Basic English Syntax with Exercises

linguistics

1.1 Language, Grammar and Linguistic Theory

Whatever else language might be (e.g. a method of communicating, something to aid thought, a form of entertainment or of aesthetic appreciation) it is first and foremost a system that enables people who speak it to produce and understand linguistic expressions. The nature of this system is what linguistics aims to discover. But where do we look for this system? It is a common sense point of view that language exists in people’s heads. After all, we talk of knowing and learning languages. This also happens to be the belief of the kind of linguistics that this book aims to introduce: in a nutshell, the linguistic system that enables us to ‘speak’ and ‘understand’ a language is a body of knowledge which all speakers of a particular language have come to acquire.

1.1 Language, Grammar and Linguistic Theory

If this is true, then our means for investigating language are fairly limited – we cannot, for instance, subject it to direct investigation, as delving around in someone’s brain is not only an ethical minefield, but unlikely to tell us very much given our current level of understanding of how the mind is instantiated in the brain. We are left, therefore, with only indirect ways of investigating language. Usually this works in the following way: we study what the linguistic system produces (grammatical sentences which have certain meanings) and we try to guess what it is that must be going on in the speaker’s head to enable them to do this. As you can imagine, this is not always easy and there is a lot of room for differences of opinion. Some of us might tell you that that is exactly what makes linguistics interesting.

1.1 Language, Grammar and Linguistic Theory

So, presumably, what we have in our heads is a (finite) set of rules which tell us how to recognise the infinite number of expressions that constitute the language that we speak. We might refer to this set of rules as a grammar, though there are some linguists who would like to separate the actual set of rules existing inside a speaker’s head from the linguist’s guess of what these rules are. To these linguists a grammar is a linguistic hypothesis (to use a more impressive term than ‘guess’) and what is inside the speaker’s head IS language, i.e. the object of study for linguistics. We can distinguish two notions of language from this perspective: the language which is internal to the mind, call it I-language, which consists of a finite system and is what linguists try to model with grammars; and the language which is external to the speaker, E-language, which is the infinite set of expressions defined by the I-language that linguists take data from when formulating their grammars. We can envisage this as the following:

1.1 Language, Grammar and Linguistic Theory

Linguistic theories are no different from any other theory in this respect. All linguists base themselves on one theory or another. One group of linguists, known as generativists, claim that in order to do things properly we need to make our theories explicit. This can be seen as a reaction to a more traditional approach to linguistics which typically claims to operate atheoretically, but, in fact, makes many implicit assumptions about language which are themselves never open to investigation or challenge. Generative linguists point out that progress is unlikely to be made like this, as if these assumptions turn out to be wrong we will never find out, as they are never questioned. In order to find out if our assumptions are correct, they need to be constantly questioned and the only way to do this is to make them explicit.

1.3.1 Categorial features

One way to impose a system on elements is to use a set of features to distinguish between them. Each category can then be defined in terms of a unique collection of these features, but they may share some of the features with other categories, accounting for similarities between them. In linguistics, binary features, i.e. those which can be valued in one of two ways (plus or minus), have been found useful for producing systems of categorisation. For example, we might propose a feature [±F] (‘F’ to indicate functional) to distinguish between the thematic and functional categories. All thematic categories would possess the [–F] feature and all functional categories would possess the [+F] feature. In this way we can immediately distinguish between the two groups and account for why certain categories are similar to others in terms of which feature they possess.