- •Part one starting out
- •What is linguistics?
- •What is a linguist?
- •How does linguistics differ from traditional grammar?
- •The scope of linguistics
- •Questions
- •What is language?
- •Use of sound signals
- •The Need for Learning
- •Duality
- •Arbitrariness
- •Displacement
- •Creativity (Productivity)
- •Patterning
- •Structure dependence
- •Human language versus animal communication
- •Origin and functions of language
- •Questions
- •The study of language
- •Nineteenth century: historical linguistics
- •Early- to mid-20th century: descriptive linguistics
- •Generative linguistics and the search for universals
- •Questions
- •Deciding where to begin
- •Language as a game
- •Universal and particular
- •Questions
- •The inner circles
- •Sound patterns
- •Sorting out the basic sounds
- •The phonemes of English
- •Allophones
- •Sound combinations
- •Shared properties of phonemes
- •Metrical phonology
- •Questions
- •Words and pieces of words
- •Defining words
- •Morphemes
- •Recognition of morphemes
- •Types of morpheme
- •Allomorphs
- •Phonological conditioning
- •Word classes
- •Major word classes
- •Questions
- •Sentence patterns
- •Linking words together
- •Word order
- •Inflections
- •Function words
- •Constituent analysis
- •Tree diagrams
- •Rewrite rules
- •Identifying constituents
- •Adding in extra patterns
- •Layers of branches
- •Complex sentences
- •Questions
- •Meaning
- •Word meaning
- •Semantic fields
- •Coping with overlaps
- •Synonyms and opposites
- •Classification (inclusion)
- •The meaning of sentences
- •Questions
- •The outer rings
- •Using language
- •The cooperative principle
- •Speech acts
- •Remembered frameworks
- •Discourse analysis
- •Taking it in turns
- •Repairs
- •Politeness
- •Questions
- •Language and society
- •The notion of a language
- •Dialect and accent
- •Stylistic variation
- •Speech versus writing
- •The topic under discussion
- •The language of advertising
- •Change in language styles
- •Charting phonological variation
- •Phonological variation in British English
- •Social networks
- •Language and sex
- •Multilingual communities
- •Pidgins and Creoles
- •Questions
- •Language and mind
- •Psycholinguistic evidence
- •Acquiring language
- •The content-process controversy
- •The rule-governed nature of child language
- •Learning the meaning of words
- •Understanding syntax
- •Recognizing words
- •Speech production
- •Speech disorders
- •Language and the brain
- •Part four changes and comparisons
- •Language change
- •How language changes
- •Spread of change within a language
- •Causes of language change
- •Natural tendencies
- •Therapeutic changes
- •Changes which trigger one another off
- •Interacting changes
- •Reconstruction
- •Questions
- •Genetic similarities
- •Building a family tree
- •Reconstructing the parent language
- •Unreliability of reconstructions
- •Linguistic areas
- •Language types
- •Word order criteria
Remembered frameworks
The field of artificial intelligence (Al) has provided a further approach to how people understand one another. AI makes proposals about how to simulate intelligent systems on computers. The original problem was one of finding out how computers could be made to cope with inexplicit and superficially irrelevant conversations:
Salesman: Pink sinks are the latest fashion, madam. Customer: My dish-washer's red.
A solution proposed for the computer might also be one utilized by humans. Knowledge, it was suggested, might be stored in the form of stereotypical situations, or frames. These memorized frameworks are adapted to fit in with present reality, so they are altered as required. So, for example, a person might have a frame representing a typical kitchen, and would have 'slots' in the frame for a sink, a cooker, a dish-washer and so on. A superficially disjointed conversation, such as the one above, would become quite coherent when considered in relation to the 'kitchen frame' in a person's mind. Furthermore the speakers in this conversation clearly have a certain amount of mutual knowledge, in that they both have a similar outline kitchen frame. Another way of dealing with human interaction, therefore, is to specify both the relevant frames and the mutual knowledge held in common by the participants.
Discourse analysis
So far, we have concentrated on cases in which people made sense of quite strange disjointed utterances. However, when we use language, we do not necessarily do so in a random and unstructured way. Both conversation and written texts have various devices for welding together miscellaneous utterances into a cohesive whole. Compare the two accounts of George's meal below:
A George ate the curry with delight. Curry had always been George's favourite food. The curry was subtly flavoured. George detected hints of cumin and coriander in the curry. Cumin and coriander are George's favourite spices.
В George ate the curry with delight. This type of food had always
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been his favourite. The dish was subtly flavoured, ami in it he detected hints of his favourite spices, cumin and coriander.
The two versions are more or less the same as far as semantic content is concerned, and the syntax is fairly similar. Nevertheless, there4 is a lot of difference between the two. The second is both stylistically better, and more normal-sounding. The first appears to have been written sentence by sentence, without any attention to the overall effect. In the second, various devices have been used in order to link the sentences together into a cohesive whole: after its first occurrence, the word curry has been replaced by alternative words this type of food, the dish, and by the pronoun it. Similarly, George has been replaced by he, and in some places, the order of words has been altered so as to maintain the smooth connections, as when in it was brought to the front of its clause. In addition, some of the original sentences have been joined together.
Discourse analysis is the study which deals with this topic. It overlaps with stylistics, the study of linguistics and literature. Devices which maintain the smooth flow of communication are particularly important in written language, where there is no one available to clarify unclear points. However, many of these devices are also used in ordinary conversation. Consider two versions of the same dialogue:
A Edna: Someone ought to lock up Fred. Minnie: Fred is a disgrace.
Edna: Someone caught Fred peeping at the new lodger through the bathroom window.
Minnie: What is the name of the new lodger? Is the name of the new lodger Arabella or Annabel?
В Edna: Fred ought to be locked up. Minnie: That man's a disgrace.
Edna: He was caught peeping through the bathroom window at the new lodger.
Minnie: What's her name? Is it Arabella or Annabel?
The first version sounds stilted and odd, even though by itself, each sentence is well-formed. The second version sounds far more like an ordinary conversation. It contains devices similar to those used in the piece of prose about George and his curry: alter the first occurrence of Fred, the alternative phrase that man and the pronoun he was used. 'Hie third sentence has been changed into the passive, in order lo keep Fred at the centre of attention. And so on. The overall result is that the whole
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dialogue becomes linked together into a cohesive whole, something that people who know a language do automatically - though people learning a second language usually have to be taught this skill, as the devices used vary in their details from language to language.