, charm); word endings (as the English -s for plural: birds, -ed for past tense: asked, -ing for present participle: charming); prefixes and suffixes (e.g., English pre- , as in preadmission, or -ness, in openness); and even internal alterations indicating such grammatical categories as tense (English sing-sang), number (English mouse-mice), or case.

There are many words in English that are fairly obviously analyzable into smaller grammatical units. For example, the word "unacceptability" can be divided into un-, accept, abil-, and -ity (abil- being a variant of -able). Of these, at least three are minimal grammatical units, in the sense that they cannot be analyzed into yet smaller grammatical units--un-, abil-, and ity. The status of accept, from this point of view, is somewhat uncertain. Given the existence of such forms as accede and accuse, on the one hand, and of except, exceed, and excuse, on the other, one might be inclined to analyze accept into ac- (which might subsequently be recognized as a variant of ad-) and -cept. The question is left open. Minimal grammatical units like un-, abil-, and -ity are what Bloomfield called morphemes; he defined them in terms of the "partial phonetic-semantic resemblance" holding within sets of words. For example, "unacceptable," "untrue," and "ungracious" are phonetically (or, phonologically) similar as far as the first syllable is concerned and are similar in meaning in that each of them is negative by contrast with a corresponding positive adjective ("acceptable," "true," "gracious"). This "partial phonetic-semantic resemblance" is accounted for by noting that the words in question contain the same morpheme (namely, un-) and that this morpheme has a certain phonological form and a certain meaning.

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

Morphs that are in complementary distribution and represent the same morpheme are said to be allomorphs of that morpheme. For example, the regular plurals of English nouns are formed by adding one of three morphs on to the form of the singular: /s/, /z/, or /iz/ (in the corresponding written forms both /s/ and /z/ are written -s and /iz/ is written -es). Their distribution is determined by the following principle: if the morph to which they are to be added ends in a "sibilant" sound (e.g., s, z, sh, ch), then the syllabic allomorph /iz/ is selected (e.g., fish-es /fis-iz/, match-es /mac-iz/); otherwise the nonsyllabic allomorphs are selected, the voiceless allomorph /s/ with morphs ending in a voiceless consonant (e.g., cat-s /kat-s/) and the voiced allomorph /z/ with morphs ending in a vowel or voiced consonant (e.g., flea-s /fli-z/, dog-s /dog-z/). These three allomorphs, it will be evident, are in complementary distribution, and the alternation between them is determined by the phonological structure of the preceding morph. Thus the choice is phonologically conditioned.

Very similar is the alternation between the three principal allomorphs of the past participle ending, /id/, /t/, and /d/, all of which correspond to the -ed of the written forms. If the preceding morph ends with /t/ or /d/, then the syllabic allomorph /id/ is selected (e.g., wait-ed /weit-id/). Otherwise, if the preceding morph ends with a voiceless consonant, one of the nonsyllabic allomorphs is selected--the voiceless allomorph /t/ when the preceding morph ends with a voiceless consonant (e.g., pack-ed /pak-t/) and the voiced allomorph /d/ when the preceding morph ends with a vowel or voiced consonant (e.g., row-ed /rou-d/; tame-d /teim-d/). This is another instance of phonological conditioning. Phonological conditioning may be contrasted with the principle that determines the selection of yet another allomorph of the past participle morpheme. The final /n/ of show-n or see-n (which marks them as past participles) is not determined by the phonological structure of the morphs show and see. For each English word that is similar to "show" and "see" in this respect, it must be stated as a synchronically inexplicable fact that it selects the /n/ allomorph. This is called grammatical conditioning. There are various kinds of grammatical conditioning.

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

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

The principal division within morphology is between inflection and derivation (or word formation). Roughly speaking, inflectional constructions can be defined as yielding sets of forms that are all grammatically distinct forms of single vocabulary items, whereas derivational constructions yield distinct vocabulary items. For example, "sings," "singing," "sang," and "sung" are all inflectional forms of the vocabulary item traditionally referred to as "the verb to sing"; but "singer," which is formed from "sing" by the addition of the morph -er (just as "singing" is formed by the addition of -ing), is one of the forms of a different vocabulary item. When this rough distinction between derivation and inflection is made more precise, problems occur. The principal consideration, undoubtedly, is that inflection is more closely integrated with and determined by syntax. But the various formal criteria that have been proposed to give effect to this general principle are not uncommonly in conflict in particular instances, and it probably must be admitted that the distinction between derivation and inflection, though clear enough in most cases, is in the last resort somewhat arbitrary.

Bloomfield and most linguists have discussed morphological constructions in terms of processes. Of these, the most widespread throughout the languages of the world is affixation; i.e., the attachment of an affix to a base. For example, the word "singing" can be described as resulting from the affixation of -ing to the base sing. (If the affix is put in front of the base, it is a prefix; if it is put after the base, it is a suffix; and if it is inserted within the base, splitting it into two discontinuous parts, it is an infix.) Other morphological processes recognized by linguists need not be mentioned here, but reference may be made to the fact that many of Bloomfield's followers from the mid-1940s were dissatisfied with the whole notion of morphological processes. Instead of saying that -ing was affixed to sing they preferred to say that sing and -ing co-occurred in a particular pattern or arrangement, thereby avoiding the implication that sing is in some sense prior to or more basic than -ing. The distinction of morpheme and morph (and the notion of allomorphs) was developed in order to make possible the description of the morphology and syntax of a language in terms of "arrangements" of items rather than in terms of "processes" operating upon more basic items. Nowadays, the opposition to "processes" is, except among the stratificationalists, almost extinct. It has proved to be cumbersome, if not impossible, to describe the relationship between certain linguistic forms without deriving one from the other or both from some common underlying form, and most linguists no longer feel that this is in any way reprehensible.

3. Syntax

Syntax refers to the relations among word elements in a sentence. For example, English word order is most commonly subject-verb-object: Mary baked pies. The order pies baked Mary is not meaningful English syntax.

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

What Bloomfield had in mind as the criterion for form class membership (and therefore of syntactic equivalence) may best be expressed in terms of substitutability. Form classes are sets of forms (whether simple or complex, free or bound), any one of which may be substituted for any other in a given construction or set of constructions throughout the sentences of the language.

The smaller forms into which a larger form may be analyzed are its constituents, and the larger form is a construction. For example, the phrase "poor John" is a construction analyzable into, or composed of, the constituents "poor" and "John." Because there is no intermediate unit of which "poor" and "John" are constituents that is itself a constituent of the construction "poor John," the forms "poor" and "John" may be described not only as constituents but also as immediate constituents of "poor John." Similarly, the phrase "lost his watch" is composed of three word forms--"lost," "his," and "watch"--all of which may be described as constituents of the construction. Not all of them, however, are its immediate constituents. The forms "his" and "watch" combine to make the intermediate construction "his watch"; it is this intermediate unit that combines with "lost" to form the larger phrase "lost his watch." The immediate constituents of "lost his watch" are "lost" and "his watch"; the immediate constituents of "his watch" are the forms "his" and "watch." By the constituent structure of a phrase or sentence is meant the hierarchical organization of the smallest forms of which it is composed (its ultimate constituents) into layers of successively more inclusive units. Viewed in this way, the sentence "Poor John lost his watch" is more than simply a sequence of five word forms associated with a particular intonation pattern. It is analyzable into the immediate constituents "poor John" and "lost his watch," and each of these phrases is analyzable into its own immediate constituents and so on, until, at the last stage of the analysis, the ultimate constituents of the sentence are reached. The constituent structure of the whole sentence is represented by means of a tree diagram.

Each form, whether it is simple or composite, belongs to a certain form class. Using arbitrarily selected letters to denote the form classes of English, "poor" may be a member of the form class A, "John" of the class B, "lost" of the class C, "his" of the class D, and "watch" of the class E. Because "poor John" is syntactically equivalent to (i.e., substitutable for) "John," it is to be classified as a member of A. So too, it can be assumed, is "his watch." In the case of "lost his watch" there is a problem. There are very many forms--including "lost," "ate," and "stole"--that can occur, as here, in constructions with a member of B and can also occur alone; for example, "lost" is substitutable for "stole the money," as "stole" is substitutable for either or for "lost his watch." This being so, one might decide to classify constructions like "lost his watch" as members of C. On the other hand, there are forms that--though they are substitutable for "lost," "ate," "stole," and so on when these forms occur alone--cannot be used in combination with a following member of B (cf. "died," "existed"); and there are forms that, though they may be used in combination with a following member of B, cannot occur alone (cf. "enjoyed"). The question is whether one respects the traditional distinction between transitive and intransitive verb forms. It may be decided, then, that "lost," "stole," "ate" and so forth belong to one class, C (the class to which "enjoyed" belongs), when they occur "transitively" (i.e., with a following member of B as their object) but to a different class, F (the class to which "died" belongs), when they occur "intransitively." Finally, it can be said that the whole sentence "Poor John lost his watch" is a member of the form class G. Thus the constituent structure not only of "Poor John lost his watch" but of a whole set of English sentences can be represented by means of the tree diagram given in the above figure. New sentences of the same type can be constructed by substituting actual forms for the class labels.

Any construction that belongs to the same form class as at least one of its immediate constituents is described as endocentric; the only endocentric construction in the model sentence above is "poor John." All the other constructions, according to the analysis, are exocentric. This is clear from the fact that the letters at the nodes above every phrase other than the phrase A + B (i.e., "poor John," "old Harry," and so on) are different from any of the letters at the ends of the lower branches connected directly to these nodes. For example, the phrase D + E (i.e., "his watch," "the money," and so forth) has immediately above it a node labelled B, rather than either D or E. Endocentric constructions fall into two types: subordinating and coordinating. If attention is confined, for simplicity, to constructions composed of no more than two immediate constituents, it can be said that subordinating constructions are those in which only one immediate constituent is of the same form class as the whole construction, whereas coordinating constructions are those in which both constituents are of the same form class as the whole construction. In a subordinating construction (e.g., "poor John"), the constituent that is syntactically equivalent to the whole construction is described as the head, and its partner is described as the modifier: thus, in "poor John," the form "John" is the head, and "poor" is its modifier. An example of a coordinating construction is "men and women," in which, it may be assumed, the immediate constituents are the word "men" and the word "women," each of which is syntactically equivalent to "men and women." (It is here implied that the conjunction "and" is not a constituent, properly so called, but an element that, like the relative order of the constituents, indicates the nature of the construction involved. Not all linguists have held this view.)

One reason for giving theoretical recognition to the notion of constituent is that it helps to account for the ambiguity of certain constructions. A classic example is the phrase "old men and women," which may be interpreted in two different ways according to whether one associates "old" with "men and women" or just with "men." Under the first of the two interpretations, the immediate constituents are "old" and "men and women"; under the second, they are "old men" and "women." The difference in meaning cannot be attributed to any one of the ultimate constituents but results from a difference in the way in which they are associated with one another. Ambiguity of this kind is referred to as syntactic ambiguity. Not all syntactic ambiguity is satisfactorily accounted for in terms of constituent structure.

4. Semantics

Bloomfield thought that semantics, or the study of meaning, was the weak point in the scientific investigation of language and would necessarily remain so until the other sciences whose task it was to describe the universe and man's place in it had advanced beyond their present state. In his textbook Language (1933), he had himself adopted a behaviouristic theory of meaning, defining the meaning of a linguistic form as "the situation in which the speaker utters it and the response which it calls forth in the hearer." Furthermore, he subscribed, in principle at least, to a physicalist thesis, according to which all science should be modelled upon the so-called exact sciences and all scientific knowledge should be reducible, ultimately, to statements made about the properties of the physical world. The reason for his pessimism concerning the prospects for the study of meaning was his feeling that it would be a long time before a complete scientific description of the situations in which utterances were produced and the responses they called forth in their hearers would be available. At the time that Bloomfield was writing, physicalism was more widely held than it is today, and it was perhaps reasonable for him to believe that linguistics should eschew mentalism and concentrate upon the directly observable. As a result, for some 30 years after the publication of Bloomfield's textbook, the study of meaning was almost wholly neglected by his followers; most American linguists who received their training during this period had no knowledge of, still less any interest in, the work being done elsewhere in semantics.

Two groups of scholars may be seen to have constituted an exception to this generalization: anthropologically minded linguists and linguists concerned with Bible translation. Much of the description of the indigenous languages of America has been carried out since the days of Boas and his most notable pupil Sapir by scholars who were equally proficient both in anthropology and in descriptive linguistics; such scholars have frequently added to their grammatical analyses of languages some discussion of the meaning of the grammatical categories and of the correlations between the structure of the vocabularies and the cultures in which the languages operated. It has already been pointed out that Boas and Sapir and, following them, Whorf were attracted by Humboldt's view of the interdependence of language and culture and of language and thought. This view was quite widely held by American anthropological linguists (athough many of them would not go as far as Whorf in asserting the dependence of thought and conceptualization upon language).

Also of considerable importance in the description of the indigenous languages of America has been the work of linguists trained by the American Bible Society and the Summer Institute of Linguistics, a group of Protestant missionary linguists. Because their principal aim is to produce translations of the Bible, they have necessarily been concerned with meaning as well as with grammar and phonology. This has tempered the otherwise fairly orthodox Bloomfieldian approach characteristic of the group.

The two most important developments evident in recent work in semantics are, first, the application of the structural approach to the study of meaning and, second, a better appreciation of the relationship between grammar and semantics. The second of these developments will be treated in the following section on Transformational-generative grammar. The first, structural semantics, goes back to the period preceding World War II and is exemplified in a large number of publications, mainly by German scholars--Jost Trier, Leo Weisgerber, and their collaborators.

The structural approach to semantics is best explained by contrasting it with the more traditional "atomistic" approach, according to which the meaning of each word in the language is described, in principle, independently of the meaning of all other words. The structuralist takes the view that the meaning of a word is a function of the relationships it contracts with other words in a particular lexical field, or subsystem, and that it cannot be adequately described except in terms of these relationships. For example, the colour terms in particular languages constitute a lexical field, and the meaning of each term depends upon the place it occupies in the field. Although the denotation of each of the words "green," "blue," and "yellow" in English is somewhat imprecise at the boundaries, the position that each of them occupies relative to the other terms in the system is fixed: "green" is between "blue" and "yellow," so that the phrases "greenish yellow" or "yellowish green" and "bluish green" or "greenish blue" are used to refer to the boundary areas. Knowing the meaning of the word "green" implies knowing what cannot as well as what can be properly described as green (and knowing of the borderline cases that they are borderline cases). Languages differ considerably as to the number of basic colour terms that they recognize, and they draw boundaries within the psychophysical continuum of colour at different places. Blue, green, yellow, and so on do not exist as distinct colours in nature, waiting to be labelled differently, as it were, by different languages; they come into existence, for the speakers of particular languages, by virtue of the fact that those languages impose structure upon the continuum of colour and assign to three of the areas thus recognized the words "blue," "green," "yellow."

The language of any society is an integral part of the culture of that society, and the meanings recognized within the vocabulary of the language are learned by the child as part of the process of acquiring the culture of the society in which he is brought up. Many of the structural differences found in the vocabularies of different languages are to be accounted for in terms of cultural differences. This is especially clear in the vocabulary of kinship (to which a considerable amount of attention has been given by anthropologists and linguists), but it holds true of many other semantic fields also. A consequence of the structural differences that exist between the vocabularies of different languages is that, in many instances, it is in principle impossible to translate a sentence "literally" from one language to another.

It is important, nevertheless, not to overemphasize the semantic incommensurability of languages. Presumably, there are many physiological and psychological constraints that, in part at least, determine one's perception and categorization of the world. It may be assumed that, when one is learning the denotation of the more basic words in the vocabulary of one's native language, attention is drawn first to what might be called the naturally salient features of the environment and that one is, to this degree at least, predisposed to identify and group objects in one way rather than another. It may also be that human beings are genetically endowed with rather more specific and linguistically relevant principles of categorization. It is possible that, although languages differ in the number of basic colour categories that they distinguish, there is a limited number of hierarchically ordered basic colour categories from which each language makes its selection and that what counts as a typical instance, or focus, of these universal colour categories is fixed and does not vary from one language to another. If this hypothesis is correct, then it is false to say, as many structural semanticists have said, that languages divide the continuum of colour in a quite arbitrary manner. But the general thesis of structuralism is unaffected, for it still remains true that each language has its own unique semantic structure even though the total structure is, in each case, built upon a substructure of universal distinctions.

D. Linguistics and Other Disciplines

1. Psycholinguistics

The term psycholinguistics was coined in the 1940s and came into more general use after the publication of Charles E. Osgood and Thomas A. Sebeok's Psycholinguistics: A Survey of Theory and Research Problems (1954), which reported the proceedings of a seminar sponsored in the United States by the Social Science Research Council's Committee on Linguistics and Psychology.

The boundary between linguistics (in the narrower sense of the term: see the introduction of this article) and psycholinguistics is difficult, perhaps impossible, to draw. So too is the boundary between psycholinguistics and psychology. What characterizes psycholinguistics as it is practiced today as a more or less distinguishable field of research is its concentration upon a certain set of topics connected with language and its bringing to bear upon them the findings and theoretical principles of both linguistics and psychology. The range of topics that would be generally held to fall within the field of psycholinguistics nowadays is rather narrower, however, than that covered in the survey by Osgood and Sebeok.

Language Acquisition

One of the topics most central to psycholinguistic research is the acquisition of language by children. The term acquisition is preferred to "learning," because "learning" tends to be used by psychologists in a narrowly technical sense, and many psycholinguists believe that no psychological theory of learning, as currently formulated, is capable of accounting for the process whereby children, in a relatively short time, come to achieve a fluent control of their native language. Since the beginning of the 1960s, research on language acquisition has been strongly influenced by Chomsky's theory of generative grammar, and the main problem to which it has addressed itself has been how it is possible for young children to infer the grammatical rules underlying the speech they hear and then to use these rules for the construction of utterances that they have never heard before. It is Chomsky's conviction, shared by a number of psycholinguists, that children are born with a knowledge of the formal principles that determine the grammatical structure of all languages, and that it is this innate knowledge that explains the success and speed of language acquisition. Others have argued that it is not grammatical competence as such that is innate but more general cognitive principles and that the application of these to language utterances in particular situations ultimately yields grammatical competence. Many recent works have stressed that all children go through the same stages of language development regardless of the language they are acquiring. It has also been asserted that the same basic semantic categories and grammatical functions can be found in the earliest speech of children in a number of different languages operating in quite different cultures in various parts of the world.

Although Chomsky was careful to stress in his earliest writings that generative grammar does not provide a model for the production or reception of language utterances, there has been a good deal of psycholinguistic research directed toward validating the psychological reality of the units and processes postulated by generative grammarians in their descriptions of languages. Experimental work in the early 1960s appeared to show that nonkernel sentences took longer to process than kernel sentences and, even more interestingly, that the processing time increased proportionately with the number of optional transformations involved. More recent work has cast doubt on these findings, and most psycholinguists are now more cautious about using grammars produced by linguists as models of language processing. Nevertheless, generative grammar continues to be a valuable source of psycholinguistic experimentation, and the formal properties of language, discovered or more adequately discussed by generative grammarians than they have been by others, are generally recognized to have important implications for the investigation of short-term and long-term memory and perceptual strategies.

Speech perception

Another important area of psycholinguistic research that has been strongly influenced by recent theoretical advances in linguistics and, more especially, by the development of generative grammar is speech perception. It has long been realized that the identification of speech sounds and of the word forms composed of them depends upon the context in which they occur and upon the hearer's having mastered, usually as a child, the appropriate phonological and grammatical system. Throughout the 1950s, work on speech perception was dominated (as was psycholinguistics in general) by information theory, according to which the occurrence of each sound in a word and each word in an utterance is statistically determined by the preceding sounds and words. Information theory is no longer as generally accepted as it was a few years ago, and more recent research has shown that in speech perception the cues provided by the acoustic input are interpreted, unconsciously and very rapidly, with reference not only to the phonological structure of the language but also to the more abstract levels of grammatical organization.

Other areas of research in Psycholinguistics

Other areas of psycholinguistics that should be briefly mentioned are the study of aphasia and neurolinguistics. The term aphasia is used to refer to various kinds of language disorders; recent work has sought to relate these, on the one hand, to particular kinds of brain injury and, on the other, to psychological theories of the storage and processing of different kinds of linguistic information. One linguist has put forward the theory that the most basic distinctions in language are those that are acquired first by children and are subsequently most resistant to disruption and loss in aphasia. This, though not disproved, is still regarded as controversial. Two kinds of aphasia are commonly distinguished. In motor aphasia the patient manifests difficulty in the articulation of speech or in writing and may produce utterances with a simplified grammatical structure, but his comprehension is not affected. In sensory aphasia the patient's fluency may be unaffected, but his comprehension will be impaired and his utterances will often be incoherent.

Neurolinguistics should perhaps be regarded as an independent field of research rather than as part of psycholinguistics. In 1864 it was shown that motor aphasia is produced by lesions in the third frontal convolution of the left hemisphere of the brain. Shortly after the connection had been established between motor aphasia and damage to this area (known as Broca's area), the source of sensory aphasia was localized in lesions of the posterior part of the left temporal lobe. More recent work has confirmed these findings. The technique of electrically stimulating the cortex in conscious patients has enabled brain surgeons to induce temporary aphasia and so to identify a "speech area" in the brain. It is no longer generally believed that there are highly specialized "centres" within the speech area, each with its own particular function; but the existence of such a speech area in the dominant hemisphere of the brain (which for most people is the left hemisphere) seems to be well established. The posterior part of this area is involved more in the comprehension of speech and the construction of grammatically and semantically coherent utterances, and the anterior part is concerned with the articulation of speech and with writing. Little is yet known about the operation of the neurological mechanisms underlying the storage and processing of language.

2. Sociolinguistics

Just as it is difficult to draw the boundary between linguistics and psycholinguistics and between psychology and psycholinguistics, so it is difficult to distinguish sharply between linguistics and sociolinguistics and between sociolinguistics and sociology. There is the further difficulty that, because the boundary between sociology and anthropology is also unclear, sociolinguistics merges with anthropological linguistics (see below).

It is frequently suggested that there is a conflict between the sociolinguistic and the psycholinguistic approach to the study of language, and it is certainly the case that two distinct points of view are discernible in the literature at the present time. Chomsky has described linguistics as a branch of cognitive psychology, and neither he nor most of his followers have yet shown much interest in the relationship between language and its social and cultural matrix. On the other hand, many modern schools of linguistics that have been very much concerned with the role of language in society would tend to relate linguistics more closely to sociology and anthropology than to any other discipline. It would seem that the opposition between the psycholinguistic and the sociolinguistic viewpoint must ultimately be transcended. The acquisition of language, a topic of central concern to psycholinguists, is in part dependent upon and in part itself determines the process of socialization; and the ability to use one's native language correctly in the numerous socially prescribed situations of daily life is as characteristic a feature of linguistic competence, in the broad sense of this term, as is the ability to produce grammatical utterances. Some of the most recent work in sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics has sought to widen the notion of linguistic competence in this way. So far, however, sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics tend to be regarded as relatively independent areas of research.

Social dimensions

Language is probably the most important instrument of socialization that exists in all human societies and cultures. It is largely by means of language that one generation passes on to the next its myths, laws, customs, and beliefs, and it is largely by means of language that the child comes to appreciate the structure of the society into which he is born and his own place in that society.

As a social force, language serves both to strengthen the links that bind the members of the same group and to differentiate the members of one group from those of another. In many countries there are social dialects as well as regional dialects, so that it is possible to tell from a person's speech not only where he comes from but what class he belongs to. In some instances social dialects can transcend regional dialects. This is notable in England, where standard English in the so-called Received Pronunciation (RP) can be heard from members of the upper class and upper middle class in all parts of the country. The example of England is but an extreme manifestation of a tendency that is found in all countries: there is less regional variation in the speech of the higher than in that of the lower socioeconomic classes. In Britain and the United States and in most of the other English-speaking countries, people will almost always use the same dialect, regional or social, however formal or informal the situation and regardless of whether their listeners speak the same dialect or not. (Relatively minor adjustments of vocabulary may, however, be made: an Englishman speaking to an American may employ the word "elevator" rather than "lift" and so on.) In many communities throughout the world, it is common for members to speak two or more different dialects and to use one dialect rather than another in particular social situations. This is commonly referred to as code-switching. Code-switching may operate between two distinct languages (e.g., Spanish and English among Puerto Ricans in New York) as well as between two dialects of the same language. The term diglossia (rather than bilingualism) is frequently used by sociolinguists to refer to this by no means uncommon phenomenon.

In every situation, what one says and how one says it depends upon the nature of that situation, the social role being played at the time, one's status vis-à-vis that of the person addressed, one's attitude towards him, and so on. Language interacts with nonverbal behaviour in social situations and serves to clarify and reinforce the various roles and relationships important in a particular culture. Sociolinguistics is far from having satisfactorily analyzed or even identified all the factors involved in the selection of one language feature rather than another in particular situations. Among those that have been discussed in relation to various languages are: the formality or informality of the situation; power and solidarity relationships between the participants; differences of sex, age, occupation, socioeconomic class, and educational background; and personal or transactional situations. Terms such as style and register (as well as a variety of others) are employed by many linguists to refer to the socially relevant dimensions of phonological, grammatical, and lexical variation within one language. So far there is very little agreement as to the precise application of such terms.

3. Other Relationships

Anthropological linguistics

The fundamental concern of anthropological linguistics is to investigate the relationship between language and culture. To what extent the structure of a particular language is determined by or determines the form and content of the culture with which it is associated remains a controversial question. Vocabulary differences between languages correlate obviously enough with cultural differences, but even here the interdependence of language and culture is not so strong that one can argue from the presence or absence of a corresponding cultural difference. For example, from the fact that English--unlike French, German, Russian, and many other languages--distinguishes lexically between monkeys and apes, one cannot conclude that there is an associated difference in the cultural significance attached to these animals by English-speaking societies. Some of the major grammatical distinctions in certain languages may have originated in culturally important categories (e.g., the distinction between an animate and an inanimate gender). But they seem to endure independently of any continuing cultural significance. The "Whorfian hypothesis" (the thesis that one's thought and even perception are determined by the language one happens to speak), in its strong form at least, is no longer debated as vigorously as it was a few years ago. Anthropologists continue to draw upon linguistics for the assistance it can give them in the analysis of such topics as the structure of kinship. A more recent development, but one that has not so far produced any very substantial results, is the application of notions derived from generative grammar to the analysis of ritual and other kinds of culturally prescribed behaviour.

Computational linguistics

By computational linguistics is meant no more than the use of electronic digital computers in linguistic research. At a theoretically trivial level, computers are employed to scan texts and to produce, more rapidly and more reliably than was possible in the past, such valuable aids to linguistic and stylistic research as word lists, frequency counts, and concordances. Theoretically more interesting, though much more difficult, is the automatic grammatical analysis of texts by computer. Considerable progress was made in this area by research groups working on machine translation and information retrieval in the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, France, and a few other countries in the decade between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s. But much of the original impetus for this work disappeared, for a time at least, in part because of the realization that the theoretical problems involved in machine translation are much more difficult than they were at first thought to be and in part as a consequence of a loss of interest among linguists in the development of discovery procedures. Whether automatic syntactic analysis and fully automatic high-quality machine translation are even feasible in principle remains a controversial question.

Mathematical linguistics

What is commonly referred to as mathematical linguistics comprises two areas of research: the study of the statistical structure of texts and the construction of mathematical models of the phonological and grammatical structure of languages. These two branches of mathematical linguistics, which may be termed statistical and algebraic linguistics, respectively, are typically distinct. Attempts have been made to derive the grammatical rules of languages from the statistical structure of texts written in those languages, but such attempts are generally thought to have been not only unsuccessful so far in practice but also, in principle, doomed to failure. That languages have a statistical structure is a fact well known to cryptographers. Within linguistics, it is of considerable typological interest to compare languages from a statistical point of view (the ratio of consonants to vowels, of nouns to verbs, and so on). Statistical considerations are also of value in stylistics (see below).

Algebraic linguistics derives principally from the work of Noam Chomsky in the field of generative grammar (see above Chomsky's grammar). In his earliest work Chomsky described three different models of grammar--finite-state grammar, phrase-structure grammar, and transformational grammar--and compared them in terms of their capacity to generate all and only the sentences of natural languages and, in doing so, to reflect in an intuitively satisfying manner the underlying formal principles and processes. Other models have also been investigated, and it has been shown that certain different models are equivalent in generative power to phrase-structure grammars. The problem is to construct a model that has all the formal properties required to handle the processes found to be operative in languages but that prohibits rules that are not required for linguistic description. It is an open question whether such a model, or one that approximates more closely to this ideal than current models do, will be a transformational grammar or a grammar of some radically different character.

Stylistics

The term stylistics is employed in a variety of senses by different linguists. In its widest interpretation it is understood to deal with every kind of synchronic variation in language other than what can be ascribed to differences of regional dialect. At its narrowest interpretation it refers to the linguistic analysis of literary texts. One of the aims of stylistics in this sense is to identify those features of a text that give it its individual stamp and mark it as the work of a particular author. Another is to identify the linguistic features of the text that produce a certain aesthetic response in the reader. The aims of stylistics are the traditional aims of literary criticism. What distinguishes stylistics as a branch of linguistics (for those who regard it as such) is the fact that it draws upon the methodological and theoretical principles of modern linguistics.

Philosophy of language

The analysis of language has always been a subject of particular concern to philosophers, and traditional grammar was strongly influenced by the dominant philosophical attitudes of the day. Modern linguistics and modern philosophical theories have so far had little influence on one another. Some philosophers have shown an interest in Chomsky's controversial suggestion that work in generative grammar lends support to the rationalists in their long-standing dispute about the source of human knowledge. Potentially more fruitful, perhaps, is the interest shown by a number of linguists in philosophical treatments of reference, quantification, and presupposition, in systems of modal logic, and in the work of the so-called philosophers of ordinary language.

Applied linguistics

In the sense in which the term applied linguistics is most commonly used nowadays it is restricted to the application of linguistics to language teaching. Much of the recent expansion of linguistics as a subject of teaching and research in the universities in many countries has come about because of its value, actual and potential, for writing better language textbooks and devising more efficient methods of teaching languages. Linguistics is also widely held to be relevant to the training of teachers of the deaf and speech therapists. Outside the field of education in the narrower sense, applied linguistics (and, more particularly, applied sociolinguistics) has an important part to play in what is called language planning; i.e., in advising governments, especially in recent created states, as to which language or dialect should be made the official language of the country and how it should be standardized.

E. The English Language

he English language is a chief medium of communication of people in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and numerous other countries. It is the official language of many nations in the Commonwealth of Nations and is widely understood and used in all of them. It is spoken in more parts of the world than any other language and by more people than any other tongue except Chinese.

English belongs to the Anglo-Frisian group within the western branch of the Germanic languages, a subfamily of the Indo-European languages. It is related most closely to the Frisian language, to a lesser extent to Netherlandic (Dutch-Flemish) and the Low German (Plattdeutsch) dialects, and more distantly to Modern High German.

Vocabulary

The English vocabulary has increased greatly in more than 1500 years of development. The most nearly complete dictionary of the language, the Oxford English Dictionary (13 vol., 1933), a revised edition of A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (10 vol., 1884-1933; supplements), contains 500,000 words. It has been estimated, however, that the present English vocabulary consists of more than 1 million words, including slang and dialect expressions and scientific and technical terms, many of which only came into use after the middle of the 20th century. The English vocabulary is more extensive than that of any other language in the world, although some other languages—Chinese, for example—have a word-building capacity equal to that of English.

Extensive, constant borrowing from every major language, especially from Latin, Greek, French, and the Scandinavian languages, and from numerous minor languages, accounts for the great number of words in the English vocabulary. In addition, certain processes have led to the creation of many new words as well as to the establishment of patterns for further expansion. Among these processes are onomatopoeia, or the imitation of natural sounds, which has created such words as burp and clink; affixation, or the addition of prefixes and suffixes, either native, such as mis- and -ness, or borrowed, such as ex- and -ist; the combination of parts of words, such as in brunch, composed of parts of breakfast and lunch; the free formation of compounds, such as bonehead and downpour; back formation, or the formation of words from previously existing words, the forms of which suggest that the later words were derived from the earlier ones—for example, to jell, formed from jelly; and functional change, or the use of one part of speech as if it were another, for example, the noun shower used as a verb, to shower. The processes that have probably added the largest number of words are affixation and especially functional change, which is facilitated by the peculiarities of English syntactical structure.

Spelling

English is said to have one of the most difficult spelling systems in the world. The written representation of English is not phonetically exact for two main reasons. First, the spelling of words has changed to a lesser extent than their sounds; for example, the k in knife and the gh in right were formerly pronounced (see Middle English Period below). Second, certain spelling conventions acquired from foreign sources have been perpetuated; for example, during the 16th century the b was inserted in doubt (formerly spelled doute) on the authority of dubitare, the Latin source of the word. Outstanding examples of discrepancies between spelling and pronunciation are the six different pronunciations of ough, as in bough, cough, thorough, thought, through, and rough; the spellings are kept from a time when the gh represented a back fricative consonant that was pronounced in these words. Other obvious discrepancies are the 14 different spellings of the sh sound, for example, as in anxious, fission, fuchsia, and ocean.

Role of Phonemes

Theoretically, the spelling of phonemes, the simplest sound elements used to distinguish one word from another, should indicate precisely the sound characteristics of the language. For example, in English, at contains two phonemes, mat three, and mast four. Very frequently, however, the spelling of English words does not conform to the number of phonemes. Enough, for example, which has four phonemes (enuf), is spelled with six letters, as is breath, which also has four phonemes (breu) and six letters.

The main vowel phonemes in English include those represented by the italicized letters in the following words: bit, beat, bet, bate, bat, but, botany, bought, boat, boot, book, and burr. These phonemes are distinguished from one another by the position of articulation in the mouth. Four vowel sounds, or complex nuclei, of English are diphthongs formed by gliding from a low position of articulation to a higher one. These diphthongs are the i of bite (a glide from o of botany to ea of beat), the ou of bout (from o of botany to oo of boot), the oy of boy (from ou of bought to ea of beat), and the u of butte (from ea of beat to oo of boot). The exact starting point and ending point of the glide varies within the English-speaking world.

Stress, Pitches, and Juncture

Other means to phonemic differentiation in English, apart from the pronunciation of distinct vowels and consonants, are stress, pitch, and juncture. Stress is the sound difference achieved by pronouncing one syllable more forcefully than another, for example, the difference between rec¢ ord (noun) and re cord¢ (verb). Pitch is, for example, the difference between the pronunciation of John and John? Juncture or disjuncture of words causes such differences in sound as that created by the pronunciation of blackbird (one word) and black bird (two words). English employs four degrees of stress and four kinds of juncture for differentiating words and phrases.

Inflection

Modern English is a relatively uninflected language. Nouns have separate endings only in the possessive case and the plural number. Verbs have both a strong conjugation—shown in older words—with internal vowel change, for example, sing, sang, sung, and a weak conjugation with dental suffixes indicating past tense, as in play, played. The latter is the predominant type. Only 66 verbs of the strong type are in use; newer verbs invariably follow the weak pattern. The third person singular has an -s ending, as in does. The structure of English verbs is thus fairly simple, compared with that of verbs in similar languages, and includes only a few other endings, such as -ing or -en; but verb structure does involve the use of numerous auxiliaries such as have, can, may, or must. Monosyllabic and some disyllabic adjectives are inflected for degree of comparison, such as larger or happiest; other adjectives express the same distinction by compounding with more and most. Pronouns, the most heavily inflected parts of speech in English, have objective case forms, such as me or her, in addition to the nominative (I, he, we) and possessive forms (my, his, hers, our).

Parts of Speech

Although many grammarians still cling to the Greco-Latin tradition of dividing words into eight parts of speech, efforts have recently been made to reclassify English words on a different basis. The American linguist Charles Carpenter Fries, in his work The Structure of English (1952), divided most English words into four great form classes that generally correspond to the noun, verb, adjective, and adverb in the standard classification. He classified 154 other words as function words, or words that connect the main words of a sentence and show their relations to one another. In the standard classification, many of these function words are considered pronouns, prepositions, and conjunctions; others are considered adverbs, adjectives, or verbs.

2. Development of the Language

Three main stages are usually recognized in the history of the development of the English language. Old English, known formerly as Anglo-Saxon, dates from AD 449 to 1066 or 1100. Middle English dates from 1066 or 1100 to 1450 or 1500. Modern English dates from about 1450 or 1500 and is subdivided into Early Modern English, from about 1500 to 1660, and Late Modern English, from about 1660 to the present time.

Old English Period

Old English, a variant of West Germanic, was spoken by certain Germanic peoples (Angles, Saxons, and Jutes) of the regions comprising present-day southern Denmark and northern Germany who invaded Britain in the 5th century AD; the Jutes were the first to arrive, in 449, according to tradition. Settling in Britain, the invaders drove the indigenous Celtic-speaking peoples, notably the Britons, to the north and west. As time went on, Old English evolved further from the original Continental form, and regional dialects developed. The four major dialects recognized in Old English are Kentish, originally the dialect spoken by the Jutes; West Saxon, a branch of the dialect spoken by the Saxons; and Northumbrian and Mercian, subdivisions of the dialects spoken by the Angles. By the 9th century, partly through the influence of Alfred, king of the West Saxons and the first ruler of all England, West Saxon became prevalent in prose literature. A Mercian mixed dialect, however, was primarily used for the greatest poetry, such as the anonymous 8th-century epic poem Beowulf and the contemporary elegiac poems.

Old English was an inflected language characterized by strong and weak verbs; a dual number for pronouns (for example, a form for “we two” as well as “we”), two different declensions of adjectives, four declensions of nouns, and grammatical distinctions of gender. Although rich in word-building possibilities, Old English was sparse in vocabulary. It borrowed few proper nouns from the language of the conquered Celts, primarily those such as Aberdeen (“mouth of the Dee”) and Inchcape (“island cape”) that describe geographical features. Scholars believe that ten common nouns in Old English are of Celtic origin; among these are bannock, cart, down, and mattock. Although other Celtic words not preserved in literature may have been in use during the Old English period, most Modern English words of Celtic origin, that is, those derived from Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, or Irish, are comparatively recent borrowings.

The number of Latin words, many of them derived from the Greek, that were introduced during the Old English period has been estimated at 140. Typical of these words are altar, mass, priest, psalm, temple, kitchen, palm, and pear. A few were probably introduced through the Celtic; others were brought to Britain by the Germanic invaders, who previously had come into contact with Roman culture. By far the largest number of Latin words was introduced as a result of the spread of Christianity. Such words included not only ecclesiastical terms but many others of less specialized significance.

About 40 Scandinavian (Old Norse) words were introduced into Old English by the Norsemen, or Vikings, who invaded Britain periodically from the late 8th century on. Introduced first were words pertaining to the sea and battle, but shortly after the initial invasions other words used in the Scandinavian social and administrative system—for example, the word law—entered the language, as well as the verb form are and such widely used words as take, cut, both, ill, and ugly.

Middle English Period

At the beginning of the Middle English period, which dates from the Norman Conquest of 1066, the language was still inflectional; at the end of the period the relationship between the elements of the sentence depended basically on word order. As early as 1200 the three or four grammatical case forms of nouns in the singular had been reduced to two, and to denote the plural the noun ending -es had been adopted.

The declension of the noun was simplified further by dropping the final n from five cases of the fourth, or weak, declension; by neutralizing all vowel endings to e (sounded like the a in Modern English sofa), and by extending the masculine, nominative, and accusative plural ending -as, later neutralized also to -es, to other declensions and other cases. Only one example of a weak plural ending, oxen, survives in Modern English; kine and brethren are later formations. Several representatives of the Old English modification of the root vowel in the plural, such as man, men, and foot, feet, survive also.

With the leveling of inflections, the distinctions of grammatical gender in English were replaced by those of natural gender. During this period the dual number fell into disuse, and the dative and accusative of pronouns were reduced to a common form. Furthermore, the Scandinavian they, them were substituted for the original hie, hem of the third person plural, and who, which, and that acquired their present relative functions. The conjugation of verbs was simplified by the omission of endings and by the use of a common form for the singular and plural of the past tense of strong verbs.

In the early period of Middle English, a number of utilitarian words, such as egg, sky, sister, window, and get, came into the language from Old Norse. The Normans brought other additions to the vocabulary. Before 1250 about 900 new words had appeared in English, mainly words, such as baron, noble, and feast, that the Anglo-Saxon lower classes required in their dealings with the Norman-French nobility. Eventually the Norman nobility and clergy, although they had learned English, introduced from the French words pertaining to the government, the church, the army, and the fashions of the court, in addition to others proper to the arts, scholarship, and medicine.

Midland, the dialect of Middle English derived from the Mercian dialect of Old English, became important during the 14th century, when the counties in which it was spoken developed into centers of university, economic, and courtly life. East Midland, one of the subdivisions of Midland, had by that time become the speech of the entire metropolitan area of the capital, London, and probably had spread south of the Thames River into Kent and Surrey. The influence of East Midland was strengthened by its use in the government offices of London, by its literary dissemination in the works of the 14th-century poets Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and John Lydgate, and ultimately by its adoption for printed works by William Caxton. These and other circumstances gradually contributed to the direct development of the East Midland dialect into the Modern English language.

During the period of this linguistic transformation the other Middle English dialects continued to exist, and dialects descending from them are still spoken in the 20th century. Lowland Scottish, for example, is a development of the Northern dialect.

The Great Vowel Shift

The transition from Middle English to Modern English was marked by a major change in the pronunciation of vowels during the 15th and 16th centuries. This change, termed the Great Vowel Shift by the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen, consisted of a shift in the articulation of vowels with respect to the positions assumed by the tongue and the lips. The Great Vowel Shift changed the pronunciation of 18 of the 20 distinctive vowels and diphthongs of Middle English. Spelling, however, remained unchanged and was preserved from then on as a result of the advent of printing in England about 1475, during the shift. (In general, Middle English orthography was much more phonetic than Modern English; all consonants, for example, were pronounced, whereas now letters such as the l preserved in walking are silent).

All long vowels, with the exception of /ì/ (pronounced in Middle English somewhat like ee in need) and /u/ (pronounced in Middle English like oo in food), came to be pronounced with the jaw position one degree higher. Pronounced previously in the highest possible position, the/ì/ became diphthongized to “ah-ee,” and the/u/ to “ee-oo.” The Great Vowel Shift, which is still in progress, caused the pronunciation in English of the letters a, e, i, o, and u to differ from that used in most other languages of Western Europe. The approximate date when words were borrowed from other languages can be ascertained by means of these and other sound changes. Thus it is known that the old French word dame was borrowed before the shift, since its vowel shifted with the Middle English /a/ from a pronunciation like that of the vowel in calm to that of the vowel in name.

Modern English Period

In the early part of the Modern English period the vocabulary was enlarged by the widespread use of one part of speech for another and by increased borrowings from other languages. The revival of interest in Latin and Greek during the Renaissance brought new words into English from those languages. Other words were introduced by English travelers and merchants after their return from journeys on the Continent. From Italian came cameo, stanza, and violin; from Spanish and Portuguese, alligator, peccadillo, and sombrero. During its development, Modern English borrowed words from more than 50 different languages.

In the late 17th century and during the 18th century, certain important grammatical changes occurred. The formal rules of English grammar were established during that period. The pronoun its came into use, replacing the genitive form his, which was the only form used by the translators of the King James Bible (1611). The progressive tenses developed from the use of the participle as a noun preceded by the preposition on; the preposition gradually weakened to a and finally disappeared. Thereafter only the simple ing form of the verb remained in use. After the 18th century this process of development culminated in the creation of the progressive passive form, for example, “The job is being done.”

The most important development begun during this period and continued without interruption throughout the 19th and 20th centuries concerned vocabulary. As a result of colonial expansion, notably in North America but also in other areas of the world, many new words entered the English language. From the indigenous peoples of North America, the words raccoon and wigwam were borrowed; from Peru, llama and quinine; from the West Indies, barbecue and cannibal; from Africa, chimpanzee and zebra; from India, bandanna, curry, and punch; and from Australia, kangaroo and boomerang. In addition, thousands of scientific terms were developed to denote new concepts, discoveries, and inventions. Many of these terms, such as neutron, penicillin, and supersonic, were formed from Greek and Latin roots; others were borrowed from modern languages, as with blitzkrieg from German and sputnik from Russian.

20th-Century English

In Great Britain at present the speech of educated persons is known as Received Standard English. A class dialect rather than a regional dialect, it is based on the type of speech cultivated at such schools as Eton and Harrow and at such of the older universities as Oxford and Cambridge. Many English people who speak regional dialects in their childhood acquire Received Standard English while attending school and university. Its influence has become even stronger in recent years because of its use by such public media as the British Broadcasting Corp.

Widely differing regional and local dialects are still employed in the various counties of Great Britain. Other important regional dialects have developed also; for example, the English language in Ireland has retained certain individual peculiarities of pronunciation, such as the pronunciation of lave for leave and fluther for flutter; certain syntactical peculiarities, such as the use of after following forms of the verb be; and certain differences in vocabulary, including the use of archaic words such as adown (for down) and Celtic borrowings such as banshee. The Lowland Scottish dialect, sometimes called Lallans, first made known throughout the English-speaking world by the songs of the 18th-century Scottish poet Robert Burns, contains differences in pronunciation also, such as neebour (“neighbor”) and guid (“good”), and words of Scandinavian origin peculiar to the dialect, such as braw and bairn. The English spoken in Australia, with its marked diphthongization of vowels, also makes use of special words, retained from English regional dialect usages, or taken over from indigenous Australian terms.

Basic English

A simplified form of the English language based on 850 key words was developed in the late 1920s by the English psychologist Charles Kay Ogden and publicized by the English educator I. A. Richards. Known as Basic English, it was used mainly to teach English to non-English-speaking persons and promoted as an international language. The complexities of English spelling and grammar, however, were major hindrances to the adoption of Basic English as a second language.

The fundamental principle of Basic English was that any idea, however complex, may be reduced to simple units of thought and expressed clearly by a limited number of everyday words. The 850-word primary vocabulary was composed of 600 nouns (representing things or events), 150 adjectives (for qualities and properties), and 100 general “operational” words, mainly verbs and prepositions. Almost all the words were in common use in English-speaking countries; more than 60 percent were one-syllable words. The abbreviated vocabulary was created in part by eliminating numerous synonyms and by extending the use of 18 “basic” verbs, such as make, get, do, have, and be. These verbs were generally combined with prepositions, such as up, among, under, in, and forward. For example, a Basic English student would use the expression “go up” instead of “ascend.”

Pidgin English

English also enters into a number of simplified languages that arose among non-English-speaking peoples. Pidgin English (see Pidgin), spoken in the Melanesian islands, New Guinea, Australia, the Philippines, and Hawaii and on the Asian shores of the Pacific Ocean, developed as a means of communication between Chinese and English traders. The Chinese adopted many English words and a few indispensable non-English words and created a means of discourse, using a simple grammatical apparatus. Bêche-de-Mer, a pidgin spoken in the southern and western Pacific islands, is predominantly English in structure, although it includes many Polynesian words. Chinook Jargon, used as a lingua franca by the Native Americans, French, and English on the North American Pacific coast, contains English, French, and Native American words; its grammatical structure is based on that of the Chinook language. The use of pidgin is growing in Africa, notably in Cameroon, Sierra Leone, and East Africa.

Future of the English Language

The influence of the mass media appears likely to result in standardized pronunciation, more uniform spelling, and eventually a spelling closer to actual pronunciation. Despite the likelihood of such standardization, a unique feature of the English language remains its tendency to grow and change. Despite the warnings of linguistic purists, new words are constantly being coined and usages modified to express new concepts. Its vocabulary is constantly enriched by linguistic borrowings, particularly by cross-fertilizations from American English. Because it is capable of infinite possibilities of communication, the English language has become the chief international language.

3. American/Canadian English

n important development of English outside Great Britain occurred with the colonization of North America. American English may be considered to include the English spoken in Canada, although the Canadian variety retains some features of British pronunciation, spelling, and vocabulary. The most distinguishing differences between American English and British English are in pronunciation and vocabulary. There are slighter differences in spelling, pitch, and stress as well. Written American English also has a tendency to be more rigid in matters of grammar and syntax, but at the same time appears to be more tolerant of the use of neologisms. Despite these differences, it is often difficult to determine—apart from context—whether serious literary works have been written in Great Britain or the U.S./Canada—or, for that matter, in Australia, New Zealand, or South Africa.

It differs from English spoken elsewhere in the world not so much in particulars as in the total configuration. That is, the dialects of what is termed Standard American English share enough characteristics so that the language as a whole can be distinguished from Received Standard (British) English or, for example, Australian English.

The differences in pronunciation and cadence between spoken American English and other varieties of the language are easily discernible. In the written form, however, despite minor differences in vocabulary, spelling, and syntax, and apart from context, it is often difficult to determine whether a work was written in England, the United States, or any other part of the English-speaking world.

American lexicographer Noah Webster was among the first to recognize the growing divergence of American and British usages. His work An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) marked this difference with its inclusion of many new American words, indigenous meanings attached to old words, changes in pronunciation, and a series of spelling reforms that he devised (-er instead of British -re, -or to replace-our, check instead of cheque). Webster went so far as to predict that the American language would one day become a distinct language. Some later commentators, notably H. L. Mencken, compiler of The American Language (3 volumes, 1936-1948), have also argued that it is a separate language, but most authorities today agree that it is a dialect of British English.

Patterns of American English

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the study of American English was concerned mainly with identifying Americanisms and giving the etymologies of Americanisms in the vocabulary: words borrowed from Native American languages (mugwump, caucus); words retained after having been given up in Great Britain (bug, to mean insects in general rather than bed bug specifically, as in Great Britain); or words that developed a new significance in the New World (corn, to designate what the British call maize, rather than grain in general). Large numbers of American terms (elevator, truck, hood [of an automobile], windshield, garbage collector, drugstore) were shown to differ from their British counterparts (respectively: lift, lorry, bonnet, windscreen, dustman, chemist's). Such lexical differences between Standard American and British English still exist, but, as a result of modern communications, speakers of English everywhere have no trouble in understanding one another. More recently, linguistic researchers have turned their attention to the study of variation patterns in American English and to the social and historical sources of these patterns.

Regional Dialects

Regionally oriented research before 1940 distinguished three main regional dialects of Standard American English, each of which has several subdialects. The Northern (or New England) dialect is spoken in New England and New York State; one of its subdialects is the “New Yorkese” of New York City. The Midland (or General American) dialect is heard along the coast from New Jersey to Delaware, with variants spoken in an area bounded by the Upper Ohio Valley, West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and eastern Tennessee. The Southern dialect, with its varieties, is spoken from Delaware to South Carolina. From their respective focal points these dialects, according to this theory, have spread and mingled across the rest of the country.

Social/Cultural Dialects

Social/cultural dialects vary both the vocabulary and grammar of Standard American English and are not always intelligible to speakers of the standard language. The most distinctive variety of American English, in terms of vocabulary and grammar, is the social/cultural dialect known as Gullah, actually a contact language, or creole, spoken by blacks in the Georgia-South Carolina low country but also as far away as southeast Texas. Gullah, combining 17th- and 18th-century Black English and several West African languages, has given to American English such words as goober (peanut), gumbo (okra), and voodoo. It is the dialect used in the novel Porgy (1925) by American writer DuBose Heyward. “Me beena shum” (I was seeing him/her/it) is barely intelligible to a speaker of Standard American English, and almost all Gullah speakers shift to more standard usage when conversing with outsiders.

Pennsylvania Dutch, another distinguishable dialect, is actually English heavily influenced by literal translations from the original German language of settlers in Pennsylvania. In this dialect such a construction as “He may come back bothsides, ain't?” (He might come back on either side, mightn't he?) is possible. Most Pennsylvania Dutch speakers also readily adapt themselves to standard usage.

Black English

Until the 19th century, most blacks throughout the country spoke a creole similar to Gullah and West Indian English. Change in the direction of Standard American English vocabulary and syntax, particularly in the 20th century, has been rapid but never complete. The Black English of the inner cities characteristically retains such locutions as “He busy” (He is busy) as opposed to “He be busy” (He is busy indefinitely) and “She been said that” to express action markedly in the past (she had said that). In the 1960s Black English became a topic of linguistic controversy in educational circles because of its supposed deficiencies and ultimately was the subject of legislative action under the Bilingual Education Act (1968). Nevertheless, Black English has made contributions to American English vocabulary, especially through jazz—from the word jazz itself to such terms as nitty-gritty and uptight.

Development of American English

English commentators in the 18th century noted the “astounding uniformity” of the language spoken in the American colonies, excepting the language spoken by the slaves. (Subvarieties of English, however, were spoken by Native Americans and other non-British groups.) The reason for this uniformity is that the first colonists came not as regional but as social groups from all parts of England, so that dialect leveling was the dominant force.

Grammatical Formality

Against this background of uniformity, deviations from Standard American English have frequently met with disapproval from those who promulgate “correct” English. Grammatical formality is the most notable feature of Standard American English, and particular stigma is attached to the use of nonstandard verb forms. Rigidity in grammar and syntax in written Standard American English is greater than in British English in part because large numbers of immigrants acquired English as a second language according to formal rules. Also, social mobility in the United States has produced certain anxieties and confusion about “correct” usage as an indication of status. What is considered Standard American English is today spoken for business and professional purposes by people in all parts of the country, many of whom speak very differently in private. In writing, however, many feel constrained to use formal, Latinate locutions even when addressing close friends.

Regional Variations

In earlier times, the dialect of New England, with its British form of pronunciation (ah for a in path, dance; loss of the r sound in barn, park), was considered prestigious, but such pronunciations failed to inspire nationwide emulation. Indeed, no single regional characteristic has ever been able to dominate the language. (One of the reasons that some linguists define Black English as a language rather than a dialect is that its vocabulary, pronunciation, and syntax are similar in all parts of the country, rural and urban.)

Today, the concept of so-called Network Standard, promoted by radio and television, provokes some argument from dialectologists, who champion diversity and richness of speech, but regional variations have by no means been obliterated. The Midland (or General American) distinct r sound persists (car), and even educated speakers in the South do not differentiate pen from pin.

Growth of the American Vocabulary

The uniformity of the English spoken by the British colonists until about 1780 was soon disrupted by non-English influences. First, many Native American words were taken over directly to describe indigenous flora and fauna (sassafras, raccoon), food (hominy), ceremonies (powwow), and, of course, geographic names (Massachusetts, Susquehanna). Phrasal compounds, translated or adapted from the Native American, were also added to English: warpath, peace pipe, bury the hatchet, fire water. Other borrowings came in time from the Dutch (boss, poppycock, spook), German (liverwurst, noodle, cole slaw, semester), French (levee, chowder, prairie), Spanish (hoosegow, from juzgado, “courtroom”; mesa, ranch[o]; tortilla), and Finnish (sauna).

Other modifications in vocabulary came about presumably because of lack of education or because of confusion on the part of explorers and settlers who applied incorrect names to things encountered in the New World—for example, partridge, used indiscriminately for quail, grouse, or other game birds, and buffalo, applied to the American bison.

American English vocabulary has been and still is enriched with jargon, terms coming from trades and professions. Slang, argot, and even certain euphemisms have also been a constant source of language enrichment, although some terms die out before they are admitted to the standard vocabulary. In the 19th century prudishness influenced the language: legs were called “limbs,” and pregnant “in the family way.”

As might be expected in a nation originating from 13 maritime colonies, a great admixture of nautical expressions has been in the language since early times: freight (used as a verb), slush fund, shove off, hail from. Baseball took over skipper (to mean manager), on deck, and in the hole (originally hold) from the nautical vocabulary and contributed many of its own colorful idiomatic expressions to the general language (for example, get to first base).

Influence on British English

Spread by motion pictures, books, and television, Americanisms—especially American slang—have in large numbers found their way to Great Britain, more and more blurring the distinctions between the two forms of the English language. Although nonstandard phrases, such as “met up with” or “try out” (in the sense of test), may still encounter objections from purists, the very force of their objections shows how influential such words have been on everyday British English speech.

American English dictionary

(1828), two-volume dictionary by the American lexicographer Noah Webster. He began work on it in 1807 and completed it in France and England in 1824-25, producing a two-volume lexicon containing 12,000 words and 30,000 to 40,000 definitions that had not appeared in any earlier dictionary. Because it was based on the principle that word usage should evolve from the spoken language, the work was attacked for its "Americanism," or unconventional preferences in spelling and usage, as well as for its inclusion of nonliterary words, especially technical terms in the arts and sciences. Despite harsh criticism, the work sold out, 2,500 copies in the United States and 3,000 in England, in little over a year. It was relatively unpopular thereafter, however, despite the appearance of the second, corrected edition in 1840; and the rights were sold in 1843 by the Webster estate to George and Charles Merriam.

4. Other Englishes

Australian and New Zealand English

Unlike Canada, Australia has few speakers of European languages other than English within its borders. There are still many Aboriginal languages, though they are spoken by only a few hundred speakers each and their continued existence is threatened. More than 80 percent of the population is British. By the mid-20th century, with rapid decline of its Aboriginal tongues, English was without rivals in Australia.

During colonial times the new settlers had to find names for a fauna and flora (e.g., banksia, iron bark, whee whee) different from anything previously known to them: trees that shed bark instead of leaves and cherries with external stones. The words brush, bush, creek, paddock, and scrub acquired wider senses, whereas the terms brook, dale, field, forest, and meadow were seldom used. A creek leading out of a river and entering it again downstream was called an anastomizing branch (a term from anatomy), or an anabranch, whereas a creek coming to a dead end was called by its native name, a billabong. The giant kingfisher with its raucous bray was long referred to as a laughing jackass, later as a bushman's clock, but now it is a kookaburra. Cattle so intractable that only roping could control them were said to be ropable, a term now used as a synonym for "angry" or "extremely annoyed."

A deadbeat was a penniless "sundowner" at the very end of his tether, and a no-hoper was an incompetent fellow, hopeless and helpless. An offsider (strictly, the offside driver of a bullock team) was any assistant or partner. A rouseabout was first an odd-job man on a sheep station and then any kind of handyman. He was, in fact, the "down-under" counterpart of the wharf labourer, or roustabout, on the Mississippi River. Both words originated in Cornwall, and many other terms, now exclusively Australian, came ultimately from British dialects. "Dinkum," for instance, meaning "true, authentic, genuine," echoed the "fair dinkum," or fair deal, of Lincolnshire dialect. "Fossicking" about for surface gold, and then rummaging about in general, perpetuated the term fossick ("to elicit information, ferret out the facts") from the Cornish dialect of English. To "barrack," or jeer noisily, recalled Irish "barrack" ("to brag, boast"), whereas "skerrick" in the phrase "not a skerrick left" was obviously identical with the "skerrick" meaning "small fragment, particle," still heard in English dialects from Westmorland to Hampshire.

Some Australian English terms came from Aboriginal speech: the words boomerang, corroboree (warlike dance and then any large and noisy gathering), dingo (reddish-brown half-domesticated dog), galah (cockatoo), gunyah (bush hut), kangaroo, karri (dark-red eucalyptus tree), nonda (rosaceous tree yielding edible fruit), pokutukawa (evergreen bearing brilliant blossom), wallaby (small marsupial), and wallaroo (large rock kangaroo). Australian English has slower rhythms and flatter intonations than RP. Although there is remarkably little regional variation throughout the entire continent, there is significant social variation. The neutral vowel // (as the a in "sofa") is frequently used, as in London Cockney: "arches" and "archers" are both pronounced [a:t z], and the pronunciations of RP "day" and "go" are, respectively, [d i] and [gu].

Although New Zealand lies over 1,000 miles away, much of the English spoken there is similar to that of Australia. The blanket term Austral English is sometimes used to cover the language of the whole of Australasia, or Southern Asia, but this term is far from popular with New Zealanders because it makes no reference to New Zealand and gives all the prominence, so they feel, to Australia. Between North and South Islands there are observable differences. For one thing, Maori, which is still a living language (related to Tahitian, Hawaiian, and the other Austronesian [Malayo-Polynesian] languages), has a greater number of speakers and more influence in North Island.

The English of India-Pakistan

In 1950 India became a federal republic within the Commonwealth of Nations, and Hindi was declared the first national language. English, it was stated, would "continue to be used for all official purposes until 1965." In 1967, however, by the terms of the English Language Amendment Bill, English was proclaimed "an alternative official or associate language with Hindi until such time as all non-Hindi states had agreed to its being dropped." English is therefore acknowledged to be indispensable. It is the only practicable means of day-to-day communication between the central government at New Delhi and states with non-Hindi speaking populations, especially with the Deccan, or "South," where millions speak Dravidian (non-Indo-European) languages--Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam. English is widely used in business, and, although its use as a medium in higher education is decreasing, it remains the principal language of scientific research.

In 1956 Pakistan became an autonomous republic comprising two states, East and West. Bengali and Urdu were made the national languages of East and West Pakistan, respectively, but English was adopted as a third official language and functioned as the medium of interstate communication. (In 1971 East Pakistan broke away from its western partner and became the independent state of Bangladesh.)

African English

Africa is the most multilingual area in the world, if people are measured against languages. Upon a large number of indigenous languages rests a slowly changing superstructure of world languages (Arabic, English, French, and Portuguese). The problems of language are everywhere linked with political, social, economic, and educational factors.

The Republic of South Africa, the oldest British settlement in the continent, resembles Canada in having two recognized European languages within its borders: English and Afrikaans, or Cape Dutch. Both British and Dutch traders followed in the wake of 15th-century Portuguese explorers and have lived in widely varying war-and-peace relationships ever since. Although the Union of South Africa, comprising Cape Province, Transvaal, Natal, and Orange Free State, was for more than a half century (1910-61) a member of the British Empire and Commonwealth, its four prime ministers (Botha, Smuts, Hertzog, and Malan) were all Dutchmen. In the early 1980s Afrikaners outnumbered Britishers by three to two. The Afrikaans language began to diverge seriously from European Dutch in the late 18th century and has gradually come to be recognized as a separate language. Although the English spoken in South Africa differs in some respects from standard British English, its speakers do not regard the language as a separate one. They have naturally come to use many Afrikanerisms, such as kloof, kopje, krans, veld, and vlei, to denote features of the landscape and occasionally employ African names to designate local animals and plants. The words trek and commando, notorious in South African history, have acquired almost worldwide currency.

Elsewhere in Africa, English helps to answer the needs of wider communication. It functions as an official language of administration in Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland and in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Uganda, and Kenya. It is the language of instruction at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda; at the University of Nairobi, Kenya; and at the University of Dar es Salaam, in Tanzania.

The West African states of The Gambia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Nigeria, independent members of the Commonwealth, have English as their official language. They are all multilingual. The official language of Liberia is also English, although its tribal communities constitute four different linguistic groups. Its leading citizens regard themselves as Americo-Liberians, being descendants of those freed blacks whose first contingents arrived in West Africa in 1822. South of the Sahara indigenous languages are extending their domains and are competing healthily and vigorously with French and English.

F. Languages of the World

stimates of the number of languages spoken in the world today vary depending on where the dividing line between language and dialect is drawn. For instance, linguists disagree over whether Chinese should be considered a single language because of its speakers' shared cultural and literary tradition, or whether it should be considered several different languages because of the mutual unintelligibility of, for example, the Mandarin spoken in Beijing and the Cantonese spoken in Hong Kong. If mutual intelligibility is the basic criterion, current estimates indicate that there are about 6000 languages spoken in the world today. However, many languages with a smaller number of speakers are in danger of being replaced by languages with large numbers of speakers. In fact, some scholars believe that perhaps 90 percent of the languages spoken in the 1990s will be extinct or doomed to extinction by the end of the 21st century. The 12 most widely spoken languages, with approximate numbers of native speakers, are as follows: Mandarin Chinese, 836 million; Hindi, 333 million; Spanish, 332 million; English, 322 million; Bengali, 189 million; Arabic, 186 million; Russian, 170 million; Portuguese, 170 million; Japanese, 125 million; German, 98 million; French, 72 million; Malay, 50 million. If second-language speakers are included in these figures, English is the second most widely spoken language, with 418 million speakers.

1. Language Classification

Linguists classify languages using two main classification systems: typological and genetic. A typological classification system organizes languages according to the similarities and differences in their structures. Languages that share the same structure belong to the same type, while languages with different structures belong to different types. For example, despite the great differences between the two languages in other respects, Mandarin Chinese and English belong to the same type, grouped by word-order typology. Both languages have a basic word order of subject-verb-object.

A genetic classification of languages divides them into families on the basis of their historical development: A group of languages that descend historically from the same common ancestor form a language family. For example, the Romance languages form a language family because they all descended from the Latin language. Latin, in turn, belongs to a larger language family, Indo-European, the ancestor language of which is called Proto-Indo-European. Some genetic groupings are universally accepted. However, because documents attesting to the form of most ancestor languages, including Proto-Indo-European, have not survived, much controversy surrounds the more wide-ranging genetic groupings. A conservative survey of the world's language families follows.

Indo-European Language Family

The Indo-European languages are the most widely spoken languages in Europe, and they also extend into western and southern Asia. The family consists of a number of subfamilies or branches (groups of languages that descended from a common ancestor, which in turn is a member of a larger group of languages that descended from a common ancestor). Most of the people in northwestern Europe speak Germanic languages, which include English, German, and Dutch as well as the Scandinavian languages, such as Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. The Celtic languages, such as Welsh and Gaelic, once covered a large part of Europe but are now restricted to its western fringes. The Romance languages, all descended from Latin, are the only survivors of a somewhat more extensive family, Italic, which includes, in addition to Latin, a number of now extinct languages of Italy. Languages of the Baltic and Slavic (Slavonic) branches are closely related. Only two of the Baltic languages survive: Lithuanian and Latvian. The Slavic languages, which cover much of eastern and central Europe, include Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian. In the Balkan Peninsula, two branches of Indo-European exist that each consist of a single language—namely the Greek language and the Albanian language. Farther east, in Caucasia, the Armenian language constitutes another single-language branch of Indo-European.

The other main surviving branch of the Indo-European family is Indo-Iranian. It has two subbranches, Iranian and Indo-Aryan (Indic). Iranian languages are spoken mainly in southwestern Asia and include Persian, Pashto (spoken in Afghanistan), and Kurdish. Indo-Aryan languages are spoken in the northern part of South Asia (Pakistan, northern India, Nepal, and Bangladesh) and also in most of Sri Lanka (see Indian Languages). This branch includes Hindi-Urdu, Bengali, Nepali, and Sinhalese (the language spoken by the majority of people in Sri Lanka). Historical documents attest to other, now extinct, branches of Indo-European, such as the Anatolian languages, which were once spoken in what is now Turkey and include the ancient Hittite language.

Other European Language Families

The Uralic languages constitute the other main language family of Europe. They are spoken mostly in the northeastern part of the continent, spilling over into northwestern Asia; one language, Hungarian, is spoken in central Europe. Most Uralic languages belong to the family's Finno-Ugric branch. This branch includes (in addition to Hungarian) Finnish, Estonian, and Saami. Europe also has one language isolate (a language not known to be related to any other language): Basque, which is spoken in the Pyrenees. At the boundary between southeastern Europe and Asia lie the Caucasus Mountains. Since ancient times the region has contained a large number of languages, including two groups of languages that have not been definitively related to any other language families. The South Caucasian, or Kartvelian, languages are spoken in Georgia and include the Georgian language. The North Caucasian languages fall into North-West Caucasian, North-Central Caucasian, and North-East Caucasian subgroups. The genetic relation of North-West Caucasian to the other subgroups is not universally agreed upon. The North-West Caucasian languages include Abkhaz, the North-Central Caucasian languages include Chechen, and the North-East Caucasian languages include the Avar language.

Asian and Pacific Language Families

South Asia contains, in addition to the Indo-Aryan branch of Indo-European, two other large language families. The Dravidian family is dominant in southern India and includes Tamil and Telugu. The Munda languages represent the Austro-Asiatic language family in India and contain many languages, each with relatively small numbers of speakers. The Austro-Asiatic family also spreads into Southeast Asia, where it includes the Khmer (Cambodian) and Vietnamese languages. South Asia contains at least one language isolate, Burushaski, spoken in a remote part of northern Pakistan.

A number of linguists believe that many of the languages of central, northern, and eastern Asia form a single Altaic language family, although others consider Turkic, Tungusic, and Mongolic to be separate, unrelated language families. The Turkic languages include Turkish and a number of languages of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), such as Uzbek and Tatar. The Tungusic languages are spoken mainly by small population groups in Siberia and Manchuria. This family includes the nearly extinct Manchu language. The main language of the Mongolic family is Mongolian. Some linguists also assign Korean and Japanese to the Altaic family, although others regard these languages as isolates. In northern Asia there are a number of languages that appear either to form small, independent families or to be language isolates, such as the Chukotko-Kamchatkan language family of the Chukot and Kamchatka peninsulas in the far east of Russia. These languages are often referred to collectively as Paleo-Siberian (Paleo-Asiatic), but this is a geographic, not a genetic, grouping.

The Sino-Tibetan language family covers not only most of China, but also much of the Himalayas and parts of Southeast Asia. The family's major languages are Chinese, Tibetan, and Myanmar. The Tai languages constitute another important language family of Southeast Asia. They are spoken in Thailand, Laos, and southern China and include the Thai language. The Miao-Yao, or Hmong-Mien, languages are spoken in isolated areas of southern China and northern Southeast Asia. The Austronesian languages, formerly called Malayo-Polynesian, cover the Malay Peninsula and most islands to the southeast of Asia and are spoken as far west as Madagascar and throughout the Pacific islands as far east as Easter Island. The Austronesian languages include Malay (called Bahasa Malaysia in Malaysia, and Bahasa Indonesia in Indonesia), Javanese, Hawaiian, and Maori (the language of the aboriginal people of New Zealand).

Although the inhabitants of some of the coastal areas and offshore islands of New Guinea speak Austronesian languages, most of the main island's inhabitants, as well as some inhabitants of nearby islands, speak languages unrelated to Austronesian. Linguists collectively refer to these languages as Papuan languages, although this is a geographical term covering about 60 different language families. The languages of the Australian Aborigines constitute another unrelated group, and it is debatable whether all Australian languages form a single family.

African Language Families

The languages of Africa may belong to as few as four families: Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Congo, and Khoisan, although the genetic unity of Nilo-Saharan and Khoisan is still disputed. Afro-Asiatic languages occupy most of North Africa and also large parts of southwestern Asia. The family consists of several branches. The Semitic branch includes Arabic, Hebrew, and many languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea, including Amharic, the dominant language of Ethiopia. The Chadic branch, spoken mainly in northern Nigeria and adjacent areas, includes Hausa, one of the two most widely spoken languages of sub-Saharan Africa (the other being Swahili). Other subfamilies of Afro-Asiatic are Berber, Cushitic, and the single-language branch Egyptian, which contains the now-extinct language of the ancient Egyptians.

The Niger-Congo family covers most of sub-Saharan Africa and includes such widely spoken West African languages as Yoruba and Fulani, as well as the Bantu languages of eastern and southern Africa, which include Swahili and Zulu. The Nilo-Saharan languages are spoken mainly in eastern Africa, in an area between those covered by the Afro-Asiatic and the Niger-Congo languages. The best-known Nilo-Saharan language is Masai, spoken by the Masai people in Kenya and Tanzania. The Khoisan languages are spoken in the southwestern corner of Africa and include the Nama language (formerly called Hottentot).

Language Families of the Americas

Some linguists group all indigenous languages of the Americas into just three families, while most separate them into a large number of families and isolates. Well-established families include Eskimo-Aleut. The family stretches from the eastern edge of Siberia to the Aleutian Islands, and across Alaska and northern Canada to Greenland, where one variety of the Inuit (Eskimo) language, Greenlandic, is an official language. The Na-Dené languages, the main branch of which comprises the Athabaskan languages, occupies much of northwestern North America. The Athabaskan languages also include, however, a group of languages in the southwestern United States, one of which is Navajo. Languages of the Algonquian and Iroquoian families constitute the major indigenous languages of northeastern North America, while the Siouan family is one of the main families of central North America.

The Uto-Aztecan family extends from the southwestern United States into Central America and includes Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec civilization and its modern descendants. The Mayan languages are spoken mainly in southern Mexico and Guatemala. Major language families of South America include Carib and Arawak in the north, and Macro-Gê and Tupian in the east. Guaraní, recognized as a national language in Paraguay alongside the official language, Spanish, is an important member of the Tupian family. In the Andes Mountains region, the dominant indigenous languages are Quechua and Aymara; the genetic relation of these languages to each other and to other languages remains controversial.

Pidgin and Creole Languages

Individual pidgin and creole languages pose a particular problem for genetic classification because the vocabulary and grammar of each comes from different sources. Consequently, many linguists do not try to classify them genetically. Pidgin and creole languages are found in many parts of the world, but there are particular concentrations in the Caribbean, West Africa, and the islands of the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific. English-based creoles such as Jamaican Creole and Guyanese Creole, and French-based creoles such as Haitian Creole, can be found in the Caribbean. English-based creoles are widespread in West Africa. About 10 percent of the population of Sierra Leone speaks Krio as a native language, and an additional 85 percent speaks it as a second language. The creoles of the Indian Ocean islands, such as Mauritius, are French-based. An English-based pidgin, Tok Pisin, is spoken by more than 2 million people in Papua New Guinea, making it the most widely spoken auxiliary language of that country. The inhabitants of the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu speak similar varieties of Tok Pisin, called Pijin and Bislama, respectively.

2. International Languages

International language is any of several languages, natural or deliberately constructed, used to facilitate communications among peoples with different native languages.

From time to time different natural languages have been used as universal tongues. As a result of conquest or colonialism, subjugated nations have been forced to abandon their own languages or have gradually adopted the language of the conqueror; conversely, occupying forces have often gradually assimilated the languages of the conquered, as was the case of the Normans in England. In other cases, peoples neighboring on a commercially, culturally, or politically preeminent nation have voluntarily, although usually only partly, adopted the language of that nation as auxiliary to their own. By such means the Latin language came closest of all native languages to becoming a truly universal tongue. Similarly, French from the 18th to the 19th century and English in the 20th century enjoyed relative universality in diplomatic, scientific, and commercial circles.

Other attempts at universal means of communication have been made by the use of a lingua franca or pidgin, or by simplifying existing languages; an example of the last is Basic English, devised between 1925 and 1930. The use of living native languages has generally, however, proved to be impracticable because of difficulties in learning them or because of nationalistic prejudices.

For these reasons, many attempts have been made to construct artificial universal languages, based on elements of natural languages with simplifications of grammar and spelling. Volapük, devised in 1880 by the German bishop Johann Martin Schleyer, and Esperanto, invented in 1887 by a Polish physician, Dr. Ludwik L. Zamenhof, were both based on a combination of Latin, the Romance languages, and the Germanic languages. Volapük eventually proved too difficult to learn and to use; Esperanto is still the most widely spoken of the artificial languages. Interlingua, created in 1951 by the International Auxiliary Language Association, is derived from English and the Romance languages; it has primarily been used in international scientific and technological journals, thus eliminating the need for costly multiple translations.

International languages include both existing languages that have become international means of communication and languages artificially constructed to serve this purpose. The most famous and widespread artificial international language is Esperanto; however, the most widespread international languages are not artificial. In medieval Europe, Latin was the principal international language. Today, English is used in more countries as an official language or as the main means of international communication than any other language. French is the second most widely used language, largely due to the substantial number of African countries with French as their official language. Other languages have more restricted regional use, such as Spanish in Spain and Latin America, Arabic in the Middle East, and Russian in the republics of the former USSR.

G. History of linguistics

1. Earlier History

Non-Western traditions

Linguistic speculation and investigation, insofar as is known, has gone on in only a small number of societies. To the extent that Mesopotamian, Chinese, and Arabic learning dealt with grammar, their treatments were so enmeshed in the particularities of those languages and so little known to the European world until recently that they have had virtually no impact on Western linguistic tradition. Chinese linguistic and philological scholarship stretches back for more than two millennia, but the interest of those scholars was concentrated largely on phonetics, writing, and lexicography; their consideration of grammatical problems was bound up closely with the study of logic.

Certainly the most interesting non-Western grammatical tradition--and the most original and independent--is that of India, which dates back at least two and one-half millennia and which culminates with the grammar of Panini, of the 5th century BC. There are three major ways in which the Sanskrit tradition has had an impact on modern linguistic scholarship. As soon as Sanskrit became known to the Western learned world the unravelling of comparative Indo-European grammar ensued and the foundations were laid for the whole 19th-century edifice of comparative philology and historical linguistics. But, for this, Sanskrit was simply a part of the data; Indian grammatical learning played almost no direct part. Nineteenth-century workers, however, recognized that the native tradition of phonetics in ancient India was vastly superior to Western knowledge; and this had important consequences for the growth of the science of phonetics in the West. Thirdly, there is in the rules or definitions (sutras) of Panini a remarkably subtle and penetrating account of Sanskrit grammar. The construction of sentences, compound nouns, and the like is explained through ordered rules operating on underlying structures in a manner strikingly similar in part to modes of contemporary theory. As might be imagined, this perceptive Indian grammatical work has held great fascination for 20th-century theoretical linguists. A study of Indian logic in relation to Paninian grammar alongside Aristotelian and Western logic in relation to Greek grammar and its successors could bring illuminating insights.

Whereas in ancient Chinese learning a separate field of study that might be called grammar scarcely took root, in ancient India a sophisticated version of this discipline developed early alongside the other sciences. Even though the study of Sanskrit grammar may originally have had the practical aim of keeping the sacred Vedic texts and their commentaries pure and intact, the study of grammar in India in the 1st millennium BC had already become an intellectual end in itself.

Greek and Roman antiquity

The emergence of grammatical learning in Greece is less clearly known than is sometimes implied, and the subject is more complex than is often supposed; here only the main strands can be sampled. The term he grammatike techne ("the art of letters") had two senses. It meant the study of the values of the letters and of accentuation and prosody and, in this sense, was an abstract intellectual discipline; and it also meant the skill of literacy and thus embraced applied pedagogy. This side of what was to become "grammatical" learning was distinctly applied, particular, and less exalted by comparison with other pursuits. Most of the developments associated with theoretical grammar grew out of philosophy and criticism; and in these developments a repeated duality of themes crosses and intertwines.

Much of Greek philosophy was occupied with the distinction between that which exists "by nature" and that which exists "by convention." So in language it was natural to account for words and forms as ordained by nature (by onomatopoeia--i.e., by imitation of natural sounds) or as arrived at arbitrarily by a social convention. This dispute regarding the origin of language and meanings paved the way for the development of divergences between the views of the "analogists," who looked on language as possessing an essential regularity as a result of the symmetries that convention can provide, and the views of the "anomalists," who pointed to language's lack of regularity as one facet of the inescapable irregularities of nature. The situation was more complex, however, than this statement would suggest. For example, it seems that the anomalists among the Stoics credited the irrational quality of language precisely to the claim that language did not exactly mirror nature. In any event, the anomalist tradition in the hands of the Stoics brought grammar the benefit of their work in logic and rhetoric. This led to the distinction that, in modern theory, is made with the terms signifiant ("what signifies") and signifié ("what is signified") or, somewhat differently and more elaborately, with "expression" and "content"; and it laid the groundwork of modern theories of inflection, though by no means with the exhaustiveness and fine-grained analysis reached by the Sanskrit grammarians.

The Alexandrians, who were analogists working largely on literary criticism and text philology, completed the development of the classical Greek grammatical tradition. Dionysius Thrax, in the 2nd century BC, produced the first systematic grammar of Western tradition; it dealt only with word morphology. The study of sentence syntax was to wait for Apollonius Dyscolus, of the 2nd century AD. Dionysius called grammar "the acquaintance with [or observation of] what is uttered by poets and writers," using a word meaning a less general form of knowledge than what might be called "science." His typically Alexandrian literary goal is suggested by the headings in his work: pronunciation, poetic figurative language, difficult words, true and inner meanings of words, exposition of form-classes, literary criticism. Dionysius defined a sentence as a unit of sense or thought, but it is difficult to be sure of his precise meaning.

The Romans, who largely took over, with mild adaptations to their highly similar language, the total work of the Greeks, are important not as originators but as transmitters. Aelius Donatus, of the 4th century AD, and Priscian, an African of the 6th century, and their colleagues were slightly more systematic than their Greek models but were essentially retrospective rather than original. Up to this point a field that was at times called ars grammatica was a congeries of investigations, both theoretical and practical, drawn from the work and interests of literacy, scribeship, logic, epistemology, rhetoric, textual philosophy, poetics, and literary criticism. Yet modern specialists in the field still share their concerns and interests. The anomalists, who concentrated on surface irregularity and who looked then for regularities deeper down (as the Stoics sought them in logic) bear a resemblance to contemporary scholars of the transformationalist school. And the philological analogists with their regularizing surface segmentation show striking kinship of spirit with the modern school of structural (or taxonomic or glossematic) grammatical theorists.

The European Middle Ages

It is possible that developments in grammar during the Middle Ages constitute one of the most misunderstood areas of the field of linguistics. It is difficult to relate this period coherently to other periods and to modern concerns because surprisingly little is accessible and certain, let alone analyzed with sophistication. In the early 1970s the majority of the known grammatical treatises had not yet been made available in full to modern scholarship, so that not even their true extent could be classified with confidence. These works must be analyzed and studied in the light of medieval learning, especially the learning of the schools of philosophy then current, in order to understand their true value and place.

The field of linguistics has almost completely neglected the achievements of this period. Students of grammar have tended to see as high points in their field the achievements of the Greeks, the Renaissance growth and "rediscovery" of learning (which led directly to modern school traditions), the contemporary flowering of theoretical study (men usually find their own age important and fascinating), and, in recent decades, the astonishing monument of Panini. Many linguists have found uncongenial the combination of medieval Latin learning and premodern philosophy. Yet medieval scholars might reasonably be expected to have bequeathed to modern scholarship the fruits of more than ordinarily refined perceptions of a certain order. These scholars used, wrote in, and studied Latin, a language that, though not their native tongue, was one in which they were very much at home; such scholars in groups must often have represented a highly varied linguistic background.

Some of the medieval treatises continue the tradition of grammars of late antiquity; so there are versions based on Donatus and Priscian, often with less incorporation of the classical poets and writers. Another genre of writing involves simultaneous consideration of grammatical distinctions and scholastic logic; modern linguists are probably inadequately trained to deal with these writings.

Certainly the most obviously interesting theorizing to be found in this period is contained in the "speculative grammar" of the modistae, who were so called because the titles of their works were often phrased De modis significandi tractatus ("Treatise Concerning the Modes of Signifying"). For the development of the Western grammatical tradition, work of this genre was the second great milestone after the crystallization of Greek thought with the Stoics and Alexandrians. The scholastic philosophers were occupied with relating words and things--i.e., the structure of sentences with the nature of the real world--hence their preoccupation with signification. The aim of the grammarians was to explore how a word (an element of language) matched things apprehended by the mind and how it signified reality. Since a word cannot signify the nature of reality directly, it must stand for the thing signified in one of its modes or properties; it is this discrimination of modes that the study of categories and parts of speech is all about. Thus the study of sentences should lead one to the nature of reality by way of the modes of signifying.

The modistae did not innovate in discriminating categories and parts of speech; they accepted those that had come down from the Greeks through Donatus and Priscian. The great contribution of these grammarians, who flourished between the mid-13th and mid-14th century, was their insistence on a grammar to explicate the distinctions found by their forerunners in the languages known to them. Whether they made the best choice in selecting logic, metaphysics, and epistemology (as they knew them) as the fields to be included with grammar as a basis for the grand account of universal knowledge is less important than the breadth of their conception of the place of grammar. Before the modistae, grammar had not been viewed as a separate discipline but had been considered in conjunction with other studies or skills (such as criticism, preservation of valued texts, foreign-language learning). The Greek view of grammar was rather narrow and fragmented; the Roman view was largely technical. The speculative medieval grammarians (who dealt with language as a speculum, "mirror" of reality) inquired into the fundamentals underlying language and grammar. They wondered whether grammarians or philosophers discovered grammar, whether grammar was the same for all languages, what the fundamental topic of grammar was, and what the basic and irreducible grammatical primes are. Signification was reached by imposition of words on things; i.e., the sign was arbitrary. Those questions sound remarkably like current issues of linguistics, which serves to illustrate how slow and repetitious progress in the field is. While the modistae accepted, by modern standards, a restrictive set of categories, the acumen and sweep they brought to their task resulted in numerous subtle and fresh syntactic observations. A thorough study of the medieval period would greatly enrich the discussion of current questions.

The Renaissance

It is customary to think of the Renaissance as a time of great flowering. There is no doubt that linguistic and philological developments of this period are interesting and significant. Two new sets of data that modern linguists tend to take for granted became available to grammarians during this period: (1) the newly recognized vernacular languages of Europe, for the protection and cultivation of which there subsequently arose national academies and learned institutions that live down to the present day; and (2) the exotic languages of Africa, the Orient, the New World, and, later, of Siberia, Inner Asia, Papua, Oceania, the Arctic, and Australia, which the voyages of discovery opened up. Earlier, the only non-Indo-European grammar at all widely accessible was that of the Hebrews (and to some extent Arabic); and Semitic in fact shares many categories with Indo-European in its grammar. Indeed, for many of the exotic languages scholarship barely passed beyond the most rudimentary initial collection of word lists; grammatical analysis was scarcely approached.

In the field of grammar, the Renaissance did not produce notable innovation or advance. Generally speaking, there was a strong rejection of speculative grammar and a relatively uncritical resumption of late Roman views (as stated by Priscian). This was somewhat understandable in the case of Latin or Greek grammars, since here the task was less evidently that of intellectual inquiry and more that of the schools, with the practical aim of gaining access to the newly discovered ancients. But, aside from the fact that, beginning in the 15th century, serious grammars of European vernaculars were actually written, it is only in particular cases and for specific details (e.g., a mild alteration in the number of parts of speech or cases of nouns) that real departures from Roman grammar can be noted. Likewise, until the end of the 19th century, grammars of the exotic languages, written largely by missionaries and traders, were cast almost entirely in the Roman model, to which the Renaissance had added a limited medieval syntactic ingredient.

From time to time a degree of boldness may be seen in France: Petrus Ramus, a 16th-century logician, worked within a taxonomic framework of the surface shapes of words and inflections, such work entailing some of the attendant trivialities that modern linguistics has experienced (e.g., by dividing up Latin nouns on the basis of equivalence of syllable count among their case forms). In the 17th century, members of Solitaires (a group of hermits who lived in the deserted abbey of Port-Royal in France) produced a grammar that has exerted noteworthy continuing influence, even in contemporary theoretical discussion. Drawing their basic view from scholastic logic as modified by rationalism, these people aimed to produce a philosophical grammar that would capture what was common to the grammars of languages--a general grammar, but not aprioristically universalist. This grammar has attracted recent attention because it employs certain syntactic formulations that resemble in detail contemporary transformational rules, which formulate the relationship between the various elements of a sentence.

Roughly from the 15th century to World War II, however, the version of grammar available to the Western public (together with its colonial expansion) remained basically that of Priscian with only occasional and subsidiary modifications, and the knowledge of new languages brought only minor adjustments to the serious study of grammar. As education has become more broadly disseminated throughout society by the schools, attention has shifted from theoretical or technical grammar as an intellectual preoccupation to prescriptive grammar suited to pedagogical purposes, which started with Renaissance vernacular nationalism. Grammar increasingly parted company with its older fellow disciplines within philosophy as they moved over to the domain known as natural science, and technical academic grammatical study has increasingly become involved with issues represented by empiricism versus rationalism and their successor manifestations on the academic scene.

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

2. The 19th Century

Development of the comparative method

It is generally agreed that the most outstanding achievement of linguistic scholarship in the 19th century was the development of the comparative method, which comprised a set of principles whereby languages could be systematically compared with respect to their sound systems, grammatical structure, and vocabulary and shown to be "genealogically" related. As French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, and the other Romance languages had evolved from Latin, so Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit as well as the Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic languages and many other languages of Europe and Asia had evolved from some earlier language, to which the name Indo-European or Proto-Indo-European is now customarily applied. That all the Romance languages were descended from Latin and thus constituted one "family" had been known for centuries; but the existence of the Indo-European family of languages and the nature of their genealogical relationship was first demonstrated by the 19th-century comparative philologists. (The term philology in this context is not restricted to the study of literary languages.)

The main impetus for the development of comparative philology came toward the end of the 18th century, when it was discovered that Sanskrit bore a number of striking resemblances to Greek and Latin. An English orientalist, Sir William Jones, though he was not the first to observe these resemblances, is generally given the credit for bringing them to the attention of the scholarly world and putting forward the hypothesis, in 1786, that all three languages must have "sprung from some common source, which perhaps no longer exists." By this time, a number of texts and glossaries of the older Germanic languages (Gothic, Old High German, and Old Norse) had been published, and Jones realized that Germanic as well as Old Persian and perhaps Celtic had evolved from the same "common source." The next important step came in 1822, when the German scholar Jacob Grimm, following the Danish linguist Rasmus Rask (whose work, being written in Danish, was less accessible to most European scholars), pointed out in the second edition of his comparative grammar of Germanic that there were a number of systematic correspondences between the sounds of Germanic and the sounds of Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit in related words. Grimm noted, for example, that where Gothic (the oldest surviving Germanic language) had an f, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit frequently had a p (e.g., Gothic fotus, Latin pedis, Greek podós, Sanskrit padás, all meaning "foot"); when Gothic had a p, the non-Germanic languages had a b; when Gothic had a b, the non-Germanic languages had what Grimm called an "aspirate" (Latin f, Greek ph, Sanskrit bh). In order to account for these correspondences he postulated a cyclical "soundshift" (Lautverschiebung) in the prehistory of Germanic, in which the original "aspirates" became voiced unaspirated stops (bh became b, etc.), the original voiced unaspirated stops became voiceless (b became p, etc.), and the original voiceless (unaspirated) stops became "aspirates" (p became f ). Grimm's term, "aspirate," it will be noted, covered such phonetically distinct categories as aspirated stops (bh, ph), produced with an accompanying audible puff of breath, and fricatives (f ), produced with audible friction as a result of incomplete closure in the vocal tract.

In the work of the next 50 years the idea of sound change was made more precise, and, in the 1870s, a group of scholars known collectively as the Junggrammatiker ("young grammarians," or Neogrammarians) put forward the thesis that all changes in the sound system of a language as it developed through time were subject to the operation of regular sound laws. Though the thesis that sound laws were absolutely regular in their operation (unless they were inhibited in particular instances by the influence of analogy) was at first regarded as most controversial, by the end of the 19th century it was quite generally accepted and had become the cornerstone of the comparative method. Using the principle of regular sound change, scholars were able to reconstruct "ancestral" common forms from which the later forms found in particular languages could be derived. By convention, such reconstructed forms are marked in the literature with an asterisk. Thus, from the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European word for "ten," *dekm, it was possible to derive Sanskrit dasha, Greek déka, Latin decem, and Gothic taihun by postulating a number of different sound laws that operated independently in the different branches of the Indo-European family.

The role of analogy

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

Other 19th-century theories and development

Inner and outer form

One of the most original, if not one of the most immediately influential, linguists of the 19th century was the learned Prussian statesman, Wilhelm von Humboldt (died 1835). His interests, unlike those of most of his contemporaries, were not exclusively historical. Following the German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803), he stressed the connection between national languages and national character: this was but a commonplace of romanticism. More original was Humboldt's theory of "inner" and "outer" form in language. The outer form of language was the raw material (the sounds) from which different languages were fashioned; the inner form was the pattern, or structure, of grammar and meaning that was imposed upon this raw material and differentiated one language from another. This "structural" conception of language was to become dominant, for a time at least, in many of the major centres of linguistics by the middle of the 20th century. Another of Humboldt's ideas was that language was something dynamic, rather than static, and was an activity itself rather than the product of activity. A language was not a set of actual utterances produced by speakers but the underlying principles or rules that made it possible for speakers to produce such utterances and, moreover, an unlimited number of them. This idea was taken up by a German philologist, Heymann Steinthal, and, what is more important, by the physiologist and psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, and thus influenced late 19th- and early 20th-century theories of the psychology of language. Its influence, like that of the distinction of inner and outer form, can also be seen in the thought of Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist. But its full implications were probably not perceived and made precise until the middle of the 20th century, when the U.S. linguist Noam Chomsky re-emphasized it and made it one of the basic notions of generative grammar.

Phonetics and dialectology

Many other interesting and important developments occurred in 19th-century linguistic research, among them work in the areas of phonetics and dialectology. Research in both these fields was promoted by the Neogrammarians' concern with sound change and by their insistence that prehistoric developments in languages were of the same kind as developments taking place in the languages and dialects currently spoken. The development of phonetics in the West was also strongly influenced at this period, as were many of the details of the more philological analysis of the Indo-European languages, by the discovery of the works of the Indian grammarians who, from the time of the Sanskrit grammarian Panini (5th or 6th century BC), if not before, had arrived at a much more comprehensive and scientific theory of phonetics, phonology, and morphology than anything achieved in the West until the modern period.

3. The 20th Century

Structuralism

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

Structural linguistics in Europe

Structural linguistics in Europe is generally said to have begun in 1916 with the posthumous publication of the Cours de Linguistique Générale (Course in General Linguistics) of Ferdinand de Saussure. Much of what is now considered as Saussurean can be seen, though less clearly, in the earlier work of Humboldt, and the general structural principles that Saussure was to develop with respect to synchronic linguistics in the Cours had been applied almost 40 years before (1879) by Saussure himself in a reconstruction of the Indo-European vowel system. The full significance of the work was not appreciated at the time. Saussure's structuralism can be summed up in two dichotomies (which jointly cover what Humboldt referred to in terms of his own distinction of inner and outer form): (1) langue versus parole and (2) form versus substance. By langue, best translated in its technical Saussurean sense as language system, is meant the totality of regularities and patterns of formation that underlie the utterances of a language; by parole, which can be translated as language behaviour, is meant the actual utterances themselves. Just as two performances of a piece of music given by different orchestras on different occasions will differ in a variety of details and yet be identifiable as performances of the same piece, so two utterances may differ in various ways and yet be recognized as instances, in some sense, of the same utterance. What the two musical performances and the two utterances have in common is an identity of form, and this form, or structure, or pattern, is in principle independent of the substance, or "raw material," upon which it is imposed. "Structuralism," in the European sense then, refers to the view that there is an abstract relational structure that underlies and is to be distinguished from actual utterances--a system underlying actual behaviour--and that this is the primary object of study for the linguist.

Two important points arise here: first, that the structural approach is not in principle restricted to synchronic linguistics; second, that the study of meaning, as well as the study of phonology and grammar, can be structural in orientation. In both cases "structuralism" is opposed to "atomism" in the European literature. It was Saussure who drew the terminological distinction between synchronic and diachronic linguistics in the Cours; despite the undoubtedly structural orientation of his own early work in the historical and comparative field, he maintained that, whereas synchronic linguistics should deal with the structure of a language system at a given point in time, diachronic linguistics should be concerned with the historical development of isolated elements--it should be atomistic. Whatever the reasons that led Saussure to take this rather paradoxical view, his teaching on this point was not generally accepted, and scholars soon began to apply structural concepts to the diachronic study of languages. The most important of the various schools of structural linguistics to be found in Europe in the first half of the 20th century have included the Prague school, most notably represented by Nikolay Sergeyevich Trubetskoy (died 1938) and Roman Jakobson (born 1896), both Russian émigrés, and the Copenhagen (or glossematic) school, centred around Louis Hjelmslev (died 1965). John Rupert Firth (died 1960) and his followers, sometimes referred to as the London school, were less Saussurean in their approach, but, in a general sense of the term, their approach may also be described appropriately as structural linguistics.

Structural linguistics in America

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

After Boas, the two most influential American linguists were Edward Sapir (died 1939) and Leonard Bloomfield (died 1949). Like his teacher Boas, Sapir was equally at home in anthropology and linguistics, the alliance of which disciplines has endured to the present day in many American universities. Boas and Sapir were both attracted by the Humboldtian view of the relationship between language and thought, but it was left to one of Sapir's pupils, Benjamin Lee Whorf, to present it in a sufficiently challenging form to attract widespread scholarly attention. Since the republication of Whorf's more important papers in 1956, the thesis that language determines perception and thought has come to be known as the Whorfian hypothesis.

Sapir's work has always held an attraction for the more anthropologically inclined American linguists. But it was Bloomfield who prepared the way for the later phase of what is now thought of as the most distinctive manifestation of American "structuralism." When he published his first book in 1914, Bloomfield was strongly influenced by Wundt's psychology of language. In 1933, however, he published a drastically revised and expanded version with the new title Language; this book dominated the field for the next 30 years. In it Bloomfield explicitly adopted a behaviouristic approach to the study of language, eschewing in the name of scientific objectivity all reference to mental or conceptual categories. Of particular consequence was his adoption of the behaviouristic theory of semantics according to which meaning is simply the relationship between a stimulus and a verbal response. Because science was still a long way from being able to give a comprehensive account of most stimuli, no significant or interesting results could be expected from the study of meaning for some considerable time, and it was preferable, as far as possible, to avoid basing the grammatical analysis of a language on semantic considerations. Bloomfield's followers pushed even further the attempt to develop methods of linguistic analysis that were not based on meaning. One of the most characteristic features of "post-Bloomfieldian" American structuralism, then, was its almost complete neglect of semantics.

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

Transformational grammar

The most significant development in linguistic theory and research in recent years was the rise of generative grammar, and, more especially, of transformational-generative grammar, or transformational grammar, as it came to be known. Two versions of transformational grammar were put forward in the mid-1950s, the first by Zellig S. Harris and the second by Noam Chomsky, his pupil. It is Chomsky's system that has attracted the most attention so far. As first presented by Chomsky in Syntactic Structures (1957), transformational grammar can be seen partly as a reaction against post-Bloomfieldian structuralism and partly as a continuation of it. What Chomsky reacted against most strongly was the post-Bloomfieldian concern with discovery procedures. In his opinion, linguistics should set itself the more modest and more realistic goal of formulating criteria for evaluating alternative descriptions of a language without regard to the question of how these descriptions had been arrived at. The statements made by linguists in describing a language should, however, be cast within the framework of a far more precise theory of grammar than had hitherto been the case, and this theory should be formalized in terms of modern mathematical notions. Within a few years, Chomsky had broken with the post-Bloomfieldians on a number of other points also. He had adopted what he called a "mentalistic" theory of language, by which term he implied that the linguist should be concerned with the speaker's creative linguistic competence and not his performance, the actual utterances produced. He had challenged the post-Bloomfieldian concept of the phoneme (see below), which many scholars regarded as the most solid and enduring result of the previous generation's work. And he had challenged the structuralists' insistence upon the uniqueness of every language, claiming instead that all languages were, to a considerable degree, cut to the same pattern--they shared a certain number of formal and substantive universals.

Tagmemic, stratificational, and other approaches

The effect of Chomsky's ideas has been phenomenal. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that there is no major theoretical issue in linguistics today that is debated in terms other than those in which he has chosen to define it, and every school of linguistics tends to define its position in relation to his. Among the rival schools are tagmemics, stratificational grammar, and the Prague school. Tagmemics is the system of linguistic analysis developed by the U.S. linguist Kenneth L. Pike and his associates in connection with their work as Bible translators. Its foundations were laid during the 1950s, when Pike differed from the post-Bloomfieldian structuralists on a number of principles, and it has been further elaborated since then. Tagmemic analysis has been used for analyzing a great many previously unrecorded languages, especially in Central and South America and in West Africa. Stratificational grammar, developed by a U.S. linguist, Sydney M. Lamb, has been seen by some linguists as an alternative to transformational grammar. Not yet fully expounded or widely exemplified in the analysis of different languages, stratificational grammar is perhaps best characterized as a radical modification of post-Bloomfieldian linguistics, but it has many features that link it with European structuralism. The Prague school has been mentioned above for its importance in the period immediately following the publication of Saussure's Cours. Many of its characteristic ideas (in particular, the notion of distinctive features in phonology) have been taken up by other schools. But there has been further development in Prague of the functional approach to syntax (see below). The work of M.A.K. Halliday in England derived much of its original inspiration from Firth (above), but Halliday provided a more systematic and comprehensive theory of the structure of language than Firth had, and it has been quite extensively illustrated.

The Father of Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), Swiss linguist, whose ideas about language structure influenced the development of the linguistic theory known as structuralism. He was born in Geneva, and attended science classes for a year at the University of Geneva before turning to language studies at the University of Leipzig in 1876. As a student he published his only book, Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes (Memoir on the Original Vowel System in the Indo-European Languages, 1879), an important work on the vowel system of Proto-Indo-European, considered the parent language from which the Indo-European languages descended.

Saussure's scholarship in the early part of his career focused on philology, the study of language history, but he later shifted his attention to the study of general linguistics. He taught at the École des Hautes Études in Paris from 1881 to 1891 and then became a professor of Sanskrit and Comparative Grammar at the University of Geneva. Although Saussure never wrote another book, his teaching proved highly influential. After his death two of his students compiled his lecture notes and other materials into a seminal work, Cours de linguistique générale (1916; Course in General Linguistics, 1959). The book explained his structural approach to language and established a series of theoretical distinctions that have become basic to the study of linguistics. In addition to linguistics, Saussure's work has affected disciplines such as anthropology, history, and literary criticism.

Structural linguist, Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949), American linguist and founder of structural linguistics. Born in Chicago, Bloomfield graduated with a bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1906 and received his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1909. In 1917 he extensively researched Tagalog and other Austronesian languages, and in the 1920s he worked on grouping Native American languages. He played a key role in the founding of the Linguistic Society of America in 1924. Bloomfield is best known for his commitment to linguistics as an independent science and his insistence on using scientific procedures. Early in his career he was influenced by behaviorism, a school of psychology based on the objective study of behavior. He based his work, especially his approach to meaning, on behavioristic principles. His major work, Language (1933) is regarded as the classic text of structural linguistics, also called structuralism. The book synthesized the theory and practice of linguistic analysis.

Generative-transformational linguist, Noam Chomsky (1928- ), American linguist, educator, and political activist, educated at the University of Pennsylvania. He is regarded as the founder of transformational-generative grammar, a system that revolutionized linguistics. Chomsky believes that language is the result of an innate human faculty. His analyses of language start with basic sentences, from which are developed an endless variety of syntactic combinations by means of a set of rules that he formulates. At the end of a chain of syntactic rules are phonological rules governing pronunciation.

Chomsky joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1955 and became known not only as a teacher and writer but as an articulate opponent of American involvement in the Vietnam War. His major linguistic publications are Syntactic Structures (1957), Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), The Sound Pattern of English (1968; with Morris Halle, 1923- ), Language and Mind (1972), The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory and Reflections on Language (both 1975). Language and Responsibility (1979) links language and politics; Chomsky's political writings include American Power and the New Mandarins (1969) and The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians (1983).

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SUHENDRA YUSUF

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Jumat, Oktober 10, 2008

FOUNDATION OF LINGUISTICS

Topics to be covered by week

CONTENTS

1.

What language is

Language as system ◊ arbitrary ◊ vocal ◊ symbol ◊ human ◊ communication

2.

Other definitions

B.

Language in Communication

Paralanguage ◊ Kinesics ◊ Proxemics

2.

The design features of human language

D.

Linguistics and Other Disciplines

1.

Psycholinguistics

Language Acquisition ◊ Speech perception ◊ Aphasia and Neurolinguistics

2.

Sociolinguistics

Social dimensions

3.

Other Relationships

Anthropological linguistics ◊ Computational linguistics ◊ Mathematical linguistics

Stylistics ◊ Philosophy of language ◊ Applied linguistics

4.

Other Englishes

Australian and New Zealand English ◊ India-Pakistan ◊ African English

G.

History of linguistics

1.

Earlier History

Non-Western traditions ◊ Greek and Roman antiquity ◊ The European Middle Ages

2.

The 19th Century

Development of the comparative method ◊ The role of analogy

3.

The 20th Century

Structuralism ◊ Transformational grammar ◊ Tagmemic, stratificational, and others

Foundation of Linguistics