Declaration For Greater Independence

Linguistics

Introduction:

(Linguistics is) the scientific study of language. The word was first used in the middle of the 19th century to emphasize the difference between a newer approach to the study of language that was then developing and the more traditional approach of philology. The differences were and are largely matters of attitude, emphasis, and purpose. The philologist is concerned primarily with the historical development of languages as it is manifest in written texts and in the context of the associated literature and culture. The linguist, though he may be interested in written texts and in the development of languages through time, tends to give priority to spoken languages and to the problems of analyzing them as they operate at a given point in time.

The field of linguistics may be divided in terms of three dichotomies: synchronic versus diachronic, theoretical versus applied, and microlinguistics versus macrolinguistics. A synchronic description of a language describes the language as it is at a given time; a diachronic description is concerned with the historical development of the language and the structural changes that have taken place in it. The goal of theoretical linguistics is the construction of a general theory of the structure of language or of a general theoretical framework for the description of languages; the aim of applied linguistics is the application of the findings and techniques of the scientific study of language to practical tasks, especially to the elaboration of improved methods of language teaching. The terms microlinguistics and macrolinguistics are not yet well established, and they are, in fact, used here purely for convenience. The former refers to a narrower and the latter to a much broader view of the scope of linguistics. According to the microlinguistic view, languages should be analyzed for their own sake and without reference to their social function, to the manner in which they are acquired by children, to the psychological mechanisms that underlie the production and reception of speech, to the literary and the aesthetic or communicative function of language, and so on. In contrast, macrolinguistics embraces all of these aspects of language. Various areas within macrolinguistics have been given terminological recognition: psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, dialectology, mathematical and computational linguistics, and stylistics. Macrolinguistics should not be identified with applied linguistics. The application of linguistic methods and concepts to language teaching may well involve other disciplines in a way that microlinguistics does not. But there is, in principle, a theoretical aspect to every part of macrolinguistics, no less than to microlinguistics.

Tagmemics

The system of tagmemic analysis, as presented by Kenneth L. Pike, was developed for the analysis not only of language but of all of human behaviour that manifests the property of patterning. In the following treatment, only language will be discussed.

Modes of language

Every language is said to be trimodal—i.e., structured in three modes: phonology, grammar, and lexicon. These modes are interrelated but have a considerable degree of independence and must be described in their own terms. Phonology and lexicon should not be seen as mere appendages to grammar, the former simply specifying which phonemes can combine to form morphemes (or morphs), and the latter simply listing the morphemes and other meaningful units with a description of their meaning. There are levels of structure in each of the modes, and the units of one level are not necessarily coterminous with those of another. Phonemes, for example, may combine to form syllables and syllables to form phonological words ("phonological word" is defined as the domain of some phonological process such as accentuation, assimilation, or dissimilation), but the morpheme (or morph) will not necessarily consist of an integral number of syllables, still less of a single syllable. Nor will the word as a grammatical unit necessarily coincide with the phonological word. Similarly, the units of lexical analysis, sometimes referred to as lexemes (in one sense of this term), are not necessarily identifiable as single grammatical units, whether as morphemes, words, or phrases. No priority, then, is ascribed to any one of the three modes.

The originality of tagmemic analysis and the application of the term tagmeme is most clearly manifest in the domain of grammar. By a tagmeme is meant an element of a construction, the element in question being regarded as a composite unit, described in such terms as "slot-filler" or "function-class." For example, one of the tagmemes required for the analysis of English at the syntactic level might be noun-as-subject, in which "noun" refers to a class of substitutable, or paradigmatically related, morphemes or words capable of fulfilling a certain grammatical function, and "subject" refers to the function that may be fulfilled by one or more classes of elements. In the tagmeme noun-as-subject—which, using the customary tagmemic symbolism, may be represented as Subject:noun—the subject slot is filled by a noun. When a particular tagmeme is identified in the analysis of an actual utterance, it is said to be manifested by the particular member of the grammatical class that occurs in the appropriate slot in the utterance. For example, in the utterance “John is asleep,” the subject tagmeme is manifested by the noun "John." Tagmemicists insist that tagmemes, despite their bipartite structure, are single units. In grammatical analysis, the distribution of tagmemes, not simply of classes, is stated throughout the sentences of the language. Subject:noun is a different tagmeme from Object:noun, as it is also a different tagmeme from Subject: pronoun.

Historical (diachronic) linguistics

Linguistic change

All languages change in the course of time. Written records make it clear that 15th-century English is quite noticeably different from 21st-century English, as is 15th-century French or German from modern French or German. It was the principal achievement of the 19th-century linguists not only to realize more clearly than their predecessors the ubiquity of linguistic change but also to put its scientific investigation on a sound footing by means of the comparative method.

• Sound change: Since the beginning of the 19th century, when scholars observed that there were a number of systematic correspondences in related words between the sounds of the Germanic languages and the sounds of what were later recognized as other Indo-European languages, particular attention has been paid in diachronic linguistics to changes in the sound systems of languages.
  
  
• Grammatical change: A language can acquire a grammatical distinction that it did not have previously, as when English developed the progressive ("He is running") in contrast to the simple present ("He runs"). It can also lose a distinction; e.g., modern spoken French has lost the distinction between the simple past (Il marcha "he walked") and the perfect (Il a marché "he has walked"). What was expressed by means of one grammatical device may come to be expressed by means of another.
  
  
• Semantic change: Near the end of the 19th century, a French scholar, Michel Bréal, set out to determine the laws that govern changes in the meaning of words. This was the task that dominated semantic research until the 1930s, when scholars began to turn their attention to the synchronic study of meaning. Many systems for the classification of changes of meaning have been proposed, and a variety of explanatory principles have been suggested. So far no "laws" of semantic change comparable to the phonologist's sound laws have been discovered. It seems that changes of meaning can be brought about by a variety of causes. Most important, perhaps, and the factor that has been emphasized particularly by the so-called words-and-things movement in historical semantics is the change undergone in the course of time by the objects or institutions that words denote. For example, the English word "car" goes back through Latin carrus to a Celtic word for a four-wheeled wagon. It now denotes a very different sort of vehicle; confronted with a model of a Celtic wagon in a museum, one would not describe it as a car.
  
  

Borrowing

Languages borrow words freely from one another. Usually this happens when some new object or institution is developed for which the borrowing language has no word of its own. For example, the large number of words denoting financial institutions and operations borrowed from Italian by the other western European languages at the time of the Renaissance testifies to the importance of the Italian bankers in that period. (The word "bank" itself, in this sense, comes through French from the Italian banca). Words now pass from one language to another on a scale that is probably unprecedented, partly because of the enormous number of new inventions that have been made in the 20th and 21st centuries and partly because international communications are now so much more rapid and important. The vocabulary of modern science and technology is very largely international.

The comparative method

The comparative method in historical linguistics is concerned with the reconstruction of an earlier language or earlier state of a language on the basis of a comparison of related words and expressions in different languages or dialects derived from it. The comparative method was developed in the course of the 19th century for the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European and was subsequently applied to the study of other language families. It depends upon the principle of regular sound change—principle that met with violent opposition when it was introduced into linguistics by the Neo-grammarians in the 1870s but by the end of the century had become part of what might be fairly described as the orthodox approach to historical linguistics. Changes in the phonological systems of languages through time were accounted for in terms of sound laws.

Criticisms of the comparative method

One of the criticisms directed against the comparative method is that it is based upon a misleading genealogical metaphor. In the mid-19th century, the German linguist August Schleicher introduced into comparative linguistics the model of the "family tree." There is obviously no point in time at which it can be said that new languages are "born" of a common parent language. Nor is it normally the case that the parent language "lives on" for a while, relatively unchanged, and then "dies." It is easy enough to recognize the inappropriateness of these biological expressions. No less misleading, however, is the assumption that languages descended from the same parent language will necessarily diverge, never to converge again, through time. This assumption is built into the comparative method as it is traditionally applied. And yet there are many clear cases of convergence in the development of well-documented languages. The dialects of England are fast disappearing and are far more similar in grammar and vocabulary today than they were even a generation ago. They have been strongly influenced by the standard language. The same phenomenon, the replacement of nonstandard or less prestigious forms with forms borrowed from the standard language or dialect, has taken place in many different places at many different times. It would seem, therefore, that one must reckon with both divergence and convergence in the diachronic development of languages: divergence when contact between two speech communities is reduced or broken and convergence when the two speech communities remain in contact and when one is politically or culturally dominant.

The comparative method presupposes linguistically uniform speech communities and independent development after sudden, sharp cleavage. Critics of the comparative method have pointed out that this situation does not generally hold. In 1872 a German scholar, Johannes Schmidt, criticized the family-tree theory and proposed instead what is referred to as the wave theory, according to which different linguistic changes will spread, like waves, from a politically, commercially, or culturally important centre along the main lines of communication, but successive innovations will not necessarily cover exactly the same area. Consequently, there will be no sharp distinction between contiguous dialects, but, in general, the further apart two speech communities are, the more linguistic features there will be that distinguish them.

Social dialectology

The methodology of generative grammar was first applied to dialectology in the 1960s, when the use of statistical means to measure the similarity or difference between dialects also became increasingly common. The most important development of that time, however, was the rapid growth of methods for investigating the social variation of dialects; social variation, in contrast to geographic variation, is prominent in the United States, above all in large urban centres. In cities such as New York, a whole scale of speech variation can be found to correlate with the social status and educational level of the speakers. In addition, age groups exhibit different patterns, but such patterns of variation differ from one social stratum to another. Still another dimension of variation, especially important in the United States, is connected with the race and ethnic origin of a speaker as well as with the speaker's date of immigration. So-called Black English, or African American English, has been influenced by the southeastern U.S. origin of most of the African American population of non-southern U.S. regions: many Black English peculiarities are in reality transplanted southeastern dialectal traits.

Normally, speakers of one of the social dialects of a city possess at least some awareness of the other dialects. In this way, speech characteristics also become subjectively integrated into the system of signs indicating social status. And, in seeking to enhance their social status, poorer and less educated speakers may try to acquire the dialect of the socially prestigious. Certain groups—e.g., African Americans and the working class—however, will, under certain conditions, show a consciousness of solidarity and a tendency to reject members who imitate either the speech or other types of behaviour of models outside their own social group.

As a consequence of an individual's daily contacts with speakers of the various social dialects of a city, elements of the other dialects are imperceptibly drawn into his dialect. The collective result of such experiences is the spread of linguistic variables—i.e., groups of variants (sounds or grammatical phenomena) primarily determined by social (educational, racial, age, class) influences, an example being the existence of the two forms "He don't know" and the standard "He doesn't know." Traits representing variables in inter-group relations can become variable features in the speech of individuals as well; i.e., an individual may employ two or more variants for the same feature in his own speech, such as "seeing" and "seein'" or "he don't" and "he doesn't." The frequency of usage for each variable varies with the individual speaker as well as with the social group. There are intermediate stages of frequency between different social groups and entire scales of transitions between different age groups, thus creating even greater variation within the dialect of an individual. The variables also behave differently in the various styles of written or spoken language used by each speaker.

The study of variables is one of the central tasks of any investigation of the dialects of American cities. Applying the statistical methods of modern sociology, linguists have worked out investigative procedures sharply different from those of traditional dialectology. The chief contributor was William Labov, the pioneer of social dialectology in the U.S. The basic task is to determine the correlation between a group of linguistic variables—such as the different ways of pronouncing a certain vowel—and extralinguistic variables, such as education, social status, age, and race. For a reasonable degree of statistical reliability, one must record a great number of speakers. In general, several examples of the same variable must be elicited from each individual in order to examine the frequency and probability of its usage. Accordingly, the number of linguistic variables that can be examined is quite limited, in comparison with the number of dialectal features normally recorded by traditional fieldworkers in rural communities; in these situations, the investigator is often satisfied with one or two responses for each feature.

A completely new, flexible, and imaginative method of interviewing is needed for such work in urban centres, as well as new ways of finding and making contact with informants. One example is Labov's method for testing the fate of final and preconsonantal "r" in speakers of different social levels. Choosing three New York City department stores, each oriented to a completely different social stratum, he approached a large number of salesladies, asking each of them about the location of a certain department that he knew to be on the fourth floor. Thus, their answers always contained two words with potential "r's"— "fourth" and "floor." This shortcut enabled Labov to establish in a relatively short time that the salesladies in the store with richer customers clearly tended to use "r-full" forms, whereas those in the stores geared to the poorer social strata more commonly used "r-less" forms.

Social dialectology has focused on the subjective evaluation of linguistic features and the degree of an individual's linguistic security, phenomena that have considerable influence on linguistic change. Linguistic scientists, in studying the mechanism of such change, have found that it seems to proceed gradually from one social group to another, always attaining greater frequency among the young. Social dialectology also has great relevance for a society as a whole, in that the data it furnishes will help deal with the extremely complex problems connected with the speech of the socially underprivileged, especially of minority groups. Thus, the recent emphasis on the speech of minority groups, such as the Black English of American cities, is not a chance phenomenon. Specific methods for such investigation are being developed, as well as ways of applying the results of such investigation to educational policies.