Download Lecture #30 (ling 2

Review of lectures 8-14
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Definition: The evolution of language in
human society and its role in the formation of
culture is studied in anthropological
linguistics.
This is another aspect of language, society
and culture.
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The structure of language has a social and
cultural basis in the same way as other
customs, conventions, and codes such as
those related to dress and food.
Each culture organizes its world in its own
way giving names to objects, identifying
areas of significance or values and
suppressing other areas.
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Anthropological studies have explored the
relation between language and culture.
Language is invented to communicate and
express a culture.
The language begins to determine the way we
think and see the world
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Definition: The study of the style of literary
texts
Taking the view of register (language used in
different fields – religious sermons, sports
commentary, law etc.), we can study the
styles of literary texts.
We may describe its features at levels of
phonology, syntax, lexis, etc.
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We distinguish one text from the other
We appreciate how it achieves some special
features and effects through the use of
language.
This kind of study is termed as ‘Literary
stylistics’
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The writers try to link ‘what’ is being said
with ‘how it is being said’
It is through the latter that writers can fully
convey their complex ideas and feelings
Stylistic analysis also helps in better
understanding of how metaphor, irony,
paradox, ambiguity etc. operate in literary
texts (they are effects of language and
building up of a coherent linguistic structure)
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Neurolinguistics is the study of the neural
mechanisms in the human brain that control
the comprehension, production, and
acquisition of language.
As an interdisciplinary field, neurolinguistics
draws methodology and theory from fields
such as neuroscience, linguistics, cognitive
science, neurobiology, communication
disorders, neuropsychology and computer
science.
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Later, Carl Wernicke, after whom Wernicke’s
area is named, proposed that different areas
of the brain were specialized for different
linguistic tasks.
Broca's area specialized at handling the
motor production of speech, and Wernicke's
area handling auditory speech
comprehension
Anthropological Linguistics
The evolution of language in human society and
its role in the formation of culture
 Literary Stylistics
The study of the style of literary texts
 Neurolinguistics
the study of the neural mechanisms in the
human brain that control the comprehension,
production, and acquisition of language.
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The most influential:
 American school of structural
anthropologists – Leonard Bloomfield
& after World War II, Noam Chomsky
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The European linguists, chiefly among
them the Swiss linguist Ferdinand De
Saussure
The most influential:
 American school of structural
anthropologists – Leonard Bloomfield
& after World War II, Noam Chomsky
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The European linguists, chiefly among
them the Swiss linguist Ferdinand De
Saussure
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An individual makes use of his
knowledge (langue) to produce actual
sentences (parole)
Individuals can communicate with
each other because they share the
same langue.
 Individuals produce different
sentences based on the same langue
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Noam Chomsky, an American linguist
made similar distinction between
competence & performance
 Competence- native speaker’s
knowledge of his language (mastery of
the system of the system of rules)
 Performance – production of actual
sentences in use in real-life situations
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Speaker’s knowledge of the structure of
language is the speaker’s linguist’s
competence.
The way a speaker uses it- his linguistic
performance
Competence – set of principles
Performance – what a speaker does
Competence – kind of code
Performance – the act of encoding or
decoding
Moreover, it is not easier to study
performance through recording by
audio and video devices.
 Study of parole gives us data that
makes us understand langue and
competence better.
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Language is a system of symbolic signs since
there are often very complex associative
relationships between the signifiers and the
signifieds in a language
Signifiers and signified operate in their
relationship with each other
Saussure’s contributions
 Saussure exerted two kinds of influence on
modern linguistics: First, he provided a
general orientation, a sense of the task of
linguistics which has seldom been
questioned.
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Second, he influenced modern linguistics in
the specific concepts.
Saussure’s contributions
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Many of the developments of modern
linguistics can be described as his concept,
i.e. his idea of the arbitrary nature of the
sign, langue vs. parole, synchrony vs.
diachrony, syntagmatic and paradigmatic
relations, etc.
Saussure’s contributions
Saussure’s contribution regarding the concepts
of sign & symbol distinction brought a new
revolution and enjoys a prime importance in the
domain of modern linguistics
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Language made of signs
Linguistic sign has two parts – Signifier &
Signified
That which signifies (the word) – Signifier
That which is signified (the concept) –
Signified
Sign – composite of both, it consists of the
relationship between signifier & signified
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That is why we say that language is a system
of symbolic signs since there are often very
complex associative relationships between
the signifiers and the signifieds in a language
Signifiers and signified operate in their
relationship with each other
Saussure’s contributions

Many of the developments of modern
linguistics can be described as his concept,
i.e. his idea of the arbitrary nature of the
sign, langue vs. parole, synchrony vs.
diachrony, syntagmatic and paradigmatic
relations, etc.
Saussure’s contributions
Saussure’s contribution regarding the concepts
of sign & symbol distinction brought a new
revolution and enjoys a prime importance in the
domain of modern linguistics
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Two intersecting threads build up fabric of
language.
Language has duality of structure.
At one level we select the elements out of
many, at another level, we combine these
elements to form a structural unit
With a limited number of elements, we can
construct a large number of combinations
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System – set of paradigmatic relationships
between elements
Structure – set of syntagmatic relationships
between elements at each level in the
language
At level of sounds – phonological system
(vowels & consonants) & phonological
structure ( determining combination of
vowels & consonants)
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At level of sentence- formation, we have
syntactic system (word classes such as noun,
verb, adjective, adverb) & syntactic structure
(determining combination of these word
classes) to enable formation of sentences
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Substance and symbols (letters of the
alphabet) are raw material of language
They become meaningful when given a
particular shape or order.
At one level we consider only the form or
shape
At another we consider the level of meaning
A combination of both gives us a meaningful
form.
Diachronic & Synchronic Approaches
 Diachronic approach related with
development of language over different ages
 Synchronic approach related with the shape
of language at a specific time without
considering its shape in the past or future
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Developed by Noam Chomsky & followers in
1950s.
Came as a reaction to behaviourism
Chomsky asserted that language is free from
stimulus control
Creativity is a human attribute which
distinguishes men from machines
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Generativism is an integrated whole in which
the technical details of formalization are on a
par with a number of logically unconnected
ideas about language and the philosophy of
science.
Language free from stimulus control
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Human can produce variety of utterances
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It’s a rule governed creativity.
We produce utterances with a certain
grammatical structure.
Generativism different from Bloomfieldian
and Post-Bloomfieldian structuralism.
They emphasized on the structural diversity
Generativists interested in similarities in
languages
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Chomsky gives importance to the formal
properties of languages & to the nature of the
rules that their description requires.
Human language faculty is innate and species
–specific
Another difference – Competence and
performance.
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Generative grammar is set of rules which,
operating upon a finite vocabulary of units ,
generates a set of (finite or infinite) strings,
which is well formed in the language that is
characterized by the grammar.
The word ‘generate’ does not relate to any
process of sentence production
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A generative grammar is the specification of
the grammatical structure of the sentences
that it generates.
Grammar of a particular language is a system
of rules & principles that link sounds and
meaning
human beings are endowed with a number of
special faculties (mind)
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Chomsky says that there are certain
phonological, syntactic and semantic units
that are universal.
Human beings are independent of any
external stimuli
All human languages are similar in structure.
All human languages make reference to the
properties and objects of the physical world
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grammatical similarities between widely
separated and historically unrelated
languages are as important as their
differences.