The nature of language and grammar

What this course studies

Structure of English looks at English the way a linguist does: as a system with parts that fit together. Its sounds combine into syllables and words, its words are built from smaller meaningful pieces, and words combine into phrases, clauses and sentences by rules that every fluent speaker follows without being taught them. A teacher of English who can name these parts and explain how they work can diagnose a learner's error instead of only marking it wrong.

This first topic sets up the vocabulary for the whole course: what language is, what makes human language different from other kinds of communication, the levels at which language is organised, and what the word grammar means to a linguist.

1. What language is

Most textbooks build on one classic definition: language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by means of which the members of a social group cooperate and interact. Each word in that definition carries a property worth unpacking.

• Systematic. Language is not a heap of words. Sounds, word parts and words combine only in certain orders. English allows blick as a possible new word but not bnick; it allows the tall boy but not boy tall the. Speakers know these patterns even when they cannot state them.
• Arbitrary. Nothing in the sound of dog resembles the animal. Filipino says aso, German Hund, French chien: the link between form and meaning is a matter of convention, not nature. Onomatopoeic words such as buzz or tiktilaok are only partial exceptions, because even they differ from language to language.
• Vocal. Speech is primary. Every normally developing child acquires speech before writing, humans spoke for tens of thousands of years before anyone wrote, and many languages today have no writing system at all. Writing is a later representation of speech. (Sign languages show that the same human capacity can use the hands and eyes instead of the voice; they are full languages.)
• Symbolic. Words stand for things, ideas, actions and relations; they are not the things themselves.
• Social and conventional. A language belongs to a speech community, and its conventions are learned from that community.
• Creative. A finite set of words and rules lets speakers produce and understand an unlimited number of new sentences.
• Changing. Every living language changes. Old English hlāford became lord; nice once meant 'foolish'. Change is not decay: it is what languages in use always do.

2. Saussure and the linguistic sign

The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure is often called the father of modern linguistics. His Course in General Linguistics (1916) was published after his death by students who rebuilt his lectures from their notes. Three of his distinctions are still used.

• The linguistic sign joins a signifier (the sound-image, such as the sounds of tree) with a signified (the concept of a tree). The bond between them is arbitrary.
• Langue and parole. Langue is the abstract system shared by a community: its sounds, words and rules. Parole is what individuals actually say on particular occasions. Linguistics, for Saussure, studies langue through parole.
• Synchronic and diachronic. A synchronic study describes a language at one point in time (English today); a diachronic study follows its change across time (English from 700 to 2000).

3. What makes human language special: Hockett's design features

In 1960 the American linguist Charles Hockett listed the design features of human language, properties that together set it apart from animal communication. A bee's dance or a vervet monkey's alarm call has a few of them; only human language has them all. The ones teachers use most are these.

• Arbitrariness – no natural link between form and meaning (see above).
• Discreteness – language is made of separate units. /p/ and /b/ are distinct sounds, not points on a smooth scale, so pat and bat are different words.
• Duality of patterning – language is organised on two levels. Meaningless sounds combine into meaningful units (/k/ + /æ/ + /t/ = cat), and meaningful units combine into larger ones (cat + -s, the cats sleep). The same few dozen sounds therefore yield tens of thousands of words.
• Productivity (also called creativity or openness) – speakers can make and understand messages never produced before.
• Displacement – speakers can talk about things that are not here and now: yesterday's typhoon, a city abroad, a unicorn.
• Cultural transmission – a language is learned from the community a child grows up in, not inherited genetically. A child of Ilocano parents raised in Cebu acquires Cebuano.
• Interchangeability – any speaker can also be a receiver and can say anything they can understand.
• Semanticity – signals carry fixed meanings tied to features of the world.

4. The levels of linguistic structure

Linguists describe a language at several levels, each with its own unit. The rest of this course follows the levels from the bottom up.

Two units are easy to confuse. The phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that can change meaning (/p/ versus /b/ in pat and bat). The morpheme is the smallest unit that carries meaning or grammatical function (cat and -s in cats). From smallest to largest, the units run: phoneme, morpheme, word, phrase, clause, sentence.

5. What "grammar" means

The word grammar has at least four senses, and a teacher needs to keep them apart.

• Mental grammar. The unconscious system of rules in every speaker's mind. Noam Chomsky called this knowledge linguistic competence, and the use of it in actual speaking and listening performance (Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, 1965). Slips of the tongue, false starts and memory lapses are performance errors; they do not show that the speaker lacks the rule.
• Descriptive grammar. A linguist's account of how speakers actually use a language, recorded without praise or blame. A descriptive grammar notes that many speakers of some dialects say ain't and describes where it occurs.
• Prescriptive grammar. Rules about how people should speak or write, usually based on a prestige variety: 'do not split an infinitive', 'never end a sentence with a preposition', 'use whom after a preposition'. Robert Lowth's A Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762) is the famous early example.
• Pedagogical (teaching) grammar. A grammar written for learners, which selects, simplifies and sequences rules for the classroom.

Competence also lets speakers judge sentences. Chomsky's Colorless green ideas sleep furiously is grammatical (its structure is perfect English) but meaningless, while Furiously sleep ideas green colorless is ungrammatical. Grammaticality and meaning are separate.

6. Schools of grammar

• Traditional grammar goes back to the Greek and Latin grammarians (Dionysius Thrax wrote a grammar of Greek around 100 BC). Early English grammars copied Latin categories and definitions: 'a noun is the name of a person, place or thing'. It gave us the parts of speech and much of our terminology, but its definitions are based on meaning and it is often prescriptive.
• Structural grammar (American structuralism, after Leonard Bloomfield's Language, 1933) describes the forms speakers actually use and classifies words by their form and position rather than their meaning. Its tool for sentences is immediate constituent (IC) analysis, cutting a sentence into its two main parts, then each part into two, and so on.
• Transformational-generative (TG) grammar began with Chomsky's Syntactic Structures (1957). It tries to state the rules that generate all and only the grammatical sentences of a language, and it relates sentences through transformations: an underlying deep structure becomes the surface structure we hear (an active sentence and its passive share one deep structure).
• Functional grammar, especially M.A.K. Halliday's systemic functional grammar (An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 1985), treats grammar as a resource for making meaning in social situations, and asks what each structure is used to do.

7. English among the world's languages

English belongs to the West Germanic branch of the Indo-European family, together with German, Dutch and Frisian. Its history is usually divided into Old English (about 450–1100), Middle English (about 1100–1500), Early Modern English (about 1500–1800) and Modern English. Norman French after 1066 and Latin and Greek in the Renaissance gave English much of its vocabulary, which is why it has pairs such as begin and commence.

Braj Kachru described English worldwide in three circles. The inner circle holds countries where English is the main native language (the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia). The outer circle holds countries where English, brought by colonisation, is an official second language used in government, schools and the media: the Philippines, India, Singapore, Nigeria. The expanding circle holds countries where English is learned as a foreign language (Japan, China, Korea).

Philippine English is an outer-circle variety with its own regular features of sound, vocabulary and usage (presidentiable, for a while on the telephone, open the light). A descriptive linguist treats it as a variety with its own norms; a teacher still decides which norms a given exam, workplace or audience expects.

Summary

• Language is a system of arbitrary, conventional vocal symbols used by a community; it is systematic, creative and always changing.
• Saussure gave us the sign (signifier + signified), langue/parole and synchronic/diachronic study.
• Hockett's design features include arbitrariness, discreteness, duality of patterning, productivity, displacement and cultural transmission.
• The levels are phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics; the phoneme distinguishes meaning, the morpheme carries it.
• Grammar can mean mental grammar (competence), descriptive grammar, prescriptive grammar or teaching grammar.
• The main schools are traditional, structural, transformational-generative and functional.
• English is West Germanic; the Philippines is in Kachru's outer circle, and Philippine English is a variety of its own.