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Chapter
Introduction to Linguistics
1
1
Preliminaries
Linguistics is the science that studies language. Someone who studies lin-
guistics is a linguist. Notice that there is a common understanding of the
word linguist as meaning “someone who knows many languages.” While it is
oen true that linguists know several languages, being a polyglot (i.e., some-
one who knows many languages) is not a requirement for being a linguist.
Note that in the denition above we have talked about “language,”
not a specic language (say, English) or a group of languages. To a large
extent, all languages in the world are based on similar principles. Part of our
goal will be to outline such principles. e other purpose of this book (and
of this course) is to make you appreciate the complexity (and the beauty) of
language as well as the complex relations between the speakers, their societ-
ies, and their languages.
Language Principles
All languages of the world share some design features (see Figure 1.1). Lan-
guages share some general organizational mechanisms that distinguish them
from other forms of communication, such as the systems of communication
developed by animals and insects. While many animal communication sys-
tems may share some of these features, none has them all.
Understanding Language Structure, Interaction, and Variation, Third Ed.: An Introduction to Applied Linguistics and Sociolinguistics for Nonspecialists
Steven Brown, Salvatore Attardo, and Cynthia Vigliotti
http://www.press.umich.edu/5896147/understanding_language_structure_interaction_and_variation_third_ed
Michigan ELT, 2014
Copyright (c) 2014. University of Michigan Press. All rights reserved.

2 Understanding Language, Third Ed.
FIGURE 1.1: Eight Design Features of Languages
Double articulation Language uses a small number of sounds (less
than 50 in most languages) that are combined
to produce a large, but nite, number of words,
which can be combined in an innite number of
sentences.
Productivity Language can produce novel sentences that have
never been uttered before.
Arbitrariness There is no necessary connection between sound
and meaning: the meaning dog and the English
word dog are connected arbitrarily as proven by
the existence of the word chien in French, which
expresses roughly the same meaning.
Interchangeability An individual can both be a speaker and a hearer.
Displacement Language can be used to talk about things that are
not present or do not exist. Language can also be
used to lie.
Discreteness The dierences between language units are of an
all-or-nothing kind: a sound cannot be heard as
something in between a b or a p sound.
Specialization Speaking requires only a limited part of the
speaker’s behavior/attention and is independent
of its context.
Cultural transmission Not all aspects of language are innate; some are
taught after birth and dier according to the
culture the child is reared in.
Understanding Language Structure, Interaction, and Variation, Third Ed.: An Introduction to Applied Linguistics and Sociolinguistics for Nonspecialists
Steven Brown, Salvatore Attardo, and Cynthia Vigliotti
http://www.press.umich.edu/5896147/understanding_language_structure_interaction_and_variation_third_ed
Michigan ELT, 2014
Copyright (c) 2014. University of Michigan Press. All rights reserved.

1: Introduction to Linguistics 3
The Subelds of Linguistics
e elds in which linguistics is traditionally divided are:
zPhonetics deals with the sounds of language.
zPhonology deals with how the sounds are organized.
zMorphology deals with how sounds are put together to
form words.
zSyntax deals with how sentences are formed.
zSemantics deals with the meanings of words, sentences,
and texts.
zPragmatics deals with how sentences and texts are used
in the world (i.e., in context).
zText linguistics deals with units larger than sentences,
such as paragraphs and texts (i.e., any message, large or
small, simple or complex, expressed through language).
Several other elds within linguistics that look at language from the
perspective of another discipline include:
zSociolinguistics (language in society)
zPsycholinguistics (psychology of language)
zAnthropological linguistics (anthropology of language,
a.k.a. ethnolinguistics)
zHistorical linguistics (the history of languages)
zNeurolinguistics (language and the brain)
zLanguage pedagogy (how to teach languages; its best-
known eld is English as a second/foreign language)
zComputational linguistics (computers and language)
zMany others, such as forensic linguistics (language and
the law) and translation.
Understanding Language Structure, Interaction, and Variation, Third Ed.: An Introduction to Applied Linguistics and Sociolinguistics for Nonspecialists
Steven Brown, Salvatore Attardo, and Cynthia Vigliotti
http://www.press.umich.edu/5896147/understanding_language_structure_interaction_and_variation_third_ed
Michigan ELT, 2014
Copyright (c) 2014. University of Michigan Press. All rights reserved.

4 Understanding Language, Third Ed.
Exercises
Words to Know
double articulation productivity arbitrariness
interchangeability displacement discreteness
specialization cultural transmission
Review 1.1 ...............................................................................................
1. Explain: All languages in the world are based on similar principles.
2.
What evidence in this unit tells you that linguistics is primarily
concerned with speech? Which subelds might be useful for
investigating literacy?
Approaches to Language
e following sections will outline dierent ways in which a linguist, or a
knowledgeable amateur, may approach language. e sections will cover
the prescriptive and descriptive approaches, the historical approach (with
a few hints at the origins of linguistics as a historical discipline), and the
very important competence-versus-performance distinction. e last sec-
tion rounds the chapter o with a discussion of the scientic method as it
applies to the study of language.
Understanding Language Structure, Interaction, and Variation, Third Ed.: An Introduction to Applied Linguistics and Sociolinguistics for Nonspecialists
Steven Brown, Salvatore Attardo, and Cynthia Vigliotti
http://www.press.umich.edu/5896147/understanding_language_structure_interaction_and_variation_third_ed
Michigan ELT, 2014
Copyright (c) 2014. University of Michigan Press. All rights reserved.

1: Introduction to Linguistics 5
Prescriptive vs. Descriptive
You have been using, but also studying, language for much of your life.
Task
What grammar rules do you remember from school? Make a list.
After you have read this section, try to decide whether the rules you
remember are prescriptive or descriptive rules.
We can look at language from two points of view:
zPrescriptivism consists basically of stating what is con-
sidered right and wrong in language. It passes judg-
ments—for example, splitting innitives is wrong. is
means that To boldly go where no one has gone before... is
a bad sentence because it “splits” the innitive to go.
zDescriptivism, on the other hand, consists of describing
the facts, as in, some people split innitives, and some
don’t. Which kind of people split innitives? When do
they do that? What can be used to split an innitive?
A common misunderstanding is that descriptivists “have no rules”
and that they have a permissive “anything goes” attitude. In fact, noth-
ing could be further from the truth. Descriptive linguistics is dedicated to
describing the rules of the language, and language is seen as essentially rule-
governed (that is, made of rules). So what is the issue? Don’t descriptivists
and prescriptivists agree?
In fact, prescriptivists and descriptivists disagree deeply: descriptiv-
ists seek to nd the rules that govern the languages spoken by people (i.e.,
English, French, Chinese, Swahili, and all others), while prescriptivists, for
the major part, seek to impose arbitrary rules that come from outside the
language and/or seek to preserve a stage of the language that has been le
behind by the evolution of the language itself.
Understanding Language Structure, Interaction, and Variation, Third Ed.: An Introduction to Applied Linguistics and Sociolinguistics for Nonspecialists
Steven Brown, Salvatore Attardo, and Cynthia Vigliotti
http://www.press.umich.edu/5896147/understanding_language_structure_interaction_and_variation_third_ed
Michigan ELT, 2014
Copyright (c) 2014. University of Michigan Press. All rights reserved.