here is something about linguistics What is linguistics? Typically when Ive told people I study linguistics, they have responded saying something like, oh thats cool, but their face says, I dont really know what that means. So Id like to use this inaugural post to explain what linguistics is in general. For the sake of keeping things brief, Ill keep this post at that and follow up with posts about different sub-fields of linguistics and what they study, as well as why linguistics is important and why I study it. Then Ill move on to interesting tidbits I find or think of that I want to share that have to do with linguistics in everyday life. Merriam Websters dictionary defines linguistics as, the study of human speech including the units, nature, structure, and modification of language. I would include the scientific study of these things because there is, in most cases, a very scientific approach to the study of language, full of hypotheses, detailed data collection methods, statistical analyses and conclusions. In other words, the scientific method is used often in linguistics. I prefer this type of linguistic study, where you can observe an interesting language phenomenon, hypothesize something about it, test it, and actually see results. However, there are also unscientific approaches to the study of language that are theoretical and theorize about ideal speakers of a language and what they should and should not do, as opposed to what they actually do with language. Many consider them, myself included, to be more philosophical than scientific because they dont follow the scientific method and cant be falsified. Theyre idealizations. Both approaches, among others, can tell us different things, but no one approach to lingusitics can explain everything. This theoretical approach is the kind developed by a very famous linguist from M.I.T. you may have heard of, Noam Chomsky. Chomsky became famous because in the 50s, when B.F. Skinners behaviorist theory of psychology was hugely popular, Chomsky went against the grain and said that language did not develop by stimulus and response as everyone else thought, but rather from an innate language mechanism in the brain. In other words, Skinner would have said that language acquisition is a set of habits that can be acquired through conditioning, or trials and errors and rewards with successes. But Chomsky claimed there is a Universal Grammar from which all languages come, and that when we are children learning our first language, we have access to that Universal Grammar and we just tune our brain to the specific settings for our first language within the Universal Grammar. Its like flipping switches, and he says some things dont need to be taught, but are just there. For example, English would have different settings, or flipped switches, than Spanish. Many theorists have discussed what those different switches are and how they are set for certain languages. I wont get into that because its very technical and I dont really know much about Universal Grammar. But thats the basic idea behind it. As a Christian and creationist who believes God designed and created man and we did not just evolve from nothing, I agree with Chomsky (though hes not a creationist) that we have a language mechanism in the brain that God gave us for us to communicate. However, I dont believe his theory can explain everything. In some ways its too rigid. Heres what I mean. If theres one thing that Ive learned studying linguistics is that there is a whole lot of variation in how people use language. People dont always follow a set of rules about how they should speak and never stray from it. Youll know this if you just look at a grammar textbook and compare it to how you say things. For example, I often say, Theres some books over there, when the correct way to say it is, Therere some books over there, by making plural agreement between there are, or therere and books. My wife sometimes says, you better wouldnt do that, meaning, you shouldnt do that. Where did that come from? She heard that from her relatives growing up, who she says got it from their Amish ancestors who spoke Pennsylvania Dutch, a mixture of English and German. So now she says it. Because of things like this I believe that, even if we have an innate language mechanism that helps us learn a language, this mechanism can also be molded based on what we hear from the speech around us so that we can change our way of speaking over time. I believe God gave our brains the ability to soak in what we experience and let that affect our learning. There have been many studies that have shown that the frequency of a certain word or phrase heard in speech can affect how we say and use that word or phrase. Using my previous example, if theres is heard frequently enough with plural nouns, we may just start using it with plural nouns even though its supposed to be for singular nouns. I should leave it at this for now to not make this post too long. The basic idea Im trying to get across is that there are multiple ways of studying human language and they each tells us something different. There are many different sub-fields of linguistics that look at language through different lenses, and Ill discuss those in my next post. Linguistics is fascinating and important because it deals with how we communicate, and how we communicate is very interesting and important because language is always changing. Language carries meaning and it is deeply ingrained in our everyday lives. So I hope that as you read this, if anyone does, that you learn something about linguistics and what it means to you and how it impacts your daily life.
Posted on: Sun, 17 Nov 2013 16:55:09 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015