Deciding where to begin
This chapter shows that language can be explored in different ways, and outlines how this exploration might be carried out.
Language is an enormous and very complex phenomenon. If one wants to study it, where should one begin? People tend to argue about this. One way of studying something complex is to suggest that it is like something we humans already know something about. This chapter will propose that language could be envisaged as a game.
[]() Language as a game
Suggestive metaphors often help humans to handle complex phenomena. For example, only when the heart was thought of as a pump did we begin to understand the circulation of the blood.
[]()Insight
Metaphors may provide awareness of phenomena that are otherwise complex, or difficult to comprehend.
Language can be regarded as a complicated type of game, assuming a ‘game’ to be ‘a specified type of activity governed by rules’. The various facets involved in a game can show why there is some disagreement when linguists try to decide where to begin studying language.
In a typical game, such as chess or soccer, []()anyone trying to find out how the game is played has to deal with three broad types of question: the aims of the game, the principles of interaction, and the permitted moves.
Under the aims of the game, comes the fundamental question: what are people trying to do when they play it? In soccer, the players are trying to kick the ball into a net in order to score. The ‘aims’ of language involve not only the broad functions outlined in Chapter 2 (conveying information, expressing emotion, keeping in touch socially, and so on), but also more specific purposes for which language can be used, such as:
Obtain information: Where’s the parrot?
Make someone do something: Shut the door!
Make a promise: I’ll pay you next week.
The principles of interaction involve questions such as: How many people can play? Do they all play at the same time, or do they take it in turns? If so, how does one know when a person’s turn is over? Within language, people take it in turns to speak, and each language tends to have certain socially prescribed ‘turns’. For example, in English, a greeting is usually followed by another greeting:
John: Good morning, Felicity.
Felicity: Why hallo there, John.
Under permitted moves, linguists explore which ‘moves’ are permitted, and which not. In chess, some pieces can move across the board only in straight lines, and others only diagonally. With regard to language, there are rules underlying well-formed sequences of a language. In English, for example, verbs precede their objects, as in The cat ate the canary, rather than \*The cat the canary ate which would be the standard order in, say, Turkish.
All of these aspects of a game are important, and no one could play without some acquaintance with them. In language also, all these facets are applicable, and native speakers have a firm grasp of them. When dealing with language, one might at []()first sight want to tackle these facets in the order listed above. But in practice, there is a problem. It is easier to specify the basic permitted moves than it is to give a clear account of the aims and principles of interaction, which are closely interwoven with the social structures of the society involved. For this reason, the majority of professional linguists prefer to begin with those aspects of language which can most easily be detached from the social background. They therefore start with the permitted moves or, in linguistic terminology, the grammar of the language. They consider this to be the core of linguistic study, and expect to add on its interrelationships with society at a later stage. A knowledge of the linguistic resources of a language is often a prerequisite to an intelligent discussion of how these resources are used.
[]()Insight
When studying language as a game, it is best to start with the permitted moves, because these are not so intertwined with the social structure of a society.
In this book, therefore, we shall be moving from the basic linguistic core outwards. In other words, we shall start from the centre of the circle diagram shown in Chapter 1 (Figure 1.1), and move out to the edges later. But a decision as to where to begin does not necessarily imply an overall order of importance: people put on their socks before their shoes, but they are not necessarily giving more importance to socks than to shoes. But as a next step, possible reasons for studying language will be considered.
[]() Single-language specialists versus universalists
People want to study language for different reasons. In general, people fall into one of two categories. On the one hand, some people might want to study language because they are interested in knowing more about one particular language. Into this first category might come a teacher of French, or a missionary who had discovered a new South American language, or []()a person who has an American-Indian great-grandmother and wants to know more about Nootka. On the other hand, there are those who want to find out more about language itself, as an intriguing human ability. Into this second category come the majority of professional linguists and other social scientists – people such as sociologists, psychologists and anthropologists, who need to know about the phenomenon of language as a whole.
[]()Insight
Some people study language because they are interested in one particular language, while others want to know about the phenomenon of language as a whole. These two groups are likely to write different types of grammar, and to view linguistics quite differently.
People interested in a particular language will be trying to write a perfect grammar of their chosen language, or one section of it, usually by making a detailed study of the patterns of that language alone. For example, they might be interested in the relationship of French vowels to one another, perhaps with a view to perfecting their accent for a trip to France. It would be quite irrelevant to them whether this vowel system coincided with that of any other language, and such people would probably pick those aspects of linguistics to help them which seemed to be best suited to the phenomenon they were examining, even if it meant choosing an unfashionable or unknown model of grammar. They are likely to consider that the chief role of linguistics is the development of analytic techniques which will enable them to fulfil their chosen task.
Those interested in language as a whole, on the other hand, will be trying to find a framework which would be suitable for all languages. Such people may well write a grammar of a particular language, but they will be doing this in order to test out a theory with wider implications, since one way of testing a proposed universal framework is to see whether it will fit any given language. If it does not, then it must be amended or abandoned. This type of person might also be working on French []()vowels, but they would be interested not so much in the vowels themselves, as in finding a skeleton plan which could ‘capture’ their characteristics alongside those of other languages. A framework which was perfect for French, but was inadequate for, say, Greek, Swahili and Icelandic, would have to be abandoned.
Unfortunately, in recent years, extremists from each of these groups of people have spent an unnecessary amount of time attacking one another. Those interested in a particular language have argued that those searching for a universal framework are too theoretical and irrelevant to everyday life. One hears comments such as, ‘Modern linguistics doesn’t help me very much when it comes to teaching my Spanish class’, or ‘I’m doing a thesis on fish imagery in Shakespeare, and I can’t see where linguistics fits in.’ The universal-framework enthusiasts counter this criticism by saying that the individual language specialists are narrow-minded people who simply like collecting facts, and one hears comments such as, ‘I wish she’d stop making lists of irregular verbs in Arawak and get on with something useful.’
As will be clear from Chapter 3, the reasons for this controversy are partly historical. It is characteristic of an academic discipline to take new turnings: the ‘old’ school will regard the new with suspicion and distaste, and the ‘new’ will condemn the old as misguided and out of date. Since those who are interested in individual languages have very similar aims to the Bloomfieldian descriptive linguists, they tend to be treated as old-fashioned by universal framework linguists, who are often convinced that they are ‘right’ merely because their type of linguistics has tended to be more fashionable in recent years.
In fact, the two views are complementary, not contradictory. No one can work seriously on a universal framework unless they have at their disposal a considerable amount of information about individual languages against which to test their theories. Conversely, the heaping up of masses of information about diverse languages reduces linguistics to the level of a hobby such as stamp-collecting unless some attempt is made to []()handle the miscellaneous facts within a wider framework.
Moreover, it is perhaps wrong to assume that anyone interested in linguistics must fall into either category. Nowadays, a growing number of people are carrying out both types of study. In addition, those who start out with an interest in a particular language will ideally move on to becoming interested in language as a human phenomenon. The progression from a predilection for, say, German word formation or French vowels, to a desire to help develop a universal framework can be likened to the possible progression of an intelligent motor mechanic, who is likely to move from a wish to service their own car, to an interest in how cars work in general. A person may, initially, want to learn only how to fit a new fan-belt onto a vintage Rolls-Royce. This may lead them to an interest in identifying and labelling the various components of the car’s engine, and an understanding of how they fit together. Eventually, they may become curious as to how the Rolls-Royce compares with other cars, and to start looking into the theory of the internal-combustion engine as a whole.
The progression from the particular to the universal is perhaps more important for the linguist than for the motor mechanic. Anyone working seriously on a language needs to know whether the phenomena they meet are unique or commonplace. To take a trivial example, someone working on English may be intrigued by the division of nouns into those that can be counted, as in six hens, three cabbages, and those that cannot: we do not normally say six butters, or three soaps (unless we mean three types of butter or soap). We have to say some butter, some soap, or use a word expressing a quantity, as in six pounds of butter, three bars of soap. How widespread is this phenomenon in the languages of the world? Is English exceptional in this respect? Or is, say, Igbo, unusual in not having such a distinction? Furthermore, if a language does make this distinction, are there any other related characteristics which are likely to follow in consequence? These are the types of question which, in the short run, are likely to lead someone to study language in a wider way.
[]()Insight
Anyone working on a particular language []()is likely to want to move on to knowing how their preferred language compares with other languages, and to finding out whether its characteristics are usual or unusual.
In the long run, a ‘universal grammar’ (if one could ever be written) would have enormously important implications for our knowledge of the human race. Such a grammar might well reflect innate properties of the human mind. In the opinion of Chomsky, ‘There are very deep and restrictive principles that determine the nature of human language and are rooted in the specific character of the human mind.’
However, the idea of finding a fixed universal grammar has been slowly fading, as noted in the last chapter. Trying to find absolute constraints may be as pointless as trying to find out if there is a limit on the height of human beings. It does not matter if a man 10 feet tall were to be found. What matters is understanding the normal range. Similarly, with linguistics, a search for abnormalities may not be as useful as finding out how most languages behave.
But it is important for anyone studying linguistics to have a basic background knowledge of the techniques of descriptive linguistics, particularly the procedures and terminology used in the identification of linguistic units. The use of such techniques is essential if one is faced with a hitherto unknown, unwritten language, where the flow of speech must be broken down into segments. They can be of value in other circumstances also. Language teachers, for example, may gain new insights into the languages they teach if they approach them as if they were totally new, unwritten languages. Such people need to know the answers to such questions as: ‘How can one identify words?’, ‘What is a word?’, ‘Can a word be split up into smaller segments? If so, by what criteria can one do this?’, ‘How is it possible to identify the basic sounds in any language?’, and so on. These and similar questions will be dealt with in the next few chapters.
[]()THINGS TO REMEMBER
[]()Suggestive metaphors often help humans []()to understand complex phenomena.
[]()It is useful to regard language as a game.
[]()Participants in a game require a knowledge of the aims of the game, the principles of interaction and the permitted moves.
[]()In treating language as a game, it is useful to start with the permitted moves, as these are less entwined with social structures.
[]()Single-language specialists might (at first) be separated from universalists, who are interested in language as a human phenomenon.
[]()Single-language specialists are likely to progress to also being interested in language as a whole.