Notes
on Fromkin, An Introduction
to Language, Chapter One
What is language?
1.
Page
5a: The
text says: "Knowing the sound system of a language includes...knowing which
sounds may start a word, end a word, and follow each other." This is called
phonotactics.
2.
Page 5b: The arbitrary relation of form and meaning: This is a quote
from the famous Swiss structuralist linguist, Ferdinand
de Saussure, who is sometimes called the "father of modern
linguistics". The original, with English translation: "Le lien unifiant
le signifiant et le signifié est arbitraire" ('the bond between the
signifier and the signified is arbitrary'). (de Saussure, Ferdinand.Course
in General Linguistics. Edited by Charles Bally & Albert Sechehaye,
in collaboration with Albert Riedlinger. New York: The Philosophical Library,
1959: 67.)
Saussure's Course in General Linguistics
is a compilation of notes on his lectures, and it is available in a number of
different
editions.
3. American Sign Language (ASL):
Browser where you can look up video of thousands of ASL signs:
http://commtechlab.msu.edu/sites/aslweb/
4.
Sound symbolism: http://www.humnet.unipi.it/anglistica/servizi/soundsymb.htm
Longer
text: http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Studios/9783/phonpap1.html
Phonosemantics
and Linguistic Iconism Web Sites (large collection of links):
http://www.conknet.com/%7Emmagnus/Links.html
Onomatopoeia:
http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/lit_terms/onomatopoeia.html
Six
Lectures on Sound and Meaning by Roman Jakobson (1942) (long texts):
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ru/jakobson.htm
Sounds
of the world's animals:
http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/ballc/animals/animals.html
5.
The generative approach: Introspection.
The researcher analyzes data that he himself produces.
Quote from linguist William
Labov: If we study the various restrictions imposed upon linguistics since
Saussure, we see more and more data being excluded in a passionate concern
for what linguistics is not. Every field of substance has come
under attack at one time or another: semantics, phonetics, social factors,
and finally speech itself. The culmination of this puristic program is the
generative view of linguistics as the study of an ideal homogeneous structure,
revealed in the intuitions of the most highly sophisticated members of the
community who create through introspection both the theory and the data. ...
One must look with admiration and astonishment at the boldness of linguists
who have thus discarded the great body of data produced by ordinary citizens
arguing, conversing, orating, corresponding, etc., proceeding with full confidence
to recreate linguistics out of their own intuitions. And indeed, linguistic
theory of the past decade has flourished in this otherworldly setting: it
has produced a vast corpus of deep argumentation which makes the theory of
previous decades seem shallow by comparison. But this philosophical mode of
investigation is quite unsuited to the study of change, where we have no intuitions
at all. We have not inherited the intuitions of the eighteenth century, and
it is unlikely that the twenty-first century will accept ours, intermingled
as they are with our theoretical persuasions. It is clear that the study of
history must rest on some point outside of the linguist's mind, in the secular
world.
(From: "On the Use of
the Present to Explain the Past," in L. Heilmann, ed. 1975. Proceedings
of the 11th International Congress of Linguists. Bologna: Il Mulino. Pp. 825-851.)
The
data-based approach: Do fieldwork, collect large amounts of data; use
corpora (singular: corpus) to study language as it is actually used.
6.
Dionysius
Thrax. (£G£d£j£h£o£m£d£jς £K£l£\£i)
7.
Our book says there are between 3,000-6,000 languages spoken in the world; SIL's
Ethnologue catalogues over 6,000. Many of these are spoken by a handful of people,
and are certain to die out in the coming decades or years. Here is a quote about
losing biological species that applies just as well to languages that become extinct:
Destroying species is like tearing pages out of an unread book, written in a language
humans hardly know how to read, about the place where they live.
-Holmes Rolston III, professor of philosophy (1932- )