By Ibtihal J.

Abbas Organized By Uday Sadiq

Assist Lect. at the Department of English/ College of Al Imam Al Kadhim/ Babylon Sections

Chapter One

What is linguistics?
 It is the systematic study of language.
 It is the integral part of being human.
 The language spoken by children.
 Human language is different from animal communication.
Do animals have a language?

What is a linguist?
 A person who studies linguistics.
 The word “linguist” is unsatisfactory. Why?
 Does not need to speak more than one language.
 Need not be fluent.
 Observer.

How does linguistics differ from traditional grammar?

 Descriptive vs. prescriptive
 Spoken vs. written
 English vs. Latin

The scope of linguistics

 Phonetics
 Phonology
 Syntax
 Semantics
 Pragmatics
 Sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, applied linguistics stylistics, anthropological linguistics, etc.

The difference between phonetics and linguistics

 Phoneticians are concerned with the actual physical sounds.
 Linguists are concerned with the way in which language is patterned.
  Phonology = the study of sounds of languages.
 Pragmatics= the study of language in use.
 Semantics= the study of meaning.
 Syntax= the study of the arrangement of words.
 Psycholinguistics= the study of language and mind.
 Sociolinguistics= the study of language and society.
 Applied linguistics= the study of application of linguistics to language teaching.
 Computational linguistics= the study of use of computers to simulate language and its workings.
 Stylistics= the study of language and literature.

Chapter Two What Is Language?

Is Language the Only Means to Communicate?

Surely not, there are many ways to communicate other than language like winking, waving, smiling and so on.

What are the design features?

 Use of sound signals
 Arbitrariness
 The need for learning
 Duality
 Displacement
 Creativity
 Patterning
 Structure dependence
Use of sounds signals
 The advantages of sound signals:
- can be used in the darkness.
- allow a wide variety of messages to be sent.
- leave the body free for other activities.
 Both, humans and animals, use the sound signals but with humans they are more systematic.
 Humans acquired their sounds at a late stage while animals are earlier than that.
Arbitrariness
 In animals communication, there is a clear connection between the signal and the message.
 In humans language, there is no connection between the signal and the message (arbitrary).
 Onomatopoeic words are words which imitate the natural sounds of a thing, e.g., quack-quack, meow,
baa and so on.

The need for learning

 Animals know how to communicate without learning; while humans learn to communicate.
 A human being brought up in isolation does not acquire a language unless he learns it.
 Human language is by no means totally conditioned by the environment. Discuss

Duality
 It is the organization of language into two layers (sounds and units).
 Most animals use each basic sound once; while humans are more flexible regarding the use of sounds.
 Animals have only one layer; whereas humans have two layers.
 In animals, the number of signal are equal to the number of messages; but human language has the
reverse.
Displacement
 Animals communicate about things in the immediate only; while humans can communicate about
past, present and future.
 In this case, animals are similar to a human baby crying for pain.
 Other examples are dogs and bees.
Creativity
 Animals lack creativity in that they use a very limited number of messages.
 On the other hand, humans can produce novel utterances that are never heard before.
 Example “there is a purple platypus crawling across the ceiling.”
Patterning
 In animal communication, there is no system or organization for their elements.
 In human language, they link sounds and words in a few well-defined pattern.
 An example, bats tabs sta *sbat *abts *stba
 Language can be regarded as an intricate network of interlinked elements. Discuss
 Structure dependence
 Human language has a structure while animal communication has not.
 The system of human language is more complicated than that of animals, e.g., saying ‘adding –ed to
the third word in a sentence can make past’ is not workable.
 Language operations are structure dependent. (Explain or discuss)

A Question to Think about???

Human language is innately guided. Clarify

A comparison
Human Language Animal communication
1. Use sound signals. 1. Use sound signals.
2. There is no connection between the signal 2. There a connection between the signal and
and the message (arbitrary). the message (genetically inbuilt).
3. Duality and displacement are essentials in 3. Duality and displacement are rare in
human language. animal communication.
4. Creativity is existed in human language. 4. Creativity cannot be present in animal
5. Patterning and structure are existed in communication.
human language. 5. Patterning and structure are not existed.

Origin of Language
* To have a language, three preconditions must be present:
1. Humans notice objects and actions.
2. They are able to produce a range of sounds.
3. They have to name these objects.
It is thought that habits begin to be rules.
 Chapter Three The Study of Language

Most Important Contributors in Linguistics

— Plato and Aristotle
— Sir William Jones
— Darwin
— Young Grammarians
— De Saussure
— Bloomfield
— Chomsky
Nineteenth Century: Historical Linguistics
* Before 19th c., linguistics was the interest of philosophers.
* Plato and Aristotle made contributions to the study of language

Plato
1. He shows how some words can be ambiguous because of their different meanings in Greek and English, e.g., the word
“beautiful”
In Greek darkness
In English good-looking
2. He was the first one who distinguished between nouns and verbs.

3. He presented some studies in form and its function in context.

Sir William Jones

— The birth of the study of linguistics is attributed to him.
— He talks about the structural similarities among languages like Greek, Latin, Germanic, etc.
— He assumes that languages are grouped into families. The Proto-Indo-European is the largest one.
— His discovery makes all the following linguists write about “comparative grammar”.
— In other words, the work was with the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European languages and making
hypotheses about them.
Darwin
— His popular published book “Origin of Species” and his theory of Evolution have a relation to language.
— That is, it is so natural to compare the evolution of language to the evolution of species.
Young Grammarians
— They are a group of scholars and linguists who have a major influence of linguistics.
— They state that language change is regular.
— For instance, the word “chin” in Old English war pronounced with /k/ sound as /kin/.
— This change can affect all words that begin with the letters “ch”.
— Yet their theory is modified later on.
Early-to mid-20th C.: Descriptive Linguistics
— The emphasis is shifted from language change to language description.
— Instead of how certain items are changed, linguists begin to select one language and to describe it.
— The contributors of this period are:
1. De Saussure
— He is the father of modern linguistics.
— He died without having any written form in linguistics.
— A group of his students collected his lectures to be published in one book “Course in General
Linguistics”.
— His statement was that all the elements of a language are interlinked.
— The game of chess.
— Language is a built structure of mixed elements.
— Structural linguistics is misunderstood. Why?
— Linguistics began as an offshoot of anthropology. Discuss?
2. Bloomfield
— His book is entitled “language”.
— He presents some procedures for the description of any language.
— He states that languages should be dealt with objectively and systematically.
— He is interested in the way words are arranged rather than the meaning.
— He focused on the grammars of unwritten languages.
Discovery procedures:- are a set of principles which enable a linguist to discover the linguistic units of an
unwritten language.
Mid-to Late-20th c.: Generative Linguistics and the Search for Universal
— In 1957, Chomsky published his book “Syntactic Structures”.
— The attention is shifted from description of actual utterances to questions about the nature of the system
which produces the output.
— For him, Bloomfieldian linguistics was both far too ambitious and far too limited in scope. Discuss
1. Ambitious unrealistic in extracting a perfect description of a language from a mass of data.
2. Limited concentrated on describing sets of utterances, which happened to have been spoken.
* Chomsky has talked about Creativity which is the ability of human beings to produce and comprehend an
indefinite number of novel utterances.
Chomsky Pointed to out
— Anyone who knows a language must have internalized a set of rules.
— The linguist’s task is to discover these rules which constitute the grammar of that language.
* Chomsky therefore used the word (grammar) interchangeably to mean
1. A person’s internalized rules
2. A linguist’s guess for these rules

— Generative Grammar is a device for generating grammatical sequences of a language.

— Thus, grammar is described as “explicit”. Why?
— Rules enable people to separate the well-formed sentences from the ill-formed ones.
— Then, Chomsky calls his theory as “transformational-generative grammar” TGG.

Language Universal
— Since all humans are similar, their internalized language mechanisms are likely to have common
properties.
— Linguist’s function is to concentrate on features that are available to all languages.
— Chomsky proposes that humans are pre-programmed with a basic knowledge of their language
“Universal Grammar”.
— Then, he talks about more abstract issues “minimalist program”.
— That is, he is interested in the tiny details of individuals.
— How is he criticized?

21th Century: Future Trends

— Huge numbers of linguists have begun to have interest in language and linguistics.
— The most remarkable production in this era is the optimality theory.
— Its proposal is that there are no fixed bounds on language.
 Chapter Four Deciding Where to Begin

Language as a Game
Q\ What are the criteria shared by both a language and a game?
- the aims of the game
- the principles of interaction
- the permitted moves

Q\ What are the aims of language?

-conveying information
- express emotions
- ordering others
- promising and etc.

Q\ What does it mean by “principles of interaction in language”?

- It refers to the turns taken by people during speaking, and each language has its own social turns, e.g. greeting.

Q\ What does moves mean in language?

- They mean the rules that a language can work with, e.g., verbs precede objects in English.

* In practice, there is a problem with these three facets. Comment

- The problem occurs in the fact that the aims and the principles of interaction are mixed with social structure. Thus, it’s
preferable to begin with the moves.

Universal vs. Particular

 Particularists = those who want to study language because they are interested in knowing more about one
particular language.
Interested in writing a perfect grammar of one language or a detailed study for it.
 Universalists = those who want to find out more about language as a whole.
Interested in writing a grammatical framework, which will be suitable for all languages.
Questions to be discussed
— Unfortunately, extremists from each group keep attacking each other. Discuss
— The reason for the controversy between Particulariss and Universalists is historical. Clarify/Discuss
— The Universalists and Particulaists views are complementary. Discuss
— It is wrong to assume that anyone interested in linguistics must fall into either the Particularist or the Universalist
category. Discuss
— The progression from the particular to the universal is so important. Clarify
— What is the implication of “universal grammar” on the human knowledge?

Created By Ibtihal J. Abbas

Assist Lect. at the Department of English/ College of Al Imam Al Kadhim/ Babylon Sections

Organized By Uday Sadiq

 Chapter Five Sounds Patterns

* The conventional written forms are most unsatisfactory. Justify

- They are unsatisfactory since the provide little guide to pronunciation.
* Written forms obscure our view of language. Discuss
- Linguists have pointed out that written forms may obscure our views regarding a language, e.g., the word “fish” can be
spelt as “phish” or “ghish” since in three words the letters “f”, “ph” and “gh” can be pronounced as /f/.
* Linguists have abandoned the conventional spelling. Justify
- They have abandoned the conventional spelling for the purpose of representing spoken utterances and replacing it via the
International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).
* IPA is a system for transcription in which one symbol represents one sound.

Q\ What are the store of symbols of IPA?

 conventional written alphabet, e.g. bird.
 Variations of alphabet letters, e.g., bang.
 Obsolete letters, e.g., dish.
 Greek alphabet, e.g., thin.
 Inventions, e.g., Llanelli.
 Supplementary marks, e.g., boot.

* Sorting out the basic sounds

Q\ What are the steps of documenting unknown and unwritten language?
 finding a suitable informant.
 Transcribing his speech by making him pronouncing some utterances.
 Naming everyday objects.
 Informant is a reliable native speaker from whom to gather samples.
* The number of phonemes varies from language to language. Discuss
- The number varies from one language to language in the sense that each language has a limited number of
phonemes. The average is around 35 while English has 44 and some languages have only 13 and others have more.
Phoneme: - is the smallest segment of sound which can distinguish two words, e.g., pit…bit.
Minimal pairs: - are pairs of words such as pit and pet which differ by only one phoneme.
Received Pronunciation (RP): - is only one of the many accents found in Great Britain and the most widespread.
 English Phonemes
/ \
consonants vowels
/ \
pure vowels Diphthongs
• Allophones
* Allophones are the variant forms of phonemes.
Q\ What are the types of variations of phonemes?
 The variation can be random.
- no two sounds can ever be the same.
 The variation is predictable.
- can be conditioned by the sounds round it.
Complementary distribution: - is a set of environments that allophones can occur in in which one environment
complements the other.
Sound Combinations
 we have to study sounds in combination.
 Each language has a certain sequence of sounds.

• Shared properties of phonemes

Q\ It would be a mistake to regard the phonemes of English as separate from one another. Discuss
Distinctive feature: - is any feature that distinguishes one phoneme from the other.
Natural class: - is a group of sounds which share important features in common.
• Distinguish between segmental and non-segmental phonemes.
 Segmental phonemes are chunks of sounds a language has, e.g., /p/, /t/.
 Non-segmental phonemes are those phonemes that use rising and falling tone in distinguishing meaning, e.g., ma.
Metrical phonology: - is a new branch of phonology that studies the interplay of stressed and unstressed syllables.

Created By Ibtihal J. Abbas

Assist Lect. at the Department of English/ College of Al Imam Al Kadhim/ Babylon Sections
Organized By Uday Sadiq