How to Study Linguistics

A Guide to Understanding Language

Geoffrey Finch, Martin Coyle, John Peck

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781350317963
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

If you are new to linguistics as a subject and beginning a course at undergraduate or sixth-form level, How to Study Linguistics is the ideal introduction and companion to your studies. - Covers all the core areas of linguistic study, with chapters discussing strategies for studying phonology, syntax and semantics.
- Explores other branches of linguistics such as sociolinguistics, stylistics, and psycholinguistics.
- Includes a chapter on writing linguistics essays and a detailed glossary to aid learning and revision.
- Second edition includes new material designed to help the more advanced reader. How to Study Linguistics is both a guide to current ideas about linguistics and a refreshingly practical text book. It will not only develop your skills as a language student, but will also make an often complex and daunting subject easy to understand, and a pleasure to study.

1 Beginning Linguistics

If you are just starting your studies in linguistics the first piece of advice I have may seem rather odd. It is this: beware of all books on linguistics. And that includes the one you are now reading. A healthy scepticism is not a bad thing. Most books on linguistics raise expectations of understanding which they cannot fulfil. This is not entirely their fault, of course. There is an undeniable technical and theoretical base to the subject, and negotiating through this whilst still remaining reasonably coherent is not easy. But in spite of all the technical terminology, linguistics is not a science. It’s a pity that the subject doesn’t have a different name. We tend to think of disciplines ending in ‘ics’ – e.g. statistics, mathematics, physics – as having a precise scientific core consisting of unchallengeable facts. Linguistics is not like that. Neither, of course, strictly speaking, are mathematics, statistics, or physics. Indeed, many scientists, nowadays, would question this view of science. Nevertheless, it’s important to bear in mind that the subject matter of linguistics, language, is made up. Words do not grow out of the ground, they haven’t evolved like matter from the interaction of natural elements. And whilst there is much to suggest that the structures and processes which enable language to develop are inborn, there is still a very important sense in which language is human-made. It is our possession in a way that nothing else is. And the process of making up, or inventing, never stops.

It’s as well to remember this when government bodies go on, as they periodically do, about ‘bad’ English and the importance of maintaining standards. The question we should be asking is ‘whose language is it anyway?’ Language is one of the few truly democratic forces left to us. It may be used as an instrument of oppression, when one nation colonises or annexes another, but it has an unerring ability to turn on its handler. We have only to look at how international varieties of English are flourishing around the world in former colonies, from the Indian subcontinent to the Caribbean, to see the democratising influences of the language. And even in England, although it is sometimes argued that the combined forces of the media and public schools are producing a uniform pronunciation, the truth is that conservative speech patterns are themselves subtly changing under the influence of newly emergent accents. Despite institutional pressure and manipulation, language is ultimately a law unto itself. Samuel Johnson, the eighteenth-century writer, and one of the first people to attempt to control linguistic behaviour, reflects soberly in the preface to his Dictionary of the English Language on the failure of nations to ‘fix’ their languages:

With this hope, however, academies have been instituted, to guard the avenues of their languages, to retain fugitives, and repulse intruders; but their vigilance and activity have hitherto been vain; sounds are too volatile and subtile for legal restraints; to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind are equally the undertakings of pride unwilling to measure its desires by its strength. (Johnson, 1958, pp. 233–4)

Despite Johnson’s lament about ‘the boundless chaos of a living speech’ (p. 219), however, language is not chaotic. There are rules governing linguistic behaviour just as there are everything else in life. They may not be the rules which people might wish to impose on us, but they are rules none the less. It is these rules which linguists are concerned with studying. Perhaps an analogy might help here. Imagine that I am attending an important function at my place of work. One of the things I have to do is decide what to wear. If there is a dress code I have to find out what it is in order to avoid embarrassing myself along with everybody else. Let’s say it’s a suit and tie affair. Now I may of course decide that wearing a suit and tie is rather stuffy and turn up instead in jeans and a tee-shirt. The reaction of people to this will inevitably vary. Some will think it refreshingly informal, whilst others will consider it ‘bad form’. But no one will think me undressed. I have clothes on in all the right places even if some people don’t like what I am wearing. If, however, I were to arrive with my underpants around my head, my trousers round my neck and my shirt tied round my waist I could be accused of being undressed, as well as running a serious risk of being locked up. There are two sorts of rules here. One is a rule about which part of the body, trousers, for example, are worn on, and the other is about what kind of trousers are worn. The first we could consider a clothing rule, and the second a social rule. The first one is not likely to change; it is doubtful that we will ever get a situation where it is considered normal to wear trousers around one’s neck. The second, however, is changing all the time. There are many more occasions now when people dress casually where previously they would have dressed formally.

And it is similarly the case with language. Sometimes you will hear people object that certain expressions or constructions are ‘not English’ or ‘ungrammatical’. Some teachers still like to say this about ain’t or the use of the double negative, as in I ain’t got no money. But this is not so. Something is only ungrammatical if it fails to follow a rule in the way it is formed. I ain’t got no money doesn’t follow the same rule in its construction as I haven’t any money but it’s not without one. People who use this construction wouldn’t dream of saying got I have money n’t no, which would be uninterpretable. Someone who produced that would be like the hypothetical person mentioned above, wearing his clothes in all the wrong places. And, as in the clothing example, there are two sorts of rules here: a linguistic sort and a social sort. This is an important distinction to make because it’s easy to mix them up. We mustn’t confuse linguistic judgements with social ones. Of course, some people will attempt to prove that the double negative is ungrammatical by saying it’s illogical, ‘two negatives make a positive’. But no one in the entire history of its use has ever understood it in that way. Up until the end of the Middle Ages it was a regular feature of English, as anyone who has studied Chaucer knows. Here is Chaucer, for example, in The Wife of Bath’s Tale, bemoaning the fact that people can no longer see fairies: ‘But now kan no man se none elves mo’ (‘but now no one can see no more elves’). The double negative was simply an emphatic way of negating something. What we have done in standard speech over the centuries is to weaken it. Other languages, like French, have resisted this, except in colloquial speech, where, ironically, it is the single negative which is non-standard.

The second piece of advice I wish to give therefore is this: learn to think linguistically. This doesn’t mean ignoring social rules. They obviously have their place. We might want to argue about what that place is but they are an undeniable fact of life. There are some occupations where using forms like ain’t, or double negatives, or saying I done that instead of I did that, could cost you your job. Oddly enough we have become a little more tolerant of certain accents than we have of non-standard grammar. It is quite common nowadays to hear the weather forecast in a regional accent on television, although more prestigious accents are still reserved for the main news. We need to know about social rules, therefore, but it is important to recognise that they are simply conventions. What weight we give to them is entirely relative. In ten or twenty years time, they could be less or more important. There is nothing to stop the Queen giving her Christmas broadcast in jeans, just as there is nothing to stop her saying me and my husband. No clothing, or linguistic rule, would be broken. The publishing world, except in the case of creative writing, sticks rigorously to standard grammar, and one can see why. Using a uniformly accepted style is clearly convenient and runs less risk of offending anyone. In writing this book I have used standard forms although you will find many more contractions, haven’t, mustn’t, isn’t, it’s, than were acceptable some years ago. And I have several sentences which begin with and – like this one. The nature of social rules, and the way in which they operate, is itself a fascinating study and some areas of linguistics, notably sociolinguistics, are more concerned with them than others. But compared with linguistic rules they are only of fractional significance. The rules which enable us to produce either I haven’t any money, or I ain’t got no money are far more complex and profound than those which would discriminate against one in favour of the other.

The best place to start an investigation of the differences between social and linguistic judgements about language use is with your own speech habits. Try making a list of things you say which people object to and see if you can categorise them in terms of the nature of the objections and the contexts in which they are made. Some objections might be purely on grounds of politeness, like saying what? instead of pardon? when something is misheard. Others might concern the use of non-standard forms, as for example, mine’s better than what yours is or he done it very nice. And some might entail a fine point of grammar quite impenetrable to all except those making the objection. Like most people, I can remember as a child being told to say may I leave the table? not can I leave the table? and failing to see the difference, let alone its importance. Picking others up on minor points of language use is very much a national pastime. People seize with glee on any deviation in spelling, pronunciation, or expression as if it were some failure of character or intelligence. This is partly because in England, at any rate, language use is unfortunately bound up with issues of class. Using ‘incorrect’ forms is frequently considered an indication of being lower class, and no one wants to be thought that.

If you do this exercise you will find that part of the problem of categorising your ‘deviant’ speech habits lies in the terms ‘correct/incorrect’ themselves. Apart from being very vague, they inevitably suggest social approval or disapproval and as such blur any distinction we might want to make between social and linguistic judgements. The whole notion of correctness is too prescriptive to be of any use linguistically. Not surprisingly, therefore, you will rarely find linguists referring to it, except in a social sense. They prefer to talk instead of usages being well-formed or ill-formed. A particular usage is only ill-formed if it is not generated by a grammatical rule. Using this criterion, all the examples above are perfectly well-formed even though at first glance they might not appear to be so. Those who regularly produce forms such as he done it very nice, for example, are not ignorant of the existence of did. They will continue to say he did do it not he done do it (unless they are speaking Caribbean English). It is simply that a different rule is operating about when to use the past participle (done), as opposed to the past tense form (did). And as for the use of an adjective instead of an adverb, nice rather than nicely, this also occurs sometimes in Standard English – come quick, not quickly, and open the window wide, not widely. We can find frequent similar uses in Shakespeare: ‘How sweet [not “sweetly”] the moonlight sleeps upon this bank’ (The Merchant of Venice, V.i.54).

’Well-formed’ and ‘ill-formed’ are terms which encapsulate linguistic judgements. We need another set of terms, however, to encapsulate social ones. In 1965 the linguist Noam Chomsky introduced the terms acceptable/unacceptable. The notion of ‘acceptability’ offers a much better way of coping with variant forms than that of ‘correctness’. Using it as a criterion we could say that all of the expressions in the last but one paragraph,

what?

mine’s better than what yours is.

he done it very nice.

can I leave the table?

are of varying acceptability depending on individual taste and conventions of politeness and context. Any usage which is ill-formed must of necessity be unacceptable whereas the reverse is not the case. The consequence of this is that we can categorise he done it very nice, for example, as well-formed, but unacceptable, if used in a BBC news broadcast. Between friends, however, it is both well-formed and acceptable.

The difference between concepts of well-formedness and acceptability on the one hand, and correctness on the other, is that the former are descriptive, rather than prescriptive, in character. That is, they seek to establish rules, whether of the social or linguistic kind, from actual use rather than from the pronouncements of some external authority. But, if that is the case, the question arises ‘in what sense are they rules?’ If they are merely describing what exists, how can that constitute a set of rules? In the case of social rules a better term, as suggested earlier, would probably be ‘conventions’. We could argue that it is a matter of social convention that newscasters avoid non-standard grammar. Conventions operate by a kind of unconscious agreement between the parties involved. The matter is more complicated, however, with linguistic rules, to which we have said that the terms well/ill-formed apply. What gives a linguistic rule its authority? A linguist might well reply, ‘the language’, in that a sentence like got I have money n’t no is linguistically impossible, but we are entitled to probe a little further I think.

To begin with, linguistic rules are not immutable; they do change over time and across dialects. Consider, for example, the sentence they disappeared him, and ask yourselves whether it is well- or ill-formed. I am guessing that you would judge it to be ill-formed, that is, not linguistically possible, and many conservative grammars would agree with you. They would do so on the grounds that disappear is an intransitive verb, in other words, it can’t take an object – you don’t disappear something. Verbs are quite frequently classified into transitive and intransitive according to whether they have objects; so the verb hit is transitive – something has to be hit. Verbs such as fall and die, on the other hand, are intransitive, in that they cannot take an object – you don’t fall or die something. According to this grammatical account, disappear is a similar kind of verb: he disappeared is complete, whereas he disappeared him is nonsense. However, it isn’t nonsense to an increasingly large number of people. In some parts of the world to disappear someone means to make them vanish, usually in highly mysterious circumstances. It’s a usage which has been popularised by the media, in particular the American film industry. So, we are faced with a dilemma here. We either pronounce the American usage incorrect and seek to outlaw it, which is the approach a prescriptive grammar might take, or, because we are taking a descriptive approach, we decide it is well-formed but then are faced with having to alter the rules and declare it transitive. And the problem doesn’t end there, because there are other verbs which have this slippery habit of crossing over. If we look again at fall, for example, it’s possible for that to be used transitively in Nigerian English. A Nigerian can say don’t fall me down, meaning don’t cause me to fall over. We should have to say don’t push/knock me over, but the meaning there is subtly different.

If it is the case that particular communities can change the way in which words behave, is there any real point in talking about linguistic rules? Isn’t it just a free for all? The answer to this is ‘no’, and we must realise why this is so. What we are witnessing in these innovations is the grammar of English growing with use. There’s an important point here and one which, as students of linguistics, we have to keep hold of. The popular view of grammar sees it as something mechanical, the learning of which is akin to learning the laws of thermodynamics. But in reality grammar is organic, it resembles a living thing in its ability to produce fresh matter apparently without end. What we term ‘rules’ are not so much laws, as linguistic patterns of behaviour governing the operation of English. Every speaker of English contributes to these, for not only do we speak the language, but in a more subtle sense, the language speaks through us. Rules are open to interpretation and negotiation, whereas laws, being immutable, are not.

But you’re probably wondering where this leaves the issue of transitive and intransitive verbs. Well, the important thing about innovations is that they make us look more closely at the rules to see how they can be modified in order to take account of the new evidence. And what we begin to discover when we look more closely at verbs is that being transitive or intransitive is an operation potentially open to the great majority, and possibly all, of them. In other words, rather than classify them into transitive and intransitive, it’s better to talk of transitive and intransitive uses. Those which we class as intransitive are simply the ones for which we have not yet discovered a transitive use. In the case of disappear we now have done this. The sinister process by which some governments cause people to disappear without trace has led to the verb developing a transitive sense. And just as some verbs can extend their grammatical range, others may contract theirs. Today, the verb like is only used transitively, the sentence I like is incomplete – we must like something or someone. In Shakespeare’s time, however, it was quite normal for the verb like to be used without an object. In his preface to The Devil is an Ass, the seventeenth-century playwright Ben Jonson writes ‘if this play do not like, the Devil is in it’. The verb like is being used here with our modern sense of ‘please’, a sense it has since lost. Because of this, the intransitive construction is no longer usable.

What I am suggesting, then, is that the linguistic rules which we extrapolate from actual use are inevitably provisional. Every time the language changes it offers us the chance to interpret them more accurately so that we have a more precise understanding of the way in which language works. Let me try another analogy here. Linguists like to compare language to a game, usually a board game because there are pieces which can be moved around, and usually chess, because it’s arguably the most complex of the board games. It’s quite a good analogy because in chess each piece moves in a specified way, but its power to do so at any particular moment in the game depends on the place it occupies on the board and its relationship to the other pieces. Similarly with words, their value is constantly changing depending on their freedom to manœuvre. In the case of disappear an obstruction has been removed and its range increased because the state of play has changed; whereas with like, however, an obstruction has been imposed and therefore its range has been limited.

But there is one important dif...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• General Editors’ Preface
• 1. Beginning Linguistics
• 2. The Linguistic Context
• 3. Studying Sound
• 4. Studying Syntax
• 5. Studying Meaning
• 6. Studying Linguistics Further
• 7. How to Write a Linguistics Essay
• Appendix: The International Phonetic Alphabet
• Glossary
• References
• Index