1.1 INTRODUCTION
Every person knows a language; many people know more than one. But what do we really know about the language we use every day? What could we say, for example, about the five following sentences:
- (1) Impossible a was job it
- (2) I am hungry
- (3) Why you left wanted to know
- (4) Marilyn Monroe wants to become President of Great Britain
- (5) The tlint was beert
Everybody will probably agree that (1), (3) and (5) are not good, in contrast to sentences (2) and (4), which are at least well formed. In (1) the order of words is not correct; in (3) there is a word missing; and (5) contains two elements that are clearly not words of English. On what grounds can we make statements like these? Is our knowledge of language simply a collection of all the words and sentences we have ever heard? Could we say, for example, that (1) is not the sentence It was an impossible job? Have we perhaps once heard this last sentence and still remember it as a ācorrect English sentenceā? This is very unlikely, as we can demonstrate with example (4). Sentence (4) is good English, even though it is not true. We know that this is a well-formed English sentence, even though we probably have never heard it before. Language users are capable of deciding whether a sentence is good or not, not just on the basis of memory, but also on the basis of their knowledge of language. This knowledge of language is not conscious; it is rather abstract and often couched in general rules. As a consequence we may not find it easy to explain why a particular sentence is good or not.
What do we mean when we speak of āabstract knowledgeā here? This can be explained with help from the following example. Suppose somebody shows us an unknown object and calls it a pewt. What would we say if there were two of these objects? Most probably we would say two pewts. Speakers of English do not need time to think about this; they just know that the form pewten would not sound right, even though there are a few English plurals that take -en, such as oxen and children. We learn the basic rules for plural noun formation as children, at a very early age: catācats, dogādogs, houseāhouses, gooseāgeese and oxāoxen. But although we have this knowledge, many people may not be able to say why pewts is better than pewten. Knowing a language for most language users means that they can understand and produce it, but not necessarily that they can explain how the system works. For this reason we say that this knowledge is abstract and unconscious.
In this introductory chapter we will discuss the phenomenon of ālanguageā and the ways in which it is studied in the discipline of linguistics. In Section 1.2 we will review a number of important properties of language. āLanguageā is here taken to mean natural language, that is, languages that are spoken by humans, and that have developed in a natural way in the course of history, probably from some primitive communication system used by our ancestors. There are also, however, other kinds of language, such as the languages used for writing computer programs. These other kinds of languages, and the way they differ from human language, will be discussed in Section 1.3. In Section 1.4 we will consider the variation that exists within the natural languages, including the difference between sign languages and spoken languages. The ways in which language is studied in linguistics will be discussed in Section 1.5. An important aim of linguistics is to try and make explicit, often in the form of a grammar, the unconscious, abstract knowledge that people have of the languages they speak. Section 1.6 will consider the various different types of grammar we may distinguish, such as, for example, a grammar which describes the history of a language versus a grammar that aims to describe the current situation of that language. Finally, Section 1.7 presents an overview of the various subfields within linguistics. This section also serves as an introduction to the rest of the book.
1.2 LANGUAGES
In this section we will consider natural, human languages such as English, Hindi, Turkish, Swahili, etc. What is so special about language as a phenomenon? We can get an idea by looking at the properties of such languages.
Every language is used for general communication. Using a natural language, humans can in principle communicate with each other about anything in their world, from talking about the weather to writing or reading a scientific article about global warming. Depending on the subject a different jargon may be used ā when talking about football, people in a cafĆ© use words that are quite different from those used in a parliamentary debate about health insurance costs. These different jargons are, however, part of the language as a whole. Also, to a very large extent, they employ the same grammar.
As we said in the introduction, languages have a certain structure. We can establish the rules that the sentences of a language need to satisfy. The sum total of those rules is the grammar of that language. The sentence Tomorrow I will travel to Manchester is correct, but I tomorrow will travel to Manchester is not. This is not to say that the first sentence is the only option we have in English when we want to say ...
