LIN101 Unit 1 Notes (No Overall Title)

What is linguistics?

Definition: Linguistics is the scientific study of language.
Scope: looks at patterns within a language, across multiple languages, and seeks to understand how languages vary and what underlying similarities they share.
Levels of study:
- At the lowest level: the raw physical form of language (sound waves and mouth movements in spoken languages; arm and face movements in signed languages).
- Middle level: organizational systems that combine the raw form into larger units like words and sentences.
- Highest level: language users in social interaction, transmission of meaning, understanding, variation and change, and the relationship between language and social interaction.
Why study linguistics? Three main motivations:
- Personal joy and critical thinking about new things; language is central to daily human interaction.
- Real-world impact: applications across many fields (illustrative list below).
- Building collective knowledge: insights into brain and social behavior; long-term benefits for humanity.
Real-world applications mentioned:
- Language pathology: identifying and treating language disorders.
- Language technology: speech synthesis, speech recognition, text classification, automated translation, database queries.
- Education: language teaching, literacy.
- Law: writing and interpreting contracts and policies; forensic linguistics.
- Business: advertising, branding.
- Publishing: copyediting, lexicography.
- Entertainment: dialect coaching, creating constructed languages for film/TV.
Broader significance: advances in linguistics can shed light on how the brain and society function, with long-term relevance beyond immediate applications.

So, what is language?

The term language is used broadly (e.g., computer languages, body language, the language of math, Pig Latin, the language of the heart), but linguistics focuses on human natural languages like Cantonese, English, Quechua, Farsi, and American Sign Language.
A language is a system of communication with a physical modality:
- Spoken languages: vocal-auditory modality (mouth to send, ears to receive).
- Sign languages: manual-visual modality (hands to send, eyes to receive).
- Some languages use tactile modalities (manual-somatic) for those who are blind and deaf.
Modality study is phonetics (a core topic of this course).
Design features of language (Charles Hockett, 1960; later refinements): two important design features concern internal structure and how discrete units combine.
Two-level system (duality of patterning):
- Level 1: discrete meaningful units (e.g., morphemes, words) that, on their own, have no meaning or with little predictable relationship to form.
- Level 2: combination of those units to form larger messages (phrases, sentences) with more predictable meanings due to systematic organization.
Discreteness at the lowest level: the same sounds can combine to form different words with unrelated meanings (e.g., cheap vs peach).
Morphology (word formation) and the second-level combinatorial system:
- Example: cheap + suffixes -er and -en yield new words with predictable meanings:
- ext{cheaper} = ext{cheap} + ext{-er}
- ext{cheap en} = ext{cheap} + ext{-en}
- Similar for white: ext{whiter} = ext{white} + ext{-er} and ext{whiten} = ext{white} + ext{-en}
Syntax: how phrases and sentences are built on the second level, with predictable meanings based on the meanings of individual words.
Semantics: the study of meaning in words, phrases, and sentences.
Core topics in LIN102: morphology, syntax, semantics.

Design features that distinguish human language from animal communication

Interchangeability: most users of a language can both produce and understand messages.
Cultural transmission: language is learned through interaction with people and communities; not all animal communication is learned this way.
- Example: silkworms use pheromones (bombykol) for mating signals; only females produce it, males do not.
- In contrast, much of human language is learned via cultural transmission.
Displacement: ability to communicate about things not in the here and now (past, future, dreams, abstract concepts, hypothetical scenarios).
Reflexiveness: language can talk about language itself (meta-language use).
Arbitrariness: the form of a word usually has no necessary relationship to its meaning (Saussurean insight).
- However, there are exceptions:
- Duality of patterning creates predictability at the second level (e.g., adjectives/nouns combinations often follow predictable patterns).
- Some exceptions to pure arbitrariness, such as on the phenomenon of onomatopoeia.
Onomatopoeia: words that imitate sounds; but cross-linguistic variation shows that the sound-meaning mapping is not universal:
- English duck sound: quack; Hungarian ducks: hap; Icelandic ducks: bra; Japanese ducks: gā.
- Onomatopoeia thus shows both iconic (some resemblance to sounds) and arbitrariness (language-specific mappings).
Phonesthemes: certain articulations tend to co-occur with related meanings (broad tendencies, not universal):
- English examples with gl- and light-related meanings: glare, gleam, glisten, glitter, glow, etc.
- Counterexamples exist (gladiator, globe, glue); not universal.
- Mongolian Sign Language example: signs with an extended pinky often carry negative meanings (e.g., FEEL-BAD, ARGUE, UNFRIEND) though not universal (Healy 2011).

Languages and dialects

Idiolect: every individual has a unique way of using language; no two people have exactly the same idiolect.
Mutual intelligibility as a starting point for “same language” is not perfect:
- Many Chinese varieties (Cantonese, Mandarin, Shanghainese, Hakka, Hunanese) are informally called dialects but are not mutually intelligible; linguists classify them as separate languages.
- Norwegian and Danish are highly similar with high mutual intelligibility yet treated as separate languages for political/social reasons.
- Parisian French vs Clamart French are mutually intelligible; as you travel toward Madrid, Spanish and French become less mutually intelligible, illustrating a dialect continuum.
Dialect continuum: languages in a region form a gradual, smooth transition with no clear boundary where one language ends and another begins; as you move geographically, dialects blend into each other.
Related concept: ring species (Mayr 1942) expresses a similar problem in biology: neighboring groups interbreed, but the endpoints cannot.
Example visualization: a dialect continuum map shows smooth color transitions from Parisian French to Madrid Spanish with magenta blends in between.
Global examples of dialect continua include: Sinitic languages (China), Indo-Aryan languages (India), Algonquian (Canada), Arabic dialects (N. Africa/Middle East), Slavic (eastern Europe), Turkic (Europe/central Asia), Kikongo (central Africa), among others.

Linguistic knowledge and the goals of linguistics

Core aim: discover how the brain works by studying the structure of language and its use; there is an implicit grammar in the mind that defines what is valid in a language (grammatical) vs. what is not (ungrammatical).
Grammaticality is often marked with an asterisk (*) to indicate ungrammatical forms in descriptions.
Two ways to identify linguistic rules:
- Performance: actual utterances produced by speakers.
- Competence: speakers’ conscious judgments about the grammaticality of hypothetical utterances.
Noam Chomsky (1965) argued that competence should be the main focus because the mental grammar may allow forms rarely or never produced in performance; studying competence reveals deeper rules beyond surface performance.
- Parallel to Saussure’s distinction: parole (performance) vs langue (the abstract system of a community).
- Example: brass vs *bnass:
- Performance would likely produce brass and untreated *bnass as unpronounceable/unlikely in real use.
- Competence would recognize allowed new words like blass as pronounceable and acceptable for new product names, while *bnass would be unacceptable.
Descriptive vs prescriptive linguistics:
- Descriptive: describe how language is actually used by speakers.
- Prescriptive: dictate how people should use language; often linked to social mobility but not reflective of natural language use.
Social and ethical implications: prescriptive rules can carry stigma and shame; linguists focus on describing rather than prescribing.
Foundational references from the lecture:
- Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1916. Cours de linguistique générale. Paris: Payot.
- Hockett, Charles F. 1960. The origin of speech. Scientific American 203(3): 88–97.
- Mayr, Ernst. 1942. Systematics and the origin of species from the viewpoint of a zoologist. New York: Columbia University Press.
- Healy, Christina. 2011. Pinky extension as a phonestheme in Mongolian Sign Language. Sign Language Studies 11(4): 575–593.
Practical takeaway: the mind-brain view of language, its structure, and how usage reflects underlying competence vs. performance shapes linguistic research and education.

Notes on connections, context, and implications

Connections to broader themes:
- Language as a window into human cognition and social behavior.
- Relationship between language variation (dialects) and social/political boundaries.
- The balance between universals in language (design features) and variation (dialects, phonesthemes, onomatopoeia) across cultures.
Real-world relevance:
- Understanding language helps in education, technology, law, and social interaction.
- Recognizing dialect continua can impact language policy and education in multilingual regions.
Philosophical considerations:
- Arbitrariness vs iconic cues in language points to the interplay between conventionalized forms and perceptual biases.
- The nature of linguistic knowledge (competence) vs usage (performance) informs debates about innate structure vs learned variation.

References (as cited in the lecture)

Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Healy, Christina. 2011. Pinky extension as a phonestheme in Mongolian Sign Language. Sign Language Studies 11(4): 575–593.
Hockett, Charles F. 1960. The origin of speech. Scientific American 203(3): 88–97.
Mayr, Ernst. 1942. Systematics and the origin of species from the viewpoint of a zoologist. New York: Columbia University Press.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1916. Cours de linguistique générale. Paris: Payot.