FPTLI02 - Linguistics I Guide

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Chapter: /Language and Linguistics

Lingüística I
FPTLI02
Nueva versión cortesía de:
IDIOMAS MODERNOS
Texto:
Prof. Vanessa Courleander Chapter: /Language and Linguistics
Transcripción:
Gabriela López
Erik Urrutia
Stephany Vargas
Diseño:
Stephany Vargas
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Language and Linguistics
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1.1 What is language?
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I
Language
1.1 What is language?
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. At first sight this definition – which is one that
will be found in most textbooks and general treatments of the subject – is straightforward
enough. But what exactly is meant by ‘language’ and ‘scientific’? And can linguistics, as it is
currently practiced, be rightly described as a science?
The question “What is language?” is comparable with – and, some would say, hardly less
profound than – “What is life?”, the presuppositions of which circumscribe and unify the
biological sciences. Of course, “What is life?” is not the kind of question that the biologist has
constantly before his mind in his everyday work. It has more of a philosophical ring to it. And
the biologist, like other scientists, is usually too deeply immersed in the details of some
specific problem to be pondering the implications of such general questions. Nevertheless, the
presumed meaningfulness of the question “What is life?” – the presupposition that all living
things share some property or set of properties which distinguishes them from non-living
things – establishes the limits of the biologist’s concerns and justifies the autonomy, or partial
autonomy, of his discipline. Although the question “What is life?” can be said, in this sense,
to provide biology with its very reason for existence, it is not so much the question itself as the
particular interpretation that the biologist puts upon it and the unraveling of its more detailed
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implications within some currently accepted theoretical framework that nourish the biologist’s
day-to-day speculations and research. So it is for the linguist in relation to the question “What
is language?”
The first thing to notice about the question “What is language?” is that it uses the word
‘language’ in the singular without the indefinite article. Formulated as it is in English, it thus
differs grammatically, if not in meaning, from the superficially similar question “What is
language?” Several European languages have two words, not one, to translate the English
word ‘language’: cf. French ‘langage’: ‘langue’, Italian ‘linguaggio’: ‘lingua’; Spanish
‘lenguaje’: ‘lengua’. In each case, the difference between the two words correlates, up to a
point, with the difference in the two senses of the English word ‘language’. For example, in
French the word ‘langage’ is used to refer to language in general and the word ‘langue’ is
applied to particular languages. It so happens that English allows its speakers to say, of some
person, not only that he possesses a language (English, Chinese, Malay, Swahili, etc.), but that
he possesses language. Philosophers, psychologists and linguists commonly make the point
that it is the possession of language which most clearly distinguishes man from other animals.
We shall be looking into the substance of this claim in the present chapter. Here I wish to
emphasize the obvious, but important, fact that one cannot possess (or use) natural language
without possessing (or using) some particular natural language.
I have just used the term ‘natural language’; and this brings us to another point. The word
‘language’ is applied, not only to English, Chinese, Malay, Swahili, etc. – i.e. to what
everyone will agree are languages properly so called – but to a variety of other systems of
communication, notation or calculation, about which there is room for dispute. For example,
mathematicians, logicians and computer scientists frequently construct, for particular
purposes, notational systems which, whether they are rightly called languages or not, are
artificial, rather than natural. So too, though it is based on pre-existing natural languages and is
incontrovertibly a language, is Esperanto, which was invented in the late nineteenth century
for the purpose of international communication. There are other systems of communication,
both human and non-human, which are quite definitely natural rather than artificial, but which
do not seem to be languages in the strict sense of the term, even though the word ‘language’ is
commonly used with reference to them. Consider such phrases as ‘sign language’, ‘body
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language’ or ‘the language of the bees’ in this connection. Most people would probably say
that the word ‘language’ is here being used metaphorically or figuratively. Interestingly
enough, it is ‘langage’, rather than ‘langue’, that would normally be used in translating such
phrases into French. The French word ‘langage’ (like the Italian ‘linguaggio’ and the Spanish
‘lenguaje’) is more general than the other member of the pair, not only in that it is applied to
systems of communication, whether they are natural or artificial, human or non-human, for
which the English word ‘language’ is employed in what appears to be an extended sense.
The linguist is concerned primarily with natural languages. The question “What is
language?” carries with it the presupposition that each of the several thousand recognizably
distinct natural languages spoken throughout the world is a specific instance of something
more general. What the linguist wants to know is whether all natural languages have
something in common not shared by other systems of communication, human or non-human,
such that it is right to apply to each of them the word ‘language’ and to deny the application of
the term to other systems of communication – except in so far as they are based, like
Esperanto, on pre-existing natural languages. This is the question with which we shall be
dealing in the present chapter.
1.2 Some definitions of ‘language’
Definitions of language are not difficult to find. Let us look at some. Each of the following
statements about language, whether it was intended as a definition or not, makes one or more
points that we will take up later. The statements all come from classic works by well-known
linguists. Taken together, they will serve to give some preliminary indication of the properties
that linguists at least tend to think of as being essential to language.
(i) According to Sapir (1921: 8): “Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method Chapter: /Language and Linguistics
of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of voluntarily produced symbols.”

This definition suffers from several defects. However broadly we construe the terms ‘idea’,
‘emotion’ and ‘desire’, it seems clear that there is much that is communication by language
which is not covered by any of them; and ‘idea’ in particular is inherently imprecise. On the
other hand, there are many systems of voluntarily produced symbols that we only count as
languages in what we feel to be an extended or metaphorical sense of the word ‘language’. For
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example, what is now popularly referred to by means of the expression ‘body language’ –
which makes use of gestures, postures, eye-gaze, etc. – would seem to satisfy this point of
Sapir’s definition. Whether it is purely human and non-instinctive is, admittedly, open to
doubt. But so too, as well shall see, is the question whether languages properly so called are
both purely human and non-instinctive. This is the main point to be noted in Sapir’s definition.
(ii) In their Outline of Linguistic Analysis Bloch & Trager wrote (1942: 5): “A language is a
system of arbitrary vocal symbols by means of which a social group cooperates.” What is
striking about this definition, in contrast with Sapir’s, is that it makes no appeal, except
indirectly and by implication, to the communicative function of language. Instead it pulls all
the emphasis upon its social function; and, in doing so, as well shall see later, it takes a rather
narrow view of the role that language plays in society. The Bloch & Trager definition differs
from Sapir’s in that it brings in the property of arbitrariness and explicitly restricts language to
spoken language (thus making the phrase ‘written language’ contradictory). The term
‘arbitrariness’ is here being used in a rather special sense: we will come back to this presently.
We will also come back to the question of the relation that holds between language and
speech. All that needs to be said at this point is that, as far as natural languages are concerned,
there is a close connection between language and speech. Logically, the latter presupposes the
former: one cannot speck without using language (i.e. without speaking in a particular
language), but on can use language without speaking. However, granted that language is
logically independent of speech, there are good grounds for saying that, in all natural
languages as we know them, speech is historically, and perhaps biologically, prior to writing.
And this is the view that most linguists take.
(iii) In his Essay on Language, Hall (1968: 158) tells us that language is “the institution
whereby humans communicate and interact with each other by means of all, the fact of
habitually used oral-auditory arbitrary symbols”. Among the points to notice here are, first of
all, the fact that both communication and interaction are introduced into the definition
(‘interaction’ being broader than and, in this respect, better than ‘co-operation’) and, second,
that the term ‘oral-auditory’ can be taken to be roughly equivalent to ‘vocal’, differing from it
only in that ‘oral-auditory’ makes reference to the hearer as well as to the speaker (i.e. to the
receiver as well as the sender of the vocal signals that we identify as language-utterances).
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Hall, like Sapir, treats language as purely human institution; and the term ‘institution’ makes
explicit the view that the language that is used by a particular society is part of that society’s
culture. The property of arbitrariness is, once again, singled out for mention.
What is most noteworthy in Hall’s definition, however, is his employment of the term
‘habitually used’; and there are historical reasons for this. Linguistics and the psychology of
language were strongly influenced, for about thirty years or so, especially in America, by the
stimulus-response theories of the behaviourists; and within the theoretical framework of
behaviourism the term ‘habit’ acquired a rather special sense. It was used with reference to
bits of behavior that were identifiable as statistically predictable responses to particular
stimuli. Much that we would not normally think of as being done as a matter of habit was
brought within the scope of the behaviourists’ term; and many textbooks of linguistics reflect
this more or less technical use of the term and, with its adoption, commit themselves, by
implication at least, to some version or other of the behaviourists’ stimulus-response theory of
language-use and language-acquisition. It is now generally accepted that this theory is, if not
wholly inapplicable, of very restricted applicability both in linguistics and in the psychology
of language.
Hall presumably means by language ‘symbols’ the vocal signals that are actually
transmitted from sender to receiver in the process of communication and interaction. But it is
now clear that there is no sense of the term ‘habit’, technical or non-technical, in which the
utterances of a language are either themselves habits or constructed by means of habits. If
‘symbol’ is beings used to refer, not to language-utterances, but to the words or phrases of
which they are composed, it would still be wrong to imply that a speaker uses such and such a
word, as a matter of habit, on such and such an occasion. One of the most important facts
about language is that there is, in general, no connection between words and the situations in
which they are used such that occurrence of particular words is predictable, as habitual
behavior is predictable, from the situations themselves. For example, we do not habitually
produce an utterance containing the word ‘bird’ whenever we happen to find ourselves in a
situation in which we see a bird; indeed, we are no more likely to use the word ‘bird’ in such
situations than we are in all sorts of other situations. Language, as we shall see later, is
stimulus-free.
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(iv) Robins (1979a: 9-14) does not give a formal definition of language: be rightly points
out that such definitions "tend to be trivial and uninformative, unless they presuppose some
general theory of language and of linguistic analysis". But he does list and discuss a number of
salient facts that "must be taken into account in any seriously intended theory of language”.
Throughout successive editions of this standard textbook, he notes that languages are "symbol
systems… almost wholly based on pure or arbitrary convention", but lays special emphasis on
their flexibility and adaptability1. There is perhaps no logical incompatibility between the view
that languages are systems of habit ('habit' being construed in a particular sense) and the view
expressed by Robins. It is after all conceivable that a habit-system should itself change over
time, in response to the changing needs of its users. But the term “habit” is not one that we
usually associate with adaptable behaviour. We shall need to look a little more closely at the
notion of infinite extensibility later. And we shall then see that a distinction must be drawn
between the extensibility and modifiability of a system and the extensibility or modifiability of
the products of that system. It is also important to recognize that, as far as the system is
concerned, some kinds of extension and modification are theoretically more interesting than
others. For example, the feet that new words can enter the vocabulary of a language at any toe
is of far less theoretical interest than is the fact that new grammatical constructions can, and
do, arise in the course of time. One of the central issues in linguistics is whether there are any
limits to this latter kind of modifiability and, if so, what the limits are.
The last definition to be quoted here strikes a very different note: "From now on I will
consider a language to be a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and
constructed out of a finite set of elements.” This definition is taken from Chomsky's Syntactic
Structures (1957: 13), whose publication inaugurated the movement known as
transformational grammar. Unlike the other definitions, it is intended to cover much else Chapter: /Language and Linguistics
besides natural languages. But, according to Chomsky, all natural languages, in either their
spoken or their written form are languages in the sense of his definition: since (a) each natural
language has a finite number of sounds in it (and a finite number of letters in its alphabet—on
the assumption that it has an alphabetic writing system); and (b), although there may be
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In earlier editions (19S4: 14; 1973:13) he says: "Languages are infinitely extendable and modifiable according
to the changing Deeds and conditions of the speakers." In the cost recent edition 'adaptable' replaces ‘Infinity
extendable’.
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infinitely many distinct sentences in the language, each sentence can be represented as a finite
sequence of these sounds (or letters). It is the task of the linguist describing some particular
natural language to determine which of the finite sequences of elements in that language are
sentences and which are non-sentences. And it is the task of the theoretical linguist who
interprets the question "What is language?" as meaning “What is natural language?" to
discover, if he can, the structural properties, if there are any, whereby natural languages differ
from what, in contrast with them, may be called non-natural languages.
It is Chomsky's belief- and he has Stressed this increasingly in his more "recent work - not
only that there are indeed such structural properties, but that they are so abstract, so complex
and so highly specific to their purpose that they could not possibly be learned from scratch by
an infant grappling with the problem of acquiring his native language. They must be known to
the child, in some sense, prior to and independently of his experience of any natural language,
and used by him in the process of language acquisition. It is because Chomsky holds this view
that he describes himself as a rationalist, rather than an empiricist. We will come back to this
point (cf. 7.4).
Chomsky's definition of language has been quoted here largely for the contrast that it
provides with the others, both in style, and in content. It says nothing about the communicative
function of either natural or non-natural languages; it says nothing about the symbolic nature
of the elements or sequences of them. Its purpose is to focus attention upon the purely
structural properties of languages and to suggest that these properties can be investigated from
a mathematically precise point of view. It is Chomsky's major contribution to linguistics to
have given particular emphasis to what he calls the structure-dependence of the processes
whereby sentences are constructed in natural languages and to have formulated a general
theory of grammar which is based upon a particular definition of this property (cf. 4.6). Chapter: /Language and Linguistics
The five definitions of 'language' quoted and briefly discussed above have served to
introduce some of the properties which some linguists have taken to be essential features of
languages as we know them. Most of them have taken the view that languages are systems of
symbols designed, as it were, for the purpose of communication. And this is how we will look
at languages below, in the section entitled ‘The semiotic point of view': semiotics, as we shall
see, is the discipline or branch of study that is devoted to the investigation of symbolic and
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communicative behaviour. The question that will concern us at that point will be whether there
is any simple property or set of properties that distinguishes natural languages from other
semiotic systems. Some of the properties that have been mentioned here are arbitrariness,
flexibility and modifiability, freedom from stimulus control, and structure-dependence. Others
will be added to this list in due course. The relation between language and speech will be dealt
with in 1.4.
Lyons, J. (1981) Language and linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
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1.2 Properties of human language
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The nature of Human Language
A fitting way to introduce this section is by quoting the view on language of the
seventeenth-century philosopher Rene Descartes. In 1637 Descartes said:
“It is a very remarkable fact that there are none so depraved and stupid, without
even excepting idiots, that they cannot arrange different words together,
forming of them a statement by which they make known their thoughts; while,
on the other hand, there is no animal, however perfect and fortunately
circumstanced it may be, which can do the same…”
Descartes’ statement contains the two basic aspects of this unit. First, the fact that the
system of communication used by human beings has some properties which are unique to it
and which distinguish it from animal communication systems. Second, the fact that human
communication seems to involve different units or components (sounds, words, sentences).
Properties of human language
The following are properties of human language which differentiate it from animal
communication systems.
a. Displacement
Human beings have the ability to communicate about events and thing which are not
present in the immediate environment. This property seems to be absent in animal
communication, which seems to be characterized by only communicating about things
and events which are physically present. Yule (1985), very amusingly, describes this
property of displacement in the following terms: “When your pet cat comes home after Chapter: /Language and Linguistics
spending a night in the back alleys and stands at your feet calling ‘meow’, you are
likely to understand this message as relating to that immediate time and place If you
ask the cat where it was the night before and what it was up to, you may get the same
‘meow’ response. It seems that animal communication is almost exclusively designed
for this moment, here and now. It cannot affectively be used to relate events which are
far removed in time and place” (p. 17).
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Humans
first articulation: individual sounds
second articulation: combined sounds (words).
b. Duality of double articulation
Animals who use sounds to communicate can produce a limited number of sounds,
and each sound is associated to a meaning. That is, the number of messages an animal
can transmit is restricted to the number of sounds they can produce. Human language,
on the other hand is organized at two levels or layers simultaneously. A physical level
of sound at which we pronounce sounds like a, t, and p. When those sounds are
produced in the order tap, we have another level which assigns a certain meaning to
this particular arrangement of sounds, a meaning which is different from the one
resulting from combining the same individual sounds in a different way such as pat.
So, we have a level of distinct separate sounds, and another level in which meaning is
assigned to the different possible sound combinations. This organization of language
into two layers: a layer of individual sounds combining into a second layer of larger
units (words) is what is known as duality or double articulation. This property of
duality gives human language a great degree of flexibility and makes it a very
economical system, since a very large number of sound combinations (words) can be
produced with a limited set of distinct sounds (an average of thirty to forty sounds),
and therefore, a very large number of meanings can be expressed out of a limited set of
sounds.
Again, and to clarify this discussion of the property of duality, an example from
Yule (1985) will be presented.
“It is obvious that although your dog may be able to produce ‘woof’, it does
not seem to be a feature of the canine repertoire that the w, oo and f elements
can be separated out as a distinct level of production. If your dog could Chapter: /Language and Linguistics
operate with the double level (i.e. duality), then you might expect to hear
‘oowf’ and even ‘foow’, each with different meanings.” (P. 22).
c. Arbitrariness
In animal language, there is in general a direct link between the signal and the
message. For example, in order to show that nectar is to the left, a bee would move its
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body to the left; in order to scare away an opponent, an animal may simulate an
attacking attitude.
In human language, however, there is no connection between the signal and the
meaning it represents. That is the meanings of the signals used in human language are
arbitrarily fixed. For example, there is no reason why the object represented by the
signal mesa should be called that way and not pola. In other words, in human language
there is no intrinsic connection between a word and its meaning.
Perhaps the best way to conceptualize what this property of arbitrariness means is
by looking at the few exceptions which exist in human language with respect to this
property. These exceptions are represented by onomatopoeic words. The phenomenon
of onomatopoeia illustrates exactly the opposite of the property of arbitrariness, since
in onomatopoeic words – quack, meow, splash, boom, bang, etc. – there is a direct
connection between the signal and its meaning.
One question immediately comes to mind: if the relation between words and their
meaning is arbitrary, then, how is communication possible at all? The answers to these
questions are convention and cultural transmission. The arbitrary relation between the
signal and its meaning is a convention which is shared by all members of a social
group, a convention which at the same time is culturally transmitted from one
generation to the next.
The property of arbitrariness is the basis for the necessity of dictionaries and for
the necessity of the different tactics and strategies employed in the learning of
vocabulary. The structures of a language are governed by general principles which,
once learned, can be applied (with some exceptions) in all cases. This is the case, for Chapter: /Language and Linguistics
example, of the rule for plural (leaving aside irregular forms like children, feet, etc…).
Once the learner internalizes the rule for plural formation, -he/she will apply it to all
new nouns he/she learns. In the case of vocabulary, however, there is no rule or
principle governing the relation between words and their meanings, therefore, other
learning strategies become necessary.
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d. Patterning
Human language consists of discrete (separate) units, which combine or arrange to

form larger units. Thus we find that sounds combine to form words and words combine
to form sentences. However, the combination of these units is not random, on the
contrary, the arrangement is very systematic, it follows very well-defined patterns.
Consider for example the English sounds i, d, k, s. There are only two possibilities for
arranging these sounds to obtain well-formed English words: kids or skid, but never
*iksd or *dski. The ill-formed words are perfectly pronounceable from the
physiological point of view, but they are excluded from the English vocabulary
because they do not follow the rules or patterns of English for the combination of
sounds to form words.
An interesting aspect of this property of patterning is that new words which are
incorporated to a language follow the restrictions placed by the rules or patterns of the
language for the formation of words. Thus, we know that trelo is not a Spanish word
but it could perfectly be one. If, for example, a machine to pluck women’s eyebrows
were to be invented, it could perfectly be called a trelo, but never a *irteo, since this
last word violates the restrictions imposed by the language for the combinations of
sounds.
The property of patterning is also evident when words are arranged to form
sentences. Consider the words quickly – the – disappeared – fog. Again, we find that to
obtain a well-formed English sentence we only have three possible combinations: The
fog quickly disappeared, the fog disappeared quickly or Quickly, the fog disappeared.
Any other combinations such as: *fog the disappeared quickly or *the quickly fog Chapter: /Language and Linguistics
disappeared, produces an ill-formed sentence. Notice that if we were to substitute
items in the sentence The fog disappeared quickly, there are also restrictions about
which items can be replaced by others.
The fog disappeared quickly

A cat meowed loudly
This glass breaks easily
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A word like the can only be substituted by words like a and this, but never for a
word like into. Similarly, at the level of the word, in a word like bet, the e can only be
replaced by i, u or a, but never by z or r.
In short, language shows to be “an intricate network of interlinked elements in

which every item is held in its place and given its identity by all the other items”
(Aitchison, 1981, p. 25).
e. Creativity (also productivity or open-endedness)
Animals have a limited set of messages they can send just as a limited range of
topics to communicate about. Human beings, on the other hand, are not restricted to a
fixed set of messages or topics, due largely to the great scope and diversity of human
thought and experience. Therefore, human language is not, as O’Grady et al (1989, p.1)
put it, “a package of ready-made messages”. Human language enables human beings to
“produce and understand new words and sentences as the need arises”. In other words,
human language is creative, it allows for “novelty and innovation in response to new
experiences, situations and thoughts.”
The main implication of the property of creative is the fact that potentially, the
number of sentences in a language is infinite. This fact has important implications for
language learning. If the number of sentences in a language is infinite, how can a
human brain which is finite learn a system which is infinite? The answer some linguists
have offered is that human beings do not, and in fact, cannot memorize all the
sentences of a language, they propose that human beings learns a finite set of rules with
which to create an infinite number of sentences. In this respect, the language user is on Chapter: /Language and Linguistics
a par with the chess player. The chess player has not memorized all the possible
strategies and play-combinations. The chess player has learned a few rules about the
movements of the pieces and about general strategies, and with those rules and infinity
of possible chess games are created.
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1.3. Linguistic forms and functions
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I
Introduction: linguistic forms and functions
1.1. The functions of language
The analysis of discourse is, necessarily, the analysis of language in use. As such, it
cannot be restricted to the description of linguistic forms independent of the purposes or
functions which those forms are designed to serve in human affairs. While some linguists may
concentrate on determining the formal properties of a language, the discourse analyst is
committed to an investigation of what a language is used for. While the formal approach has a
long tradition, manifested in innumerable volumes of grammar, the functional approach is less
well documented. Attempts to provide even a general set of labels for the principal functions
of language have resulted in vague, and often confusing, terminology. We will adopt only two
terms to describe the major functions of language and emphasize that this division is an
analytic convenience. It would be unlikely that, in any occasion, a natural language utterance Chapter: /Language and Linguistics
would be used to fulfill only one function, to the total exclusion of the other. That function
which language serves in the expression of ‘content’ we will describe as transactional, and
that function involved in expressing social relation and personal attitudes we will describe as
interactional. Our distinction, ‘transactional/interactional’, stands in general correspondence
to the functional dichotomies – ‘representative/expressive’, found in Bühler (1934),
‘referential/emotive’ (Jakobson, 1960), ‘ideational/interpersonal’ (Halliday,1970b) and
‘descriptive/social-expressive’ (Lyons, 1977).
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1.1.1 The transactional view
Linguists and linguistic philosophers tend to adopt a limited approach to the functions of
language in society. While they frequently acknowledge that language may be used to perform
many communicative functions, they nonetheless make the general assumption that the most
important function is the communication of information. Thus Lyons (1977:32) observes that
the notion of communication is readily used ‘of feelings, moods and attitudes’ but suggests
that he will be primarily interested in – ‘the intentional transmission of factual, or
propositional, information’-. Similarly Bennett (1976:5) remarks ‘it seems likely that
communication is primarily a matter of a speaker’s seeking either –to inform a hearer of
something- or to enjoy some action upon him’.
The value of the use of language to transmit information is well embedded in our
cultural mythology. We all believe that it is the faculty of language which has enabled the
human race to develop diverse cultures, each with its distinctive social customs, religious
observances, laws, oral traditions, patterns of trading, and so on. We all believe, moreover,
that it is the acquisition of written language which has permitted the development within some
of these cultures of philosophy, science and literature (see Goody, 1977). We all believe that
this development is made possible by the ability to transfer information through the use of
language, which enables man to utilize the knowledge of his forebears, and the knowledge of
other men in other cultures.
We shall call the language which is used to convey ‘factual or propositional information’
primarily transactional language. In primarily transactional language we assume that what the
speaker (or writer) has primarily in mind is the efficient transference of information. Language
used in such a situation is primarily ‘message oriented’. It is important that the recipient gets
the informative detail correct. Thus if a police man gives directions to a traveler, a doctor tells
a nurse how to administer medicine to a patient, a householder puts in an insurance claim, a
shop assistant explains the relative merits of two types of knitting wool, or a scientist describes
an experiment, in each case it matters that the speaker should make what he says (or writes)
clear. There will be unfortunate (even disastrous) consequences in the real world if the
message is not properly understood by the recipient.
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1.1.2 The interactional view
Whereas linguists, philosophers of language and psycholinguists have, in general, paid

particular attention to the use of language for the transmission of ‘factual or propositional
information’, sociologists and sociolinguists have been particularly concerned with the use of
language to establish and maintain social relationships. In sociological and anthropological
literature the phatic use of language has been frequently commented on – particularly the
conventional use of language to open talk-exchanges and to close them. Conversational
analysts have been particularly concerned with the use of language to negotiate role-
relationships, peer-solidarity, the exchange of turns in a conversation, the saving of face of
both speaker and hearer (cf. Labov, 1972a; Brown and Levinson, 1978; Sacks, Schegloff &
Jefferson, 1974; Lakoff, 1973). It is clearly the case that a great deal of everyday human
interaction is characterized by the primarily interpersonal rather than the primarily
transactional use of language. When two strangers are standing shivering at a bus-stop in an
icy wind and one turns to the other and says ‘My goodness, it’s cold’, it is difficult to suppose
that the primary intention of the speaker is to convey information. It seems much more
reasonable to suggest that the speaker is indicating a readiness to be friendly and to talk.
Indeed a great deal of ordinary everyday conversation appears to consist of one individual
commenting on something which is present to both him and his listener. The weather is of
course the most quoted example of this in British English. However a great deal of casual
conversation contains phrases and echoes of phrases which appear more to be intended as
contributions to a conversation than to be taken as instances of information-giving. Thus a
woman in a bus describing the way a mutual friend has been behaving, getting out of bed too
soon after an operation, concludes her turn in the conversation by saying:
Aye, she’s an awfy woman. (awfy = So awful) Chapter: /Language and Linguistics
This might be taken as an informative summary. Her neighbor then says reflectively
(having been supportively uttering aye, aye throughout the first speaker’s turn):
Aye, she’s an awfy woman.
22
Pirsig (1976: 313) remarks of such a conversation: ‘the conversation’s pace intrigues
me. It isn’t intended to go anywhere, just fill the time of day… on and on and on with no point
or purpose other than to fill the time, like the rocking of a chair’.
What seems to be primarily at issue here is the sharing of common point of view. Brown
& Levinson point out the importance for social relationships of establishing common ground
and agreeing on points of views, and illustrate the lengths to which speakers in different
cultures will go to maintain an appearance of agreement, and they remark ‘agreement may
also be stressed by repeating part or all of what the preceding speaker has said’ (1978: 117).
Whereas, as we shall notice, written language is, in general, used for primarily transactional
purposes, it is possible to find written genres whose purpose is not primarily to inform but to
maintain social relationships – ‘thank you’ letters, love letters, games of consequences, etc.
1.2 Spoken and written language
1.2.1 Manner of production
From the point of view of production, it is clear that spoken and written language make
somewhat different demands on language-producers. The speaker has available to him the full
range of ‘voice quality’ effects (as well as facial expression, postural and gestural systems).
Armed with these he can always override the effect of the words he speaks. Thus the speaker
who says ‘I’d really like to’, leaning forward, smiling, with a ‘warm, breathy’ voice quality, is
much more likely to be interpreted as meaning what he says, than another speaker uttering the Chapter: /Language and Linguistics
same words, leaning away, brow puckered, with a ‘sneering, nasal’ voice quality. These
paralinguistic cues are denied to the writer. We shall generally ignore paralinguistic features in
spoken language in this book since the data we shall quote from is spoken by co-operative
adults who are not exploiting paralinguistic resources against the verbal meanings of their
utterances but are, rather, using them to reinforce meaning.
23
Not only is the speaker controlling the production of communicative systems which are
different from those controlled by the writer, he is also processing that production under
circumstances which are considerably more demanding. The speaker must monitor what it is
that he has just said, and determine whether it matches his intentions, while he is uttering his
current phrase and monitoring that, and simultaneously planning his next utterance and fitting
that into the overall pattern of what he wants to say and monitoring, moreover, not only his
own performance but its reception by his hearer. He has no permanent record of what he has
said earlier, and only under unusual circumstances does he have notes which remind him what
he wants to say next.
The writer, on the contrary, may look over what he has already written, pause between
each word with no fear of his interlocutor interrupting him, take his time in choosing a
particular word, even looking it up in the dictionary if necessary, check his progress with his
notes, reorder what he has written, and even change his mind about what he wants to say.
Whereas the speaker is under considerable pressure to keep on talking during the period
allotted to him, the writer is characteristically under no such pressure. Whereas the speaker
knows that any words which pass his lips will be heard by his interlocutor and, if they are not
what he intends, he will have to undertake active, public ‘repair’, the writer can cross out and
rewrite in the privacy of his study.
There are, of course, advantages for the speaker. He can observe his interlocutor and, if
he wishes to, modify what he is saying to make it more accessible or acceptable to his hearer.
The writer has no access to immediate feedback and simply has to imagine the reader’s
reaction. It is interesting to observe the behavior of individuals when given a choice of
conducting a piece of business in person or in writing. Under some circumstances a face-to-
face interaction is preferred but, in others, for a variety of different reasons, the individual may
prefer to conduct his transaction in writing. Whereas in spoken interaction the speaker has the
advantage of being able to monitor his listener’s minute-by-minute reaction to what he says,
he also suffers from the disadvantage of exposing his own feelings (‘leaking’; Ekman &
Friesen, 1969) and of having to speak clearly and concisely and make immediate response to
whichever way his interlocutor reacts.
24
1.2.2 The representation of discourse: texts
So far we have considered in very general terms some of the differences in the manner
of production of writing and speech. Before we on to discuss some of the ways in which the
forms of speech and writing differ, we shall consider, in the next two sections, some of the
problems of representing written and spoken language. We shall place this within a general
discussion of what it means to represent ‘a text’. We shall use text as a technical term, to refer
to the verbal record of a communicative act. (For another approach to text cf. discussion in
Chapter 6)
1.2.3 Written texts
The notion of ‘text’ as a printed record is familiar in the study of literature. A ‘text’ may
be differently presented in different editions, with different type-face, on different sizes of
paper, in one or two columns, and we still assume, from one edition to the next, that the
different presentations all represent the same ‘text’. It is important to consider just what it is
that is ‘the same’. Minimally, the words should be the same words, presented in the same
order. Where there are disputed readings of texts, editors usually feel obliged to comment on
the crux; so of Hamlet’s
O, that this too too sullied flesh would melt
(1.ii.129)
Dover Wilson makes it clear that this is an interpretation, since the second Quarto gives ‘too
too sallied’ and the first Folio ‘too too solid’ (Dover Wilson, 1934). Even where there is no
doubt about the identity of words and their correct sequence, replicating there alone does not Chapter: /Language and Linguistics
guarantee an adequate representation of a text. Consider the following extract of dialogue from
Pride and Prejudice:
‘Mr. Bennet, how can you abuse your own children in such a way? You take delight in
vexing me. You have no compassion on my poor nerves.’
25
‘You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. They are my
old friends. I have heard you mention them with consideration these twenty years at
least.’
It is clear that more than simply reproducing the words in their correct order is required. It is
necessary to replicate punctuation conventions, as well as the lineation which indicates the
change of speaker. The extract reads as gobbledygook if it is read as a speech by one
individual. An adequate representation of a text must assign speeches to the correct characters,
sentences to the correct paragraphs, and paragraphs to the correct chapters. The author’s
organization and staging of his work must be preserved.
In a piece of expository prose, the author’s indication of the development of the

argument contributes to the reader’s experience of the text. Thus titles, chapter headings, sub-
divisions and sub-headings all indicate to the reader how the author intends his argument to be
chunked. The detail of lineation rarely matters in expository or descriptive prose. However it
clearly becomes crucial in the reproduction of poetry. The work of those seventeenth-century
poets who created poems in the shape of diamonds or butterflies would be largely
incomprehensible if the form were not preserved.
The notion of ‘text’ reaches beyond the reproduction of printed material in some further
printed form. A letter, handwritten in purple ink with many curlicues, may have its text
reproduced in printed form. Similarly, neutral printed versions may be produced of
handwritten shopping lists, slogans spray-painted on to hoardings, and public notices
embossed on mental plates. In each case the ‘text’ will be held to have been reproduced if the
words, the punctuation and, where relevant, the lineation are reproduced accurately.
Where the original text exploits typographical variety, a text reproduced in one type-face Chapter: /Language and Linguistics
may lack some of the quality of the original. An obvious example is a newspaper item which
may exploit several different type-faces, different sizes of type and a particular shape of lay-
out. It is interesting to observe that publishers regularly reproduce conscious manipulation of
the written medium on the part of the writer. Thus Jane Austen’s expression of contrast is
reproduced by publishers in italics:
26
‘Nay’, said Elizabeth, ‘this is not fair. You wish to think all the world
respectable, and are hurt if I speak ill of any body. I only want to think you perfect…’
Similarly Queen Victoria’s use of underlining in her handwritten journals is represented by her
publishers in the printed version with an italic type-face to represent the emphasis she wishes
to indicate when writing of Lord Melbourne:
he gave me such a kind, and I may say, fatherly look

(Thursday, 28 June 1938)
Where the writer is deliberately exploiting the resources of the written medium, it seems
reasonable to suggest that that manipulation constitutes part of the text.
A further illustration of this is to be found in the conventions governing spelling. In

general we assume that words have a standardized spelling in British English. The fact of the
standardization enables authors to manipulate idiosyncratic spelling to achieve special effects.
Thus in Winnie-the-Pooh, the publishers reproduce the notice outside Owl’s house in one inset
line, using capitals, and with the author’s own spelling:
PLEZ CNOKE IF AN RNSR IS NOT REQID
The Point the author makes with this particular spelling would be lost if the words were
reproduced in their standard form. It might then be claimed that such a form of the text was
incomplete or inadequate, because the point which the author wishes to make is no longer
accessible from the written text. Indeed the importance of the correct citing of an author’s
spelling is regularly marked by the insertion of sic into a citation by a second author who
wishes to disclaim responsibility for an aberrant spelling.
We have so far been making the simplifying assumption that it is clear, in all cases, what
the original text consists of. Where handwritten texts are at issue, it is often the case that the
individual reproducing the text in a printed version has to make a considerable effort of
interpretation to assign a value to some of the less legible words. In literature, as we have
remarked already, uncertainty may give rise to cruces, to disputed texts. In letters,
prescriptions, shopping lists, school essays, the reader normally pushes through a once-for-all
interpretation of a text which may never be read again. It must be clear however, that a printed
27
version of a handwritten text is, in an important sense, an interpretation. This is particularly
clear in the handwritten attempts of very young children where the adult is obliged to assign
each large painstakingly formed letter token to a particular type of letter, which he may then
re-interpret in the light of the larger message. Thus we have before us a page with a drawing
of a large animal (reported to be a lion) and a table with a goldfish bowl on it. The five-year-
old writes below what might be transliterated as:
1. the lion wos the fish to ti it

2. the cat wants to get dwon the steis
3. with qwt to dsthhb thelion
A possible interpretation of the text thus represented might be:
The lion wants the fish to eat it. The cat wants to get down the stairs
without to disturb the lion.
The transliteration of the original with qwt, in line 3, reasonably accurately represents
the first letter (which may also be represented as a figure nine if nine has a straight back
stroke). A more charitable and interpretative transliteration would render it as a (i.e.
‘unhatted’ a with a long backstroke (a). We shall return to the problem of the interpretive
work of the reader/listener in identifying the words which constitute the text, in the next
section.
1.2.4 Spoken texts
The problem encountered with the notion of ‘text’ as the verbal record of a Chapter: /Language and Linguistics
communicative act become a good deal more complex when we consider what is meant by
spoken ‘text’. The simplest view to assume is that a tape-recording of a communicative act
will preserve the ‘text’. The tape-recording may also preserve a good deal that may be
extraneous to the text – coughing, chairs creaking, buses going past, the scratch of a match
lighting a cigarette. We shall insist that these events do not constitute part of the text (though
they may form part of the relevant context, cf. Chapter 2).
28
In general the discourse analyst works with a tape-recording of an event, from which he
then makes a written transcription, annotated according to his interests on a particular occasion
transcriptions of the sort which will appear in this book. He has to determine what constitutes
the verbal event, and what form will he transcribe it in. Unless the analyst produces a fine-
grained phonetic transcription (which very few people would be able to read fluently) details
of accent and pronunciation are lost. In general, analysts represent speech using normal
orthographic conventions. The analyst may hear an utterance which might be transcribed
phonemically as /greIpbrItn/. Is he to render this as orthographically as grape britain? Hardly.
He will interpret what he hears and normalize to the conventional orthographic form Great
Britain inserting conventional word boundaries in the orthographic version which do not, of
course, exists in acoustic signal. If he hears a form /gənə/, is he to render this in the
orthography as gonna (which for some readers may have a particularly American association)
or gointuh or going to? The problem is a very real one, because most speakers constantly
simplify words phonetically in the stream of speech (see Brown, 19977: ch. 4). If the analyst
normalizes to the conventional written form, the words take on a formality and specificity
which necessarily misrepresent the spoken form.
Problems with representing the segmental record of the words spoken pale into
insignificance compared with the problems of representing the suprasegmental record (details
of intonation and rhythm). We have no standard conventions for the representing of the
paralinguistic features of the utterance which are summarized as ‘voice quality’, yet the effect
of an utterance being said kindly and sympathetically is clearly very different from the effect
if it is said brutally and harshly. Similarly it is usually possible to determine from a speaker’s
voice his or her sec, approximate age and educational status, as well as some aspects of state
of health and personality (see Abercrombie, 1968; Laver, 1980). It is not customary any detail Chapter: /Language and Linguistics
relating to these indexical features of the speaker in transcriptions by discourse analysts. In
general, too, rhythmic and temporal features of speech are ignored in transcriptions; the
rhythmic structure which appears to bind some groups of words more closely together than
others, and the speeding up and slowing down of the overall pace of speech relative to the
speaker’s normal pace in a given speech situation, are such complex variables that we have
very little idea how they are exploited in speech and to what effect (but, cf. Butterworth,
1980). It seems reasonable to suggest, though, that these variables, together with pause and
29
intonation, perform the functions in speech that punctuation, capitalization, italicization,
paragraphing, etc. perform in written language. If they constitute part of the textual record in
spoken language, they should be included as part of the textual record in spoken language. If it
is relevant to indicate Queen Victoria’s underlining, then it is surely also relevant to indicate,
for example, a speaker’s use of high pitch and loudness to indicate emphasis.
The response of most analysts to this complex problem is to present their transcription of
the spoken text using the conventions of the written language. Thus Cicourel (1973)
reproduces three utterances recorded in a classroom in the following way:
1. Ci: Like this?

2. T: Okay, yeah, all right, now…
3. Ri: Now what are we going to do?
In 1 and 3 we have to assume that the ? indicates that the utterance functions as a question –
whether it is formally marked by, for instance, rising intonation in the case of 1, we are not
told. Similarly the status of commas in the speech of T(eacher) is not made explicit –
presumably they are to indicate pauses in the stream of speech, but it may be that they simply
indicate a complex of rhythmic and intonational cues which the analyst is responding to. What
must be clear in a transcript of this kind is that a great deal of interpretation by the analyst has
gone on before the reader encounters this ‘data’. If the analyst chooses to italicize a word in
his transcription to indicate, for example, the speaker’s high pitch and increased loudness, he
has performed an interpretation on the acoustic signal, an interpretation which, he has decided,
is in effect equivalent to a writer’s underlining of a word to indicate emphasis. There is a
sense, then, in which the analyst is creating the text which others will read. In this creation of
the written version of the spoken text he makes appeal to conventional modes of interpretation Chapter: /Language and Linguistics
which, he believes, are shared by other speakers of the language.
It must be further emphasized that, however objective the notion of ‘text’ may appear as
we have define it (‘the verbal record of a communicative act’), the perception and
interpretation of each text is essentially subjunctive. Different individuals pay attention to
different aspects of texts. The content of the text appeals to them or fits into their experience
differently. In discussing texts we idealize away from this variability of the experiencing of
30
the text and assume what Schutz has called ‘the reciprocity of perspective’, whereby we take it
for granted that readers of a text or listeners to a text share the same experience (Schutz,
1953). Clearly for a great deal of ordinary everyday language this assumption of an amount of
overlap of point of view sufficient to allow mutual comprehension is necessary. From time to
time however we are brought to a halt by different interpretations of ‘the same text’. This is
particularly the case when critical attention is being focused on details of spoken language
which were only ever intended by the speaker as ephemeral parts, relatively unimportant, of
the working-out of what he wanted to say. It seems fair to suggest that discourse analysis of
spoken language is particularly prone to over-analysis. A text frequently has a much wider
variety of interpretations imposed upon it by analysts studying it at their leisure, than would
ever have been possible for the participants in the communicative interaction which gives rise
to the ‘text’. Once the analyst has ‘created’ a written transcription from a recorded spoken
version, the written text is available to him in just the way a literary text is available to the
literary critic. It is important to remember, when we discuss spoken ‘texts’, the transitoriness
of the original.
It must be clear that our simple definition of a ‘text’ as ‘the verbal record of a
communicative act’ requires at least two hedges:
(i) the representation of a text which is presented for discussion may in part,
particularly where the written representation of a spoken text is involved, consist of
a prior analysis (hence interpretation) of a fragment of discourse by the discourse
analyst presenting the text for consideration
(ii) features of the original production of the language, for example shaky handwriting
or quavering speech, are somewhat arbitrarily considered as features of the text
rather than features of the context in which the language is produced.
1.2.5 The relationship between speech and writing
The view that written language and spoken language serve, in general, quite different
functions in society has been forcefully propounded, hardly surprisingly, by scholars whose
main interest lies in anthropology and sociology. Thus Goody & Watt (1963) and Goody
(1977) suggest that analytic thinking followed the acquisition of written language ‘since it was
31
the setting down of speech that enabled man clearly to separate words, to manipulate their
order and to develop syllogistic forms of reasoning’ (Goody, 1977; 11). Goody goes on to
make even larger claims about the ways in which the acquisition of writing, which permits
man to reflect upon what he has thought, has permitted the development of cognitive
structures which are not available to the non-literate (cf. also the views of Vygotsky, 1962).
He examines the use of ‘figures of the written word’ in various cultures, particularly in the
‘non speech uses of language’ which develop systems of classification like lists, formulae,
tables, and ‘recipes for the organization and development of human knowledge’ (1977:17).
Goody suggests that written language has two main functions: the first is the storage
function which permits communication over time and space, and the second is that which
‘shifts language from the oral to the visual domain’ and permits words and sentences to be
examined out of their original contexts, ‘where they appear in a very different and highly
“abstract” context’ (1977: 78).
It seems reasonable to suggest that, whereas in daily life in a literate culture, we use
speech largely for the establishment and maintenance of human relationships (primarily
interactional use), we use written language largely for the working out of and transference of
information (primarily transactional use). However, there are occasions when speech is used
for the detailed transmission of factual information. It is noteworthy, then, that the recipient
often writes down the details that he is told. So a doctor writes down his patient’s symptoms,
an architect writes down his client’s requirements, Hansard records the proceedings of the
British Parliament, we write down friends’ addresses, telephone numbers, recipes, knitting
patterns and so on. When the recipient is not expected to write down the details, it is often the
case that the speaker repeats them sometimes several times over. Consider the typical structure
of a news broadcast which opens with the headlines' — a set of summary statements — which
are followed by a news item that consists of an expansion and repetition of the first headline,
in which is embedded a comment from ‘our man on the spot’ that recapitulates the main points
again, then, at the end of the broadcast, there is a repetition of the set of headlines. There is a
general expectation that people will not remember detailed facts correctly if they are only
exposed to them in the spoken mode, especially if they are required to remember them over an
extended period of time. This aspect of communication is obviously what written language is
32
supremely good at, whether for the benefit of the individual of the individual remembering the
private paraphernalia of daily life, or for the benefit of nations in establishing constitutions,
laws and treaties with other nations.
The major differences between speech and writing derive from the fact that one is
essentially transitory and the other is designed to be permanent. It is exactly this point which
D. J. Enright makes in the observation that ‘Plato may once have thought more highly of
speech than of writing, but I doubt he does now!’ (Review in The Sunday Times, 24 January
1982).
1.2.6 Differences in form between speech and writing
It is not our intention here to discuss the many different forms of spoken language which
can be identified even within one geographical area like Britain. Clearly there are dialectal
differences, accent differences, as well as ‘register’ differences depending on variables like the
topic of discussion and the roles of the participants (see e.g. Trudgill, 1974 and Hudson, 1980
for discussion of these sorts of differences). There is however, one further distinction which is
rarely noted, but which it is important to draw attention to here. That is the distinction between
the speech of those whose language is highly influenced by long and constant immersion in
written language forms, and the speech of those whose language is relatively uninfluenced by
written forms of language. It is of course the case that it is the speech of the first set whose
language tends to be described in descriptions of the language (grammars), since descriptions
are typically written by middle-aged people who have spent long years reading written
language. In particular situations the speech of, say, an academic, particularly if he is saying
something he has said or thought about before, may have deal in common with written
language forms. For the majority of the population, even of a ‘literate’ country, spoken
language will have very much less in common with the written language. This, again, is a
point appreciated by Goody: ‘Some individuals spend more time with the written language
than they do with the spoken. Apart from the effects on their own personalities… what are the
effects on language? How do written languages differ from spoken ones?' (1977: 124). In the
discussion which follows we shall draw a simplistic distinction between spoken and written
language which takes highly literate written language as the norm of written language, and the
33
speech of those who have not spent many years exposed to written language (a set which will
include most young undergraduate students) as the norm for spoken language.
In 1.2.1 we discussed some of the differences in the manner of production of speech and
writing, differences which often contribute significantly to characteristic forms in written
language as against characteristic forms in speech. The overall effect is to produce speech
which is less richly organised than written language, containing less densely packed
information, but containing more interactive markers and planning ‘fillers’. The standard
descriptive grammars of English (e.g. Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech & Svartvik, 1972) typically
describe features of the written language, or that form of the spoken language which is highly
influenced by written language. From the descriptive work of a number of scholars studying
spoken language (e.g. Labov, 1972a; Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975; Chafe, 1979; Ochs, 1979;
Cicourel, 1981; Goffman, 1981) we can extract some (by no means all) features which
characterise spoken language:
(a) the syntax of spoken language is typically much less structured than that of written
language
i. spoken language contains many incomplete sentences, often simply sequences of

phrases
ii. spoken language typically contains rather little subordination
iii. in conversational speech, where sentential syntax can be observed, active
declarative forms are normally found. In over 50 hours of recorded
conversational speech. Brown, Currie and Kenworthy (1980) found
very few examples of passives, it-clefts or wh-clefts. Crystal (1980) also presents
some of the problems encountered in attempting to analyse spontaneous speech Chapter: /Language and Linguistics
in terms of categories like sentence and clause.
As a brief example, notice how this speaker pauses and begins each new 'sentence' before
formally completing the previous one:
it's quite nice the Grassmarket since + it's always had the antique shops but
they're looking + they're sort of + em + become a bit nicer +
34
(b) in written Language an extensive set of metalingual markers exists to mark
relationships between clauses (that complementizers, when/while temporal markers,
so-called 'logical connectors' like besides, moreover, however, in spite of, etc.), in
spoken language the largely paratactically organised chunks are related by and, but,
then and, more rarely, if. The speaker is typically less explicit than the writer: I'm so
tired (because) I had to walk all the way home. In written language rhetorical
organisers of larger stretches of discourse appear, like firstly, more important than,
and in conclusion. These are rare in spoken language.
(c) in written language, rather heavily premodified noun phrases (like that one) are
quite common – it is rare in spoken language to find more than two premodifying
adjectives and there is a strong tendency to structure the short chunks of speech so
that only one predicate is attached to a given referent at a time (simple case-frame or
one-place predicate) as in: it's a biggish cat + tabby + with torn ears, or in: old
man McArthur he was a wee chap + oh very small + and eh a beard + and he was
pretty stooped.
The packaging of information related to a particular referent can, in the written

language, be very concentrated, as in the following news item:
A man who turned into a human torch ten days ago after snoozing in his locked
car while smoking his pipe has died in hospital.
(Evening News (Edinburgh), 22 April 1982)
(d) whereas written language sentences are generally structured in subject-predicate

form, in spoken language it is quite common to find what Givón (1979b) calls topic-
comment structure, as in the cats + did you let them out. Chapter: /Language and Linguistics
(e) in informal speech, the occurrence of passive constructions is relatively infrequent.

That use of the passive in written language which allows non-attribution of agency
is typically absent from conversational speech. Instead, active constructions with
indeterminate group agents are noticeable, as in:
Oh everything they do in Edinburgh + they do it far too slowly
35
(f) in chat about the immediate environment, the speaker may rely on (e.g.) gaze
direction to supply a referent: (looking at the rain) frightful isn't it.
(g) the speaker may replace or refine expressions as he goes along: this man + this
chap she wets going out with.
(h) the speaker typically uses a good deal of rather generalised vocabulary: a lot of,
got, do, thing, nice, stuff, place, and things like that.
(i) the speaker frequently repeats the same syntactic form several times over, as this
fairground inspector does: I look at fire extinguishers + I look at fire exits + I look
at what gangways are available + I look at electric cables what + are they properly
earthed + are they properly covered.
(j) the speaker may produce a large number of prefabricated 'fillers': well, erm, I think,
you know, if you see what I mean, of course, and so on.
Some of the typical distinctions between discourse which has been written and that
which has been spoken can be seen in the following two descriptions of a rainbow. (No direct
comparison is intended, since the two pieces of discourse were produced in strictly non-
comparable circumstances for very different purposes.)
(1) And then, in the blowing clouds, she saw a band of faint
iridescence colouring in faint shadows a portion of the hill. And forgetting,
startled, she looked for the hovering colour and saw a rainbow forming
itself. In one place it gleamed fiercely, and, her heart anguished with hope,
she sought the shadow of iris where the bow should be. Steadily the colour
gathered, mysteriously, from nowhere, it took presence upon itself, there was
a faint, vast rainbow.

(D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, chapter 16)
In the first extract (1), the rich lexis and well-organised structure are indications that the
writer has taken time in the construction, and possibly reconstruction after several rewritings,
of the final product. There are complete sentences, containing subordinations, frequent
modifications via adjectives and adverbs and more than single predicates per referential
36
expression. In extract (2), there are frequent pauses, often interrupting major syntactic units,
repetitions, incomplete sentences, generalised vocabulary, fillers and one example of a tongue-
slip.
(2) normally after + very heavy rain + or something like that + and + you're
driving along the road + and + far away + you see + well + er + a series + of
+ stripes + formed like a bow + an arch + + very very far away + ah + seven
colours but ++ I guess you hardly ever see seven it's just a + a series of +
colours which + they seem to be separate but if you try to look for the
separate (kʌz) - colours they always seem + very hard + to separate + if you
see what I mean ++
(Postgraduate student speaking informally)
The speaker planning in the here-and-now, possibly threatened with his interlocutor
wanting to take a turn, typically repeats himself a good deal, using the same syntactic
structure, the same lexical items, using the first word that comes to mind rather than hunting
for the mot juste, filling in pauses with ‘fillers’. The overall effect is of information produced
in a much less dense manner than is characteristic of written language. We must assume that
the density of information packing in spoken language is appropriate for the listener to process
comfortably. Most people have experienced expository prose read aloud which they have
found difficult to follow in the spoken mode. Few people can extract a great deal from a
lecture which is read aloud with no visual support. Goody points out that the written form of
language releases us from the linear experiential mode: ‘the fact that it takes a visual form
means that one can escape from the problem of the succession of events in time, by
backtracking, skipping, looking to see who-done-it before we know what it is they did. Who,
except the most obsessive academic, reads a book as he hears speech? Who, except the most
avant-garde of modern dramatists, attempts to write as they speak?' (1977: 124).
1.3 Sentence and utterance
It might seem reasonable to propose that the features of spoken language outlined in the
preceding section should be considered as features of utterances, and those features typical of
written language as characteristic of sentences. In this convenient distinction, we can say, in a
37
fairly non-technical way, that utterances are spoken and sentences are written and that we will
apply these terms to what Lyons describes as ‘the products of ordinary language-behaviour’.
In the case of the term sentence, it is important to be clear about the type of object one is
referring to. Lyons makes a distinction between ‘text-sentences’ and ‘system-sentences’. He
describes the latter in the following way:
system-sentences never occur as the products of ordinary language-behaviour.

Representations of system-sentences may of course be used in metalinguistic
discussion of the structure and functions of language: and it is such
representations that are customarily cited in grammatical descriptions of
particular languages.
(Lyons. 1977: 30)
Since the linguistic exemplification presented in support of our discussion throughout this
book is overwhelmingly drawn from 'ordinary language behaviour', we shall generally employ
the term 'sentence' in the 'text-sentence', and riot the 'system-sentence' sense.
Although the linguist who undertakes the analysis of discourse has ultimately the same
aims as a linguist who uses 'system-sentences' in his grammatical description of a language,
there are important methodological differences' involved in the two approaches. Both linguists
wish to produce accurate descriptions of the particular language studied. In pursuit of this
goal, the grammarian will concentrate on a particular body of data and attempt to produce an
exhaustive but economical set of rules which will account for all and only the acceptable
sentences in. his data. He will not normally seek to account for the mental processes involved
in any language-user's production of chose sentences, nor to describe the physical or social
contexts in which those sentences occur. On each of these issues, concerning 'data’, 'rules',
'processes' and 'contexts', the discourse analyst will take a different view.
1.3.1 On ‘data’
The grammarian's 'data' is inevitably the single sentence, or a set of single sentences
illustrating a particular feature of the language being studied. It is also typically the case that
the grammarian will have constructed the sentence or sentences he uses as examples. This
38
procedure is not often made explicit, but an overt commitment to the constructed-data
approach has recently been expressed in the following terms:
I shall assume... that invented strings and certain intuitive judgements about them
constitute legitimate data for linguistic research.
(Gazdar, 1979: 11)
In contrast, the analysis of discourse, as undertaken and exemplified in this book, is typically
based on the linguistic output of someone other than the analyst. On the few occasions where
constructed data is used as illustration (of a paradigm, for example, in Chapter 4), it is
inevitably directed towards accounting for the range of formal options available to a speaker
or writer. More typically, the discourse analyst's 'data' is taken from written texts or tape-
recordings. It is rarely in the form of a single sentence. This type of linguistic material is
sometimes described as 'performance-data' and may contain features such as hesitations, slips,
and non-standard forms which a linguist like Chomsky (1965) believed should not have to be
accounted for in the grammar of a language.
Although these two views of 'data' differ substantially, they are not incompatible, unless
they are taken in an extreme form. A discourse analyst may regularly work with extended
extracts of conversational speech, for example, but he does not consider his data in isolation
from the descriptions and insights provided by sentence-grammarians. It should be the case
that a linguist who is primarily interested in the analysis of discourse is, in some sense, also a
sentence-grammarian. Similarly, the sentence-grammarian cannot remain immured from the
discourse he encounters in his daily life. The sentence he constructs to illustrate a particular
linguistic feature must, in some sense, derive from the 'ordinary language' of his daily life and
also be acceptable in it. Chapter: /Language and Linguistics
A dangerously extreme view of 'relevant data' for a discourse analyst would involve
denying the admissibility of a constructed sentence as linguistic data. Another would be an
analytic approach to data which did not require that there should be linguistic evidence in the
data to support analytic claims. We shall return to the issue of ‘relevant data’ for discourse
analysis in Chapter 2. An over-extreme view of what counts as data for the sentence-
grammarian was, according to Sampson (1980), noticeable in some of the early work of
39
generative grammarians. Chomsky gave an indication of the narrowness of view which could
be taken, when, immediately before his conclusion that 'grammar is autonomous', he stated:
Despite the undeniable interest and importance of semantic and statistical studies of
language, they appear to have no direct relevance to the problem of determining or
characterising the set of grammatical utterances.
(Chomsky. 1957: 17)
The essential problem in an extreme version of the constructed-sentence approach occurs

when the resulting sentences are tested only against the linguist's introspection. This can (and
occasionally did) lead to a situation in which a linguist claims that the 'data’ he is using
illustrates acceptable linguistic strings because he says it does, as a result of personal
introspection, and regardless of how many voices arise in disagreement. The source of this
problem, as Sampson (1980: 153) points out, is that the narrow restriction of ‘data’ to
constructed sentences and personal introspection leads to a 'non-testability', in principle, of
any claims made. One outcome of this narrow view of data is that there is a concentration on
'artificially contrived sentences isolated from their communicative context' (see Preface to
Givón (ed.), 1979). Although we shall appeal frequently, in the course of this book, to the
insights of sentence-grammarians, including those working within a generative framework, we
shall avoid as far as possible the methodology which depends on what Lyons (1968) described
as regularised, standardised and decontextualized data.
Brown, G. and Yule, G. (1941). Discourse analysis. Cambridge University Press
40
1.4. What is linguistics?
41
Unit I Introduction to the study of language
This unit is divided in two parts. The first part deals with Linguistics, the science that
has as its objective the systematic study of language. We will study its scope, characteristics,
and related disciplines. In this first part we will also study the nature, properties and
components of human language. The second part of this unit deals with three different schools,
or points of view about language which have had an important influence in FLT.
A. The science of Linguistics
1. Definition and scope
Linguistics can be defined as the scientific study of language. In studying human

language, Linguistics tries to answer two basic questions: “What is language? How does
it work?”
The job of the linguist, the professional who devotes him/herself to the study of
language, could be said to be that of “putting language under a microscope”.
It is important to clarify the job of the linguist, since many misconceptions exist
about the object of modern Linguistics.
A popular, though incorrect, notion is that a linguist is someone who speaks many
languages. A linguist is a professional who has been prepared to investigate about
language. He/she observes, analyzes and tries to explain linguistic phenomena such as the
stress rules in English, the Spanish verb tenses system, the Russian vowel system, the Chapter: /Language and Linguistics
German gender system or plural formation in Turkish. Linguists can observe, analyze and
explain phenomena like the ones mentioned without necessarily being speakers of
English, Spanish, Russian, German or Turkish.
As an approximate illustration of the above, look at the following data from

Turkish, a language which most probably you do not speak or understand.
42
SINGULAR PLURAL
(man) ADAM ADAMLAR
(secret) SIR SIRLAR
(road) YOL YOLLAR
(arm) KOL KOLLAR
On the basis of these data one concludes that plural formation in Turkish involves
adding the suffix “lar”. Of course, the data we have are not enough, and the conclusion
offered cannot be generalized. However, the central point in this example is that it is not
necessary to speak Turkish to be able to analyze and explain its plural formation. What
has been shown with the Turkish data is, in a very small scale, what a linguist does.
To conclude, a linguist observes, analyzes and offers explanations about language

without necessarily having to speak the language he or she is analyzing. As Aitchison
(1978) puts it, a linguist “is a skilled objective observer rather than a participant, a
consumer of languages rather than a producer...” (p. 12).
It is crucial for second language teachers to clearly understand the object and scope
of Linguistics, since in the same way that there are misconceptions about a linguist’s job
among the general population, there have also been misconceptions in the FLT field about
what to expect from the linguist. It has been thought that Linguistics is the most
important, if not the only, source discipline for FLT. A word of caution is in order.
Linguistics is an important source discipline for FLT: the questions “What is language?”
“How does it work?”, the central ones in Linguistics, are also questions of relevance for
FLT. The descriptions and analyses of a particular language produced by linguists are
useful for teachers trying to teach that language, but are by no means the only relevant
source. Language teachers, as was mentioned in the Introduction, need to answer many
other questions related to language learning and language teaching, and with respect to
these aspects, Linguistics is not a relevant source discipline, since its objectives are not
related to pedagogical problems.
43
2. Some characteristics of Linguistics
Linguistics as a science is a relatively new field emerging as such in the early

twentieth century. However, before the emergence of the science of Linguistics, scholars
in different parts of the world were working on language, but from perspectives which are
very different from those of Linguistics as we know it today. Although as slightly
inaccurate decision, for the purposes of these materials, all the work related to language
before the beginning of the twentieth century will be subsumed under the label
“Traditional Linguistics”. (2) What follows is a discussion of the main characteristics of
modern Linguistics that distinguish it from traditional linguistics.
a. Descriptivism v.s. Prescriptivism
Linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive. That is linguists are interested in what is

actually said and not in what should be said. Traditional linguistics was typically
prescriptive, that is, its objective was to establish rules of correctness and to decree what
was “right” and “wrong” with respect to language. As a product of Traditional Linguistics
we find statements like “ ‘taller than me’ is wrong, it should be ‘taller than I’ ”; “ ‘I will
visit my grandmother for Christmas’ is wrong, it should be ‘I shall visit my grandmother
for Christmas’ ”.
Modern Linguistics, on the other hand, does not make value judgments about
language. Aitchison (1981) describes the linguist as an observer and recorder of facts, not
a judge. Uses of language which people tend to label “wrong” such as “emprestar”,
“veníanos” etc... are seen by Modern Linguistics as social variations which may not be Chapter: /Language and Linguistics
appropriate in certain social contexts, but most certainly not as “incorrect language”
produced by “people who do not know how to speak”.
Modern Linguistics views language as a dynamic, changing system that varies with
time and according to social, geographical and even individual contexts, and therefore,
2
The reason for considering this label somewhat inaccurate is that in the nineteenth century, before the
emergence of Linguistics, there were actually two different approaches each with its own objectives. These
approaches were the one known as “Traditional Grammar” and the one known as “Historical Linguistics”.
44
rejects the notion of “absolute and unchanging correctness” (Aitchison, 1981 p. 13). In
short, Linguistics does not prescribe rules that people are supposed to follow, rather, it
describes language as actually produced by native speakers.
b. Primacy of spoken language over written language.
Another characteristic of modern Linguistics that distinguishes it from traditional

Linguistics is that linguists regard the spoken language as primary. Traditional linguistics,
on the other hand, stressed the importance of written language. There were two main
reasons for this. The first one relates to the permanence of written language as opposed to
the temporary, fleeting nature of spoken language. The medium of transmission of written
language (paper) makes it a very stable system. This is not the case with the medium of
transmission of spoken language: sound waves in the air. Added to this is the
consideration that sound recording was not possible at the time. The second reason is
closely related to the prescriptive attitude towards language held by traditional
Linguistics. Written language is more conservative and resistant to change than spoken
language. This led traditional linguists to consider written language as the “pure” version
of language and to base their rules and analyses on literary works.
Modern linguistics, on the other hand, without disregarding the written from, looks
first at spoken language, based on the following assumptions:
i. Speech preceded writing in all known human civilizations.
ii. Many human societies do not have a writing system and yet all human social
groups communicate orally.
iii. All normal human beings learn how to speak but not all of them learn to read Chapter: /Language and Linguistics
and write.
It is important to notice, however, that the primacy of spoken language just discussed
does not imply that written language is simply a “parasite” of spoken language, that is, a
simple graphic representation, or, in other words, “speech written down”. Written
language is of enormous importance, especially in educated communities in which the
printed or written word is an important and necessary part of daily communication
45
(newspapers, books, exams, formal and informal letter etc...). Linguists do not disregard
written language; rather, the conceive spoken and written language as different
communication systems which share some similarities but which at the same time differ
in many respects; as systems which must be studied on their own, but always maintaining
the premise that the primary form of communication is the spoken form.
c. Synchronic v.s. diachronic
An important aspect of linguistics before the early twentieth century was the fact that
its objective was not really to answer the questions “What is language” but rather, “Where
did this particular language (Spanish, English, Russian, etc...) come from?” That is, it was
mostly historical or diachronic. With this historical objective in mind, traditional
linguistics would, for example, study the origin of Spanish in Latin, and analyze how the
“mother” language, Latin, left its trace in its “daughter”, Spanish. Along these lines they
would, for instance, say that the Spanish word “leche” comes from the Latin word with
the same meaning “lakte”, and that this “mother word” can still be found in Spanish forms
like “lacteo”, “lactar” and “lactante”. This led traditional linguistics to emphasize the
etymology (origin) of words and structures in the language being studied, a practice
which, by the way, was an important component of FLT methods in the nineteenth
century.
Modern Linguistics, on the other hand, maintains that children who learn, for
example, Spanish, do not have access to this historical information and yet, they have no
problem in learning and using the word “leche”. Even with adult speakers, one can
reasonably claim that they use words like “leche” and “lacteo” without knowing what
their Latin origins were. Therefore, modern Linguistics would claim that the study of Chapter: /Language and Linguistics
language should be synchronic, that is, at one point in time, and not diachronic, that is,
historical, evolutionary. The objective, in other words, would be to analyze and describe
what speakers say at one particular point in time and no to attempt to trace the historical
origins of what people say. As was said at the beginning of this section, the objective is to
try to answer the questions “What is language” and not “Where did this language come
from”
46
d. Not Latin-based
A fourth characteristic of modern Linguistics is that, as opposed to Traditional

Linguistics, it does not make languages fit the framework of Latin. In previous sections,
we discussed the prescriptive and diachronic aspect of linguistics before the twentieth
century. These characteristics led to thinking that the grammar of Latin was the best
framework for the grammar of other languages. Latin was a language which, due to the
domination and expansion of the Roman Empire, left its trace on most known languages
of the time. At the same time, Latin, together with Greek, were considered to be the
languages of scholarship, philosophy and religion. These circumstances led traditional
linguistics to use Latin grammar as the framework to establish the rules of other
languages. In the case of English we find traditional linguists establishing a prescriptive
rule like: “In ‘good’ English infinitives should never be split.” According to this rule,
phrases like “to quickly move”, “to humbly apologize”, “to solemnly swear” and “to
boldly go” are “wrong”. The basis for this rules is the fact that since in Latin infinitives
were only one word (amare, ire etc...), it was thought that infinitives in English should
resemble as much as possible Latin infinitives, and therefore, they should not be split. The
above phrases, according to traditional linguists should be “to move quickly”, “to swear
solemnly” etc...
Modern Linguistics, on the other hand, rejects the notion that any one language is the
framework to describe other languages. A modern linguist would claim that each
language is a different system and it must be described on its own. An important
circumstance in the rejection of Latin as a universal framework took place in the late
nineteenth century. At this time, a number of anthropologists and linguists set out to
describe the culture and language of tribes of Northamerican indians which were about to
disappear due to the increasing assimilation of younger generations to the mainstream,

Northamerican culture. The indian languages under study simply did not fit Latin
grammar, nor should they have been expected to, due to the lack of historical connection.
It was found, for example, that the tense categories of past, present and future typical of
Latin and of all European languages, did not exist in many of these indian languages.
Therefore, the finding that there were human languages which showed characteristics
47
radically different from those of Latin, led modern linguists to oppose the notion of a
Latin-based framework for all languages.
In the late 1950’s, a group of modern linguists proposed the notion that all human
languages, in spites of being systems on their own, share common characteristics. These
linguists claimed the existence of a universal grammar. This notion of a universal
grammar, however, must not be confused with the traditional notion of Latin as the
universal frameworks. Linguists working on a universal grammar are trying to propose a
core, basic grammar which is common to all human languages. This universal framework,
however, does not correspond to the grammar of Latin or of any other specific language
spoken in the world.
3. Linguistics and related disciplines
It has already been established that the two basic questions linguists ask are: What is
language? How does it work? However, closely related to these are questions like “How
do human beings learn to speak? What are the mental processes responsible for language
production and comprehension? How and why do languages change? To what extent are
social differences reflected in language structure and language use? What is the nature of
the language center in the brain? What happens in the brain when we produce and
comprehend language? How do people learn a second language? What are the most
effective ways to teach both the native and a foreign language?
Attempts to answer questions like the above have brought about the emergence of
disciplines which draw on the descriptions and explanations provided by Linguistics and
which connect this information with insights from sciences like psychology, sociology,
neurology, and education. Chapter: /Language and Linguistics
These interactions have given rise to the following disciplines:
Psycholinguistics: Study of the relationship between language and mind. Its main
concerns are the mental processes that take place during comprehension and
production and the process of language learning.
48
Sociolinguistics: Study of the relationship between language and society. Their main
concern is the description of language variation within a social group.
Neurolinguistics: Study of the neurological bases of language production and

comprehension.
Educational linguistics: Study of the relationship between language description and

education. Its main concerns are the pedagogical aspects of first and second language
learning.
Linguistics, as the scientific study of language is called, has only been considered a
discipline in its own right for about a hundred years. Up to the present time of the age of
the linguistics “boom”, language study was done by philologists, grammarians and
philosophers, having always been one of the most urgent concerns in Man’s quest to
understand Man. Still it is only since the last century that the studies of language have
truly begun to be scientific and linguistics has become the center of the formulation of
important theories about Man and his world for which our age will be remembered in the
centuries to come; and linguistics has broaden its scope to include the study of language
in all its facets and uses.
When we take an overview of the field of linguistics, a primary diachotomy presents

itself —the distinction between general and descriptive linguistics. 3General linguistics
principally includes components and aspects of the language process. The linguist
generally defines linguistics as the scientific study of language and languages. Why
include both singular and plural of language?
Language (singular) refers to the study of language in the general and universal Chapter: /Language and Linguistics
sense, or rather language as a system whose structure is more similar that different in the
languages of the world. The term languages (plural) refers to the description of the
structure of individual languages. People often ask this question to the person who
defines himself as a linguist: “How many languages do you speak?” It is a common
misconception among people that a linguist is a person who know many languages. This
is not the case, anymore than a botanist is a person who knows the names of many plants.
3
John Lyons. Language and Linguistics Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. p. 34.
49
The botanist is a scientist who knows how to describe scientifically the structure of the
plant world (in general) and also particular plants (individual). Likewise, the linguist is
one who studies language scientifically and describes language as a system and also as in
particular languages.
Linguists recognize that language is the one actively among the species which is
purely human and that human language has a set of defining aspects universal to all
human languages.4
First, one could mention that language is made up of a set of sounds —this being the
most obvious aspect of human language. It is conceivable that there could be a natural
language which would be made up of something other than sounds, but in reality all
human languages are made up of a system of speech sounds and all the languages of the
world use some fifty-odd speech sounds, used, of course, by each language in different
combinations in order to connect sound to meaning.
Secondly, this connection between sound and the meaning of the external world is
arbitrary, which means that language is a social phenomena. This is to say that the
linguistics sign chosen to represent something in the world, is the sign agreed upon by the
members of a language community and the older members of a language community
teach the younger members of a community the agreed-upon sign. This also means that a
human in isolation, that is a human infant growing up without any human contact, will
not learn a human language. When the last man on earth dies, language will also cease to
exist.
Another aspect, the third here, is the aspect which is the take-off point for all modern
linguistics: That all language is systematic. A system is a framework in which there are Chapter: /Language and Linguistics
the elements of substitutability and predictability. This systematic quality of human

language is the outcome of Man’s highly developed brain which made it possible for him
to go from a call system in which a sound or “call” represented only one thing to a dual
4
Archibald A. Hill. Introduction to Linguistic Structures New York: Harcourt Brace Ivanovich, 1958. p. 4.
50
system in which the elements can be substituted and rearranged according to operational
rules in order to produce an infinite number of combinations. 5
The fourth characteristic is that language is symbolic, which is the defining

characteristic of the human brain –the ability to handle symbolic thinking. An animal’s
limited communicative behavior is based solely on stimulus and response; whereas a
human being has a brain capable of using symbols to talk (and think) and respond to
things that exist both spatially and temporally outside the immediate environment. Man
can talk and respond with and to symbols which represent things that do not exist. A
unicorn does not exist but we know what the word unicorn means. We can talk about
things in the future and in the past and about things that may never occur.
The fifth aspect of language is that all human language is complete. Whatever exist
or can be imagined to exist can be expressed in human language. The ancient Greeks had
no word for airplane because the airplane did not exist in their environment, but if it had
existed, the Greeks would have found a name for it. This is the aspect, completeness,
which the linguists have for many years recognized as universal. This is the one aspect,
however, that non-linguists often deny, laboring under the misconception that so-called
“primitive” languages are less complicated, complete or logical than the so-called
“civilized” languages. Johann Peter Suessmilch, a Prussian statistician-clergyman, in the
18th century pointed out that all languages are perfect (and thus the reflection of God’s
perfection) and he cited examples from European, Semitic and “primitive” languages to
provide empirical evidence that all languages are equally complicated and logical.6
What we refer to as general linguistics and descriptive linguistics are closely related,
and perhaps the great advances in both these fields of linguistic study have been the Chapter: /Language and Linguistics
extensive descriptions of the structure of the components of language –phonology, syntax
and semantics, morphology– produced by the descriptive linguists. The general linguists
have utilized the structural or formal descriptions to postulate language universals, to
talk about the aspects common to all language, and to establish the characteristics
5
Bruce L. Liles. An Introduction to Linguistics. Englewood, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974. pp. 28-34.
6
Victoria Fromkin and Robert Rodman. An Introduction to Language. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1978. pp- 19-20.
51
specific to the human mind, to mention only a few. Out of this broader theoretical view –
the general linguistics view– there have developed the interdisciplinary areas of
sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, stylistics, ethnography of language, semiotics, the
philosophy of language, etc.
The advances in descriptive and general linguistics referred to above have been
chiefly concentrated in theoretical considerations, and this field, still unknown to most
people outside the academic world, has become one of the most, if not the most,
influential discipline in academic, intellectual and scientific endeavors. One of the
principal goals of modern linguistics is to establish linguistics as a science. From the
Collected Essays of Sir Thomas Huxley, Sturtevant quotes Huxley’s view of science –
“nothing out trained and organized common sense,”7 and points out that this implies that
the evidence of the senses is valid. However, the interpretation of sensory stimuli, one,
must be constantly revised, and secondly, the common sense of one age differs from that
of another, and thirdly, the scientist, not the average member of society, keeps records
carefully, making it possible for each scientist to be able to take up where his predecessor
left off and continue advancing the scientific cause.
Here, the development of modern linguistics, once again, finds itself in a split
between an inductive and a deductive approach to linguistic theory. The American
Structuralists assumed the inductive approach. According to Martin Joos in 1952, “the
abandonment of deduction (in American Linguistics) in favour of induction has never
been reversed.”8 Interestly, this is the same year that Noam Chomsky first published his
Syntactic Structures which revolutionized linguistics and turned it, perhaps forever and
probably taking with it the philosophy of science, toward the deductive approach. Before
this, the American Structuralist--Bloomfield, Sapir, Boas, Hocket –to list a few of the
principal figures, believed that the scientist starts with observation of a corpus of data, in
9
linguistics a body of utterances from a language. This approach presupposes that this
body of data, a priori, has a structure, the work of the linguist being to discover the
7
E. H. Sturtevant. Introduction to Linguistic Science New Haven: Yale University Press. 1967. p . 1.
8
Martin Joos. “Difference and Similarity: Principles of Linguistic Classification” Readings for Applied Linguistics.
Ed. J.P.B. Allen and S. Pit Corder. London: Oxford University Press, 1975. Vol. 1, p. 188.
9
Charles F. Hockett. Extract from “A Note on ‘Structure’”, Linguistics 14, 209-271, 1943. Reprinted in Linguistics,
ed. H. Joos, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957. p. 199.
52
system inherent in the data. This naturally gave rise to a tremendous importance in the
procedures themselves. Often it appeared that the American Structuralist methodology for
discovering elements of the structure of a language was elevated by them to the level of a
rigid philosophy. Consequently, the linguistic studies made during the period by the
American Structuralist were purely descriptive and limited to describing only a corpus of
utterances. There were as many descriptions of a language as there were descriptive
linguists. As a result there were several shortcomings in the work of the American
Structuralists: 1) The failure to establish criterion for deciding which description was
“better” or “right”, 2) the failure to provide and explanation as well as a description of
utterances, and 3) the failure to explain how with a finite number of operational rules, an
infinite number of utterances are produced.
Chomsky in describing what a grammatical description should do stated, “One

requirement that a grammar must meet is that it be finite” 10 The theoretical foundation,
then of Chomsky’s theory was that a linguistic theory must not only describe the
language, but predict the possible utterances in a language. This, of course, is the basic
difference between the American Structuralist and the Linguistic Circle of Prague,
Chomsky and the Generative Grammarians, the former bearing an empirist and inductivist
stance and the latter, a rationalist and deductivist stance.
Hockett, in 1947, compared structural linguistics to a game unless the linguist stays
away from the game and considers linguistics as a science. In other words, in order to
analyze the linguistic system (or any system) one must step outside of the system. He
states “the analysis of the linguistic scientist is to be of such a nature that the linguist can
account also for utterances which are not in the corpus at a given time.”11
The American Structuralists were deeply influenced by the Linguistic Circle of
Prague founded in 1926 by Velém Mathesius. However, they did not incorporate the
Circle’s fundamental theoretical concept, the idea of “underlying form or underlying
structure or representation. Still the influence in linguistics of the group was greater than
any other, and this influence was profoundly felt by the American Structuralists, also. The
10
Noam Chomsky. Syntatic Structures. The Hague: Mouton, 1968. p. 18.
11
Charles F. Hockett. op. Cit. pp. 279-289.
53
separation of phonetics and phonology was one of the group’s first principles to be
developed. This basic concept was what pushed the American Structuralist to become so
dedicated to the study of the phoneme, a concept which was largely the accomplishment
of the Prague Circle.12 Perhaps the most resounding theory to come out of the Prague
Circle was Roman Jakobson’s analysis of the phoneme into distinctive features using the
13
binary system of notation. Markedness, the way of expressing the amount of
information is carried in a form, was also one of the principles which came out of the
Prague Circle.
The chief difference between the Prague Circle, as well as most of the European
Structuralists, and the American Structuralists was that the American Structuralists were
influenced mainly by anthropology and psychology, whereas the Prague Circle members
came mostly from the ranks of philology which gave a humanistic characteristic to their
research.14 The Linguistic Circle of Prague did not feel compelled to stay bound
obsessively to one theoretical position, and yet they had more influence on linguistics than
any other group. The American Structuralists, on the other hand, felt bound to continue
their empiricist position and were determined to come up with a self contained system.
They set as their goal a complete description of the language. They adhered to
Bloomfield’s tenets that language must be described from the surface first and that
anything that could not be dealt with objectively must be left to be done at a latter time.
15
Phonetics and phonology were obviously the first consideration. Some attention was
also given to morphology, less to syntax, and almost none to semantics. Phonemics
analysis was the basis of all description... that is segmentation of language and the
classifying of the segments and describing how they are strung together in a linear fashion
to form larger and larger constituent structures. They saw language as levels rather than Chapter: /Language and Linguistics
as an integrated system, and they had so much practice and success with phonemic
analysis that all their analysis at other levels was based on the phoneme.
12
Josef Vachek. The Linguistic School of Prague Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966. p. 46.
13
Roman Jakobson and Marris Halle. Fundamentals of Language The Hague: Mouton, 1956. p. 31
14
Dwight Bolinger. Aspects of Language New York: Harcourt Brace jovanovich, 1975. p. 514.
15
Leonard Bloomfield. Language New York:Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1933. pp. 32-41.
54
At the same time as the American Structuralists held their influence, the Firthians in
Britain, likewise having come out of anthropology, were also dedicated to the
phonological level. The Firthian, like the American Structuralist, avoided setting up an
integrated theory of language structure. It was not until Chomsky and the Generative
Grammarians that linguistics had a theoretical base from which an integrated theory of
language could be worked out. Louis Hjelmslev, the Danish linguist, in his Prolegomena
to a Theory of Language, had said many of the theoretical things that Chomsky said later.
However, Chomsky had the success of being widely followed in the scientific world
because of his brilliant elaboration of his theories.
Linguist science in this century has grown, as is natural, out of the linguistic science
of the 19th century. Nevertheless, as we have pointed out in this work, the focus in
linguistics has changed drastically. The philologists of the 19th century were concerned
with historical studies of the language and gave no attention to general linguistics. They
did do extraordinary work in comparative language and literary analysis and in mapping
language families with the contributions of outstanding linguists such as Paul Herman. 16
The most important influence in changing the dominance of historical linguistics was
Ferdinand de Saussure who clearly saw the diachotomy between historical and
descriptive linguistics.17 De Saussure insisted on a distinction between synchrony and
diachrony, and of course, synchrony today has the first claim on the linguists’ attention,
and synchronic studies outnumbered diachronic. Descriptive linguistics, as pointed out in
this work, overshadowed historical linguistics.
The linguists in this century, particularly those who originated the trend in the United
States in the 1940’s, became anxious to use the term applied science. 18 This is probably Chapter: /Language and Linguistics
because these linguists wanted linguistics to be considered a science, and a science has
theoretical element and an applied element. The name has had a good deal of popularity
in various areas, and applied linguistics has come to be almost synonymous, in academic
16
Robert D. King. Historical Linguistics and Generative Grammar. Englewood Cliffs, M. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969. pp. 1-6.
17
Ferdinand de Saussure. Curso de Linguística General trad. Amado Alonso Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1965. pp. 149-
151.
18
William F. Mackey. “Applied Linguistics” Readings in Applied Linguistics eds. J.P.B. Allan and S. Fit Corder London:
Oxford University Press, 1975. Vol.1. P.247
55
circles at least, with second language teaching. In this area of second language teaching,
one can see the impact of the different linguistic theoretical positions on methodology:
THEORETICAL APPLIED
Historical Traditional Teaching Approach
Descriptive(Amer. Structuralist) Audio-Lingual Methods
Generative Grammar Cognitive Approach
Sociolinguistics Notional-Functional Syllabus
The traditional grammarians offered prescriptive grammars and teaching and the
learning of rules of grammar (which often meant reciting the rules) as their contribution
to second language teaching. As Sol Soporta pointed out, “The impact of modern
linguistic theory must be to improve the content of pedagogical grammars.” 19 Thus, the
post ‘40’s linguists repudiated the position that verbalizing rules would ensure
performance and took a firm stand in favor of practice, which they established as the basis
of the audio-lingual method. However, some linguists like Sol Soporta theorize that “The
drill which serves as input to a naive student and which is somehow converted into
command of precisely the appropriate rule is an allusion.” 20 The American Structuralists,
because of their dedication to empiricism incorporated behaviourist methodology into
their second language teaching. The goal of the audio-lingual method was to produce
bilinguals, but this goal stayed largely unfulfilled. The cognitive approach (it is not a
methodology) has been gaining favour because of its base in generative grammar’s
explanation of the language process and its recognition of the theory of competence and
performance. As S. Pit Corder has said “The tendency in language teaching at the present
time is towards more closely defined aims in terms of the competence of our pupils.”21
One of the contributions of the American Structuralists to language description and

second language teaching was the making of contrastive grammars which covered the
19
Sol Soporta. “Scientific Grammars and Pedagogical Grammars” Ibid. p. 274.
20
Sol Soporta. Ibid.
21
S. Pit Corder. “Linguistics and the Language Teaching Syllabus” Reading for Applied Linguistics eds. J.P.B. Allen
and S. Pit Corder. London: Oxford University Press, 1975. Vol. 1. p. 277.
56
points of difference between two languages. This perhaps has been as much a contribution
to first language teaching as to second language teaching--sometimes we first become
aware or our native language when we study a second.
The theoretical linguist’s commitment, then, to applied linguistics is to make the best
possible description of language. This implies that language must be described in the
spoken form in its social environment. The second language student should also be
exposed to dialects of the language he is learning. This aspect of linguistics is reflected in
the growing influence of sociolinguistics and sociolinguistic studies on the field of
education and language planning. Because of the need in education planning to have a
broad view of language, the studies most utilized for education are macro-studies, while
the general linguist tends to concentrate on the micro-study.22
Linguistics will continue to contribute to language teaching. For Chomsky linguistics

is part of psychology; he points out that the usual distinction between the study of
language (linguistics) and the study of the acquisition of language (psychology) is not
valid, and that one cannot study the one without the other.
“...we might expect that any progress made in the psychology of language will
furnish suggestive models for other aspects of cognitive psychology (such as
visual perception, formation of theories about the external world, whether those
of common sense or of scientific research, etc.), which might be studied
profitably in a similar manner: that is, by determining the basic properties of the
acquired cognitive systems and by investigating the processes of acquisition and
use of these systems.”23
Perhaps then, psycholinguistics is the future field of linguistics which will make the Chapter: /Language and Linguistics
greatest theoretical contribution and applicable insights into language.
22
Joshua A. Fishman. The Sociology of Language Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House, 1979. pp. 29-54.
23
Noam Chomsky. Language and Responsibility compiled by Mitsou Ronat from conversations. New York:
Pantheon Books, 1979. p. 43.
57
Schools of thought
Chapter: /Schools of thought
58
As we said at the end of the previous section, our present knowledge about the nature of
language is the product of the work of different scholars throughout the last century. In this
section we will study the three most important schools of thought in Linguistics:
Structuralism, Generativism and Functionalism. These schools are considered the most
important one on the grounds of both the light they have thrown on the nature of language and
the implications they have had for second language teaching.
Before any discussion of these schools is attempted, it must be emphasized one more that all
of them have contributed to our present understanding of language and at the same time, none
of them offers a final answer to the questions “what is language?”. The analysis and
interpretation of the information about the different schools must be done within the
framework of the above statement.
59
60
Structuralism
The beginnings of the Structuralist school can be traced to the first decade of the 20 th century
in Europe. Later, between the 1930’s and the 1960’s, a different version of Structuralism
emerged in the United States. The first version of Structuralism will be called European
Structuralism and the second one, Northamerican Structuralism.
a. European Structuralism
During the nineteenth century, the study of language concentrated on studying the
changes that different languages underwent through time. Linguists tried to reconstruct
dead languages on the basis of the similarities that were found to exist between languages
thought to be related historically to those dead languages. In short, during the nineteenth
century scholars in Linguistics worked from a historical, or diachronic perspective.
However, one of these scholars, towards the end of his professional life became
dissatisfied with the diachronic interest of linguists of his time. He was the Swiss linguist
Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). According to Saussure, historical comparisons of
languages answered a question like “where did this language come from?”, but did not
answer what he considered to be the fundamental questions: “what is language?” For
Saussure, this question had to be addressed by describing language in a particular state,
without reference to time, that is, synchronically. Saussure, is thus responsible for
adscribing to Modern Linguistics the characteristics of being descriptive and synchronic,
characteristics which still define Linguistics today. The fact of having made the question
“what is language?” the central one in linguistic studies, has deservedly made Saussure
the founding father of Modern Linguistics. What follows is a summary of the main tenets
of European structuralism, as represented by Saussure.
(1) Language has a structure
This, today very obvious statement, may be signalled as the one that initiated the
school of Structuralism and with it, the development of Linguistics as we know it
today. Saussure was the first linguist to stress the fact that “language was a carefully
61
built structure of interwoven elements...” (Aitchison, 1978, p.34) and that it was the
objective of Linguistics to propose a description of those elements and of the
structural patterns into which they arranged.
(2) Language is a system of signs
For Saussure,
“noises count as language only when they serve to express or communicate

ideas; otherwise, they are just noise. For noises to express or communicate ideas
they must be part of a system of conventions which relate noises to ideas. They
must, in other words, be part of a system of signs. The sign is the union of a form
which signifies, which Saussure calls the signifier (signifiant) and an idea which
is signified (signifie). Though we may speak of signifier and signified as if they
were separate entities, they exist only as components of the sign.” (Culler, 1976,
p. 9)
In an attempt to illustrate the abstract concept of the sign, look at the following
diagram:
1 signified
signifier [tri:]
Sign 1111111
tree Chapter: /Schools of thought
The linguistic sign, according to Saussure, is arbitrary. In this respect, Culler (1976)
tells us:
“What does Saussure mean by the arbitrary nature of the sign? In one sense
the answer is quite simple. There is no natural or inevitable link between the
signifier and the signified. Since I speak English, I may use the signifier
62
represented by dog to talk about an animal of a particular species, but this
sequence of sounds is no better suited to that purpose than another sequence.
Lod, tet, or bloop would serve equally well if it were accepted by members of
my speech community. There is no intrinsic reason why one of these signifiers
rather than another should be linked with the concept of a dog. Are there no
exceptions to this basic principle? Certainly. There are cases of onomatopeia,
where the sound of the signifier seems in some way mimetic or imitative, as in
the English bow-wow or arf-arf. But there are few such cases, and the fact that
we identify them as a separated class and special case only emphasizes more
strongly that ordinary signs are arbitrary”. (pp. 10-11).
(3) Langue and parole
The distinction between langue and parole is another one of Saussure’s relevant
contributions to Linguistics. Lyons (1968) says:
“The distinction is intended to eliminate an ambiguity in the use of the word

language. Suppose we were to propose as a provisional definition of English the
following: the English language may be defined as the set of utterances produced
by speakers of English when they are speaking English. We see the ambiguity
immediately. When we say of someone that he ‘speaks English’ (or is a speaker
of English) we do not imply that he is actually ‘speaking English’ on any one
occasion. It would be quite reasonable to say of a parrot, in the appropriate
circumstances, that it ‘is speaking English’, but not that it ‘speaks English’. Let
us follow Saussure and say that all those who ‘speak English’ (or are speakers of
English) share a particular langue and that the set of utterances which they
produce when they are ‘speaking English’ constitute instances of parole.” (p. 51)
When describing the dichotomy of langue and parole, Culler (1976) tells us:
“La langue is the system of a language, the language as a system of forms,

whereas parole is actual speech... Langue is what the individual assimilates when
he learns a language, a set of forms deposited by the practice of speech in
speakers who belong to the same community, a grammatical system which exists
63
in the mind of each speaker. It is the social product whose existence permits the
individual to exercise his language faculty. Parole, on the other hand, is the
‘executive side of language’... In the act of parole the speaker selects and
combines elements of the linguistic system (langue) and gives these forms a
concrete phonic and psychological manifestation as sounds and meaning” (pp.22-
23).
Saussure himself says: “In separating langue from parole we are separating what is
social from what is individual and what is essential from what is ancillary and
accidental” (Bally and Sechehaye, 1959, p. 14).
Another way of conceptualizing langue and parole is to think of the former as

potential linguistic knowledge and the latter as actual realization of that knowledge.
The reason that led Saussure to make such a distinction was to determine which of
the two should be the object of linguistic description. According to Saussure, a
linguist must describe langue, that is, the objective of linguistic description should be
to determine the elements and rules which constitute the language system.
To conclude, from the discussion presented of European Structuralism it can be seen

that it is to Saussure to whom we owe our knowledge of language as a highly
structured, patterned system, made up of signs which are arbitrarily connected to the
object they represent (signified). These signs form a system which serves as a bridge
between sound and meaning. We also owe Saussure the insistence on synchronic
description and especially, the distinction between the potential knowledge of the
language system shared by members of a speech community (langue) and the actual
use of that knowledge in the form of speech (parole).
The influence of Saussure’s ideas about language has been felt throughout the
twentieth century. As we will see, all subsequent studies of language, in a greater or

lower degree, will borrow, expand and/or modify basic assumptions about the nature
of language made by Ferdinand de Saussure.
64
b. Northamerican Structuralism
To better understand the main tenets of this trend, it is necessary to mention two very
important circumstances which accompanied its emergence. First, the dominant
philosophy of science at the time Structuralism emerged in the United States dictated that
for any discipline to be called a science it had to deal with observable and measurable
facts, analyzable by mean of rigorous, objective procedures. This conception of science,
as we will see later, permeated all aspects of the view of language proposed by
Northamerican structuralists. Second, Structural linguistics in the United States had its
origins in the concern of a group of anthropologists to describe and record the culture and
language of a number of fast-disappearing American-indian tribes. When these
anthropologists set out to record the language of these indian groups, they found there was
no methodology for them to follow in order to describe these languages. The main
instrument at their disposal was what was known as “Traditional Grammar”, with its
prescriptive tendency, its claim that all languages came from Latin and its assumption that
the “purest” form of language was the written form. These tenets, as one can imagine,
were of little help to the field worker trying to describe largely unknown languages which
had no historical connection to Latin and many of which did not have a writing system. It
was a reaction to the principles of “traditional grammar” what explains many of the
claims advanced by Northamerican structuralists. The progressive attempts of these
pioneer anthropologists to lay down clear, rigorous and objective steps to follow in the
description of a language brought about the emergence of the school of Northamerican
Structuralism, whose basic tenets are best described by the linguist Leonard Bloomfield,
in his influential book “Language”, published in 1933.
The main tenets of Northamerican structuralism were:
(1) Linguistics is a descriptive science

The objective of the linguist is not to prescribe what people should say, but to
describe objectively what people say, without making value judgments.
(2) The primary form of language is the spoken form
65
Many speech communities do not have a writing system and yet they have a
spoken means of communication. Children learn to read and write only after
they go through formal schooling; not all children become literate, but all
normal children learn to speak. This led Northamerican structuralists to claim
the primacy of spoken language over written language.
(3) Every language is a system in its own right
The fact that the grammar of Latin did not provide an adequate framework for
the description of many of the indian languages already mentioned, led
Northamerican structuralists to claim that no language should be taken as a
mold or framework for other languages, in other words, languages should not
be described in terms of another language, but rather, they should be described
in their own terms.
(4) Language is a system in which smaller units arrange systematically to form

larger ones.
The influence of Saussure can be clearly seen in this assumption of

Northamerican structuralists. Language has a structure and it is the objective of
Linguistics to describe this structure. Northamerican structuralists proposed the
procedure of beginning with the smallest units, describing and classifying them
and describing the patterns into which they combined to form larger units. The
end of this process was to arrive at a taxonomy (like those made in Botany or
Zoology) or inventory of the items that conformed a language and of the pattern
into which they arranged. From this tenet, the notions of allophones and
phonemes, allomorphs and morphemes were originated.
(5) Meaning should not be part of linguistic analysis

Bloomfield and Northamerican structuralists in general considered meaning as

abstract, unobservable and therefore, unscientific. This led them to disregard
semantics in their efforts to describe language.
66
(6) The procedures to determine the units in language should be objective and
rigorous
Northamerican structuralism rejected traditional definitions of, for example, a

noun as “the word that refers to persons, animals or things”. These definitions
were for them subjective and mostly, based on meaning, which, as we have
already said, they excluded from their analysis. Northamerican structuralists
provided two observable criteria for defining the items of language: form and
distribution. According to them, if a linguist works with these criteria in mind,
recourse to meaning is unnecessary as illustrated by a non-sense sentence like
Pabs volted fruddily in the mas
The position of the words (distribution) and their morphological characteristics

(form), both observable criteria, are enough to describe them as nouns, verbs,
etc...
(7) Language is observable speech, not knowledge
Northamerican structuralists explicitly rejected Saussure’s distinction between

langue and parole and his proposal that the objective of Linguistics should be to
describe langue. In Northamerican structuralism, the mental aspects of language
were rejected as unscientific abstractions. Therefore, they established as their
objective to make a taxonomy of language, based on observable samples of
speech. Collection of a corpus of speech by means of tape-recordings was
always the first indispensable step Northamerican structuralists followed in
making their description. The sample collected in the tape was transcribed
phonetically, thus recording the allophones. The allophones were grouped into
phonemes, following (in theory), objective criteria like complementary

distribution and disregarding meaning (in theory). The phonemes were grouped
into morphemes and these into sentence patterns, always following (in theory)
objective criteria like for and distribution and disregarding meaning.
67
The phrase “in theory” in parenthesis is important, since Northamerican
structuralists were not always consistent with their principle that meaning
should be disregarded. A perfect example of this was the widely used technique
of “minimal pairs” to classify allophones into phonemes. The basis of the use of
minimal pairs is semantic. That is, sounds which provoke a change in meaning
are assigned to different phonemes. Thus, the use of minimal pairs as a criterion
to group allophones into phonemes was not consistent with the principle that
meaning should be disregarded because it is unobservable. When
Northamerican structuralists were faced with this inconsistency their reaction
was to say that they were not using it as a “basic” criterion but as a “shortcut”,
that is, as a faster way of determining the phonemes of a language than
complementary distribution.
To conclude, to Northamerican structuralism we owe the concepts of phoneme and allophone,

morpheme and allomorph and the highlighting of the importance of form and distribution in
the analysis of the patterns into which language items are arranged. The contribution of this
school was enormous with respect to the information it gave about the more observable
aspects of language such as phonetics, and phonology. However, its contributions with respect
to syntax were not very many and most of all, its disregard for meaning made its contribution
to semantics virtually nil. What is more, its rejection of any aspect of language that was not
directly observable led it to miss important aspects of language which were of a more abstract
and mental nature. By the 1950’s, it was becoming apparent that the objective of making a
taxonomy was too narrow. Making a taxonomy of language based only on observable speech
and leaving aside the mind who uses it did not seem very productive. Like Aitchison (1978)
puts it, “By around 1950, Linguistics had lost touch with other disciplines and become an
abstruse subject of little interest to anyone outside it. It was ready for a revolution”. (p. 35)
The revolution to come, probably the most influential one in this century, was embodied by
Noam Chomsky’s theory of Transformational-Generative Grammar to which we now turn.
68
2.2. Transformational Generative Grammar
69
Transformational Generative Grammar
The publication of the book “Syntactic structures” by Noam Chomsky in 1957, gave a
complete turn to the study of language. One very important basis for such a turn was a
redefinition and reconceptualization of science. Chomsky claimed human language was one of
the mental faculties human beings possess and which distinguish the human species from
animals.
Therefore, it cannot be assumed that the system of language can be studied by simply
analyzing a corpus of observable date independently of the mind that produced such a corpus.
Whitman (1975), when discussing this aspect of Chomsky’s views argues that according to
Transformational-Generative Grammar “[…] language, far from being independent of the
mind, was so inextricably tied to the mind that the study of language was virtually the study of
the human mind.” (p. 4). This basic assumption is what has made Transformational-
Generative grammar be labeled a “mentalistic theory of language, and what gave birth to the
discipline of Psycholinguistics, that is, the discipline that studies the relation between language
and mind.
The mentalistic approach to the study of language also implied a different direction of
scientific investigation. The human mind is far from observable and measurable, but this is no
obstacle for the scientist to propose hypotheses based in his7her imagination and intuitions as
a scientist, and then test these hypotheses with observable data-. In other words, for Chomsky,
sine qua non: objectivity and observability were not sine qua non conditions of science. In fact, for
Absolutely
essential Chomsky, an approach to the study of language that limits itself to only observable and
measurable data is extremely limited and narrow, and misses crucial and extremely interesting
aspects of human language: precisely, those abstract, mental aspects which are not observable.
The job of the linguist, then, is to propose models and hypotheses about language,
conceptualized as a mental phenomenon, and then use observable data as a vehicle to verify
the proposed hypotheses.
70
Chomsky, as a linguist, proposed a model to describe and explain the nature of human
language (some aspects of this model will be discussed later). However, Chomsky, besides
questioning the type of linguistic analysis done by Northamerican Structuralists, also
questioned the assumptions about language learning that had dominated the field of
Psychology for decades: those of behaviorism. In two later and highly influential publications
(1959; 1965), Chomsky strongly and convincingly questioned behavioral, mechanistic views
of language learning based on stimulus-response, and made mentalistic proposals about the
process of language learning whose impact is still felt today.
In short, the Chomskyan revolution implied not only a turning in the way language was
viewed, but also in the way language learning was viewed. Chomsky’s basic views of
language and language learning constitute the main tenets of his theory of Transformational-
Generative Grammar, the next point in the discussion.
a. Human beings are born with an innate capacity to acquire language

For Chomsky, the mental capacity to acquire language is species uniform and
species specific, it is species uniform because all members of the human species
possess it and species specific because only the human species possesses it. In other
words, all human beings are genetically equipped to learn Language, just like all cows
are genetically equipped to digest in a species specific way. Notice the use of the
capital “L” in the previous phrase. The claim that human beings are born with a mental
predisposition to acquire language does not mean they already know a specific
language (Chinese, Spanish, French, English). The claim Chomsky makes is that all
human babies are born with a mental language faculty, a mental predisposition to
acquire a human language. This innate faculty enables them to process and make sense
of the specific human language in their environment. Psycholinguists under the
influence of Chomsky have proposed the existence of LAD (language acquisition

device). This LAD would be part of every human being’s genetic constitution (just
like, among other things, the ability to walk in two feet) and it would contain abstract
rules for “[…] the induction and processing of environmental human language data”
(Whitman, 1975, p. 23).
71
b. There are universal properties which are shared by all human languages
Chomsky claims that at a very abstract, underlying level, all human languages
have common characteristics, in other words, that there are language universals. This
is a logical consequence of the innateness hypothesis. If language acquisition is guided
by the rules contained in the LAD, and if this LAD is common to all members of the
human species, then, all the different human languages must have something in
common, since they are different manifestations of a genetic language faculty
possessed by all members of the human species.
A good example to better conceptualize the notion of language universals is to
think if something like a car. What does something have to have in order to be called a
car? An engine, wheels, a transmission, seats and perhaps other general properties.
However, there are different kinds of cars, they all have engine, but some have four-
cylinder engines, six-cylinder engines, eight-cylinder engines, some have cylinders
arranged in straight lines, others have them arranged in V-shape, etc… All cars have
transmission but some have a traditional four or five setting transmission while others
have an automatic transmission. They all have wheels but the wheels change from
model to model.
Similarly, all cars have seats which also change from one model to the next. The
common general properties found in all cars would be equivalent to what Chomsky
calls language universals and the specific realization of those general properties in the
different models of cars would correspond to the individual characteristics of each one
of the different human languages.
c. Competence and Performance

Chomsky reacts against the proposal of Northamerican Structuralism that human
language is just observable speech. For Chomsky, the sentences human beings produce
are the result of the application of their knowledge of the language, and the objective if
the linguist should be to describe the knowledge people have which allows them to
produce sentences, and not the actually produced observable sentences. In other words,
for Chomsky, language is knowledge, not observable speech. Under the obvious
influence of Saussure, Chomsky distinguishes between competence and performance.
72
Competence refers to the internalized knowledge people have of the rules that govern
the production of sentences in their language. Performance, on the other hand, refers to
the use of language. It is worth emphasizing that for Chomsky, performance is not the
most relevant aspect of language since according to him, when people actually use
language they are subject to the influence if external variables like distractions,
interruptions, fatigue and memory limitations. These variables lead people to make
mistakes. Thus, Chomsky claims, the linguist must abstract or idealize from people’s
real, actual production and describe the abstract knowledge they have which allows
them to produce sentences. In what is probably his most famous (and as we will see
later, most controversial) statement, Chomsky argues that:
Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a

completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly
and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory
limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest and errors in applying his
knowledge of the language in actual performance. (1965, p.3)
In connection with the concept of competence, it is necessary to discuss another

important concept: that of grammaticality. Chomsky argues that a person’s
competence consists of the rules that allow for the generation (thus the term
“generative”) of all possible grammatical sentences in the language. The term
“grammatical”, as used by Chomsky, has no prescriptive connotation. By
“grammatical” Chomsky means generated by the rules of the language which exist in
the mind of native speaker-hearers. The sentence I can go is a grammatical sentence of
English since the rules of this language generate such a sentence. However, the
sentence *I can to go is an ungrammatical sentence since the rules of English do not
generate it. The job of a child acquiring his/her language is to gradually discover the
rules that generate all the possible grammatical sentences in the corresponding
language, in other words, to gradually build a grammar of the language. In this sense,
with the concepts of competence and grammaticality, Generative-Transformational
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Grammar equates grammar with knowledge. The job of the linguist is to describe and
explain the form and nature of the rules that make up a person’s competence.
d. Language is rule-governed behavior

An important contribution of Generative-Transformational Grammar is its
emphasis on the creative aspect if human language, that is, on the fact that the number
of sentences in a language is infinite. For Chomsky, people are able to understand and
produce novel sentences, that is, sentences they have never heard or spoken before. A
problem to explain in this respect would be: “how can a finite organ like the human
brain handle an infinite system?” The answer, according to Chomsky, lies in the
concept of competence. A person’s competence consists of a finite set of rules which
allow for the generation of an infinity of sentences. To illustrate the rule-governed
aspect of human language, a comparison is generally made between language users and
chess players. A chess player does not and cannot memorize all the possible fames
he/she can make, rather, he/she knows a set of rules for moving the different pieces,
and with these rules he/she creates an infinite number of combinations of moves to be
made in different games. Similarly, a language user knows a finite set of rules and with
these he/she is able to create and understand an infinity of sentences.
e. Language is an abstract system

Chomsky questions the structuralist notion that language description should stay at
the level of simply describing the items of language and their arrangements. Chomsky
also takes issue with the insistence of Northamerican Structuralists to leave meaning
aside in language description.
For Chomsky, the proposal of phrase structure (PS) rules which describe items and
their arrangement is but one step in the description of language, and does not describe
many complexities found in human language. As an example, consider the following
sentences:
Yesterday it rained.
It rained yesterday.
It is obvious that the two sentences contain the same constituents, but their
arrangement is different. It is also obvious that the meaning of both sentences is
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similar. Chomsky would argue that if one describes simply the elements of language
and their arrangement one cannot describe why different syntactic patterns like the
ones above would show similar semantic relations.
Chomsky argues that the way structuralists analyzed the syntactic patterns of
language did not capture the fact that sentences which are paraphrases one of the other
are semantically obvious, observable level is called the surface structure.
Thus, the deep structure of a sentence like John is easy to please would be
something like “It is easy for someone to please John” and the deep structure of a
sentence like John is eager to please, something like “John is eager to please
someone”. Both deep structures would be realized in a similar syntactic arrangement in
their surface structure.
If sentences have two levels of structure, the next question is, how do abstract,
deep structures become surface structures? To connect the two levels Chomsky
proposes another set of rules: transformational rules. The application of
transformational rules, or transformations converts deep structures into surface
structures. In the example sentences
It snowed yesterday
Yesterday it snowed
the phrase structure rules and the lexicon of English:
S → NP + VP
NP → (det) + N + (adj)
VP → V + (NP) + (adv)
N: it V: snowed Adv: yesterday
would produce a deep structure like:
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S
NP VP1
N V Adv
it snowed yesterday
A transformation called Adverb moving transformation would move the adverb at

the beginning of the sentence to yield the surface structure “Yesterday it snowed”.
Transformations are rules which move, delete or add elements to the deep
structure. In the following sentence, a transformation has deleted an element:
Move
The deep structure of imperative sentences contains the understood subject “you”.
S 1
NP VP
N V
You Move
A transformation called the Imperative deletion transformation, eliminates the

pronoun “you” to yield the surface form “Move!”
Chomsky would argue that the proposal of a deep structure level is not based just
on his intuition, he argues that some facts of the English language justify proposing a
deep level of structural analysis.
She killed herself

Consider the following sentences:
They call themselves the Crazy Boys
It is seen that the reflexive pronouns are a copy of the subject of the sentence with
the corresponding reflexive form. “She killed herself” means “she killed she”, where
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the first and second “she” refer to the same person. The same relation obtains in the
second sentence between “they” and “themselves”.
Wash yourself
Now consider the sentences:
Look at yourself
The question generative transformationalist grammarians would ask is: Where

does the reflexive “yourself” come from if there is no subject in the surface to copy it
from as was the case in the examples preceding this one? The answer would be that at
a deep abstract level, there is a “you” from where the “yourself” is copied. Thus, the
deep structure of “wash yourself” would be
NP VP1
N V NP
You wash you
where the two “yous” refer to the same person.
The reflexive transformation would convert the second pronoun into “yourself”
and the imperative transformation would delete the first “you”.
The fact that there are “understood” elements which do not show up in any
observable form constitutes a good argument for the proposal of an abstract,
unobservable level of structure like Chomsky’s deep structure.
In short, Chomsky argues that the language system is a very abstract one, whose
complexities cannot be analyzed by simply describing and taxomizing the constituents that
make up sentences and the observable arrangements they take. Furthermore, Chomsky argues
that meaning cannot be excluded from linguist analysis, since the different language items and
their arrangements fulfill a semantic role. The alternative he offers to the limitations of the
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analysis proposed by structuralists, specially Northamerican structuralists is that of conceiving
language as an abstract system with two levels or structures: a deep abstract level in which
semantic relations are captured (this level is obtained by the conjunction of PS rules and the
lexicon of the language) and a more obvious level, the surface structure. The two levels are
connected by means of rules called transformations.
To summarize all the information presented about Generative-Transformational

Grammar it can be said that Chomsky revolutionized the conceptions of language and
language learning by proposing a mentalistic approach to the study of both. With respect to
language learning, Chomsky claims that language learning is a mental process which is guided
by a language faculty, innate in every member of the human species. This innate faculty,
embodied in what has come to be called the LAD (language acquisition device) justifies the
claim that all human languages share a core of common characteristics which he calls
language universals. With respect to the nature of language, Chomsky conceives language as
an abstract system with complex properties which cannot be studied by analyzing exclusively
the superficial observable arrangements of elements. In order to explain the abstract properties
of human language, Chomsky proposes a two-level analysis of language structure (deep and
surface structure). This two-level analysis implies proposing an extra set of rules (besides PS
rules) to connect the two levels of structure: transformational rules. Chomsky also argues that
a linguist cannot aim at describing observable, already produced utterances since they are
infinite in number. Rather, the objective of linguistic analysis should be to describe the
knowledge speaker/hearers have of the rules that generate the infinite number of grammatical
sentences, in other words, their competence.
Chomsky’s model of language brings back meaning into linguistic analysis, as seen in
the notion of deep structure. This, besides all the mentalistic contributions he made, was a
welcome change in language description. However, the 1970s brought about a questioning of
some aspects of Chomsky’s theory. The basis for the questioning was related to the fact that
Chomsky’s inclusion of meaning in language description was restricted to the linguistic
aspects of meaning (especially those concerning the lexicon, linear word order and internal
arrangement of constituents) and left aside those aspects of meaning related to speaker’s
intentions and contextual influences, in other words, Chomsky paid little or no attention to the
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pragmatic side of language. The competence-performance distinction also started to be the
object of heavy questioning on especially two counts. First, Chomsky’s claim that language
was knowledge and not use, competence and not performance, and therefore had to be
described by resorting to “ideal speaker-hearers” in “homogeneous speech communities” did
not convince linguists and sociolinguists who saw language use as important as language
knowledge and who saw little profit in ignoring the heterogeneity and widespread variation
that exists in “real-life” speech communities. Second, and closely related, even those linguists
and sociolinguists who were willing to accept a distinction between language knowledge and
language use, took issue with Chomsky with respect to the claim that a person’s language
knowledge consisted only of the rules to form grammatical sentences with no consideration of
the fact that sentences may be well formed but socially unacceptable.
In short, Chomsky’s main contribution was to show the many complexities and abstract
properties of human language as a mental phenomenon; however, the weak points of his
theory are in his regard for the pragmatic aspects of language which are a bridge between the
individual who knows and uses language and the social group to which this individual
belongs. The next school of thought, Functionalism, is an attempt to incorporate pragmatic
aspects into language description by conceptualizing language as a means for social
communication.
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2.3. Functionalism
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Functionalism
The term functionalism will be used as a cover term or umbrella to include different
positions about language which base themselves on the premise that language is an instrument
of communication among members of a social group.
Within this label we will study first, the concept of communicative competence offered
by the sociolinguists Dell Hymes (1971/1979) and the main tenets of M.A.K. Halliday’s
Systemic Grammar (1973)
a. Communicative competence
Hymes (1971/1979) argues that Chomsky’s view of competence is a narrow one.
Hymes questions Chomsky’s assumption that language used in actual situations is
irrelevant to linguistic theory. For Hymes, Chomsky’s exclusive attention to
knowledge if the language system and his consideration that actual use is irrelevant,
leave out a crucial aspect of language knowledge and language use: the socio-cultural
aspect. The consideration of the socio-cultural aspect as relevant to linguistics leads
Hymes to reject Chomsky’s proposal of describing the knowledge possessed by “ideal
speaker-hearers” in “completely homogeneous speech communities”.
Hymes also questions Chomsky’s conceptualization of performance as imperfect
or degenerate. Hymes would admit that in actual use, people do make pauses,
hesitations and false starts but, he would argue, such “imperfection” may be actually
efficient. Hymes adds “[…] one can see that what to grammar is imperfect […] may be
artful accomplishment of social act […] or the patterned, spontaneous evidence of
problem solving and conceptual thought” (1971/1979, p. 8). In this quotation Hymes
emphasizes the fact that in actual interaction speakers and hearers know respectively
when to hesitate, stop, etc… and how to fill in the gaps existing in the delivered
message, both guided by the information given by the context in which the interaction
takes place.
According to Hymes, the disregard for socio-cultural factors and the
consideration of performance as imperfect and degenerate have led to such an idealized
portrait of language knowledge as the chomskyan one. In very biblical terms, Hymes
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sums up his questioning of Chomsky’s definition of competence and performance by
calling it a “Garden-of-Eden view”. Hymes says:
(In Chomsky’s terms) human life seems to be divided between grammatical

competence, an ideal, innately-derived sort of power, and performance, an
exigency rather like the eating of the apple, thrusting the perfect speaker-hearer
out into a fallen world. Of this world, where meanings may be won by the sweat
of the brow, and communication achieved in labor, little is said. The controlling
image (in Chomsky’s theory) is of an abstract, isolated individual, almost an
unmotivated cognitive mechanism, not, except incidentally, a person in a social
world. (p. 8) (parenthesis mine)
As an alternative, Hymes proposes a reconceptualization of the chomskyan

notion of competence, arguing that people’s knowledge of language consists of more
than the rules for forming grammatical sentences. In Hymes’ view, people not only
know how to construct well-formed sentences, they also know when, where and with
whom to use these sentences. In other words, people not only know how to form
grammatical sentences, they also know how to use the sentences which are
appropriate to the context. The term used by Hymes to describe a person’s
knowledge for constructing sentences which are both well-formed and contextually
appropriate is that of communicative competence.
Thus, Hymes makes the important contribution of expanding the chomskyan

notion of competence as knowledge of the language system (linguistic or
grammatical competence) to include also knowledge of the consequences of using
sentences in social interaction.
An important aspect of Hymes’ notion of communicative competence is the

distinction it allows to make between grammaticality and appropriateness.
Remember that in Generative-Transformational Grammar the crucial notion was that
of grammaticality, that is, the property sentences have of conforming to or being
generated by the rules of the language. Whit Hymes’ definition, -sentences should be
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analyzed not only in terms of their grammaticality, but also in terms of their
appropriateness to the context in which they are produced.
As an example consider a sentence like
Give me the red pen
This is a well-formed English sentence. However, if a student says that

sentence to the director of his/her school, he/she could be scolded by being rude or
impolite, something which would not happen if the student said it to a close friend. In
the first case, the sentence would be grammatical but inappropriate, and in the second
one, it would be both grammatical and appropriate.
Hymes uses the concept of communicative competence not only in reference to

the socio-linguistic knowledge speakers have and use but also in reference to the
process of language learning. Children, according to Hymes, gradually build their
competence with respect to both what is grammatical and what is appropriate. In
Hymes’ words,
We have then to account for the fact that a normal child acquires
knowledge of sentences, not only as grammatical, but also as appropriate. He or
she acquires competence as to when to speak, when not, and as to what to talk
about, with whom, when, where, in what manner. In short, a child becomes able
to accomplish a repertoire of speech acts, to take part in speech events and to
evaluate their accomplishment by others… The acquisition of such competency is
of course fed by social experience, needs and motives […] (1971/1979, p. 15).
In short, Hymes position with respect to language implies an inclusion of

sociocultural aspects in both the conceptualization of language learning and of the
nature of language. With respect to the models that attempt to describe the language
system, Hymes states,
We break irrevocably with the model that restricts the design of language
to one face toward referential meaning, one toward sound, and that defines
organization of language as solely consisting of rules for linking the two. Such
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a model implies naming to be the sole use of speech, as if language were never
organized to lament, rejoice, beseech, admonish, aphorize, inveigh, for the
many varied forms of persuasion, direction, expression and symbolic play. A
model of language must design it with a face toward communicative conduct
and social life” (1971/1979, p. 15).
Hymes is a sociologist of language and his investigations have led him more
towards language-related sociological research than towards language description
itself. The model which represents the best attempt to incorporate social aspects in a
model of the language system is M.A.K. Halliday’s Systemic Grammar. The main
characteristics and basic tenets of Halliday’s model are discussed in the next section.
b. Systemic Grammar
The British linguists M.A.K. Halliday has proposed a model of language called
Systemic Grammar. The term “systemic” relates to the central category of the model:
the system. Halliday considers language as a series of systems, and defines systems as
sets of options at different levels (semantic, syntactic, lexical, phonological) available
to language user, from which they choose according to the context. The main tenets of
Systemic Grammar are:
1. Systemic Grammar gives high priority to the sociological aspects of language

As opposed to Chomsky, Halliday considers that questions like “what is
language”, “how does it work?”, cannot be answered without reference to what
the social functions of language are and to the ways in which language form
(structures, lexicon, sounds) fulfills those functions. In this light, Systemic
Grammar takes as one central interest, not the uniformity of individual
psychological aspects of language, but the social varieties of language which
are determined by the social context in which language is used. In this respect,
the notion of –registers- becomes very important. Registers are different styles
of language which a speaker or writer uses according to the situation. In
Systemic Grammar, language forms would be analyzed not in themselves, but
in relation to the register in which they are used. We thus find terms like
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formal, informal and academic registers, which would determine the choice of
the corresponding language forms on the part of the speaker or writer.
The emphasis on the social context, leads Systemic Grammar to question
the emphasis Generative-Transformational Grammar makes on the phenomena
like structural ambiguity to justify what Halliday considers excessively abstract
descriptions. That is, Systemic Grammar would not make a big issue of the fact
that “they are baking apples” is structurally ambiguous, since such ambiguity
would exist only if the sentence is considered in isolation of the linguistic and
cultural context in which it is embedded. As opposed to previous linguistic
theories (both Structuralism and Generative-Transformational Grammar),
Systemic Grammar is not a grammar of the sentence, and sentences like the
preceding example would not be ambiguous in a model that attempts to take
into account the linguistic and social context in which sentences are produced.
2. Language is DOING rather than KNOWING

Systemic Grammar, in open disagreement with Chomsky, views language
as a means for doing things with forms rather than as knowing those forms.
Halliday does not distinguish between “knowing” and “using” like Chomsky
did. Rather, he distinguishes between linguistic behavior potential (systems of
options open to language users for meaning and saying) and actual linguistic
behavior (real choices people actually make when saying something). In other
words, the distinction is not between what one knows and what one dies with it,
but between what one can potentially do with language and what one actually
does.
3. Grammaticality/ungrammaticality are not two terms of a dichotomy, but two

ends of a continuum
Systemic Grammar also questions the dichotomic, black-and-white
distinction between grammatical sentences and ungrammatical sentences. For
Halliday, sentences can also be unusual, unacceptable or unlikely, depending
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on the context in which they are used. Thus, Systemic linguistics proposes a
continuum of grammaticality which would look like the following
Grammatical Acceptable Unusual Very unusual Ungrammatical
What the diagram above shows is that it is possible to have intermediate

degrees of grammaticality, and for Halliday, the placing of sentences in
particular points of the continuum would depend on the context in which the
sentence is produced.
4. Pragmatic, contextual aspects are included in the semantic component

Halliday reacts to the chomskyan restriction of meaning to only syntactic
and lexical meaning. A central point of Systemic Grammar is the integration of
Pragmatics and Semantics. For Halliday, speaker’s intentions and other
contextual aspects are as much part of meaning as the meaning conveyed by
words and sentence patterns. Thus, Systemic Grammar would offer a way to
describe the difference between sentences like
Can you give me a light?
Can you speak French?
since a central part of this model are the functions of purposes that a sentence
fulfills in social interaction. Systemic Grammar would claim that an integral
part of the meaning of the first sentence would be the fact that is has the
function of requesting, and that part of the meaning of the second one would be
its function of asking for information. Models which concentrate exclusively on
the meanings conveyed by language form, like Generative-Transformational

Grammar, would describe those sentences as syntactically equivalent and
semantically different only by virtue of the different words they contain, but
would consider irrelevant the fact that despite the syntactic similarity, they
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serve two different functions or purposes: requesting an action and asking for
information.
5. The description of language structure cannot be separated from the social

function it fulfills
Under the premise that language has evolved in the service of social
functions, Halliday claims that language structure cannot be described without
reference to the social functions it serves. This premise has led Halliday to
equate Structuralism and Generativism in the sense that both are structural,
since their only concern is language structure, disregarding language function.
For Halliday, Structuralism would describe language structure in taxonomic
terms, while Generativism would give a much more abstract and sophisticated
account of the same language structure. However, he would insist, their
disregard for the social, contextual component of language, could make them
both be termed as structural, in the sense mentioned above.
As we have said before, Halliday views language as a series of systems at

different levels. These systems consist of a set of options available to the
language user. The systems of options start at the level of social behavior in the
face of a certain situation or context. Remember, that Halliday sees language as
a form of doing, as behavior potential. In the context of society, human beings
have a potential of options to behave. One of these options is to behave
linguistically, that is, to speak or write. For example, a mother is at home with
her child and suddenly a fire breaks out. In that context of situation, she can
decide to grab the child and run outdoors, without speaking, or she can decide
to say something like: Fire! Let’s run! etc… If she says something, she has
chosen one of the many options available to her in that specific situation: the
speaking or language option. This example then shows that language as
behavior potential is, among many, one of the things members of a social group
can do.
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Once we enter the language option, a question arises. What made the
mother use a particular sentence? What made her choose one sentence among
all the possible ones for her situation? This brings us to the next system in
Halliday’s model. The CAN MEAN system. In this system, once the
speaking/writing option has been chosen, speakers have available a number of
purposes which in turn open the sets of possibilities for the CAN SAY system.
That is, the choice of forms (can say) depends on what speakers/writers can
mean. The level CAN MEAN relates the levels CAN DO and CAN SAY. Again,
in each of these levels there are systems of options which determine the entry to
further systems of options. Let us take another example adapted from Halliday
to illustrate his model.
Context: A child goes out to play and his mother finds out he has been in
a place that could be dangerous for him.
BEHAVIOR MEANING
POTENTIAL POTENTIAL LINGUISTIC POTENTIAL (CAN SAY)
(CAN DO) (CAN MEAN)
Don’t go there anymore!
Scold
You’ve been a naughty boy!
Speak to the If you go there again, I’ll tell dad
Threaten
child If I see you there, I’ll smack you
Context
That place is dangerous, why don’t you go
Reason
to the park?
Plead Honey please, don’t go there again
Spank the
child
As can be seen from the illustration above, the description of language

begins with the social context and ends with the language forms. This kind of
description is obviously different from those offered by Chomsky, since here
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the social, contextual component, far from being considered irrelevant, is built
into the model.
To sum up, Halliday’s Systemic Grammar is an attempt to incorporate sociological

aspects into language description. His view of language have represented an important
advancement in Linguistics, since they have allowed to see language, not as an isolated system
of constituents and rules but as a highly structured system, whose workings are directly linked
to the social purposes of the individuals who use it to interact with each other. However,
Halliday’s model can be questioned on the basis that its priority to social aspects has implied a
neglect of psychological aspects which may be of equal importance in language description
and use. Another limitation of Halliday’s model may be that its emphasis on incorporating
language function has implied a lack of depth into the complexities of language form.
The last comment serves well as a bridge to some concluding remarks with respect to the
different schools of thought that have been presented.
The first remark relates to the statement made at the beginning of this part as to the lack
of final answers with respect to the nature of language. A school of thought may dominate the
field for a time, but since no school is able to answer all the questions about the nature of
language or to account for all the elements that determine its complex nature, it will
necessarily leave open or unanswered questions which will in turn serve as the basis for new
schools of thought. In other words, the limitations of one school become the working material
for the next one and in this cycle, our knowledge about the nature of language progresses, but
at the same time, our awareness of its complexities also increases. The more complexities that
arise, the farther away we feel from a definitive answer to the questions “what is language?”,
“How does it work?”
The second remark to make is that in spite of the fact that linguists seem to act as if their
particular view replaced a previous one, the claims they have made about the nature of
language seem actually complementary, and the discoveries of one school seem to feed the
next one. This can be illustrated by two examples. Chomsky is using (and of course,
expanding) claims made about Northamerican Structuralists, especially with respect to the
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form and distribution of constituents. This shows that the knowledge which is gained with
work of one school is not thrown down the drain by the next one, but rather, it is in many
cases taken as a basis to present new conceptualizations. The second example relates to
Chomsky’s emphasis on the mental, psychological aspects of language and Halliday’s
emphasis on the social aspects of language. Both linguists have convincingly shown from their
respective positions that language is a psychological phenomenon as well as a social one. The
fact that they chose to emphasize one aspect over the other is not that they are unaware of the
existence of the other aspect, but rather, that the complexity to be described, psychological or
social, is such that defies an easy representation in the forms of a single model and thus, as
scientists, linguists have decided which aspect to emphasize, depending on their own personal
theoretical preferences.
The ideal model of language, which does not yet appear in sight, would be one which
amalgamated the observable and abstract language-internal aspects uncovered by
Structuralism and Generativism, the mentalistic, psychological aspects of Generativism and
the sociological aspects of Functionalism (in its broader sense). This ideal model, as it has
been stated looks nowhere in sight yet. Therefore, fields or disciplines like Second language
teaching, which need to turn to linguistics for some aspects of their endeavor, would do well to
keep in mind the final remarks just made, in order to make decisions about applications or
implications which are critical, rational and not dogmatic.
61 to 90
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3. Morphology
Chapter: /3. Morphology
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Morphology:
Morphology deals with the processes by which words are formed and with the internal
structure of words.
The importance of morphology lies, among other things, in the fact that the lexicon of a
language is constantly changing. New words are continually added as the need arises. For
example, imagine that a new political movement were created in Venezuela which advocated
that children should be the ones to control power. What could this movement be called? To
follow the pattern of other similar terms, the movement can be called “chamocracia”. From
this term, words like “chamocrata” and “chamocrático” would be formed and used by
speakers. As another example, imagine that an object was invented which allowed us to
simultaneously sweep and clean the floor with water and that the object were called “prato”.
Immediately, words like “pratos”, “prateo”, “pratear” and “prateando” would be used by
speakers.
What stands out from the examples above is that the processes involved in the formation
of words appear to be regular and systematic, and they involve the use of units smaller than
the word.
The discussion of the morphological component will touch first, upon processes for the
formation of words and second, on the internal structure of words.
a. Word-formation processes
1. Borrowing
A common process for languages to create new words is to borrow them
from other languages. Spanish and English have words like alcohol, croissant,
piano, robot, yogurt and zebra (cebra), which they have borrowed from Arabic,
French, Italian, Czech, Turkish and Bantu, respectively. These examples
involve borrowing a word in its original form and making the corresponding
adaptations in pronunciation. However, there is another kind of borrowing,
called calque or loan translation, in which the word or expression of the
original language is translated literally in the language which makes the
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borrowing. Examples of borrowing by calque in Spanish would be rascacielos
(from skyscraper), perros calientes (from hot dogs) and luna de miel (from
honey moon)
2. Compounding
This process involves the combination of two existing forms to produce a
single new form. Examples of compounding in English would be words like
textbook, bookshelf and bedroom. In Spanish, we find words like casa-cuna and
sacapuntas as examples of compounding.
3. Derivation
This common process involves the adding of affixes to a word, to form a
new word of a different category or with a different meaning. These affixes can
be either prefixes (un-, im-, mis-, pre-) or suffixes (-ful, -ly, -less, -ish, -ness, -
ism). Thus, by derivation, words like the following are formed:
By adding a prefix:
happy – unhappy understand – misunderstand
register – preregister possible - impossible
By adding a suffix:
wonder – wonderful blue – blueish terror – terrorism
care – careless happy – happiness glad – gladly
4. Coinage
This process involves the creation of a totally new term. The term prato,
just invented, could be an example. Other instances of coinage are represented
by terms like aspirin and nylon in English, and modess in Spanish, which were
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originally invented as trade names and which have become words of every day,
common use.
5. Backformation
This process implies reducing the number of syllables in a word of a
certain category (commonly a noun) to create a shorter word of a different
category (commonly a verb). The original word is introduced first in the
language as a noun, and later other categories are created. An example of this in
both English and Spanish would be televise/televisar (from television).
6. Clipping
By means of this process, new words are formed by reducing the number
of syllables of an original form. Examples of this in English would be flu (from
influenza), lab (from laboratory), fan (from fanatic), gas (from gasoline), bus
(from autobus), and ad (from advertisement).
7. Blending
This process consists in combining parts of two words (usually the
beginning of one word and the end of another one) to form a new one. Typical
examples of blending in English are smog (smoke + fog), motel (motor + hotel)
and brunch (breakfast + lunch).
8. Conversion /category change

By this process, a word of a certain category, for example noun, is used
as a verb without suffering any reduction of syllables. Examples of conversion
would be the use of the noun butter in English in a sentence like I like to butter
my bread, and the use of the noun bottle in the wine is bottled by specialists.
9. Use of acronyms
This process involves using the initial letters of a set of words. Typical
every day words in English formed from acronyms are “laser” (light
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amplification by stimulated emission of radiation), radar (radio detecting and
ranging) and scuba (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus).
b. The internal structure of words
1. The morpheme
The discussion of word formation processes has assumed that the word is
an easily identifiable unit. This is true, from the point of view of the layperson
who uses and takes language for granted. However, when one approaches the
unit of the word as a language scientist, what appears to be such an obvious
unit is not that easy to define.
One attempt to define a world could be to characterize it as being made
up of phonemes and as being the smallest unit that carries meaning. After all,
phonemes in themselves are meaningless, and it is not until you put them
together to make a word that the form means something.
A look at the following simple word will reveal that words are more than
a string of sounds put together:
steps
Let us concentrate on the first and last elements of the word. It is obvious
that despite being the same phoneme, with the same pronunciation, the last /s/
is doing something that the first /s/ is not. The first /s/ is simply part of the word
like /t/, /e/ and /p/; however, the last /s/ is giving some information about the
word, it is telling us that there are more than one (plural) /step/ and
furthermore, it is telling us that when we use this word in a sentence, the verb
that follows has to be in its plural form, that is, we would have to say, for
example, steps are and not *steps is. In sum, the last /s/ has some kind of
meaning and grammatical function that the first /s/ does not have.
95
pets books
This is confirmed by looking at many other words in
bets lips
English which show the same pattern as the word in our
cakes bats
example.
This has led linguists to propose that words are not indivisible blocks, but
rather they can be composed of smaller parts which carry meaning or
grammatical function. These smaller elements have been called morphemes. A
morpheme is then the minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function.
Let us illustrate this definition with some examples. In a word like
“national” there are two morphemes: nation + –al, the latter converts the noun
_into an adjective_. In words like “nationalize” there are three morphemes:
nation + –al + –ize, where the latter converts the adjective into a ver. In a word
like “nationalization” there are four morphemes: nation + –al + –ize + –tion;
the last morpheme converts the verb into a noun. Finally, in a word like
“nationalizations” there are five morphemes: nation + –al + –ize + –tion + –s,
and the last morpheme gives the plural form of the noun.
When trying to segment words into morphemes, the basic technique is the
comparison with similar forms, like we did in the case of:
steps pets bets cakes books lips
Another example of this technique would be to segment loudly in two

morphemes: loud + –ly, on the basis of the occurrence of similar forms like:
rapidly beautifully concisely briefly
However, the application of this criterion has been a source of some

confusion since there are cases when the resulting segmentation is
controversial.
Consider the Spanish diminutive –ito, as in niñito. This form can be
segmented into two morphemes: niño + –ito. This segmentation is supported by
the occurrence of many similar forms like:
carrito pajarito gorrito
96
However, what about a word like apetito? Are we to conclude that there
are two morphemes here? We all feel as Spanish speakers that apetito is not a
small “apeto” and yet, the criterion of formal similarity would lead us to claim
that there are two morphemes in the word.
Similar controversies in the segmentation into morphemes occur in
English. Consider the following:
strawberry blueberry blackberry cranberry
In the first three cases, the segmentation of the word into two morphemes
is clear and straightforward. Straw/blue/black + –berry. A strawberry is a berry
(a fruit of some kind and size) that feels like straw to the touch; a blueberry is a
berry that is blue and a blackberry is a berry that is black. However, when we
come to cranberry, the same reasoning cannot be made. Cranberry in English
possess the same problem we noted for apetito in Spanish. In fact, when
linguists talk about this problem with segmentation into morphemes, they refer
to it as “the cranberry problem”.
In the face of this problem, some linguists have taken the position that
words like cranberry in English and apetito (in Spanish) are made up of two
morphemes because of their form, and others have taken the position that they
are one morpheme because in spite of the appearance of two morphemes, the
relation in meaning between the parts does not hold like in the other cases
(niñito, blueberry).
2. Morphemes and allomorphs

An important fact about morphemes is that they may have different
manifestations or variants. Let us look at the plural morpheme in English.
Pronounce the following three sets of plural forms:
steps dogs horses

bets bees dishes
lamps lambs churches
cats cods judges
97
The plural in the first set is pronounced [s], in the second set [z], and in
the third set [Iz]. As we can see then, there are different ways of pronouncing
the same morpheme. These different variants of a morpheme are called
allomorphs.
In the case of the plural morpheme, the use of the allomorphs just
described obeys a very systemic phonological principle.
The allomorph [s], which is voiceless, is used when the noun ends in a
voiceless sound (no vibration of the vocal chords; put your hand on your throat
as you pronounce [p] and [t] and you will feel no vibration). The allomorph [z],
which is voiced, is used when the noun ends in a voiced sound (vibration of the
vocal chords; put your hand on your throat as you pronounce [g], [i, as in bees].
[m] and [d] and you will feel vibration). The allomorph [ Iz] is used when the
word ends in [s], [z], [tʃ], the final sound in church, and [dʒ], the final sound in
judge. In these cases, all these sounds require the adding of the extra syllable
[Iz] for the plural to be clearly marked. Try for example to say horse + [s] or
church + [s]. You will notice that it is not clear whether you are saying horse in
singular with a longer [s] or church in singular with a longer [tʃ], or whether
you are saying the plural. That is why that [Iz], especially the [I] becomes
necessary, to avoid confusion between the singular and the plural.
Since the three plural allomorphs discussed follow a phonological
principle (voiced with voiced; voiceless with voiceless; insertion of [ I] in the
case of sounds similar to [s] and [z]), they are called phonologically
conditioned allomorphs.
However, there is more to say with respect to allomorphs. The plural
morpheme, as we all know, has other forms. Consider the cases of what are
generally called irregular plurals like:
children feet women sheep

In these cases, no principle can be called upon to describe the formation

of the plural. In cases like these linguists talk about lexical conditioning, that
98
is, the form the plural takes is determined by the word itself. That is, child
determines children; tooth determines teeth and so on.
The fact that some allomorphs are phonologically conditioned and others
are lexically conditioned implies that at an abstract level, all nouns will have
the plural morpheme, no matter what shape the plural takes. That is:
horse + plural = horse + z
cat + plural = cat + s
dog + plural = dog + z
child +plural = children
foot + plural = feet
sheep + plural = sheep + Ø
Notice that in the case of sheep, the irregularity is explained by assuming

that there is another lexically conditioned plural allomorph: zero (represented
as Ø by linguists).
This Ø symbol is also used by linguists to describe the morpheme for
singular in languages like English and Spanish, as illustrated below:
house + singular = house + ø = house

casa + singular =casa + ø = casa
The difference between phonologically conditioned and lexically

conditioned allomorphs is an interesting one to analyze not only from the point
of view of language description, but also from the point of view of language
learning.
Notice that you, as a learner of English, and also children learning
English as their mother tongue, learn the irregular plurals differently from the
regular ones. For the phonologically conditioned plurals, no effort is required to
learn each individual plural; what is needed is the learning of the principle that
99
governs the production of the phonologically predicable allomorphs [s], [z] and
[Iz]. For the lexically conditioned allomorphs, however, an extra effort seems to
be required to learn them separately, on the part of both first and second
language learners of English. This extra effort is seen in errors both learners
make when learning English like *childs, *foots. These errors suggest that
learners are, at the beginning, using the principle of phonological conditioning
until, in the later stages of the learning process they learn to separate the nouns
whose plurals is regular and phonologically conditioned from those whose
plural is lexically conditioned. When this step is taken, learners use the correct
irregular forms.
3. Classification of morphemes
The following chart illustrates the different types of morphemes.
LEXICAL
FREE
FUNCTIONAL
MORPHEMES
DERIVATIONAL
BOUND
INFLECTIONAL
Free morphemes are those which can occur by themselves as

independent, single words. Table, brush, sleep, nice, of and the are examples of
free morphemes.
The free morphemes can be of two types: lexical and functional (these
two types of morphemes have also been called content words and function
words respectively).
Lexical morphemes are those which carry the basic content or message of
what we say. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are examples of lexical
morphemes.
100
Functional morphemes are those which do not have an independent,
identifiable meaning, and whose role is rather that of showing how different
elements of a sentence relate to each other. Prepositions, articles and
conjunctions would be examples of functional morphemes.
Telegrams constitute an interesting example of the difference between
lexical and functional morphemes. In telegrams, since their cost relates to the
number of words they contain, people tend to use lexical morphemes (content
words) and to suppress functional morphemes (function words), since the basic
load of the message is carried by the former. Another interesting example of the
importance of lexical morphemes is seen in children learning their mother
tongue and in some second language learners. In the case of first language
learning, children have been observed to go through a state called telegraphic
speech, which is characterized by the absence of functional morphemes (baby
want milk/mommy go). Similarly, second language learners have been observed
to go through a similar stage (called in their case simplification by omission and
non-technically Tarzan stage) in which only lexical morphemes are used.
Bound morphemes are those which cannot occur on their own and are
always attached to another morpheme. The base word to which a bound
morpheme is attached is called the stem. For example, the word undressed
consists of three morphemes. The morpheme un–, the stem, or free morpheme
dress and the morpheme –ed. The bound morphemes are generally affixes,
which are attached before the stem (prefixes) or after the stem (suffixes).
The bound morphemes are of two types: derivational and inflectional.
Derivational morphemes involve a change in the category of the word or a

change in meaning. Examples of derivational morphemes in English would

be:
Category teach + –er = teacher care + –ful = careful
change: glad + –ly = gladly rational + –ize = rationalize
101
Meaning un + happy = unhappy pre + –cook = precook
change: dis + integrate = disintegrate re + do = redo
in + tolerable = intolerable
Inflectional morphemes do not change the basic meaning.
call + –s = calls
call + –ed = called
call + –ing = calling
write + –en = written
table + –s = tables
boy + –s = boys
big + –er = bigger
big + –est = biggest
102

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1

Chapter: /Language and Linguistics

Nueva versión cortesía de:

1.1 What is language?

1.2 Some definitions of ‘language’

of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of voluntarily produced symbols.”

Lyons, J. (1981) Language and linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Chapter: /Language and Linguistics

Chapter: /Language and Linguistics

Properties of human language

b. Duality of double articulation

Human language consists of discrete (separate) units, which combine or arrange to

The fog disappeared quickly

In short, language shows to be “an intricate network of interlinked elements in

e. Creativity (also productivity or open-endedness)

Chapter: /Language and Linguistics

Introduction: linguistic forms and functions

1.1. The functions of language

Whereas linguists, philosophers of language and psycholinguists have, in general, paid

Aye, she’s an awfy woman.

1.2 Spoken and written language

1.2.1 Manner of production

1.2.3 Written texts

O, that this too too sullied flesh would melt

In a piece of expository prose, the author’s indication of the development of the

he gave me such a kind, and I may say, fatherly look

A further illustration of this is to be found in the conventions governing spelling. In

PLEZ CNOKE IF AN RNSR IS NOT REQID

1. the lion wos the fish to ti it

A possible interpretation of the text thus represented might be:

1.2.4 Spoken texts

1. Ci: Like this?

1.2.5 The relationship between speech and writing

1.2.6 Differences in form between speech and writing

i. spoken language contains many incomplete sentences, often simply sequences of

The packaging of information related to a particular referent can, in the written

(d) whereas written language sentences are generally structured in subject-predicate

(e) in informal speech, the occurrence of passive constructions is relatively infrequent.

a faint, vast rainbow.

avant-garde of modern dramatists, attempts to write as they speak?' (1977: 124).

1.3 Sentence and utterance

system-sentences never occur as the products of ordinary language-behaviour.

The essential problem in an extreme version of the constructed-sentence approach occurs

Chapter: /Language and Linguistics

Brown, G. and Yule, G. (1941). Discourse analysis. Cambridge University Press

Chapter: /Language and Linguistics

A. The science of Linguistics

1. Definition and scope

Linguistics can be defined as the scientific study of language. In studying human

As an approximate illustration of the above, look at the following data from

(man) ADAM ADAMLAR

(secret) SIR SIRLAR

(road) YOL YOLLAR

(arm) KOL KOLLAR

To conclude, a linguist observes, analyzes and offers explanations about language

Linguistics as a science is a relatively new field emerging as such in the early

a. Descriptivism v.s. Prescriptivism

Linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive. That is linguists are interested in what is

b. Primacy of spoken language over written language.