An Introduction to Language

Kirk Hazen

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118559956
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

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

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

1
Introduction

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Chapter outline

1. Chapter overview
2. Language, languages, and the people who speak them
3. What is language?
   1. What are language sounds?
   2. What are words?
   3. What are phrases?
   4. What is discourse?
4. Language differences
5. Language similarities
6. Variation through time
7. Variation today
8. Understanding the world of language
9. The complex nature of language
10. Judging language
11. Standard Englishes and vernacular Englishes
12. Grammars
    1. Teaching grammars
    2. Prescriptive grammars
    3. Descriptive grammars
    4. Mental grammars
    5. Universal Grammar
13. Meaning
14. Standard Englishes and different world views
15. Structure
16. A tour of language
17. Chapter summary
18. Key concepts
19. Notes
20. References
21. Further reading
22. Exercises
    1. Individual work
    2. Group work
23. Study questions

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Chapter Overview

This chapter introduces you to human language, but that is a huge thing to study. Some brave linguists catch words from the last speaker of a dying language while others study subtle changes in a language spoken by millions. Although we use knowledge gathered from such studies, we take a broader look at how language works. To do this, we narrow our focus to specific topics about language, including the many different parts that make up language. We tour the small, medium, and large parts of language to explain their qualities and how the language factory in your mind fits them together, like so many nuts, bolts, metal forms, and plastic widgets assembled together to make a car. To prepare for this tour, we must first understand what language and grammar mean, how a language can be living or dead, and the differences between languages and writing. Importantly, you must also face the language judgments you make on a daily basis: If you consider yourself part of the Grammar Police, be forewarned, many of your assumptions are overturned in this book.

Language, Languages, and the People Who Speak Them

There are more people on earth than ever before, and every place we find humans, we find language. In large cities like Singapore, many languages are spoken, and most people speak more than one. As with most humans, Singaporeans are multilingual. In rural areas of some countries, like the state of West Virginia, almost everyone speaks only one language and is monolingual. Regardless of the number, we naturally develop language, and even in those communities where people only speak one language, there will be different pronunciations, different words, and different styles of language.

One of the difficult parts of learning about language is that language is so normal and natural for us: We take it for granted. Like eating or breathing, we language every day.¹ Most of us focus our attention on talking or listening, not on dissecting how we speak. But like the biology of eating and breathing, the machinery behind language is complex. For language, what we produce and consume is beautifully complex.

There are about 6,900 languages currently spoken on Earth. Those languages can be grouped by similarities into around 128 different families.² A wide range of language topics will be considered in this book, primarily with English as the example language. For good or for bad, and most likely for both, English has become a dominant world language. There are at least 350,000,000 speakers of English who learned it as babies. Depending on how you restrict the label English, there are probably 1,000,000,000 speakers of some kind of English. With that many speakers, a lot of variation is introduced into English every day, and that diversity provides us with opportunities to examine how language works.

The idea of language variation will come up a lot in this book. For example, people in the United States usually call a small, movable room that rises and falls between floors in a building an elevator. In England, the same object would be called a lift. We say that there is variation in the words because we note the differences in form. Having different sounds for the same object may not happen in any other species, but it is a basic feature of human language. Language variation tells us important information about human language. The chapters in this book often use variation in language to teach about its qualities.

In order to illustrate what is fully possible in language, this book would need to use examples from several hundred languages. Such a book would be a daunting task for any reader. With at least a billion speakers, English has a lot of variation. The goal in this book is to understand how language works through illustrations of what humans do with language, and there is enough variation in the Englishes around the world to provide many examples.

What Is Language?

Language is the discrete combinatorial system humans use most for communication. Discrete means ‘separate’ here, and combinatorial means ‘ability to add together.’ We take small separate parts, push them together in specific combinations, and create larger parts of language. For spoken languages, we store collections of sounds together with their associated ideas. We call them words, and they can be short (e.g. I) or long (e.g. Mississippi), but they are all sets of sounds connected to a meaning. With those words, we build larger phrases such as noun phrases (e.g. most squids), verb phrases (e.g. crushed the daisies), and prepositional phrases (e.g. on the kangaroo). The phrases themselves are discrete parts in larger constructions such as sentences (a larger kind of phrase) and conversations. Phrases and sentences are discussed in Chapters 7 and 8.

It is important to understand that language is not a thing. It is important, but a difficult task for all of us. Despite the word language being a noun, it is not an object: Instead, it is a set of relationships. We produce and consume language naturally, and we do it quite well. Yet, language is a complex activity, and in that complexity is beauty.

Since language itself is not an object but is instead a natural human ability to communicate, it may seem odd to hear about living languages and dead languages. The label living language refers to any language which is used by a community of native speakers; the label dead language refers to any language which is not used by a community of native speakers. Living languages like English, Arabic, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese have many native speakers. Dead languages like Natchez, Kitanemuk, and Wappo were all North American languages, but they no longer have native speakers. Ancient Latin has no native speakers and is also considered a dead language, even though its modern descendants now thrive as Spanish, Italian, French, and Portuguese. You can even get modern texts translated into Latin, such as Dr. Seuss's Cat in the Hat (Cattus Petasatus), but Latin is still a dead language. A small number of languages have actually been revived. Modern Hebrew is a revived language, brought back starting at the end of the nineteenth century from the dead language of Classical Hebrew (which was still used for religious ceremonies). The Celtic language Manx last had a native speaker in 1974, but revival efforts by local enthusiasts are underway to bring it back to living status.

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Word Play: Sounds and Meaning

In languages like English, there are some sets of sounds that do come up in words with similar meanings. Consider th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Linguistics in the World
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Companion Website
• Acknowledgments
• Note to Instructors
• Preface: About the Book
• 1: Introduction
• 2: Sounds
• 3: Patterns of Sounds
• 4: Simple Words in the Lexicon
• 5: Idioms, Slang, and the English Lexicon
• 6: Words Made of Many Parts
• 7: Putting Pieces Together
• 8: Building Bigger Phrases
• 9: From Phrases to Meaning
• 10: The Winding Paths of Language in Education
• 11: The Life Cycles of Language
• Glossary
• Index
• End User License Agreement