English Linguistics E-Book

Christian Mair

• Herausgeber: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: bachelor-wissen
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 570

Beschreibung

bachelor-wissen "English Linguistics" is a compact and easy-to-use introduction to English Linguistics which - is tailored to the needs of students of English at German, Austrian and Swiss universities - contains graded exercises to motivate students to carry out independent research, and - bridges the gap between linguistics and the literary and cultural-studies components of the typical BA in English Studies. Bachelor-wissen "English Linguistics" goes beyond the usual introduction in offering accompanying web resources which provide additional material and multi-media illustration. The new edition includes current theoretical approaches in the fields of sociolinguistics and World Englishes.

Leseprobe

[I]English Linguistics

[II]narr bachelor-wissen.de ist die Reihe für die modularisierten Studiengänge

die Bände sind auf die Bedürfnisse der Studierenden abgestimmt

das fachliche Grundwissen wird in zahlreichen Übungen vertieft

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auf www.bachelor-wissen.de finden Sie begleitende und weiterführende Informationen zum Studium und zu diesem Band

Christian Mair

[III]English Linguistics

An Introduction

4th updated edition

[IV]Idee und Konzept der Reihe: Johannes Kabatek, Professor für Romanische Philologie mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der iberoromanischen Sprachen an der Universität Zürich.

DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.24053/9783823394488

4., aktualisierte Auflage 20223., aktualisierte Auflage 20152., aktualisierte Auflage 20121. Auflage 2008

© 2022 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5 · 72070 Tübingen · Deutschland

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Internet: www.narr.deeMail: [email protected]

ISSN 1864-4082ISBN 978-3-8233-8448-9 (Print)ISBN 978-3-8233-0286-5 (ePub)

[V] Contents

Preface: how to use this book

1Introduction – linguistic and other approaches to language

1.1Orientation

1.2Demonstration/discussion

1.3Problems and challenges

1.4Practice

2Phonetics and phonology – the sounds of speech

2.1Orientation

2.1.1Sounds and letters: The need for a phonetic alphabet

2.1.2Sounds as sounds, and sounds as elements of linguistic systems: From phonetics to phonology

2.1.3Stress, pitch, intonation – phonetics and phonology beyond the individual sound

2.2Demonstration/discussion

2.3Problems and challenges

2.4Practice

3Morphology and word-formation – the structure of the word

3.1Orientation

3.1.1Free and bound morphemes

3.1.2Lexical and grammatical morphemes

3.2Demonstration/discussion: The major word formation strategies of present-day English

3.3Problems and challenges

3.4Practice

4Syntax I/general principles – the structure of the clause

4.1Orientation

4.1.1Words, phrases, clauses and sentences

4.1.2Form categories and their grammatical functions

4.2Demonstration/discussion

4.2.1Basic strategies for the expression of grammatical relations

4.2.2Typological classification of languages

4.3Problems and challenges

4.4Practice

5Syntax II/the fundamentals of English grammar

5.1Orientation

5.1.1Parts of speech

5.1.2Phrases

5.1.3Seven basic clause patterns

5.2Demonstration/discussion

5.3Problems and challenges

5.4Practice

6Semantics and lexicology – the meaning of words

6.1Orientation

6.2Demonstration/discussion

6.3Problems and challenges

6.4Practice

7Pragmatics and discourse analysis

7.1Orientation

7.2Demonstration/discussion

7.3Problems and challenges

7.4Practice

8Applied linguistics, language teaching and translation studies

8.1Orientation

8.2Demonstration/discussion

8.3Problems and challenges

8.4Practice

9A pluricentric language – standard Englishes around the world

9.1Orientation

9.2Demonstration/discussion

9.3Problems and challenges

9.4Practice

10Dialectology – regional variation in English

10.1Orientation

10.2Demonstration/discussion

10.3Problems and challenges

10.4Practice

11Language in the city – social and ethnic variation, multilingualism

11.1Orientation

11.2Demonstration/discussion

11.3Problems and challenges

11.4Practice

12Language change and the history of English

12.1Orientation

12.1.1Old English period (c. 500 – c. 1100)

12.1.2Middle English period (c. 1100 – c. 1500)

12.1.3Early Modern English period (c. 1500 – c. 1750)

12.1.4Late Modern English and Present-Day English (since c. 1750)

12.2Demonstration/discussion

12.3Problems and challenges

12.4Practice

13Past masters, current trends – theorising linguistics for students of English

13.1Orientation

13.2Demonstration/discussion

13.3Problems and challenges

13.4Practice

14Linguistics and the public – language myths, language politics, language planning and language rights

14.1Orientation

14.2Demonstration/discussion

14.3Problems and challenges

14.4Practice

Glossary of linguistic terms

Index

[IX]Preface: how to use this book

The present book is obviously not the first introduction to linguistics for students of English. It complements and competes with a number of related titles, some published in Britain and the United States for international audiences, and some published in Germany with the needs of a more local readership in mind. Some of what this book presents is new and original material not found elsewhere; a fair amount is just the basic stuff that undergraduates in English have to master if they want to understand the complexities of the structure and the use of the (foreign) language they have decided to focus on in their studies.

Nevertheless, the author has a clear justification for publishing just this book. It is the unified perspective it is written from – a perspective which he hopes will be useful and productive for the intended audience. A factor that motivated the first edition of the present book was an external political one, the profound transformation in European higher education that started in 1999, was implemented in the following decade and has come to be known as the “Bologna Process.” In Germany, Austria and many other European countries, this led to the creation of numerous new BA programmes – a reform that obviously required re-thinking of curricula. The present book was a response to this in that it aims to meet bachelor students’ needs without diluting and lowering academic standards.

Secondly, the book aims to present linguistics not as an end in itself, but specifically for students of English, i.e. students wishing to make productive use of what they learn about language and linguistics in other areas of their academic courses (cultural studies, literature) and in their later professional careers in language teaching, the media, public relations or similar areas of language- and culture-related professional activity.

Thirdly, the book is not designed as a manual of information to be learned and reproduced, but as an invitation to explore the fascinating complexity which the English language, and languages in general, display both in their structure and in their use. The focus is thus on learner autonomy as an essential first step towards independent research. As readers will see, each of the following 14 units has the following structure:

Orientation

Demonstration/discussion

Problems and challenges

Practice

The reader’s careful attention is invited for the first. The reader’s own initiative, activity and creativity are vital prerequisites to the success of the [X]other three. To help readers with basic concepts and terminology, the book contains a comprehensive glossary at the end. If you experience difficulties with some of the exercises, or if you want to check your results, you can consult the web-page accompanying the book at www.meta.narr.de/9783823384489/Zusatzmaterial.zip, which gives you the solutions. This site also contains some useful additional materials.

The book will no doubt serve many practical purposes – as a class text, helping students prepare for their exams, or as a reference work consulted occasionally. Beyond that, however, I hope that readers will retain a few essential insights even after they have forgotten about the inevitable detail, such as the lesser-used symbols of the phonetic alphabet, or some technical definition of a grammatical concept, or the specifically New Zealand realisations of the short vowels. These include:

a fascination with the intricate structural complexity of the English language, and – by implication – that uniquely human endowment, the language faculty;

an appreciation of the diversity of a global language, of the many varieties of English that have arisen in response to the expressive, social and cultural needs of an extremely heterogeneous community of speakers; and – not least –

a theoretically grounded understanding of the true role of language in society.

The importance of language in fostering human community and society cannot be over-estimated. And yet public debates about language issues are still too often informed by half-truths and myths – propagated by educators, politicians, cultural critics. What the trained linguist can bring to this debate is two academic virtues: a respect for empirical data and a commitment to rational argument. In the public discourse on the shape of English and the role the language plays in the world today, this is a much needed contribution.

I would not like to close this preface without re-expressing my thanks to a number of people involved in the previous three editions of this book, in particular Jürgen Freudl (with Narr Publishers at the time of the first edition, dedicated editor and much needed and appreciated enforcer of deadlines) and my former Freiburg team members Dr. Birgit Waibel, Dr. Udo Rohe, Anastasia Cobet and Luminiţa Traşcă, and adding to this an equally heartfelt “Thank you!” to Rafaela Tosin, who helped in the preparation of the fourth edition, and to Kathrin Heyng (at Narr Verlag), who saw the typescript through the production process professionally and with a sharp eye for detail.

Freiburg, October 2021Christian Mair

Unit 1 [1]Introduction – linguistic and other approaches to language

1.1    Orientation

What is linguistics?

Any book introducing undergraduate students to a new academic field, its terminology and investigative methods must start by answering the defining question, which in our case is simply: “What is linguistics?” To say that “linguistics is the rational and systematic scientific study of language, usually based in institutions of higher learning such as colleges or universities” seems a fairly helpful first approximation. Of course, in offering an answer to this first question, I have raised two more. First, it is not at all clear what we mean by language in an academic-linguistic context. The every-day English word language has multiple meanings (as do its equivalents in other languages), as can easily be demonstrated by comparing its meaning in the following two sentences (see Exercise 1 below for further examples):

The language of the British press has changed considerably over the past few decades.

Language is what distinguishes human beings from apes.

In the first example, the word language denotes a particular functional variety of one specific language, in this case English, whereas in the second it could be glossed as the “ability to learn and use any of a large number of human languages.”

A subfield of the humanities, a social science, an experimental natural science?

Secondly, while its home in universities as one academic discipline among others is secure, the precise status of linguistics as a science is contested territory (as we shall see in many places throughout this book). Is linguistics part of the humanities, close to literary and cultural studies, with which it shares an interest in the phenomenon of style for example? Is it an empirical social science, using quantitative and qualitative methods to study the communicative networks among people which ultimately constitute society? Is it an experimental science like psychology, studying the role of language in human cognition, or the place of language-acquisition in the development of the human personality? Or is it a natural science, in that it helps us to understand the complex physiology of the human speech apparatus, or the neurological basis of language both in the healthy person and in those suffering from various kinds of language disorder or language loss?

In an introduction to linguistics it is worth noting that the way we answer this question partly depends on the language we conduct the debate in. The English word science, for example, has a much narrower range than German Wissenschaft. While science is largely confined to the natural sciences and a [2]small number of other fields using statistical and mathematical procedures of analysis, the German term is also regularly used to describe disciplines such as Literaturwissenschaft, Geschichtswissenschaft, Musikwissenschaft and Kulturwissenschaft, which in English would not be considered sciences, but part of the humanities. Thus, the German word Sprachwissenschaft is very inclusive in its meaning and therefore a good translation for the English term linguistics; its literal equivalent, language science, is much narrower than German Sprachwissenschaft, implying a way of studying language that is inspired by the rigorous methodological procedures of the exact sciences.

Linguistics for students of English

This incomplete list of possible orientations in linguistics opens up many vistas that the present introduction will not explore. Its aims are more practical and limited. The first is to equip readers with the terminology and methods necessary to describe present-day English, the language they have made the focus of their studies, both in its structure and in its use. The second aim is to introduce students to the major theoretical positions and trends in the field, so as to give them the basis for independent further work. And not least the book aims to show where a knowledge of linguistics can be made productive outside the field, for example in the teaching and learning of foreign languages, or for developing a more sophisticated grasp of language-related issues in literary and cultural studies.

Linguistics – the pre-history of the field

[3]But how did the burgeoning discipline of linguistics arise historically? In answering this question, we cannot help but be struck by an apparent paradox. We find signs of people’s keen interest in linguistic issues for practically the whole recorded history of humanity, but dispassionate scientific objectivity in the study of language, the scholarly study of language for its own sake, or – for short – linguistics as an academic discipline, are historically very recent pursuits.

One marvel that seems to have caused people to wonder in many places and at different times in history is the fact that human beings live in a world of many languages, which is obviously impractical. A well-known non-scholarly answer to this puzzle is contained in the Old Testament of the Bible (Genesis 11), where multilingualism is explained as God’s punishment for the human pride manifested in the attempt to build the enormous Tower of Babel (see Figure 1.1).

Fig. 1.1 Pieter Breughel the Elder, “Tower of Babel” (1563), Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum

Within one and the same language community, people are keenly aware of sometimes very slight differences in pronunciation, grammar or vocabulary. In a British context, for example, “aitch-dropping,” technically speaking the dropping of initial /h/ in stressed syllables, is a strong social marker. If someone says ’eavy metal music instead of heavy metal music, the contrast is trivial, and any confusion about the intended meaning is unlikely. However, this detail of pronunciation will instantly mark out the speaker as either educated, standard or middle-class (if heavy is pronounced with h) or uneducated, non-standard or working-class (if the aitches are dropped). Of course, the general public, including literary writers, are aware of this, so that aitch-dropping becomes available as an efficient device for literary characterisation, as it does, for example, in the case of Uriah Heep (from Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield), who styles himself as ’umble (← humble) all the time. The motif is taken up by the rock band of the same name, whose first album is called Very ’eavy, very ’umble.

Fig. 1.2Very ’eavy: Cover of LP record

Among those fascinated by language long before the emergence of linguistics as a specialised discipline have been major philosophers. The classical Greek thinker Plato (428/27 BC – 348/47 BC), for example, thought a lot about the question of whether the form and shape [4]of a word have any natural or logical correspondence to the person, thing, quality, activity or process it refers to, or whether this relation is arbitrary.

Linguistics and philosophy

If we think of verbs such as German zischen or English hiss, we might conclude that the former view is plausible – the sound of the words seems to be motivated by the sound in the real world. If we think about a sound sequence such as /i:gl/, there is clearly no such correspondence between the form and the denoted concept. By convention, this sound sequence corresponds to Igel “hedgehog” for those who speak German and to an [5]entirely different animal, eagle “Adler,” for those who speak English. More importantly, there is nothing about either of the two animals that makes this particular word a natural choice to name them. In the typical fashion of a dialogical Platonic argument, the philosopher develops a compromise position: Kratylos argues that names are motivated; Hermogenes claims that they are arbitrary; Socrates moderates between the two.

“Onomatopoeia” – the imitation of natural sounds

Modern linguists are less circumspect and tend to agree that Hermogenes’ position is the appropriate one. First, there are far more words for which the relation between sound and meaning is arbitrary than there are onomatopoetic forms in which the sound of the words appears to imitate some natural sound. Secondly, even those words that seem to be imitations of actual natural sounds turn out to be highly arbitrary and language-specific on closer inspection. Note, for example, that the initial letter <z> in German zischen, which corresponds to the sounds /ts/, would be a forbidden combination in English (see Exercise 5 below for further discussion).

Linguistics and language teaching

Apart from philosophical concerns about language, there have also been practical ones. Language teaching, for example, has a history to look back on which is at least as old as the philosophical debate about language. In fact, two of the seven Classical “liberal arts,” which formed the core curriculum of higher education well into the Early Modern period, are language-related, namely grammar (which in the old understanding included the study of pronunciation) and rhetoric (see Figure 1.3).

Fig. 1.3 The “seven liberal arts,” with Grammatica and Rhetorica on the top and top-right (from: Herrad of Landsberg, “Hortus deliciarum” [1180])

For a long time, the foreign languages that were studied and taught most in our part of the world were Latin, Greek and Hebrew, the three sacred languages of the Bible. From the 16th and 17th centuries onwards, teaching and reference materials, such as dictionaries and grammar books, started being developed for more and more of the modern European languages. Some of the pedagogical works that have come down to us over the ages clearly reveal a lot of linguistic insight, but as a whole this tradition does not amount to more than a precursor of the scholarly linguistic perspective on lan[6]guage. Figure 1.4 presents the title page of one such practical grammar of English, which was presumably produced for the benefit of German immigrants to British North America.

Fig. 1.4Grammatica Anglicana concentrata, oder Kurtz-gefaßte englische Grammatica. Worinnen Die zur Erlernung dieser Sprache hinlänglich-nöthige Grund-Sätze Auf eine sehr deutliche und leichte Art abgehandelt sind (Philadelphia 1748), title page

Linguistics and textual criticism

Another precursor of academic linguistics is the tradition of textual criticism which first flowered during the Renaissance, when scholars looked at ancient texts from classical antiquity very closely in order to determine their authentic versions, which had often been corrupted in centuries of transmission. Very often, such a comparison of different manuscript versions was a necessary step to prepare the first printed editions of these texts. This pursuit was known as philology (from the ancient Greek for “love of the word” or “love of language”). Originally, philology comprised the study of language and literature. Today the term is preserved in expressions such as “Englische Philologie,” one of the traditional German designations of English Studies. In a modern linguistic context, the term philology refers to the specialist study of language history, especially in the context of editing texts.

Finally, the fact that Europeans conquered and colonised ever growing portions of the world meant that many new and exotic languages were encountered, translated from and into, documented and taught. Arabic, Chinese, Persian and the ancient and modern languages of India thus became of interest to Europeans. This meant that, slowly but surely, a critical mass of knowledge about languages accumulated which led to the birth of linguistics as an academic discipline toward the end of the 18th century.

The birth of linguistics as an academic discipline

In this early phase, language scholars’ orientation was strongly historical. Building on an insight first formulated in 1786 by William Jones (1746–1794), who worked as a judge on behalf of the British East India Company in Calcutta, subsequent generations of scholars traced the history of the various members of what was later to be referred to as the Indo-European family of languages in order to reconstruct their common origin (proto-Indo-European or Ursprache) and their mutual relationship. In particular, Jones’ seminal insight was to note systematic correspondences between Sanskrit, an ancient language of the Indian subcontinent, and Ancient Greek, which made it plausible to trace both back to a common historical source (see Unit 12 for further discussion of the historical relationships among the Indo-European languages, esp. Figure 12.1).

Fig. 1.5 William Jones (1746–1794), pioneer of historical-comparative (Indo-European) linguistics

What was found out in the course of the 19th century still holds in its essence today. The Celtic languages spoken in the very West of Europe, the Germanic, Romance, Slavic languages, some languages of the Baltic region (Latvian, Lithuanian), Albanian, Greek, Persian and some of the major languages of the Indian subcontinent such as Hindi or Punjabi all go back to a common ancestor. Before the emergence of historical-comparative linguistics, people indulged in bizarre speculations on historical relation[7]ships between languages and peoples on the basis of a few pairs of words that happened to sound similar. Today, we have a rigid methodology to assess the value of such claims, and people who will still argue for direct links between the civilisations of ancient Asia and ancient America just because a few place names, names for gods or food-stuffs happen to sound similar are fortunately not taken seriously any more – a modest triumph of science over speculation.

Diachronic and synchronic approaches to the study of language

One practitioner of historical-comparative linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), based at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, was instrumental in bringing about a re-orientation of approach which has dominated the field to the present day. He pointed out that the diachronic study of language (i.e. the study of its development through time) produced interesting insights of many kinds, but these never explained how a particular language worked as a system of choices for its speakers at a particular time (the synchronic perspective).

To illustrate this with an example: if I tell you that the word nice originally meant “foolish” or “ignorant” when it was first used in English around 800 years ago, I am telling you a truth that you can find recorded in any good etymological dictionary (i.e. a dictionary that traces the history of a word in the language back to the oldest attested forms or to other languages from which it was borrowed). Obviously, the original meaning and the present one are so different that one cannot have changed into the other overnight. There must have been many intermediate steps. One such step is illustrated in the following extract from a classic novel written in the first half of the 18th century, Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders:

I was really with child [= pregnant].

This was a perplexing thing because of the Difficulty which was before me, where I should get leave to Lye Inn; it being one of the nicest things in the World at that time of Day, for a Woman that was a Stranger, and had no Friends, to be entertain’d in that Circumstance without Security, which by the way I had not, neither could I procure any. (Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders. 1722: ch. 32)

The context, a single mother preparing to give birth in a strange city, makes clear that the situation is far from nice in the present sense of “pleasant.” Rather, the idea is that the situation is tricky or difficult to handle. You may find these language-historical facts boring and irrelevant. You may find them to have some practical use, because they help you understand older texts better. Or you may even find them fascinating because such complex changes of word-meaning raise interesting issues relating to human psychology and cognition. What, for example, is the connection between ignorance and the quality of being pleasant? Is it that simple minds are conventionally regarded as harmless, non-threatening and therefore “nice” company?

[8]Whatever your views may be, one thing is certain, however. No amount of historical information on the changing meanings of nice in the past will help you learn how to use this adjective in the present. Here, we are faced with other problems – for example understanding the difference in meaning and style between how nice of you and how kind of you in native-speaker usage or explaining why we can say how unkind of you, but not how unnice of you (even though negation of nice easily works if we use another strategy: that was not nice of you!).

In practice the move from the diachronic approach to the synchronic one often meant that the focus of interest shifted from the oldest stages of the language (in the case of English the Old English period lasting from c. 500 to c. 1100) to the contemporary language, but this does not necessarily have to be the case. We can study Old English from a synchronic perspective, for example, by showing how it worked as a structured system at a given point in time, let’s say the well-documented period immediately before the Norman Conquest in 1066. Alternatively, we can take a diachronic approach to present-day English, for example by focussing on those processes of historical change that are going on right now. Here we could point to the adjectiveawesome, which has developed considerably over the past 100 years, from a very specific and narrow meaning (“awe-inspiring”) to a much wider one, as a general-purpose positive evaluation (“great,” “excellent,” “terrific”). The last adjective, terrific, shows that history has repeated itself, because terrific had moved along the same course a couple of centuries earlier (from “inspiring terror” to “great”).

What unites both historical-comparative (diachronic) and structuralist-synchronic approaches to language and sets them apart from all the precursor traditions is their explicitly descriptive orientation. Teachers instruct pupils in how to use a language correctly (that is according to the educated standards prevalent in a community). Some of them might even discourage pupils from using the adjectivenice in writing, because they consider it too informal and imprecise. No doubt, there are many native speakers of English, especially outside the United States, who still react negatively to the contemporary use of awesome described above. This notwithstanding, academic linguists – whether working in the diachronic or synchronic traditions – generally do not pass value judgments on the linguistic forms and structures they are studying.

[9]1.2    Demonstration/discussion

Prescriptive and descriptive approaches to the study of language

In this section we will illustrate the contrast between various judgmental or prescriptive perspectives on language and the strictly descriptive take on linguistic phenomena which is the hallmark of academic linguistics. After the discussion of the examples, you will be able to more clearly understand the concerns of linguistics and distinguish them from other ways of analysing language.

As a first illustration, consider the general American pronunciation of English, the most widely spoken and certainly the most widely heard accent in the world today. In comparison to British English, it is characterised by a number of well-established pronunciation features. Probably most salient among them is the fact that the <r> is pronounced wherever you find it in spelling (unlike British English, where <r> is silent if it follows a vowel). Thus, you hear an /r/ in the American pronunciation of words such as water, car or hard, whereas the <r> is silent in a British pronunciation. Also, the /t/ tends to be weakened in certain positions in American English, in particular between vowels if the first one is stressed (e.g. in words such as water or Betty). Trivial though these details of pronunciation may seem, they occasionally provoke strong negative reactions. Compare, for example, the following quotation from a letter written by American novelist Henry James (1843–1916):

Fig. 1.6 Henry James, novelist (1843–1916)

There are, you see, sounds of a mysterious and intrinsic meanness, and there are sounds of a mysterious intrinsic frankness and sweetness; and I think the recurrent note that I have indicated – fatherr and motherr and otherr, waterr and matterr and scatterr, harrd and barrd, parrt, starrt, and (dreadful to say) arrt (the repetition it is that drives home the ugliness), are signal specimens of what becomes of a custom of utterance out of which the principle of taste has dropped. (Henry James, “The Question of Our Speech,” in The Question of Our Speech/The Lesson of Balzac: Two Lectures. Boston and New York 1905: 29)

This is an interesting example of linguistic self-hatred, as the famous novelist Henry James was an American by birth (even though he died a naturalised British subject). The next quotation is not from a famous individual of the past but taken from the present and the World-Wide Web. It was posted by an instructional designer with a British background and shows that some of the prejudice voiced by Henry James has survived. Here the focus in not on the pronunciation of the /r/, but on the way in which the consonant /t/ is handled in American English:

How did the T become a D when in the middle of a word? I am a British lady and find this very annoying and hard to understand what was meant. For years [10]I really thought that Nita Lowy’s name was spelt NEDA! How do the students manage in dictation (or don’t they have that in schools now). It affects everyone, as I just saw in print someone referring to Dr. Adkins, which would be the obvious spelling if one had only heard the word spoken and did not know that the correct spelling is Dr. Atkins. The sentence below gives an example of problems in understanding the spelling of certain words.

I am writing this as I hear it pronounced: Paddy and Neda attended the innerview and were congradulated on the recipe with the budder badder for the cake they cooked with their dada. (daughter).

(source: http://linguistlist.org/ask-ling/message-details1.cfm?asklingid=200316347)

This statement provides an illustration of the slight animosity which educated British speakers sometimes feel towards American speechways, probably because – as the people who got the language going – they resent the political, economic and cultural pre-eminence of the United States in the world today.

What would descriptive linguists make of the statement by Henry James? The answer is simple. They would dismiss it as a completely unfounded and subjective value judgment. Even worse, some linguists might add, is the fact that this type of negative judgment on linguistic forms usually masks contempt for the speakers who use them. This, they would argue, is dishonest and unethical, as people should be judged by what they do and not by how they speak. Historical linguists might point out that among the people who pronounced the /r/-s after vowels was one William Shakespeare (1564–1616). The r-less pronunciations of words such as father, mother or part arose only in the 18th century among the lower classes of London and then took some time to become the general British standard.

In the “British lady’s” pronouncement, the descriptive linguist would first point out that in the word congradulated as spelled here there is a mistake, because the stereotypical American would pronounce it as congraduladed, weakening the /t/ in both instances and not just in the first. Whereas Henry James does not give any rational reasons for his dislike of the American accent, the British lady presents an argument: Americans do not distinguish between certain pairs of words, which makes their English difficult to understand and confusing. To this objection, the descriptive linguist would respond that for every instance in which two words sound the same in American English there is at least one comparable case in British English. For example, the words source and sauce are clearly distinct in their pronunciation in American English but sound completely alike in British English. As it happens, the reason for this is precisely the r-less pronunciation so much favoured by Henry James.

[11]In real life, unlike constructed examples and jokes, the danger of misunderstandings resulting from the identical pronunciation of words with different meanings is minimal. If the topic of a conversation is urban problems in the United States and we hear inner city, we know from the context that we are talking about neglected city centres and do not even think of the theoretical alternative inter-city. If in a conversation in Britain somebody says /sɔ:s/ and the topic is food, we hear sauce, and not source.

Flapped /t/ in American English

What really might intrigue the descriptive linguist in the case of the American /t/ is the intricate set of rules which governs the weakening or “tapping”/“flapping” of the /t/. The latter terms are intended to capture the fact that in the American articulation of the sound the tip of the tongue just briefly taps or flaps against the palate (on which more will be said in Unit 2). As has been mentioned, such flapped or tapped /t/-s occur between vowels, but only if the first one is stressed. Thus we find them in Italy, but not in Italian, in atom (which sounds like Adam), but not in atomic, and so on. It occurs after /r/, as in dirty, hurting, and the /t/ disappears entirely after /n/, as in enter or centre, but again only if the syllable preceding the /t/ is stressed. This is why we would not get it in a word such as entire, which is stressed on the second syllable. Having been given so many clues, you can further hone your analytical skills as a budding descriptive linguist in Exercise 6 below.

Different definitions of language

Here, we shall return to the question raised at the very beginning – how to define language, the object of linguistic description. As has already been hinted at, it seems to be a much easier task to define linguistics than it is to define its object of study, human language and the diversity of languages – past and present – spoken in the world. To get a flavour of the diverse ways in which great thinkers in the field have approached the problem, consider the following proposals. Note that there is little overlap between the definitions, and that each emphasises a different aspect of the object to be defined:

Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions, and desires by means of a system of volitionally produced symbols. (Sapir 1921: 8)

From now on I will consider a language to be a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out of a finite set of elements. All natural languages in their spoken or written form are languages in this sense. […] Similarly, the set of ‘sentences’ of some formalized system of mathematics can be considered a language. (Chomsky 1957: 13)

The essence of speech is that one human being, by movements beginning at his diaphragm and involving various parts of his chest, throat, mouth and nasal passages, creates disturbances in the air around him, which within a certain distance from him have a perceptible effect on the ear-drums and through [12]them on the brains of other people, and that the hearers can, if they belong to the same language community, respond to these disturbances, or noises, and find them meaningful. (Robins 1971: 77)

After reading through the three definitions, one might well start wondering whether they actually target the same phenomenon. Sapir’s definition comes closest to our common-sense understanding; it emphasises the role of language as a tool for human communication, its symbolic character, and the fact that it is not an instinct or reflex but volitional and conscious. Chomsky’s definition, by contrast, is much more narrow and technical, drawing an analogy between the grammar of a language and a mathematical algorithm; nothing is implied about the role of language in society and communication. Robins, finally, approaches language through the sound of speech, emphasising the physical and acoustic sides of the phenomenon and disregarding grammatical function, meaning and content.

In view of these various emphases, it is probably not a mistake to have an amateur have the final say. The following definition is by the famous 19th-century American poet and writer Walt Whitman (1819–1892):

Fig. 1.7 Walt Whitman (1819–1892)

Language is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of dictionary-makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground. (Walt Whitman, “Slang in America,” 1885)

Linguistic intuition and well-formedness

Before going on with our defining work, let us pause to consider what it means to “know” a language. It certainly means to be able to speak it fluently and to communicate effectively. In addition, our linguistic intuition (“Sprachgefühl”) enables us to make judgments about nuances in meaning between alternative expressions or about the well-formedness of certain grammatical structures. Thus, native speakers of English know with absolute certainty that both of the following sentences are possible utterances in their language:

Inflation more than tripled between 1973 and 1983.

Inflation will more than triple over the next 20 years.

A German speaker, by contrast, will accept only one of the structurally analogous sentences:

*Die Inflation mehr als verdreifachte sich zwischen 1973 und 1983.

Die Inflation wird sich in den nächsten Jahren mehr als verdreifachen.

The *-sign is a widely used convention in linguistics. In synchronic linguistics it indicates that a construction or sentence is ungrammatical. In diachronic linguistics it signals that a form is assumed as a plausible [13]reconstruction although direct evidence (for example in old texts) is missing. Die Inflation verdreifachte sich zwischen 1973 und 1983, by itself, is a well-formed sentence. The problem thus is to find a place for the modification mehr als. The sentence given above does not work, and no amount of moving around the parts will make it work: *Die Inflation verdreifachte sich mehr als, *die Inflation mehr als verdreifachte sich, etc. On the other hand, any structure that has a form of verdreifachen in clause-final position is possible:

Die Inflation hat sich in den letzten Jahren mehr als verdreifacht.

Ich weiß, dass sich die Inflation alle hundert Jahre mehr als verdreifacht.

The complexity of language

This is a statement of the facts. At this stage in our introduction to linguistics we are not interested in a search for possible reasons. However, it is clear that the rules which are at work here are not those which are usually taught to foreign learners of English and German as part of their grammar teaching, nor are the sentences of the kind that children would get practice on in the early stages of natural language acquisition. In this sense, the example serves well to illustrate the enormous formal complexity of human languages. This formal complexity is capable of expressing similarly complex meanings. While it is fairly easy to define the meaning of the verbtriple (“increase threefold”), the combination more than triple raises a problem. Theoretically, this expression covers anything from “increase a little more than three-fold” to “increase a hundred-fold” and beyond. In a natural communicative situation, however, we are very likely to assume that we are talking about an increase which is between three-fold and four-fold. Why? Such problems of the logic of natural languages will be discussed in more depth in Unit 7.

A working definition of language

After this exercise in consciousness-raising, we can now return to the initial question and name a number of features which must figure in any definition of language. Together they make up a good composite working definition of what a human language is.

1)

New-born human beings have a genetic or natural predisposition to acquire a language (or languages) spoken in their communities. They are rather free to decide on what occasions and for what purposes they use language (which is an important contrast to many more instinct-based communication systems prevalent among animal populations).

2)

Human languages represent meaning symbolically. The relationship between the sound of a word and the concept it denotes is thus arbitrary, as is easily shown by the following words used to denote the concept “bread”: ekmek (Turkish), Brot (German), pane (Italian).

3)

Words are combined into larger constructions by rules which are language-specific conventions. German es wurde gesungen und getanzt[14]expresses roughly the same idea as English there was singing and dancing. It is not possible to re-create the German structure in English or vice versa.

4)

Human languages are sound-based. For a small number of the world’s ca. 6,000 languages writing systems have been developed. Deaf people are capable of expressing themselves through signing.

While, as has been hinted at, several animal species have developed very complex systems of communication, the above-named features in their combination ensure that language is a uniquely human achievement. Animals may be able to communicate warnings or directions to their fellows, but only human beings use languages for complex reasoning, to talk about alternative worlds or possible behaviour, or to systematically lie and deceive.

1.3    Problems and challenges

Corpora and the study of language

In Section 1.2 above we had a look at how people developed negative attitudes towards particular ways of pronouncing the English language. Of course, this problem is not restricted to matters of pronunciation. Similar responses are occasionally provoked by grammatical constructions, as well. Again, the linguistic details in question are trivial, but the social consequences may be considerable. This section will introduce you to the use of computerised language corpora, i.e. textual data-bases that have been compiled and annotated for the purposes of linguistic research. They are powerful tools, not the least of their advantages being that they allow students to gain hands-on research experience very early on in their coursework. The portal https://www.english-corpora.org/, hosted by US linguist Mark Davies, offers convenient access to a wide range of corpora. You can register as a user for free, preferably using your university e-mail address for better user rights, which you should do at your earliest convenience, because many of the exercises in this book will require you to carry out corpus searches. Note that the website offers instructive tutorials for self-study.

Register at the english-corpora.org website.

For an example of the stigmatisation of a grammatical construction, consider the following extract from a play by the renowned British dramatist Tom Stoppard (b. 1937):

Max:

[…] if you don’t mind me saying so.

Henry:

My saying, Max.

Max gets up and wants to leave

Henry:

I’m sorry, but it actually hurts.

(source: Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing. London 1983: 34)

[15]Without going too deeply into the details of grammatical analysis, let us make the problem explicit. Max uses the verbmind followed by a pronoun in the object form followed by the participle of the verb. In present-day English, there are numerous instances of this pattern: I found him reading, I caught them napping, etc. Henry resents the usage when it is extended to the verb mind, insisting on a supposedly correct alternative: the verb mind, followed by a possessive pronoun and a verbal noun (or gerund). Again, there are numerous instances of this pattern: I hate his singing, I am tired of your complaining, etc. Max is offended because his partner in conversation comments on the form of his utterance rather than the content. This is impolite. As the following examples show, Max has the usage facts of present-day English on his side. In most cases, both variants are possible, and if only one works, it is Max’s and not Henry’s:

She doesn’t mind his smoking during lunch.

She doesn’t mind him smoking during lunch.

She doesn’t object to Peter’s smoking during lunch.

She doesn’t object to Peter smoking during lunch.

??Who would have dreamed of such a thing’s happening a year ago?

Who would have dreamed of such a thing happening a year ago?

I can tell you that I’m not looking forward to this happening again.

*I can tell you that I’m not looking forward to this’s happening again.

There just is no genitive or possessive case for the demonstrative pronounthis, and the genitive is a rather unusual choice for a noun denoting a lifeless object such as thing. In other cases, the contrast is neutralised, because a form such as her functions both as object case and as a possessive:

Nobody objects to her smoking after lunch.

What we learn from this analysis is that certain linguistic prejudices may persist for a long time and be articulated with a lot of conviction and arrogance, even if they have no basis in fact – as can easily be verified from digital language corpora. Let us search for examples in the British National Corpus (BNC), a database comprising the unbelievable amount of almost 100 million words of running text covering a wide variety of written and spoken genres. It is among those accessible through the english-corpora.org website. The collection of the data was completed in the early 1990s, that is not long after Stoppard’s play was written. To look for examples of the construction investigated here I first searched for the two-word sequence mind him and found 35 hits, of which 14 illustrate the construction under study:

“Don’t you mind him stealing your father’s eggs?”

Therefore I don’t mind him hearing the very worst about my past.

[16]She didn’t mind him telling her things, and learned very quickly.

Diana, Barry’s wife of 35 years, doesn’t mind him meeting all the great screen goddesses.

I wouldn’t mind him being Heathcliff’s son, if only he loved her and could be a good husband to her.”

If he did not know that, I do not mind him admitting it, but it is extraordinary ignorance on his part.

I wouldn’t mind him sitting on top of my Christmas tree,” said either Dosh or Freddie.

I wouldn’t mind him missing sundays game.

Apparently, she did not mind him being a mop head when occupying other Government positions, but felt it would not be fitting for the role of Chancellor.

I mean I don’t mind him popping out as long as he’s […] gone to their house and stays there.

Well, I don’t mind him walking across that bit but <pause>

Actually, I don’t really mi-- mind him looking after me, he’s very good!

Did you mind him going over there, staying over there?

he didn’t mind him speaking and as soon as <name> yeah right then he said I’m not I’m not telling <unclear>

Henry’s desired alternative occurs less often, a mere six times:

Gullit, of course, is injured and there are still fears for his playing career, never mind his appearing in Italy.

Never mind his scrummaging, or doubts about his fitness round the park, he was worth his ticket for his line-out work.

But I didn’t mind his thinking it, his sudden flattering benignity.

No, she didn’t mind his ringing so late.

She wanted to tell him they didn’t mind his being there, it didn’t matter, he wasn’t trespassing.

Why did she mind his being hurt so much?

Sycnronically, both Henry and Max use grammar that is correct and natural in late 20th-century British English. Diachronically, Max represents the mainstream and the future, and Henry a recessive older form. Rationally, Henry was wrong to start a dispute over linguistic usage. If his aim is to stop linguistic change, he is already too late. In this example, you have seen linguistic argumentation in action: we have used empirical evidence to systematically explore a research question and we have refuted Henry’s point of view in the process. What we shall leave open for the time being is how much more evidence would be needed to blaze a trail for this research finding [17]in the real world and convince the many Henrys out there that they should stop discriminating against people on the basis of spurious claims about what proper English is.

As is common in the study of language corpora, new questions arise from the data the moment you have answered the original one. Note, for example, that the expression never mind his + VERB-ing occurs twice, whereas never mind him + VERB-ing is not attested. Is this latter form impossible, or is its absence from the British National Corpus accidental? This would be a question worth further corpus-based inquiry. We could also categorise the examples according to whether they come from written and formal texts or from spontaneous informal conversations.

References and further reading

Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic structures. The Hague/Paris: Mouton.

Oxford English Dictionary. Second edition, 1989. Ed. by John Simpson and Edmund Weiner. Oxford: OUP. <www.oed.com>

Robins, R.H. 1971. General linguistics: An introductory survey. London: Longman.

Sapir, Edward. 1921. Language: An introduction to the study of speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Comp.

There are numerous introductions to linguistics aimed at student and academic audiences.

For a work which has long been in successful use internationally see:

Yule, George.2020. The study of language: An introduction. 7th ed. Cambridge: CUP.

For works geared to the needs of a German-speaking readership and focussed on English compare:

Bieswanger, Markus, and Annette Becker. 2010. Introduction to English linguistics. 3rd ed. Tübingen: Narr.

Kortmann, Bernd. 2020. English linguistics: Essentials. 2nd ed. Berlin: Springer/Metzler.

In addition, there are numerous books on language, languages, and the English language in particular that are addressed to a non-expert readership. Many of them do not even pretend to objectivity but represent their authors’ personal prescriptive agenda. For a point of view which is presented forcefully, and not without entertainment value, but would be considered as plain reactionary by most linguists, compare:

Amis, Kingsley. 1997. The King’s English: A guide to modern usage. London: Harper-Collins. (also available as Penguin Modern Classic, 2011)

[Kingsley Amis (1922–1995) was a major 20th century English novelist.]

A popular treatment that some professional linguists would sneer at because it is sometimes rather superficial is:

Bryson, Bill. 1990. Mother tongue: The English language. London: Hamish Hamilton. (Penguin paperback edition 2009; slightly modified title Mother Tongue: The story of the English language)

Popular treatments which aim high intellectually and successfully combine expert [18]knowledge, clear exposition and a broad inter-disciplinary horizon are:

Crystal, David. 2018. The Cambridge encyclopedia of the English language. 3rd ed. Cambridge: CUP.

Pinker, Steven. 1994. The language instinct: How the mind creates language. New York NY: Morrow.

1.4    Practice

1Consider the meaning of the word language in the following expressions and paraphrase it in such a way as to bring out the contrasting usages clearly:

Example:

The language of the British press has changed considerably over the past few decades.

The word language here denotes a specific way or style of using the English language in a particular written genre.

She teaches sign language in a school for the deaf.

Sally can conduct fluent conversations in at least four languages.

Watch your language!

As a teacher I sometimes feel that the children speak a completely different language from me.

Lëtzebuergesch used to be a dialect of German but has been one of the three official languages of Luxemburg since 1984.

Who was the guy who got the Nobel Prize for decoding the language of the bees?

If you know how to read the language of graffiti, you will learn a lot about life in the city.

2Why did the instructional designer quoted in Section 1.2 above refer to herself as a British lady rather than a British woman or an Englishwoman? What are the differences in meaning between the words lady and woman in present-day English?

As a first step, note down your intuitions about – say – the contrast between Ask the lady over there and Ask the woman over there.

Discuss your intuitions with a native speaker of English and consult entries for woman and lady in a dictionary of your choice.

Collect a largish number of authentic uses of the two words from corpora and discuss the material.

[19]3To prove the point made above that knowledge of language history (diachrony) is irrelevant to the working of language as a structured system (synchrony), look up the words woman and lady in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). This is the largest and most comprehensive dictionary ever produced for any language. It occupies almost two metres of shelf-space in its printed version, and is likely to be on hand in your departmental or university library. Alternatively, if your institution has a subscription, you may check the regularly updated online version (http://www.oed.com). One special feature of the OED is that it charts the history of English words beginning with the first attested uses and through all subsequent expansions and changes of meaning. What do the entries for woman and lady say about the earliest meanings of the words? Is this knowledge useful in any way?

4Consult a native speaker of English about their response to the following forms:

We don’t need no education.

Hopefully, the war will soon be ended.

Let me assure you that I am not actuated by mercenary considerations.

Had I in the least surmised that it was her husband’s purchase of an expensive automobile that made her flip her lid, I would have told her to shut up and not get her knickers in a twist over it.

5Return to the “Platonic” problem of the appropriateness of the name to the thing and consider it in the light of the following data:

1)

The conventional representations of the sound of a sneeze are hatschi in German, atishoo/atchoo in British English, and ah-choo in American English.

2)

The conventional representations for a cock crowing are kikeriki in German, chicherichi in Italian, cocorico in French, cock-a-doodle-doo in English, kukuriku in Russian, kokekoko in Japanese, and kong-shi in Chinese.

6Indicate which of the following /t/-s are candidates for flapping in American English.

quantum physics, quantity, quantitative, quantitatively

I go to school every day

If he goes, I go too

7Consulting linguistic corpora

This is a brief extract from a conversation among working class speakers from Central Northern England (source: BNC KB1 4334 ff.).

Corrinne

She’s not interested.

Albert

No.

I think she’ll be married shortly.

June

I can see her marrying him.

[20]Corrinne

<unclear >

June

Yeah. But he’s one of them lads where she’ll never have owt, cos he don’t do, he won’t bloody work will he?

Corrinne

Well he’s doing taxis.

And this is an extract from a scientific paper included in the Freiburg-Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen (F-LOB) corpus of written British English (text J 09):

In a recent paper (Kemball-Cook et al., 1990), we demonstrated a modified sodium dodecyl sulphate polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE) method for visualization of factor VIII heavy chain (FVIII HC) polypeptides. This approach, based on that first described by Weinstein et al. (1981) enables FVIII structure to be studied in a wide range of samples including plasma without further purification. We have therefore used this technique to study the proteolytic breakdown of FVIII HC in plasma and concentrates when exposed to a range of coagulation enzymes.

Which text is easier to understand, and why?

8As you have worked hard, it is time for some relief. “What the writers say” is an occasional feature in this book highlighting some of the more bizarre and unexpected ways in which linguistics figures in English literature. The passage quoted below is from a novel by Anthony Burgess (1917–1993). Edwin is a professional linguist who all of a sudden finds himself in a psychiatric hospital and has to explain his job …

Text 1.1 Anthony Burgess, The Doctor is Sick, Penguin ed., 15

What the writers say

“Let’s sit down, shall we,” said Charlie, and Edwin, feeling that he was a bad host, led his visitors over to his bed. “Now,” said Charlie, “what is it your wife here says that you do?”

“Linguistics.”

“Aha.” The three of them sat, leg-swinging, on the bed. “I’ve never heard of it,” said Charlie, “and that’s a fact. Mind you, I’m not saying that there’s no such thing, but no mention of it has ever come my way before.”

“Oh,” said Edwin, “it does exist.”

“That’s as may be, but, if it does exist, it’ll be above the heads of people like me and her.” He jerked his head towards Sheila. “Me, I clean windows. Anybody can understand what that is, and you don’t get put into places like this if you do a job like that. Mind you, you can get put into a hospital, if you’re a window-cleaner, but not into a hospital like this one, because window-cleaning doesn’t affect the brain.”

Having worked your way through Unit 1, could you do a better job than Edwin at explaining what linguistics is about?

Unit 2 [21]Phonetics and phonology – the sounds of speech

2.1    Orientation

2.1.1    Sounds and letters: The need for a phonetic alphabet

The difficult relationship between spelling and pronunciation

In the linguistic analysis of the sounds of spoken language, beginners usually have to make a conscious effort to break the mould of spelling, particularly in a language such as English, in which there is such an obvious discrepancy between orthography and pronunciation. Of course, there is a correspondence between letters, the graphic signs of writing, and the sounds articulated in pronunciation. For example, the letter <p> fairly regularly corresponds to a particular sound, and so do most other consonants (that is sounds which usually cannot form the nucleus of a syllable, see p. 29). However, there are irregularities even here in this simple case: for example, the <p> is silent in the words psychology or pneumonia. The correspondences between sound and spelling are much more complex for most vowels (that is sounds which usually form the nucleus of a syllable). For example, the words people, beat, seed and perceive all have the same vowel [i:], but it is spelled in four different ways. If two vowels are pronounced together, we have diphthongs. The correspondence between sound and spelling is similarly complex for English diphthongs. The three words pair, pare and pear, for example, have the same diphthong [εə], which however is spelled in three different ways depending on the meaning.

Fig. 2.1 George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), writer, social activist and spelling reformer

Transcription and the phonetic alphabet

This list could easily be extended – and might culminate in asking whether fish could not equally well be written ghoti: gh as in laugh, o as in women, and ti as in nation (a witticism probably wrongly attributed to the famous dramatist and campaigner for spelling reform George Bernard Shaw).