What is Linguistics?

Linguistics is the scientific study of

language, concerned with questions like:

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• How do languages work? Are there rules?

• What are rules?

• What do we know when we know a language?

• What’s the range of possible human languages?

• How do people use language?

• Are there conventions about that?

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• Linguistics is a scientific discipline with estab-
lished theories, analytic methods, and real-world
applications.

• The primary object of linguistic study is hu-

man language, not language in other extended
senses.

• Linguistics is the study of language, not indi-

vidual languages.

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How to annoy a linguist? ... Just say:

Oh, you’re a linguist

How many languages do you speak?

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Some linguists are polyglots; most aren’t.

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The Linguist’s Motto:

Linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive.

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Prescriptive Grammar:

• Rules against certain usages.

• Few if any rules for what is allowed.

• Condemns forms generally in use.

• Explicitly normative enterprise.

Descriptive Grammar:

• Rules characterizing what people do say.

• Goal to characterize all and only what speakers

actually do.

• Caveat: Competence vs. Performance.

• Tries to do so in a way that reflects internalized

generalizations, i.e. what people know about
their language.

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From Dear Abby, April 9, 2002

It has been nearly 10 years since these rules of basic

grammar appeared in my column – and we can all
use this refresher course. My pet peeve – double
negatives: I don’t know nothing and We don’t go
nowhere are the worst offenders.

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Prescriptivist propaganda: using two negatives
in a sentence to convey a negative is illogical. So
you’re not supposed to say You don’t owe me noth-
ing to mean ‘you are free of debts to me’. But
many languages employ just this syntax, using mul-
tiple negative words to convey negation. These
include even the most literate forms of some lan-
guages:

Personne n’a rien dit (French)

Nobody not-has nothing said
‘Nobody said anything.’

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Anyway, language isn’t logical:

• parkway vs. driveway

• maternity dress vs. paternity suit

• bathing trunks (pl) vs. bikini (sing)

• you are vs. *you is

• Aren’t I clever? vs. *I aren’t clever.

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Pauleen Phillips (the original Abigail Van Buren)
was not a linguist! She didn’t know much about
language.

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Jeanne Phillips (the current Abigail Van Buren)
isn’t a linguist either, but she seems to listen to
people who know something, at least when she
talks about ‘baby talk’. See:

http://www.uexpress.com/dearabby/?uc full date=20060

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Where Did you Learn Grammar? 1

[in a room full of boys]

Would you use he/his, they/their, or some-

thing else?

Everyone insisted that answer was correct.

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Where Did you Learn Grammar? 2

[in a room full of boys]

Everyone drives own car to work.

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Where Did you Learn Grammar? 3

[in a room full of boys]

Everyone was happy because passed the

test.

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Where Did you Learn Grammar? 4

[in a room full of boys]

Everyone left the room, didn’t ?

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Where Did you Learn Grammar? 5

[in a room full of boys]

Everyone left early. seemed happy to go

home.

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Where Did you Learn Grammar? 6

Which example sounds natural?

F*k yourself!

Go f*k yourself!

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Which example sounds natural?

Screw yourself!

Go screw yourself!

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 Which example sounds natural?

Screw you!

*Go screw you!

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Who taught you this? Where did you learn it?

It wasn’t in school. It wasn’t (all) from your

parents.

From exposure, you learned a system. That

system is grammar in the linguist’s sense.

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Descriptive Linguistics

• All of Language is rule-governed.

• Linguists try to describe those rules precisely.

• A set of those rules is what linguists call a

grammar.

• Linguists theorize about the properties of nat-

ural grammars.

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Some Linguistic Methods

• Fieldwork

• Formal analysis of patterns in data sets

• Psycholinguistic experiments

• Computational modelling

• Corpus analysis

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Some Areas of Linguistics

• Phonetics: The study of speech sounds

• Phonology: The study of sound systems
• Morphology: The study of word structure
• Syntax: The study of sentence structure
• Semantics: The study of linguistic meaning
• Pragmatics: The study of language use

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Phonetics: The study of speech sounds

Voicing: [s] versus [z]

sue ([su:w]) versus zoo ([zu:w])

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Phonology: The study of sound systems

• house (sing. noun) ([haws])

• house (verb) ([hawz])

• houses (plur. noun) ([hawz@z])

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Morphology: The study of word structure

• missile: ‘ICBM’

• anti-tank-missile: ‘missile targetting tanks’

• anti-aircraft-missle: ‘missile targetting aircraft’

• anti-missile-missile: ‘missile targetting ICBMs’

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Morphological Rules

• Rule: Anti-X-missile is a missile targetting Xs.

• What kind of missile targets anti-missile-missiles?

• anti-anti-missile-missile-missile

• anti-anti-anti-missile-missile-missile-missile:
‘missile targetting anti-anti-missile-missile-missiles’

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Competence vs. Performance

Some sentences conform to the rules of gram-

mar, but put extreme demands on our process-
ing abilities.

That we lost bothers me.

That that we lost bothers me seems to upset

her.

That that that we lost bothers me seems to

upset her isn’t surprising.

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Chomsky: Distinguish the abstract system of
rules (the competence grammar) from the
reality of language use (performance).

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Syntax: The study of sentence structure

• I saw the woman with the telescope.

• I forgot how good beer tastes.

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Semantics: The study of linguistic meaning

• We screened the candidates.

• I saw her duck.

• [huwz an f@rst]
Who’s on first?/Hu’s on first.

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Pragmatics: The study of language use

Q: Is Roberts a Republican?

A: Is the Pope Catholic?

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• Phonetics: The study of speech sounds

• Phonology: The study of sound systems

• Morphology: The study of word structure

• Syntax: The study of sentence structure

• Semantics: The study of linguistic meaning

• Pragmatics: The study of language use

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• Historical Linguistics:
How languages change over time.

• Sociolinguistics: How languages vary socially.

How language is used as a social resource.

• Psycholinguistics: What goes on in people’s

heads as they use language.

• Language Acquisition: How people learn lan-

guage. (first language acquisition; second lan-
guage acquisition)

• Computational Linguistics: Making comput-

ers process (generate/‘understand’/translate...)
human languages.

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