THE
STUDY OF LANGUAGE
Linguists
are interested in all the languages of the world and in all the varieties that
are found, the standard and the non-standard, the prestigious and the
stigmatized. They recognize that languages cannot exist in any full sense
without people and they are fully aware that, as a discipline, linguistics is
still in its infancy. We can ask alt of the right questions but we cannot
always full or acceptable answers. Among the questions raised by linguists are:
How did language arise? How do children acquire it? Why does it change? Are all
human languages related? How can we teach and learn languages that are not our
mother tongue? Why do people in all countries and in all conditions have both a
language and a literature? We shall start with the first question and then
indicate how linguistics has subdivided in the attempt to study aspects of
language more closely and more systematically.
The
simplest answer to the question: How did language arise? Is that we do not
know. Nor is it likely that we shall ever know. It has been suggested that our
ancestors left the forests for the plains hundreds of thousands of years ago
and that their new conditions demanded a
much more complex signaling system. Gradually, it is argued, human beings began
to use a system of sounds that was not limited by time or in space. By this we
mean that human beings would not only make noises in the presence of danger,
but learned to relate experiences and even to anticipate them verbally. It
is possible that human languages evolved
from primitive signaling systems – possible but not provable.
First,
our records of language use go back less than six thousand years and these
records reveal languages that were just as complex, just as precise, as their
modern counterparts. Secondly, all modern languages studied are equally capable
of expressing the linguistic needs of their users. People may live in primitive
conditions but this does not mean that their languages are simple or lacking in
subtlety. Thirdly, although linguists have studied language for at least three
thousand years, we have no comprehensive or totally satisfactory grammar of any
living language. And yet children learn
the language or languages of their environment easily and completely and, it
must be added, without any obvious instruction. Perhaps the best we can do is
study today’s languages and when our knowledge is more complete we may then be
able to offer more comprehensive theories for the origin of language. They will
be theories, however, and not answers.
SOCIOLINGUISTICS
By our language we
define the groups to which we belong. We define certain people as inside the
group, and we leave others out. Language comes to be an accurate map of the
sociological divisions of a society. (Robins Burling:1973)
This
branch of linguistics concentrates on language in society, in other words, it tries to examine how and why people
use language a they interact with other members of their society.
Sociolinguistics examines variety in language and has shown that language is
not merely used to communicate ideas but also to communicate our opinion of
others and of ourselves. Even the simplest utterance such as ‘Hello!’ can
reveal that the speaker wishes to be friendly and informal, and that he or she
is probably British (many Americans would prefer ‘Hi!’). in considering any
spoken communication, therefore, a student will notice that a speaker’s
language reveals information on his sex, approximate age, regional and perhaps
ethnic origins, education and attitude to his listeners. Variation also occurs
in terms of the subject matter under discussion: nuclear disarmament will not
be discussed in the same terms as neighborly gossip. Nor will one use identical
forms of language with a shopkeeper and a minister of religion. Speakers can
also range in formality from the shared intimacy of slang through casual
conversation to the stiff correctness that usually characterizes an interview.
Variety, then, and not unchanging monotony is the norm in mother-tongue usage
and so sociolinguistics studies how, when, why and in what ways variation
occurs.
In
multilingual communities, lingua francas have often grown up as a means of
permitting communication where such lingua francas have developed, whether in
Africa, America, Asia, Australia or Europe, they show remarkable similarities.
Initially this similarity surprised linguists but the greater our knowledge
grows, the more we realize that human beings are similar and human needs are
similar, so perhaps it would be even more surprising if our techniques for
communicating proved to be very different.
Sociolinguists
thus set themselves the tasks of examining language use, its variation, its
development, change and standardization, its regional and class dialects, its
lingua francas, its specialized codes. Much has been learnt, including the fact
that we use language as often to exclude others as we do to establish bonds.
The greater our knowledge grows, however, the more we are forced to recognize
the extraordinary flexibility and complexity of all human systems of
communication.
It
is more common for a lingua franca to be what is known as a pidgin language. The definitions and
uses of the term pidgin vary in the literature; it will be defined as a mode of
speech that is not anyone’s native language, but which can be demonstrated to
have developed from at least two such languages. Typically, a pidgin retains a
large portion of the vocabulary and phonology of a language, but simplifies its
morphology and syntax. Such things as grammatical gender distinctions,
elaborate compound verb tenses, and complicated systems of pronouns are
frequently eliminated in pidginization.
When
people speaking a pidgin are for one
reason or another isolated from other language communities, it may happen that
a new generation will be born which acquires no other language except the
pidgin. A language like this, which has been a pidgin but has become a native
language, is called a creole. Obviously, the exact point at which a pidgin
stops being a pidgin and becomes a creole may be difficult to determine.
One
of the most amazing things about the linguistic competence of speakers is their
ability to move back and forth among languages, dialects, and registers with
ease, as demanded by the social situation or their own inner necessities. This
skill is called code-switching. Code
switching is a change by a speaker (or writer) from one language or language
variety to another one. Code switching can take place in a conversation when
one speaker uses one language and the other speaker answers in a different
language. A person may start speaking one language and then change to another
one in the middle of their speech, or sometimes even in the middle of a
sentence.[1]
In the United States
PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
If you were asked how
children acquire their native language, you might say something like :They
learn it by imitating their parents and other people around them.” This is a
logical conclusion to come to, and one that appeals strongly to the intuitions
of anyone who has been around little children as they learned to talk. It is
also essentially the content of one of the two major competing positions in
contemporary psycholinguistics with regard to this issue: the theoretical position associated
primarily with the work of B. F. Skinner and known as the behaviorist
hypothesis. (Suzette Haden Elgin:1979)
This
branch deals with the relationship between language and the mind, focusing
mainly on how language is learnt, stored and occasionally lost. The
relationship between language and mind has two aspects, acquisition and
performance, and the two are intimately linked. What we acquire is the ability
to perform, that is, to use language with appropriateness, and performance is
essential to complete and successful acquisition. Knowledge of this interlocking
relationship underlies most successful language teaching and so we shall return
to it in our section on applied linguistics.
The
basic fact calling for explanation in this area is the remarkably short time
that a child takes to acquire an extensive knowledge of, and high degree of
control over, the language or languages of his environment. Expressing this
another way, we can say that a normal child of five has, without any obvious
difficulty, learnt to control a language that no mature linguist can fully
explain. Let us look at a little closer at what
a child of five can actually do: he can understand utterances that he
has never heard before; produce sentences that are totally new to him and to
his listeners; and he can use his
knowledge of a speech to acquire the new skills of writing and reading. He can
do all of this because, somehow, he has managed to extract from the speech he
has heard the underlying system of the language. Furthermore, he has acquired
essentially the same samples of language.
During
the past forty years there have been two main theories to account for the
phenomenon of language learning by children. The first, known as
‘behaviourism’, was fully formulated by B. F. Skinner in Verbal Behaviour (1957). This theory claims that language learning
in children can be accounted for in very much the same way as we can account
for a dog learning to stand on its hind
legs to beg for a biscuit: training, stimulation, imitation, reward and
repetition.
The
second theory, known as ‘mentalism’, argues that just as human children are
genetically programmed to walk when they reach a certain stage of development,
so they are programmed to talk. Research suggests that all children of all
nationalities, irrespective of race, class or intelligence, learn language in
regular steps, moving from babbling to one-word utterances, then to combining
two words until their speech is indistinguishable from the adult norms of their
community. Mentalists suggest that language is as natural a part in the
development of human beings as the
growth of the body. Given the right environment, that is, exposure to speech, a
child automatically acquires language. Obviously, if a child is not exposed to
language he will not learn it. Perhaps an analogy will help here. A child is
not a miniature speaker but a potential one in the same way as an acorn is not
a miniature ok tree, but, given the right environment, it will become an oak.
Psycholinguists
also attempt to understand dysphasia (literally
‘bad speech’), dyslexia (word
blindness) and aphasia (the sudden
or gradual loss of language due to age, an accident or a stroke). We all have
experience of aphasia when we cannot remember the word for something or when we
say: ‘Put that in the fridge’ when we mean the oven or the cupboard. Such slips
are commonplace and are made by all users of language when they are tired or tense or getting old. The slips we
make are extremely interesting. Notice, for example, that the items ‘fridge’,
‘oven’ and ‘cupboard’ have a great deal in common. They are all nouns, all
receptacles for food, all in the kitchen and all with large doors. Such slips
suggest that we may store words with similar meanings together. Other slips
such as using a word like ‘woollen’ when we mean ‘wooden’ suggest that we may
store some words, especially adjectives, according to sound.
Psycholinguists
have learnt a great deal and are daily
learning more about how we use, abuse and lose language. They too have
discovered the non-finite nature of language. Some problems have been solved.
(Deaf children can be helped to better enunciation if they are fitted with a
hearing device shortly after birth.) but each solution has revealed how little
we really know about language and how much more research is needed.
APPLIED
LINGUISTICS
The
term “applied linguistics” has become fashionable in the field of education in
recent years, and, as often happens with pedagogical fads, has been used so
broadly and so loosely that it has almost ceased to have any real meaning at
all. The book market has been flooded with “applied” materials of all kinds,
especially in language arts, foreign language teaching, and the area of
bilingual/bidialectal education. This has sometimes led to serious problems,
particularly since many of these materials confuse structural linguistics and
generative transformational linguistics and offer products based upon that
confusion. When these materials fail to “work” in the classroom, the tendency
is to blame linguistics, which is not really either fair or accurate. A brief
historical discussion may be of some help here.
Travelers
have always known that communication depends on the ability to modify language
use. Sometimes the modifications required are relatively slight, as when a Londoner
wants to get directions from a Scot. Often, they are much greater and involve
the use of a language other than one’s mother tongue. People have been learning
other languages throughout recorded history and two facts seem to have been
known always:
(1)
that any human language is capable of being translated into any other and
(2)
that word-for-word translation is inadequate. To have a good knowledge of
another language means acquiring something of the native speaker’s innate
knowledge.
Recently,
the insights gained in sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics have been applied
to language teaching and learning. Courses in English for Special Purpose (ESP)
are based on the knowledge that native speakers use language differently
depending on subject matter and audience, for example. Therefore, a scientists
use. Scientists use more passive structures when they write than non-scientists
do. It is clearly useful, therefore, to teach passives to scientists who need
to learn some English.
Insights
from psycholinguistics have resulted in foreign languages being taught to
children earlier since we seem to lose our linguistic flexibility at puberty.
They have also led to an awareness that the errors made by learners can be
useful in suggesting the hypotheses learners make as they master their target
language.
Many
techniques have evolved for the efficient teaching of languages, techniques
involving contrastive analysis (a detailed examination of both mother tongue
and target language and the pinpointing of potential areas of difficulty) and
error analysis. Others have concentrated on the learner, examining the way he
creates successive ‘interlanguages’ as he moves from modeling the target
language on his mother tongue to a fuller control of the target.
It
is certainly true that language
laboratories and modified teaching strategies have resulted in a better grasp
of the spoken medium and in a quicker grasp of the basic tools necessary to
permit elementary communication. It is, however, doubtful that any one technique
will ever become a linguistic philosopher’s stone capable of transforming
hesitant learners into fluent speakers. Used by a good teacher any method can
produce students who master intricacies of a foreign language. And no method,
however linguistically sanctioned, will work without motivation, practice,
reinforcement and, most of all, the opportunity to use the acquired language
for tasks for which it would be used by the native speaker.
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[1] Jack
Richards, John Platt and Heidi Weber, Longman
Dictionary of Applied Linguistics. Longman 1985. p 43
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