Chapter 10.4: Langue Vs parole

One of the most important contributions made by Ferdinand de Saussure is the concept of langue and parole, French words that roughly equate to language and speaking. For Saussure, langue, language, is the system of signs that a speech community has agreed upon. It is one homogeneous whole. It exists “outside the individual who can never create nor modify it by himself. It exists only by virtue of a sort of contract signed by the members of a community.” Thus, learning a language is a matter of learning all the linguistic signs of the community, learning which sounds make up the phonemic system and how the sounds are put together into linguistic signs, i.e., being able to relate the sound-images (signifiers) with their appropriate mental concepts (signifieds), and combining these into coherent utterances. Standing apart from this homogeneous system is the individual utterance, the execution of the act of speaking, that is, parole. Unlike langue, speaking is always heterogeneous, changing with each utterance. The distinction is important because for Saussure linguistics as a science is concerned only with langue, not with parole. (See Course in General Linguistics, pp. 10-15).

Competence vs Performance

Saussure’s division of human speech into langue and parole has had a vast influence on thinking about language and linguistics, and eventually led to a new formulation by Noam Chomsky. Chomsky’s views of language as part of the innate biology of the human mind led him to shift the notion of langue away from an external “social contract” of linguistic signs, to an internal, cognitive recognition of the grammar of language. The term he used for this internal grammatical knowledge is linguistic competence. Every native speaker of a language has an internalized set of finite rules that allows them to comprehend and to create an infinite number of expressions. These rules govern the use of the different structural systems of English–the phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon, and so on. The actual execution of these rules is the performance, almost identical to Saussure’s parole. Any of the rules might be violated by a speaker during a specific utterance, and yet this has no bearing on that speaker’s linguistic competence. Speakers having a conversation know which words to use, how to pronounce them, and the order to put them in, and the audience of native speakers knows these rules as well. Yet during the conversation speakers might stutter or mispronounce a word, might need to pause to remember a word or to correct themselves after using a wrong word by accident, but in spite of the errors that appear in an individual performance, the linguistic competence of the speakers remains. And it is the rules that make up one’s linguistic competence that are the object of study in linguistics.

Descriptive vs Prescriptive Linguistics

Many of us have been taught certain “rules” of English in grammar classes from elementary school up through college: “do not split infinitives,” “do not end a sentence with a preposition,” “two negatives cancel each other out and make a positive,” “i before e except after c,” and so on. These are not rules of English; rather, they are rules of a specific type of standard, formal written English as decided by certain people who are considered (by some) to be authorities. Most of them were invented as stylistic suggestions in the 18th century, and they have since been passed down as rules for “correct” English. We call them prescriptive rules because they prescribe, that is, authorize or at least recommend, a certain usage. For anyone trying to write formal written English, it is a good idea to follow these rules, but that does not mean that they are rules of the English language or that the version of English they prescribe is the “correct” or “pure” version.

The true rules of English, those which make up one’s linguistic competence, are discovered by observing how English speakers actually speak, that is, they describe the usage found among English speakers; they are therefore called descriptive rules. For example, English speakers will know immediately that a word like “rbadn” cannot exist in English because it violates certain rules of English phonology: English does not use the consonant cluster rb at the beginning of words, nor does it use the cluster dn at the end of words. These phonological rules are not taught in school but all English speakers know them as part of their competence in English. In other words, these are not rules that English speakers must follow, but rather they are rules that all English speakers simply do follow (compare Saussure’s notion of a “social contract”). If we were to search every single word that exists in English we would not find a single one that begins with the consonant cluster rb. In other words, this rule describes a feature of English. It does not prescribe a feature. If a community of English speakers start using a new word that begins with rb, the rule would change so that it would describe the new reality.

The same types of rules exist for English grammar. “Don’t end sentence with a preposition” is not a descriptive rule of English; we know this because many English speakers frequently end sentences with prepositions. As an example, many native English speakers would feel quite comfortable with a sentence like “Where do you come from?” Therefore, it would be wrong to say that English cannot have prepositions at the end of a sentence. On the other hand, the rule “definite articles are placed before the noun they refer to” is a rule of English. English speakers must say “the man” not “man the.” Like the phonological rules above, this is not a rule that has to be taught, but is a rule that is formulated by observing how all speakers of English speak, even with the knowledge that other languages, like Swedish, place the definite article after the noun, “mannen.”

Acceptability

People sometimes confuse descriptive grammar with an idea that there are no rules of English or that “anything goes.” Observation of English speakers tells us that this is not so and that there are in fact a great many rules of English, and if a speaker violates one of these rules then the utterance is considered ungrammatical. The term we use when evaluating whether an utterance is grammatical or not is acceptability. Any native speaker who hears an utterance makes an immediate judgment whether or not the utterance is acceptable or not. This term keeps us from falling into problems that are associated with more loaded terms like “good” or “bad” or “correct” or “incorrect.” Some utterances are “acceptable” and some are not, based solely on the criterion of whether or not a linguistic community accepts the phrase as meaningful. The acceptability of an utterance depends entirely on the usage of speakers of the language. Different speakers might have different notions of acceptability. We must therefore make a distinction between what we as individual speakers of a language consider acceptable and what we as students studying language can term acceptable or not. Consider the following three  sentences:

1. I do not have any money.
2. I ain’t got no money.
3. Money no I has.

Which of these are acceptable and which are unacceptable? The criterion used to make that determination depends on the person making the judgment, so that one speaker might find that only 1 is acceptable, or only 2, or perhaps both 1 and 2. Part of what makes someone a native English speaker is having the ability to determine what is acceptable in their version of English. Linguists studying English as a whole, however, observe that many speakers of English would utter either 1 or 2 or both, but that no speakers of English anywhere would utter 3. 3 is therefore unacceptable in English grammar because there are no actual attestations of it in usage among speakers. To denote that an utterance is unattested, and therefore considered unacceptable, we mark it with an asterisk *:

3. *Money no I has.

It should also be noted that a speaker’s judgment of grammatical acceptability is not dependent on the semantics of the utterance. In his 1957 work Syntactic Structures, Chomsky presented what has become his most famous sentence:

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously

This sentence makes no sense, and yet it can be judged as grammatically acceptable by all native English speakers. Chomsky contrasted it with the sentence *”Furiously sleep ideas green colorless,” immediately recognized as unacceptable to a native English speaker. In other words, the notions of what is acceptable in a linguistic performance depends on whether or not the sentence conforms to the internalized rules of grammatical expression, not to whether or not the utterance makes logical sense.

Chapter 10.3: Language as a System

This is the most important aspect of language. Every language is based on a set of structural elements, phonology, morphology, syntax, and
semantics. These structures combine with each other according to systematic rules. These rules can be established by observing and describing how native speakers of a language speak. Each language has a specific set of sounds that are combined in specific, systematic methods to create words, which are then combined in specific, systematic methods to form meaningful utterances. If these methods were not systematic, then all utterances would be random and therefore meaningless. No one would be able to learn the rules, and thus no one would be able to understand what anyone else was saying.

This description of language as a system applies to all languages and all varieties of languages, whether the language of the most literate and wealthy members of societies, or the language of illiterate hunter-gatherers, or of any poor or lower-class speakers dwelling in impoverished areas throughout the world. We know this because all languages are equally capable of being understood by their speakers. Some people think that certain languages, or certain varieties of a single language, are somehow better at communication than others, more elegant, precise, or romantic, or that some language varieties are sloppier, simpler, less emotional, or more violent, etc. than other languages. None of this is true. All languages are equally systematic and thus all are equally able to express the concepts needed by its community of speakers.

Phonology

This is the study of the sounds, or phones, used by the speakers of a language. When someone speaks, their speech is uttered in a continuous stream; this continuous stream can be broken up into discrete segments of meaning. These segments are called phonemes. A phoneme is “the smallest meaningful unit
of sound in a language.”

Perhaps the most important word in this definition is meaningful. People can make a vast number of sounds with their mouths, but only some of these have meaning in any particular language. General American only uses about 39 specific and distinguishable sounds (this number might vary depending on the specific dialect; many who speak Western American English probably use only 38). Other languages have their own set of phonemes which may differ drastically from those used in English, and some sounds are only used in a few languages. For example, very few languages have the “th” sounds found in English. Some languages, like Xhosa and Khoekhoe, use clicks as phonemes (similar to the tsk tsk sound). Watch this very short video of
someone explaining the four clicks in the Nama dialect of Khoekhoe.

Although English speakers are able to make these sounds and can even use them to convey a meaning such as disapproval, they are not part of the phonemic system of English. They cannot be combined with other phonemes to create meaningful words.

There are also suprasegmental aspects of phonology, that is, features above the level of the segments. One such suprasegmental is accent or stress, which plays a major role in creating meaning. For example, say this sentence four times, each time with the stress on a different word, to see how the meaning of the sentence can change based entirely on the intonation pattern of the sentence:

• DID you kill him?
• Did YOU kill him?
• Did you KILL him?
• Did you kill HIM?

In summary, the phonemes used in English are a system: a set number of phonemes, about 39, that combine in certain ways and combinations, to form larger units. If English speakers did not agree which sounds are meaningful and which are meaningless, then the phoneme system of English would break down and become unsystematic, and communication with other English speakers would become impossible.

Morphology

Morphology is the study of the forms (morph means “form”) of a language, the combination of phonemes into meaningful units, called morphemes. The definition of a morpheme is thus very similar to the definition of a phoneme: a morpheme is the smallest, meaningful unit of lexical or grammatical meaning. For example, the word walk is a morpheme. It cannot be made any smaller (such as *w and *alk) and retain any lexical or grammatical meaning. The word walks, on the other hand, can be divided into two smaller units, i.e., two smaller morphemes: walk and –s. The inflectional ending –s is not considered a word, but it has grammatical meaning and is therefore a morpheme: it means that the verb is 3rd person singular, and that it is present tense. Some morphemes, like walk can stand on their own as individual words, and are therefore called free morpheme, whereas –s is a bound morpheme, because it can only appear when bound to another morpheme. There are many other bound morphemes we can add to walk: walk-er, walk-ed, walk-ing, walk-athon. There are two types of bound morphemes. The ones like –s, -ed and –ing do not change the meaning of the word walk; instead, they only add grammatical information. These are called inflectional morphemes, because the grammatical syllables we put on the ends of words are called inflections. The morpheme –er that changes walk from a verb into a noun referring to “someone who performs the act of walking” is called a derivational morpheme, because an entirely new word with a new meaning is derived from it.

Syntax

Syntax is “the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages” (Chomsky, Syntactic Structures, p. 11). It includes not only word order but also what types of words can be placed in which positions, the agreements between words (such as adjective and noun or noun and verb), and other related subjects.

Semantics

One aspect of morphology is the study of the lexicon of a language. The lexicon is not only all the words of a language, but also all the prefixes or suffixes used in a language, that is, the lexicon of a language is all the morphemes of that language. Thus, luck is a member of the English lexicon, but so is the prefix un- and the suffix -y that you can use to create the word unlucky. Similarly, walk is a member of the English lexicon, but so are the suffixes -ed, -ing, and –s that you can use to create the words walked, walking, and walks. In the same way that phonology has phonemes and morphology has morphemes, the lexicon of a language has lexemes. A lexeme is a basic unit of lexical meaning, regardless of how many morphemes are used to create that meaning: Thus, walk, walks, walked, walking, and walker are all forms of the same lexeme WALK.

Semantics is the study of the meanings of these lexemes. Semantics deals with how words can mean, where they derive their meanings from (e.g., from mental images, from usage, etc), and how these meanings can shift or change over time. At the heart of this is the study of the sign, and how the signifier points to and is related to the signified.

Related Aspects of Language

Graphics refers to the writing system of a language. This is not technically one of the structural elements of language and is therefore often ignored by linguistics. Nevertheless, in literate societies, the writing system can have much influence on the parts of language discussed above. Graphics is composed of the types of writing (alphabet, hieroglyphs, etc.), the spelling (orthography), the system of punctuation, etc, as methods used to record language; in other words, it refers to a technology.

Chapter 10.2: History of Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human natural language (a definition taken from Akmajian, et al., p. 5). It is considered a science since it seeks to provide an empirical, objective description of language as it exists in the world. Linguists observe language so that they may describe it and then formulate explanations or theories based on their descriptions. According to Ferdinand de Saussure, one of the founders of the modern field of linguistics, “the subject matter of linguistics comprises all manifestations of human speech,” not only “correct” formal utterances, but all other forms, current and past (Course in General Linguistics, p. 6). Linguists also studies the social contexts of language, how language is used in and influenced by social and historical factors.

The subject matter of linguistics comprises all manifestations of human speech, whether that of savages or civilized nations, or of archaic, classical or
decadent periods. In each period the linguist must consider not only correct speech and flowery language, but all other forms of expression as well. And that is not all: since he is often unable to observe speech directly, he must consider written texts, for only through them can he reach idioms that are remote in time or space”

This definition, from Saussure’s 1916 Course in General Linguistics, is a bit out of date now in its choice of words, with its talk of savages and of decadent ages, but it gives a good description of the type of data which linguists are seeking to describe: “all manifestations of human speech.” In the following paragraphs I will give a brief rundown of the history of linguistics as a science, concentrating on what is relevant for an understanding of the history of English.

Historical Linguistics

The field of historical linguistics begins in the late 18th century with a single sentence. When delivering a paper on the history of India, Sir William Jones, an English judge in Calcutta, remarked that he had observed so close a relationship between Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit (the classical language of India) that it
seemed that all three languages had sprung from a “common source.” Several scholars throughout Europe began to investigate the connections between these three languages, especially in order to determine what this “common source” might have been. This study involved gathering together, learning, and studying intensively all European and many Asian languages, not only in their contemporary forms, but more especially in their ancient forms. Grammars started appearing of early languages like Old English, Gothic, and others. As the material became available, scholars began to notice even more correspondences between the different languages. Most notably, Jakob Grimm, known today primarily for his collection of ancient Germanic folktales, discovered that certain correspondences between the sounds of one language and those of another were regular and not random.

The notion that changes in the sounds of a language did not simply occur here and there in random words led to a new approach to the study of languages by a group of young linguists, who were thus called the Junggrammatiker (German for “young grammarians”) by their detractors, though more commonly referred to today as the Neogrammarians. Building on the findings of Grimm and others, the Neogrammarians formulated the theory of the Sound Law, which states that a change that occurs in the development of a language occurs everywhere in the language with absolute regularity and with no exceptions. For example, by comparing the words father in English and pater in Latin, they could predict that other words that started with p in Latin would also start with f in English. This prediction turns out to be true when we look at other word pairs: Latin pisces ~ English fish, Latin pedem ~ English foot, Latin pullus ~ English fowl. In fact, every single occurrence of the letter p in Latin will correspond to an f in English. The correspondence of Latin p to English f is therefore a Sound Law (this one in particular is part of Grimm’s law, which we will discuss later).

In their search for sound laws, the Neogrammarians invented the field of comparative linguistics. By comparing the sounds, words, and grammars of all known languages and dialects, and relying on the theory that all the changes were absolutely regular and exceptionless, they were able to reconstruct forms of languages that were spoken even before the invention of writing. Thus, by the end of the nineteenth century much of what we know today about how to investigate the historical development and pre-historical forms of a language had already been formulated.

Structural Linguistics

One problem with the work of the Neogrammarians is that it looked at language almost entirely through the focus of individual sounds and their changes. Major aspects of language were ignored, such as how language was learned or how it was actually used by its speakers. Much of this was changed with the publication of Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics in 1916. In this book Saussure treats language as a comprehensive, systematic structure, with all the individual components working together in one, complex whole. Saussure’s approach to language, now known as “Structural Linguistics,” shifted the main emphasis of linguistic study away from diachronic study (i.e., the study of language as it changes through time) to synchronic study (the study of language at a single point in time, especially as it is used by contemporary speakers). Saussure and structural linguists treated language as a social and cultural phenomenon, dependent on the social interplay between the speaker and the auditor as they expressed concepts back and forth through speech.

Saussure’s structural linguistics represents the beginnings of the modern field of linguistics, and indeed its ideas have spread to several other fields (for
example, in literary theory, structuralism and the reaction against it known as post-structuralism are the two primary modes of thought of the twentieth century). Structural linguistics held sway until the 1950s when Noam Chomsky introduced several new ways of approaching the study of language, suggesting that the ability to learn language was innate in all humans, that is, that we have built into our brains a basic knowledge of language which is universal to all human languages. This approach is called Generative Grammar because it suggests that all humans have a certain finite set of cognitive rules (grammar) that we use to generate an infinite set of utterances. Language for Chomsky is more of a biological phenomenon than suggested by Saussure’s social approach, and linguistics has thus become one of the major branches of cognitive science. To some degree after Saussure, but especially after Chomsky, the study of language was in the abstract, separate from the study of any specific language. The study of language change in this approach is not so much the study of changes in individual words or sounds but of the underlying cognitive rules that govern them. We are a long way from the Neogrammarian goal of learning about the history of past cultures; instead the new goal is learning about the human mind. In Chomsky’s words,

One reason for studying language–and for me personally the most compelling reason–is that it is tempting to regard language, in the traditional phrase, as “a mirror of mind.” I do not mean by this simply that the concepts expressed and distinctions developed in normal language use give us insight into the patterns of thought and the world of “common sense” constructed by the human mind. More intriguing, to me at least, is the possibility that by studying language we may discover abstract principles that govern its structure and use, principles that are universal by biological necessity and not mere historical accident, that derive from mental characteristics of the species (from his Reflections on Language, as quoted in Akmajian et al., p. 9).

Here we will focus on the specific changes that English has undergone far more closely than we will on these competing theoretical approaches to language; nevertheless, we will try to keep these and other theoretical approaches in mind so that we can have a better understanding of what language is and how it can change throughout time. Although this course necessarily focuses more on the historical dimensions of linguistics so that you can have a better understanding of how English has been used throughout the course of its existence, I hope that you will also come away with a deeper understanding of language itself and the different avenues of study of language that are available.

Chapter 10.1: What is Language

Although linguists usually agree that linguistics is the scientific study of human natural language, they do not often agree on a definition of language itself. Defining language meant something very different to the neogrammarians who studied linguistics in the nineteenth century than it did to structuralists like Ferdinand de Saussure or to cognitive linguists like Noam Chomsky. Indeed, the central question guiding the work of many of these scholars has been “what is language,” and the definition one gives largely depends on the type of linguistics one studies. 

One difficulty defining language in a way that encompasses all varieties that exist (or have existed) and that distinguishes it from other forms of communication. In an attempt to address this difficulty, Charles Hockett enumerated in several papers published between 1959 and 1968 16 “design features” that all languages share. Several of these can be found in different types of animal communication, about which more is being learned all the time (see this article from Jan 20, 2015, referring to this academic article). Only human language has all 16 features.

1. Vocal-auditory channel
2. Broadcast transmission and directional reception
3. Transitoriness
4. Interchangeability
5. Total Feedback
6. Specialization
7. Semanticity
8. Arbitrariness
9. Discreteness
10. Displacement
11. Productivity
12. Traditional Transmission
13. Duality of Patterning
14. Reflexiveness
15. Learnability
16. Blending

Only some of these will be relevant for studying the history of English. For
a more in depth discussion of the rest, see the
Wikipedia
article.

1. Vocal-Auditory Channel. Language is produced in the vocal tract and processed by the ears. Although many who live in a heavily literate modern society tend to favor the written language over the spoken, language is primary a spoken phenomenon. For most of the history of English, the vast majority of people were unable to read and write and yet were able to communicate perfectly well. All languages must have a vocal-auditory method of communication, but there is no necessity for a language to be written. Therefore, linguistics focuses on the spoken language and considers written forms only secondarily or when necessary, as when studying past forms of the language.

7. Semanticity. Speech sounds in language convey specific meanings. To use Hockett’s own example, a dog’s panting produces sound and may indicate that the dog is hot, but this meaning is a side effect. The panting is a physical reaction to being hot, not an intentional communication of that hotness. A person may breath heavily to intentionally convey a certain meaning; however, it may also simply indicate that they are hot or have been physically exerting themselves. In other words, there is not a single specific meaning conveyed by this sound. To be part of language, the sounds produced by the vocal tract must carry specific meanings.

8. Arbitrariness. There is no direct connection between the auditory signal and the meaning given to it. The sounds we produce and the semanticity we ascribe to them have no intrinsic connection. This is perhaps the most crucial feature for studying how a language can change over time. It comprises two concepts: language is arbitrary and language is conventional. In his Course in General Linguistics Saussure presents the concept of the sign, a combination of the signifier, which is the sound in speech of a word, and the signified, the mental concept which the sound evokes. In the case of “tree,” the sound we make when we say the word is the signifier, which calls to mind the concept of a tree, which is the signified.

The connection between the signifier and the signified, as Saussure stressed, is entirely arbitrary. In other words, we could use any combinations of sounds as the signifier for a tree. There is nothing in the sound pattern t-r-ee that connects it inherently to either actual, physical trees that exist in the visible world or to the mental concept of trees. So why do we use the signifier “tree” instead of some other group of sounds? Purely by convention, that is, by agreement. As a community of speakers of a language, we have all decided that the sound “tree” will signify the concept of trees. We could change this and use a different sound, as long as enough speakers “agreed” to it. In fact, a thousand years ago, many English speakers used the word beam to refer to trees, but over time we have “agreed” to stop using “beam” for entire trees and to use this sound pattern for just a specific part of a tree, or even simply a long piece of wood, or even now just anything that is long and straight, such as a beam of light. Since the connection between the word “tree” and trees is arbitrary, we may decide in the future to use the word “tree” solely for something else (such as kinship relations or file structures in computers) and use another word for trees. It should be emphasized here that the term “arbitrary” as used here should not be confused with the false notion that anything can mean anything in language. As described above, it is only the connection between signified and signifier that is arbitrary, but there is a connection, one that we have agreed upon by convention. The primary objection that can be brought up against the notion of convention is onomatopoeia, words whose sound pattern seems to mimic the actual sound it refers to. Such words rarely hold up to scrutiny, however. First, many of the words which speakers of one language consider an accurate phonic representation of a sound turn out to vary widely across languages. A good example is the crow of a rooster. For English speakers, roosters say “cock-a-doodle-do,” while for Spanish speakers they say ‘kikiriki” (according to this website which lists quite a number of Spanish animal sounds). It is clear that roosters do not actually crow differently in different countries, but our perceptions of them, or at least our attempts to mimic them fall into the sound patterns of our own particular language, and thus they belong to the same conventional connection between signified and signifier. Another possible refutation is that the sounds in these words change over time according to the same sound changes that other words undergo — if they truly represented the sound they signify, then they would presumably not be altered. For example, some might think that the word “fart” is an onomatopoeia of a sound, but this word in fact goes all the way back to the Proto-Indo-European root *perd-. This root may itself be an onomatopoeia, but its descendants in multiple modern languages all sound quite different — again breaking the notion of an intrinsic connection between the sound of the word and the concept. An extract with Saussure’s own dismissal of onomatopoeia as an objection can be found on this page.

9. Discreteness. Each unit of communication can be separated and is unmistakable. When someone says the word pat we can separate it into three discrete or distinct segments, p, a, and t. These individual segments are recognizably distinct from other segments. They can also be used in different combinations and have unrelated meanings, such as tap or apt.

11. Productivity. Language can create an infinite number of new utterances with new meanings by combining already existing signs. In fact, every day each of us probably produces or comes across utterances that have never been made before in human history. Note that the ability to produce such new utterances and also to understand them means that language has a grammatical patterning or system. If there was no underlying grammatical system over which we could lay our signs in an understandable order, then we would only be able to reproduce sentences that we had previously memorized.

12. Traditional Transmission. Language is learned in social groups. We learn English because we grow up and are surrounded by other speakers of English. Furthermore, the variety of English we learn is determined by the social group in which we are speaking. Recognition of this fact will explain much of the “non-linguistic” material that we will here. For example, we have a vast amount of words in English that we borrowed from Scandinavian languages, due in large part to the Viking invasions of England in the ninth century. We also have a large amount of French words from the Norman invasion of the 11th century. Language is socially transmitted, not genetically transmitted.

13. Duality of Patterning. The infinite number of new meanings is created by a finite number of sound components. The continuous stream of speech that we hear can be divided into discrete segments (see discreteness above). These discrete segments are finite in number (in English we only use about 39 or 40 individual sounds) and on their own are meaningless, yet they can be combined in numerous ways to create an infinite number of meaningful statements.

These 7 features (out of the 16 total) are the most important for understanding how language works and how it can change over time. If we had to construct a definition out of them, we could say something like “Language is a conventional, socially-transmitted system of discrete vocal sounds which are combined to create an infinite number of signs used for human communication.”