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LANGUAGE
 Man is distinguished from other species by his capacity
for using Language.
 Language is the most precious gift and undoubtedly the
most valuable single possession of the human race.
 The term ‘language’ is derived from the Latin word ‘lingua’
meaning ‘tongue’.
 Language is our most effective means of communication.
 We can communicate with others through speech and
writing.
 Which is primary Speech or writing?
 In speech, communication is more effective.
 In speech, we can make use of variations in voice,
gesture, signs, facial expressions etc
 Speech has been with us ever since human beings
evolved as a distinct species. Speech comes first in the
life of an individual too.
 It was believed that, writing can claim to have a history of
hardly six thousand years.
 Barnett says, ‘verbal communication is a condition of the
existence of human society’.
 Use of language
 Language helps humans to reach back in to collective
knowledge of his ancestors. It is mainly through
language that human beings collect and preserve
knowledge and transfer it to the next generation.
 Man’s social behavior is conditioned by the nature of his
communication with fellow beings.
 DEFINITIONS OF LANGUAGE
 According to Hall ‘Language is the institution whereby humans
communicate and interact with each other by means of
habitually used oral auditory arbitrary symbols’.
 ‘Speech is the representation of the experience of the mind’-
Aristotle.
 ‘Language is the expression of ideas by means of speech
sounds combined in to words’ – Henry Sweet.
 Wardaugh defines language as a system of arbitrary vocal
symbols used for human communication.
Design features of language
 The American Linguist, Charles F. Hockett, in a
detailed study compared human communicative
system. He identified thirteen characteristics of
spoken language which he termed design features.
They are,
 Auditory vocal channel, Broadcast Transmission and
Directional reception, Rapid fading,
Interchangeability, Total feedback, Specialisation,
Semanticity, Arbitrariness, Discreteness,
Displacement, Productivity, Traditional Transmission
and Duality of patterning.
 Properties of Language
Human Vs AnimalCommunication
 Language has a number of inherent properties or characteristics.
These properties distinguish human language from any non human
communicative system.
 Duality
 Phonemes constitute the system of sound units.
 Morphemes constitute the system of meaning.
 Each human language has a fixed number of sound units
called "phonemes."
 These phonemes are combined to make morphemes, the
smallest unit of sound that contains meaning.
 Thus, language has got two levels of patterning that are not
present in other animals' communication.

 Thus, language has got two levels of patterning that are not
present in other animals' communication.
Creativity
 Sounds- words- phrases- sentence- endless new
words and sentences..

 Human beings use their linguistic resources to

produce new expressions and sentences.

 They arrange and rearrange phonemes, morphemes,

words, and phrases in a way that can express an
infinite number of ideas.
 This is also called the open-endedness of language.

 Animal communication is a closed system.

 It cannot produce new signals to communicate novel

events or experiences.
Interchangeability
 Any speaker of a language is a listener too
 Role of the speaker and a hearer can be
changed.
 Human language is interchangeable between
sexes too.
 But certain communications in animal world are
performed only by one gender.
 For example, bee dancing is only performed by worker
bees, which are female.
 Cultural Transmission/Traditional
Transmission.
 Language is passing from one generation to the next.
 Human language is culturally transmitted, or taught.
 Other animals communicate largely with signs they are born
knowing.
 Another important difference is that human language is
culturally transmitted.
 Human beings brought up in different cultures acquire different
languages.
 Man can also learn other languages via the influence of other
cultures.
 Animals lack this capacity.
 Their communication ability is transmitted biologically, so they
are unable to learn other languages.
Language is human specific
 Human beings have only the capacity to speak with
their definite speech organs.
 Biological differences also play a vital role in
communication.
 Human vocal cords can produce a large number of
sounds.
 Each human language uses a number of those sounds.
 Animal and birds have entirely different biological
structures, which impact the way they can form
sounds.
Language is a symbol system
Sounds will constitute words and words have
some idea or concept. Animal cries are automatic and
instinctive and not symbol.
Language is systematic
 Language emerged through combination of sounds
then words the sentence in a systematic syntagmatic
(arranged together-in a linear sequence) order.
 This in fact distinguishes human language from
animal communicative system.

Specialisation
 The sound waves of speech have no function other
than to signal meaning.
LINGUISTICS
 Linguistics is the scientific study of language.
 The word ‘Linguistics’ is derived from two Latin words
‘lingua’ and ‘istics’
 Meaning of ‘lingua’ is ‘tongue’ and ‘istics’ is,
‘knowledge’ or ‘science’.
 It has an important impact on diverse fields like,
Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology, Philosophy,
Computer Science, Speech science etc.
What is Linguistics tries to answer?
 What is Language?
 How does language work?
 It probes into various aspects of these problems, such as what
do all languages have in common?
 What range of variation is found among languages?
 How does human language differ from animal communication?
 How does a child learn to speak?
 How does one write down and analyze an unwritten language?
 Why do languages change?
 What extent are social class differences reflected in language?
And so on….
•One who studies linguistics systematically is called a
linguist.
•A Linguist is one who studies language objectively,
observes it scientifically, records facts about language
and derives general principles from them.
•A Linguist tries to observe languages and describes
them accurately.
•Finds generalizations within what has been
described.
•Finally he draws conclusions about the general
nature of human languages.
LINGUISTICS
 It investigates, how the language is
constructed.
 How it varies through space.

 How it changes through time.

 How it is related to other languages, and

 How it is used.
 Linguistics as a science
Linguistics may be considered as a science.
Like any other branch of science it has a well defined
subject matter called ‘language’.
The approach as well as methodology of linguistics is
scientific.
It studies language as a universal and recognizable part
of human behavior.
 Like a scientist, the linguist observes his data,
methods of observations various instruments
like oscillograph, sound spectrograph, etc are
used.
 A linguist has his language lab also.

 Like scientist, he analyses the features of

language and categorizes them according to
their similarities and differences.
 MAIN LEVELS OF LINGUISTICS
 PHONETICS

 PHONOLOGY

 MORPHOLOGY

 SYNTAX

 SEMANTICS AND

 PRAGMATICS
 Three central Branches
 The field of linguistics is subdivided in to three central
Branches.

Sounds Structure Meaning

 Phonetics Morphology Semantics

 Phonology Syntax Pragmatics

 BRANCHES OF LINGUISTICS
 Sociolinguistics
 Psycholinguistics
 Neuro linguistics
 Forensic linguistics
 Anthropological Linguistics
 Discourse analysis
 Computational linguistics
 PHONETICS- Branch of linguistics which deals with the
study of speech sounds.
 The word ‘Phonetics’ is derived from the Greek word
‘Phonetikos’, which means ‘Uttering Sounds’.
 In Phonetics, we study ‘Articulation’, ‘Transmission’ and
‘Reception of speech sounds’. Phonetics can be classified
into three.
PHONETICS

Articulatory Acoustic Auditory

Phonetics Phonetics Phonetics
Articulatory Phonetics- Is the branch of Phonetics which deals with the
study of the way in which the speech sounds are articulated.

Acoustic Phonetics- Is the branch of Phonetics which deals with the

study of physical properties of speech sounds (such as the frequency and
amplitude ) transmitted between mouth and ear, according to the
principles of Acoustics.

Auditory Phonetics- Is the branch of Phonetics which deals with the

study of reception and perception of speech sounds. Which means the
perpetual response to speech sounds as mediated by ear, auditory nerves
and brain.
PHONOLOGY
 Branch of linguistics which deals with the study of
system and patterning speech sounds. (Arrangement
of basic sounds in a language is called sound pattern,
ie, selection and organization of sounds in a particular
language).

 Phoneme- A phoneme may be defined as the

‘minimal (smallest),distinctive (contrastive) sound
unit of a language.’
 For example: ‘bat’ and ‘cat’

/bát/ Modern IPA /ˈkæt/ IPA.

/bæt/ Traditional IPA /kAt/ phonetic spelling.

 Initial sounds are /b/ and /c/or -/k/

 Medial sounds are /æ/ and /æ/

 Final sounds are /t/ and /t/

 Phonemic symbols are enclosed within slant lines. / /

 Must be remember that phonemes refer to sounds and never to

spellings.
Minimal pairs

 A Minimal pair is a set of two words, which differ from

each other in one sound.
 Eg: Beat /bi:t/
 Seat /siːt/
 Beat and seat constitute a minimal pair in English as
they differ from each other in the initial consonant
sounds.
 Bat /bæt/ and beat /bi:t/ -minimal pair in the medial
vowel.
 Safe /seɪf/and save /seɪv /- minimal pair with a difference
in their final sounds.
PHONE
 Phone a term used in Phonetics.
 Phone is defined as ‘the smallest perceptible discreet
segments of sound’ in a stream of speech.

 Phone is an abstract unit and which is the physical

realizations of Phonemes.

 Phones are represented with brackets []

 For example: [b], [k], [c]

ALLOPHONES
 The phonetic variants of a phonemes are referred to as Allophones.

 Ie, Allophones are the variants of the same phoneme.

 For example: ‘top’ and ‘stop’

[ˈtɑp] IPA. Sdɔ́p - (Modern IPA)

stɒp – (Traditional IPA)

 In the word ‘top’ , /t/ is pronounced with a puff of air and it is called aspirated
sound denoted by [tʰ].

 In the word ‘stop’ , /t/ is pronounced with no puff of air and it is called
Unaspirated sound denoted by [t]. So no two realization of the phoneme are the
same.

 So [tʰ] and [t] are allophones of the phoneme /t/.

MORPHOLOGY
 Branch of linguistics which deals with the study of
internal structure of words.
 Phonemes combine to form Morphemes and words.
 The branch of linguistics dealing with the relation
between morphemes and phonemes is called
‘morphophonology’ or ‘morphophonemics’.
 Morphemes- Morphemes is the minimal meaningful
unit in the structure of a language.
 The words morphology and morpheme both come from
the Greek root word morph meaning shape’.
 All words contains one or more morphemes.

For example:

dog / ˈdɑɡ/ - is a single morpheme

/d/, /o/ and /g/- phonemes

dogs- two morphemes

dog s (plural marker)- dogs

ALLOMORPHS
 Allomorphs are the different pronunciation of the same
morpheme.
 Ie, the variant forms of morphemes are called Allomorphs.
 The plural morphemes takes different manifestations as in
‘hats’ and ‘dogs’ .The plural morphemes in these words is
manifested as /s/ and /z/.
words Plural morphemes Phonetic realizations

hat /hæt/ hats /hætz/ /s/

dog /dɑɡ/ dogs /dɒɡz/ /z/
 For example: the plural morphemes takes different
manifestations as in ‘posts’, ‘dogs’ and ‘bosses’. The plural
morphemes in these words is manifested as /s/, /z/ and /Iz/

words Plural morphemes Phonetic

realizations
post /pəυst/ posts /s/ /pəυsts/
dog /dɑg/ dogs /z/ /dɑgz/
boss /bɑs/ bosses /iz/ /bɑsIz/
Morph and Zero Morph
 Morph is the phonemic representation or physical
form of a morpheme.
 Simply phonemic representation of a morpheme
is called ‘morph.
 For example: ‘people’ have phonemic
representation and physical form as /pi:pl/. And
its plural form have no physical form. And it is
called zeromorph. Ie, a morpheme which has no
phonological representation is called a
‘zeromorph’.
 Some linguists recognize a zero morph where a
morpheme is expected in the grammatical system,
but it is not represented there.

 For example: The plural of sheep is identical with

the singular sheep.

 The absence of a relative pronoun in the utterance ‘

a letter I wrote’ is an example of zero morph, ie, we
expect in the utterance ‘a letter that I wrote, but
that is not expressed, though it is implied.
 Syntax - Branch of linguistics which
deals with the study of sentence
structure.
 In other words, Syntax deals with the
rules for sentence building.
 It is derived from the Greek word
‘syntaxis’, meaning ‘arrangement’.
 Deals with the rules for sentence
building.
 Semantics:
 Branch of linguistics which deals with the study of meaning
of words and sentences.
 The noun semantics and the adjective semantic are derived
from the Greek word ‘semantikos’ meaning ‘significant’.
 It is also known as science of meaning or scientific study of
meaning.
 As a word semantics was first used by Michel Breal, a French
philologist in 1883.
 Alfred Korzybski was the first person who studies semantics
as a distict discipline, separate from the discipline of
Philosophy.
 Semantics can address meaning at the levels of words,
phrases, sentences, or larger units of discourse.
PRAGMATICS:
 Term Pragmatics-first coined in the 1930s by the American
Philosopher Charles W. Morris.
 Yule (1996) defines pragmatics as the study of speaker
meaning, the study of contextual meaning and the study
of the expression of relative distance.
Levels of Linguistic Analysis
 To study language in an analytical and systematic way, linguists
have categorized the subject matter of linguistics under the
following levels
 Sound Level
 Grammar Level
 Meaning Level
 Sound Level
Phonetics studies language at the level of sounds. How the
sounds are articulated, transmitted and received.
Phonology studies the combination of sounds in to organized
units of speech, the formation of syllables and larger units.
 Levels of Analysis Levels of
Structure
 Phonetics and
 Phonology SOUND

 Morphology WORD

Syntax SENTENCE

 Semantics MEANINGS
Approaches to the study of
linguistics
 There are various approaches to the study of
linguistics. The main approaches are
 Historic Linguistics
 Descriptive Linguistics
 Comparative Linguistics
 Historic Linguistics- Studies the facts about a language for
the purpose of describing the development of that
language for a period of time. It traces language change
and the causes and the results of such changes that
occurred from time to time.
 Descriptive Linguistics – deals with the description
and analysis of the ways in which a language operates
and it is used by a given set of speakers at a given time.

 Comparative Linguistics- Is concerned with

comparing two or more languages. It traces the
evolution of language and by comparing one with
another, establishes the relationship between them.
Ancient Approaches to the study of
language
 Human beings have probably been speaking for as long
as we have existed, but it was only around 3000 years
ago that anybody began to be curious about language.
 This happened independently in two places, that is
Ancient India and Ancient Greek.
 Grammatical analysis developed very early in Ancient
India.
 An Indian scholar Pāṇini who lived in fifth century BC
wrote ‘Ashtaadyaayi’, which have 3959 rules.
 The Sanskrit word for grammar is ‘Vyakarana’ which
means ‘separation, analysis’. Grammar is the science of
language.

 Paanini’s approach to grammar requires that the pieces

of words should first be glued together in order.

 Rules should then be applied to convert these

sequences in to the correct surface forms.
Ancient Greek
 It was Greek who founded the European foundation.
 The stoics were a group of philosophers and logicians who
flourished from about the beginning of the 4 th C B C.
 The last notable author in the stoic tradition was the
Roman emperor Marcus Aurilius,who reigned from AD 161
to 180.
 In their logical work the stoics were the chief opponents of
Aristotle’s successors, who were called Peripatetics.
 The stoic contribution to language is-
 They made a clear advance in the distinctions drawn
between the logical and grammatical study of language.
 There is an increased precision in the technical
terminology they used to discuss language.
 The earliest extant document in Greek dealing with
the subject of language was from Plato’s (425-348 BC)
opinion, that is apparently he believed that there was
an valid connection between a thing and its name.
 Plato’s most distinguished pupil, Aristotle (384-322/21
BC) , differed with his master as to the origin and
nature of language.
 Aristotle believed that, language was arrived at by
‘convention’ or ‘agreement.

 To describe this, he uses the words ‘thesis’ and

;syntheekee’ meaning arrangement and convention
respectively.

 He divided the sentence in to two parts called the

subject and the predicate. This division is still
recognized today as a fundamental part of the analysis
of sentences.
 The Alexandrian age of literature (roughly 300-150BC)
may be considered the high point of Greek linguistics
studies.

 This was the age of Aristarchus especially noted for his

analysis of the language of the Homeric poems of
Apollonios Dyskolos, writer on syntax and student of
the literary dialects of Greek.

 Dionysios Thrax, who wrote the first formal grammar

of Greek.

 Thrax concluded that Greek words fell in to eight

classes which we call Parts of Speech.
Ancient Roman
 After the Roman conquest of Greece in the mid
 2nd C BC. Roman scholars learnt of the Greek work, and
they began to apply the same analysis to their own
language, Latin.
 Latin was rather similar to Greek in its structure.
 The first Latin grammar of consequence was compiled by
Varro (116-27 BC) and bears the straightforward title ‘De
lingua Latina’.
 Mention should also be made of Quintilian’s (AD 35-90)
‘Institutio oratoria’, although, as the title indicates, it is
devoted mainly to rhetoric.
 Aelius Donatus, who taught in Rome around the
middle of the 4rth C AD, developed a grammar ‘the
Ars minor’ was widely used. It was the first book to be
printed by means of wooden type.
 This tradition was ultimately synthesized in the work
of the most influential Roman grammarian, Priscian
(512-60) wrote his elaborate Grammatical Categories’,
the standard Latin grammar of the middle ages,
consisting of eighteen books devoted to the parts of
speech and two books to syntax.
 The outstanding accomplishment in Latin is the
etymological dictionary of St. Isidore of Seville (570-
639), ‘Origines sive etymologiae’.
Semiotics
 Semiotics is a branch in Linguistics, which deals with
the study of signs. It involves the study of how
meanings are made and understood.
 The word 'semiotics' is created from the Greek word
'semeion' which means "mark" or "sign". It was
originally spelled "semeiotics" to honor the Great
Philosopher John Locke who first coined the term
`seemeiootikee' from the Greek word "semeion".
 The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and the
American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce can be
considered as the founders of modern semiotics.

 Signs are basic elements of human thought and

communication. When a sign is seen it makes to think
about something beyond the physical image of this
sign. Peirce defines sign as follows. “A sign is
something which stands to somebody for something in
some respect or capacity”
 Saussure proposed a dyadic or two – part model of the sign. He
defined a sign as being composed of two factors. They are, A
'signifier' and the ‘signified’. A 'signifier' the form which the
sign take. The 'signified' is the concept it represents.

The signifier is commonly considered as the physical form of the

sign which can be sensed and the signified is the concept which
the physical form gives. The relationship between the signifier
and the signified is called signification.
 Charles Sanders Peirce is known as the co-founder of
modern semiotics.
 Peirce gives the most important definition of
semiotics of the "Doctrine of signs which stands to
somebody for something in some respect or capacity“.

 When we take the case of traffic signals, the physical

property of red light stands to somebody who may be a
man in a car, a motorist etc, for something that may be
the signal 'stop' in some respect or capacity.

 He is also the founder of the philosophical doctrine

known as pragmatism.
 He proposed that a sign is triadic in nature which
includes symbol, Index an Icon unlike Saussure who
introduced a dyadic sign.

 Peirce included every picture, diagram, natural cry,

pointing finger, memory, dream, fancy, concept,
indication, token, symptom, letter, numeral, word,
sentence, chapter, book, library under the term sign.
 Icon- An Icon is a sign whose signifier bears a
close resemblance to the thing they refer to.

 Thus a photograph of a man can be said to be

highly iconic because it looks like that man.

 A pictorial representation, a photograph, an

architect’s model of a building, are all icons,
because they imitate or copy aspects of their
subject.
 Symbol- Peirce defines a symbol as “a sign
which refers to the object that it denotes by
virtue of a law, usually an association of
general ideas, which operates to cause the
symbol to be interpreted as referring to that
object”.
 A symbol has an arbitrary relationship
between the signifier and the signified.

 Most words are symbolic signs.

 Index- In a sense, indexes lie between icons and
symbols.

 An index is a sign whose signifier is associated

with a particular signified.

 For example, if we see a signal smoke, it creates

the picture of fire in the minds of the viewer.

 Also thermometer is an index of ‘temperature’.

Scope of Linguistics
 The main concern of modern linguistics is to describe
language, to study its nature and to establish a theory
of language.

 That is, it aims at studying the components of the

language system and to ultimately arrive at an
explanatory statement on how the system works.
 In modern linguistics, the activity of describing the
language system is the most important and so modern
linguistics is generally known as descriptive.

 That is, Linguistics is a descriptive study and not a

prescriptive one and describes language in all
aspects.
 Linguistics today is a subject of study,
independent of other disciplines.

 Linguistics, unlike past ages, is being

recognized as an independent discipline of
study, thus paving the way to a lot of
Research developments.
 Linguistics involves a vast, complex and systematic
study, with different core areas such as phonetics,
phonology, morphology, syntax semantics and
pragmatics.

 It is a very dynamic domain of study. Although some

aspects of the subject are based on historical notes and
few sets of rules, it continues to evolve out of old
boundaries into new, with developments that occur in
different languages.
 Linguistics is applied to different fields of study, and
this makes it a very important discipline.
 It is also associated with various other disciplines and
contains fields like sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics,
Computational Linguistics, Clinical Linguistics,
Forensic Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Neuro
Linguistics, Cognitive Linguistics etc.

 It is a subject that keeps changing, as languages

change.