KIRINYAGA UNIVERSITY

AEN 2110: INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF

LANGUAGE

GERALD NJUKI

SCHOOL OF BUSINESS AND EDUCATION

SEPTEMBER, 2020
CONTENT

Page
Introduction 4
General objective and specific objectives 5

SECTION ONE

1. LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS

Lesson1: What is language? 6

Lesson 2: The Origin of Human language. 9
Lesson 3: Language and the brain. 14
Lesson 4: Language vis-à-vis other forms of communication. 18
Lesson 5: Linguistics 22
Lesson 6: The scientificness of linguistics. 24
Lesson 7: Descriptive versus Prescriptive Linguistics. 28

SECTION TWO
AIMS AND SCOPE OF LINGUISTICS – LINGUISTICS IN RELATION TO OTHER
DISCIPLINES
Lesson 8: Why study language? 31
Lesson 9: Language and Psychology 33
Lesson 10: Language and History 35
Lesson 11: Language and Sociology 37

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 SECTION THREE

THE DIFFERENT LEVELS OF LANGUAGE STUDY.

Lesson 12: Phonetics. 39

Lesson 13: Place and manner of articulation. 43
Lesson 14: Phonology 47
Lesson 15: Morphology. 49
Lesson 16: Syntax. 51
Lesson 17: The clause 53
Lesson 18: The sentence 55
Lesson 19: Semantics and Pragmatics. 57
Lesson 20: Discourse Analysis. 62

REFERENCES FOR FURTHER READING 64

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INTRODUCTION

This unit constitutes one of the English units that you will be exposed to during your first year of
study.

Strictly speaking, this is not a unit that introduces the English language – it introduces Linguistics as
a discipline and various areas of language study.

The lessons are subdivided according to the content. They will take you between 2 - 2 1/2 hours to study
each one of them. Some of the lessons have questions and or activities for you. Make sure you try to
answer the questions and perform the activities before you move on to the next lesson. The questions
and activities are meant to help you understand and further clarify what you have just read.

There are 20 lessons in this unit including the activities and questions. The first four lessons are on
human language in general, language vis-à-vis other forms of communication e.g. animal language,
artificial language, the relationship between language and the brain. The next seven lessons include a
discussion of the difference between descriptive and prescriptive linguistics, the scientificness of
Linguistics and the relationship between linguistics and other disciplines. The last nine lessons cover the
different levels of language study – Phonetics, Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Semantics, Pragmatics
and Discourse analysis.

The lessons covered in sections two and three are meant to provide a base on which the units in later
levels of study will be based. For further study, a list of references is given at the end. However, this list
is not exhaustive. It covers the basic sources that you need to read. You can supplement this list by
reading any relevant books on the areas covered.

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GENERAL OBJECTIVE

This course introduces students registered in the department of English and Linguistics to
linguistics and the various areas of language study. These are the areas that the student is
expected to study in more detail in later stages of the degree course.

SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES:

At the end of this unit you should be able to:

1. Explain the nature of human language.

2. Explain the difference between human language and animal language.
3. Understand the nature of artificial languages.
4. Understand what linguistics is all about.
5. Show an understanding of the different levels of language study

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 SECTION ONE

LESSON 1

WHAT IS LANGUAGE?

At the end of this lecture you should be able to:

 Explain what language is and what it means to know a
language.
 Describe the properties of language

Language can be defined as a system of communication using speech sounds either oral or written.
These sounds are related to meaning in an arbitrary manner, i.e. there is no one to one relationship
between a sequence of sounds and what it refers to. The above definition has been found to be
appropriate since we shall mainly be dealing with spoken language in this unit. Otherwise we would like
to acknowledge the possibility of having non-spoken language for humans, i.e. sign language.

WHAT DO YOU KNOW WHEN YOU KNOW A LANGUAGE?

Language distinguishes human beings from animals. Man is probably the only species with the capacity
of speech. (Capacity to talk). This is a quality of the mind that is unique to human beings. When you
know a language, you can speak it and be understood by others who know that language. You can
produce a sequence of sounds which signify certain meanings and you can also interpret the sounds
produced by others.

Your knowledge of a language includes an unconscious knowledge of the sound system of that
particular language - knowing consciously or unconsciously which sounds are in that language and
which ones are not. E.g. an English native speaker may not be able to pronounce the word ‘Kenya’ the
way we pronounce it because the sound, which is found in the word ‘Kenya’, does not exist in English.
However, the same speaker knows all the sounds in his/her language. He will therefore replace the
impossible sound with the one closest to it. He may for instance pronounce the word as [kenia] instead
of [ke a] The most important aspect of knowing a language is to know that certain sounds or sound
sequences signify or represent different concepts or ‘meanings’. Knowing the system, which relates
sounds and meanings. This is why sequences uttered in a language we do not understand mean nothing
to us. Kiswahili speakers know what the word ‘paka’ means and they also know that it means
something different from the word ‘pata’. The word ‘paka’ can mean ‘cat’ or ‘smear on’ depending on
the context, whereas ‘pata’ means to get.

Knowing a language does not mean knowing all the words in the dictionary. If for instance you were
trying to learn Kikuyu and all you did was buy a dictionary and memorized all the words in it, you
would still not be able to form acceptable Kikuyu sentences, not even the simplest of them.

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THE PROPERTIES OF LANGUAGE

ARBITRARINESS

To a large extent the relationship between sequences of sounds and the concepts to which they refer is
arbitrary. This is where the arbitrariness in language comes in. There is for example no logical reason
why we should call this symbol  ‘kalamu’ the Kiswahili word for pen and not ‘kamalu’. Whatever
concept a given sequence of sounds is going to refer to is determined largely by the society. (Speech
community). This is why when we say Kalamu anybody who speaks Kiswahili with any degree of
competence would know what concept it refers to i.e. the meaning given to it by the speakers of
Kiswahili.

DISPLACEMENT

Human language allows humans to talk about things and events that are not present in the immediate
environment. This property of human language is called displacement. Animal communication is
generally said to lack this property. An animal cannot what it did yesterday or what it is going to do
tomorrow. Displacement allows us to talk about places and things whose existence we cannot even be
sure of. We can talk about mythical creatures, fairies angels etc. It is the property of displacement that
allows us to create fiction and to describe possible future worlds – something even the most intelligent
of animals cannot do.

PRODUCTIVITY

Knowing a language does not mean knowing all the words in the dictionary. If for instance you were
trying to learn Kikuyu and all you did was buy a dictionary and memorized all the words in it, you
would still not be able to form acceptable Kikuyu sentences, not even the simplest of them.

Knowing a language means one is able to combine words to form phrases and also to combine phrases
into sentences. There is no dictionary of any language with all the possible sentences because we are
able to produce new sentences that have never been produced before. In other words, there are an
infinite number of sentences in any language. Similarly, there is no limit to the length of any sentence.
For example, from the first sentence below, one can keep adding any number of elements to form
longer and longer sentences.

This is the house that Jack built.

This is the sack that lay in the house that Jack built.

So, how long is the longest sentence? The longest sentence is as long as you still have breath to add new
elements. This property of human language is known as Productivity.

Apart from knowing words in a language, Linguistic knowledge includes knowing rules for
forming sentences. In other words you need to know the right order of words in a sentence.

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E.g.
I expect your assignments next week.
NOT
*Assignments your expect I next week.

CULTURAL TRANSMISSION.

Human language is passed on from one generation to another in a process known as cultural
transmission. Humans are not born with the ability to produce utterances in a specific language such
as Kiswahili or English. Most animal signals unlike human language are instinctive and not learned.

DISCRETENESS

The sounds of language are meaningfully distinct. The difference between t sound and a d sound is
not very big. However when these sounds are used in a language, they are used in such a way that
the occurrence of one rather than the other in a word is meaningful. This means that the two sounds
are different. This is the property of language known as discreteness.

DUALITY

Language is organized at two levels at the same time. This property is known as duality or ‘double
articulation’. For example, we can produce individual sounds like p, t and a. We can also produce these
sounds in a particular combination, e.g. ‘tap’, we end up with another level producing a meaning, which
is different from the meaning of the combination in ‘pat’. This duality of levels is said to be one of the
most economical features of human language – the fact that with a small set of sounds we can produce a
very large number of sound combinations (words) that are different in meaning.

To a very limited extent there are certain words that are onomatopoeic. This means that the sounds of
the words imitate the sounds of nature or the pronunciation suggests the meaning – the sounds of the
word imitate the sounds of nature. For example, water flowing, or trickling. However, even for such
words, you get different sounds from one language to another. Speakers of a language can usually tell
the onomatopoeic words from those that are not.

ACTIVITY
Think of words in your language whose
sounds can suggest to you their
meanings.

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LESSON 2

THE ORIGIN OF HUMAN LANGUAGE

At the end of this lesson you should be

able to understand:

 Where human language originated

from.
 Some theories on the origin of

The question of the origin of language is a fascinating one. Man is so closely related to language that it
is believed that if we knew the how, when and where language arose, perhaps we would know how,
when and where man arose. The question of the origin of man is still a controversial issue between
Christians and evolutionists.

The question of the origin of language is difficult to answer for some reasons. One of the reasons is that
no one knows exactly for how long language has been in existence. Anthropologists believe that man
has existed for at least one million years. Yet, the earliest written records are barely six thousand years
old and they do not exist in all languages. They are therefore not representative enough for us to draw
conclusions on the basis of the few languages with written records and say which is older. There may be
some other languages that are either already extinct or that are older.

Many people are still left wondering as to how human beings communicated before language was
invented or whether indeed it is the case that language has always been in existence. Since it was so
difficult to reconcile the issue of the existence of language, scholars in the 19th century who were only
interested in the natural sciences ignored and even banned discussions of language origin.

Despite the difficulty of finding scientific evidence to explain the origin of human language,
speculations on the origin of language still continued and these provided some valuable insights into
the nature and development of language.

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CERTAIN THEORIES ON THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE

THE DIVINE ORIGIN THEORY (The Genesis theory)

According to religious beliefs, speech was God’s gift to mankind. The Egyptians believed that the
creator of speech was the god Thoth. Babylonians believed that the giver of language was the god Nabu
and the Hindus attributed our language to the godess Sarasvati the wife of Brahma who was the creator
of the universe.

According to Christian belief, God gave Adam the power to name all things. Genesis 2 verse 9 says:

And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every fowl of the air and
brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: And whatsoever Adam called every
living creature that was the name thereof.

The belief of the divine origin of languages has continued through the ages. In many religions for
example only special languages may be used in prayers and rituals. Among Muslims the Koran was not
to be translated in any other language and could only be read in Arabic. Until recently, only Latin could
be used in the Catholic mass.

Going back to the Genesis theory, what are some of its strengths?

1. The fact of Adam naming the animals indicated that he had come into possession of this unique
power of language, which the animals apparently did not have because they had not given
names to themselves or to one another, and even to date, the animals have not started naming
one another.

2. The Genesis account also observed that once a name was given to an animal it stuck to it.
This gives it a certain permanence. Most of the animals that existed during Adams time have
long since become extinct. The Genesis writer saw that names existed long after the animals
have become extinct.

The Genesis writer had also observed the diversity of languages in the world and tried to explain why
languages were diverse when originally there was supposed to be only one. His explanation was in the
story of the tower of Babel.

Generally, the Divine Origin theory is interesting as it shows man’s very early interest in the problem of
language origin and some of his first guesses about language. It is also significant from the fact that for
a very long time it was the only accepted language origin theory.

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Does the Divine Origin theory have any weaknesses?

One major weakness of the Divine Origin theory is that it turned out to be unsatisfactory since it is not
able to answer the question of language origin satisfactorily: For one, we still do not know which
language Adam used. Secondly, even if we knew the language, we would still have insufficient data to
start us off since Adam only named the animals and nothing else.

As it is, we have completely no way of proving or disproving the Divine Origin theory just as one
cannot argue scientifically for or against the existence of God.

THE INVENTION THEORY

There are scholars who argued that language was invented by man – but separated the invention of
language from reason. The invention theory emanated from the theory that the earliest manifestations of
language were cries of nature that man shared with the animals. E.g., cries of pain, fear, surprise, anger,
pleasure and so on.

According to Rousseau (1712-1772), both emotive cries and gestures proved to be too inefficient for
communicating and so man invented language - that it was out of the natural cries that man invented
language.

Rousseau was of the opinion that man shared the cries of nature with animals in the beginning but
sought to free himself. To Rousseau therefore, it was not man’s ability to reason, which distinguished
him from the animals, but his will to be free.

It is difficult to understand Rousseau’s reasoning since you tend to ask yourself how man was able to
acquire the ability for abstract thought through his use of concrete words if he was not from the
beginning equipped with special mental abilities. Rousseau separated speech from the capacity of the
human mind to reason.

HERDER’S VIEW

In 1179 Johann Herder a German philosopher and poet, refuted both the Divine Origin theory and the
Invention theory. He is in fact the one who paved the way for free scientific investigation. Herder’s view
was that language was invented by man, but not outside his reasoning power. Herder pointed out that
man in the very first step of his reasoning power isolated one object from all other objects. This isolated
object was retained in the mind and it was thus a word in the soul.

With this first distinct concept of an object isolated from other objects, language was already in his soul;
hence it was invented through his own resources and not in a mechanical manner through divine
instructions. It was therefore not God who invented language for man but man himself had to invent
language to exercise his own powers.

Herder’s argument was that even vocabulary and the way we name things, is determined by people in
the society.

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However, Herder’s view still left the question of language origin begging since for the successful
investigation of the problem of language, one requires an adequate body of concrete language data,
which was not available in 1772.

LANGUAGE AND EVOLUTION

In trying to understand the development of language, scholars have debated on the role played by the
vocal tract and the ear. They suggested that “Non-human” primates lack the physical apparatus that is
necessary to produce the range of human speech

What are some of these apparatus that humans possess that other primates lack? They are:

 The human teeth which are upright, not slanting outwards like those of apes and they
are roughly even in height. This is very useful in making sounds like f, v and th. We
really do not need this kind of arrangement for eating, because other animals also eat
despite the fact that their teeth are not arranged like ours.
 The human lips are much more flexible than the lips of other primates. The flexibility
of the lips makes it possible for us to produce sounds like p, b and w.
 The human larynx or the voice box differs significantly in position from of monkeys. It
is believed that in the course of human physical development, especially when humans
acquired an upright posture, the head moved forward and the larynx moved lower. This
created a longer cavity called the pharynx above the vocal cords, which can act as the
resonator for any sounds produced through the larynx.

Unfortunately, the position of the larynx makes it much more possible for us to choke on pieces of food.
Monkeys on the other hand, although they do not have the capacity to produce sounds, are unlikely to
choke on food or to have problems of food getting stuck in the windpipe.

The linguist, Phillip Lieberman links the development of language with the evolutionary development
of speech production and perception apparatus and subsequently the development of language. This
development would be accompanied by changes in the brain and the nervous system toward greater
complexity.

Lieberman’s notion is that languages spoken millions of years ago may have been syntactically
and phonologically simpler than any languages spoken today.

However, the notion that evolution resulted in the development of a vocal tract capable of producing a
wide range of sounds utilized by humans is insufficient to explain the origin of language. This is
evidenced by the existence of birds, e.g., parrots that have the ability to produce speech sounds, which
are however merely patterned repetitions.

STRENGTH OF THE EVOLUTION THEORY.

It is generally agreed that evolution must have resulted in the development of a vocal tract capable of
producing wide range of speech sounds. This realization may have led to the later preoccupation with the
vocal tract as a way of understanding human language.

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WEAKNESS OF THE EVOLUTION THEORY.

One weakness of the evolution theory was that it failed to take account of the fact that humans can and do
possess a language even when they cannot speak. The deaf and dumb communicate yet they cannot speak.

We can conclude that the major evolutionary step in the development of language relates to evolutionary
changes in the brain.

QUESTION
Are there any other theories advanced by your community about
the origin of language that you know of? What are their strengths
and weaknesses?

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LESSON 3

LANGUAGE AND THE BRAIN

At the end of this lesson, you should be able to understand:

1. How the development of the brain is associated with the development of language in humans.
2. Which part of the brain is responsible for language?
3 How damage to certain parts of the brain affects speech.

If asked where the ability to use language is located in the human body, most of us may answer correctly
that it is the brain. But exactly which part of the brain is responsible for language?

To answer this question, lets go to the famous story of September 1848 in Cavendish.

In this story, we are told about a construction foreman in charge of a construction crew whose name was
Phineas Gage. This man had an accident at his place of work – there was an accidental explosion. The
result of this explosion was that a 3 ½ foot long iron rod went up his upper left cheek and out through the
top of his head. It was assumed that he would never recover. However, exactly one month later, he was
up and about, and there was no apparent damage to his senses or his speech.

After this incident, it was concluded that if language had anything to do with the brain, it was evidently not
the front of the brain. Since then, a number of discoveries have been made concerning the specific areas in
the brain, which are related to language functions.

First, it was discovered that language abilities are basically located on the left side of the brain i.e., the left
hemisphere and that any damage to this side of the brain caused speech problems to individuals whereas
damage to the right hemisphere did not have the same repercussions. The relationship between language
and the brain came to be established more specifically in 1861. Subsequently three areas of the brain can
be described.

Broca’s area

Paul Broca was a French surgeon who stated at a scientific meeting in Paris that we speak with the left
hemisphere of the brain and that damage to this part of the brain resulted in extreme difficulty in
producing speech or complete loss of speech. This part of the brain was then named Broca’s area after
the surgeon Paul Broca who first described it. Technically, this area is described as the anterior speech

14
cortex. It has therefore been taken to mean that Broca’s area is crucially involved in the production of
speech.

Wernicke’s area

This area is also known as the posterior speech cortex. It was named after Carl Wernicke who was a
German doctor in the 1870s. Wernicke reported that his patients had lesions in the posterior or the back
portion of the left temporal lobe or the back part of the left hemisphere. Unlike Braoca’s patients,
Wernicke’s patients spoke fluently with good intonation and pronunciation, but with numerous instances
of lexical errors (word substitutions) and often with phonological mistakes. They also had difficulty in
comprehending speech. It was then concluded that Wernicke’s area is the part of the brain crucially
involved in the understanding of speech.

Supplementary motor area/Superior speech cortex

Penfield and Roberts were two neurosurgeons who found out that by applying minute amounts of
electrical current to specific areas of the brain, they could identify those areas where the electrical
stimulation would interfere with normal speech production. This was taken as evidence that this area is
involved in the actual articulation of speech, i.e. the movements involved in speech are controlled in this
area.

Simply put, what happens in the brain is that: -

 The word is heard and understood via Wernicke's area.

 The signal is then transferred to Broca’s area where preparations are made to produce it.
 A signal is then sent to the motor area to physically articulate the word.

However, there are those who say that damage to the left hemisphere which subsequently leads to
language disorder, is not sufficient evidence for us to now say that it is responsible for speech. They claim
that any damage to any area of the brain appears to have serious repercussions in other areas.

TONGUE TIPS AND SLIPS

It has been noted that speakers often experience difficulty in getting the brain and speech production to
work together smoothly. Such difficulties are seen as clues to the way our linguistic knowledge is
organized within the brain.

For example, there is what is referred to as the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon. This is the kind of thing
that happens when you feel that there is some word you are trying to produce but somehow it is not
coming out. You have an accurate or near accurate phonological outline of the word – You know the

15
sounds. For example you can, may be remember the first and last sounds. Sometimes you can even name
a word that is close to it in pronunciation. E.g., you may say ‘dictionary’ instead of ‘directory’

This experience suggests that our ‘word storage’ may be partially organized on the basis of some
phonological information and that some words in that ‘store’, are more easily recalled that others.

These types of mistakes are sometimes referred to as Malapropisms after a character called Mrs.
Malaprop in a play by Sheridan who kept producing words like these for comic effect.

A similar type of error is commonly described as a slip-of-the-tongue, which often results in mixed up
expressions such as “make a long shory stort” instead of “make a long story short”.

This type of error is also known as Spoonerism after the Rev. William A. Spooner, an Oxford dean who
was renowned for his tongue slips. Most of the slips attributed to him involve an interchange of two
sounds. For instance, he once complained to a student who had been absent from his class thus:

“You have hissed my mystery lectures”

Although such slips are mostly treated as errors of articulation, it has been suggested that they may result
from “slips of the brain” as it tries to organize linguistic messages.

Another type of slip is referred to as a slip-of-the-ear, which normally happens when you hear something
differently from what the speaker said.

These examples of slips, some of which may be funny, may give us a clue as to the normal workings of
the human brain as it tries to deal with language. However, some other problems with language
production and understanding may be a result of much more serious disorders in the functioning of the
brain.

APHASIA

The term that is used to describe the different types of language disorders is Aphasia. It is defined as an
impairment of language function due to localized cerebral damage, which leads to difficulty in
understanding and /or producing linguistic forms.

People usually suffer from aphasia after a stroke, head injuries suffered in an accident or through forms of
violence, which may also cause aphasia.

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Aphasia can be classified according to what type of language disorder is involved – whether it involves
understanding or whether the patient has difficulty in producing certain sounds.

Broca’s aphasia

Broca’s aphasia is a serious language disorder. Patients suffering from Broca’s aphasia speak very little
and can stay without speaking for hours or even days. When they do speak, their speech is often slow and
effortful. They also omit words like, articles and prepositions and parts of words like inflections. E.g.,
I school and went and read with book.

Wernicke’s aphasia

This is the type of language disorder that has to do with difficulties in auditory comprehension. Someone
suffering from this aphasia can produce very fluent speech, which cannot be made sense of. The following
example is from Yule 1983 of a patient suffering from Wernicke’s aphasia.

I can’t talk all of the things I do, and part of the part I can go all right, but I can’t tell from
the other people.

Patients suffering from Wernicke’s aphasia also have difficulty in finding the correct word a condition
referred to as ANOMIA.

Nevertheless, you will find word finding difficulties in many types of aphasia. Difficulties in speaking
will also often be accompanied by difficulties in writing. And those who have comprehension problems
tend to have reading difficulties.

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LESSON 4

LANGUAGE VIS-À-VIS OTHER FORMS OF COMMUNICATION

After this lesson you should be able to distinguish between

animal language and human language.

Fromkin and Rodman 1983 begin their discussion on animal languages with a quotation from Bertrand
Russell thus:

No matter how eloquently a dog may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were poor but
honest.

Contrary to this quotation from Russell, most of us probably remember a time when we believed that
animals talk. In fact this idea is deeply rooted in most African folktales. Remember the story of the hare
and the tortoise with the hare challenging the tortoise to a race, which he was sure he was going to win?

Do animals really talk or is language the exclusive property of the human species?

The answer to this question depends on what properties of human language we look at. If we view
language only as a system of communication then all animals communicate. Humans also use systems
other than their language to relate to each other and to send messages.

What is therefore so special about human language?

Is it the ability of human beings to use speech sounds?

The answer to the second question is NO. As mentioned earlier there is evidence of people who are born
deaf and dumb but are still able to learn a language i.e., sign language. This is evidence enough that the
use of speech sounds is not a key property of human language. We cannot therefore use speech sounds to
mark the distinction between animal language and human language.

Birds, e.g., parrots, are able to repeat words flawlessly but they do not relate them to anything meaningful.
The birds’ utterances carry no meaning. A parrot will keep repeating the same words over and over again
without once realizing that the same words can be taken to pieces to form new words. E.g., the word
SAW could have its sounds rearranged to form the word WAS. You can also do the same with the word
DOG to form the word GOD. Yet, this is something even little children who are still in their initial stages
of learning can do. This is the creative aspect of human language that is lacking in

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animal language. Being able to produce sounds like human beings is not the same as being able to learn a
human language.

Rene Descartes who lived in the 17th century pointed out that the ability to use language is not based on
the physiological abilities to produce speech or speech like sounds. It is not because animals lack certain
organs that they cannot make known their thoughts. Parrots utter words like us yet they cannot speak as
we do. Sometimes we may be tempted to actually conclude that animals do indeed understand human
language when we give them commands, which they understand. E.g., dogs, horses, etc.

As far as animal behavior is concerned, the animal produces a particular behavior in response to a
particular sound-stimulus, but does not actually ‘understand’ the meaning of the uttered words.

If it is difficult to conceive of an animal understanding human language, it is even more difficult to

conceive of an animal being capable of ‘producing’ human language. Animals are not even capable of
learning each other’s language. You could keep your dog in the same field with cows for years, but it will
never moo like a cow.

In a household where there is a baby and a puppy that were born at the same time, you will observe that
although the baby and the puppy will grow up together hearing the same things, about three years later,
the baby will not only be making human noises, it will also be imitating the noise made by the puppy.
What about the puppy? It will have learnt to bark - period.

THE SPIDERS, THE BIRDS AND THE BEES.

Most animals possess some kind of signaling communication system. The spiders have a complex system
for courtship. The male spider performs some gestures to inform the female spider that he is indeed a
spider and not any other animal.

This kind of communication is rather fixed and cannot be broken down into smaller elements. You cannot
find a creative spider changing or adding anything to this particular courtship ritual. Only one meaning can
be communicated with one set of gestures. It is not like human communication where we have a set of
vocabulary from which we can form an infinite set of sentences.

Birds unlike spiders have little in common with human language. The calls and the songs of many species
of birds do have a communicative function and they resemble human languages in that they have ‘dialects’
within the same species

Birdcalls consisting of one or more short notes convey messages associated with the environment around
them. E.g. Danger, feeding, nesting, flocking etc. The bird songs which consist of much more complex
patterns of notes are used to stake out territory and to attract mates. No evidence is known that points at
the songs having any internal structure. A song can also not be broken into independently meaningful
parts like words of human language. E.g., if a song says,

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 Come and be my love

You cannot break it into separate parts like ‘come’ and expect the bird to respond to just that.

However, despite certain superficial similarities to human language, birdcalls and songs are fundamentally
different kinds of communicative systems. The number of messages that can be conveyed is finite, and
messages are stimulus controlled.

The bees.

The language of the honeybees is more complex than that of the spiders. A forager bee, on returning to the
hive after it has located a source of food, does a dance, which communicates certain information about
that source to other members of the colony. There are three possible patterns that the dance can take. It
can be:

Round – this means that the food is at a distance of twenty feet.

Sickle – This means the food is at a distance of twenty to sixty feet.
Tail wagging – this means the food is at a distance beyond sixty feet.

When the bee does the round dance, it dances in circle. When it does the sickle dance it forms the shape
of a figure eight and when it does the tail wagging it repeats the sickle dance. The faster it repeats the
sickle dance, the nearer the source of the food. The slower the rate, the longer the distance

The round dance can also show the quality of the food whereas the sickle dance can show quality and
direction. The tail-wagging dance can show the precise distance.

The bees’ dance can impart many different messages and in this sense we can say it is more like human
language. However, unlike human language, the bees’ language is confined to a single subject – it is fixed
– all its messages have to do with food.

EXPERIMENTER

An experimenter forced a bee to walk to the food source. When it came back it described a distance
twenty five times further away than the food source. The bee could not say exactly what happened, it
could not describe the circumstances under which it went to the food source. From this, we can say that
there is lack of creativity in the bees’ language. The bees’ dance, like human language, is arbitrary in the
sense that bees have kind of decided what each dance stands for which in a way is the same as human
language where each speech community decides what each linguistic sign will stand for.

QUESTION

Can you think of any folktales from your community that seem to
suggest that animals talk? How much of these tales are believable.

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ARTIFICIAL LANGUAGES

Since the tragedy of the tower of Babel, when people scattered each speaking his own language, there has
been hope for a return of the kind of situation that was there when people spoke one language. Some
people have been preoccupied with trying to come up with artificial languages. An artificial language is a
language that is invented by people for specific uses. It is a language that has not evolved naturally
following the usual stages of language diversity and convergence.

Most of the artificial languages that have been invented have been invented in the hope that they will be
spoken universally and therefore this will bring about universal peace. The implication here is of course
that we have wars because we speak different languages. This is however debatable considering the
number of civil wars we have had in countries where only one language is spoken.

Most of the artificial languages have not succeeded because people were either not interested in them or
the reasons being given for their introduction. One artificial language that has had some success is
Esperanto. Esperanto was invented by a Polish scholar known as Zamenhof.

Esperanto means ‘hope’. In this language, there is grammatical regularity, ease of pronunciation and a
vocabulary based mainly on European languages, mainly Latin, Romance, Germanic and Greek.

It is claimed that several million speakers throughout the world including some people who learnt it as a
first language speak Esperanto. There is Literature written in it, a number of Institutions teach it and it is
officially recognized by some international organizations.

Esperantists claim that any intelligent person can learn their language easily. Esperanto is however not that
simple since its main languages, i.e. the languages from which its grammar and vocabulary are derived, are
very different from our own languages, so, although it may be easy to learn for someone who speaks
German, Greek or Latin, It may not be easy for someone who speaks a language that is totally unrelated
to any of these languages.

All in all, Esperanto is said to be easier to learn than the languages from which it is derived. It therefore
has the potential of playing an important role as a second language in unifying people who are
linguistically diverse but culturally and economically related.

QUESTION

Do you think the problems in the world today e.g., political social and economic problems are due to the
fact that people speak different languages If so, provide examples of cases where such problems have been
caused by linguistic diversity.

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LESSON 5

LINGUISTICS

At the end of this lesson, you should be able to:

1. Understand what it means to be a linguist,

2. What linguistics is and
3. What the study of linguistics entails

Who is a linguist?

Most people mistakenly refer to a linguist as one who speaks many languages so that when someone says
she is a linguist, she is normally asked how many languages she speaks. Being a linguist does not however
mean that one has to necessarily speak many languages. Most linguists are fluent in only one language.

Being a linguist helps one who wants to learn a new language. A linguist would probably understand the
structure of a new language much faster than a non-linguist.

Being a linguist has nothing to do with one’s ability to speak any specific number of languages but,

 One’s ability to talk about language.

 Knowing about the principles on which language can be said to work.
 Knowing about the differences that may exist between languages.

What one gains by being a linguist or by having the tools of linguistic analysis is the ability to approach the
study of language confidently and methodically. A linguist has an analytic state of mind towards all kinds
of things concerning language. Linguistics may help one in learning a new language but this is just a
byproduct of the training one receives and is quite incidental.

One who speaks many languages is called a polyglot, not a linguist. However, you may at times come
across people who are linguists as well as polyglots. The most important thing to remember is that one
does not follow from the other.

WHAT IS LINGUISTICS?

Linguistics is briefly defined as “the scientific study of language”. It is usually divided into two parts:
Diachronic (or historical) and Synchronic linguistics respectively. Diachronic linguistics examines the

22
development of languages or families of languages through time. Synchronic linguistics investigates
languages as systems of communication used by groups of people at some particular point in time.
Language is the primary object of the study of linguistics and linguists approach the notion of language
from different points of view.

Linguistics is usually defined as the science of language or as the scientific study of language. But why
should we want to defend the scientificness of linguistics? Disciplines whose scientific status is not in doubt
like Physics, Chemistry etc, feel no need to justify their claim to be called sciences.

The first point to be made clear is that the English word science is much narrower in scope than many of
its translation equivalents in other languages. In French for example, the word science covers,
knowledge, art, skill etc. whereas in English, it is very specific: Knowledge that can be made into a
system and which usually depends on seeing and testing facts and stating general natural laws - this refers
to the natural science.

Most linguists who subscribe to the definition of linguistics as the scientific study of language do so
because they have in mind some distinction between a scientific and a non-scientific way of doing things.

They may not agree on some of the implications of the term ‘scientific’, just like scholars in other
disciplines do not agree on many issues. But they generally agree on the principle differences between the
scientific and the non-scientific study of language. The most important of these points of agreement is
that linguistics is empirical rather than speculative or intuitive – It operates with publicly verifiable data
obtained by means of observation or experiment. To be empirical in this sense is for most people the very
foundation or the very hallmark of science.

Linguistics relies on scientific procedures in its studies (i.e., it uses scientific methods. It is generally
agreed that for any enterprise or study to qualify as scientific, it has to have scientific characteristics.

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LESSON 6

THE SCIENTIFICNESS OF LINGUISTICS

At the end of this lesson, you should be able to:

Understand the three scientific characteristics of a linguistic

approach to language study.

What are the scientific characteristics of a linguistic approach of language study?

There are at least three major characteristics that any study that claims to be using a scientific
method must have/display. David Crystal labels these three characteristics:

EXPLICITNESS
SYSTEMATICNESS
OBJECTIVITY

What do these concepts involve?

EXPLICITNESS

Explicitness can be interpreted to mean being clear about the assumptions on which a study is based and
defining terms clearly and consistently.

What this means in essence is that you are not supposed to assume that whoever is going to read your
work will for instance understand your definitions without any explanation. This is because there are
several definitions of concepts. For example, how do you define a sentence? You may define a sentence as
simply a group of words. However, a group of words does not necessarily constitute a sentence. You may
need to explain that the words have to be related in a certain way and also explain exactly how they need
to be related.

For example, you may need to add that the group of words that constitute a sentence must be a Noun
Phrase (NP) and a Verb Phrase (VP) where the NP may further be sub divided into an article and a noun
etc.

Consistency helps in that when we use certain terminology, we do not keep on changing.

How do we attain consistency?

24
Consistency is attained by defining the terms clearly so that there would be no need to change. E.g. what
exactly makes a sentence? What are the features that must be present for us to refer to an utterance as a
sentence and not a phrase? You may want to say that it has to have a subject and a predicate. In other
words, you need to make explicit your criteria for labeling a particular feature of language.

Let us for example look at the label ‘NOUN’. You want to establish criteria for using that label that will
avoid ambiguity. You then set up various criteria for identifying a word as belonging to the class of noun.
You may say:

1. I shall call a noun any word that can act as the subject of a sentence, as in; ‘A dog barks’.
2. I shall call a noun any word which can be preceded by the definite article, as in, “The dog’.
3. I shall call a noun, any word that can be preceded by a preposition, as in, ‘ To the dog’.
4. I shall call a noun, any word which can be used in both plural and singular forms, as
in, ‘Dog/Dogs.
5. I shall call a noun any word, which can have a case ending that shows possession, as in,
‘Dog’s teeth’.

You may want to stop here thinking you have provided a clear-cut basis for identifying words, which may
qualify as nouns. May be you have that. The five criteria cover most of the words, which may qualify as
nouns in the English language. But, have you thought about words like ‘Jane’ and ‘Nakuru’? Are they
nouns or aren’t they? Are they covered by the five criteria above? If not, can you explain why not?

The point that is being made here is that you must be ready to defend whatever criteria you use to classify
a word as belonging to a certain group/class. You do not want to find yourself in a situation where you
are asked to explain why a particular word is a noun for example and the only answer you can give is
‘Because it is a noun’.

Consistency saves us from finding ourselves in situations where we may have already defined our subject
then we begin having doubts because our definition was not clear in the first place.

Terms that are of no direct theoretical relevance to the main line of investigation can be ignored or taken
for granted especially if they have a reasonably standard use in the literature on linguistics, i.e. if your use
of that term will not start a whole debate on what you could possibly have meant.

The problem of terminology and the need for criteria probably affects Linguistics more than other
subjects. For the linguist, language is both the end as well as the means of her investigations. She has to
analyze language using language.

QUESTION

Can you think of any other reason why the five criteria above do not
adequately take care of the English noun?

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SYSTEMATICNESS

The second main characteristic of a scientific study of language is its systematicness. This can be
interpreted to mean avoiding haphazard studies, avoiding partial coverage of a topic and an
impressionistic commentary, avoiding a sporadic explicitness and an inconsistent use of terms or
procedures. You must also take account of previous work done on a subject.

In principle, a linguist would try to avoid such failings and try to adopt a systematic approach. In language,
the structures being studied are so complex and involve so many variables that it would be impossible to
reach any general conclusions about them unless they were studied in a highly organized manner.

How do we achieve this organization?

One of the most obvious ways is the manner in which linguists have tried to establish standard procedures
to be followed in analyzing language. This was a dominant characteristic of much early work in linguistics.
It was felt that when faced with a task of investigating a language, there is so much complexity that it was
essential to make it simpler by selecting certain aspects of the language to be studied first.

One linguist may for example want to begin by studying the pronunciation system (phonetics and
phonology) of a language. Then she may want to move on to the study of the structure of words
(Morphology), after this, move on to the way in which words pattern to form sentences (Syntax). Later
she may want to study the various meanings that these words convey (the Semantics).

The above would be one way of having some organization in your material and then working on it that
way. It is however not a natural approach. You do not have to use this procedure. You may want to start
from the reverse. The point is not which procedure is the most valid or which one gets the best result but
that any procedural factors must be made as explicit as possible, for example in doing research in
language, what are the factors that lead you to choose one procedure and not any other? This must be
made as clear as possible – absolutely clear.

The second main aspect of systematicness is the need to study phenomena using a procedure, which is as
methodical and standardized as possible. It helps a lot when you use your descriptive framework
consistently within any stage of your investigation.

The task that a linguist has to perform will sometimes have to do with comparing two bits of language
e.g. comparing A and B. If for example you have described A and B using different approaches then
comparing them becomes difficult. E.g. you have stated that A is a verb because of XYZ reasons, then
you have gone on to say that B is a verb but given different reasons, how then can you compare A and B?
It is like saying that the distance from kenyatta university to the city center is the same as the distance
from Jomo kenyatta International airport to the city center, but then you have given one of the distances
in kilometers and the other in miles. The two distances may be the same, but one would have to convert
them into a uniform measuring system before one can agree with your statement.

26
Systematicness also refers to strict testing of our hypotheses, beliefs, guesses etc. A hypothesis is a
statement that suggests or predicts a certain situation e.g. ‘some pronouns always occur before verbs in
Dholuo’ is a hypothesis that can either be confirmed or refuted after investigation and thorough testing. A
hypothesis is a very specific statement and it is made to be tested and to be tested rigorously. Hypotheses
must also be testable.

OBJECTIVITY

Objectivity implies open mindedness in matters of analysis. It also implies a critical mind especially where
you are suspicious of any hypothesis until some experimental evidence is produced to support the point.
Objectivity means taking care to avoid your own preconceptions that might selectively support a
hypothesis. You may for example have a hypothesis like ‘Dholuo first language speakers cannot
pronounce the sound
/z/ because they do not have the six lower teeth But is that the reason why Dholuo first language speakers
cannot pronounce the sound /z/? It is possible to confirm this hypothesis by sampling only those Dholuo
speakers who do not have the six lower teeth and if they happen not to be able to pronounce the sound /z/
then, your hypothesis will have been confirmed. But, what you will have done is to selectively support a
hypothesis by selecting data, guided by your preconceptions that have ended up supporting your
hypothesis. However, you need to think again. Try a different sample, e.g. those with all their teeth. You
will probably discover that there are people, in this second sample, who also cannot pronounce /z/. At this
point you will need to find other explanations for this problem.

Objectivity also means that as far as possible, you will make use of standardized procedure. This helps in
that you will not need to justify your use of certain procedures simply because they are not standard.
Standard procedures are those procedures that have been agreed upon by people in a particular discipline.

The opposite of objectivity is subjectivity. Being subjective means bringing in your own feelings and beliefs
in your data and analysis without once reverting to empirical evidence. You may be carrying out research
on your own mother tongue, a language you have spoken your entire life. However, when you start
researching into the said language, you do not let your familiarity with the language stand in the way of its
objective examination.

For example, there are cases where one accent or dialect is considered purer than another or one language
is considered primitive. Objectivity demands that at the very least, terms like these are challenged. Terms
like ‘pure’ or ‘primitive should either be clearly defined or rejected.

In general, we need to avoid our own preconceptions that might selectively support a hypothesis. We also
need to avoid biased conclusions based on personal feelings or intuitions. Subjective investigation, even at
its very best, is unscientific.

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LESSON 7

PRESCRIPTIVE VERSUS DESCRIPTIVE LINGUISTICS

At the end of this lesson you should be able to understand:

The difference between prescriptive and Descriptive

linguistics.

The contrast that holds between the term prescriptive and descriptive is that of prescribing how things
ought to be and describing how things are.

Prescriptive linguistics prescribes how things ought to be. It was mainly associated with traditional
grammarians. Traditional grammar is associated with the earlier grammars of Latin and Greek.
Prescriptive linguists had dos and don’ts. ‘Don’t say this, say this’ Present day linguists are very insistent
on distinguishing between descriptive and prescriptive rules because traditional grammar is prescriptive in
nature.

The traditional grammarian saw it as his task to formulate the standards of correctness and to impose if
necessary upon the speakers of the language. Rules such as the following were common in traditional
grammar:

 You should never use a double negative, e.g. “I didn’t say nothing”
 Don’t end a sentence with a preposition, e.g. “Whom did you make the dress for?”
 Don’t split the infinitive, e.g. “I want you to closely watch this”.

In actual fact, there is nothing wrong with the above constructions. The double negative construction
may be quite correct in some dialects of English even though they may not be the standard dialect. The
rule for the split infinitive derives from the application of principles and categories that were established in
the first place for the description of Greek and Latin to English. It so happens that the linguistic forms to
which the term infinitive is applied are one word forms in Greek, Latin, French, German and Russian.

In traditional grammar, the English equivalents of ‘to eat, to understand, to go’ etc, are also called
infinitives. However, you cannot compare the way the English infinitive behaves, to the way the French
infinitive behaves for example. In French, the infinitive form of the verb ‘to eat’ is ‘manger’ - one word.
This means that the infinitive marker is part of the verb. The infinitive in this case cannot therefore be
split. But, why can’t we split the infinitive in English, which is after all introduced by a separate word?
The infinitive in English is a two-word form. In principle therefore, there should be no objection in
splitting it if it still makes sense.

28
The point that is being made here is that it is wrong to impose rules of a different language onto another
language. It is wrong to describe a language on the basis of another language. Like John Lyons (1981)
says;

Neither logic nor the grammar of Latin can properly serve as the court of appeal when it comes to
deciding whether something is or is not correct in English. Nor can the unquestioned authority of
tradition for tradition’s sake (“that’s what I was taught, and my parents and my parents’
parents”).

A view that has been widely held in society until recently is that linguistic change involves a debasement
or corruption of the language. Those who held this view cannot adequately defend it. All languages are
subject to change and this is an empirical fact. Historical linguists are occupied with the investigation of
the details of language change.

The principle of conforming to the standards of the best writers that was also held by the traditional
grammarians is also indefensible in relation to the use that is commonly made of it. There is no reason to
believe, that the writer, even though he may be a genius, possesses a sure or a special knowledge of the
rules of correctness that the rest of the speakers do not possess.

Historically, most classical texts were written in Greek or Latin. It was therefore the duty of the
grammarian to make literature available to those who could not speak Greek or Latin. In fact, grammar
was equated to literary works.

It is quite unjustifiable to use the older language to describe the grammar of modern spoken languages.
There are no absolute standards in language. We can say that somebody who is not very familiar with our
language has made a mistake if he says something that violates the rules of the language, as we know it.
We can also say that the speaker of a non-standard social or regional dialect of English has spoken
ungrammatically if his utterance violates the rules of Standard English. However, when we say this, we
are assuming that he was intending to use Standard English or ought to have been intending to use
Standard English. The assumption itself requires justification because there are so many dialects of
English apart from what we know as the standard.

We are not saying that prescriptivism has no place in language. On the contrary, there are certain
administrative as well as educational advantages in the modern world in standardizing the principle dialect
that is used within a particular country or region for literary purposes. However, it is important to realize
first, that the literary standard itself is subject to change. Secondly, from its origin, the literary standard is
based on the speech of one socially or regionally determined class of people. It is therefore no more
correct nor purer in any linguistic sense than the speech of any other class or region.

In as far as language change is concerned the linguist is saying that it is a scientific fact that language does
change and we do not have the facilities to stop it and when language changes it should not be seen as a
debasement or corruption of the language. When you correct people’s speech you do so not because it is
inherently incorrect but only incorrect relative to some standard. Linguists are expected to describe the
facts about the language. Linguists describe language in its own terms; they do not gear/base their
description on non-linguistic standards of correctness.

29
A linguist knows that the grammarian of a language does not make the rules of that language.
Grammarians cannot do this and they should not. They should restrict themselves to writing what is
already there. If they set up rules that speakers do not use speakers will merely ignore them. There is also
need to remember that what is grammatical is what is in use at a particular time not what was put down in
grammar books or dictionaries may be twenty years ago.

To linguists, when there are two alternative usages, one is not correct and the other wrong. The two are
merely different. In fact sometimes you’d rather use terms like which word is more appropriate in a given
situation for example, not which is correct. Which type of language do you use when you are being formal
and which one do you use when you are being informal?

DESCRIPTIVE LINGUISTICS

Descriptive linguists are concerned with all levels of usage and with dialectal peculiarities. Descriptivists
assume that standard forms are mythical (are invented probably to suit certain purposes) Decsriptivists are
interested in all types of language in whatever style. Descrptivists believe in four principles:

1. Language is primarily speech

2. Language has system
3. Language has variety
4. Language changes

Descriptive linguistics involves uncovering the system of a specific language. They approach the language
to be described without any preconceptions. They do not try to make what they are studying conform to
any other known system. In the actual uncovering process, the linguist assumes that the native speaker is
capable of making utterances, which conform to the system of the language and which are amenable to
analysis, i.e. they should accept the fact that the native speaker is the expert of her language.

Once the linguist has collected enough data, she does a step-by-step analysis, which covers the
Phonological, Morphological and the Syntax of the language if all these levels had not been analyzed
before. From this step-by-step procedure, the ultimate aim of the linguist is to device a consistent
description complete enough to satisfy the basic requirements for learning the language.

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LESSON 8

WHY STUDY LANGUAGE?

At the end of this lesson, you should be able to explain some

of the reasons why language is studied.

People find language a fascinating behavior and they make inquiries about it from every point of view,
e.g.

 Where does language come from?

 Why do people speak different languages?
 How do words change their meaning?
 How many languages are there?
 Which is the oldest language?
 Could an artificial language work?
 Are the different languages of the world basically the same?

Whereas there are people who would ask questions such as the above, most people simply don’t bother.
Most people simply take language for granted. We begin to notice language and to worry about it when it
starts to break down, when it starts to bring problems, e.g. when language suddenly disappears or fails to
develop after an accident, a stroke or various other catastrophes. Then people begin to ask whether there
is anything that can be done.

Therapy is possible and can be quite successful. However any kind of therapy would require that one have
a very clear understanding of this skill that has been lost – namely, language. For one to be able to
diagnose a language disorder one has to know a great deal about how language works normally. You have
to know its structure and how it normally functions in detail. Language analysis comes in handy when for
instance; a child cannot talk when it is supposed to be talking. Then we begin to wonder whether:

 The child is deaf,

 The child has brain damage,
 It is simply a case of late development.

31
Sometimes there may be nothing wrong at all. Whatever the cause of the disorder, a speech therapist
needs to know a lot about language analysis in normal people, e.g. pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary
etc.

Language awareness is also necessary to teach foreign languages. In order to teach a foreign language,
successfully, it is necessary to know about it. Fluency in a language is not enough whether the language is
your mother tongue or not. You have to be able to explain its structure to others in a systematic and
precise way and organize a course of studies so that it will become relatively easy to learn.

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SECTION TWO

LINGUISTICS AND OTHER DISCIPLINES

Language is not an isolated phenomenon. It is a part of society and part of us. It enters into a very large
number of specialized fields. It is not possible to study language scientifically without to some extent
studying other aspects of society, behavior and experience. Linguistics in a way overlaps in its subject
matter with other academic studies.

LESSON 9

LANGUAGE AND PSYCHOLOGY

At the end of this lesson, you should be able to explain:

 The relationship between language and psychology.
 Some basic theories of language acquisition.
 Some areas of language study that psycholinguists are
interested in.

Psychology is the study of the mind. Psycholinguistics is the branch of Linguistics that deals with the
relationship between language and the mind. It focuses mainly on how language is learnt, stored and
occasionally lost.

The relationship between language and the mind has two aspects, acquisition and performance. The two
are intimately linked. What we acquire is the ability to perform, i.e. to use language with
appropriateness. Performance is essential to complete any successful acquisition.

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

Many psychologists and linguists prefer to use the term acquisition rather than the learning of language.
The term acquisition is considered to be neutral with respect to some of the implications that have come
to be associated with the term learning in psychology.

One thing that has preoccupied psycholinguists is how language is acquired. A child for example, takes a
very short time to acquire an extensive knowledge and high degree of control over the language or
languages of his environment. A normal child of five can understand utterances that he has never heard
before, produce sentences that are totally new to him and to his listeners and he can use his knowledge of
speech to acquire the new skills of reading and writing.

33
The child can do all of this because somehow he has managed to extract from the speech he has heard,
the underlying system of the language. All normal children acquire the language that they hear spoken
around them without special instruction. However, it is impossible to know of any child exactly when he
started talking.

First, it is not clear what should count as the criterion – Is it the child’s ability to use single words
appropriately or his ability to construct two word utterances? A second reason is that the transition
between one identifiable stage of language development and another is gradual rather than abrupt.

During the past forty years, there have been two main theories to account for the phenomenon of language
acquisition by children. The first known as behaviorism was fully formulated by B.F. Skinner in ‘Verbal
Behavior’ (1957). This theory claims that language learning can be accounted for in very much the same
way as we can account for a dog standing on its hind legs to beg for a biscuit, i.e. By training, stimulation,
imitation, reward and repetition. In the end there is habit formation with the child having made language a
habit.

The second theory known as Mentalism argues that just as human children are genetically programmed to
walk when they reach a certain stage of development, so they are programmed to talk. Research indicates
that children of all nationalities irrespective of color, race, class or intelligence learn language in regular
steps. They move from babbling to one-word utterances, then to combining two words until their speech
is indistinguishable from the adult norms of their community. Mentalists suggest that language is as natural
a part in the development of human beings as the growth of the body. However, it is true that there has to
be a right environment – exposure to speech, then, the child automatically acquires language. If a child is
not exposed to language, she will not learn it.

Psycholinguists also attempt to understand dysphasia (bad speech), dyslexia (word blindness) and aphasia
(sudden loss or gradual loss of language due to an accident or a stroke. We all have experience of aphasia
when we cannot remember a word, e.g. when we say ‘Give me the fork’ when we mean spoon or knife.
The slips we make are quite interesting. If you look at the items fork, spoon and knife, they have a lot in
common. They are all nouns; all cutlery and they are all normally found in thekitchen.

Such slips suggest that we may store words with similar meanings together, or sometimes we store words
with similar sounds together, e.g. when we say ‘wooden’ instead of ‘woolen’.

ACTIVITY

Think of and list any slips of the tongue you or people around you
often make.
State whether they are lexical or phonological.

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LESSON 10

LANGUAGE AND HISTORY

At the end of this lesson, you should be able to:

 Understand the relationship between linguistics and History.
 Explain the method of language reconstruction and classification known as the
comparative method.
 Explain the concepts of ‘basic vocabulary’ and ‘cognates’ as used in Historical
linguistics.

How does linguistics relate to history?

When you are studying changes in language over a period of time, e.g. how language was spoken in the
past in relation to how it is spoken presently, you are in the branch of linguistics known as Historical
linguistics.

What is now called historical linguistics was developed in the course of the 19th century. Scholars had
been aware that languages change with time. They knew for instance that many of the modern languages
of Europe were descended in some sense, from more ancient languages. For instance, it was known that
English developed from Anglo-Saxon and that what we now know as the Romance languages i.e. French,
Spanish, Italian etc, all had their origin in Latin.

However, up to the time the principles of historical linguistics were established, it was not generally
realized that language change is universal, continuous and to a considerable degree regular. The
transformation of one language into another is not sudden, but gradual. Linguistic communities break into
several parts due to long journeys by groups of speakers. The incursion of a foreign group in such a way
as to form an effective barrier, migration by groups of speakers in different directions. Once this happens,
the languages they speak change independently of each other.

Historical linguists use the comparative method of language reconstruction and classification. This method
enables them to reconstruct features of the original un-separated community on the basis of
corresponding features of the descendant languages.

Generally, we are aware that resemblances can be due to:

1. Chance
2. Universal linguistic features
3. Inheritance
4. Borrowing

35
Resemblances due to inheritance are evidence of historical contacts between languages. However, such
resemblances can also be due to borrowing. Genetically related languages are supposed to be later forms
of a single earlier language. In such languages, we find so many resemblances that neither accident
(chance) nor borrowing will explain them.

Comparative linguistic work starts with vocabulary items. Word lists are matched on the basis of glosses
(their meanings) for the several items in some three languages for example. Vocabulary items are divided
into basic and cultural vocabularies. The basic vocabulary consists of words for the lower numerals,
pronouns, parts of the body, natural objects (animals, plants, heavenly bodies etc). These represent
recurrent things and situations for which every community (regardless of culture or environment) has
words.

The basic vocabulary is likely to produce a maximum proportion of inheritance similarities and a minimum
of borrowing similarities. You ought to begin your analysis by looking at word pairs that seem likely to be
resemblant due to inheritance. You note the observable sound/meaning correspondences in the different
lists. You then identify words, which seem to have originated from the same historical source. Such
words are called cognates.

 Genetically related languages are normally represented on a family tree that shows the history of a
language family as involving a number of splits or (divergences). The nodes of the branches
represent proto languages (parent languages) that branch into various genetically related
languages. The relationship is that of sisterhood (with respect to one another). We therefore have
sister languages and languages are traced back to common parent languages (proto languages).
Languages can be siblings. The following languages are siblings and the examples of words given
in these languages are cognates i.e. they originated from the same historical source.

GERMANIC LANGUAGES

Swedish man son hem har mus hus

English man son home hair mouse house
German mann sohn heim haar maus haus

36
LESSON 11

LANGUAGE AND SOCIOLOGY

At the end of this lesson, you should be able to;

 Understand the relationship between language and Sociology.

 Have some basic idea of what areas are covered in Sociolinguistics.
 Explain the idea of dialects as studied by Sociolinguists.

When you study language in relation to society you are in a branch of linguistics known as
Sociolinguistics. This branch of linguistics tries to examine how and why people use language as they
interact with other members of their society. One of the areas that Sociolinguistics examines is variety in
language and it has shown that language is not just used to communicate ideas but also to communicate
our opinion of others and ourselves.

A very simple utterance can for example reveal so much about the speaker, such as sex, approximate age,
regional and may be ethnic origins, level of education and attitude towards his listeners. Sociolinguistics
also examines language use in bilingual communities. Sociolinguists therefore examine language use,
variation, development, change, standardization, regional and class dialects, lingua francae, pidgins,
Creoles etc

DIALECTS

Sociolinguists are often preoccupied with studying dialects in language. Changes in a language’s grammar,
e.g. Syntax, phonology, morphology etc take place gradually. Often such a change originates in one
region and slowly spreads to others. Such a change may take place slowly over generations of speakers.
When a change occurs in one place and fails to spread to other regions of the same speech community, a
dialect difference occurs.

The question of the difference between a dialect and a language is usually not very easy to answer.
Whatever criterion you apply, you will often find instances where your conclusions conflict with those of
common sense or popular usage. For political reasons what is officially accepted as a national form of
speech may be considered a language whereas the variety that is not officially recognized is considered a
dialect. For the same reasons the language of a minority group may have no official recognition and may
therefore be considered a dialect. It is absurd to treat as a dialect a form of speech belonging to a different
language family.

37
Some people say that a language is a form of speech that has given rise to a literature whereas a dialect
has not. Two dialects may both have developed a literature but may be closely related. Which one in this
case should be considered the dialect and which one the language?

A better approach to the question of dialects or to the question of distinction between a dialect and a
language is a purely linguistic one. If the speakers of one community can understand the speakers of
another community without a previous study of their way of speaking, then the two communities may be
said to speak the same language. The distinction between a dialect and a language is not precise and
therefore any precise definition would be an inaccurate one.

Most languages probably began as dialects, then, with time the difference between two dialects became so
pronounced that it was more reasonable to think of them as different languages. From a linguistic point of
view, the term ‘language’ can be used to refer to a single linguistic norm or a group of norms. ‘Dialect’
can then be used to refer to one of these norms. However, the norms themselves are not static - they are
subject change.

It is possible to have a language that is made of only one dialect. A dialect can therefore be a language and
vice versa. Dialects vary in prestige and criteria. Some dialects are more prestigious than others. It is also
difficult to find precise criteria for classifying dialects. A dialect is not necessarily sub-standard. Each one
of us speaks a dialect of one language or another.

A dialect difference may be confined to a particular region - this is referred to as a regional dialect.
Another dialect may be related to stratification within the society, i.e. it may be spoken along class lines
– this is a social dialect.

DEGREE OF MUTUAL INTELLIGIBILTY

In order for us to conclude that two or more varieties are actually dialects of the same language will
depend on the degree of intelligibility. That is the degree to which the people speaking the two dialects
understand one another. This is referred to as mutual intelligibility

Normally the linguist would use her linguistic training to make up her mind as to whether two varieties can
be considered dialects of the same language or not. In practice however, there are many non- linguistic
factors at play. For example, you may find that speakers consider speech forms that would objectively be
viewed as having roughly the same degree of similarity separate languages. This may be due to the fact
that the speakers belong to different political camps or religious affiliations.

ACTIVITY

Think of the language(s) that you speak. Do you know of the

existence of dialects within those languages? If so, are they
considered dialects on purely linguistic reasons or is it the social
considerations of the speakers of these dialects?

38
SECTION THREE

DIFFERENT LEVELS OF LANGUAGE STUDY

LESSON 12

PHONETICS

At the end of this lesson, you should be able to:

 Show some understanding the general areas of phonetics, i.e.
articulatory phonetics, acoustic phonetics and Auditoryphonetics.
 The three systems of bodily organs needed in the production of
speech
 Describe the various organs of speech in the vocal tract.
 Describe the concepts of passive and active articulators.

Phonetics is the general study of the characteristics of speech sounds. There are three main areas of
phonetics.

1. Articulatory Phonetics. This is the area that deals with the way in which speech sounds are
produced.
2. Acoustic phonetics. This is the area that deals with the transmission of speech sounds through the
air. When a speech sound is produced, it causes minor air disturbances (SOUND WAVES).
Various instruments are used to measure the characteristics of these sounds waves.
3. Auditory phonetics. This is the area that deals with how speech sounds are perceived by the
listener via the ear. It is also known as perceptual phonetics.

Our main interest for this unit will be articulatory phonetics – how speech sounds are produced.

THE PRODUCTION OF SPEECH

The organs of speech.

Strictly speaking there are no organs of speech, i.e. organs that are just set aside for speech and nothing
else. The parts of the body that produce speech sounds are very important for this purpose. But they all
have other duties. We can call these other duties the primary duties or primary functions. These are
functions like chewing, breathing, swallowing and smelling. Speech is a secondary function of these
organs.

39
The organs that we use for talking, i.e. for producing speech sounds are basically the same in all human
beings. For instance, there are no racial differences in the way that they behave. If there are any differences
in the structure or the behavior of the human speech organs, it has never been established. We are
therefore saying that anybody who has no abnormalities is capable of producing any speech sound in the
world. There are therefore no unpronounceable sounds. Anybody is capable of producing any sound
without any difficulty.

So, why do we find it so difficult to pronounce sounds in languages other than our own? A child for
instance can easily attain the use of sounds in any language. But when we grow older and we are faced
with the task of learning a foreign language, it becomes very difficult. It is believed that we lose the ability
for attaining speech sounds at a certain age. However, it is not known exactly when this ability is lost. It
is said with no certainty that it probably happens during our early teens.

THE VOCAL TRACT

More than half of the human body from the head to the abdomen is needed for the production of spoken
language. There are three groups or systems of bodily organs that are brought into cooperation, i.e.,
which work together for this purpose. These are:

 The respiratory system.

 The phonatory system.
 The articulatory system.

THE RESPIRATORY SYSTEM.

This combines the lungs; the muscles, which are used to either, compress or dilate the lungs, the bronchial
tubes, and the windpipe or trachea. The primary function of the respiratory system is breathing and
thereby assuring the supply of oxygen.

The phonatory system is formed by the larynx, (or voice box). The front part of the voice box can usually
be observed in male adults referred to as the Adam’s apple. The primary function of the larynx is to act as
a valve – a safety valve that closes off the lungs. It closes off the lungs partly for their protection and
partly so that the rib cage can be made rigid while the arms exert muscular efforts.

THE ARTICULATORY SYSTEM.

This consists of the nose, the lips, the mouth and the contents of the mouth including especially the teeth
and the tongue. The ear is also included among the vocal organs even though it is not part of the
producing mechanism of speech. This is because speech is not very useful unless it is received and the
main organ of reception is the ear. The ear is important to the speaker as well as the listener because when
you speak you expect some feedback.

40
PASSIVE AND ACTIVE ARTICULATORS

The articulators are those vocal organs, which are situated along the vocal tract above the glottis (the
space between the vocal cords). In the production of sounds, one of the articulators is moved towards
another one in such a way that the outline of the vocal tract through which the air-stream has to pass, is
changed

The movable articulator, i.e. the one that moves, is called the active articulator and it moves towards a
passive articulator. Most of the passive articulators are attached to the immovable upper jaw. Most of the
active articulators lie on the lower side or the floor of the vocal tract. Articulatory movements are
therefore most of the time, upward movements

The passive articulators are:

 The upper lip.

 The upper teeth.
 The roof of the mouth.
 The back wall of the throat (or pharynx).

The active articulators are:

 The lower lip.

 The tongue, i.e. the upper surface of the tongue.
 The lower teeth.
 The uvula.

VOICED AND VOICELESS SOUNDS

Sounds can be described as either being voiced or voiceless. We begin by looking at the air, as it is being
pushed out by the lungs up through the windpipe (the trachea) into the larynx. Inside the larynx are the
vocal cords. The vocal cords can take various positions. However, for our purposes, there are two
important positions:

1. When the vocal cords are spread wide apart, the air from the lungs passes through them
unimpeded. Sounds produced in this way are described as voiceless.
2. When the vocal cords are drawn together, the air from the lungs repeatedly pushes them
apart as it passes through. This creates a vibration. Sounds produced in this way are
described as voiced.

The sound, which is usually represented by letter (f) in English, is voiceless whereas the sound usually
represented by letter (v) is voiced.

41
 ACTIVITY

Place your open palm to the front of your neck and try to say
the two sounds f and v. You will notice that when you say f
there will not be any vibration. But there is a vibration when
you say
v. That is the difference between voiced and voiceless sounds.
When you feel the vibration, you are producing a voiced sound.
When you feel no vibration, you are producing a voiceless
sound

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LESSON 13

PLACE AND MANNER OF ARTICULATION.

At the end of this lesson, you should be able to:

 Describe the difference between place and manner of articulation
with regard to the production of sounds.
 Distinguish between consonants and vowels.
 Provide if asked, some examples of consonants and vowels.

PLACE OF ARTICULATION

Once the air has passed through the larynx, it comes up and out through the mouth or the nose. Inside the
mouth the air is modified, there is some kind modification depending on the organ that is involved. It
could be the tongue and other parts of the mouth. The result is that the oral cavity (the passage through
the mouth) is constricted. We therefore describe sounds in terms of place of articulation, i.e. the location
inside the mouth where the constriction takes place.

MANNER OF ARTICULATION

This refers to the way in which a sound is made. For example, is the air flowing freely through the mouth
or is there an obstruction. If there is any kind of obstruction, the phonetician normally describes the type
of obstruction.

A distinction is usually made between consonants and vowels.

CONSONANTS

Consonants are sounds that are produced with some kind of obstruction in the vocal tract.

VOWELS

These are sounds that are made without any obstruction, i.e. there is a relatively free flow of air.

MANNER OF ARTICULATION

There are several sounds that can be described in terms of their manner of articulation:

Plosives These involve a complete closure at some point in the mouth.

Pressure builds up inside the mouth, i.e. behind the closure. When

43
 the air is released, a plosive is made. Examples of plosives are p, b,
k, g etc.

Fricatives These sounds are the result of incomplete closure at some point in
the mouth. The air escapes through a narrowed channel with some
friction. Examples of fricatives are, f, v, s etc.

Trills These involve intermittent closure. The sounds can be produced by

tapping the tongue repeatedly against a point of contact. An
example of a trill is r.

Laterals These sounds also involve partial closure in the mouth. The air-
stream is blocked by the tip of the tongue but allowed to escape
around the sides of the tongue. In English we have the l, which is a
lateral.

Nasals These sounds involve the complete closure in the mouth. The
velum is lowered and most of the air escapes through the nose.
Examples of nasals are m, n etc.

Affricates These are a combination of sounds. Initially, there is a complete

closure as for a plosive. This is then followed by a slow release
withfrictionasforafricative. Examplesofaffricatesarefspeltch
as in ‘chew’; ¢ spelt dg as in ‘judge’.

Frictionless continuants. The r sound associated with BBC English is a frictionless

continuant. The closure is made as for the fricatives but the air is
released with less pressure.

Semi-vowels The sounds that begin the words ‘you’ and ‘wet’ are made without
a closure in the mouth. We therefore say that they are vowel like.
Phonetically they are represented by j and w respectively.

CONTINUANTS AND NON-CONTINUANTS

All sounds can be subdivided into continuants and non-continuants. Continuants are sounds that in
articulation can be continued as long as one has breathe, e.g. vowels, fricatives, laterals etc. Non-
continuants are those sounds that one cannot prolong, e.g. plosives, affricates and semi vowels.

PLACE OF ARTICULATION

Following are the eight commonest places of articulation:

Bilabial These are produced when the lips come together as in the sounds p, b, m etc.

44
Labio-dental These are produced when the lower and the upper teeth come together as for the
sounds f and v.

Dental These are produced where the tip or the blade of the tongue comes in contact with
the upper teeth as in [0] spelt th as in ‘think’ and [ð] also spelt th as in ‘that’.

Alveolar These are produced when the tip of the tongue touches the alveolar ridge that is
directly behind the upper teeth. Examples of sounds produced at the alveolar ridge
are, t, d, s, z etc.

Palato-alveolar There are two points of contact for these sounds. The tip of the tongue is close to
the alveolar ridge while the front of the tongue is curved towards the roof of the
mouth. Sounds produced at this point of articulation are for example ¢ and f.

Palatal For palatal sounds, the front of the tongue approximates the hard palate. You can
have palatal plosives, fricatives, laterals etc. However, in English there is only one
palatal, i.e. j as in ‘yet’

Velar For velars, the back of the tongue approximates to the soft palate. At this place, we
can have plosives k and g.

THE INTERNATIONAL PHONETIC ALPHABET (IPA)

The International Phonetic Alphabet is a regular economical system of notation for describing the sounds
that occur in speech. This alphabet is based on the ordinary Roman alphabet supplemented by other
symbols so as to provide scholars with techniques for representing all possible sounds.

DESCRIPTION OF SOUNDS

Consonants are usually described using three parameters:

1. State of the glottis –position of the vocal cords.
2. Place of articulation.
3. Manner of articulation.

VOWELS

There are three sets of categories used in the description of vowels. The first category involves the
openness of the mouth or height of the tongue. When talking about the openness of the mouth, we are
referring to the position of the tongue in relation to the roof of the mouth. How high or how low the
tongue is in relation to the roof of the mouth. A close vowel is produced with the tongue close to the roof
of the mouth, e.g. i. In a close vowel, there is contact of the sides of the tongue with the upper back teeth
and the sides of the roof of the mouth. In an open vowel, there is no contact of articulators.

The other category is that of the general area of the tongue and the area of the mouth in which the sound
is made, e.g. is it the front central or back of the mouth.

45
A third set of categories is relevant to the description of vowel sounds involving the shape of the lips
whether rounded or spread (unrounded).

We can then label a vowel by first giving the category for height, then tongue position, then lip shape.

CARDINAL VOWELS

The most useful method of describing vowels is in terms of the cardinal vowel chart. This is a
representation of the cubic area of the mouth. We can name primary cardinal vowels – there are eight of
them. The cardinal vowels are the highest points of the tongue during the pronunciation of each vowel.

C1 This is represented by i. This is a front close vowel made with the lips spread. It is similar to
the vowel in ‘tree’.
C2 this is a front half-close vowel represented by e as in the first vowel in
‘acorn’. C3 This is a front half-open vowel made with spread lips as in ‘get’.
C4 This is an open front vowel represented by a, made with spread lips. It is the lowest
vowel capable of being made at the front of the mouth as in the first vowel in ‘father’.
C5 This is a low back vowel made with neutrally open lips represented by á and is similar in quality
to the vowel sound in ‘dance’.
C6 This is a half-open back vowel made with slightly rounded lips represented by 3 as in
‘dawn’. C7 This is a half-close back vowel with rounded lips represented by o as in ‘know’.
C8 This is a close back vowel with very closely rounded lips represented by u, and is the
furthest back closest vowel we are capable of making. It is the vowel in ‘two’.

46
LESSON 14

PHONOLOGY

At the end of this lesson, you should be able to:

 Explain what phonology is about.
 Describe the concepts of, ‘phone’, ‘phoneme’, and ‘allophone’.
 Explain the idea of minimal pairs and minimal sets.

Phonology is essentially the description of the systems and patterns of speech sounds in a language or in
language. It is in effect based on what every speaker of a language unconsciously knows about the sound
pattern of that language. Because of this theoretical status, phonology is concerned with the abstract or
mental aspect of the sounds in language rather than with the physical articulation of the sounds.

We can therefore say for example that the p sounds in the pronunciation of ‘pin’ and ‘spin’ are actually
the same sound. This is because in the phonology of English they could be represented in the same way
even though in actual speech they could be quite different.

In the first instance, the fact that p in ‘pin’ occurs in initial position may give us a very different quality of
the sound, different from the p in ‘spin’. But in the phonology of English this distinction is not important
like the distinction between p and b for instance in words like ‘pin’ and ‘bin’. In these two examples there
are meaningful consequences related to the use of one sound rather than the other. In other words the two
words are different in meaning because of the fact that one is said with a b rather than a p. these sounds
are distinct meaningful sounds in English regardless of who is pronouncing them.

If we look at phonology from this point of view, we see that it is actually concerned with the abstract set
of sounds, which allows us to distinguish meaning in the actual physical sounds we say and hear.

PHONEMES

Phonemes are the meaning-distinguishing sounds in a language. The phoneme /p/ for instance is the single
sound type that came to be represented by a single symbol. All the other different versions are variants of
it. Slash marks are used to indicate a phoneme as opposed to square brackets [p] used for each phonetic or
physically produced segment.

An essential property of a phoneme is that it functions contrastively. This is the basis of determining
phonemes, i.e. whether or not they distinguish meaning in a language. When we substitute one sound for
another in a word and end up with a change in meaning, those two sounds are said to be phonemes.

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MINIMAL PAIRS AND MINIMAL SETS

When two words are identical in form except for a contrast in one phoneme occurring in the same
position, the two words are described as a minimal pair if substituting one sound for the other results in a
different word, e.g. sip and zip constitute a minimal pair since it is the substitution of s for z that is
responsible for the change in meaning.

When a group of words are differentiated each one from the other by changing one phoneme (always in
the same position), then we have a minimal set.

Big Pig
Rig Fig
Dig Wig

Constitute a minimal set based on the initial consonants.

Fought Foot
Fit Fate

Is a minimal set based on the medial vowels?

PHONES AND ALLOPHONES

Whereas a phoneme is an abstract unit of sound, there can be different phonetic realizations of any
phoneme. These phonetic units are technically described as phones. In English the /p/ phoneme is realized
differently depending on whether it occurs in initial position or in non-initial position. In initial position it
is produced with aspiration [p] whereas in non-initial position it is produced without aspiration. In words
like pot, pit, pin etc, p is pronounced with aspiration whereas in words like spot, spit and spin it is
pronounced without aspiration.

We therefore have at least two phones for each /p/ phoneme in English, [p] and [p]. These phonetic
variants are allophones. The important distinction between phonemes and allophones is that substituting
one phoneme for another will result in a word with a different meaning but substituting allophones only
results in a different pronunciation of the same word.

ACTIVITY
Think of pairs of words in your language that constitute
minimal pairs or minimal sets. Are there other pairs that can
determine the existence of allophones in your language?

48
LESSON 15

MORPHOLOGY

At the end of this lesson, you should be able to:

 Say what Morphology is all about.
 Explain the concepts of the ‘Morph’, the ‘Allomorph’ and the
‘Morpheme’

This is the study of word structure. In morphology, we try to see how strings of sound combine to form
meaningful elements. In this level of language study, we analyze all those basic elements that are used in a
language. These elements are referred to as Morphemes. E.g.

Walks
Walked
Walker
Walking

All consist of a basic element walk and a number of other elements such as -s, -ed, -er, -ing that are all
described as morphemes. A morpheme is a minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function. The word
‘walkers’ therefore has three morphemes:

Walk – verb
er-doer
s – third person singular marker

FREE AND BOUND MORPHEMES

Free morphemes

Free morphemes are those that can stand by themselves as single words, e.g. close, come, girl etc. Free
morphemes fall into two categories. The first category is that set of ordinary nouns, adjectives and verbs.
We think of these as the words that carry the content messages that we convey. They are called lexical
morphemes

The other group of free morphemes are called functional morphemes, e.g. and, but, when, because, on, in,
above. This set consists largely of the functional words in the language, e.g. prepositions, conjunctions,
articles and pronouns.

Bound morphemes are those that cannot normally stand alone but must be attached to other forms e.g. re-
, -ist, -s, -ed etc. re-, -ist, -s, -ed are also known as affixes, i.e. bits of language that are not usually

49
given separate listings in dictionaries. Bound morphemes can also be divided into two types - derivational
morphemes and inflectional morphemes.

Derivational morphemes are used to make new words in the language and are often used to make words
of a different grammatical category from the stem. Therefore the addition of the morpheme –ish to the
noun ‘fool’ changes it to an adjective.

Inflectional morphemes are not used to produce new words, but rather to indicate aspects of the
grammatical function of a word. In English inflectional morphemes are used to show whether a word is
singular or plural, past tense or not and if it is comparative or possessive form.

When free morphemes are used with bound morphemes, the basic word-form involved is technically
known as a stem.

Un lock ed
Prefix stem suffix
Bound free bound

The term prefix refers to the affix that comes before the stem whereas the term suffix refers to the affix
that comes after the stem.

MORPHS AND ALLOMORPHS

Morphs are the actual physical realizations of the morphemes. [buk] is a single morph realizing a single
lexical morpheme ‘book’. [buks] are two morphs realizing two different morphemes – a lexical and a
bound morpheme.

When a single morpheme is realized in two different ways, i.e. as two morphs, the two morphs are referred
to as allomorphs. E.g. in English, the plural morpheme is realized as [s], [z], [iz], [en] and zero [Ø] in
words like books, bags, boxes, oxen and the plural for sheep.

ACTIVITY

Identify the morphemes in the following words:

Talking, reads, booking, realized, unfaithfully,nationality.

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LESSON 16

SYNTAX

At the end of this lesson, you should be able to:

 Say what Syntax is about.
 Demonstrate an understanding of ‘the phrase’.
 Describe the different types of phrases.

Syntax deals with how words combine to form larger units. We shall look at three of these units – the
phrase, the clause and the sentence.

THE PHRASE

We can define a phrase as a group of words that functions as a unit and does not contain a finite verb, that
is with the exception of the verb phrase itself. A finite verb is a verb that can take as its subject a pronoun
such as ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘he,’ ‘she’, ‘it’ and ‘they’, so that we can say;

I see
He sees
They saw
Etc.

BUT NOT

*I seeing
*He to see
*We seen

And we can say that the present participle e.g. ‘seeing’, the infinitive, e.g. ‘to see’, and the past
participle ‘seen’ which are non-finite verb-forms can occur in phrases.

1. Standing upright, he recited the national anthem.

2. Bending low, he walked awkwardly into the hut.
3. Seen from this angle, the city looks beautiful.
4. His dream was to see the city of Jerusalem one more time.

There are five commonly occurring phrases in English; Noun phrases, Adjective phrases, verb phrases,
adverb phrases and preposition phrases.

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The noun phrase

This is a group of words with a noun as its headword. E.g.

The rich girl threw the poor girl a cake.

The two phrases ‘the rich girl’ and ‘the poor girl’, both have the word ‘girl’ as their headword.
The phrase ‘a cake’ has ‘cake as its headword.

The adjective phrase

This is a group of words that modifies a noun. Just like adjectives, these words can be attributive
(preceding a noun) but will occasionally follow a noun. E.g.

The utterly ridiculous play was banned.

The adjective phrase can also occur predicatively (following a verb).

The man was unbelievably polite.

The verb phrase

This is a group of words with a verb as a headword. Verb phrases can be finite,

He has been drinking

Or non-finite,

He was said to have drunk a lot of porridge.

The adverb phrase

This is a group of words that functions like an adverb. It plays the role of telling us when, where, why or
how an event occurred.

We are expecting him to arrive next semester.

He almost always arrives late.

The preposition phrase

This is a group of words that begins with a preposition.

He arrived by air.
Do you know that girl with a headscarf?

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LESSON 17

THE CLAUSE

At the end of this lesson, you should be able to:

 Understand what the clause is.
 Explain the different types of clauses.

A clause is a group of words that contains a finite verb but which cannot occur in isolation, i.e. a clause
constitutes only part of a sentence. In each complex sentence we have at least two clauses: a main clause
(one that is most like a simple sentence) and at least one subordinate or dependant clause.

He believed that the sky was blue.

Main clause

A NOUN CLAUSE

This is a group of words containing a finite verb and functioning like a noun.

He said that he was tired.

What you said was not
true.

Noun clauses can often be replaced by pronouns, e.g.

He said it.

If you are not sure how a clause functions in sentence, you should try and see what can be substituted for
it.

I shall always remember Mary.

Her.
Her kindness
What Mary has done.

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The adjective clause

This is often called a relative clause because it usually relates back to a noun whose meaning it modifies.

The man who taught me English is now in England.

The girl, whom we met on the street, is coming to visit us today.

An adverbial clause

An adverbial clause functions like an adverb in giving information about when/where/why/how an

action occurred.

When he arrived, we were asleep.

They won the game because they were the best players.

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LESSON 18

THE SENTENCE

At the end of this lesson, you should be able to:

 Understand what a sentence is.
 Describe the various types of sentences.
 Explain the difference between, Simple, Compound and
complex sentences

Bloomfield (1933) defined the sentence thus: “Each sentence is an independent linguistic form, not
included by virtue of any grammatical construction in any larger linguistic form.” The following are
examples of sentences in English.

The girl died.

The cat chased the
rat. The girl is a
secretary. The boy is
very tall.
The boy ran up the stairs.

In the written medium, you can define a sentence as that linguistic unit that begins with a capital
letter and ends with a full stop. Sentences can be divided into four subtypes:

1. Declarative sentences which make statements or assertions, e.g.

I shall arrive at 2.00 p.m.

You are not the only
student.
We must never forget that date.

2. Imperative sentences that give orders, make requests and usually have no overt subject, e.g.

Come
here. Shut
up.
Don’t walk on the
grass. Try to understand

3. Interrogative sentences that ask questions, e.g.

Did you see your brother yesterday?

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When did he come?

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 Why don’t they serve rice here?

4. Exclamatory sentences which are used to express alarm, surprise or a strong opinion, e.g.

You can’t be
serious! What a fool
I was!
She is going to win!

Sentences are also distinguished according to whether they are simple, compound or complex.

Simple sentences contain only one finite verb, e.g.

Water freezes at zero degrees centigrade.

You must never say such things.

The finite verb may be composed of up to four auxiliaries plus a head verb, e.g.

He may have been being deceived the whole time.

Headverb

Compound sentences consist of two or more simple sentences linked by the coordinating conjunctions
(and, but, so, either – or, neither – nor, then and yet), e.g.

He ran out and bumped into his father.

He could neither sit nor sleep.

Complex sentences consist of one simple sentence and one or more subordinate (or dependant) clauses,
e.g.

She became president when her father died because she was the youngest child.

In the sentence above, there is one main clause (she became president), and two subordinate clauses
(when her father died, because she was the youngest child). Notice that each clause has a finite verb
(became, died, was), and each subordinate clause begins with a subordinating conjunction. Other
examples of subordinating conjunctions are:

After: She went to school after she had taken breakfast.

Because: He left the school because he did not like
reading. Before: He arrived before the sun rose.

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LESSON 19

SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS.

At the end of this lesson, you should be able to:

 Explain the notions of Semantics and Pragmatics.
 To describe the different terms used in both Semantics and Pragmatics.
 Show how the areas of language study differ from one another.
 Say how the two areas of language study complement the other areas.

Both semantics and pragmatics are concerned with aspects of meaning in language. Semantics deals
with word and sentence meaning whereas Pragmatics deals with the characterization of speaker
meaning.

In semantics we refer to the aspects of conventional meaning that we assume are conveyed by the words
and sentences of a language. There is a distinction between Conceptual and Associative meaning.

Conceptual meaning covers those basic essential components of meaning that are conveyed by the literal
use of a word. The word ‘needle’ for example has the basic meaning of thin, sharp, steel instrument.
These components are part of the conceptual meaning. However, you may have associations or
connotations attached to a word, e.g. ‘painful’. This is an association that is not treated as part of the
conceptual meaning.

How is the study of semantics useful in the study of language?

Semantics supplements other levels of language study, e.g. syntax.

The rice ate the man.

Syntactically, this sentence is well structured. But semantically, these sentences are odd. The oddness
relates to the components of the noun ‘rice’ that differ significantly from those of the noun ‘man’. The
kind of nouns that can be subjects of the verb ‘eat’ must be entities that are capable of ‘eating’. The
noun ‘rice’ does not have this quality whereas ‘man’ does.

We can use semantic features to distinguish the meanings of words, e.g. we can say that for a noun to be
the subject of the verb ‘ate’ it must have the component, ‘animate being’. So we can say that a word

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which is +animate (=denotes an animate being) or –animate (=does not denote an animate being). This
procedure is a means of analyzing words in terms of semantic features.

+Animate
-Animate
+Human
-Human
+Male
-Male

The examples above can be said to be basic features that are used in differentiating the meanings of each
word in the language from every other word. We can then characterize a feature that is crucially
required in a noun in order for it to appear as the subject of a verb. This supplements the syntactic
analysis with the semantic features.

The is baking a cake.

N(+human)

This approach then gives us the ability to predict what nouns would make the above sentence
semantically odd, e.g. tree, dog, table, etc.

There are certain terms that are usually used to describe relationships between words in a language.

HOMOPHONY
When two or more written forms have the same pronunciation, they are described as homophones, e.g.
‘bear’ and ‘bare’, ‘meet’ and ‘meat’, ‘pale’ and ‘pail’.

HOMONYMY

When one form (either written or spoken) has two or more unrelated meanings, e.g. ‘bank’ (of a river)
and “bank’ (financial institution), ‘pupil’ (school pupil) and ‘pupil’ (of the eye); they are homonyms.
Homonyms are therefore words that have quite separate meanings but have accidentally come to have
the same phone.

POLYSEMY

Relatedness of meaning accompanying related forms is known as Polysemy.

If a word has multiple meanings (polysemic), then there will be a single entry in the dictionary with
a numbered list of the different meanings. The word ‘star’ for example is listed in the Oxford
English Dictionary with the following meanings:

1. Any one of the bodies seen in the sky at night as distant points of light.
2. Figure or design with points round it suggesting a star by its shape.
3. Planet or heavenly body regarded as influencing a person’s fortune.
4. Person famous as a singer, actor, actress etc.

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However, if two words are treated as homonyms, they will typically have two separate entries.

SYNONYMY

This is the relationship in which two or more words are in free variation in all or most contexts, e.g. the
words ‘tall’ and ‘high’ are in free variation when used with the noun ‘building’. You can say ‘a high
building’ or ‘a tall building’ but you can only use tall with the noun boy, i.e. you cannot say *‘a high
boy’.

However, if the synonyms are dialectal, e.g. one occurring in British and the other occurring in
American English, then they can be used interchangeably regardless of the context.

British United States

Autumn fall
Pavement sidewalk

ANTONYMY

This is the term applied to oppositeness of meaning, e.g.

Male/Female
Big/small
Good/bad

HYPONYMY

This is the relationship of inclusion. In other words, a term is said to include others, e.g.

Flower includes rose, daisy, water lily etc.

The including term, i.e. flower, is the super-ordinate term. The included terms are known as co-
hyponyms. When you say ‘This is a rose’, you are implying it is a flower. But when you say ‘This is a
flower’, you have not necessarily said it is a rose. The assertion of the super-ordinate therefore does not
automatically imply one specific hyponym. The implicational nature of hyponymy can therefore be said
to be unilateral i.e. it works only one way.

INTERPRETING WHAT SPEAKERS MEAN (PRAGMATICS)

There are other aspects of meaning that are not derived solely from the meanings of the words used in
phrases and sentences. When we hear utterances, we normally want to understand not only what the
words mean, but also what the writer or speaker of those words intended to convey, the study of
intended speaker meaning is called pragmatics.

Sometimes when we see or hear words, we use the words in combination with the context in which they
are said or written to interpret their intended meaning. For example, if you visit some hotels in Kenya

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you may hear the Kiswahili words ‘Nani mbuzi'? which literally translates as ‘who is a goat?’. However,
in this context most Kenyans will understand it to mean ‘who ordered goat meat?’ and not who is a
goat, which is the literal meaning

There are various types of contexts, e.g. linguistic context or co-text. Pupil is a homonym. We usually
know the intended meaning in a sentence on the basis of linguistic context, e.g.

These pupils are stupid.

Her pupils were
enlarged.

There is another type of context – physical context. If you see the word ‘bank’ on a building in the
city, the physical location will influence your interpretation of the meaning of the word. There are
certain words that depend on the immediate physical context in which they are uttered for their
interpretation. These are deictic expressions like here, there, this, that, now, then, yesterday etc,
pronouns like I, you, him, her, their etc. if someone says ‘I like living here’, does she mean, ‘in this
house, in this building, in this part of town, in this country or something else entirely?’

A deictic expression is a means of pointing with language and we can only interpret it in terms of the
location that the speaker intended to indicate in the above example.

PRESUPPOSITION

This is what a speaker assumes to be true or is known by the hearer. If someone asks you,

‘When did you get divorced?’

There are two presuppositions involved – that you used to be married and that now you are divorced

SPEECH ACTS

We normally know how a speaker wants us to interpret the function of what he says, i.e. we can
recognize the type of act performed by a speaker in uttering a sentence. The term ‘speech act’ covers
actions such as requesting, commanding, questioning and informing.

Form Function
Did you go to school? Question
Go to school! Command
You went to school. Statement

When you use forms such as did he, can you, are they, to ask a question, we describe these as direct
speech. E.g. ‘Can you drive?’ is a question seeking information. ‘Can you pass the question paper?’ is
not supposed to be understood as a question about your ability to do something even though the request
is presented in a syntactic form normally associated with a question. This is an indirect speech act.

Indirect commands are considered more polite than direct commands. If I say ‘You are making noise’, I
am requesting indirectly that you keep quiet. This is more polite than saying ‘shut up!’

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 ACTIVITY
Think of and list examples of utterances that
you have had to
interpret using either the linguistic and/or
physical context.

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LESSON 20

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

At the end of this lesson, you should be able

to:
 Explain what Discourse Analysis is all about.
 Describe the ideas of connectedness, cohesion
and coherence in texts.

When we try to investigate language beyond the way in which language is used and what speakers
intend to say – we are now trying to investigate how speakers make sense of what they read in texts
and how speakers take part in conversations. This level of language study is known as Discourse
Analysis.

No money no love.

Would be interpreted appropriately by speakers as meaning that there cannot be love where there is no
money. The effort to interpret, to be interpreted and how we can accomplish this interpretation are the
key elements in the study of discourse.

COHESION

Texts must have a certain structure that depends on factors that are quite different from those required in
the structure of a single sentence. Some of those structures are described in terms of cohesion or the ties
and connections that exist within texts.

My grandmother once bought a miniskirt. She did it by saving money from her cotton sales.
That skirt could be worth one thousand shillings nowadays. However, she gave it to my elder
sister.

In the above example, there are connections created by the use of pronouns:

Grandmother is connected to the rest of the text by the pronouns – she, she, and she.
Miniskirt is connected to the rest of the text by the pronouns – it, that.

Other general connections created are once and nowadays.

When we analyze such cohesive links, we get to understand how writers structure what they want to say
and we can also be able to judge whether a text is well written or not. However, cohesion alone is not

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enough to enable us make sense of a text. The connectedness that we experience in our interpretation of
normal texts is not simply based on connections between words. There must be some other factor that
leads us to distinguish between texts that make sense and those that don’t.

This factor is known as Coherence. This is the relationship that links the meanings of utterances in a
text. These links may be based on the speakers’ shared knowledge, e.g.

A. Could you return this book to the library for me?

B. Sorry, I am going for a class.

In the example above, there is no grammatical or lexical link between A’s question and B’s answer. But
the exchange has coherence because both A and B know that classes take priority over going to the
library and that B can only go to the library when she does not have a class.

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REFERENCES FOR FURTHER READING

Crystal D. (1985a) 2nd Ed. Linguistics.

Crystal D. (1985b) What is Linguistics?
Fromkin V. and Rodman (1988). An Introduction to language.
Lyons J. (1968). Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics.
Lyons J. (1981) Language and Linguistics: An Introduction.
Loreto Todd (1987). An Introduction to Linguistics.
Yule G. (1985). The Study of Language.
Wallwork J.F. (1969) Language and Linguistics: An Introduction to the
Study of Language.

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