An Introduction to Language E-Book

Kirk Hazen

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: LAWZ - Linguistics in the World
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 816

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

An Introduction to Language offers an engaging guide to the nature of language, focusing on how language works – its sounds, words, structures, and phrases – all investigated through wide-ranging examples from Old English to contemporary pop culture.

• Explores the idea of a scientific approach to language, inviting students to consider what qualities of language comprise everyday skills for us, be they sounds, words, phrases, or conversation
• Helps shape our understanding of what language is, how it works, and why it is both elegantly complex and essential to who we are
• Includes exercises within each chapter to help readers explore key concepts and directly observe the patterns that are part of all human language
• Examines linguistic variation and change to illustrate social nuances and language-in-use, drawing primarily on examples from English
• Avoids linguistic jargon, focusing instead on a broader and more general approach to the study of language, and making it ideal for those coming to the subject for the first time
• Supported by additional web resources – available upon publication at www.wiley.com/go/hazen/introlanguage – including student study aids and testbank and notes for instructors

Leseprobe

Linguistics in the World

Linguistics in the World is a textbook series focusing on the study of language in the real world, enriching students' understanding of how language works through a balance of theoretical insights and empirical findings. Presupposing no or only minimal background knowledge, each of these titles is intended to lay the foundation for students' future work, whether in language science, applied linguistics, language teaching, or speech sciences.

What Is Sociolinguistics?, by Gerard van Herk

The Sounds of Language, by Elizabeth Zsiga

Introducing Second Language Acquisition: Perspectives and Practices, by Kirsten M. Hummel

An Introduction to Language, by Kirk Hazen

This edition first published 2015

© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hazen, Kirk.

    An introduction to language / Kirk Hazen. – First Edition.

            pages cm – (Linguistics in the world)

    Summary: “An Introduction to Language helps shape readers' understanding of what language is, how it works, and why it is both elegantly complex and yet essential to who we are” – Provided by publisher.

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-470-65895-6 (hardback) – ISBN 978-0-470-65896-3 (paper)    1.  Linguistics.    I.  Title.

    P121.H449 2014

    410–dc23

                                                                                    2014007435

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Close-up of conkers. @ Andrew Masters/IStockphoto

Cover design by Nicki Averill

For their willingness to tune me out, for their five-second attention spans, for their exasperation at my efforts to teach them all the same, and for their continued love no matter how aggravating I am, I dedicate this book to the three people who most challenged me to become a better teacher.

For Keegan, Coleman, and Madara

Companion Website

This text has a comprehensive companion website which features a number of useful resources for instructors and students alike.

For Instructors

Instructor's manual

Answer keys for the end of chapter exercises

For Students

Interactive sample quizzes

Flashcards of key concepts

Annotated web links and video clips

Visit http://quizlet.com/_puhix to access the flashcards, and www.wiley.com/go/hazen/introlanguage for all other materials

Acknowledgments

Writing a book is something like walking down a crowded city street. You might be doing the walking by yourself, but you are not alone. Your effort might be in your walking, but you did not build the sidewalk or the city around you. You might be walking to a certain spot, but there are lots of diversions that alter your path. As walks go, writing this book has been a good one.

My two Wiley Blackwell editors deserve many thanks. The person who started me off on this trip was Danielle Descoteaux, and I want to thank her for her persistence with me (she first asked in 2006, but I did not sign up until 2010): Her vision, voluminous knowledge of publishing, avalanche-like emails, and support throughout made this project possible. Julia Kirk, my other primary editor at Wiley Blackwell, was able to carry me through with patience and sage advice.

Locally at West Virginia University, I would like to thank the students I have taught in an introduction-to-language course, vaguely enough titled The English Language. I have had the good fortune to teach this course 30 times since 1998, and it is my experience from that class and those students that forms the foundation for this book. I still enjoy teaching this class, and it is the students who make it valuable and enjoyable.

The students who have helped me the most are those who have worked with the West Virginia Dialect Project. From the lab managers to the teaching assistants, we have had amazing folk, and I am immensely grateful to have worked with them. For assistance with this book, I would like to specifically thank the WVDP technical writers/copy editors/indexers: Isabelle Shepherd, Jaclyn Daugherty, Lily Holz; team MCQ: Margery Webb, Kiersten Woods, Emily Vandevender; and the teaching assistants who contributed to quizzes, glossary terms, and homework answers: Allison Eckman, Jordan Lovejoy, Emily Greene, Emily Justiss, Shannon Goudy, Caleb Stacey, Khali Blankenship, and M'lyn Gibson.

I would like to thank my mentor, Walt Wolfram, for marking so many trails for me to follow. I want to thank Patrick Conner for hiring me at WVU and working with me on the Old English examples at WVU. I thank Julia Davydova for helping me with Russian examples and discussions of language variation, and Jim Harms and Mary Ann Samyn for their assistance with poetry and genre. Janet Holmes taught me a great deal about producing a book while we edited Research Methods in Sociolinguistics, and this book benefited from that experience. I want to thank the Department of English and the Eberly College at WVU for providing me with so many opportunities and so much freedom to work.

The reviewers for this book were invaluable for its development. Their advice was clear and direct, and I incorporated it in every section. I thank them for their astute reading and precise comments.

I especially want to thank my family for their love and support. My parents, Barbara and Al Hazen, provided me with a wonderful childhood and set me on firm educational ground, entrenching in me the idea that parents are the first teachers. My mother-in-law, Janet Coleman, and my entire extended family have kindly brought me into their lives. Above all, I want to thank Kate Hazen for working with me for the last 24 years to build the beautiful life we have and loving me all the way through.

Note to Instructors

Early introductions to language have included Saussure's Cours de Linguistique Générale (1916), Bloomfield's Language (1933), and Hockett's A Course in Modern Linguistics (1958). In these works, the authors aimed at slightly different audiences and wrote from different sociocultural contexts. Saussure lectured in an age of European language scholarship where linguistic study was the study of historical linguistics, and his lectures turned generations of students away from the concrete and historical and towards abstract systems. Bloomfield wrote as an American scholar surrounded by exciting work in dialectology, anthropological linguistics, and the study of mental systems created by students of Saussure. Both of those scholars developed material aimed at a small percentage of the population. Both of their books are works of scholarship. The difference between Saussure's work and Bloomfield's is that Saussure's was his collected lectures about how the study of language should play out. Bloomfield wrote a tremendous scholarly work about language which elucidated the state of knowledge at the time. Additionally, Bloomfield's book was a greatly expanded revision of his Introduction to the Study of Language (1914), incorporating the previous decades of work in linguistics.

For the editions I own, Saussure's Cours de Linguistique Générale is 317 pages with 30 chapters (in five parts), Bloomfield's Language is 564 pages with 28 chapters, and Hockett's A Course in Modern Linguistics is 621 pages with 64 chapters. A few modern textbooks have the same length, but these earlier works are vastly more dense. In terms of writing style, both Bloomfield's and Hockett's works are very readable for modern scholars and impressively expansive. Yet for most teachers of students who are not majoring in linguistics, the approach they take is daunting.

Hockett (1958:vii) clearly designates his book for “those college students who take an introductory course in linguistics,” but he did not write a “popularization” and warns the potential readers accordingly. As a Professor of Linguistics and Anthropology at Cornell University, Hockett (1958:viii) considered that the university “with a magic seemingly unique, makes itself a congenial home for the scholar in linguistics.”

Saussure, Bloomfield, and to a great extent Hockett, directed their work towards audiences prepared for scholarly engagement with detailed language facts. With the opening up of universities in the United States after the advent of the GI Bill, many different kinds of students entered the university, including those from blue-collar and poor families who may never have been exposed to the expectations of twentieth-century scholarship. Both of my parents fit that description, and I have wondered how my parents, from working-class Pittsburgh and poverty-stricken rural Florida, would have dealt with Hockett's morphophonemics or the distinction between internal and external sandhi. I do not imagine that it would have worked well, and I am not sure Hockett wrote for such students – those who were not budding scholars.

Since 1958, most of the textbooks have been openly designed for introductory linguistics courses and have followed Hockett's model, but rarely with the ambition needed to cover all 64 of his chapters. This book crafts a different path. This book is for people who will probably not study linguistics as scholars. It is designed for college students, and specifically for college students of the twenty-first century.

In an introductory biology course for humanities majors (an “intro to life” course), you would deal with evolution and concepts like natural selection. The general public has heard about evolution, but might not know how natural selection actually works. There would be some challenge in getting students to know how these concepts interact, plus time spent disabusing people of misconceptions. In an introductory biology course for majors, you would learn how biologists actually study natural selection and more detailed descriptions of how it works. You would have a clue about how research projects are conducted to test ideas. But natural selection would be part of both courses because it is an important concept for biology.

For this book, one foundational concept is that our species has a specific ability to acquire a highly complex communication system. That concept should be part of both intro to linguistics and intro to language classes. The intro to linguistics course might provide research studies by linguists that investigate that concept; the intro to language course would just fit it into the story about how language works. The key difference between the biology example and the linguistic example is that very few people in the college educated public realize in any explicit way the complexity human language has. When I do public talks, people overwhelmingly believe that language clearly has two forms (good and bad) and that it is a human invention; rarely does anybody start with the distinction between language and writing. I really hope that with this book, some of its basic tenets of linguistics become the norm for college-educated understanding.

The difference between what high school biology now teaches and what my parents' generation knew is dramatic. My father-in-law did not understand what a cell was when he was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer; my wife, with a BS in zoology, had to explain how cells worked. My children's high school biology classes are on the same level (with updated facts and concepts) with my intro to biology college class from 1988. Linguistics has made no such gains with general public knowledge or high school education. I want us to do so.

Preface: About the Book

Chapter outline

The scope of the book

Intro classes

This book's structure

Exercises

Englishes and other languages

The limits of this book

Analogies for language

A prescriptive guide for social trends

A path to education: confusion

For instructors

Note

The Scope of the Book

This book explores the nature of language primarily through an explanation of English, drawing on examples from other languages to illustrate similarity and diversity in human language.

As a result of the expansion of the British Empire, English is now a global language. With all the people who have learned English over the last 200 years, the language is in a different state than it used to be. We might be able to imagine a possible universe where language does not change, but as we will explore in this book, humans have a natural instinct to understand and produce language variation. A product of that daily variation is language change. Over time, our natural ability for variation has created many varieties of English.

At times, I refer to these different varieties as Englishes. It is more concise than dialects of English. Plus, the term dialect carries with it a great deal of social baggage, which will be explained throughout the book. Although speakers of many different Englishes can understand each other, the social differences and language characteristics of these varieties of English are widely recognized. As we talk about the qualities of language throughout this book, the examples will come from Englishes around the world.