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The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the non-initiated to some of the basic issues and topics in the field of linguistics and propose curriculum changes that will enlighten the language lover and give credible knowledge and skills to the future language specialist. The field is vast and developing rapidly. Linguistics departments more than ever need the research input and teaching of individuals from particular languages to support the testing of their theoretical models. In an age of interdisciplinary learning and global awareness, language departments, at the crossroads of so many disciplines, can no longer ignore the advances made in the most closely related field, linguistics. The intellectualization of language studies could enhance the prestige of a language concentration in a college or university and, at the very least, inform future commentators in public debate on many important language-related matters.

SOME MISCONCEPTIONS

I wish now to take up comments and questions I have heard over the years from concerned language students and others. I have chosen for discussion those topics that are no longer contested in the field of linguistics and are normally dealt with at an introductory level. I hope to show some of the ideational contributions that even an elementary study of linguistics can bring to language learners and language concentrators.

Difficult vs. Easy Languages

"Is it true that language X is the most difficult language to learn?" or "What is the most difficult (or easiest) language to learn?" The assumption behind these statements is that languages differ considerably in terms of level of complexity, some being inherently difficult while others are inherently easy, and that a linguist would know which belongs to which category. Studies in language universals have shown that all languages display the same intricacy, or the same simplicity, depending on how one looks at it. Children all over the world acquire their first language at the same pace, follow the same developmental stages, and have developed control of the language at about the same age. What children have mastered by the age of five pretty well demonstrates the structural intricacy of particular languages.

The individual who asks the above questions is generally focusing on one aspect of the language, for example whether this language has an elaborate case or tense system. A language encompasses more than word endings. It involves various elements and components: sounds, syllable structure, prosody such as stress and tone, morphemes, syntactic phrases, sentences and rules for their combinations, semantic structure. One language may indeed be more complicated than another in some areas yet simpler in others. English, for instance, has a simple morphological structure but a complex syllable structure. Overall, relative complexity averages out.

Primitive vs. Highly Developed Languages

One still hears people qualify languages as "primitive" or "highly developed." If primitive means a simpler precursor of language, then there is no historical record of such a language. Lyons (1984) states

no correlation has yet been discovered between the different stages of cultural development through which societies have passed and the type of language spoken at these stages of cultural development. For example, there is no such thing as a Stone Age type of language; or, as far as its general grammatical structure is concerned, a type of language that is characteristic of food-gathering or pastoral societies, on the one hand, or modern industrialized societies, on the other. (p. 28)

There is no "native speech” in the process of becoming a language any more than there are apes turning into humans. If by primitive is meant a limited form of expression, the same applies. The language of so-called "primitive" people is like any other, a complex rule-governed system capable of expressing generalities and subtleties.
An ancillary speech called pidgin often develops when speakers of various languages need to communicate. Pidgin is not a full language in that it does not have the power to express the full scale of human wants and interests. It has a marginal grammar and a vocabulary limited to specialized situations such as selling and buying. When after a period of isolation pidgin becomes the only speech available to children, these children, without anyone's help, fill in the missing elements of grammar and vocabulary and turn pidgin speech into a full language called creole. The grammars of creole languages are as complex and complete as that of any other language.

The Number of Languages

"How many languages are spoken in the world today?" The answer people give to that question is revealing. American speakers give a number that falls between 70 and 250. The reasoning is the following the same language is shared by several countries yet several countries have more than one language, so the number must compare to the number of countries in the world, somewhere around 150. The reasoning of a student from the Philippines is similar there are a couple of thousand languages spoken in my country, the same is true in surrounding countries, so there must be hundreds of thousands of languages spoken in the world today. The answer is somewhere in between these two extremes.

People are said to speak two different languages if speakers of one group cannot understand speakers of another group. How many "Chinese" languages are spoken in China? Eight or two hundred? Some varieties within one language are as diverse as the Romance languages. The language continuum is not always easy to segment. Thus the estimation of the number of languages varies between 4000 and 8000, nearly 200 of which are spoken in the Americas.

Language vs. Dialect

When asked about the number of languages spoken in the world today, most ask whether they should include "dialects." For some, dialects mean nonofficial languages; for others, languages with no written tradition; for still others, languages spoken by "primitive" groups, and so on. The linguistic definition of a language ignores political, social, or technological considerations. There is no such thing as a speaker who does not speak a full language, so an account must include them all. Linguistically, a dialect is a systematic variation by a group within a language. We all speak some dialect, in that our speech does not include all the variations of the language. Oftentimes, the speech variety from one region or from one social class acquires a status not given to others and becomes the standard for others to follow. This variety is labeled the prestige dialect, but it has no intrinsic linguistic claim to superiority over other dialects of the same language.

The Development of an International Language

Different parts of the world are coming closer together through modern communication and education. "Isn't it possible that sooner or later the number of languages will significantly diminish, perhaps to the point of there being only one 'universal' language?" Worldwide communication is too recent a phenomenon to comment on its effects. What we know from the past and present is that lingua francas have never contributed by themselves to the disappearance of a language. Brosnahan (1963) examined historical cases of language imposition, in particular, the cases of Latin, Greek, and Arabic. He observed that for each successful imposition, the language "was originally imposed on its area by military authority, and . . . once imposed, it was maintained for at least several centuries by similar authority" (p. 15). The freely chosen learning of a "foreign" international language, like English, is unlikely to have a similar effect. Societies searching for their own identity almost always proclaim their native tongue as the official language, forgoing the choice of adopting a more international one, while sometimes retaining a colonial language for intercommunal use, as in India or Sri Lanka. Motherland and mother tongue are two emotionally charged phenomena inextricably linked in the minds of most.

Writing and Language

Educated people tend to visualize languages. Most equate the number of sounds with the number of letters in their alphabet. Thus speakers (and even teachers) of English, Spanish, and French all claim that there are five vowels in their language. If it is true for Spanish, it is far from being the case for English or French. In the following English examples, the words are all identical except for the vowel sound: beat, bit, bait, bet, bat, bite, bot, bout, boat, bought, but, boot. Writing systems have more to do with civilization than with the language itself. The examples above show the ingenuity of the medieval scribe trying to transcribe a language with an alphabet fit for another. What was an adequate approximation some 700 years ago is hardly the case today. Similarly, it is not uncommon for people to think that Chinese and Japanese are related just because they share some features of their writing system. Japanese is as different from Chinese as it is from English. All three belong to different language families.

Corruption in Language

Individuals, usually speakers of the prestige dialect, lament the "corruption" or the "degradation" of the language. The drifting of forms and meanings is an inevitable manifestation of living languages. Only dead languages do not change. Persistent common "errors" must be looked at as normal developmental changes-the errors of today are the norms of tomorrow. Linguists estimate at 500 to 800 years the period it takes for a language to be transformed to the point where speakers at each end of the spectrum would be unable to communicate. Insistence on standards and norms retards the process but cannot stop it. The question is whether one wants to keep working at this sisyphian task. Energy might be better spent teaching about the nature and behavior of language, so that people will understand change and the reasons for it.

Grammar

"I don't know my grammar." Neither did Homer, if we mean the ability to label words and explain their relationships. Plato was among the first to isolate lexical categories. He identified noun and verb. Aristotle recognized tense. Once the present inventory was complete, intellectual impetus declined and grammar became an idealized repertoire of what should be rather than what was.

All languages are rule-governed. The forms and the rules for their combination is what we call the grammar of that language. Any native speaker knows implicitly, if not explicitly, all the rules of that speaker's language, therefore of that language's grammar. It is this intuitive knowledge that linguistic grammars try to characterize, and the task has proved to be extraordinarily difficult. Knowledge of and knowledge about are two different types of knowledge. We are still seeking complete answers to questions about grammar.

The Critical Age

"I'm too old to learn a second language." It was thought for a long time that only prepubescent children could learn a second language completely. Studies by Snow and Hoefnagel-Höhle (1978) have challenged this belief. In fact, in their study, motivated adults tended to learn more quickly than young children. In no case was there a natural turning point beyond which progress became impossible. Adults are, however, more likely to abandon the activity once a comfortable level of communication has been reached. Psychological factors more than physiological ones seem to play a determining role in second-language learning. First-language acquisition is different in that it is linked with the maturation of the brain in a situation in which there is strong motivation to communicate.

Language and Thinking

One often wonders whether the language a person speaks influences the way that person sees the world. This question was much debated in the nineteenth century but abandoned when linguists became more attentive to the similarities among languages. Bolinger (1986) expresses the prevailing position when he says that the differences among languages are of

no more real importance than that between the use of wood to build shelters by forest-dwellers and the use of adobe by the inhabitants of the desert. It will hardly do to assume that speakers of Chinese are telegraphic in their thinking just because a literal translation from Chinese sounds a bit like a telegram. (viii-ix)

The same can be said about the so-called "logic" of word order. Is the subject -verb -object order of English and Chinese more or less logical than the subject-object-verb of Japanese and the verb-subject-object of Arabic?

Linguists

"I'm a linguist." "Oh, then how many languages do you speak?" Most people have never heard the term linguist as an occupational category; to them it can mean only someone who is interested in languages and therefore speaks many of them. This elementary view of linguistics has led to various forms of criticism particularly among learned colleagues: "linguists try to describe languages they do not speak." How many poems has the critic written? How many planets has the astronomer visited? This is not to say that scholars would not like to see or practice what they write about. The difference between theory and practice is too well known to elaborate. A linguist is concerned with the structure of languages and can sort, analyze, describe, extract rules, and predict certain behavior from the data produced by native speakers. The linguist's hypotheses are then tested by fellow linguists who either accept, reject, or incorporate these findings after consultation with native informants, who may or may not themselves be trained linguists.

ELEMENTS OF LINGUISTICS

The past thirty years have seen an explosion in linguistics research. This section is a brief nontechnical account of the various components of language and the specialized branches of linguistics that language and literature specialists should become familiar with. The sequence of topics follows the conventional order found in "Introduction to linguistics" textbooks. Unfortunately, many native speakers of English think that all languages closely conform to the English model, in that most languages follow a similar word order, form their words in similar fashion, and use the same devices to express grammatical categories and relations. Though the current research in linguistics focuses on the similarities among languages, the purposes of this exposition are better served by concentrating on the diversity across languages.

Phonetics and Phonology

Phonetics is the study of the distinctive sounds used to differentiate words. Excluded from this definition are screams, cries, grunts, and whistles, though these may have important communicative significance. The number of distinguishable sounds human speech organs are capable of producing seems to be physiologically unlimited. The number of contrasting sounds found in the many languages of the world, however, is rather small, about one hundred, and their organization is fairly constrained. The average sound inventory of a typical language is about thirty-five.

Phonology is concerned with sound patterns. In sound production there is a convergence of two simultaneous competitive forces; one that seeks to maintain the highest contrast possible between sounds, and a second that seeks to minimize the physical effort by keeping the number of vocal maneuvers to a minimum. The need for clarity is fundamental, as seen in languages with a small sound inventory All three-vowel systems are composed of the same three vowels-those sounds located at the vertices of what is called the oral triangle: high front /i/, low central /a/, and high back /u/. A five-vowel system, which is the norm, is made up of the basic three vowels, /i/, /a/, /u/, plus two others located halfway between /i/ and /a/ and /u/ and /a/, that is /e/ and /o/. All languages with five or more vowels share the basic five. Languages then begin to diversify by filling in the spaces between these sounds: series are extended or doubled by changing the position of the tongue or the velum or the shape of the lips. The larger the number of sounds, the greater the sounds' similarity, which reduces proportionally the effort needed to produce these sounds.

Japanese is said to have a smaller-than-average sound inventory. The language makes use of other means to distinguish meaning: vowel length and consonant length. Thus biru 'building' and bi:ru 'beer'; tsuji 'a proper name' and tsu:ji 'moving the bowels'; saki 'ahead' and sakki 'before.' Most languages of the world are tone languages--for example, Chinese, Thai, a great number of languages in Africa, and some native American languages--which contrast meaning by changing the pitch of individual syllables. The Thai sound string naa takes on five different meanings depending on the vowel pitch. It can mean 'a nickname,' 'rice paddy,' 'young maternal uncle or aunt,' 'face,' or 'thick' (examples from Fromkin and Rodman 1988). The average tone distinction is four, while some languages have as many as nine.

In every language, rules operate to block certain sequences while favoring others. Well-formed English strings, for instance, exclude initial sequences like ps, pn, lb and sgl, which are natural in a variety of other languages. Some languages allow only the basic CV syllable type-that is, a vowel (V) preceded by a single consonant (C), while others admit only certain sounds in word-final position. Speakers restructure syllables in loan words to conform to their native rules. Speakers of Spanish tend to add an e before an initial consonant cluster beginning with s, while Japanese speakers simplify complex clusters by inserting a vowel between contiguous consonants, as in sotoresu for English stress, thus making a series of CV syllables.

Traditionally, phonology has focused on the way sounds interact. Sounds can be inserted, deleted, changed, or reordered depending on the phonological environment. Consider the French example film russe 'Russian film.' The undesirable sequence lmr is resolved either by dropping one consonant, the 1, or adding the vowel e resulting either in fi_m russe or filme russe. More frequently, sounds copy a feature from a contiguous sound. In the word observe, English assimilates the voiceless s to the voiced b, changing s into z, obzerv, while French assimilates b into s to produce a voiceless p, opserv. The number of phonological rules is limited, but the selection and the manner of application accounts for variety in languages.

Morphology

A morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit with meaning. Languages can be classified according to the way they form their words from morphemes. At one extreme of the continuum, we find languages that are said to have little morphology. These languages do not mark number, gender, case, tense, or mood with special morphemes (as in English walks, walked). Words consist mainly of single morphemes and characteristically are monosyllabic. Vietnamese and Chinese are examples. The sentence 'I asked her to buy me books to read is rendered in Chinese in contrast to English in this fashion: I (no case) ask (no person, no tense, no mood) he (no gender, no case) buy (no mood) I (no case) book (no number, no case) read (no mood).

Languages that make use of inflectional morphemes vary in the manner in which the process is achieved. In Latin, a single form stands for several meanings. The final vowel in the verb amo 'I love' represents simultaneously person, number, tense, and mood. The boundaries in other types of languages are more clearly delineated. Turkish is one such language. The rendition of the seven-word expression 'to be made to love each other' is a single five morpheme word sev-is-dir-il-meh which corresponds to 'love-reciprocal-causative-passive-infinitive. 'Japanese shows a similar organization: kakaseraretai 'wants to be forced to write' or 'write-causative-passive-volitive.' The number of morphemes per word is at its highest in the so-called polysynthetic languages, in which a whole sentence is rendered by one word. Typical of this category are the native American languages. The Greenlandic equivalent of 'I bought myself a fishing pole' is Aulisa-ut-isaR-siwu-nga or 'fishing-instrument-suitable-obtaining-my' (example from Sapir 1949).

Fusion is characteristic of the Semitic languages, where words are commonly constructed from consonantal roots and grammatical meaning conveyed through the syllable structure and the vowel quality. In Classical Arabic the verb 'to write' corresponds to the three consonants ktb, unpronounceable as such. The syllable structure CV VC VC indicates 'reciprocal.' A vowel a in the syllable skeleton indicates 'perfective active,' thus 'we wrote to each other' is kaatab.

English is said to be inflectionally poor, and this makes certain other inflectionally rich languages seem "difficult" to anglophone learners. Below is a partial list of the inflectional categories across languages:
Number marking: singular, dual, triple, pluralGender marking: masculine, feminine, neuter
Noun marking: common, proper, animate, inanimate, single, distributive, collective
Case marking: (up to fourteen, as in Finnish) nominative, genitive, accusative, dative, instrumental, locative, ablative, vocative
Tense marking: present, preterite, aorist, experiential perfect, gerundive
Aspect marking: perfective, imperfective, progressive, momentaneous, durative, continuous, inceptive, terminative, iterative
Mood marking: indicative, imperative, jussive, subjunctive, potential, dubitative, optative
Voice marking: active, passive, causative, reflexive
Style marking: formal, informal
Sex marking: male, female
Distance marking: near, median, far
Subjective marking: hearsay, inferred, witnessed
No language has all of the above, fortunately.

Syntax

Words come together to form sentences. Syntax is the study of sentence structures and the rules that govern their organization. A native speaker's knowledge of structures is illustrated in the classical Chomskyan examples (1a) John is easy to please and (2a) John is eager to please, where the distinction in meaning goes beyond the lexical differences of eager and easy. A simple transformation reveals the structural dissimilarity of the two sentences: (1b) It is easy to please John is an acceptable paraphrase of (1a), while (2b) *It is eager to please John is not for (2a). Sentence (2a) can be rephrased as (2c) John is eager to please anyone. How in (la) John is both the subject of is easy and the direct object of please is what syntax has to explain.

Languages vary in the manner in which they order their constituents in sentences. English is basically a subject-verb-object language in which John sees Mary is different in meaning from Mary sees John. This SVO order is far from canonic. There are as many languages with an SOV order as an SVO order and a significant number with a VSO order. The position of the object (0) (the complement) with respect to the verb (V) (the head of the complement construction) yields interesting generalizations. In SOV languages not only does the object precede the verb but all other complements precede their head: the relative clause precedes the noun, the noun precedes the preposition, and so on. We illustrate with Japanese sentences featuring a possessive construction, a relative clause, a prepositional phrase, and a comparative construction: (1) 'Taro saw his neighbor's dog' is rendered as Taro [[neighborhood man]dog] saw. (2) 'Taro saw the dog that ate the meat' gives Taro [[meat ate] dog] saw. (3) 'Taro saw a dog from the window' becomes Taro [[window from]dog]saw And (4) 'The dog is bigger than the cat' as Dog [[cat] than] big. As they learn another language, students have to adapt to and assimilate different ways of assembling their sentences.

Semantics

Meaning can be analyzed from various perspectives: grammatical, referential, and cultural. Grammatical meaning originates in the acceptable ways in which words can be combined in a particular language. A sentence such as Punctuality ate an intelligent tree is nonsensical. Part of knowing the meaning of the verb to eat is to know that its subject must be animate and its object concrete. Similarly, a knowledge of the words intelligent and tree also will prevent their association. The unacceptable sentence *John seems Peter to talk presents a different problem. There, structural rules have been broken, thus rendering the interpretation of the sentence impossible. Other sentences are structurally ambiguous; the reader is invited to consider the two interpretations of one of the classic examples of ambiguity: Flying planes can be dangerous.

“I understand what you are saying but I don't know what you mean" illustrates another way in which meaning is derived, namely, from context. Did you see them there on that day? requires some previous information regarding them, there, and that day. Someone with a watch who is asked Do you have the time? is expected to answer something other than yes or no. Discourse analysis examines the flow of given and new information, illocutionary force, relevance, and so on. Social roles and social kinships are systematically reaffirmed through greetings, apologies, and formal and informal styles. The functional use of language is complex. "Even coldly dispassionate scientific statements, whose associated expressive meaning is minimal, usually have as one of their aims that of winning friends and influencing people" (Lyons 1984: 143).

Historical Linguistics

Historical linguistics analyzes the ways in which languages change over time. Findings in this domain have contributed much to our understanding of how languages change, the rate at which they change, and the factors involved in language change. One of the main activities of historical linguistics has been to classify languages into genetic families. An outstanding accomplishment in
this domain has been to relate Japanese to Turkish and possibly to Hungarian and Finnish (Miller 1971). Comrie (1981: 194) warns about some of the problems in attempting to relate languages. Similarities may be due to chance, to borrowing, to a universal tendency, or to a true genetic affiliation. He points out that languages with no written tradition are difficult to categorize and that, for these languages, which account for more than half of the existing languages, a typology based on morphology or word order might be more appropriate.

Sociolinguistics

Interest in language has given rise to several subfields, among which we find sociolinguistics. Sociolinguistics examines those aspects of language that have social significance, for instance, the stigmatization of some speech varieties; styles of speech such as formal and informal, male and female; the use of slang; sexism; racial epithets; taboo subjects and euphemisms; the question of bilingualism; manipulative propaganda; and so on. An often heated social issue in America is the recognition of English as the official language. In previous debates, the kind of English that was taught or should be taught in school was the issue. Changes in attitude are reflected in the language: new words have been coined to avoid favoring one sex over the other, and gratuitous racial and ethnic references have disappeared from public broadcasting in the United States. These are all interesting sociolinguistic questions.

Psycholinguistics

Language is involved in the development of the human brain itself. Any physical disruption in brain mechanisms can impair the ability to acquire or use language. Psycholinguistics deals with language acquisition and cognition. The process of acquiring a first language is well documented, but the theories explaining the process are far from satisfactory. The idea that a child learns by imitation and correction is disputed on the grounds that children make creative mistakes and that the quality and quantity of correction and coaching have little effect on the acquisition process. Chomsky presupposes specialized biological structures for language. The fact that deaf children learning from signing parents go through the same stages of development as their talking counterparts supports his "innateness hypothesis." Second-language learning is even more poorly understood. Is learning a second language fundamentally the same as acquiring the first? If so, why does it appear to be different? If not, what is it? Studies in second-language learning are linked to other topics, such as memory and forgetting, attention, motivation, and perceptual strategies. There is much to be learned from current research in these areas.

To the above subfield, we can add a new and expanding discipline, computational linguistics, in which computers are programmed to simulate the comprehension and production of human language. This extraordinary enterprise requires both a clear understanding of the way the human mind learns and thinks and a precise description of the way human language is produced and used. Psychologists, linguists, and computer scientists all work together to unravel the great mystery of language and intelligence.

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