10,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Why It Matters
- Sprache: Englisch
Language is the medium in which we humans compose our thoughts, explain our thinking, construct our arguments, and create works of literature. Without language, societies as complex as ours could not exist. Geoffrey Pullum offers a stimulating introduction to the many ways in which linguistics, as the scientific study of language, matters. With its close relationships to psychology, education, philosophy, and computer science, the subject has a compelling human story to tell about the ways in which different societies see and describe the world, and its far-reaching applications range from law to medicine and from developmental psychology to artificial intelligence. Introducing Polity's Why It Matters series: In these short and lively books, world-leading thinkers make the case for the importance of their subjects and aim to inspire a new generation of students.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 143
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
Ähnliche
CONTENTS
Cover
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
1 What Makes Us Human
What Languages Are
Languages of the World
Languages and the Puzzle of Acquisition
2 How Sentences Work
Grammar and Grammatophobia
Why Most Grammars Are Wrong
The Five-Million-Dollar Grammar Slip
3 Words, Meaning, and Thought
Varieties of Meaning
Many Words for Snow?
On Whether Your Words Determine Your World
Processing the Sentences You Hear
Applying Psycholinguistics
4 Language and Social Life
Nonstandard Dialects and Despised Languages
The Field of Sociolinguistics
The Asymmetry of Intelligibility
All Languages Great and Small
5 Machines That Understand Us
The Words in the Box
Chatbots with Secret Languages?
What Machine Question-Answering Would Be Like
The Demand for Natural Language Processing
Conversing with Robots
What Real Natural Language Processing Would Involve
Conclusion
Notes on Further Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Begin Reading
Conclusion
Notes on Further Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
Pages
ii
iii
iv
vi
vii
viii
ix
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
Polity’s Why It Matters series
In these short and lively books, world-leading thinkers make the case for the importance of their subjects and aim to inspire a new generation of students.
Lynn Hunt, HistoryTim Ingold, AnthropologyNeville Morley, ClassicsAlexander B. Murphy, GeographyGeoffrey K. Pullum, Linguistics
Linguistics
Why It Matters
Geoffrey K. Pullum
polity
Copyright © Geoffrey K. Pullum 2018
The right of Geoffrey K. Pullum to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2018 by Polity Press
10
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3078-6
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Pullum, Geoffrey K., author.Title: Linguistics : why it matters / Geoffrey K. Pullum.Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references.Identifiers: LCCN 2018011378 (print) | LCCN 2018041077 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509530786 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509530755 | ISBN 9781509530755(hardback) | ISBN 9781509530762(pbk.)Subjects: LCSH: Linguistics.Classification: LCC P123 (ebook) | LCC P123 .P85 2018 (print) | DDC 410–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018011378
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Preface
This book is about the point of studying human language scientifically, and what importance that study has for broader concerns. The relevant scientific study is known as linguistics, but I construe the term very broadly, to include everything from practical applied concerns to abstract mathematical work on language structure, plus research specialities like phonetics and pragmatics, and hybrid disciplines like psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics. Sometimes I speak in the plural, and refer to the linguistic sciences.
Linguistics is not at all the same as the study of particular languages or their literatures. Some linguists are extraordinarily talented at learning and speaking foreign languages (knowing linguistics actually helps with that), but linguistics is not about learning or using or translating languages. It’s about getting a general theoretical understanding of their nature, and developing techniques for analysing and describing them.
I’m not trying to give any sort of introduction to linguistics in this relatively short book; plenty of other books do that. What I’m trying to do is to survey just a few topics that I feel make a clear case for saying that linguistics is not just an intellectually intriguing academic subject but a practically important one. I have done what I could, but I’m sure the number of linguists who feel I have picked exactly the right topics will be approximately zero. You will be able to confirm by chatting to any linguists you might meet; I encourage you to do so – and ask them which topics they would have chosen.
Linguistics is a young subject. Its history as an established academic subject taught in universities doesn’t really go back much before World War II. The Linguistics Association of Great Britain was not founded until 1959, and the Linguistic Society of America is only thirty-five years older. The subject never figured in secondary schools until quite recent reforms in Britain, and before 1965 it wasn’t even available at undergraduate level in British universities. Lots of well-educated people know virtually nothing about the subject. If this book does a little bit to encourage someone to consider taking up the study of linguistics at university, or even just taking one class in it, I shall be well satisfied.
It was my good luck to discover in the late 1960s what linguistics was, and that it had become available as an undergraduate subject at the University of York. The BA course I did there was the start of a lifetime of academic enjoyment and satisfaction. I have never for a second regretted switching into linguistics after five years in my first career (for those years I worked as a professional rock musician). I still think the linguistic sciences have great and largely underappreciated significance for society.
My continuing study of linguistics has been much aided by the colleagues I am fortunate enough to have at the University of Edinburgh. Many have helped, but I should specifically thank Melinda Wood for information about Hawaiian, Jerry Sadock for Greenlandic Inuit material in Chapter 3, Rebecca Wheeler for insights and references regarding Chapter 4, and Mark Steedman for fruitful discussions and some nice examples in Chapter 5. In addition, I owe a debt to Justin Dyer for expert and enormously helpful editing work on the manuscript and to Jim Donaldson for help with the proofs.
In a book as short as this I cannot possibly give full background information and bibliographical references. I have noted sources for a few key points in the notes at the end, and details about other topics will often be easily found through a web search, but anyone who is unable to locate a primary source that they need should email me: [email protected] is the address to use.
1What Makes Us Human
An extraterrestrial zoologist observing our planet’s wildlife a few hundred thousand years ago might well have been puzzled. The strange, soft-skinned, almost hairless primates that had emerged over the previous million years did not initially look like a good evolutionary bet, but they were doing incredibly well. Despite lacking the fangs, claws, or protective carapaces that other animals needed for safety, they were thriving. And they were developing skills and practices that the planet had never seen in any animal before. They lived in socially organized bands; nurtured and controlled fire to keep warm at night, deter predators, and cook food; planned and organized collaborative hunting; manufactured tools and weapons, sometimes with the aid of other tools; and developed practices like caring for the sick and burying the dead.
Their exploration of the planet grew steadily more ambitious. They populated not only the entire African continent but also the gigantic Eurasian land mass to the north and east. Ambrose Bierce quipped (before either of the twentieth century’s great world wars) that although humans seem addicted to extermination of their own species as well as others, nonetheless humankind ‘multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest the whole habitable earth and Canada.’ As generations passed, they steadily became more and more expert at making complex tools, weapons, ornaments, pictures, sculptures, clothes, and boats. They had found a new way to pass knowledge and skills down the generations, completely transcending biological transmission of physical traits through genetic inheritance. We don’t know when it happened: maybe 100,000 or 200,000 years ago, and possibly hundreds of thousands of years earlier; but at some time in the prehistoric past Homo sapiens (or quite possibly their immediate ancestors, Homo erectus) had developed language.
Today there are roughly 7 billion of us humans. We are the most important animals on earth, if only because of our unparalleled power to modify and perhaps destroy the planet’s very capacity to support life. Animals of other species do all sorts of clever things, and alter their environments in many ways, but it’s nothing comparable to what humans do. The complexity of human thought, behaviour, technology, and environmental modification is of an entirely different kind.
The aspects of human life that make our species unique depend in numerous ways on the special human ability to use language. For anyone who thinks it is important to understand what humans are like and why, a scientific comprehension of the capacity for language is essential. Linguistics is the scientific field devoted to achieving that understanding.
What Languages Are
What exactly do I mean by a ‘language’? In a sense the whole discipline of linguistics is devoted to a long-term project of properly answering that question by giving a full theory of the nature of human languages, the things they share, and the ways in which they differ. But as a rough starting point, human languages are structured systems for making articulated thoughts fully explicit both internally (mentally) and externally (in a form perceptible to other humans), and linguistics studies all components of such systems, together with the ways in which they are used.
It is extremely common for people to take ‘language’ and ‘communication’ to be the same thing. In this book, however, they are never equated. They are clearly distinct in that each is found in the absence of the other. Most communication, even between humans, has nothing to do with language (think of frowning, winking, shrugging, grinning, eyebrow-raising, caressing, or glaring). Some of it isn’t even voluntary (blushing, limping, trembling). And conversely, lots of the use we make of language involves no communication in any reasonable sense. Think of someone silently planning a speech that they will never give, or checking a document for wording errors, or silently reflecting on whether likely has exactly the same meaning as probable.
All animals communicate, but only humans have languages in the sense that is relevant for this book. That doesn’t mean I disapprove of talk about the language of music, flowers, art, or architecture. It’s just that when we get down to brass tacks, these metaphorical extensions of the term ‘language’ should be ignored, because they will only encourage confusion. When I talk about language I will never be referring to concertos, carnations, collages, or cupolas.
Let me get just a little more specific about languages. The systems that linguists study connect virtually unbounded numbers of sentence meanings (arbitrarily complex thoughts) to external realizations, in a medium-independent way (a given sentence can be presented in either written or spoken form). Thus the subject matter for linguists extends from the study of the ways in which speech sounds are made (phonetics) to the study of how meaningful sentences are used in context to convey implicit meanings (pragmatics). Sentences can instruct or query or exhort or signal emotion, and crucially they can express claims, either true and false, and can be used not only externally, for communication or easing of social interaction, but also internally, for reasoning.
Consider a specific sentence like Everybody seems to be leaving. You don’t need to utter it aloud; you can just think it. You can also privately and internally figure out its logical consequences; for example, it implies that apparently nobody is planning to stay. It could provide grounds for thinking that pretty soon the place will be empty. You could make it audible by saying it out loud, or make it visible by writing it down (in lower-case letters, or capital letters, or for that matter in Morse code), but you don’t have to. It’s still a sentence. And crucially, you can do any or all of these things without being in a situation where the statement could conceivably be true. The sentence doesn’t just pop up involuntarily in your mouth when everyone does actually seem to be leaving. You can consider the sentence and grasp its meaning whether it’s true right now or not.
Other animals show no signs of being able to do anything of this sort. Various cases have been reported of animals (from monkeys to prairie dogs) that produce warning cries when predators are spotted, and make different sounds for different types of predators – one call for a snake on the ground, another for an eagle in the air, and so on. But they produce these calls involuntarily when a predator is noticed, and they never use the calls for anything else. It’s nothing like what you, as a speaker of a human language, can do. You can wonder aloud about who would win in a fight between an eagle and a snake, without there being any eagles or snakes in the vicinity. No monkey can do that.
That’s not to say animals are unintelligent. Dogs, in particular, have a wonderful social ability: more than any other animal, they use their intelligence to attempt to figure out what we’re paying attention to and what we might be planning. They have admirable memory powers, too. A border collie named Rico (1994–2004) was trained to fetch any of about 200 specific named toys on command. In fact, if given an unfamiliar name (‘Fetch the glimp!’) Rico would run and fetch a previously unnamed toy, if there was one, assuming the new word was its name (an apparent word-learning behaviour known as ‘fast mapping’).
However, this was entirely the result of intensive training and supplying of rewards. Rico only responded to the owner’s fetch commands, and responded solely by running to fetch the named toy. Everything was task-based and in the moment. As the psycholinguist Paul Bloom noted, humans can use a noun like sock in other ways than by running to the bedroom to fetch one in order to get a snack as a reward. Complaining about having lost one, for example, or asking whether it’s time to go out and buy some. That kind of word use is the province of humans alone. And it forms just one small part of the array of human abilities that linguistics seeks to understand.
Languages of the World
About 7,000 distinct languages are in use among human communities today. I say ‘about’, because making the number precise is not really possible. No sharp scientific distinction can be drawn between two slightly different forms of one language and two distinct but very closely related languages. The distinctions are only assumed to be really clear where social and political facts draw suitable lines.
