Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic What is linguistics, anyway?

Hello good FoLCs,

In my first linguistics-related post (“Why I Dislike “Ultra Woman”), I jumped right into the middle of things with a topic I thought likely to be of interest to the FoLCs on the MB.

For this post, however, I am going to start at the beginning: What, exactly, is linguistics, anyway? And what do linguists do? Before I answer those questions, I wish to dispel one misconception: Linguists are NOT, necessarily, polyglots. It is perfectly possible to be a monolingual linguist. (I think that, all else being equal, the greater the number and the more diverse the languages you have at least a passing knowledge of, the better a linguist you will be. But all else is rarely equal.)

The overarching question which linguistics tries to answer is: What is it about language and about the human brain that makes it possible for children to master the basics of one or more languages before they are even capable of tying their shoelaces? Think about it – If you have ever tried to learn a foreign language in high school or in college, you know what a monumental achievement such mastery is. And statistically speaking, most children have the basics of at least two entirely different languages before they are even three years old. (Monolinguals are in the minority worldwide.) These kids not only have to figure out everything about languages -- both about language in general and about their particular language(s) -- which they do not innately know; they must realize that they are dealing with two or more different languages, they must learn the vocabulary and sentence structure of each, and they must determine under what circumstances which language should be used. IMHO, that will be the most impressive achievement they will make in their entire lifetime, no matter what else they go on to do! And, barring extenuating circumstances such as extreme disabilities or abusive isolation, *all* children succeed at the task of learning the language(s) to which they are regularly exposed growing up.

The field of linguistics has a few core areas and a number of peripheral ones. The core areas are:

- Phonetics and phonology – These related sub-fields deal with the sounds of a language. The former is concerned with how the sounds are made (articulatory phonetics) and their physical properties (acoustic phonetics); the latter with the mental representations of the sounds. More about the distinction in another post.

- Morphology, as discussed in the last post, is the study of morphemes. It is concerned with how words are assembled from smaller, meaningful parts.

- Syntax, considered by many to be the heart of linguistics, is concerned with how sentences are assembled.

- Semantics, sometimes excluded from being considered part of the core of linguistics, is the study of meaning.

These subfields of linguistics are often studied in isolation; however, there are strong interfaces among them. One may speak, for example, of morphosyntax or morphonology.

Other subfields are considered more peripheral to linguistics. They include, but are by no means limited to:

- Historical linguistics: How and why languages change over time.

- Language acquisition: How people acquire first, second, and foreign languages.

- Psycholinguistics: How the brain functionally processes language.

- Neurolinguistics: How the brain physically processes language.

- Sociolinguistics (my favourite sub-field): How language is used in society.

- Computational linguistics: Programming computers to process human language. This sub-field has come a surprisingly loooong way over the past few decades, but there is a *lot* more progress that will need to be made before we get to the Enterprise’s natural language interface. I’ll admit, we are a lot closer to being there than I would have thought, as recently as a decade ago, we would be in the course of my lifetime.

I would like to end this discussion of the sub-fields of linguistics by relating a story that is told about the difficulties of natural language translation. I have heard many variants of it and I suspect it is an urban legend, but the point of it holds up even if the events related never actually happened. Back at the height of the Cold War, so the story goes, the US Department of Defense wanted to have a computer be able to translate between English and Russian; the strategic value of such a program would be tremendous. The computer scientists of the day, naïve to the complexities of human language, thought it would be the perfect task for a computer. All they would need to do would be to develop a comprehensive list of English/Russian word pairs. The translation would then be a simple matter of looking up the word in one language and substituting its counterpart in the other language. (I imagine that at this point in the story, all of the non-monolingual FoLCs who are reading this are shaking their heads in bemusement…) Well, according to the story, such a list of word pairs was developed, and the great day arrived when the program would be tested. The sample sentence, to be fed into the computer for translation into Russian and then back into English, was “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” The end result, after the double translation, came back as, “The wine is agreeable, but the meat is decrepit.” (I’ve also seen the punch line being “The Vodka is agreeable, but the meat is rotten.”) As I said, I make no claims as to the veracity of the story, but it does illustrate nicely that language translation is a lot more complex than the naïve monolingual would think.

My tentative plans for subsequent threads are (not necessarily in this order):

- What are lects? Just what is the difference between a dialect and a language, anyway?

- Myths about signed languages, and what, precisely makes a communication system a language?

- A thread on each of the core subfields of linguistics and on at least some of the more peripheral subfields.

And I’ll end this post with an anecdote that was making the rounds when I was in grad school:

When I knew everything there was to know about my field, they gave me my bachelors’ degree. When I realized that I didn’t know ANYTHING about my field, they gave me my masters’ degree. When I realized that THEY didn’t know anything about the field either, they gave me my doctorate.

That was certainly my experience in the field of linguistics. (I suspect it is true in other fields, as well, but I can’t speak to that from first-hand experience.) The point being that, although I will for pedagogical purposes be presenting information about language as if it were cut-and-dried, language in real life is nowhere near so straightforward – as was already seen by the whole “ultra-“ discussion in the previous thread. Linguists try to present linguistics as a science; but it is at best a soft science, with all the “fuzziness” inherent therein. (Note: There are definitely linguists who would disagree with that last statement.)

Joy,
Lynn

Me the astronomy fan once got a text in German about massive and eruptive star Eta Carina and its nebula. I protested that my German isn't good enought for me to be able to understand the article very well, but my friend suggested that I should use a "translator program" which would translate the text into English. Well, when I got the test in English it told me that there was a mysterious fog surrounding strange massive asterisk Eta Carina!

There was a lot of fog...



...surrounding the asterisk!



Eta Carina and its surroundings

Ann

Hi Ann,

Thanks for that real life example!

Another example - one familiar to any Anglophone who has ever taken a French class: Suppose Clark and Lois were vacationing in Paris, and Clark decided to speak in French. If he wished to indicate his desire to go to a restaurant, he would say the French equivalent of "I have hunger" ("J'ai faim".) If he were to use the French equivalent of "am" instead of "have" ("suis" instead of "ai"), he would be expressing a desire better discussed in the nfic folder.

Joy,
Lynn

I'm looking forward to all your subsequent threads, Lynn! To the amusement of the class, one of the boys - naturally - asked what "je suis froid" (literally "I'm cold") would mean in this case, which the teacher chose not to answer. XD

And of course, I can't forget my Spanish teacher's cautionary story against Babelfish and its counterparts, which she repeated at the beginning of every semester: how one student, told to write a short essay about the Manhattan Project, put it through an online translator and came up with an essay about the Manhattan cocktail. (I'm not quite sure how "project" changed to "cocktail", but there you go.)

I took a course a year and a half ago called "Learning English as a Second Language", which brought up the issue of adult language acquisition vs. children's language acquisition. It's certainly a broad and interesting topic.

I'm eager to hear what you have to say about this! Usually, the given distinction (in an intro course) is that dialects are mutually comprehensible, thus considered to be of the same language, and when they grow so far apart that they are no longer mutually comprehensible, they become different languages (as in the case of Spanish, French, and Italian, which all developed as dialects of Latin).

This is what I was taught first, and filed it into the back of my head as irrefutably logical fact. Until another (probably more sociolinguistics-oriented) professor came up with a whole different story: that languages are no more than dialects with political power. For instance, there are French dialects in some rural parts of France which are not mutually comprehensible with more urban French. Similarly, there are European languages which are, for the most part, mutually comprehensible, yet are still considered very separate. Just one more on the endless list of highly debatable linguistic topics!

Julie

Hi Julie,

I'm glad you're enjoying these posts. :-)

You actually provided a nice "preview of coming attractions" for my next thread-starting post, which I just finished writing yesterday. (I'll probably post it early to mid next week.) That is the one discussing lects, and focusing on dialects vs. languages. In fact, you've pretty much said in a nutshell what I have discussed in greater length; namely that mutual intelligibility and geopolitical boundaries are often cited, but neither provides a full explanation. The bottom line is the division is wherever society puts it; it is definitely *not* based on linguistic analyses!

I had had an entire semester course on L1 (first language) acquisition. It is a very rich topic, indeed. (I wish I remembered more of the course contents!) My language pedagogy classes also discussed the differences between child and adult language acquisition.

Out of curiosity, in your language classes, have you come across the work of a Robert DiPietro, involving strategic interactions (scenarios)? He was my mentor.

Joy,
Lynn

Not so far, at least to my recollection. But I'm not nearly finished with my studies yet.

Julie

I'm very much looking forward to your next linguistics post. I'm especially looking forward to the language/dialect distinction, for I have the following little problem:
My native language is German (from Germany). If someone from Switzerland speaks his local dialect of German, I don't understand anything. Nothing. Nada.
On the other hand, if someone from the Netherlands speaks (slowly) in his native language, I usually get the gist of things, sometimes even more (because Dutch is not only very close to both German and English, but even more so to my native dialect).

I also remember Ann (TOC) forwarding an email that was in Swedish, with a little additional text. Guess what? I understood about 50% of the original message - and this was my very first encounter with Swedish. And - so far - my last. (Once again, there's the fact that Swedish and German are related languages...)

Btw, there's something similar going on with Italian and Spanish: Quite often, people from South Italy don't have an easy time communicating with people from the North and vice versa. Still, at least some of them are able to converse with people from Spain, each in their native language.