BA‐Basismodul: Introduction to Linguistics – Basic Questions, Concepts and Methods (Di 16‐18; R. 208) Florian Haas Tel.: 838‐72314 f.haas@fu‐berlin.de Handout 1: Introduction
1. Organisation
1.1 Course requirements:
• regular attendance and active participation in class
• hand in assignments (homework)
• final exam
™ Please contact me (e-mail: [email protected]; telephone: 838-72314) if you cannot
attend one of the classes!
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exclusion from the exam -- this holds for both the faker and the
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Textbook:Plag, Ingo et al. (2007). Introduction to English Linguistics. Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter. (€ 19,95) >>> available at Buchexpress (Unter den Eichen 97)
2. Levels of description
2.1 PHONETICS: The study of speech sounds (their production, perception and acoustic
properties)
2.2 PHONOLOGY: The study of sound systems, i.e. the way speech sounds are organised in
a language
2.3 MORPHOLOGY: The study of word structure - how are words built up from smaller
units?
2.4 SYNTAX: The study of units that are larger than words, i.e. phrases and sentences
2.5 SEMANTICS: The study of word and sentence meaning
2.6 PRAGMATICS: The study of meaning in context - the various ways in which the
meaning/function of a sentence can depend on the context in which it is uttered
3. Some central dichotomies
3.1 synchronic – diachronic
• Synchronic: the description of a language at a particular point or period in time
• Diachronic: the documentation and explanation of linguistic change
3.2 descriptive – prescriptive
(1) a. Who did they vote for?
b. I can’t find the book which she was referring to.
• Descriptive: “In certain non-canonical clause constructions the complement of a
preposition may be fronted so that it precedes the preposition (usually with
1
•
intervening material) instead of occupying the basic complement position after the
preposition […]:1
Prescriptive: “It is well to consider that a sentence ending with a preposition is
sometimes clumsy, often weak.”2; “A preposition is something you should never
end a sentence with.”
3.3 language-specific – comparative
• one language vs. two languages (contrastive linguistics) vs. many languages
(linguistic typology)
3.4 applied – not applied
• Applied: Using linguistic theory to address real-world problems. e.g. second
language acquisition and language education; lexicography (the production of
dictionaries) and forensic linguistics (the interface between language, the law and
crime; e.g. voice identification, testing the authenticity of suicide notes)
• Not applied: the investigation of language as such. Note that these insights may be
used by applied linguists
3.5 empirical – introspective
This dichotomy concerns the type of data that linguists use
• Empirical: the investigation of large corpora (e.g. The British National Corpus
[BNC] http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/ ); interview techniques; psycholinguistic
experiments; questionnaires; fieldwork
• Introspective: the linguist’s own intuition about what is and what is not possible in
their native language
3.6 language system (‘langue’) – language use (‘parole’)
• goes back to Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), who founded the field of
structural linguistics
• Since de Saussure, linguists have become more and more aware that in order to
explain the make-up of the ‘langue’ aspects of language use must be taken into
account. The strict separation between the two is therefore rather an idealization.
4. The linguistic sign
•
•
The linguistic sign, according to de Saussure, consists of two inseparable parts: a
sound sequence, called signifier (French signifiant), and a concept, called
signified (French signifié)
The association between the two parts of a linguistic sign, is arbitrary, but
conventional.
concept
[bk]
sound pattern
Reading for next week: Ch. 1 from Finegan (1999) (available for download)
1
From: Huddleston, R. and G. K. Pullum (2005) A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar. Cambridge:
CUP. P. 137.
2
From: Bernstein, M. (1968) The Careful Writer. Athenäum.
2