Linguistics Historical Perspective

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LINGUISTICS HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE Some of the earliest linguistic activities can be recalled from Iron Age India with the analysis of Sanskrit. The Pratishakhyas (from ca. the 8th century BC) constitute as it were a proto-linguistic ad hoc collection of observations about mutations to a given corpus particular to a given Vedic school. Systematic study of these texts gives rise to the Vedanga discipline of Vyakarana, the earliest surviving account of which is the work of Pānini (c. 520 – 460 BC), who, however, looks back on what are probably several generations of grammarians, whose opinions he occasionally refers to. Pānini formulates close to 4,000 rules which together form a compact generative grammar of Sanskrit. Inherent in his analytic approach are the concepts of the phoneme, the morpheme and the root. Due to its focus on brevity, his grammar has a highly unintuitive structure, reminiscent of contemporary "machine language" (as opposed to "human readable" programming languages). Indian linguistics maintained a high level for several centuries; Patanjali in the 2nd century BC still actively criticizes Panini. In the later centuries BC, however, Panini's grammar came to be seen as prescriptive, and commentators came to be fully dependent on it. Bhartrihari (c. 450 – 510) theorized the act of speech as being made up of four stages: first, conceptualization of an idea, second, its verbalization and sequencing (articulation) and third, delivery of speech into atmospheric air, the interpretation of speech by the listener, the interpreter. Western linguistics begins in Classical Antiquity with grammatical speculation such as Plato's Cratylus. The first important advancement of the Greeks was the creation of the alphabet. As a result of the introduction of writing, poetry such as the Homeric poems became written and several editions were created and commented, forming the basis of philology and critic. The sophists and Socrates introduced dialectics as a new text genre. Aristotle defined the logic of speech and the argument. Furthermore Aristotle works on rhetoric and poetics were of utmost importance for the understating of tragedy, poetry, public discussions etc. as text genres. One of the greatest of the Greek grammarians was Apollonius Dyscolus.Apollonius wrote more than thirty treatises on questions of syntax, semantics, morphology, prosody, orthography, dialectology, and more. In the 4th c., Aelius Donatus compiled the Latin grammar Ars Grammatica that was to be the defining school text through the Middle Ages. In De vulgari eloquentia ("On the Eloquence of Vernacular"), Dante Alighieri expanded the scope of linguistic enquiry from the traditional languages of antiquity to include the language of the day. In the Middle East, the Persian linguist Sibawayh made a detailed and professional description of Arabic in 760, in his monumental work, Alkitab fi al-nahw (The Book on Grammar), bringing many linguistic aspects of language to light. In his book he distinguished phonetics from phonology. Sir William Jones noted that Sanskrit shared many common features with classical Latin and Greek, notably verb roots and grammatical structures, such as the case system. This led to the theory that all languages sprung from a common source and to the discovery of the Indo-European language

2 family. He began the study of comparative linguistics, which would uncover more language families and branches. In 19th century Europe the study of linguistics was largely from the perspective of philology (or historical linguistics). Some early-19thcentury linguists were Jakob Grimm, who devised a principle of consonantal shifts in pronunciation – known as Grimm's Law – in 1822; Karl Verner, who formulated Verner's Law; August Schleicher, who created the "Stammbaumtheorie" ("family tree"); and Johannes Schmidt, who developed the "Wellentheorie" ("wave model") in 1872. Ferdinand de Saussure was the founder of modern structural linguistics, with an emphasis on synchronic (i.e. non-historical) explanations for language form. In North America, the structuralist tradition grew out of a combination of missionary linguistics (whose goal was to translate the bible) and Anthropology. While originally regarded as a sub-field of anthropology in the United State, linguistics is now considered a separate scientific discipline in the US, Australia and much of Europe. Edward Sapir, a leader in American structural linguistics, was one of the first who explored the relations between language studies and anthropology. His methodology had strong influence on all his successors. Noam Chomsky's formal model of language, transformational-generative grammar, developed under the influence of his teacher Zellig Harris, who was in turn strongly influenced by Leonard Bloomfield, has been the dominant model since the 1960s. The structural linguistics period was largely superseded in North America by generative grammar in the 1950s and 60s. This paradigm views language as a mental object, and emphasizes the role of the formal modeling of universal and language specific rules. Noam Chomsky remains an important but controversial linguistic figure. Generative grammar gave rise to such frameworks such as Transformational grammar, Generative Semantics, Relational Grammar, Generalized Phrase-structure Grammar, Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) and Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG). Other linguists working in Optimality Theory state generalizations in terms of violable constraints that interact with each other, and abandon the traditional rule-based formalism first pioneered by early work in generativist linguistics. Functionalist linguists working in functional grammar and Cognitive Linguistics tend to stress the non-autonomy of linguistic knowledge and the non-universality of linguistic structures, thus differing significantly from the formal approaches.

Written and Composed By: Prof. A. R. Somroo M.A. English, M.A. Education Cell Phone:03339971417

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LINGUISTICS GENERAL LINGUISTICS Linguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure (grammar) and the study of meaning (semantics). Grammar encompasses morphology (the formation and composition of words), syntax (the rules that determine how words combine into phrases and sentences) and phonology (the study of sound systems and abstract sound units). Phonetics is a related branch of linguistics concerned with the actual properties of speech sounds (phones), non-speech sounds, and how they are produced and perceived. Other sub-disciplines of linguistics include the following: evolutionary linguistics, which considers the origins of language; historical linguistics, which explores language change; sociolinguistics, which looks at the relation between linguistic variation and social structures; psycholinguistics, which explores the representation and functioning of language in the mind; neurolinguistics, which looks at the representation of language in the brain; language acquisition, which considers how children acquire their first language and how children and adults acquire and learn their second and subsequent languages; and discourse analysis, which is concerned with the structure of texts and conversations, and pragmatics with how meaning is transmitted based on a combination of linguistic competence, non-linguistic knowledge, and the context of the speech act. Linguistics is narrowly defined as the scientific approach to the study of language, but language can, of course, be approached from a variety of directions, and a number of other intellectual disciplines are relevant to it and influence its study. Semiotics, for example, is a related field concerned with the general study of signs and symbols both in language and outside of it. Literary theorists study the use of language in artistic literature. Linguistics additionally draws on work from such diverse fields as psychology, speech-language pathology, informatics, computer science, philosophy, biology, human anatomy, neuroscience, sociology, anthropology, and acoustics. Within the field, linguist is used to describe someone who either studies the field or uses linguistic methodologies to study groups of languages or particular languages. Outside the field, this term is commonly used to refer to people who speak many languages or have a great vocabulary.

Names for the discipline Before the twentieth century, the term "philology", first attested in 1716, was commonly used to refer to the science of language, which was then predominantly historical in focus. Since Ferdinand de Saussure’s insistence on the importance of synchronic analysis, however, this focus has shifted and the term "philology" is now generally used for the "study of a language's grammar, history and literary tradition," especially in the United States,where it was never as popular as it was elsewhere (in the sense of the "science of language"). Although the term "linguist" in the sense of "a student of language" dates from 1641,the term "linguistics" is first attested in 1847. It is now the usual academic term in English for the scientific study of language.

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SELECTED SUB-FIELDS OF LINGUISTICS Historical linguistics Historical linguistics studies the history and evolution of languages through the comparative method. Often the aim of historical linguistics is to classify languages in language families descending from a common ancestor. This evolves comparison of elements in different languages to detect possible cognates in order to be able to reconstruct how different languages have changed over time. This also involves the study of etymology, the study of the history of single words. Historical linguistics is also called "diachronic linguistics" and is opposed to "synchronic linguistics" that study languages in a given moment in time without regarding its previous stages.In universities in the United States, the historic perspective is often out of fashion. Historical linguistics was among the first linguistic disciplines to emerge and was the most widely practiced form of linguistics in the late 19th century. The shift in focus to a synchronic perspective started with Saussure and became predominant in western linguistics with Noam Chomskys emphasis on the study of the synchronic and universal aspects of language.

Semiotics Semiotics is the study of sign processes (semiosis), or signification and communication, signs and symbols, both individually and grouped into sign systems, including the study of how meaning is constructed and understood. Semioticians often do not restrict themselves to linguistic communication when studying the use of signs but extend the meaning of "sign" to cover all kinds of cultural symbols. Nonetheless semiotic disciplines closely related to linguistics are literary studies, discourse analysis, text linguistics, and philosophy of language.

Descriptive linguistics and language documentation Since the inception of the discipline of linguistics linguists have been concerned with describing and documenting languages previously unknown to science. Starting with Franz Boas in the early 1900s descriptive linguistics became the main strand within American linguistics until the rise of formal structural linguistics in the mid 20th century. The rise of American descriptive linguistics was caused by the concern with describing the languages of indigenous peoples that were (and are) rapidly moving towards extinction. The ethnographic focus of the original Boasian type of descriptive linguistics occasioned the development of disciplines such as Sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, and linguistic anthropology, disciplines that investigate the relations between language, culture and society. The emphasis on linguistic description and documentation has since become more important outside of North America as well, as the documentation of rapidly dying indigenous languages has become a primary focus in many of the worlds' linguistics programs. Language description is a work intensive endeavour usually requiring years of field work for the linguist to learn a language sufficiently well to write a reference grammar of it. The further task of language documentation requires the linguist to collect a preferably large corpus of texts and recordings of sound and video in the language, and to arrange for its storage in accessible formats in open repositories where it may be of the best use for further research by other researchers.

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LINGUISTICS THEORATICAL LINGUISTICS Theoretical linguistics is the branch of linguistics that is most concerned with developing models of linguistic knowledge. The fields that are generally considered the core of theoretical linguistics are syntax, phonology, morphology, and semantics. Although phonetics often informs phonology, it is often excluded from the purview of theoretical linguistics, along with psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics. Theoretical linguistics also involves the search for an explanation of linguistic universals, that is, properties all languages have in common. Linguistics concerns itself with describing and explaining the nature of human language. Relevant to this are the questions of what is universal to language, how language can vary, and how human beings come to know languages. All humans (setting aside extremely pathological cases) achieve competence in whatever language is spoken (or signed, in the case of signed languages) around them when growing up, with apparently little need for explicit conscious instruction. While non-humans acquire their own communication systems, they do not acquire human language in this way (although many non-human animals can learn to respond to language, or can even be trained to use it to a degree). Therefore, linguists assume, the ability to acquire and use language is an innate, biologically-based potential of modern human beings, similar to the ability to walk. There is no consensus, however, as to the extent of this innate potential, or its domain-specificity (the degree to which such innate abilities are specific to language), with some theorists claiming that there is a very large set of highly abstract and specific binary settings coded into the human brain, while others claim that the ability to learn language is a product of general human cognition. It is, however, generally agreed that there are no strong genetic differences underlying the differences between languages: an individual will acquire whatever language(s) he or she is exposed to as a child, regardless of parentage or ethnic origin. Linguistic structures are pairings of meaning and form; such pairings are known as Saussurean signs. In this sense, form may consist of sound patterns, movements of the hands, written symbols, and so on. There are many levels of linguistics concerned with particular aspects of linguistic structure, ranging from those focused primarily on form to those focused primarily on meaning:     

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Phonetics, the study of the physical properties of speech (or signed) production and perception Phonology, the study of sounds (or signs) as discrete, abstract elements in the speaker's mind that distinguish meaning Morphology, the study of internal structures of words and how they can be modified Syntax, the study of how words combine to form grammatical sentences Semantics, the study of the meaning of words (lexical semantics) and fixed word combinations (phraseology), and how these combine to form the meanings of sentences Pragmatics, the study of how utterances are used in communicative acts and the role played by context and non-linguistic knowledge in the transmission of meaning Discourse analysis, the analysis of language use in texts (spoken, written, or signed)

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Phonetics Phonetics is the study of speech sounds with concentration on three main points :   

Articulation : the production of speech sounds in human speech organs. Perception : the way human ears respond to speech signals, how the human brain analyses them. Acoustic features : physical characteristics of speech sounds such as color, loudness, amplitude, frequency etc.

According to this definition, phonetics can also be called linguistic analysis of human speech at the surface level. That is one obvious difference from phonology, which concerns the structure and organisation of speech sounds in natural languages, and furthermore has a theoretical and abstract nature. One example can be made to illustrate this distinction: In English, the suffix -s can represent either [s], [z] or can be silent (symbolised as ø) depending on context.

Articulatory phonetics The field of articulatory phonetics is a subfield of phonetics. In studying articulation, phoneticians attempt to document how humans produce speech sounds (vowels and consonants). That is, articulatory phoneticians are interested in how the different structures of the vocal tract, called the articulators (tongue, lips, jaw, palate, teeth etc.), interact to create the specific sounds.

Auditory phonetics Auditory phonetics is a branch of phonetics concerned with the hearing, acquisition and comprehension of phonetic sounds of words of a language. As articulatory phonetics explores the methods of sound production, auditory phonetics explores the methods of reception--the ear to the brain, and those processes.

Acoustic phonetics Acoustic phonetics is a subfield of phonetics which deals with acoustic aspects of speech sounds. Acoustic phonetics investigates properties like the mean squared amplitude of a waveform, its duration, its fundamental frequency, or other properties of its frequency spectrum, and the relationship of these properties to other branches of phonetics (e.g. articulatory or auditory phonetics), and to abstract linguistic concepts like phones, phrases, or utterances.

Phonology Phonology is the study of language sounds. Phonology is divided into two separate studies, phonetics and phonemics. Phonetics is what depicts the sounds we hear. It calls attention to the smallest details in language sounds. There are three kinds of phonetics: acoustic phonetics, auditory phonetics, and articulatory phonetics. Acoustic phonetics deals with the physical properties of sound, what sounds exactly are coming from the person speaking. Auditory phonetics deals with how the sounds are perceived, exactly what the person hearing the sounds is perceiving. Finally, articulatory phonetics studies how the speech sounds are produced. This is what describes the actual sounds in detail. It is also known as descriptive phonetics.

7 Phonemics studies how the sounds are used. It analyzes the way sounds are arranged in languages and helps you to hear what sounds are important in a language.The unit of analysis for phonemics is called phonemes. "A phoneme is a sound that functions to distinguish one word from another in a language."For example, how we distinguish the English word tie from the word die. The sounds that differentiates two words are [t] and [d].

Morphology Morphology is the study of word structure. For example, in the sentences The dog runs and The dogs run, the word forms runs and dogs have an affix -s added, distinguishing them from the bare forms dog and run. Adding this suffix to a nominal stem gives plural forms, adding it to verbal stems restricts the subject to third person singular. Some morphological theories operate with two distinct suffixes -s, called allomorphs of the morphemes Plural and Third person singular, respectively. Languages differ with respect to their morphological structure. Along one axis, we may distinguish analytic languages, with few or no affixes or other morphological processes from synthetic languages with many affixes. Along another axis, we may distinguish agglutinative languages, where affixes express one grammatical property each, and are added neatly one after another, from fusional languages, with non-concatenative morphological processes (infixation, umlaut, ablaut, etc.) and/or with less clear-cut affix boundaries.

Syntax Syntax is the study of language structure and word order. It is concerned with the relationship between units at the level of words or morphology. Syntax seeks to delineate exactly all and only those sentences which make up a given language, using native speaker intuition. Syntax seeks to describe formally exactly how structural relations between elements (lexical items/words and operators) in a sentence contribute to its interpretation. Syntax uses principles of formal logic and Set Theory to formalize and represent accurately the hierarchical relationship between elements in a sentence. Abstract syntax trees are often used to illustrate the hierarchical structures that are posited. Thus, in active declarative sentences in English the subject is followed by the main verb which in turn is followed by the object (SVO). This order of elements is crucial to its correct interpretation and it is exactly this which syntacticians try to capture. They argue that there must be such a formal computational component contained within the language faculty of normal speakers of a language and seek to describe it.

Semantics Semantics is the study of intensive meaning in words and sentences.Semantics can be expressed through diction (word choice) and inflexion. Inflexion may be conveyed through an author's tone in writing and a speaker's tone of voice, changing pitch and stress of words to influence meaning.

Pragmatics Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics which studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology, and linguistics. It studies how the transmission of meaning depends not only on the linguistic knowledge (e.g. grammar, lexicon etc.) of the speaker and listener, but

8 also on the context of the utterance, knowledge about the status of those involved, the inferred intent of the speaker, and so on. In this respect, pragmatics explains how language users are able to overcome apparent ambiguity, since meaning relies on the manner, place, time etc. of an utterance. The ability to understand another speaker's intended meaning is called pragmatic competence. An utterance describing pragmatic function is described as metapragmatic. Pragmatic awareness is regarded as one of the most challenging aspects of language learning, and comes only through experience.

Discourse Analysis Discourse analysis (DA), or discourse studies, is a general term for a number of approaches to analyzing written, spoken or signed language use. The objects of discourse analysis—discourse, writing, talk, conversation, communicative event, etc.—are variously defined in terms of coherent sequences of sentences, propositions, speech acts or turns-at-talk. Contrary to much of traditional linguistics, discourse analysts not only study language use 'beyond the sentence boundary', but also prefer to analyze 'naturally occurring' language use, and not invented examples. This is known as corpus linguistics; text linguistics is related. Discourse analysis has been taken up in a variety of social science disciplines, including linguistics, sociology, anthropology, social work, cognitive psychology, social psychology, international relations, human geography, communication studies and translation studies, each of which is subject to its own assumptions, dimensions of analysis, and methodologies.

Written and Composed By Prof. A. R. Somroo M.A. English, M.A. Education Phone:03339971417

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BRANCHES OF LINGUISTICS SOCIOLINGUISTICS: Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used. Sociolinguistics differs from sociology of language in that the focus of sociolinguistics is the effect of the society on the language, while the latter's focus is on the language's effect on the society. Sociolinguistics overlaps to a considerable degree with pragmatics. It also studies how language varieties differ between groups separated by certain social variables, e.g., ethnicity, religion, status, gender, level of education, age, etc., and how creation and adherence to these rules is used to categorize individuals in social or socioeconomic classes. As the usage of a language varies from place to place (dialect), language usage varies among social classes, and it is these sociolects that sociolinguistics studies. The social aspects of language were in the modern sense first studied by Indian and Japanese linguists in the 1930s, and also by Gauchat in Switzerland in the early 1900s, but none received much attention in the West until much later. The study of the social motivation of language change, on the other hand, has its foundation in the wave model of the late 19th century. Sociolinguistics in the West first appeared in the 1960s and was pioneered by linguists such as William Labov in the US and Basil Bernstein in the UK.

Applications of Sociolinguistics For example, a sociolinguist might determine through study of social attitudes that a particular vernacular would not be considered appropriate language use in a business or professional setting. Sociolinguists might also study the grammar, phonetics, vocabulary, and other aspects of this sociolect much as dialectologists would study the same for a regional dialect. The study of language variation is concerned with social constraints determining language in its contextual environment. Code-switching is the term given to the use of different varieties of language in different social situations. William Labov is often regarded as the founder of the study of sociolinguistics. He is especially noted for introducing the quantitative study of language variation and change, making the sociology of language into a scientific discipline.

Sociolinguistic variables Studies in the field of sociolinguistics typically take a sample population and interview them, assessing the realisation of certain sociolinguistic variables. Labov specifies the ideal sociolinguistic variable to    

be high in frequency, have a certain immunity from conscious suppression, be an integral part of larger structures, and be easily quantified on a linear scale.

10 Phonetic variables tend to meet these criteria and are often used, as are grammatical variables and, more rarely, lexical variables. Examples for phonetic variables are: the frequency of the glottal stop, the height or backness of a vowel or the realisation of word-endings. An example of a grammatical variable is the frequency of negative concord (known colloquially as a double negative).

Fundamental Concepts in Sociolinguistics While the study of sociolinguistics is very broad, there are a fundamental concepts on which many sociolinguistic inquiries depend.

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Speech Community Speech community is a concept in sociolinguistics that describes a more or less discrete group of people who use language in a unique and mutually accepted way among themselves. Speech communities can be members of a profession with a specialized jargon, distinct social groups like high school students or hip hop fans, or even tight-knit groups like families and friends. Members of speech communities will often develop slang or jargon to serve the group's special purposes and priorities.

High prestige and low prestige varieties Crucial to sociolinguistic analysis is the concept of prestige; certain speech habits are assigned a positive or a negative value which is then applied to the speaker. This can operate on many levels. It can be realised on the level of the individual sound/phoneme, as Labov discovered in investigating pronunciation of the post-vocalic /r/ in the NorthEastern USA, or on the macro scale of language choice, as realised in the various diglossias that exist throughout the world, where SwissGerman/High German is perhaps most well known. An important implication of sociolinguistic theory is that speakers 'choose' a variety when making a speech act, whether consciously or subconsciously.

Social network Understanding language in society means that one also has to understand the social networks in which language is embedded. A social network is another way of describing a particular speech community in terms of relations between individual members in a community. A network could be loose or tight depending on how members interact with each other.For instance, an office or factory may be considered a tight community because all members interact with each other. A large course with 100+ students be a looser community because students may only interact with the instructor and maybe 1-2 other students. A multiplex community is one in which members have multiple relationships with each other.For instance, in some neighborhoods, members may live on the same street, work for the same employer and even intermarry. The looseness or tightness of a social network may affect speech patterns adopted by a speaker. For instance, Dubois and Hovarth (1998:254) found that speakers in one Cajun Louisiana community were more likely to pronounce English "th" [θ] as [t] (or [ð] as [d]) if they participated in a relatively dense social network (i.e. had strong local ties and interacted with many other speakers in the community), and less likely if their networks were looser (i.e. fewer local ties).

11 A social network may apply to the macro level of a country or a city, but also to the inter-personal level of neighborhoods or a single family. Recently, social networks have been formed by the Internet, through chat rooms, MySpace groups, organizations, and online dating services.

Internal vs. external language In Chomskian linguistics, a distinction is drawn between I-language (internal language) and E-language (external language). In this context, internal language applies to the study of syntax and semantics in language on the abstract level; as mentally represented knowledge in a native speaker. External language applies to language in social contexts, i.e. behavioral habits shared by a community. Internal language analyses operate on the assumption that all native speakers of a language are quite homogeneous in how they process and perceive language. External language fields, such as sociolinguistics, attempt to explain why this is in fact not the case. Many sociolinguists reject the distinction between I- and Elanguage on the grounds that it is based on a mentalist view of language. On this view, grammar is first and foremost an interactional (social) phenomenon (e.g. Elinor Ochs, Emanuel Schegloff, Sandra Thompson).

Written and Composed By: Prof. A.R. Somroo M.A. English, M.A. Education Cell Phone: 03339971417

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BRANCHES OF LINGUISTICS PSYCHOLINGUISTICS: Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were largely philosophical ventures, due mainly to a lack of cohesive data on how the human brain functioned. Modern research makes use of biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and information theory to study how the brain processes language. There are a number of subdisciplines; for example, as non-invasive techniques for studying the neurological workings of the brain become more and more widespread, neurolinguistics has become a field in its own right. Psycholinguistics covers the cognitive processes that make it possible to generate a grammatical and meaningful sentence out of vocabulary and grammatical structures, as well as the processes that make it possible to understand utterances, words, text, etc. Developmental psycholinguistics studies children's ability to learn language.

Areas of study Psycholinguistics is interdisciplinary in nature and is studied by people in a variety of fields, such as psychology, cognitive science, and linguistics. There are several subdivisions within psycholinguistics that are based on the components that make up human language.

Linguistic-related areas: 

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Phonetics and phonology are concerned with the study of speech sounds. Within psycholinguistics, research focuses on how the brain processes and understands these sounds. Morphology is the study of word structures, especially the relationships between related words (such as dog and dogs) and the formation of words based on rules (such as plural formation). Syntax is the study of the patterns which dictate how words are combined together to form sentences. Semantics deals with the meaning of words and sentences. Where syntax is concerned with the formal structure of sentences, semantics deals with the actual meaning of sentences. Pragmatics is concerned with the role of context in the interpretation of meaning.

Psychology-related areas: 

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The study of word recognition and reading examines the processes involved in the extraction of orthographic, morphological, phonological, and semantic information from patterns in printed text. Developmental psycholinguistics studies infants' and children's ability to learn language, usually with experimental or at least quantitative methods (as opposed to naturalistic observations such as those made by Jean Piaget in his research on the development of children).

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Theories Theories about how language works in the human mind attempt to account for, among other things, how we associate meaning with the sounds (or signs) of language and how we use syntax—that is, how we manage to put words in the proper order to produce and understand the strings of words we call "sentences." The first of these items—associating sound with meaning—is the least controversial and is generally held to be an area in which animal and human communication have at least some things in common. Syntax, on the other hand, is controversial, and is the focus of the discussion that follows. There are essentially two schools of thought as to how we manage to create syntactic sentences: (1) syntax is an evolutionary product of increased human intelligence over time and social factors that encouraged the development of spoken language; (2) language exists because humans possess an innate ability, an access to what has been called a "universal grammar." This view holds that the human ability for syntax is "hardwired" in the brain. This view claims, for example, that complex syntactic features such as recursion are beyond even the potential abilities of the most intelligent and social non-humans. (Recursion, for example, includes the use of relative pronouns to refer back to earlier parts of a sentence— "The girl whose car is blocking my view of the tree that I planted last year is my friend.") The innate view claims that the ability to use syntax like that would not exist without an innate concept that contains the underpinnings for the grammatical rules that produce recursion. Children acquiring a language, thus, have a vast search space to explore among possible human grammars, settling, logically, on the language(s) spoken or signed in their own community of speakers. Such syntax is, according to the second point of view, what defines human language and makes it different from even the most sophisticated forms of animal communication. The first view was prevalent until about 1960 and is well represented by the mentalistic theories of Jean Piaget and the empiricist Rudolf Carnap. As well, the school of psychology known as behaviorism puts forth the point of view that language is behavior shaped by conditioned response. The second point of view (the "innate" one) can fairly be said to have begun with Noam Chomsky’s highly critical review of Skinner's book in 1959 in the pages of the journal Language. That review started what has been termed "the cognitive revolution" in psychology. The field of psycholinguistics since then has been defined by reactions to Chomsky, pro and con. The pro view still holds that the human ability to use syntax is qualitatively different from any sort of animal communication. That ability might have resulted from a favorable mutation (extremely unlikely) or (more likely) from an adaptation of skills evolved for other purposes. That is, precise syntax might, indeed, serve group needs; better linguistic expression might produce more cohesion, cooperation, and potential for survival, BUT precise syntax can only have developed from rudimentary—or no—syntax, which would have had no survival value and, thus, would not have evolved at all. Thus, one looks for other skills, the characteristics of which might have later been useful for syntax. In the terminology of modern evolutionary biology, these skills would be said to be "pre-adapted" for syntax .Just what those skills might have been is the focus of recent research—or, at least, speculation.

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BRANCHES OF LINGUISTICS APPLIED LINGUISTICS: Applied linguistics is an interdisciplinary field of study that identifies, investigates, and offers solutions to language-related reallife problems. Some of the academic fields related to applied linguistics are education, linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and sociology Major branches of applied linguistics include bilingualism and multilingualism, computer-mediated communication (CMC), conversation analysis, contrastive linguistics, language assessment, literacies, discourse analysis, language pedagogy, second language acquisition, lexicography, language planning and policies, pragmatics, forensic linguistics, and translation. The tradition of applied linguistics established itself in part as a response to the narrowing of focus in linguistics with the advent in the late 1950s of generative linguistics, and has always maintained a socially accountable role, demonstrated by its central interest in language problems. Linguists are largely concerned with finding and describing the generalities and varieties both within particular languages and among all language. Applied linguistics takes the result of those findings and "applies" them to other areas. The term "applied linguistics" is often used to refer to the use of linguistic research in language teaching only but results of linguistic research are used in many other areas as well, such as lexicography and translation. "Applied linguistics" has been argued to be something of a misnomer since applied linguists focus on making sense of and engineering solutions for real-world linguistic problems, not simply "applying" existing technical knowledge from linguistics; moreover, they commonly apply technical knowledge from multiple sources, such as sociology (e.g. conversation analysis) and anthropology. Today, computers are widely used in many areas of applied linguistics. Speech synthesis and speech recognition use phonetic and phonemic knowledge to provide voice interfaces to computers. Applications of computational linguistics in machine translation, computer-assisted translation, and natural language processing are areas of applied linguistics which have come to the forefront. Their influence has had an effect on theories of syntax and semantics, as modeling syntactic and semantic theories on computers constraints. Linguistic analysis is a subdiscipline of applied linguistics used by many governments to verify the claimed nationality of people seeking asylum who do not hold the necessary documentation to prove their claim. This often takes the form of an interview by personnel in an immigration department. Depending on the country, this interview is conducted in either the asylum seeker's native language through an interpreter, or in an international lingua franca like English. Australia uses the former method, while Germany employs the latter; the Netherlands uses either method depending on the languages involved.Tape recordings of the interview then undergo language analysis, which can be done by either private contractors or within a department of the government. In this analysis, linguistic features of the asylum seeker are used by analysts to make a determination about the speaker's nationality. The reported findings of the linguistic analysis can play a critical role in the government's decision on the refugee status of the asylum seeker.

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LINGUISTICS LINGUISTICS V/S TRADITIONAL GRAMMAR In linguistics, traditional grammar is a theory of the structure of language based on ideas Western societies inherited from ancient Greek and Roman sources. The term is mainly used to distinguish these ideas from those of contemporary linguistics. In the English-speaking world at least, traditional grammar is still widely taught in elementary schools. Traditional grammar distinguishes between the grammar of the elements that constitute a sentence (i.e. inter-elemental) and the grammar within sentence elements (i.e. intra-elemental).

Concepts of inter-elemental grammar for the English language Subject,predicate,object,predicative adjunct,sentence,clause,phrase

(aka

complement),adverbial

and

Concepts of intra-elemental grammar for the English language Noun,adjective,determiner,verb,adverb,preposition,conjunction,pronoun

Controversy The term is mainly used to distinguish these ideas from those of contemporary linguistics, which are intended to apply to a much broader range of languages, and to correct a number of errors in traditional grammar. Although modern linguistics has exposed the limitations of traditional grammar, it is still the backbone of the grammar instruction given to the general population in Western countries. As such, while very few people have encountered linguistics, nearly everybody in a modern Western culture encounters traditional grammar. This is one of the big difficulties that linguists face when they try to explain their ideas to the general public. Modern linguistics owes a very large debt to traditional grammar, but it departs from it quite a lot, in the following ways (among others): 





Linguistics aims to be general, and to provide an appropriate way of analysing all languages, and comparing them to each other. traditional grammar is usually concerned with one language, and when it has been applied to non-European languages, it has very often proved very inappropriate. Linguistics has broader influences than traditional grammar has. For example, modern linguistics owes as much of a debt to Panini's grammar of Sanskrit as it does to Latin and Greek grammar. Linguistics is in many ways more descriptively rigorous, because it goes after accurate description as its own end. In traditional grammar, description is often only a means towards formulating usage advice.

While there is a large overlap between traditional grammar and prescriptive grammar, they are not entirely the same thing. Traditional grammar is best thought of as the set of descriptive concepts used by nearly all prescriptive works on grammar. Linguists' critiques of prescriptive grammar often take the form of pointing out that the usage prohibition in question is stated in terms of a concept from traditional grammar that modern linguistics has rejected

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LINGUISTICS HUMAN AND ANIMAL COMMUNICATION Most animals have inter and intra-species communication systems to communicate with one another. They cry,hoot, bleat, dance and coo, and to some degree these noises and acts accomplish the same purposes as human language. They make instinctive noises. Animals, some scholars believe, have both the discrete and non-discrete system of communication. For example non-discrete in the case of the bees who communicate among among themselves through a dance, and discrete in the case of verbal monkeys who communicate through a bark, lip-smacking, ‘aarr’ sounds, etc., but their message as well as symbols are limited in quantity and dimension. Human languages, on the other hand, are much more interestingly unlimited. Animal communication, thus, is devoid of the complexity, novelty, multiplicity and creativity of human language. Animal communication is a closed system; it is unextendable and unmodifiable. The bees and the monkeys use even now-a-day the same communication system which they used, say five thousand years ago. Here animal communication lacks the variety of the human communication. The number of sentences in any natural language is inexhaustible. There is no limit to the number of conceptual units in the human language, nor to the number of posssible symbols. Human language is extendable and modifiable. Human communication is structurally complex while the animal communication is not. The former is conditioned by time and geography, the latter is not, for example,the dogs of all the countries have the same system of message and symbols. Humanbeings, on the other hand, use a variety of symbols which differ from one geographical nation or region to another. Human language is much more acquired by effort and is the result of social interaction. Animal communication differs in this respect too. If a human child is kept away from human society for a long time, and is conditioned to live in the communit, say of wolves, in all probability, he will not be able to acquire human language. In other words, animal system of communication is instinctive and inherited; human language is not such. Human language has a much wider range of flexibility, modification, change, variety, creativity, etc. than animal communication. In human language, the element of mimicry is more than it is in the animal communication. The organ of speech by which human produce sounds are a rare gift of Nature to man. No other species except apes and monkeys has been endowed with this gift. We can summarize the Human VS Animal communication system as under:

Human Language 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Unlimited and infinite Open system Extendable, modifiable Flexible and full of variety Non-instinctive Acquired Conditioned by geography Full of novelty and creativity Recurrent Grammatical Copgnitive as well as behavioral Descriptive and Narrative

Animal Communcation Limited and finite Closed System Unextendable, unmodifiable Inflexible and without variety Instinctive Inherited Not conditioned by Geography Bereft of Novelty and creativity Repititive Non-grammatical Only Behavioral Non-descriptive and non-narrative

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LINGUISTICS THE PRODUCTION OF SPEECH An effective act of speech is an exceedingly complex operation involving a number of operations. The first stage is psychological, the second is physiological and the third is physical. First of all a concept is formulated in in the speaker’s brain, and human nervous system transmits this linguistic message to the so called organs of speech. The organs of speech are thus set in motion and their movements creat disturbance in the air, and these sound waves are received by the listener’s ears. At the listener’s end, first of all the ears receive the linguistic codification, his nervous system passes this linguistic message to the brain, where the linguistic interpretation of the message takes place. The linguistic message conveyed to the organs of speech by the nervous system activates the lungs, larynx and the cavities above in such a way that they perform a series of movements to produce a particular pattern of sound. For the production of speech, we need an air-stream mechanism. Generally all speech sounds are made by an egressive pulmonic air stream on out going breath. In this way the speech sound is produced by the articulatory movements in the chest, throat, mouth ands nose.There are four areas: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Larynx containing the vocal cords. The oral cavity (Mouth). The pharyngeal cavity(Throat) The nasal cavity(Nose)

The air stream coming from the lungs may be modified in any of these areas in a variety of ways. The role of each speech organ is as under:

(A) The Diaphram and Lungs The diaphram is situated in the human body below the lungs and controls the expansion and contraction of the lungs in breathing.It is involved in the production of chest pulses on which the division of syllables is based. The lungs serve for a source of air, which passes upward through the wind pipe and larynx consisting of the vocal cords on to the mouth or both, and comes outwards. The source of energy for the production of speech is generally the air-stream coming out of the lungs.

(B) The Larynx and Vocal Cords The larynx is the little box that is popularly called the Adam’s apple. It is casing formed of cartilage and muscles, a bony box like structure in the front of the throat, situated in the upper part of the wind pipe or the trachea, containing a valve like opening consisting of two membranous tissues, the vocal cords. The vocal cords are like a pair of lips placed horizontally from front to back. The opening between them is called glottis. When we breath in and out, the glottis is open. This is the position of production of the breathed or voiceless sounds, for example /f,o,s,h/ as in the english words fan, think, sell, hell. The major role of the vocal cords is that of a vibrator in the production of of voice, or phonation. The vocal cords vibrate many times in a second with the pressure of the air coming through them. This vibration produces a musical note called voice, and sounds produced in

18 this way are called voice-sounds. For example, all vowel sounds, and the consonants /v,z,m,n/ as in englisg words Valley,zero,mad, nail are voiced.

(C) The soft Palate The roof of the mouth has three parts: behind the upper front teeth called the hard concave surface behind it called palate at the back, with the uvula at its

the hard convex surface justy alveolar or teeth ridge, theb the hard palate and the soft end.

The soft palate can be moved up to block the passage into the nose. The from the lungs then has to come out through the mouth only and the sounds produced in this way are called the oral sounds.All english sounds except /m,n,‫תּ‬/ are oral sounds. If the soft palate is lowered and passage through the mouth is closed, the air from the lungs come out through the nose only. Sounds produced in this manner are called nasal sounds.For example, /m,n,‫תּ‬/ in English words man,nun and song.

(D) The Tongue Of all the movable organs within the mouth, tongue is by far the most fleecy and is capable of assuming a great variety of positions in the articulation of both vowels and consonants. The tongue for the convenience of description has four parts: the tip, the blade, the front and the back. It is the position of the tongue which is largely responsible for the difference in in the sounds of various vowels. The external end of the tongue is called the tip. The part opposite the hard palate is called the front. The part opposite to the alveolar ridge is called the blade and the part opposite the volume is called the back.

(E) The Lips The position of lips affects very considerably the shape of the total cavity.They may be shut or held apart in various ways. When they are held tightly shut, they form a complete obstruction to produce bilabial stops, e.g. /p,b/.If they are held apart,they assume various positions to utter different words.

Written and Composed BY; Prof. A.R. Somroo M.A. English, M.A. Education Phone: 03339971417