Lesson 1: Linguistics and Language: An Overview

Lesson 1:
Linguistics and Language: An
Overview

INTRODUCTION
As human beings, we possess one of the most important skills that we
sometimes take for granted. This skill is what we call language. Can you imagine any
activity which does not involve language at any point in time? This makes the study of
language more interesting and intriguing. When one studies a language, he or she
deals with linguistics. With that, one becomes a linguist at any rate.

In studying linguistics, a lot of questions are being asked as to how are

languages structured, how a language is acquired, or even ask why not all people
speak the same language among others.

As future language teachers in the new millennium, you have to seek answers
to these questions through giving keen attention in studying linguistics and its
intricacies. Along the way, you may find surprising answers and some of those will
prompt you to explore more profound interesting questions related to linguistics.

In this lesson, you will understand and learn the basics of linguistics, linguistics
and English language teaching, definition and origin of language, and views about
language. Your perspective of linguistics and language will be deemed beneficial for
English language teaching.

Time Frame: 1 week; 9 hours

At the end of the lesson, you can:

 define linguistics and language

 demonstrate familiarity with the origin of language

 determine the importance of language views in language learning and
teaching

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Engage L1

Think about these!

1. What do you call a person who studies language?
2. How do you think language originate?

How did you find the questions? Were you able

to at least give a certain answer to each
question?
If you find it hard to answer them, topics in
Lesson 1 will give you the answers.

Explore L1

Let’s try this out!

Instructions:
1. Get a clean sheet of A4 paper, a timer, and a pen.

2. In the middle of the paper, write the word “Linguistics”.

3. Set your timer for 2 minutes.
4. Turn on the timer and write as many words as you can which you can associate
with the term given. Ready, set, go!

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 Lesson 1: Linguistics and Language: An Overview

Explain L1

1. What is linguistics and how is it related to English language teaching?

2. What are the different language views and how important are they in language
learning and teaching?
3. How did language originate?
These questions will guide you as you read the study notes provided below. Read
and understand them well.

What is linguistics?
According to the Linguistic Society of America, linguistics is the scientific study
of language. Linguists apply the scientific method to conduct formal studies of speech
sounds, grammatical structures, and meaning across the world’s 6,000+
languages. Likewise, linguists study meaning, discourse, and many other language
aspects that you have always wondered about.

Moreover, when you study linguistics at any level, you gain insight into one of the
most fundamental parts of being human- the ability to communicate through
language. You can study every aspect of language from functional theory to language
acquisition, and computational linguistics to psycholinguistics. Studying linguistics
enables you to understand how language works, and how it is used, developed and
preserved over time.

It is also important to note that linguists are not only polyglots, grammarians, and
word lovers. They are researchers dedicated to the systematic study of language
who apply the scientific method by making observations, testing hypotheses, and
developing theories. The science of language encompasses more than sounds,
grammar, and meaning. When you study linguistics, you are at the crossroads of every
discipline.

What is Language?

Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and
using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system
of complex communication.

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The approximately 3000-6000 languages that are spoken by humans today are
the most salient examples, but natural languages can also be based on visual rather
than audible stimuli, for example in sign languages and written languages. Codes and
other signs of artificially constructed communication system such as those used for
computer programming can also be called languages. A language in this sense is a
system of signs for encoding and decoding information. The English word derives from
Latin lingua, “language, tongue”. This metaphoric relation between language and the
tongue exists in many languages and testifies to the historical prominence of spoken
languages. When used a s general concept, “language” refers to the cognitive faculty
that enables humans to learn and to use systems of complex communication.

The word “language” can also be used to describe the set of rules that makes
this possible, or the set of utterances that can be produced from those rules.

Languages evolve and diversify over time, and the history of their evolution can
be reconstructed by comparing modern languages to determine which traits their
ancestral languages must have had from the later to have occurred. A group of
languages that descend from a common ancestor is known as a language family.
The languages that are most spoken in the world today belong to the Indo-European
family, which includes languages such as English, Spanish, Russian and Hindi; the
Sino-Tibetan languages, which include Mandarin, Chinese, Cantonese and many
others; Semitic languages, which include Arabic and Hebrew; and the Bantu
languages, which include Swahili, Zulu, Xhosa and hundreds of other languages
spoken throughout Africa.

Language is a verbal or non-verbal expression and communication of ideas or

of emotions between or among human beings with the use of words, gestures, or
symbols as well understood by both the speakers and their listeners.

Simply put, language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human
communication.

How is linguistics related to English language teaching?

Teachers’ knowledge on the workings of language and language teaching are

essentially intertwined with each other. The teachers’ competence on how a language
behaves will certainly help teachers explain to the students how the language works,
as well as anticipate and respond appropriately to possible learning difficulties.
1. Knowledge of linguistics, specifically phonology, may be useful for explaining
interference problems that may be experienced by English language learners
with the English sound system. To illustrate, in the absence of the following
sounds such as /f/ and /v/ in Philippine languages, except in Ivatan and Ibanag,

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Filipino English learners are likely to use /p/ and /v/ as substitute sounds, e.g.,
/pæn/ for /fæn/ ‘ fan’ and /bæn/ for /væn/ ‘van’. Language teachers are advised
to remember that each language has its own inventory of phonemes that may
differ from that of another language. Such differences may result in using
sounds that only approximate the target sounds, as shown in the aforecited
examples.

2. Language teachers need to realize that grammatical units such as morphemes,

words, phrases and clauses behave quite differently across languages. For
example, plurality, and tense in English are expressed through inflections as is
{-s/ -es} and {-ed}. However, Tagalog plurality is expressed as separate words
as in mga bata ‘children’. Linguistically speaking, Tagalog verbs have no tense,
only aspects – perfective “kumain’ and imperfective ‘kumakain’, which may
explain the Filipinos’ problems in dealing with English tenses.

3. Helping students to discover the meaning of words by parsing them into small
parts depends heavily on the teacher’s knowledge of morphology or word
formation rules. To exemplify, students may parse or segment the following
words, taking note of the morpheme {-ment} that recurs in embarrassment,
government, disillusionment, enhancement. As students discover the meaning
of {-ment} as ‘state or condition’, they may be able to give the meaning of the
cited examples as: ‘state of being embarrassed’, ‘state of governing’, ‘state of
being disillusioned’, and ‘state of enhancing’. Hence, the process of word
formation such as derivation may help learners interpret and remember
meaning of words that follow certain patterns in forming short words into longer
words.

4. Teachers’ knowledge about larger units of language use – discourse structure

– may be relevant when teaching exchanges or conversations. The use of
language for social functions such as asking permission involves familiarity with
modals that express formality and a higher degree of politeness when speaking
with someone who is older, who occupies a higher position, or is an authority
than the speaker. In this context appropriacy has to be observed in selecting
modals. For example, it is appropriate to use may, not can when asking
permission from someone who is older, higher in position than the speaker. e.g.
May I use the office computer?

What are the views about language?

1. The Structuralists believe that language can be described in terms of
observable and verifiable data as it is being used. They also describe
language in terms of its structure and according to the regularities and
patterns or rules in language structure. To them, language is a system

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of speech sounds, arbitrarily assigned to the objects, states, and

concepts to which they refer, used for human communication.
Proponents of this view include Ferdinand de Saussurre and Noam
Chomsky.

 Language is primarily vocal. Language is speech, primarily made

up of vocal sounds produced by the speech apparatus in the human
body. The primary medium of language is speech; the written record
is but a secondary representation of the language. Writing is only the
graphic representation of the sounds of the language. While most
languages have writing systems, a number of languages continue to
exist, even today, in the spoken form only, without any written form.
Linguists claim that speech is primary, writing secondary. Therefore,
it is assumed that speech has a priority in language teaching.

 Language is a system of systems. Language is not a disorganized

or a chaotic combination of sounds. Sounds are arranged in certain
fixed or established, systematic order to form meaningful units or
words. For example, no word in English starts with bz-, lr- or zl-
combination, but there are those that begin with spr- and str- (as in
spring and string). In like manner, words are also arranged in a
particular system to generate acceptable meaningful sentences. The
sentence “Shen bought a new novel” is acceptable but the group of
words “Shen bought new novel a” is unacceptable, since the word
order of the latter violates the established convention in English
grammar, the Subject-Verb-Object or S-V-O word order.
Language is a system of structurally related elements or ‘building
blocks’ for the encoding of meaning, the elements being phonemes
(sounds), morphemes (words), tagmemes (phrases and
sentences/clauses). Language learning, it is assumed, entails
mastering the elements or building blocks of the language and
learning the rules by which these elements are combined, from
phoneme to morpheme to word to phrase to sentence.

 Language is arbitrary. There is no inherent relation between the

words of a language and their meanings or the ideas conveyed by
them. Put another way, there is no one to one correspondence
between the structure of a word and the thing it stands for. There is
no ‘sacred’ reason why an animal that flies is called ibon in Filipino,
pajaro in Spanish, bird in English. Selection of these words in the
languages mentioned here is purely an accident of history that native
speakers of the languages have agreed on. Through the years

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reference to such animal has become an established convention that

cannot be easily changed.
That language is arbitrary means that the relationship between
the words and the ‘things’ they denote is merely conventional, i.e.
native speakers of English, in some sense, agreed to use the sounds
/ kæt / ‘cat’ in English because native speakers of English ‘want’ it to
be.

 Language is a means of communication. Language is an

important means of communicating between humans of their ideas,
beliefs, or feelings. Language gives shape to people’s thoughts, as
well as guides and controls their activity.

2. The transformationalists/cognitivists believe that language is a

system of knowledge made manifest in linguistic forms but innate and,
in its most abstract form, universal. Proponents of this include Noam
Chomsky for the Theory of Universal Grammar and Jerry Fodor on
extreme Innatist Theory.

 Language is innate. The presence of the language acquisition device

(LAD) in the human brain predisposes all normal children to acquire
their first language in an amazingly short time, around five years
since birth.
 Language is creative. It enables native speakers to produce and
understand sentences they have not heard nor used before.
 Language is a mental phenomenon. It is not mechanical.
 Language is universal. It is universal in the sense that all normal
children the world over acquire a mother tongue but it is also
universal in the sense that, at a highly abstract level, all languages
must share key features of human languages, such as all languages
have sounds; all languages have rules that form sounds into words,
words into phrases and clauses; and all languages have
transformation rules that enable speakers to ask questions, negate
sentences, issue orders, defocus the doer of the action, etc.

3. The functionalists believe that language is a dynamic system through

which members of speech community exchange information. It is a vehicle for
the expression of functional meaning such as expressing one’s emotions,
persuading people, asking and giving information, making people do things for
others.
This view of language emphasizes the meaning and functions rather
than the grammatical characteristics of language, and leads to a language

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teaching content consisting of categories of meaning/notions and functions

rather than of elements of structure and grammar.
4. The interactionists believe that language is a vehicle for establishing
interpersonal relations and for performing social transactions between
individuals. It is a tool for creating and maintaining social relations through
conversations. Language teaching content, according to this view, may be
specified and organized by patterns of exchange and interaction.

How did language originate?

According to Richard Nordquist (2020), there are five of the oldest and most
common theories of how language began. These are the following:
The Bow-Wow Theory
According to this theory, language began when our ancestors started imitating
the natural sounds around them. The first speech was onomatopoeic—marked by
echoic words such as moo, meow, splash, cuckoo, and bang.

What's wrong with this theory? Relatively few words are onomatopoeic, and
these words vary from one language to another. For instance, a dog's bark is heard
as au au in Brazil, ham ham in Albania, and wang, wang in China. In addition, many
onomatopoeic words are of recent origin, and not all are derived from natural sounds.
The Ding-Dong Theory
This theory, favored by Plato and Pythagoras, maintains that speech arose in
response to the essential qualities of objects in the environment. The original sounds
people made were supposedly in harmony with the world around them.
What's wrong with this theory? Apart from some rare instances of sound
symbolism, there is no persuasive evidence, in any language, of an innate connection
between sound and meaning.
The La-La Theory

The Danish linguist Otto Jespersen suggested that language may have
developed from sounds associated with love, play, and (especially) song.
What's wrong with this theory? As David Crystal notes in "How Language
Works" (Penguin, 2005), this theory still fails to account for "... the gap between the
emotional and the rational aspects of speech expression... ."
The Pooh-Pooh Theory

This theory holds that speech began with interjections—spontaneous cries of

pain ("Ouch!"), surprise ("Oh!"), and other emotions ("Yabba dabba do!").

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What's wrong with this theory? No language contains very many

interjections, and, Crystal points out, "the clicks, intakes of breath, and other noises
which are used in this way bear little relationship to the vowels and consonants found
in phonology."
The Yo-He-Ho Theory

According to this theory, language evolved from the grunts, groans, and snorts
evoked by heavy physical labor.
What's wrong with this theory? Though this notion may account for some of
the rhythmic features of the language, it doesn't go very far in explaining where words
come from.
As Peter Farb says in "Word Play: What Happens When People Talk" (Vintage,
1993): "All these speculations have serious flaws, and none can withstand the close
scrutiny of present knowledge about the structure of language and about the evolution
of our species."
But does this mean that all questions about the origin of language are
unanswerable? Not necessarily. Over the past 20 years, scholars from such diverse
fields as genetics, anthropology, and cognitive science have been engaged, as
Kenneally says, in "a cross-discipline, multidimensional treasure hunt" to find out how
language began. It is, she says, "the hardest problem in science today."

As William James remarked, "Language is the most imperfect and expensive

means yet discovered for communicating thought."

Elaborate L1

Let your imagination work! - To be given in class

Evaluate L1

 To be given in class

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References

Linguistics. (2020) https://www.myucd.ie/courses/arts-humanities/linguistics/

https://www.bing.com/search?form=MOZTSB&pc=MOZD&q=linguistics

https://www.linguisticsociety.org/what-linguistics

Mehta, S.K. (2020). Handbookof Applied Language Linguistics and Literature. New Delhi, India: Ishika Publishing House.

Nordquist, R. (2020). Five Theories on the Origins of Language https://www.thoughtco.com/where-does-language-come-from-

1691015

Readers’ Digest Great Encyclopedia Dictionary, 1975

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