an informal intro to linguistics 2k18: What is Linguistics (part 1)

What is linguistics? 


A typical linguistic reply to "what is linguistics" is something like, "the scientific study of language" or "investigating language in a systematic way". Hmm. Well then. What's language? 

 I imagine many English speakers will give some definition to the effect of "communication—words that we use to convey meanings". Seems sensible enough. 

 What sorts of questions should the study of language—or better yet, the scientific study of language—be able to answer? Immediately, questions addressing practical concerns and aesthetic issues may come to mind:

Is this what linguistics is about?

These are all fine enough questions, yet they all (surprisingly) happen to fall outside the scope of what linguistics, as an academic discipline, purports to be about. These questions, would—except by the particularly polymathic or rebellious linguist—typically be addressed in other disciplines. For example:


This isn't to say that people that call themselves linguists do not engage these issues. But rather, answering these questions are largely considered sites to apply linguistics rather than belonging to linguistics proper.

Well then, what does linguistics talk about?! 

Negative negative negative!


Many linguistics textbooks open by emphasizing what linguistics is not.
Typically, these manifestos (which may be found in nearly any introduction to linguistics textbook from the past half century onward) began with some statement about description vs prescription.

As the tale is typically told, description is saying how things are whereas prescription is telling how things should be. Description can be scientific, driven by the testing of hypotheses whereas prescription is decidedly not scientific. Consider the following sentence:

So I was like, "totally", but that like wasn't like what I thought I was getting into, so you know he was all "noooo you can't do that".

This sentence is rhetorically horrendous. Maybe it made you actually cringe. Literally cringe. The magnanimous linguist, however, suspends judgment.


Linguistics is about describing facts about language rather than telling people what to do. Instead of condemning the use of like, the linguist likes to look for likeness in locations where like lies. Nice, no?

Okay, okay, okay. We get it—you linguists talk systematically/scientifically and establish facts. But, what sort of facts does linguistics look at?

Language (with a capital L) 


Simply put, linguistics is about different things to different people. More on this later. But to begin, I'll describe some common trends in how language is discussed by linguists.

In many now mainstream characterizations, linguistics is about Language (with a capital 'L'), a human capacity to pair forms (e.g. sounds, manual signs in signed languages) with meanings in a rule-governed manner. Language is the same capacity underlying all human languages. All human languages? Yes; we just introduced the notion of Language by referring to languages.

 What is a language? A start at answering this question might begin with giving some instances of things we call languages—"oh, you know... English, French, German, Spanish, Chinese, ...Punjabi?" We'll proceed assuming we know what a language is. Adults speak them. Usually one in the United States (monolinguals), but often more. Children are good at learning them until around puberty. You will flail your arms and cry trying to learn a second language and you will never be good enough. Languages are systems, which can be called instances or manifestations of Language.

How can these systems be studied?

Theories, Trees, and Theses


 Linguistics is often carried out by trying to treat natural language as a formal language (e.g. programming languages) through representations like:

 a.
b.

(Image source: http://www.nltk.org/book/ch08.html)

 The key thing here is not the specific shape of these trees, but the fact that speech, which looks something like...



(Image source: https://www.unc.edu/~jlsmith/ling520_info.html)

...can be represented as a small number of discrete elements. How they are hierarchically arranged (if at all), how they relate to one another, etc. depends on the theory. But more-or-less by definition, formal theories of languages represent languages in what can be translated into strings of characters.

 Treating languages as a systems that can be represented formally opens the door to objective testing of models. For a discipline which aims to align itself as scientific, this is desirable. 

 Here are two diagrams for representing sentences composed of the words "the dog saw a man in the park". The things we actually observe when using sentences like these are words, represented in green in the trees above. As they are at the bottom of these syntactic trees, they are structurally called terminal nodes (or leaves). Each word belongs to some category, often called a "part of speech". For example, park is a noun (N), and the is a determiner (Det). In these two trees, there are only a few rules at work which determine how parts of speech may be combined to yield higher levels of organization. A Determiner (Det) and a Noun (N) make a Noun Phrase (NP), for instance (bottom right of both tree diagrams).

 Two trees are included here to illustrate the expressive power of these sorts of diagrams. There are at least two interpretations of "the dog saw a man in the park". First, there is "the dog saw (a man) in the park" (a) wherein the dog is in the park, and the man may or may not be. Second there is, "the dog saw (a man in the park)" (b), where the man is in the park, but the dog may not be. This sentence is said to be ambiguous because there are multiple possible ways to parse (generate) the string (sequence of words) "the dog saw a man in the park".

Moving beyond sequences of symbols


 Tree diagrams like the ones above do an excellent job at modeling certain facts.They nevertheless, are relatively limited in what they can explain. The above trees only model generalizations about the order of words, but do not do much of anything to explain how language "works" in terms of, among other concerns:




There are various ways that these more difficult to model things are brought into the linguistic discussion. Two broad trends can be described as follows: (1) empirical studies matching simple linguistic structures to 'extra-linguistic' factors, and (2) more elaborate theoretical machinery.

(1) The empirical strategy is utilized in psycholinguistics, for instance. Researchers can study things like the differences in time required for listeners to interpret different sorts of sentences. Pairing the formal machinery that allows specific hypotheses about linguistic form (e.g. word order) to be expressed with state-of-the-art tools to measure beeps and blips of the brain, psycholinguists can scientifically approach aspects of language which are out of reach of out-of-the-lab theorists.

(2) The more elaborate theoretical machinery approach can be informed by the (1) empirical strategy, but needn't necessarily be (though it should). This strategy generally involves devising complex formal representations, roughly in the same spirit of the two trees given earlier. Many researchers, for instance, have tried to formalize meaning, and then pair meaning representations with sentences. Needless to say, this is a challenging endeavor.


Bringing it all together


Right! Where were we? Oh yes, we were talking about Language and how it is studied.

So, what do we know about language? I refer to a book titled Language Myths (e.d. Bauer & Trudgill 1999), which goes over a number of 'misconceptions' about language, for example:

Myth 1: The Meaning of Words Should Not be Allowed to Vary or Change
Myth 2: Some Languages are Just Not Good Enough
Myth 3: The Media are Ruining English
Myth 4: French is a Logical Language
Myth 5: English Spelling is Kattastroffik
Myth 6: Women Talk Too Much
Myth 7: Some Languages are Harder than Others
Myth 8: Children Can't Speak or Write Properly Any More
Myth 9: In the Appalachians They Speak like Shakespeare
Myth 10: Some Languages Have No Grammar

[...]

The story goes that these are 'myths' which linguistics, as the science of language dispels. Think that one friend that starts speaking all too often by saying "aaaaactuuallllyyyyy...".

The core tenets of the Church of Linguitology, expounded in this collection of straw-man arguments, are as follows:


So geez, please stop complaining about the decline of language in your country, you elitist grammarian ass-hat. Your characterization of female speech reeks of patriarchy. Oh, and stop trying to make out the East to be exotic by saying that Chinese is "a hard language". Oh, and your language has grammar, just like your mom's grammar. Take that!

We have trees to represent syntactic structures, data from many languages, and now numbers, so this is the science of language.

Hooooold on buddy...


Is linguistics, as an objective science, able to answer normative questions like how language should be? How about questions of aesthetic judgment like whether Mandarin Chinese sounds funny, or whether Japanese sounds like robot-speech?

The tradition of linguistics (broadly construed) has many methods for answering many specific types of questions. Linguistics is particularly rich in formalisms for describing patters of words, sounds, etc. The investigation of many of questions under the aegis of linguistics qua "The Science of Language" are scientific indeed. Under the umbrella of literature are also more philosophical, historical, literary, etc. projects which are decidedly non-scientific, which is not meant in any pejorative sense—there are many activities besides testing falsifiable hypotheses with empirical evidence that are worth doing. But a corollary of recognizing the diversity of methods conducted under the same name of linguistics is that 'facts' in this field are heterogeneous in character, asserted on different principles. Some are facts in the sense of being empirically testable claims we have yet to falsify (e.g. all languages have words to refer to things and actions). Other 'facts' are merely the postulates we assume proceeding forward (e.g. all languages are expressions of a Universal Grammar with a finite number of parameters...). 

This series


What is linguistics? The linguist replies, "the scientific study of Language". (You misheard the linguist the first time, he was saying Language (with a capital L), distinct from language) Hmm. Simply put, 'language' has many meanings, and linguistics is about different things to different people. This is no cop-out hand wavy answer, because if we actually want to say anything about language, we need to share some definitions before moving on.

Linguistics, in my view, is science insofar as scientific methodologies are chosen. Science is a methodology, not a set of facts. Many phoneticians (researchers who study the sounds of human language), for instance are very often very scientific. Measures of well established acoustic features, well-designed experiments, and appropriately used statistical analyses are the envy of other linguists wrestling with more difficult to quantify data (I coin the term, "phonetics envy", akin to "physics envy"). Computational linguists subject their models to rigorous testing over large data sets. Both of these 'subfields' of linguistics are quite scientific by virtue of the methodologies they use.

On the other hand, many linguists don't operate in a very scientific way. Now there is nothing wrong with doing things that are not science (e.g. philosophy, mathematics, art), as long as you do not lie and say you are doing science. But, the modifier scientific should not be carried over to the particular political or cultural leanings of practitioners as those that identify with the tradition of linguistics.

Very often, linguistics qua language science is taken up to support honorable causes. For example, many linguists are deeply concerned with honoring the sovereignty of indigenous peoples or encouraging the study of foreign languages. These are fine positions to have, but it is also important to look at just how, if at all, the methodologies of linguistic inquiry translate into imperatives for specific courses of pursuing social justice.


Heptapod from the film Arrival


In this series, an informal intro to linguistics 2k18, I'll be exploring a number of topics in linguistics, both scientific and not. In the sense that I'll include cartoons, have fun with punctuation, talk to you and myself, and sometimes use unconventional words, this intro is informal. But, it is also my goal to earnestly engage interesting questions, sometimes using formalisms in the sense of symbolic logic, rigor, and the whole (s)hebang (let's be inclusive here). Chief among my objectives with this series is to look at what 'facts' in linguistics are scientifically established, and which things introduction to linguistics students are taught fall under other categories: e.g. unverified hypotheses, speculation, sophistry, and misinterpreted sarcasm.

This series will look at interesting questions about language, such as:



We will examine what linguistics can and can't tell us about these questions. We will venture outside of linguistics when necessary to find answers. Additionally, we will critically looking at the "accepted wisdom" enshrined in many introduction to linguistics textbooks in conventional modules of language like phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax.

Here, we make no pretense at being "scientific" on-the-whole. We will examine ideas closely and discuss evidence, and maybe even do some small empirical pilot studies. But, we will also proudly shrug our shoulders and throw up our hands saying "I dunno" when we don't. Because when you know when you don't know, then you know (that you don't know).

an informal intro to linguistics 2k18




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