Stephen van Vlack

Sookmyung Women`s University

Graduate School of English

Introduction to Linguistics

Fall 2004

Week 1 class notes

The goal of all linguistic endeavor, no matter what area one is working in, is to find universals. This is the ultimate goal of linguistics and is also what makes modern linguistic thought different from past models. The person we have to thank for all this is, of course, Noam Chomsky. Back in 1957, with the publication of Syntactic Structures, he shook the world of language with a simple and not actually very new idea; the idea that languages occurs at levels below the surface. What actually comes out of the mouth is not the real representation of how language is constructed and organized in the mind. This observation came initially from the observation that there seemed to be movement in language: that is, that by moving elements of an utterance around new meanings could be created. Look at the simple example below.

A. The armadillo was eaten by the hungry man.

B. Was the armadillo eaten by the hungry man?

Clearly, the two utterances above are related. We won`t worry for now which utterance is derived from which or what their relationship is. It is enough to say that they are related. Such phenomena was already observed and discussed by the ancient Greeks 2500 years ago. In this way Chomsky was not new, but how he solved this problem changed the entire way that language was looked at.

Chomsky`s great innovation was the suggestion of an underlying layer of language which was created by the raw knowledge (competence) one has of their language. This sounds like a simple claim, but it changed everything.

All the theories up to that time had been dealing with surface level representations of language. They only looked at what people actually said and they sought to describe it. It was generally assumed that language was learned though memorization and practice and that utterances were encapsulated whole in people`s brains. No one was particularly concerned with how individual utterances were made, or to use Chomsky`s term `generated`. After Chomsky, describing a system which accounts for how utterances are generated became the main focus of linguistic inquiry. This has defined how language is viewed by researchers in the field.

Chomsky views language as a complex cognitive system which uses a highly finite number of signs to create an infinite number of structures and accompanying meanings. This is a large claim and one which would require a system of great complexity; a complexity far exceeding any other type of knowledge or cognitive system. Thus, for him, language (due to its inherent complexity) must be a separate but outwardly integrated cognitive system within brain. The study of linguistics, then, is to try to find out what a native speaker knows about her or his language: i.e., what the nature of the system is. In this way, linguistics is a sub-division of psychology.

Now, we all know that several different components have been proposed within the scheme of linguistics. These components have traditionally been; phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and discourse, as well as semantics and pragmatics. We need to differentiate semantics and pragmatics from the other components. The first five components (phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and discourse) are all structural levels and they are arranged in size order. Phonetics has the smallest units while discourse has the largest. Semantics (word meaning) and pragmatics (contextual meaning) surround and drive the structural components, or at least that how things were thought to work. Modern linguistics has shifted the levels a bit and we will get a chance to see how later in this course, but the levels as described above are still helpful and necessary for us to know, particularly as relative beginners to this exciting field of study.

Another main part of Chomsky`s theory and one that particularly interests us in this course is that all languages seem to share certain properties. This observation is based on the simple fact that all human babies, provided they have the right environment, are capable of acquiring any human language and they do so in the same way. All children in all language environments acquire their L1 in the same way. They reach the same milestones in the same general time and once more, they do so in an almost automatic fashion. According to Chomsky, babies do not need to try to learn their first language. They just do whether they want to or not. This led to the postulation of the LAD. It seemed to Chomsky that for this to happen something must be there in the brain to help these babies acquire language, for first language acquisition is simply too uniform and automatic for it to happen by chance. Language must, therefore, be a genetic endowment which developed in humans alone. This means that language is innate in humans. After all, something clearly must control the acquisition process.

At the same time, on the empirical front, this must mean that languages must share common properties. If something controls the language acquisition process, then it must control or shape the system of language as well. If this were not true than the LAD would work differently on different languages and more variation in L1 acquisition would be evident. Because variation is conspicuously absent, there must be common properties. These properties have come to be know as language universals.

Linguists working in the descriptive/structuralist tradition believe that all languages are potentially completely different and that anything is possible in language. Chomskian linguists, on the other hand, believe that all languages share certain properties and that these universals also constrain the possible shapes that a human language can take.

Universals are a fascinating topic and they will be the main focus for us in this class. In looking at universals we will, in effect, need to go through and first see how linguistics in general works. Since Chomsky has worked primarily in the syntactic component, most of what we will be doing in this course is working to find out how the idea of universals was arrived at and then how it developed and was further constrained into a generatively descriptive system which has universals at its forefront.

There are two different approaches to looking for universals, the Chomsky school (generative) and the Greenberg school (typology). For Chomsky, the best way to look for universals is to try to delve as deeply as possible into the linguistic system of one language always abstracting and updating the formalisms until the underlying nature of the system is discovered. In the typology approach, researchers work in comparing the structures and properties of all languages, again in a somewhat abstract way, and through this will be able to figure out what properties all languages share. Both approaches are interesting and have a certain amount of validity, but unfortunately there is little cooperation between people working on either side.

Closely tied to the idea of universals is the study of the origins of language. This has become a very hot topic of late for linguists for several reasons. Firstly, past research in language origins was carried out by philosophers for the most part and some of the basic theories were quite ridiculous. With the development of the related field of cognitive science, linguists have felt pressure to do something about this. The second reason is that discussion of language origins and the resulting theories will bear directly on theories of language and particularly language universals.

Because Chomsky believes so firmly in the separateness of language in the brain and that linguistic development has followed a path of its own, theories of language origins may have a direct effect on this. In any case, it should be fun as well as challenging to try to unravel these mysteries together.