Linguistics
is conceived as the study of human
language and the linguist is someone who
engages in his study. Concerning language people have attempt to define it in a
number of ways:
-a system for representing things, actions, ideas, and states
-a system of meaning shared among people
-a set of grammatically correct utterances (words, sentences, etc)
-a set of utterances that could be understood by a linguistic community.
However for the sake of accuracy here is the definition of the word
‘linguistics’ given in Webster’s dictionary: "the study of human speech in
its various aspects (as the units, nature, structure and modification of
language or
languages or a language including esp. such factors as phonetics,
phonology, morphology, accent, syntax, semantics, general or philosophical
grammar and the relation between writing and speech)."
When talking about language we may say that it is a system of
conventionalized symbols by which we communicate. The main properties are:
‘arbitrariness’
‘symbolism’
‘creativity’.
‘Arbitrariness’ can be explained by taking some
words as examples:
cane (Italian)
chat (French)
dog (English)
The relationship between speech sounds and meaning is regarded as arbitrary
and for this reason different languages have different speech sounds to represent
the same things:
English: the rice is burning!
Korean:
Pap thanda
Italian: Il riso sta bruciando
Different languages convey the same message. However there are words where the pronunciation suggests the meaning.
These are called ‘onomatopoeic words’.
English: cuckoo!
Spanish: cuco!
Italian: cucu!
German: kuckuck
English: buzz
English: hiss
All languages: tic tac
Italian: chichiricchì English: cock-a-doodle-do
Russian: kukuriku
In the vocabulary of any language there is a small group of onomatopoeic
words as the majority words of languages are to be seen as “arbitrary”. The
relationship between the words and things is symbolic.
Dog symbolizes a certain class of quadruped
Chair symbolizes a certain type of furniture
Creativity is another important feature of all languages which allow new
utterances to be created thanks to new thoughts, experiences, situations.
The little girl ate the apple
The man ate the apple
Both ate the apple
The rabbit ate the cabbage
All these examples have structural similarity. But, for instance, the
following sentence “ The rull stud the thrull” does not make any sense since
the words have no meaning even though the structure conforms to the rules of
English. On the contrary “dog the ate bone the” does not conform to the rules
of English. In other examples such as
She wintered in Mexico
He holidayed in Greece
the verbs are created from time expressions. However these two instances:
It midnighted in the festival
He nooned at Shirley’s house
are to be considered incorrect because ‘noon and midnight’ are points of time
rather than periods of time.
Thus it is clear from what I have said up to now that languages are
rule-governed structures. These rules reflect the systematic structure of
language; they are not imposed from the outside but are observed regularity
of language behaviour. In each language we have the following characteristics
of grammar:
Grammar with its rules and elements
Linguistic competence which correspond to knowledge of language
Linguistic performance which deals with how people use their knowledge of
language, that is, grammar in comprehension and production
All languages have a grammar that can be more or less equal in complexity.
The components of grammar are:
Phonetics: the articulation and perception of speech sound
Phonology: the pattering of speech sound
Morphology: word-formation
Syntax: sentence formation
Semantics: the interpretation of words andsentences
Pragmatics: how to use things with words
Talking about ‘human languages’ we can
say that their main feature consists in the fact that unities of meaning
(signs) are arbitrary and conventional. Nothing in the sound of the words in
a language allow us to discover the meaning of the words. The sound, for
example, of the words “chaise”, “chair”, “sedia”, do not have any physical
relation with the objects described by these words.
Onomatopoeic words (Italian ‘cocodé/chicchiricchì’ used to imitate the song
of the chicken or the cock) or rather the sounds that compound them are bound
to the object they describe. This is difficult to understand when we become
aware that for the same group of objects different onomatopoeic words will be
used in different languages (cock-a-doodle-doo in English, kukuriku in
Russian etc).
All this implies that signs (unities of meaning which form a message) are
conventional and arbitrary form. The words of a language have been chosen by
human beings to represent a given set of objects, ideas, or phenomena.
Speaking the same language as someone else, then, means sharing a certain
number of conventions. Languages are regarded as creative because during our
lifetime we would rarely repeat the same sentence twice. This happens thanks
to the composition of languages themselves which in their turn are made up of
combinable and divisible particles that can be expressed by the slightest
change in a statement. And an almost infinite number of sentences can be
created by starting from a limited number of words and sounds.
Altri riassunti su Course in General Linguistics