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Monster boy and the cursed kingdom telescope

04/12/2021 Client: muhammad11 Deadline: 2 Day

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Part of the Tongue Involved

Tongue Height

FRONT CENTRAL BACK

HIGH u boot

ROUNDED ʊ put

MID o boat

ǝ about ᴧ butt

LOW

i beet

ɪ bit

e bait

ɛ bet

æ bat a balm ɔ bawd

Classification of American English Vowels

Consonants Vowels

p pill t till k kill i beet ɪ bit b bill d dill g gill e bait ɛ bet m mill n nil ŋ ring u boot ʊ foot f feel s seal h heal o boat ɔ bore v veal z zeal l leaf æ bat a pot/bar θ thigh ʧ chill r reef ʌ butt ə sofa ð thy ʤ gin j you aɪ bite aʊ bout ʃ shill ʍ which w witch ɔɪ boy ʒ measure

A Phonetic Alphabet for English Pronunciation

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V i c t o r i a F r o m k i n

Late, University of California, Los Angeles

r o b e r t r o d m a n

North Carolina State University, Raleigh

n i n a h ya m s

University of California, Los Angeles

An Introduction to Language 10e

Australia • Brazil • Japan • Korea • Mexico • Singapore • Spain • United Kingdom • United States

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ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced, transmitted, stored or used in any form or by any means graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including but not limited to photocopying, recording, scanning, digitizing, taping, Web distribution, in- formation networks, or information storage and retrieval systems, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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An Introduction to Language, Tenth Edition Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, and Nina Hyams

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This is an electronic version of the print textbook. Due to electronic rights restrictions, some third party content may be suppressed. Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. The publisher reserves the right to remove content from this title at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. For valuable information on pricing, previous editions, changes to current editions, and alternate formats, please visit www.cengage.com/highered to search by ISBN#, author, title, or keyword for materials in your areas of interest.

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In memory of Simon Katz and Lauren Erickson

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ChApter 1

What Is Language? 1

Linguistic Knowledge 1 Knowledge of the Sound System 2 Knowledge of Words 3

Arbitrary Relation of Form and Meaning 3

The Creativity of Linguistic Knowledge 5

Knowledge of Sentences and Nonsentences 7

Linguistic Knowledge and Performance 8

What Is Grammar? 9 Descriptive Grammars 9 Prescriptive Grammars 10 Teaching Grammars 12 Universal Grammar 13 The Development of Grammar 14 Sign Languages: Evidence for

Language Universals 15

What Is Not (Human) Language 16 The Birds and the Bees 16 Can Animals Learn Human

Language? 19

Language and Thought 21

Summary 25 References for Further Reading 27 Exercises 28

Preface xi

About the Authors ix

Contents

ChApter 2

Morphology: the Words of Language 33

Content Words and Function Words 35

Morphemes: The Minimal Units of Meaning 36

The Discreteness of Morphemes 38 Bound and Free Morphemes 39

Prefixes and Suffixes 40 Infixes 41 Circumfixes 41

Roots and Stems 42 Bound Roots 43

Rules of Word Formation 43 Derivational Morphology 44 Inflectional Morphology 46 The Hierarchical Structure of Words 49 Rule Productivity 52

Exceptions and Suppletions 54 Lexical Gaps 55

Other Morphological Processes 56 Back-Formations 56 Compounds 57 “Pullet Surprises” 60

Sign Language Morphology 60

Morphological Analysis: Identifying Morphemes 61

Summary 65 References for Further Reading 66 Exercises 66

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vi Contents

Lexical Semantics (Word Meanings) 152 Theories of Word Meaning 153

Reference 154 Sense 155

Lexical Relations 155 Semantic Features 158

Evidence for Semantic Features 159 Semantic Features and Grammar 159

Argument Structure 162 Thematic Roles 163

Pragmatics 165 Pronouns and Other Deictic Words 166

Pronouns and Situational Context 167

Pronouns and Linguistic Context 168 Implicature 170

Maxims of Conversation 171 Presupposition 174 Speech Acts 174

Summary 175 References for Further Reading 177 Exercises 178

ChApter 5

phonetics: the sounds of Language 189

Sound Segments 190 Identity of Speech Sounds 191 The Phonetic Alphabet 192

Articulatory Phonetics 194 Consonants 195

Place of Articulation 195 Manner of Articulation 197 Phonetic Symbols for American

English Consonants 203 Vowels 205

Tongue Position 205 Lip Rounding 207 Diphthongs 207 Nasalization of Vowels 208 Tense and Lax Vowels 208

Major Phonetic Classes 208 Noncontinuants and Continuants 209

ChApter 3

syntax: the sentence patterns of Language 76

What the Syntax Rules Do 77 What Grammaticality Is Not Based On 80

Sentence Structure 81 Constituents and Constituency Tests 82

Syntactic Categories 84 Phrase Structure Trees 87 Building Phrase Structure Trees 95 The Infinity of Language: Recursive

Rules 100 What Heads the Sentence 104 Structural Ambiguities 105 More Structures 107

Transformational Analysis 109 The Structure Dependency of Rules 111

UG Principles and Parameters 114

Sign Language Syntax 117

Appendix A 119

Appendix B 121

Appendix C 127

Summary 128 References for Further Reading 129 Exercises 129

ChApter 4

the Meaning of Language 139

What Speakers Know about Sentence Meaning 140

Truth 140 Entailment and Related Notions 141 Ambiguity 142

Compositional Semantics 143 Semantic Rules 144

Semantic Rule I 145 Semantic Rule II 146

When Compositionality Goes Awry 147 Anomaly 147 Metaphor 149 Idioms 150

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Contents vii

Slips of the Tongue: Evidence for Phonological Rules 251

Prosodic Phonology 252 Syllable Structure 252 Word Stress 253 Sentence and Phrase Stress 254 Intonation 255

Sequential Constraints of Phonemes 256 Lexical Gaps 257

Why Do Phonological Rules Exist? 258 Optimality Theory 259

Phonological Analysis 260

Summary 264 References for Further Reading 265 Exercises 266

ChApter 7

Language in society 279

Dialects 279 Regional Dialects 281

Phonological Differences 283 Lexical Differences 284 Syntactic Differences 284 Dialect Atlases 285

Social Dialects 287 The “Standard” 288 African American English 291 Latino (Hispanic) English 295 Genderlects 297 Sociolinguistic Analysis 300

Languages in Contact 301 Lingua Francas 301 Contact Languages: Pidgins and

Creoles 302 Creoles and Creolization 306 Bilingualism 309

Codeswitching 310

Language and Education 312 Second-Language Teaching Methods 312 Teaching Reading 313

Literacy in the Deaf Community 315 Bilingual Education 316 Minority Dialects 318

Obstruents and Sonorants 209 Consonantal Sounds 209 Syllabic Sounds 210

Prosodic Features 210 Tone and Intonation 211

Phonetic Symbols and Spelling Correspondences 213

The “Phonetics” of Signed Languages 215

Summary 216 References for Further Reading 218 Exercises 218

ChApter 6

phonology: the sound patterns of Language 224

The Pronunciation of Morphemes 225 The Pronunciation of Plurals 225 Additional Examples

of Allomorphs 228

Phonemes: The Phonological Units of Language 230

Illustration of Allophones 230 Phonemes and How to Find Them 232 Complementary Distribution 233

The Need for Similarity 235

Distinctive Features of Phonemes 235 Feature Values 236 Nondistinctive Features 237 Phonemic Patterns May Vary across

Languages 238 Natural Classes of Speech Sounds 239 Feature Specifications for American

English Consonants and Vowels 241

The Rules of Phonology 241 Feature-Changing Rules 243

Assimilation Rules 243 Dissimilation Rules 245

Segment Insertion and Deletion Rules 247

From One to Many and from Many to One 249

The Function of Phonological Rules 250

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viii Contents

Comparative Reconstruction 365 Historical Evidence 369

Extinct and Endangered Languages 371

The Genetic Classification of Languages 374 Languages of the World 375

Types of Languages 378

Why Do Languages Change? 381

Summary 384 References for Further Reading 385 Exercises 386

ChApter 9

Language Acquisition 394

The Linguistic Capacity of Children 394 What’s Learned, What’s Not? 395 Stages in Language Acquisition 398 The Perception and Production of Speech

Sounds 398 Babbling 400 First Words 401 Segmenting the Speech Stream 402

The Acquisition of Phonology 404 The Acquisition of Word Meaning 406 The Acquisition of Morphology 408 The Acquisition of Syntax 411 The Acquisition of Pragmatics 415 The Development of Auxiliaries:

A Case Study 416 Setting Parameters 419 The Acquisition of Signed Languages 420

The Role of the Linguistic Environment: Adult Input 422

The Role of Imitation, Reinforcement, and Analogy 422

The Role of Structured Input 424

Knowing More Than One Language 425 Childhood Bilingualism 426

Theories of Bilingual Development 427 Two Monolinguals in One Head 428 The Role of Input 429 Cognitive Effects of Bilingualism 429

Second Language Acquisition 430

Language in Use 318 Styles 319 Slang 319 Jargon and Argot 320 Taboo or Not Taboo? 320

Euphemisms 322 Racial and National Epithets 323 Language and Sexism 323

Marked and Unmarked Forms 324 Secret Languages and Language

Games 325

Summary 326 References for Further Reading 328 Exercises 329

ChApter 8

Language Change: the syllables of time 337

The Regularity of Sound Change 338 Sound Correspondences 339 Ancestral Protolanguages 339

Phonological Change 340 Phonological Rules 341 The Great Vowel Shift 342

Morphological Change 344

Syntactic Change 345

Lexical Change 350 Change in Category 350 Addition of New Words 351

Word Coinage 351 Words from Names 353 Blends 354 Reduced Words 355

Borrowings or Loan Words 356 Loss of Words 359 Semantic Change 360 Broadening 361

Narrowing 361 Meaning Shifts 361

Reconstructing “Dead” Languages 361 The Nineteenth-Century

Comparativists 362 Cognates 363

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Contents ix

Neurolinguistic Studies of Sentence Structure 473

Language and Brain Development 474 Left Hemisphere Lateralization for

Language in Young Children 475 Brain Plasticity 476 The Critical Period 476

The Modular Mind: Dissociations of Language and Cognition 479

Linguistic Savants 479 Specific Language Impairment 481 Genetic Basis of Language 482

Summary 482 References for Further Reading 486 Exercises 487

ChApter 11

Computer processing of human Language 495

Computers That Talk and Listen 495 Computational Phonetics and Phonology 496

Speech Recognition 496 Speech Synthesis 498

Computational Morphology 502 Computational Syntax 503 Computational Semantics 505 Computational Pragmatics 507 Computational Sign Language 508

Applications of Computational Linguistics 509 Computer Models of Grammar 509 Frequency Analysis, Concordances,

and Collocations 510 Computational Lexicography 511 The Culturomic Revolution 512

Twitterology 513 Information Retrieval and

Summarization 514 Spell Checkers 515 Machine Translation 516 Computational Forensic Linguistics 518

Trademarks 518 Interpreting Legal Terms 519 Speaker Identification 519

Is L2 Acquisition the Same as L1 Acquisition? 430

Native Language Influence in L2 Acquisition 432

The Creative Component of L2 Acquisition 433

Heritage Language Learners 434 Is There a Critical Period for L2

Acquisition? 434

Summary 436 References for Further Reading 438 Exercises 438

ChApter 10

Language processing and the human Brain 444

The Human Mind at Work 444 Comprehension 445

The Speech Signal 446 Speech Perception 447 Bottom-up and Top-down

Models 449 Lexical Access and Word

Recognition 451 Syntactic Processing 453

Speech Production 456 Lexical Selection 456 Application and Misapplication

of Rules 458 Planning Units 458

Brain and Language 461 The Human Brain 461 The Localization of Language

in the Brain 462 Aphasia 463 Split Brains 470 Dichotic Listening 471 Event-Related Potentials 471

Neural Evidence of Grammatical Phenomena 472 Neurolinguistic Studies of Speech

Sounds 472

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x Contents

Consonantal Alphabet Writing 536 Alphabetic Writing 537

Writing and Speech 539 Spelling 542

Texting 544 The Current English Spelling

System 544 Spelling Pronunciations 546

Pseudo-writing 547

Summary 548 References for Further Reading 549 Exercises 550

Glossary 555

Index 587

Summary 521 References for Further Reading 523 Exercises 523

ChApter 12

Writing: the ABCs of Language 527

The History of Writing 528 Pictograms and Ideograms 528 Cuneiform Writing 529 The Rebus Principle 531 From Hieroglyphics to the Alphabet 532

Modern Writing Systems 533 Word Writing 534 Syllabic Writing 535

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The tenth edition of An Introduction to Language continues in the spirit of our friend, colleague, mentor, and coauthor, Victoria Fromkin. Vicki loved lan- guage, and she loved to tell people about it. She found linguistics fun and fascinating, and she wanted every student and every teacher to think so, too. Though this edition has been completely rewritten for improved clarity and currency, we have nevertheless preserved Vicki’s lighthearted, personal ap- proach to a complex topic, including witty quotations from noted authors (A. A. Milne was one of Vicki’s favorites). We hope we have kept the spirit of Vicki’s love for teaching about language alive in the pages of this book.

The first nine editions of An Introduction to Language succeeded, with the help of dedicated teachers, in introducing the nature of human language to tens of thousands of students. This is a book that students enjoy and under- stand and that professors find effective and thorough. Not only have majors in linguistics benefited from the book’s easy-to-read yet comprehensive pre- sentation, but also majors in fields as diverse as teaching English as a sec- ond language, foreign language studies, general education, the cognitive and neurosciences, psychology, sociology, and anthropology have enjoyed learning about language from this book.

highlights of this edition This edition includes new developments in linguistics and related fields that will strengthen its appeal to a wider audience. Much of this information will enable students to gain insight and understanding about linguistic issues

preface

Well, this bit which I am writing, called Introduction, is really the er-h’r’m of the book, and I have put it in, partly so as not to take you by surprise, and partly because I can’t do without it now. There are some very clever writers who say that it is quite easy not to have an er-h’r’m, but I don’t agree with them. I think it is much easier not to have all the rest of the book.

a. a. milne, Now We Are Six, 1927

The last thing we find in making a book is to know what we must put first.

blaise Pascal (1623–1662)

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xii prefACe

and debates appearing in the national media and will help professors and stu- dents stay current with important linguistic research. We hope that it may also dispel certain common misconceptions that people have about language and language use.

Exercises (250) continue to be abundant in this edition, and more research- oriented exercises have been added for those instructors who wish their students to pursue certain topics more deeply. Many of the exercises are mul- tipart, amounting to more than 300 opportunities for “homework” so that in- structors can gauge their students’ progress. Some exercises are marked as “challenge” questions: they go beyond the scope of what is ordinarily expected in a first course in language study. An answer key is available to instructors to assist them in areas outside of their expertise.

Chapter 1, “What Is Language?” continues to be a concise introduction to the general study of language. It contains many “hooks” for engaging stu- dents in language study, including “Language and Thought,” which takes up the Sapir-Whorf hypotheses; the universal properties of languages including signed languages of the deaf; a consideration of animal “languages”; and the occasional silliness of self-appointed mavens of “good” grammar who beg us not to carelessly split infinitives and who find sentence-ending prepositions an abomination not to be put up with.

Chapter 2, “Morphology: The Words of Language,” launches the book into the study of grammar with morphology, the study of word formation, as that is the most familiar aspect of grammar to most students. The subject is treated with clarity and an abundance of simple illustrations from non- English languages to emphasize the universality of word structure including the essentials of derivational versus inflectional morphology, free and bound morphemes, and the hierarchical structure of words.

Chapter 3, “Syntax: The Sentence Patterns of Language,” is the most heavily revised chapter of former editions. Once it has introduced the univer- sal and easily understood notions of constituency, syntactic categories (parts of speech), phrase structure trees, structural ambiguity and the infinite scope of language, the chapter delves into the now nearly universally accepted X-bar grammatical patterns for describing the deeper and more subtle syntactic structures of English and other languages. The topic is approached slowly and developed painstakingly so as to inform and not overwhelm. In particular, the current views on binary branching, heads and complements, selection (both C- and S-), and transformational analysis within the X-bar framework are carefully explained and illustrated. Formalisms are held to the bare minimum required to enhance clarity. Non-English examples abound in this chapter as throughout the entire book, and the weighty elements of the- ory are lightened by the inclusion of insightful examples and explanations, supplemented as always by quotations, poetry, cartoons, and humor.

Chapter 4, “The Meaning of Language,” on semantics, has been more finely structured so that the challenging topics of this complex subject can be digested in smaller pieces. Still based on the theme of “What do you know about meaning when you know a language?” the chapter first introduces stu- dents to truth-conditional semantics and the principle of compositionality.

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prefACe xiii

Following that are discussions of what happens when compositionality fails, as with idioms, metaphors, and anomalous sentences. Lexical semantics takes up various approaches to word meaning, including the concepts of reference and sense, semantic features, argument structure, and thematic roles. The most dramatic upgrade of this chapter is a newly expanded and modernized section on pragmatics. Here we discuss and illustrate in depth the influence of situational versus linguistic context on the communicative content of ut- terances, the significance of implicature in comprehension, Grice’s Maxims of Conversation, presuppositions, and J. L. Austin’s speech acts.

Chapter 5, “Phonetics: The Sounds of Language,” retains its former or- ganization and continues to embrace IPA (International Phonetics Association) notation for English in keeping with current practices, with the sole exception of using /r/ in place of the technically correct /ɹ/ when illustrating English. We continue to mention alternative notations that students may encounter in other publications.

Chapter 6, “Phonology: The Sound Patterns of Language,” has been streamlined by relegating several complex examples (e.g., metathesis in Hebrew) to the exercises, where instructors can opt to include them if it is thought that students can handle advanced material. The chapter continues to be presented with a greater emphasis on insights through linguistic data accompanied by small amounts of well-explicated formalisms, so that the student can appreciate the need for formal theories without experiencing the burdensome details.

Chapter 7, “Language in Society,” has been moved forward in the book from previous editions to emphasize its growing importance as a major sub- field of linguistics. Growth in this area of study, even in the few years since the ninth edition, has been astronomical. We have strived heartily to present the established facts and principles of sociolinguistics while bringing up to date subjects such as banned languages (it’s still happening); dead and dying languages (also still happening); gender differences; minority dialects such as Hispanic English (“Spanglish”); languages in contact such as pidgins, creoles, and lingua francas that may be found in linguistically heterogeneous areas; the use of computers in sociolinguistic analysis; second language teaching; and bilingual education, among others.

Chapter 8, “Language Change: The Syllables of Time,” has been updated with the latest research on language families, language relatedness, and lan- guage typology. Also, in response to reviewers’ requests, a detailed and more complex illustration of the application of the comparative method to two contemporary dialects to reconstruct their ancestor—often called “internal reconstruction”—is now part of this chapter.

Chapter 9, “Language Acquisition,” has been thoroughly restructured and rewritten to enhance clarity since the ninth edition. In addition, much of what has been learned about second language acquisition (adult learning of a for- eign language) has been folded into this chapter along with an entirely new section on “heritage languages,” the learning of an intrafamily language after immigration to a country where that language is not spoken (e.g., Yiddish by Jews who emigrated from Russia).

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xiv prefACe

Chapter 10, “Language Processing and the Human Brain,” could well have been entitled “psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics” but that may have made the subject seem overly daunting. This chapter combines a straight- forward discussion of many of the issues that regard the psychology of language—what the mind does—with the neurology of language—what the brain does—during language usage. Dramatic changes in the understanding of the brain’s role in language processing are occurring virtually every day owing to the rapid enhancement of the ability of neurolinguists to measure brain activity to tiny degrees of sensitivity at extremely precise locations. This chapter reports on those techniques and some of the results regarding lan- guage and the brain that ensue. The psycholinguistic portion of this chapter appeared as the first half of chapter 9 in the ninth edition; the second and greater portion of this chapter is an enlargement and updating of chapter 2 from the ninth and previous editions.

Chapter 11, “Computer Processing of Human Language,” is an expan- sion into a full chapter of what was the second half of chapter 9 in the ninth edition. The fundamentals of computational linguistics are still covered and have been clarified and expanded, but the force driving the promotion of the subject into a chapter of its own is the astonishing progress in the application of computers to human languages, which has burgeoned to a degree hardly imaginable even as we wrote previous editions. Anchoring the extensive new material in this chapter is the introduction of the Culturomic Revolution in the computer processing of language, in which computers have analyzed bil- lions (with a b) of lines of text with results that will astonish even the most blasé readers. Culturomics, which is concerned with published, written texts, is soon to be augmented by “twitterology,” a study of “on-the-fly” language usage by billions of people (i.e., “twitterers”) in thousands of languages, only beginning to be linguistically analyzed as the this edition goes to press. But those who wish to keep abreast of the power of computers applied to language will find this chapter indispensable.

Chapter 12, “Writing: The ABCs of Language,” has undergone a mild re- writing to further improve clarity. Texting and twittering, while largely un- studied by linguists, are included in a new section adding a further dimension to what it means to write a language.

Terms that appear bold in the text are defined in the revised glossary at the end of the book. The glossary has been expanded and improved so that the tenth edition provides students with a linguistic lexicon of nearly 700 terms, making the book a worthy reference volume.

The order of presentation of chapters 2 through 6 was once thought to be nontraditional. Our experience, backed by previous editions of the book and the recommendations of colleagues throughout the world, has convinced us that it is easier for the novice to approach the structural aspects of lan- guage by first looking at morphology (the structure of the most familiar lin- guistic unit, the word). This is followed by syntax (the structure of sentences), which is also familiar to many students, as are numerous semantic concepts. We then proceed to the more novel (to students) phonetics and phonology, which students often find daunting. However, the book is written so that in- dividual instructors can present material in the traditional order of phonetics,

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prefACe xv

phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics (chapters 5, 6, 2, 3, and 4) without confusion, if they wish.

As in previous editions, the primary concern has been basic ideas rather than detailed expositions. This book assumes no previous knowledge on the part of the reader. An updated list of references at the end of each chapter is included to accommodate any reader who wishes to pursue a subject in more depth. Each chapter concludes with a summary and exercises to enhance the students’ interest in and comprehension of the textual material.

Additional resources Linguistics CourseMate. An Introduction to Language includes Linguistics CourseMate, which helps students gain a deeper and more comprehensive un- derstanding of the textual material.

Linguistics CourseMate includes:

• an interactive eBook, with highlighting, note taking and search capabilities • interactive learning tools including:

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Answer Key. The Answer Key for An Introduction to Language contains an- swers to all of the exercises in the core text, and is available to instructors through the publisher.

Instructor Companion Web Site. This password-protected companion site contains useful resources for instructors—including chapter-level PowerPoint lecture slides, and a downloadable version of the Answer Key. Go to www. cengagebrain.com to access the site.

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xvi prefACe

Acknowledgments Our endeavor to maintain the currency of linguistic concepts in times of rapid progress has been invaluably enhanced by the following colleagues, to whom we owe an enormous debt of gratitude:

Natasha Abner University of California, American Sign Los Angeles Language Byron Ahn University of California, Syntax Los Angeles Susia Curtiss University of California, Neurolinguistics Los Angeles Kyle Johnson University of Massachusetts, Syntax Amherst Craig Melchert University of California, Historical linguistics Los Angeles Robyn Orfitelli University of California, Language acquisition Los Angeles Maria “Masha” Polinsky Harvard University Heritage languages Jessica Rett University of California, Semantics Los Angeles Erik Thomas North Carolina Sociolinguistics State University Kie Zuraw University of California, Phonology Los Angeles

Brook Danielle Lillehaugen undertook the daunting task of writing the Answer Key to the ninth and tenth editions. Her thoroughness, accuracy, and insightfulness in construing solutions to problems and discussions of issues are appreciated by all who avail themselves of this useful document, including us, the authors.

We also express deep appreciation for the incisive comments of six review- ers of the ninth edition, known to us as R2 through R7, whose frank assess- ment of the work, both critical and laudatory, heavily influenced this new edition:

Anna Szabolcsi, Department of Linguistics, New York University Kathryn Wolfe-Quintero, Department of World Languages, University of South Florida Nicholas Sobin, Department of Languages and Linguistics, University of Texas, El Paso Virginia Lewis, Department of Languages, Literature, and Speech Communication, Northern State University Ulrike Christofori, Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Educa- tion, San Joaquin Delta College Omer Silva-Villena, Departamento de Lenguas, Literatura, y Comuni- cación, Universidad de la Frontera, Chile

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prefACe xvii

We continue to be deeply grateful to the individuals who have sent us suggestions, corrections, criticisms, cartoons, language data, and exercises over the course of many editions. Their influence is still strongly felt in this tenth edition. The list is long and reflects the global, communal collabora- tion that a book about language—the most global of topics—merits. To each of you, our heartfelt thanks and appreciation. Know that in this tenth edition lives your contribution:1

Adam Albright, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Otto Santa Ana, Uni- versity of California, Los Angeles; Rebecca Barghorn, University of Oldenburg; Seyed Reza Basiroo, Islamic Azad University; Karol Boguszewski, Poland; Melanie Borchers, Universität Duisburg-Essen; Donna Brinton, Emeritus, University of California, Los Angeles; Daniel Bruhn, University of California, Berkeley; Lynn A. Burley, University of Central Arkansas; Ivano Caponigro, University of California, San Diego; Ralph S. Carlson, Azusa Pacific Univer- sity; Robert Channon, Purdue University; Judy Cheatham, Greensboro Col- lege; Leonie Cornips, Meertens Institute; Antonio Damásio, University of Southern California; Hanna Damásio, University of Southern California; Julie Damron, Brigham Young University; Rosalia Dutra, University of North Texas; Christina Esposito, Macalester College; Fred Field, California State University, Northridge; Susan Fiksdal, Evergreen State College; Beverly Olson Flanigan and her teaching assistants, Ohio University; Jackson Gandour, Purdue Uni- versity, West Lafayette; Jule Gomez de Garcia, California State University, San Marcos; Deborah Grant, Independent consultant; Loretta Gray, Central Washington University; Xiangdong Gu, Chongqing University; Helena Halmari, University of London; Karin Hedberg, Sam Houston State University; Sharon Hargus, University of Washington; Benjamin H. Hary, Emory University; Tometro Hopkins, Florida International University; Eric Hyman, University of North Carolina, Fayetteville; Dawn Ellen Jacobs, California Baptist Univer- sity; Seyed Yasser Jebraily, University of Tehran; Kyle Johnson, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Paul Justice, San Diego State University; Simin Karimi, University of Arizona; Edward Keenan, University of California, Los Angeles; Robert D. King, University of Texas; Sharon M. Klein, California State University, Northridge; Nathan Klinedinst, Institut Jean Nicod/CNRS, Paris; Otto Krauss, Jr., late, unaffiliated; Elisabeth Kuhn, Virginia Commonwealth University; Peter Ladefoged, late, University of California, Los Angeles; Mary Ann Larsen-Pusey, Fresno Pacific University; Rabbi Robert Layman, Philadelphia; Byungmin Lee, Korea; Virginia “Ginny” Lewis, Northern State University; David Lightfoot, Georgetown University; Ingvar Lofstedt, Univer- sity of California, Los Angeles; Giuseppe Longobardi, Università di Venezia; Harriet Luria, Hunter College, City University of New York; Jeff MacSwan, Arizona State University; Tracey McHenry, Eastern Washington University; Pamela Munro, University of California, Los Angeles; Tom Nash, Southern Oregon University; Carol Neidle, Boston University; Don Nilsen, Arizona State University; Reiko Okabe, Nihon University, Tokyo; John Olsson, Forensic

1Some affiliations may have changed or are unknown to us at this time.

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xviii prefACe

Linguistic Institute, Wales, U.K.; Anjali Pandey, Salisbury University; Barbara Hall Partee, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Fernanda Pratas, Uni- versidade Nova de Lisboa; Vincent D. Puma, Flagler College; Mousa Qasem, Kuwait University; Ian Roberts, Cambridge University; Tugba Rona, Istanbul International Community School; Natalie Schilling-Estes, Georgetown Univer- sity; Philippe Schlenker, Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris and New York University; Carson Schütze, University of California, Los Angeles; Bruce Sherwood, North Carolina State University; Koh Shimizu, Beijing; Dwan L. Shipley, Washington University; Muffy Siegel, Temple University; Andrew Simpson, University of Southern California; Neil Smith, University College London; Nancy Stenson, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities; Donca Steriade, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Mel Storm, Emporia State University; Nawaf Sulami, Univer- sity of Northern Iowa; Megha Sundara, University of California, Los Angeles; Robert (Bob) Trammell, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton; Dalys Vargas, College of Notre Dame; Willis Warren, Saint Edwards University; Donald K. Watkins, University of Kansas; Walt Wolfram, North Carolina State University; Maria Luisa Zubizarreta, University of Southern California.

Please forgive us if we have inadvertently omitted any names, and if we have spelled every name correctly, then we shall believe in miracles.

Finally, we wish to thank the editorial and production team at Cengage Learning. They have been superb and supportive in every way: Michael Rosenberg, publisher; Joan M. Flaherty, development editor; Daniel Saabye, content project manager; Erin Bosco, Assistant Editor; Janine Tangney, Media Editor.

Last but certainly not least, we acknowledge our debt to those we love and who love us and who inspire our work when nothing else will: Nina’s son, Michael; Robert’s children Zack and Emily together with a trio—soon to be a quartet—of grandchildren: Cedar, Luke, Juniper, and ?; our parents and siblings; and our dearly beloved and still deeply missed colleagues, Vicki Fromkin and Peter Ladefoged.

The responsibility for errors in fact or judgment is, of course, ours alone. We continue to be indebted to the instructors who have used the earlier editions and to their students, without whom there would be no tenth edition.

Robert Rodman Nina Hyams

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xix

VICTorIa FromkIn received her bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1944 and her M.A. and Ph.D. in linguis- tics from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1963 and 1965, respec- tively. She was a member of the faculty of the UCLA Department of Linguistics from 1966 until her death in 2000, and served as its chair from 1972 to 1976. From 1979 to 1989 she served as the UCLA Graduate Dean and Vice Chancel- lor of Graduate Programs. She was a visiting professor at the Universities of Stockholm, Cambridge, and Oxford. Professor Fromkin served as president of the Linguistics Society of America in 1985, president of the Association of Graduate Schools in 1988, and chair of the Board of Governors of the Acad- emy of Aphasia. She received the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award and the Professional Achievement Award, and served as the U.S. Delegate and a mem- ber of the Executive Committee of the International Permanent Committee of Linguistics (CIPL). She was an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the New York Academy of Science, the American Psychological Society, and the Acoustical Society of America, and in 1996 was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences. She published more than one hundred books, monographs, and papers on topics concerned with phonetics, phonology, tone languages, African languages, speech errors, processing models, aphasia, and the brain/mind/language interface—all research areas in which she worked. Professor Fromkin passed away on January 19, 2000, at the age of 76.

robErT rodman received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1961, a master’s degree in mathemat- ics in 1965, a master’s degree in linguistics in 1971, and his Ph.D. in linguis- tics in 1973. He has been on the faculties of the University of California at Santa Cruz, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Kyoto Industrial College in Japan, and North Carolina State University, where he is currently a professor of computer science. His research areas are forensic linguistics and computer speech processing. Robert resides in Raleigh, North Carolina, with his two rescued greyhounds Gracie and Shelby-Sue.

nIna HyamS received her bachelor’s degree in journalism from Boston Uni- versity in 1973 and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in linguistics from the Gradu- ate Center of the City University of New York in 1981 and 1983, respectively. She joined the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1983, where she is currently a professor of linguistics. Her main areas of research are childhood language development and syntax. She is author of the book

About the Authors

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xx ABout the Authors

Language Acquisition and the Theory of Parameters (D. Reidel Publishers, 1986), a milestone in language acquisition research. She has also published numerous articles on the development of syntax, morphology, and semantics in children. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of Utrecht and the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and has given numerous lectures throughout Europe and Japan. Nina lives in Los Angeles with her pal Spot, a rescued border collie mutt and his olde English bulldogge companion, the ever soulful Nellie.

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When we study human language, we are approaching what some might call the “human essence,” the distinctive qualities of mind that are, so far as we know, unique to man.

Whatever else people do when they come together—whether they play, fight, make love, or make automobiles—they talk. We live in a world of language. We talk to our friends, our associates, our wives and husbands, our lovers, our teach- ers, our parents, our rivals, and even our enemies. We talk face-to-face and over all manner of electronic media, and everyone responds with more talk. Hardly a moment of our waking lives is free from words, and even in our dreams we talk and are talked to. We also talk when there is no one to answer. Some of us talk aloud in our sleep. We talk to our pets and sometimes to ourselves.

The possession of language, perhaps more than any other attribute, distin- guishes humans from other animals. According to the philosophy expressed in the myths and religions of many peoples, language is the source of human life and power. To some people of Africa, a newborn child is a kintu, a “thing,” not yet a muntu, a “person.” It is only by the act of learning language that the child becomes a human being. To understand our humanity, we must understand the nature of language that makes us human. That is the goal of this book. We be- gin with a simple question: what does it mean to “know” a language?

Linguistic Knowledge Do we know only what we see, or do we see what we somehow already know?

CYNTHIA OZICK, “What Helen Keller Saw,” New Yorker, June 16 & 23, 2003

1 What Is Language?

NOAM CHOMSKY, Language and Mind, 1968

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2 CHAPTER 1 What Is Language?

When you know a language, you can speak and be understood by others who know that language. This means you are able to produce strings of sounds that signify certain meanings and to understand or interpret the sounds pro- duced by others. But language is much more than speech. Deaf people produce and understand sign languages just as hearing persons produce and under- stand spoken languages. The languages of the deaf communities throughout the world are equivalent to spoken languages, differing only in their modality of expression.

Most everyone knows at least one language. Five-year-old children are nearly as proficient at speaking and understanding as their parents. Yet the ability to carry out the simplest conversation requires profound knowledge that most speakers are unaware of. This is true for speakers of all languages, from Albanian to Zulu. A speaker of English can produce a sentence having two relative clauses without knowing what a relative clause is. For example:

My goddaughter who was born in Sweden and who now lives in Iowa is named Disa, after a Viking queen.

In a parallel fashion, a child can walk without understanding or being able to explain the principles of balance and support or the neurophysiological con- trol mechanisms that permit one to do so. The fact that we may know some- thing unconsciously is not unique to language.

Knowledge of the Sound System When I speak it is in order to be heard.

ROMAN JAKOBSON

Part of knowing a language means knowing what sounds (or signs1) are in that language and what sounds are not. One way this unconscious knowledge is revealed is by the way speakers of one language pronounce words from another language. If you speak only English, for example, you may substitute an English sound for a non-English sound when pronouncing “foreign” words like French ménage à trois. If you pronounce it as the French do, you are using sounds outside the English sound system.

French people speaking English often pronounce words like this and that as if they were spelled zis and zat. The English sound represented by the initial letters th in these words is not part of the French sound system, and the mispronunciation reveals the French speaker’s unconscious knowledge of this fact.

Knowing the sound system of a language includes more than knowing the inventory of sounds. It means also knowing which sounds may start a word,

1The sign languages of the deaf will be discussed throughout the book. A reference to “language,” then, unless speech sounds or spoken languages are specifically mentioned, includes both spoken and signed languages.

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Linguistic Knowledge 3

end a word, and follow each other. The name of a former president of Ghana was Nkrumah, pronounced with an initial sound like the sound ending the English word sink. While this is an English sound, no word in English be- gins with the nk sound. Speakers of English who have occasion to pronounce this name often mispronounce it (by Ghanaian standards) by inserting a short vowel sound, like Nekrumah or Enkrumah, making the word correspond to the English system. Children develop the sound patterns of their language very rapidly. A one-year-old learning English knows that nk cannot begin a word, just as a Ghanaian child of the same age knows that it can in his language.

We will learn more about sounds and sound systems in chapters 5 and 6.

Knowledge of Words Sounds and sound patterns of our language constitute only one part of our lin- guistic knowledge. Beyond that we know that certain sequences of sounds sig- nify certain concepts or meanings. Speakers of English understand what boy means, and that it means something different from toy or girl or pterodactyl. We also know that toy and boy are words, but moy is not. When you know a lan- guage, you know words in that language; that is, you know which sequences of sounds relate to specific meanings and which do not.

Arbitrary Relation of Form and Meaning The minute I set eyes on an animal I know what it is. I don’t have to reflect a moment; the right name comes out instantly. I seem to know just by the shape of the creature and the way it acts what animal it is. When the dodo came along he [Adam] thought it was a wildcat. But I saved him. I just spoke up in a quite natural way and said, “Well, I do declare if there isn’t the dodo!”

MARK TWAIN, Eve’s Diary, 1906

If you do not know a language, the words (and sentences) of that language will be mainly incomprehensible, because the relationship between speech sounds and the meanings they represent is, for the most part, an arbitrary one. When you are acquiring a language you have to learn that the sounds represented by the letters house signify the concept ; if you know French, this same meaning is represented by maison; if you know Russian, by dom; if you know Spanish, by casa. Similarly, is represented by hand in English, main in French, nsa in Twi, and ruka in Russian. The same sequence of sounds can represent different meanings in different languages. The word bolna means ‘speak’ in Hindu-Urdu and ‘aching’ in Russian; bis means ‘devil’ in Ukrainian and ‘twice’ in Latin; a pet is a domestic animal in English and a fart in Catalan; and the sequence of sounds taka means ‘hawk’ in Japanese, ‘fist’ in Quechua, ‘a small bird’ in Zulu, and ‘money’ in Bengali.

These examples show that the words of a particular language have the meanings they do only by convention. Despite what Eve would have us believe in Mark Twain’s satire Eve’s Diary, a pterodactyl could have been called ron, blick, or kerplunkity.

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4 CHAPTER 1 What Is Language?

HERMAN®/LaughingStock Licensing Inc., Ottawa, Canada

As Juliet says in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet:

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet;

This conventional and arbitrary relationship between the form (sounds) and meaning (concept) of a word is also true in sign languages. If you see someone using a sign language you do not know, it is doubtful that you will understand the message from the signs alone. A person who knows Chinese Sign Language (CSL) would find it difficult to understand American Sign Language (ASL), and vice versa.

Many signs were originally like miming, where the relationship between form and meaning is not arbitrary. Bringing the hand to the mouth to mean “eating,” as in miming, would be nonarbitrary as a sign. Over time these signs may change, just as the pronunciation of words changes, and the miming effect is lost. These signs become conventional, so that the shape or movement of the hands alone does not reveal the meaning of the signs.

There is some sound symbolism in language—that is, words whose pro- nunciation suggests their meanings. Most languages contain onomatopoeic words like buzz or murmur that imitate the sounds associated with the objects or actions they refer to. But even here, the sounds differ from language to language and reflect the particular sound system of the language. In English cock-a-doodle-doo is an onomatopoeic word whose meaning is the crow of a rooster, whereas in Finnish the rooster’s crow is kukkokiekuu. Forget gobble gobble when you’re in Istanbul; a turkey in Turkey goes glu-glu.

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Linguistic Knowledge 5

Sometimes particular sound combinations seem to relate to a particular concept. Many English words beginning with gl relate to sight, such as glare, glint, gleam, glitter, glossy, glaze, glance, glimmer, glimpse, and glisten. However, gl words and their like are a very small part of any language, and gl may have nothing to do with “sight” in another language, or even in other words in English, such as gladiator, glucose, glory, glutton, globe, and so on.

To know a language we must know words of that language. But no speaker knows all the entries in an unabridged dictionary and even if someone did he would still not know that language. Imagine trying to learn a foreign language by buying a dictionary and memorizing words. No matter how many words you learned, you would not be able to form the simplest phrases or sentences in the language, or understand a native speaker. No one speaks in isolated words. And even if you could manage to get your message across using a few words from a traveler’s dictionary, like “car—gas—where?” the best you could hope for is to be pointed in the direction of a gas station. If you were answered with a sentence it is doubtful that you would understand what was said or be able to look it up, because you would not know where one word ended and another began. Chapter 3 will discuss how words are put together to form phrases and sentences, and chapter 4 will explore word and sentence meanings.

The Creativity of Linguistic Knowledge All humans are artists, all of us . . . Our greatest masterpiece of art is the use of a language to create an entire virtual reality within our mind.

DON MIGUEL RUIZ, 2012

Albert: So are you saying that you were the best friend of the woman who was married to the man who represented your husband in divorce?

André: In the history of speech, that sentence has never been uttered before.

NEIL SIMON, The Dinner Party, 2000

Knowledge of a language enables you to combine sounds to form words, words to form phrases, and phrases to form sentences. You cannot buy a dictionary or phrase book of any language with all the sentences of the language. No dic- tionary can list all the possible sentences, because the number of sentences in a language is infinite. Knowing a language means being able to produce and understand new sentences never spoken before. This is the creative aspect of language. Not every speaker can create great literature, but everybody who knows a language can create and understand new sentences.

This creative aspect of language is quite easy to illustrate. If for every sen- tence in the language a longer sentence can be formed, then there is no limit to the number of sentences. In English you can say:

This is the house. or

This is the house that Jack built.

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6 CHAPTER 1 What Is Language?

or This is the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.

or This is the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.

And you need not stop there. How long, then, is the longest sentence? A speaker of English can say:

The old man came. or

The old, old, old, old, old man came. How many “olds” are too many? Seven? Twenty-three?

It is true that the longer these sentences become, the less likely we would be to hear or to say them. A sentence with 276 occurrences of “old” would be highly unusual in either speech or writing, even to describe Methuselah. But such a sentence is theoretically possible. If you know English, you have the knowledge to add any number of adjectives as modifiers to a noun and to form sentences with indefinite numbers of clauses, as in “the house that Jack built.”

All human languages permit their speakers to increase the length and com- plexity of sentences in these ways; creativity is a universal property of human language.

Our creative ability is reflected not only in what we say but also in our under- standing of new or novel sentences. Consider the following sentence: “Daniel Boone decided to become a pioneer because he dreamed of pigeon-toed giraffes and cross- eyed elephants dancing in pink skirts and green berets on the wind-swept plains of the Midwest.” You may not believe the sentence; you may question its logic; but you can understand it, although you probably never heard or read it before now.

In pointing out the creative aspect of language, Noam Chomsky, who many re- gard as the father of modern linguistics, argued persuasively against the view that language is a set of learned responses to stimuli. True, if someone steps on your toes you may automatically respond with a scream or a grunt, but these sounds are not part of language. They are involuntary reactions to stimuli. After we re- flexively cry out, we can then go on to say: “Thank you very much for stepping on my toe, because I was afraid I had elephantiasis and now that I can feel the pain I know I don’t,” or any one of an infinite number of sentences, because the particu- lar sentences we produce are not controlled by any stimulus.

Even some involuntary cries like “ouch” change according to the language we speak. Step on an Italian speaker’s toes and he will cry “ahi.” French speakers of- ten fill their pauses with the vowel sound that starts their word for ‘egg’—oeuf— a sound that does not occur in English. Even conversational fillers such as er, uh, and you know in English are constrained by the language in which they occur.

The fact of human linguistic creativity was well expressed more than 400 years ago by Huarte de San Juan (1530–1592): “Normal human minds are such that . . . without the help of anybody, they will produce 1,000 (sentences) they never heard spoke of . . . inventing and saying such things as they never heard from their masters, nor any mouth.”

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Linguistic Knowledge 7

Knowledge of Sentences and Nonsentences A person who knows a language has mastered a system of rules that assigns sound and meaning in a definite way for an infinite class of possible sentences.

NOAM CHOMSKY, Language and Mind, 1968

Our knowledge of language not only allows us to produce and understand an infinite number of well-formed (even if silly and illogical) sentences. It also permits us to distinguish well-formed (grammatical) from ill-formed (ungram- matical) sentences. This is further evidence of our linguistic creativity because ungrammatical sentences are typically novel, not sentences we have previously heard or produced, precisely because they are ungrammatical!

Consider the following sentences:

a. John kissed the little old lady who owned the shaggy dog. b. Who owned the shaggy dog John kissed the little old lady. c. John is difficult to love. d. It is difficult to love John. e. John is anxious to go. f. It is anxious to go John. g. John, who was a student, flunked his exams. h. Exams his flunked student a was who John.

If you were asked to put an asterisk or star before the examples that seemed ill formed or ungrammatical or “no good” to you, which ones would you mark? Our intuitive knowledge about what is or is not an allowable sentence in English convinces us to star b, f, and h. Which ones did you star?

Would you agree with the following judgments?

a. What he did was climb a tree. b. *What he thought was want a sports car.2 c. Drink your beer and go home! d. *What are drinking and go home? e. I expect them to arrive a week from next Thursday. f. *I expect a week from next Thursday to arrive them. g. Linus lost his security blanket. h. *Lost Linus security blanket his.

If you find the starred sentences unacceptable, as we do, you see your lin- guistic creativity at work.

These sentences also illustrate that not every string of words constitutes a well-formed sentence in a language. Sentences are not formed simply by placing one word after another in any order, but by organizing the words according to the rules of sentence formation of the language. These rules are finite in length and finite in number so that they can be stored in our finite brains. Yet, they

2The asterisk is used before examples that speakers find ungrammatical. This notation will be used throughout the book.

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8 CHAPTER 1 What Is Language?

permit us to form and understand an infinite set of new sentences. They also en- able us to judge whether a sequence of words is a well-formed sentence of our language or not. These rules are not determined by a judge or a legislature, or even taught in a grammar class. They are unconscious rules that we acquire as young children as we develop language and they are responsible for our linguis- tic creativity. Linguists refer to this set of rules as the grammar of the language.

Returning to the question we posed at the beginning of this chapter— what does it mean to know a language? It means knowing the sounds and meanings of many, if not all, of the words of the language, and the rules for their combination—the grammar, which generates infinitely many possible sentences. We will have more to say about these rules of grammar in later chapters.

Linguistic Knowledge and Performance “What’s one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one?” “I don’t know,” said Alice. “I lost count.” “She can’t do Addition,” the Red Queen interrupted.

LEWIS CARROLL, Through the Looking-Glass, 1871

Speakers of all languages have the knowledge to understand or produce sentences of any length. Here is an example from the ruling of a federal judge:

We invalidate the challenged lifetime ban because we hold as a matter of federal constitutional law that a state initiative measure cannot impose a severe limitation on the people’s fundamental rights when the issue of whether to impose such a limitation on these rights is put to the voters in a measure that is ambiguous on its face and that fails to mention in its text, the proponent’s ballot argument, or the state’s official description, the severe limitation to be imposed.

Theoretically there is no limit to the length of a sentence, but in practice very long sentences are highly improbable, the verbose federal judge not- withstanding. Evidently, there is a difference between having the knowledge required to produce or understand sentences of a language and applying this knowledge. It is a difference between our knowledge of words and gram- mar, which is our linguistic competence, and how we use this knowledge in actual speech production and comprehension, which is our linguistic performance.

Our linguistic knowledge permits us to form longer and longer sentences by joining sentences and phrases together or adding modifiers to a noun. However, there are physiological and psychological reasons that limit the number of ad- jectives, adverbs, clauses, and so on that we actually produce and understand. Speakers may run out of breath, lose track of what they have said, or die of old age before they are finished. Listeners may become tired, bored, disgusted, or confused, like poor Alice when being interrogated by the Red Queen.

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What Is Grammar? 9

When we speak, we usually wish to convey some message. At some stage in the act of producing speech, we must organize our thoughts into strings of words. Sometimes the message is garbled. We may stammer, or pause, or pro- duce slips of the tongue like saying preach seduction when speech production is meant (discussed in chapter 10).

What Is Grammar? We use the term “grammar” with a systematic ambiguity. On the one hand, the term refers to the explicit theory constructed by the linguist and proposed as a description of the speaker’s competence. On the other hand, it refers to this competence itself.

NOAM CHOMSKY AND MORRIS HALLE, The Sound Pattern of English, 1968

Descriptive Grammars There are no primitive languages. The great and abstract ideas of Christianity can be discussed even by the wretched Greenlanders.

JOHANN PETER SUESSMILCH, in a paper delivered before the Prussian Academy, 1756

The way we are using the word grammar differs from most common usages. In our sense, the grammar is the knowledge speakers have about the units and rules of their language—rules for combining sounds into words (called phonology), rules of word formation (called morphology), rules for combining words into phrases and phrases into sentences (called syntax), as well as the rules for assigning meaning (called semantics). The grammar, together with a mental dictionary (called a lexicon) that lists the words of the language, rep- resents our linguistic competence. To understand the nature of language we must understand the nature of grammar.

Every human being who speaks a language knows its grammar. When lin- guists wish to describe a language, they make explicit the rules of the grammar of the language that exist in the minds of its speakers. There will be some dif- ferences among speakers, but there must be shared knowledge too. The shared knowledge—the common parts of the grammar—makes it possible to com- municate through language. To the extent that the linguist’s description is a true model of the speakers’ linguistic capacity, it is a successful description of the grammar and of the language itself. Such a model is called a descriptive grammar. It does not tell you how you should speak; it describes your basic linguistic knowledge. It explains how it is possible for you to speak and under- stand and make judgments about well-formedness, and it tells what you know about the sounds, words, phrases, and sentences of your language.

When we say that a sentence is grammatical we mean that it conforms to the rules of the mental grammar (as described by the linguist); when we say that it is ungrammatical, we mean it deviates from the rules in some way. If, however, we posit a rule for English that does not agree with your intuitions

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10 CHAPTER 1 What Is Language?

as a speaker, then the grammar we are describing differs in some way from the mental grammar that represents your linguistic competence; that is, your lan- guage is not the one described. No language or variety of a language (called a dialect) is superior or inferior to any other in a linguistic sense. Every grammar is equally complex, logical, and capable of producing an infinite set of sen- tences to express any thought. If something can be expressed in one language or one dialect, it can be expressed in any other language or dialect. It might involve different means and different words, but it can be expressed. (We will have more to say about dialects in chapter 7.)

Prescriptive Grammars It is certainly the business of a grammarian to find out, and not to make, the laws of a language.

JOHN FELL, Essay towards an English Grammar, 1784

Just read the sentence aloud, Amanda, and listen to how it sounds. If the sentence sounds OK, go with it. If not, rearrange the pieces. Then throw out the rule books and go to bed.

JAMES KILPATRICK, “Writer’s Art” (syndicated newspaper column), 1998

Any fool can make a rule

And every fool will mind it

HENRY DAVID THOREAU, journal entry, 1860

Not all grammarians, past or present, share the view that all grammars are equal. Language “purists” of all ages believe that some versions of a language are better than others, that there are certain “correct” forms that all edu- cated people should use in speaking and writing, and that language change is corruption. The Greek Alexandrians in the first century, the Arabic scholars at Basra in the eighth century, and numerous English grammarians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries held this view. They wished to prescribe rather than describe the rules of grammar, which gave rise to the writing of prescriptive grammars.

In the Renaissance a new middle class emerged who wanted their children to speak the dialect of the “upper” classes. This desire led to the publication of many prescriptive grammars. In 1762 Bishop Robert Lowth wrote A Short Introduction to English Grammar with Critical Notes. Lowth prescribed a num- ber of new rules for English, many of them influenced by his personal taste. Before the publication of his grammar, practically everyone—upper-class, middle-class, and lower-class—said I don’t have none and You was wrong about that. Lowth, however, decided that “two negatives make a positive” and there- fore one should say I don’t have any; and that even when you is singular it should be followed by the plural were. Many of these prescriptive rules were based on Latin grammar and made little sense for English. Because Lowth

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What Is Grammar? 11

was influential and because the rising new class wanted to speak “properly,” many of these new rules were legislated into English grammar, at least for the prestige dialect—that variety of the language spoken by people in positions of power.

The view that dialects that regularly use double negatives are inferior can- not be justified if one looks at the standard dialects of other languages in the world. Romance languages, for example, use double negatives, as the follow- ing examples from French and Italian show:

French: Je ne veux parler avec personne. I not want speak with no-one.

Italian: Non voglio parlare con nessuno. not I-want speak with no-one.

English translation: “I don’t want to speak with anyone.”

Prescriptive grammars such as Lowth’s are different from the descriptive grammars we have been discussing. Their goal is not to describe the rules peo- ple know, but to tell them what rules they should follow. The great British Prime Minister Winston Churchill is credited with this response to the “rule” against ending a sentence with a preposition: “This is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put.”

Today our bookstores are populated with books by language purists attempting to “save the English language.” They criticize those who use enor- mity to mean ‘enormous’ instead of ‘monstrously evil.’ But languages change in the course of time and words change meaning. Language change is a natural process, as we discuss in chapter 8. Over time enormity was used increasingly used to mean ‘enormous,’ and now that President Barack Obama has used it that way (in his victory speech of November 4, 2008) and that J. K. Rowling uses it similarly in the immensely popular Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, that usage will gain acceptance. Still, the “saviors” of the English language will never disappear. They will continue to blame television, the schools, and even the National Council of Teachers of English for failing to preserve the standard language, and are likely to continue to dis (oops, we mean disparage) any- one who suggests that African American English (AAE)3 and other dialects are viable, complete languages.

All human languages and dialects are fully expressive, complete, and logi- cal, as much as they were two hundred or two thousand years ago. Hopefully (another frowned-upon usage), this book will convince you that all languages and dialects are rule-governed, whether spoken by rich or poor, powerful or weak, learned or illiterate. Grammars and usages of particular groups in so- ciety may be dominant for social and political reasons, but from a linguistic (scientific) perspective they are neither superior nor inferior to the grammars and usages of less prestigious members of society.

Having said all this, it is undeniable that the standard dialect (defined in chapter 7) may indeed be a better dialect for someone wishing to obtain a

3AAE is also called African American Vernacular English (AAVE), Ebonics, and Black English (BE). It is spoken by some (but by no means all) African Americans. It is discussed in chapter 7.

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12 CHAPTER 1 What Is Language?

particular job or achieve a position of social prestige. In a society where “lin- guistic profiling” is used to discriminate against speakers of a minority dialect, it may behoove those speakers to learn the prestige dialect rather than wait for social change. But linguistically, prestige and standard dialects do not have superior grammars.

Finally, all of the preceding remarks apply to spoken language. Writing is another story (see chapter 12). Writing follows certain prescriptive rules of grammar, usage, and style that the spoken language does not, and is subject to little, if any, dialectal variation. And writing is not acquired naturally through simple exposure to others speaking the language as spoken languages are (see chapter 9), but must be taught.

Teaching Grammars I don’t want to talk grammar. I want to talk like a lady.

G. B. SHAW, Pygmalion, 1912

The descriptive grammar of a language attempts to describe the rules internal- ized by a speaker of that language. It is different from a teaching grammar, which is used to learn another language or dialect. Teaching grammars can be helpful to people who do not speak the standard or prestige dialect, but find it would be advantageous socially and economically to do so. They are used in schools in foreign language classes. This kind of grammar gives the words and their pronunciations, and explicitly states the rules of the language, especially where they differ from the language of instruction.

It is often difficult for adults to learn a second language without formal instruction, even when they have lived for an extended period in a country where the language is spoken. (Second language acquisition is discussed in more detail in chapter 9.) Teaching grammars assume that the student already knows one language and compares the grammar of the target language with the grammar of the native language. The meaning of a word is provided by a gloss—the parallel word in the student’s native language, such as maison, ‘house’ in French. It is assumed that the student knows the meaning of the gloss ‘house’ and so also the meaning of the word maison.

Sounds of the target language that do not occur in the native language are often described by reference to known sounds. Thus the student might be aided in producing the French sound u in the word tu by instructions such as “Round your lips while producing the vowel sound in tea.”

The rules about how to put words together to form grammatical sentences also refer to the learners’ knowledge of their native language. For example, the teaching grammar Learn Zulu by Sibusiso Nyembezi states that “The difference between singular and plural is not at the end of the word but at the beginning of it,” and warns that “Zulu does not have the indefinite and definite articles ‘a’ and ‘the.’” Such statements assume students know the rules of their own grammar, in this case English. Although such grammars might be considered

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What Is Grammar? 13

prescriptive in the sense that they attempt to teach the student what is or is not a grammatical construction in the new language, their aim is different from grammars that attempt to change the rules or usage of a language that is already known by the speaker.

This book is not primarily concerned with either prescriptive or teaching grammars. However, these kinds of grammars are considered in chapter 7 in the discussion of standard and nonstandard dialects.

Universal Grammar In a grammar there are parts that pertain to all languages; these components form what is called the general grammar. In addition to these general (universal) parts, there are those that belong only to one particular language; and these constitute the particular grammars of each language.

CÉSAR CHESNEAU DU MARSAIS, c. 1750

There are rules of particular languages, such as English or Arabic or Zulu, that form part of the individual grammars of these languages, and then there are rules that hold in all languages. The universal rules are of particular interest because they give us a window into the human “faculty of language” which enables us to learn and use any particular language.

Interest in language universals has a long history. Early scholars encouraged research into the nature of language in general and promoted the idea of gen- eral grammar as distinct from special grammar. General grammar was to reveal those features common to all languages.

Students trying to learn Latin, Greek, French, or Swahili as a second language are generally so focused on learning aspects of the new lan- guage that differ from their native language that they may be skeptical of the universal laws of language. Yet there are many things that all lan- guage learners know unconsciously even before they begin to learn a new language. They know that a language has its own set of sounds, perhaps thought of as its alphabet, that combine according to certain patterns to form words, and that the words themselves recombine to form phrases and sentences. The learner will expect to find verbs and nouns—as these are universal grammatical categories; she will know that the language— like all languages—has a way of negating, forming questions, issuing com- mands, referring to past or future time, and more generally, has a system of rules that will allow her to produce and understand an infinite number of sentences.

The more linguists explore the intricacies of human language, the more evi- dence accumulates to support Chomsky’s view that there is a Universal Gram- mar (UG) that is part of the biologically endowed human language faculty. We can think of UG as the blueprint that all languages follow that forms part of the child’s innate capacity for language learning. It specifies the different com- ponents of the grammar and their relations, how the different rules of these

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14 CHAPTER 1 What Is Language?

components are constructed, how they interact, and so on. A major aim of lin- guistic theory is to discover the nature of UG.

The linguist’s goal is to reveal the “laws of human language,” as the physicist’s goal is to reveal the “laws of the physical universe.” The complexity of language undoubtedly means this goal will never be fully achieved. All scientific theories are incomplete, and new hypotheses must be proposed to account for new data. Theories are continually changing as new discoveries are made. Just as physics was enlarged by Einstein’s theories of relativity, so grows the linguistic theory of UG as new dis- coveries shed new light on the nature of human language. The compara- tive study of many different languages is of central importance to this enterprise.

The Development of Grammar How comes it that human beings, whose contacts with the world are brief and personal and limited, are nevertheless able to know as much as they do know?

BERTRAND RUSSELL, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, 1948

Linguistic theory is concerned not only with describing the knowledge that an adult speaker has of his or her language, but also with explaining how this knowledge is acquired.

All typically developing children acquire (at least one) language in a rela- tively short period with apparent ease. They do this despite the fact that par- ents and other caregivers do not provide them with any specific language instruction. Indeed, it is often remarked that children seem to “pick up” language just from hearing it spoken around them. Children are language- learning virtuosos—whether a child is male or female, from a rich family or a disadvantaged one, grows up on a farm or in the city, attends day care or has home care, none of these factors fundamentally affects the way language develops. Children can acquire any language they are exposed to with compa- rable ease—English, Dutch, French, Swahili, Japanese—and even though each of these languages has its own peculiar characteristics, children learn them all in very much the same way. For example, all children go through a babbling stage; their babbles gradually give way to words, which then combine to form simple sentences and then sentences of ever-increasing complexity. The same child who may be unable to tie her shoes or even count to five has managed to master the complex grammatical structures of her language and acquire a substantial lexicon.

How children accomplish this remarkable cognitive feat is a topic of intense interest to linguists. The child’s inexorable path to adult linguistic knowledge and the uniformity of the acquisition process point to a sub- stantial innate component to language development, what we referred to earlier as Universal Grammar. Children acquire language as quickly and effortlessly as they do because they do not have to figure out all the gram- matical rules, only those that are specific to their particular language. The

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What Is Grammar? 15

universal properties—the laws of language—are part of their biological endowment. In chapter 9 we will discuss language acquisition in more detail.

Sign Languages: Evidence for Language Universals It is not the want of organs that [prevents animals from making] . . . known their thoughts . . . for it is evident that magpies and parrots are able to utter words just like ourselves, and yet they cannot speak as we do, that is, so as to give evidence that they think of what they say. On the other hand, men who, being born deaf and mute . . . are destitute of the organs which serve the others for talking, are in the habit of themselves inventing certain signs by which they make themselves understood.

RENÉ DESCARTES, Discourse on Method, 1637

The sign languages of deaf communities provide some of the best evidence to support the view that all languages are governed by the same universal prin- ciples. Current research on sign languages has been crucial to understanding the biological underpinnings of human language acquisition and use.

The major language of the deaf community in the United States is American Sign Language (ASL). ASL is an outgrowth of the sign language used in France and brought to the United States in 1817 by the great educator Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet.

ASL and other sign languages do not use sounds to express meanings. Instead, they are visual-gestural systems that use hand, body, and facial gestures as the forms used to represent words and grammatical rules. Sign languages are fully developed languages, and signers create and comprehend unlimited numbers of new sentences, just as speakers of spoken languages do. Signed languages have their own grammatical rules and a mental lexicon of signs, all encoded through a system of gestures, and are otherwise equiva- lent to spoken languages. Signers are affected by performance factors just as speakers are; slips of the hand occur similar to slips of the tongue. Finger fum- blers amuse signers just as tongue twisters amuse speakers. These and other language games play on properties of the “sound” systems of the spoken and signed languages.

Deaf children who are exposed to signed languages acquire them just as hearing children acquire spoken languages, going through the same linguistic stages, including the babbling stage. Deaf children babble with their hands, just as hearing children babble with their vocal tracts. Neurological studies show that signed languages are organized in the brain in the same way as spoken languages, despite their visual modality. We discuss the brain basis of language in chapter 10.

In short, signed languages resemble spoken languages in all major aspects. This universality is expected because, regardless of the modality in which it is expressed, language is a biologically based ability. Our knowledge, use and acquisition of language are not dependent on the ability to produce and hear sounds, but on a far more abstract cognitive capacity.

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16 CHAPTER 1 What Is Language?

What Is Not (Human) Language It is a very remarkable fact that there are none so depraved and stupid, without even excepting idiots, that they cannot arrange different words together, forming of them a statement by which they make known their thoughts; while, on the other hand, there is no other animal, however perfect and fortunately circumstanced it may be, which can do the same.

RENÉ DESCARTES, Discourse on Method and Meditation on First Philosophy

All languages share certain fundamental properties, and children naturally acquire these languages—whether they are spoken or signed. Both modalities are equally accessible to the child because human beings are designed for human language. But what of the “languages” of other species: Are they like human languages? Can other species be taught a human language?

The Birds and the Bees Teach me half the gladness That thy brain must know; Such harmonious madness From my lips would flow, The world should listen then, as I am listening now.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, 1792–1822, To a Skylark

Most animal species possess some kind of communication system. Humans also communicate through systems other than language such as head nodding or facial expressions. The question is whether the communication systems used by other species are at all like human language with its very specific proper- ties, most notably its creative aspect.

Many species have a non-vocal system of communication. Among cer- tain species of spiders there is a complex system for courtship. Before ap- proaching his ladylove, the male spider goes through an elaborate series of gestures to tell her that he is indeed a spider and a suitable mate, and not a crumb or a fly to be eaten. These gestures are invariant. One never finds a creative spider changing or adding to the courtship ritual of his species.

A similar kind of gestural language is found among the fiddler crabs. There are forty species, and each uses its own claw-waving movement to signal to another member of its “clan.” The timing, movement, and posture of the body never change from one time to another or from one crab to another within the particular variety. Whatever the signal means, it is fixed. Only one meaning can be conveyed.

An essential property of human language not shared by the communica- tion systems of spiders, crabs and other animals is its discreteness. Human languages are not simply made up of a fixed set of invariant signs. They are composed of discrete units—sounds, words, phrases—that are combined

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What Is Not (Human) Language 17

according to the rules of the grammar of the language. The word top in English has a particular meaning, but it also has individual parts that can be rearranged to produce other meaningful sequences—pot or opt. Simi- larly, the phrase the cat on the mat means something different from the mat on the cat. We can arrange and rearrange the units of our language to form an infinite number of expressions. The creativity of human language de- pends on discreteness.

In contrast to crabs and spiders, birds communicate vocally and bird- songs have always captured the human imagination. Musicians and compos- ers have been moved by these melodies, sometimes imitating them in their compositions, other times incorporating birdsongs directly into the music. Birdsongs have also inspired poets as in Shelley’s To a Skylark, not to mention cartoonists.

Birds do not sing for our pleasure, however. Their songs and calls com- municate important information to other members of the species and some- times to other animals. Birdcalls (consisting of one or more short notes) convey danger, feeding, nesting, flocking, and so on. Bird songs (more com- plex patterns of notes) are used to stake out territory and to attract mates. Like the messages of crabs and spiders, however, there is no evidence of any internal structure to these songs; they cannot be segmented into dis- crete meaningful parts and rearranged to encode different messages as can the words, phrases, and sentences of human language. In his territorial song the European robin alternates between high-pitched and low-pitched notes to indicate how strongly he feels about defending his territory. The different alternations indicate intensity and nothing more. The robin is creative in his ability to sing the same song in different ways, but not creative in his abil- ity to use the same units of the system to express different messages with different meanings. Recently, scientists have observed that finches will react when the units of a familiar song are rearranged. It is unclear, however, whether the birds recognize a violation of the rules of the song or are just responding to a pattern change.

Though crucial to the birds’ survival, the messages conveyed by these songs and calls are limited, relating only to a bird’s immediate environment and needs. Like the dog in Russell’s quote above, birds cannot tell us their story,

Patrick McDonnell/King Features Syndicate

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18 CHAPTER 1 What Is Language?

however beautifully they sing. Human language is different of course. Our words and sentences are not simply responses to internal and external stimuli. If you’re tired you may yawn, but you may also say “I’m tired,” or “I’m going to bed,” or “I’m going to Starbucks for a double espresso.” Notably, you also have the right to remain silent, or talk about things completely unrelated to your physical state—the weather, the movie you saw last night, your plans for the weekend, or most interesting of all, your linguistics class.

The linguists call this property of human language displacement: the ca- pacity to talk (or sign) messages that are unrelated to here and now. Displace- ment and discreteness are two fundamental properties that distinguish human language from the communication systems of birds and other animals.

One respect in which birdsongs do resemble human languages is in their de- velopment. In many bird species the full adult version of the birdsong is acquired in several stages, as it is for children acquiring language. The young bird sings a simplified version of the song shortly after hatching and then learns the more detailed, complex version by hearing adults sing. However, he must hear the adult song during a specific fixed period after birth—the period differs from spe- cies to species; otherwise song acquisition does not occur. For example, the chaf- finch is unable to learn the more detailed song elements after ten months of age. A baby nightingale in captivity may be trained to sing melodiously by another nightingale, a “teaching bird,” but only before its tail feathers are grown. These birds show a critical period for acquiring their “language” similar to the critical period for human language acquisition, which we will discuss in chapters 9 and 10. As with human language acquisition, the development of the birdsongs of these species involves an interaction of both learned and innate structure.

An interesting consequence of the fact that some birdsongs are partially learned means that variation can develop. There can be “regional dialects” within the same species, and as with humans, these dialects are transmitted from parents to offspring. Researchers have noted, in fact, that dialect differ- ences may be better preserved in songbirds than in humans because there is no homogenization of regional accents due to radio or TV. We will discuss human language dialects in chapter 7.

Honeybees have a particularly interesting signaling system. When a forager bee returns to the hive she communicates to other bees where a source of food is located by performing a dance on a wall of the hive that reveals the location and quality of the food source. For one species of Italian honeybee, the danc- ing may assume one of three possible patterns: round (which indicates loca- tions near the hive, within 20 feet or so); sickle (which indicates locations at 20 to 60 feet from the hive); and tail-wagging (for distances that exceed 60 feet). The number of repetitions per minute of the basic pattern in the tail-wagging dance indicates the precise distance: the slower the repetition rate, the longer the distance. The number of repetitions and the intensity with which the bee dances the round dance indicates the richness of the food source: the more rep- etitions and the livelier the bee dance the more food to be gotten.

Bee dances are discrete in some sense, consisting of separate parts and in principle they can communicate infinitely many different messages, like human language; but unlike human language the topic is always the same, namely food. They lack the displacement property. As experiments have shown, when

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What Is Not (Human) Language 19

a bee is forced to walk to a food source rather than fly, she will communicate a distance many times farther away than the food source actually is. The bee has no way of communicating the special circumstances of its trip. This absence of creativity makes the bee’s dance qualitatively different from human language.

As we will discuss in chapter 10, the human language ability is rooted in the human brain. Just like human language, the communication system of each species is determined by its biology. This raises the interesting question of whether it is possible for one species to acquire the language of another; more specifically, can animals learn human language?

Can Animals Learn Human Language? It is a great baboon, but so much like man in most things. . . . I do believe it already understands much English; and I am of the mind it might be taught to speak or make signs.

ENTRY IN SAMUEL PEPYS’S DIARY, 1661

The idea of talking animals is as old and as widespread among human societ- ies as language itself. All cultures have legends in which some animal speaks. All over West Africa, children listen to folktales in which a “spider-man” is the hero. “Coyote” is a favorite figure in many Native American tales, and many an animal takes the stage in Aesop’s famous fables. Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse, and Donald Duck are icons of American culture. The fictional Doctor Doolittle communicated with all manner of animals, from giant snails to tiny sparrows, as did Saint Francis of Assisi.

In reality, various species show abilities that seem to mimic aspects of hu- man language. Talking birds such as parrots and mynahs can be taught to faithfully reproduce words and phrases, but this does not mean they have ac- quired a human language. As the poet William Cowper put it: “Words learned by rote a parrot may rehearse; but talking is not always to converse.”

Talking birds do not decompose their imitations into discrete units. Polly and Molly do not rhyme for a parrot. They are as different as hello and good- bye. If Polly learns “Polly wants a cracker” and “Polly wants a doughnut” and also learns to say whiskey and bagel, she will not then spontaneously produce “Polly wants whiskey” or “Polly wants a bagel” or “Polly wants whiskey and a bagel.” If she learns cat and cats, and dog and dogs, and then learns the word parrot, she will not be able to form the plural parrots as children do. Unlike every developing child, a parrot cannot generalize from particular instances and cannot therefore produce sentences he has not been directly taught. A parrot—even a very verbose one—cannot produce an unlimited set of utter- ances from a finite set of units. The imitative utterances of talking birds mean nothing to the birds; these utterances have no communicative function. It is clear that simply knowing how to produce a sequence of speech sounds is not the same as knowing a language. But what about animals that appear to learn the meanings of words? Do they have human language?

Dogs can easily be taught to respond to commands such as heel, sit, fetch, and so on, and even seem to understand object words like ball, toy, and so on. Indeed, in 2004 German psychologists reported on a Border collie named

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20 CHAPTER 1 What Is Language?

Rico who had acquired a 200-word vocabulary (containing both German and English words). When asked to fetch a particular toy from a pile of many toys Rico was correct over 90% of the time. When told to fetch a toy whose name he had not been previously taught, Rico could match the novel name to a new toy among a pile of familiar toys about 70% of the time—a rate comparable to that of young children performing a similar novel name task. More recently, a border collie named Chaser who lives in South Carolina is reported to under- stand the names of 1022 toys! Chaser was taught these names over a 3-year period. And like Rico he is able to connect a novel name to a new toy placed in a huge pile of toys whose names he already knows.

Rico and Chaser are clearly very intelligent dogs and their name recognition skills are amazing. It is unlikely, however, that Rico or Chaser (or Spot or Rover) understand the meanings of words or have acquired a symbolic system in the way that children do. Rather, they learn to associate a particular sequence of sounds with an object or action. For Chaser and Rico the name ‘Sponge Bob,’ for example, might mean something like ‘fetch Sponge Bob’—what the dog has been taught to do. The young child who has learned the name ‘Sponge Bob’ knows that it refers to a particular toy or TV character independent of any a par- ticular game or context. The philosopher Bertrand Russell summed up the dog rather insightfully, noting that “. . . however eloquently he may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were honest though poor.”

In their natural habitat, chimpanzees, gorillas, and other nonhuman pri- mates communicate with each other through visual, auditory, olfactory, and tactile signals. Many of these signals seem to have meanings associated with the animals’ immediate environment or emotional state. They can signal dan- ger and can communicate aggressiveness and subordination. However, the natural sounds and gestures produced by all nonhuman primates are highly stereotyped and limited in the type and number of messages they convey. Their signals cannot be broken down into discrete units and rearranged to create new meanings. They also lack the property of displacement. Intelligent though they are, these animals have no way of expressing the anger they felt yesterday or the anticipation of tomorrow.

Even though primate communication systems are quite limited, many people have been interested in the question of whether they have the latent capacity to acquire complex linguistic systems similar to human language. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, there were a number of studies designed to test whether nonhuman primates could learn human language, including both words (or signs) and the grammatical rules for their combination.

In early experiments researchers raised chimpanzees in their own homes alongside their children, in order to recreate the natural environment in which human children acquire language. The chimps were unable to vocalize words despite the efforts of their caretakers, though they did achieve the ability to understand a number of individual words. Primate vocal tracts do not permit them to pronounce many different sounds but because of their manual dexterity, sign language was an attractive alternative to test their cognitive linguistic abil- ity. Starting with a chimpanzee named Washoe, and continuing over the years with a gorilla named Koko and another chimp ironically named Nim Chimpsky

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Language and Thought 21

(after Noam Chomsky—and the subject of a major motion picture, Project Nim, released Aug. 2011), intense efforts were made to teach them American Sign Language. Though the primates achieved small successes such as the ability to string two signs together, and occasionally showed flashes of creativity, none remotely reached the qualitative linguistic ability of a human child.

Similar results were obtained in attempting to teach primates artificial lan- guages designed to resemble human languages in some respects. Common chimpanzees Sarah, Lana, Sherman, Austin, and more recently, a male bonobo (or pygmy chimpanzee) named Kanzi, were taught languages whose “words” were plastic chips, or keys on a keyboard, that could be arranged into “sen- tences.” The researchers were particularly interested in the ability of primates to communicate using such abstract symbols.

These experiments also came under scrutiny. Questions arose over what kind of knowledge Sarah and Lana and Kanzi were showing with their symbol manipulations and to what extent their responses were being inadvertently cued by experimenters. Many scientists, including some who were directly in- volved with these projects, have concluded that the creative ability that is so much a part of human language is not evidenced by the chimps’ use of the artificial languages. As often happens in science, the search for the answers to one kind of question leads to answers to other questions. The linguistic ex- periments with primates have led to many advances in our understanding of primate cognitive ability. Researchers have gone on to investigate other ca- pacities of the chimp mind, such as causality. These studies also point out how remarkable it is that within just a few short years, without the benefit of explicit guidance and regardless of personal circumstances, all human children are able to create new and complex sentences never spoken or heard before.

Language and Thought It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought—that is, a thought diverging from the principles of IngSoc— should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.

GEORGE ORWELL, appendix to 1984, 1949

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922

Many people are fascinated by the question of how language relates to thought. It is natural to imagine that something as powerful and fundamental to human nature as language would influence how we think about or perceive the world around us. This is clearly reflected in the appendix of George Orwell’s master- piece 1984, quoted above. Over the years there have been many claims made regarding the relationship between language and thought. The claim that the structure of a language influences how its speakers perceive the world around them is most closely associated with the linguist Edward Sapir and his student

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22 CHAPTER 1 What Is Language?

Benjamin Whorf, and is therefore referred to as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. In 1929 Sapir wrote:

Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society . . . we see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.4

Whorf made even stronger claims:

The background linguistic system (in other words, the grammar) of each language is not merely the reproducing instrument for voicing ideas but rather is itself the shaper of ideas, the program and guide for the individual’s mental activity, for his analysis of impressions, for his synthesis of his mental stock in trade . . . We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages.5

The strongest form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is called linguistic determinism because it holds that the language we speak determines how we perceive and think about the world. According to this view language acts like a filter on reality. One of Whorf’s best-known claims in support of linguis- tic determinism was that the Hopi Indians do not perceive time in the same way as speakers of European languages because the Hopi language does not make the grammatical distinctions of tense that, for example, English does with words and word endings such as did, will, shall, -s, -ed, and -ing.

A weaker form of the hypothesis is linguistic relativism, which says that different languages encode different categories and that speakers of different languages therefore think about the world in different ways. For example, lan- guages break up the color spectrum at different points. In Navaho, blue and green are one word. Russian has different words for dark blue (siniy) and light blue (goluboy), while in English we need to use the additional words dark and light to express the difference. The American Indian language Zuni does not distinguish between the colors yellow and orange.

Languages also differ in how they express locations. For example, in Italian you ride “in” a bicycle and you go “in” a country while in English you ride “on” a bicycle and you go “to” a country. In English we say that a ring is placed “on” a finger and a finger is placed “in” the ring. Korean, on the other hand, has one word for both situations, kitta, which expresses the idea of a tight-fitting relation between the two objects. Spanish has two different words for the inside of a corner (rincón) and the outside of a corner (esquina).

That languages show linguistic distinctions in their lexicons and grammar is certain, and we will see many examples of this in later chapters. The question is to what extent—if at all—such distinctions determine or influence the thoughts and perceptions of speakers. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is controversial, but

4Sapir, E. 1929. Language. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, p. 207. 5Whorf, B. L., and J. B. Carroll. 1956. Language, thought, and reality: Selected writings. Cam- bridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Language and Thought 23

it is clear that the strong form of this hypothesis is false. Peoples’ thoughts and perceptions are not determined by the words and structures of their language. We are not prisoners of our linguistic systems. If speakers were unable to think about something for which their language had no specific word, translations would be impossible, as it would be to learn a second language. English may not have separate words for the inside of a corner and the outside of a corner, but we are perfectly able to express these concepts using more than one word. In fact, we just did. If we could not think about something for which we do not have words, how would infants ever learn their first words, much less languages?

Many of the specific claims of linguistic determinism have been shown to be wrong. For example, the Hopi language may not have words and word endings for specific tenses, but the language has other expressions for time, including words for the days of the week, parts of the day, yesterday and tomorrow, lunar phases, seasons, etc. The Hopi people use various kinds of calendars and various devices for time-keeping based on the sundial. Clearly, they have a sophisticated concept of time despite the lack of a tense system in the language.

The Munduruku, an indigenous people of the Brazilian Amazon, have no words in their language for triangle, square, rectangle, or other geometric con- cepts, except circle. The only terms to indicate direction are words for up- stream, downstream, sunrise, and sunset. Yet Munduruku children understand many principles of geometry as well as American children, whose language is rich in geometric and spatial words.

Though languages differ in their color words, speakers can readily perceive colors that are not named in their language. Grand Valley Dani is a language spoken in New Guinea with only two color words, black and white (dark and light). In experimental studies, however, speakers of the language showed rec- ognition of the color red, and they did better with fire-engine red than off-red. This would not be possible if their color perceptions were fixed by their lan- guage. Our perception of color is determined by the structure of the human eye, not by the structure of language. A source of dazzling linguistic creativity is to be found at the local paint store where literally thousands of colors are given names like soft pumpkin, Durango dust, and lavender lipstick.

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24 CHAPTER 1 What Is Language?

The Whorfian claim that is perhaps most familiar is that the Eskimo language Inuit has many more words than English has for snow and that this affects the worldview of the Inuit people. However, anthropologists have shown that Inuit has no more words for snow than English does: around a dozen, including sleet, blizzard, slush, and flurry. But even if it did, this would not show that language conditions the Inuits’ experience of the world, but rather that experience with a particular world creates the need for certain words. In this respect the Inuit speaker is no different from the computer programmer, who has a technical vocabulary for Internet protocols, or the linguist, who has many specialized words regarding language. In this book we will introduce you to many new words and linguistic concepts, and surely you will learn them! This would be impossible if your thoughts about language were determined by the linguistic vocabulary you now have.

In our understanding of the world we are certainly not “at the mercy of whatever language we speak,” as Sapir suggested. However, we may ask whether the language we speak influences our cognition in some way. In the domain of color categorization, for example, it has been shown that if a lan- guage lacks a word for red, say, then it’s harder for speakers to reidentify red objects. In other words, having a label seems to make it easier to store or access information in memory. Similarly, experiments show that Russian speakers are better at discriminating light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy) objects than English speakers, whose language does not make a lexical distinction between these categories. These results show that words can influence simple percep- tual tasks in the domain of color discrimination. Upon reflection, this may not be a surprising finding. Colors exist on a continuum, and the way we segment into “different” colors happens at arbitrary points along this spectrum. Because there is no physical motivation for these divisions, this may be the kind of situ- ation where language could show an effect.

The question has also been raised regarding the possible influence of gram- matical gender on how people think about objects. Many languages, such as Spanish and German, classify nouns as masculine or feminine; in Spanish “key” is la llave (feminine) and “bridge” is el puente (masculine). Some psychologists have suggested that speakers of gender-marking languages think about objects as having gender, much like people or animals have. In one study, speakers of German and Spanish were asked to describe various objects using English ad- jectives (the speakers were proficient in English). In general, they used more masculine adjectives—independently rated as such—to describe objects that are grammatically masculine in their own language. For example, Spanish speakers described bridges (el puente) as big, dangerous, long, strong, and sturdy. In German the word for bridge is feminine (die Brücke) and German speakers used more feminine adjectives such as beautiful, elegant, fragile, peaceful, pretty, and slender. Interestingly, it has been noted that English speakers, too, make consistent judg- ments about the gender of certain objects (ships are “she”) even though English has no grammatical gender on common nouns. It may be, then, that regardless of the language spoken, humans have a tendency to anthropomorphize objects and this tendency is somehow enhanced if the language itself has grammatical gender. Though it is too early to come to any firm conclusions, the results of these and similar studies seem to support a weak version of linguistic relativism.

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Politicians and marketers certainly believe that language can influence our thoughts and values. One political party may refer to an inheritance tax as the “estate tax,” while an opposing party refers to it as the “death tax.” In the abortion debate, some refer to the “right to choose” and others to the “right to life.” The terminology reflects different ideologies, but the choice of expres- sion is primarily intended to sway public opinion. Politically correct (PC) lan- guage also reflects the idea that language can influence thought. Many people believe that by changing the way we talk, we can change the way we think; that if we eliminate racist and sexist terms from our language, we will become a less racist and sexist society. As we will discuss in chapter 7, language itself is not sexist or racist, but people can be, and because of this particular words take on negative meanings. In his book The Language Instinct, the psychologist Steven Pinker uses the expression euphemism treadmill to describe how the eu- phemistic terms that are created to replace negative words often take on the negative associations of the words they were coined to replace. For example, handicapped was once a euphemism for the offensive term crippled, and when handicapped became politically incorrect it was replaced by the euphemism disabled. And as we write, disabled is falling into disrepute and is often re- placed by yet another euphemism, challenged. Nonetheless, in all such cases, changing language has not resulted in a new worldview for the speakers.

As prescient as Orwell was with respect to how language could be used for social control, he was more circumspect with regard to the relation between language and thought. He was careful to qualify his notions with the phrase “at least so far as thought is dependent on words.” Current research shows that language does not determine how we think about and perceive the world. Future research should show the extent to which language influences other aspects of cognition such as memory and categorization.

Summary

We are all intimately familiar with at least one language, our own. Yet few of us ever stop to consider what we know when we know a language. No book contains, or could possibly contain, the English or Russian or Zulu language. The words of a language can be listed in a dictionary, but not all the sentences can be. Speakers use a finite set of rules to produce and understand an infinite set of possible sentences.

These rules are part of the grammar of a language, which develops when you acquire the language and includes the sound system (the phonology), the structure and properties of words (the morphology and lexicon), how words may be combined into phrases and sentences (the syntax), and the ways in which sounds and meanings are related (the semantics). The sounds and meanings of individual words are related in an arbitrary fashion. If you had never heard the word syntax you would not know what it meant by its sounds. The gestures used by signers are also arbitrarily related to their meanings. Language, then, is a system that relates sounds (or hand and body gestures) with meanings. When you know a language, you know this system.

This knowledge (linguistic competence) is different from behavior (linguistic performance). You have the competence to produce a million-word sentence

Summary 25

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26 CHAPTER 1 What Is Language?

but performance limitations such as memory and endurance keep this from oc- curring. There are different kinds of “grammars.” The descriptive grammar of a language represents the unconscious linguistic knowledge or capacity of its speakers. Such a grammar is a model of the mental grammar every speaker of the language possesses. It does not teach the rules of the language; it describes the rules that are already known. A grammar that attempts to legislate what your grammar should be is called a prescriptive grammar. It prescribes. It does not describe, except incidentally. Teaching grammars are written to help people learn a foreign language or a dialect of their own language.

The more linguists investigate the thousands of languages of the world and describe the ways in which they differ from each other, the more they discover that these differences are limited. There are linguistic universals that pertain to each of the parts of grammars, the ways in which these parts are related, and the forms of rules. These principles compose Universal Grammar, which provides a blueprint for the grammars of all possible human languages. Univer- sal Grammar constitutes the innate component of the human language faculty that makes language development in children possible.

Strong evidence for Universal Grammar is found in the way children acquire language. Children learn language by exposure. They need not be deliberately taught, though parents may enjoy “teaching” their children to speak or sign. Children will learn any human language to which they are exposed, and they learn it in definable stages, beginning at a very early age.

The fact that deaf children learn sign language shows that the abil- ity to hear or produce sounds is not a prerequisite for language learning. All the sign languages in the world, which differ as spoken languages do, are visual-gestural systems that are as fully developed and as structurally complex as spoken languages. The major sign language used in the United States is American Sign Language (ASL). The ability of human beings to acquire, know, and use language is a biologically based ability rooted in the structure of the human brain, and expressed in different modalities (spoken or signed).

If language is defined merely as a system of communication, or the ability to produce speech sounds, then language is not unique to humans. There are, however, certain characteristics of human language not found in the commu- nication systems of any other species. A basic property of human language is its creativity—a speaker’s ability to combine the basic linguistic units to form an infinite set of “well-formed” grammatical sentences, most of which are novel, never before produced or heard. Human languages consist of discrete units that combine according to the rules of the grammar of the language. Hu- man languages also allow us to talk about things that are removed in time and space from our immediate environment or mental or physical state. These are the properties of discreteness and displacement and they distinguish human language from the “languages” of other species.

For many years researchers were interested in the question of whether lan- guage is a uniquely human ability. There have been many attempts to teach nonhuman primates to communicate using sign language or symbolic systems that resemble human language in certain respects. Overall, results have been

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References for Further Reading 27

disappointing. Some chimpanzees have been trained to use an impressive num- ber of symbols or signs. But a careful examination of their multi-sign utterances reveals that unlike children, the chimps show little creativity or spontaneity. Their “utterances” are highly imitative (echoic), often unwittingly cued by train- ers, and have little syntactic structure. Some highly intelligent dogs have also learned a significant number of words, but their learning is restricted to a spe- cific context and it is likely that their “meanings” for these words are very differ- ent from the symbolic or referential meanings that would be learned by a human child.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis holds that the particular language we speak determines or influences our thoughts and perceptions of the world. Much of the early evidence in support of this hypothesis has not stood the test of time. More recent experimental studies suggest that the words and grammar of a language may affect aspects of cognition, such as memory and categorization.

References for Further Reading

Anderson, S. R. 2008. The logical structure of linguistic theory. Language (Decem- ber): 795–814.

Bickerton, D. 1990. Language and species. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Chomsky, N. 1986. Knowledge of language: Its nature, origin, and use. New York and

London: Praeger. _____. 1975. Reflections on language. New York: Pantheon Books. _____. 1972. Language and mind. Enlarged ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Crystal, D. 2010. Cambridge encyclopedia of language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge

University Press. Gentner, D., and S. Goldin-Meadow. 2003. Language in mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hall, R. A. 1950. Leave your language alone. Ithaca, NY: Linguistica. Jackendoff, R. 1997. The architecture of the language faculty. Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press. _____. 1994. Patterns in the mind: Language and human nature. New York: Basic Books. Klima, E. S., and U. Bellugi. 1979. The signs of language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press. Lane, H. 1989. When the mind hears: A history of the deaf. New York: Vintage Books

(Random House). Milroy, J., and L. Milroy. 1998. Authority in language: Investigating standard English,

3rd ed. New York: Routledge. Napoli, D. J. 2003. Language matters: A guide to everyday thinking about language.

New York: Oxford University Press. Pinker, S. 1999. Words and rules: The ingredients of language. New York:

HarperCollins. _____. 1994. The language instinct. New York: William Morrow. Premack, A. J., and D. Premack. 1972. Teaching language to an ape. Scientific

American (October): 92–99. Terrace, H. S. 1979. Nim: A chimpanzee who learned sign language. New York: Knopf. Stam, J. 1976. Inquiries into the origin of language: The fate of a question. New York:

Harper & Row. Stokoe, W. 1960. Sign language structure: An outline of the visual communication system

of the American deaf. Silver Spring, MD: Linstok Press.

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