Linguists study the primary medium by which culture is transmitted, language
. The discipline of linguistics—at first called philology—dates from approximately the same period that biological anthropology and archaeology began, the late eighteenth century. Sir William Jones (1746–1794), a jurist and student of Asian languages assigned to the British East India Company’s outpost at modern-day Calcutta, is generally credited with founding the discipline. In 1786, in the course of a speech to the Bengal Asiatic Society, of which he was the founder and president, Jones outlined, for the first time, the family-tree model of linguistic relationships, focusing on what would soon be called the Indo-European language family.
Within a generation, comparative philology (now called historical, or diachronic, linguistics) was an established discipline. Scholars such as Jacob Grimm (1785–1863), Franz Bopp (1791–1867), and August Schleicher (1821–1868) had reconstructed what appeared to be the Proto-Indo-European lexicon. Eventually, other language families, such as Sino-Tibetan (Chinese, Tibetan, Thai, Burmese, etc.) and Hamito-Semtic (Ancient Egyptian, Hebrew, Babylonian, Arabic, and other Near Eastern languages), also began to be studied from this perspective. Franz Boas (1858–1942), in addition to being a pioneer sociocultural anthropologist, was also among the first to apply the comparative method to the study of Native American languages.
In the early decades of that century, thanks primarily to the efforts of a brilliant Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), a new structural approach to the study of language emerged, one that emphasized synchronic studies rather than the historical focus that had dominated during the previous century. De Saussure made a basic distinction between what he called la langue, the basic rules that govern the grammar of a given language, and la parole, the specific speech patterns that occur at any given instant. The linguist’s job is to elicit the nature of la langue by recording and analyzing examples of la parole. This approach soon led to two concepts that still dominate anthropological linguistics: the phoneme and morpheme. A phoneme is a minimal sound feature of a language that signals a difference in meaning; a morpheme is an ordered arrangement of such speech sounds that carries an indivisible meaning. Thus, the sounds represented by the English letters d, o, and g are phonemes, while the word dog is a morpheme. Combining the same phonemes in reverse order produces a wholly different morpheme, god. Structural linguists are also concerned with syntax, the arrangement of morphemes into phrases and sentences, and semantics, how meanings are structured by morphemes and their forms and their position and function in sentences. Grammar is the entirety of a language’s phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic rules that enable humans to communicate and transmit culture.
In the course of the last few decades, linguists have debated the extent to which there are universal, innate features that form the fundamental structure of all human languages. The U.S. linguist Noam Chomsky has argued in favor of this proposition. In Syntactic Structures (1957), Chomsky suggested that all human beings have the innate ability to generate every possible sentence in their language. This approach to the study of language is called transformational-generative grammar (TG). However, not all linguists accept this model. A great many hold that, like culture, language is infinitely variable and that there are no proven universal features.
The relationship between language and culture has also been a major concern among linguists, especially anthropological linguists. Two pioneers in the study of this relationship were Edward Sapir (1884–1939) and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941), who suggested that there was an intrinsic connection between the fundamental features of a culture and the structure of its language. For example, as Whorf pointed out, the Hopi Indian language does not mark verb tense, a feature that Whorf said is reflected in the absence of a linear time concept in Hope culture. All events are intrinsically linked to one another, and life simply unfolds. Although by no means universally accepted by contemporary anthropologists—some critics object that his approach is tautological and that there is no evidence to support the priority of language over culture—the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis continues to influence anthropological thinking.
Early in the twentieth century, after the publication of books such as Sapir’s Language (1921) and Leonard Bloomfield’s (1887–1949) book of the same title (1933), linguistics developed into a separate discipline dedicated to the scientific study of language, with connections to the related fields of cognitive science and cognitive psychology, as well as some aspects of computer science (artificial intelligence, machine translation), after the publication of Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures. The development of TG grammar produced an explosion of research in both synchronic and diachronic linguistics that continues to extend our understanding of language and mind and how we communicate.
Anthropological linguistics exists as a separate but related discipline that emphasizes the relationship between language and culture, but adopts a more holistic and, often, humanistic approach than, for example, cognitive psychology. Anthropological linguists study a variety of language practices, ranging from the relationship between language and music within specific cultures to children’s use of language in play. A major focus that distinguishes linguistic anthropology from other branches of linguistics is its focus on questions of politics, power, and social inequality, as these aspects of culture affect language. The study of language ideologies emphasizes the different statuses of certain language practices, in contexts ranging from a bank officer turning down a loan applicant, to political speeches, to bilingual and bicultural contexts (for example, the study of “Spanglish,” forms of language developed by Americans who speak both Spanish and English), to the controversies about varieties of English spoken by African Americans.

Descriptive Linguistics is concerned with the documentation of all aspects of individual languages, including their sound structure (phonetics and phonology), word structure (morphology), phrase and sentence structure (syntax), semantics, discourse patterns, and pragmatics of use.
Since its inception in 1978, the Department of Linguistics at the University of Oregon has embraced descriptive linguistic work, coupled with a long-standing commitment to lesser-studied and endangered languages. While not intending to be exclusive, the Department has historically had research strengths in Native American languages (North, Central, and South America), Tibeto-Burman, Southeast Asian, South Asian, African, Austronesian, and Slavic languages. The Oregon program emphasizes language description within typological, functional, and cognitive frameworks.
On the one hand, descriptive research on a wide variety of languages is an essential foundation for attempts to explain why general properties of the human linguistic capacity, and linguistic forms, meaning, and use, are the way they are. That is, sound description is essential to sound theory. On the other hand, descriptive research is an essential part of the documentation of the cultures and cognitive worlds of language communities around the world.
As new descriptive findings have come to light, they have shown time and again that an adequate understanding of human language and its organization ‚ i.e., the development of linguistic theory ‚ simply cannot be elaborated on the basis of just a few languages. Many previously-proposed theoretical universals have had to be discarded because they were made in ignorance of actual language variation. At Oregon, we seek to understand how properties of individual languages compare to those of other languages along multiple parameters (hence, typology), and in this way to further scientific knowledge about the limits of possible human language variation.
The Oregon research program also includes the broad hypothesis that linguistic structures are the way they are for one (or more) of three reasons: because of their function as “tools” for human communication, because of their developmental history, or because of the nature of human cognitive processing. Thus, an understanding of human linguistic structures must be grounded in functional, historical, and cognitive linguistic research.
Traditionally, descriptive research on specific languages has been expressed in book-length grammars, dictionaries, and text collections. Such materials have long-lasting importance both to subsequent scientific studies and to language communities. Thus, the Oregon program places high value on the elaboration of such materials, as well as on the “classic” scientific article which may more pointedly focus on how descriptive facts and patterns bear on theoretical concerns.
Maa (Kenya and Tanzania) (Payne)
Maa is the language spoken by some 800,000 Maasai, Samburu, Camus, and Okiek peoples, ranging from south of Lake Turkana in Kenya to central Tanzania. Maa is an Eastern Nilotic language. The traditional pastoralist life of most Maa speakers is increasingly impacted by major cities like Nairobi, which are located in what was traditional Maasai grazing land, and by tourists, western education, commerce, modern entertainment, and national land policies. My linguistic work on Maa includes a large lexicography and database project, as well as work on morphosyntax and semantics.

Maa (Maasai) Lexicography and Text Databases (Payne)
The Maa (Maasai) language is currently spoken by some 800,000 Maasai, Samburu, Camus and Okiek peoples in Kenya and Tanzania. In all cultures there is both basic and specialized vocabulary which describes activities, traditions, cosmology, religion, and the myriad ways of life specific to that culture. These features cannot be thoroughly understood without an understanding of the vocabulary that expresses the concepts comprising the traditions of the culture. The extensive lexicographic and text database will be valuable documents for preserving and transmitting the cultural knowledge of the Maa people, who are being impacted by rapid cultural change at the turn of the 21st century. Previously, however, no linguistically accurate set of texts or dictionary of the language has existed.
The current project is producing computerized text and lexicography databases, with a comprehensive set of fields, such that a variety of dictionaries and text materials can eventually be published depending on the needs of various audiences, including linguists, anthropologists, historians, bilingual school teachers, non-governmental organizations, and Maa speakers themselves. The project is also studying Maa tone, vowel harmony, semantic and morphosyntactic properties of verbs, and syntactic constructions.

Maa: Advanced Tongue Root in Maasai (Guion and Payne)
Dr. Guion, Dr. Payne and Mark Post are currently investigating acoustic characteristics of advanced tongue root in Maasai, a Nilotic language spoken in Africa. Formant frequencies as well as overall spectral slope are being analyzed from the vowel productions of several native speakers. In addition, research into the production of the advanced tongue root vowels is planned using electroglottography.

Panare (Venezuela) (Payne and Payne)
The Panare (also known as EÃ’pa, ca. 2,500 speakers) live in the central savanah-area of Venezuela, south of the Orinoco River. For decades, the Panare have traded with Spanish-speaking mestizos, but but appear to be tenaciously hanging on to their heritage language. Panare is one of about 25 Cariban languages. My linguistic work on Panare includes a grammar in-process with Tom Payne, as well as other work on word order and “split” syntactic patterns.

Quichua (Ecuador) (Guion)
Recently, Dr. Guion investigated the effects of perceptual and production constraints on bilingual systems in Quichua-Spanish bilinguals. It was found that native Quichua speakers who had acquired Spanish vowels had significantly different Quichua vowel systems than (near-)monolingual Quichua speakers. The change in the Quichua vowels can be attributed to a reorganization of the combined vowel systems in which the vowels are dispersed in an adaptive process to maintain sufficient perceptual distance between the vowels.
In other work carried out in Otavalo, Ecuador Dr. Guion, in collaboration with Dr. Flege of the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Jonathan Loftin of the University of Texas, assessed the effect of first language use on both first and second language production. The results indicated that interaction of the first and second language systems affect the success of second language acquisition.

Yagua (Peru) (Payne and Payne)
The Yagua people (ca. 3,000 speakers) live in the northern Peruvian rainforest, in the vicinity of the Amazon, the Napo, and their tributaries. Paul Rivet left written documentation of an obviously related language Peba, but Yagua is now the only extant langauge of the Peba-Yaguan family. My own research on Yagua, some of it co-authored with Tom Payne, was greatly facilitated by the pioneering work of Paul Powlison. My work on Yagua has focused on word order and morphosyntax.

Recent Syntactic and Morphosyntactic Borrowings from English into Bulgarian (Vakareliyska)
The project, based on field work in Sofia, Bulgaria, in fall term 2008, examines two recent types of morphosyntactic and syntactic borrowings into Bulgarian from English: (a) constructions in which an NP consists of two nouns, one of which, an English borrowing, operates as a modifier of the other without the requisite Slavic adjectival suffix and grammatical ending: e.g., ekshun figura ‘action figure’; and (b) varying degrees of success in efforts to incorporate English-style gender-neutral language into Bulgarian, a grammatical gender-marking language, in job announcements and written communications.

Introduction

A word of comfort to those of you who are unhappy about an important and so far unique and unprecedented linguistic development underway in the world and the present shift in English identity to a world property or world identity.
The rise of global English doesn’t mean the loss of a geographical identity. People in Britain remain British, those in the US stay American. A model is Switzerland. You can be German, French or Italian but you are ultimately Swiss. Even now the term Spanish is misleading because it doesn’t consider the Catalans and others.
Although I still believe the loss of a linguistic identity has far more advantages than drawbacks, other languages in the world won’t be spared. A much more disastrous fate is awaiting them. It will also free us from the shackles of nationalism and arrogance. We will save time and energy which we still put into translation. A global English might overrun and replace lots of languages (compare French and la grande nation). So everybody in the world will acquire a new linguistic identity. I wonder, what’s wrong with that. After all languages come and go. This is a rule of nature. Just think of what happened to Latin. It gave birth before it died to a number of daughters Like: Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese….
On the other hand a lot of people are worried that the English invasion will bring with it American and English culture. They believe it’s a kind of cultural colonialism. The whole world will be Anglo-Saxonized or Americanized. Even in China people have already started eating MacDonald’s hamburgers (symbolic). There is no reason to worry that Chinese (Mandarin) one day will be a more powerful language than English. Chinese sounds are more difficult to the people of the world. In addition its writing system is cumbersome and not suitable for international communication. Human beings have always lamented the demise of the present. Shelly’s “West Wind” makes way for a new life.
Language is the basis for all human interactions. No thinking is possible without language. It is indeed surprising why linguistics and language have not got the attention and focus they deserve till now. After all, human knowledge and science is only possible through the medium of language. Acquiring a new language opens new perspectives on life and broadens our minds. Our identity is still based on language. However, in case of English and because of its international role the idea of identity might get lost or is in deed on its way to be lost (it is becoming a world or a human identity). Yet, English culture and literature can only be seen in English. That’s why although translation is a brilliant discipline it cannot overcome its deficiencies. Just imagine translating Shakespeare or Coleridge into Dutch.In short, language is superior to all other disciplines and is always first in sequence. It is knowledge, pleasure, emotions (mind and body or body and soul in one). After all we are not only heads but bodies too.
Density and Speed
One question which doesn’t leave my mind is: Can the human language we know cope with the information density and the speed we are experiencing. As you know, information is growing and coding or packing information into language is necessary. Informal language uses more verbs. It is verbal or verbose (i.e. information density is low). Academic language tries to avoid verbs as much as possible apart from some basic ones like: be, have and a couple of other high frequency ones. So nominalization is a feature of Academic English because of the problem of information density. You can do more operations on nouns than on verbs. For example you can count nouns; use adjectives with them (describe them) etc… But nominalization means using nouns and as you knows most of them, at least the academic ones, are of Romance origin i.e. very long words (multi-syllabic). What will be if this information density grows to such an extent that the present human language is no more capable of packing information. On the other hand human language is slow for communicating messages. You need more time to pronounce long Romance words. Will there be a new communication medium to cope with the problems of density and speed.
Ambiguity, Density, Identity and Speed
Now I would like to extend the ideas of density and speed which I touched upon to two additional important phenomena which are part and parcel of human language.
Ambiguity
Some people complain about the imprecise use of language. If human language won’t suffice to code information in the future due to information density and speed and of course due to misunderstandings (ambiguity) then the analogue language we have now might make way for a digital language Nowadays, everything is becoming digital. Why not human language? Once human language is digitized or replaced by a digital (computer) language (whether prescribed or agreed on), not only ambiguity ends but also beauty and mysticism and culture of human heritage. This means there will definitely be advantages of density, speed and clarity but a lot of disadvantages as I already mentioned will ensue foremost among those is reduction. Digital data is compressed or zipped. Compression means losing part of the information which is beyond human perception. Thus! , Digitalization means reducing human language to two modes, there is current or no current, a duality of yes and no like vending machines or computers. It is always a win/lose situation. This is an economic principle. We have to make a decision and set priorities.
Identity
Another problem of human language is identity. Identity doesn’t only help us to belong to a nation and provide a profile but also create big human conflicts. Just take nationalism which is not only based on skin colour and facial features but also on language.
There are different peoples (nations) in the world: In the Middle East there are Arabs, Turks, Kurds or Persians. In East Asia there are: Chinese, Koreans, and Vietnamese. In Germanic Europe there are: the English, the Germans, and the Dutch etc. In Romance Europe: the French, the Italians, the Spanish. All these People look alike in their own parts of the world and it is difficult to tell them a part like one cell twins but they have lots of conflicts mostly based on nationalism (language identity). Using a digital language might solve some national conflicts. Human relations will probably then be based on economy and not languages.
Growth
Perhaps one day we will cease to be bodies or at least some parts of our bodies will be left as remnants based on a different anatomy (giving way to big heads) in the process of human evolution. The problem is not one of technology as much as that of growth .The pace of information growth is scaring. This is in deed a gloomy picture (at least to us now). Our biggest problem and enemy is ultimately growth not only that of information. Every thing is growing: world population is growing, pollution is growing, and economy is growing. People usually think it is positive but any growth means more consumption and more damage. This means we have to set priorities. I personally find it difficult to cope with the information overload. Sometimes I develop interest in a variety of issues and I find myself lost. It has already become difficult to make a choice or a decision.
Maths or translating language into a digital or formal language can only substitute natural language by means of reduction. Reduction means parts of our analogue language (like intonation and other features) are lost because digital or mathematical language stops the language flow, creates boundaries and compresses data as I already mentioned. So because of information density, speed and the possible need for a language that doesn’t allow ambiguity. The language we know now might change or be replaced. I mean human beings have already thought of a language like Esperanto void of identity based on linguistic differences which has caused a lot of human suffering. I am not saying this is what I personally prefer. I know the price we have to pay but our present language has to cope with the big challenges it is going to face in the future.

Suppose extraterrestrials landed on our Earth I am sure they would be greatly surprised to find that people on a small planet like Earth can neither communicate freely and direct (without the help of an intermediary i.e. an interpreter or a translator) nor can get in touch easily. Their astonishment would grow further when they find out how much suffering this linguistic diversity has caused so far. People’s nationalities have been defined foremost on linguistic grounds. Languages create different identities and cultures. This on the one hand makes the world more interesting but on the other hand prepares ground for tragic conflicts. The loss of a linguistic identity doesn’t necessarily mean the loss of a geographic or ethnic identity but it will mean one obstacle being removed.
I would like to elaborate on this issue by drawing a comparison from economy. In Europe, we used to have different currencies and in a sense it was a nice feeling to see foreign currencies when we were on holiday but no one can deny that the introduction of a single currency has also solved a lot of problems. The advantages of a single currency certainly outweigh the disadvantages by far if any. The EURO has set an example and paved the way for a single, at least, official European language. People can go on using their languages but we need a common European or world language to make us strong in unity. People are afraid of the loss of cultures and languages. However, cultures and languages have never been static. They are destined to change. In the age of globalization, information and communication technology, satellite TV and fast travelling the gap has become narrower. In addition, we can save more time and energy when everybody can communicate without any linguistic barriers. I hope one day the present state becomes history and we can say: A long time ago people on our Earth used to have different languages and we wonder how they could cope without a single world language.
English has already become global and no more the property of a certain community. Nobody feels at a disadvantage when speaking English. It’s no more Germanic in quality because it has at least incorporated vocabulary from nearly all languages in the world. This makes English indeed global. Every nation can find a bit of its linguistic heritage integrated into English. Moreover, its writing system has no diacritical points as in some languages which make them difficult to use, pronounce and communicate in writing. English has become a powerful tool and rich; it has become simple and complex at the same time. Gender is nearly non-existent because the article remains “the” whatever the gender and the position in a sentence. There are no difficult case endings and sounds as in lots of other languages which sometimes constitute insurmountable barriers. We can express any idea most powerfully and precisely. It has reached the level of maturity and deserves the label of a global language. In addition, it sounds beautiful and appealing to the ear or at least acceptable and learnable by the majority of people. Finally, global English is experiencing a simplification of its grammar and phonetics.
Density, Memory and Speed
Information is increasing on a daily basis. Our human knowledge has grown, is still growing and will continue to grow due to advances in nearly all disciplines. We are already experiencing information overload. The question is what will be in 50or so years? Even computers are facing difficulty with memory challenges and new search engines like Google are adapted to more effective ways of information storage and retrieval. Academic language takes refuge in nominalization. Our present languages are not prepared to keep pace with such density and speed not experienced before and it is not clear whether our memories and brains can accommodate and cope with these developments.
Global English
English is experiencing a development unprecedented in human history. Every day there are new speakers of English. Again what will be in 50 years or so? The impact of this new situation will be three-fold:
• First, the dominance of English will be to the “disadvantage” of other languages and cultures.
• Second, loss of linguistic identity (to the “disadvantage” of the so-called “native speakers”) which might have advantages since linguistic variety despite its beauty has been a source of tragic conflicts in the world. No more BE or AmE but a global English.
• Third, English will change in its new role to accommodate other cultures and languages. People have already started mixing BE and AmE and don’t care about the pedantic view not to mix the two varieties.
Of course, in every change and development lie advantages and disadvantages but perhaps the advantages outweigh the advantages. In addition to what is mentioned, we will save a lot of time and energy spent on translations and thus communications barriers are removed. This doesn’t mean that a Global English in turn won’t change or split but it is a fact that people in our global village and a 24-hour society are not kept apart as they used to by geographical barriers. We can communicate freely and quickly through the medium of Global English. We have already reached the age of more direct and instant contact. Future linguistic changes consequently will be of a different nature.
The principle of convention and democracy in change
This is not plea for an artificial replacement of the present world languages. On the contrary natural languages are a means of social cuddling and cannot be changed by the dictatorship of minorities. It’s always the dictatorship of the majority. There will be no revolution but changes are already underway. It’s a fact that a Global English is already underway to overrun many a language.
The versatile and analogue character of Natural Languages
Natural (analogue) languages are certainly superior to artificial or digital languages because they accommodate nearly all of our present needs and can be used for all disciplines. However, we have already developed mathematical and computer languages to satisfy specific needs. In addition, natural languages leave room for ambiguity which still might be very useful to satisfy certain human needs (like literature, playing on words, implications, jokes ….) but can also be a source of misunderstanding. On the other hand digitization is simple, boring and poor cannot satisfy our present social needs although it is precise, mathematical, can be reduced, stored and manipulated.
As already mentioned these are only predictions made due to a variety of changes and developments in the last 20 years or so. Perhaps the most threatening force is growth. This word might sound positive but is in fact behind a lot of evil. Just imagine everything is growing, Earth population, economy (which means more consumption and Pollution and more…). Human knowledge has grown exponentially. This is the reality and not fiction even though a lot of trash is being produced daily but you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. In order to cope with this growth we need resources. For example we need food for the growing population, but producing and consuming food means in turn more pollution, more damage…
As far as human knowledge is concerned we also need resources to store and retrieve information. There are big advances in science and technology and our knowledge is growing on a daily basis. Just take the number of books, websites published everyday in comparison what was some years ago.
The computer networks worldwide, the phone, TV (satellite, cable, terrestrial), internet (email and the web), modern airlines have made it possible to contact each other just in-time, interact with each other, discuss issues online, share work, brainstorm ideas, pool resources and so on much faster and more productively. There are practically no boundaries left. All sciences are linked and have become inter-disciplinary. In Europe the EU and the single currency have also removed borders. Thus growth or density of information necessitates a tool to communicate and interact faster. Human language might not be capable of keeping pace with this growth and speed. Academic language is compact uses more nouns than verbs (nominalization: independent of tense, aspect and mood) because you can pack more information into nouns than verbs, use many of them (cram your text but still not wordy). They are quieter, more objective and do a lot of other operations on them. For example, you can count them, modify them…. Verbs in comparison are verbal or verbose (more talk than matter). They i.e. verbs are more subjective, dynamic (the majority of verbs are dynamic not stative and even among the limited number of stative verbs which exist some behave dynamically. Verbs of high frequency belong to informal register, show change and are conjugated which you don’t have in nouns. Nouns are static (almost lifeless), neutral to change and emotions and more objective. Counting the number of nouns and verbs in a page of an academic paper will show this tendency. In addition, verbs are subordinate to nouns because they relate nouns to each other like prepositions and we can do only with a few of them. Some are transitive with one object or some have two open connections. So we need something beyond English either as an adapted natural language or an artificial functioning next to our natural one. It can be any tool.
However, human language is beautiful, encodes more than linguistic information, and allows room for ambiguity. There are a lot of implications and layers in human language next to the basic linguistic layer. It is analogue, has no boundaries and is far much superior to mathematical or digital languages.

Throughout the history of the study of man there has been a fundamental opposition between those who believe that progress is to be made by a rigorous observation of man’s actual behavior and those who believe that such observations are interesting only in so far as they reveal to us hidden and possibly fairly mysterious underlying laws that only partially and in distorted form reveal themselves to us in behavior. Freud, for example, is in the latter class, most of American social science in the former.
Noam Chomsky is unashamedly with the searchers after hidden laws. Actual speech behavior, speech performance, for him is only the top of a large iceberg of linguistic competence distorted in its shape by many factors irrelevant to linguistics. Indeed he once remarked that the very expression “behavioral sciences” suggests a fundamental confusion between evidence and subject matter. Psychology, for example, he claims is the science of mind; to call psychology a behavioral science is like calling physics a science of meter readings. One uses human behavior as evidence for the laws of the operation of the mind, but to suppose that the laws must be laws of behavior is to suppose that the evidence must be the subject matter.
In this opposition between the methodology of confining research to observable facts and that of using the observable facts as clues to hidden and underlying laws, Chomsky’s revolution is doubly interesting: first, within the field of linguistics, it has precipitated a conflict which is an example of the wider conflict; and secondly, Chomsky has used his results about language to try to develop general anti-behaviorist and anti-empiricist conclusions about the nature of the human mind that go beyond the scope of linguistics.
His revolution followed fairly closely the general pattern described in Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: the accepted model or “paradigm” of linguistics was confronted, largely by Chomsky’s work, with increasing numbers of nagging counterexamples and recalcitrant data which the paradigm could not deal with. Eventually the counter-examples led Chomsky to break the old model altogether and to create a completely new one. Prior to the publication of his Syntactic Structures in 1957, many, probably most, American linguists regarded the aim of their discipline as being the classification of the elements of human languages. Linguistics was to be a sort of verbal botany. As Hockett wrote in 1942, “Linguistics is a classificatory science.”[1]
Suppose, for example, that such a linguist is giving a description of a language, whether an exotic language like Cherokee or a familiar one like English. He proceeds by first collecting his “data,” he gathers a large number of utterances of the language, which he records on his tape recorder or in a phonetic script. This “corpus” of the language constitutes his subject matter. He then classifies the elements of the corpus at their different linguistic levels: first he classifies the smallest significant functioning units of sound, the phonemes, then at the next level the phonemes unite into the minimally significant bearers of meaning, the morphemes (in English, for example, the word “cat” is a single morpheme made up of three phonemes; the word “uninteresting” is made up of three morphemes: “un,” “interest,” and “ing”), at the next higher level the morphemes join together to form words and word classes such as noun phrases and verb phrases, and at the highest level of all come sequences of word classes, the possible sentences and sentence types.
The aim of linguistic theory was to provide the linguist with a set of rigorous methods, a set of discovery procedures which he would use to extract from the “corpus” the phonemes, the morphemes, and so on. The study of the meanings of sentences or of the uses to which speakers of the language put the sentences had little place in this enterprise. Meanings, scientifically construed, were thought to be patterns of behavior determined by stimulus and response; they were properly speaking the subject matter of psychologists. Alternatively they might be some mysterious mental entities altogether outside the scope of a sober science or, worse yet, they might involve the speaker’s whole knowledge of the world around him and thus fall beyond the scope of a study restricted only to linguistic facts.
Structural linguistics, with its insistence on objective methods of verification and precisely specified techniques of discovery, with its refusal to allow any talk of meanings or mental entities or unobservable features, derives from the “behavioral sciences” approach to the study of man, and is also largely a consequence of the philosophical assumptions of logical positivism. Chomsky was brought up in this tradition at the University of Pennsylvania as a student of both Zellig Harris, the linguist, and Nelson Goodman, the philosopher.
Chomsky’s work is interesting in large part because, while it is a major attack on the conception of man implicit in the behavioral sciences, the attack is made from within the very tradition of scientific rigor and precision that the behavioral sciences have been aspiring to. His attack on the view that human psychology can be described by correlating stimulus and response is not an a priori conceptual argument, much less is it the cry of an anguished humanist resentful at being treated as a machine or an animal. Rather it is a claim that a really rigorous analysis of language will show that such methods when applied to language produce nothing but false-hoods or trivialities, that their practitioners have simply imitated “the surface features of science” without having its “significant intellectual content.”
As a graduate student at Pennsylvania, Chomsky attempted to apply the conventional methods of structural linguistics to the study of syntax, but found that the methods that had apparently worked so well with phonemes and morphemes did not work very well with sentences. Each language has a finite number of phonemes and a finite though quite large number of morphemes. It is possible to get a list of each; but the number of sentences in any natural language like French or English is, strictly speaking, infinite. There is no limit to the number of new sentences that can be produced; and for each sentence, no matter how long, it is always possible to produce a longer one. Within structuralist assumptions it is not easy to account for the fact that languages have an infinite number of sentences.
Furthermore the structuralist methods of classification do not seem able to account for all of the internal relations within sentences, or the relations that different sentences have to each other. For example, to take a famous case, the two sentences “John is easy to please” and “John is eager to please” look as if they had exactly the same grammatical structure. Each is a sequence of noun-copula-adjective-infinitive verb. But in spite of this surface similarity the grammar of the two is quite different. In the first sentence, though it is not apparent from the surface word order, “John” functions as the direct object of the verb to please; the sentence means: it is easy for someone to please John. Whereas in the second “John” functions as the subject of the verb to please; the sentence means: John is eager that he please someone. That this is a difference in the syntax of the sentences comes out clearly in the fact that English allows us to form the noun phrase “John’s eagerness to please” out of the second, but not “John’s easiness to please” out of the first. There is no easy or natural way to account for these facts within structuralist assumptions.
Another set of syntactical facts that structuralist assumptions are inadequate to handle is the existence of certain types of ambiguous sentences where the ambiguity derives not from the words in the sentence but from the syntactical structure. Consider the sentence “The shooting of the hunters is terrible.” This can mean that it is terrible that the hunters are being shot or that the hunters are terrible at shooting or that the hunters are being shot in a terrible fashion. Another example is “I like her cooking.” In spite of the fact that it contains no ambiguous words (or morphemes) and has a very simple superficial grammatical structure of noun-verb-possessive pronoun-noun, this sentence is in fact remarkably ambiguous. It can mean, among other things, I like what she cooks, I like the way she cooks, I like the fact that she cooks, even, I like the fact that she is being cooked.
Such “syntactically ambiguous” sentences form a crucial test case for any theory of syntax. The examples are ordinary pedestrian English sentences, there is nothing fancy about them. But it is not easy to see how to account for them. The meaning of any sentence is determined by the meanings of the component words (or morphemes) and their syntactical arrangement. How then can we account for these cases where one sentence containing unambiguous words (and morphemes) has several different meanings? Structuralist linguists had little or nothing to say about these cases; they simply ignored them. Chomsky was eventually led to claim that these sentences have several different syntactical structures, that the uniform surface structure of, e.g., “I like her cooking” conceals several different underlying structures which he called “deep” structures. The introduction of the notion of the deep structure of sentences, not always visible in the surface structure, is a crucial element of the Chomsky revolution, and I shall explain it in more detail later.
One of the merits of Chomsky’s work has been that he has persistently tried to call attention to the puzzling character of facts that are so familiar that we all tend to take them for granted as not requiring explanation. Just as physics begins in wonder at such obvious facts as that apples fall to the ground or genetics in wonder that plants and animals reproduce themselves, so the study of the structure of language beings in wondering at such humdrum facts as that “I like her cooking” has different meanings, “John is eager to please” isn’t quite the same in structure as “John is easy to please,” and the equally obvious but often overlooked facts that we continually find ourselves saying and hearing things we have never said or heard before and that the number of possible new sentences is infinite.
The inability of structuralist methods to account for such syntactical facts eventually led Chomsky to challenge not only the methods but the goals and indeed the definition of the subject matter of linguistics given by the structuralist linguists. Instead of a taxonomic goal of classifying elements by performing sets of operations on a corpus of utterances, Chomsky argued that the goal of linguistic description should be to construct a theory that would account for the infinite number of sentences of a natural language. Such a theory would show which strings of words were sentences and which were not, and would provide a description of the grammatical structure of each sentence.
Such descriptions would have to be able to account for such facts as the internal grammatical relations and the ambiguities described above. The description of a natural language would be a formal deductive theory which would contain a set of grammatical rules that could generate the infinite set of sentences of the language, would not generate anything that was not a sentence, and would provide a description of the grammatical structure of each sentence. Such a theory came to be called a “generative grammar” because of its aim of constructing a device that would generate all and only the sentences of a language.
This conception of the goal of linguistics then altered the conception of the methods and the subject matter. Chomsky argued that since any language contains an infinite number of sentences, any “corpus,” even if it contained as many sentences as there are in all the books of the Library of Congress, would still be trivially small. Instead of the appropriate subject matter of linguistics being a randomly or arbitrarily selected set of sentences, the proper object of study was the speaker’s underlying knowledge of the language, his “linguistic competence” that enables him to produce and understand sentences he has never heard before.
Once the conception of the “corpus” as the subject matter is rejected, then the notion of mechanical procedures for discovering linguistic truths goes as well. Chomsky argues that no science has a mechanical procedure for discovering the truth anyway. Rather, what happens is that the scientist formulates hypotheses and tests them against evidence. Linguistics is no different: the linguist makes conjectures about linguistic facts and tests them against the evidence provided by native speakers of the language. He has in short a procedure for evaluating rival hypotheses, but no procedure for discovering true theories by mechanically processing evidence.
The Chomsky revolution can be summarized in the following chart:

Most of this revolution was already presented in Chomsky’s book Syntactic Structures. As one linguist remarked, “The extraordinary and traumatic impact of the publication of Syntactic Structures by Noam Chomsky in 1957 can hardly be appreciated by one who did not live through this upheaval.”[2] In the years after 1957 the spread of the revolution was made more rapid and more traumatic by certain special features of the organization of linguistics as a discipline in the United States. Only a few universities had separate departments of linguistics. The discipline was (by contrast to, say, philosophy or psychology), and still is, a rather cozy one. Practitioners were few; they all tended to know one another; they read the same very limited number of journals; they had, and indeed still have, an annual get-together at the Summer Linguistics Institute of the Linguistic Society of America, where issues are thrashed out and family squabbles are aired in public meetings.
All of this facilitated a rapid dissemination of new ideas and a dramatic and visible clash of conflicting views. Chomsky did not convince the established leaders of the field but he did something more important, he convinced their graduate students. And he attracted some fiery disciples, notably Robert Lees and Paul Postal.
The spread of Chomsky’s revolution, like the spread of analytic philosophy during the same period, was a striking example of the Young Turk phenomenon in American academic life. The graduate students became generative grammarians even in departments that had traditionalist faculties. All of this also engendered a good deal of passion and animosity, much of which still survives. Many of the older generation still cling resentfully to the great traditions, regarding Chomsky and his “epigones” as philistines and vulgarians. Meanwhile Chomsky’s views have become the conventional wisdom, and as Chomsky and his disciples of the Sixties very quickly become Old Turks a new generation of Young Turks (many of them among Chomsky’s best students) arise and challenge Chomsky’s views with a new theory of “generative semantics.”
II
The aim of the linguistic theory expounded by Chomsky in Syntactic Structures (1957) was essentially to describe syntax, that is, to specify the grammatical rules underlying the construction of sentences. In Chomsky’s mature theory, as expounded in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), the aims become more ambitious: to explain all of the linguistic relationships between the sound system and the meaning system of the language. To achieve this, the complete “grammar” of a language, in Chomsky’s technical sense of the word, must have three parts, a syntactical component that generates and describes the internal structure of the infinite number of sentences of the language, a phonological component that describes the sound structure of the sentences generated by the syntactical component, and a semantic component that describes the meaning structure of the sentences. The heart of the grammar is the syntax; the phonology and the semantics are purely “interpretative,” in the sense that they describe the sound and the meaning of the sentences produced by the syntax but do not generate any sentences themselves.
The first task of Chomsky’s syntax is to account for the speaker’s understanding of the internal structure of sentences. Sentences are not unordered strings of words, rather the words and morphemes are grouped into functional constituents such as the subject of the sentence, the predicate, the direct object, and so on. Chomsky and other grammarians can represent much, though not all, of the speaker’s knowledge of the internal structure of sentences with rules called “phrase structure” rules.
The rules themselves are simple enough to understand. For example, the fact that a sentence (S) can consist of a noun phrase (NP) followed by a verb phrase (VP) we can represent in a rule of the form: S ? NP + VP. And for purposes of constructing a grammatical theory which will generate and describe the structure of sentences, we can read the arrow as an instruction to rewrite the left-hand symbol as the string of symbols on the right-hand side. The rewrite rules tell us that the initial symbol S can be replaced by NP + VP. Other rules will similarly unpack NP and VP into their constituents. Thus, in a very simple grammar, a noun phrase might consist of an article (Art) followed by a noun (N); and a verb phrase might consist of an auxiliary verb (Aux), a main verb (V), and a noun phrase (NP). A very simple grammar of a fragment of English, then, might look like this:
1. S ? NP + VP
2. NP ? Art + N
3. VP ? Aux + V + NP
4. Aux ? (can, may, will, must, etc.)
5. V ? (read, hit, eat, etc.)
6. Art ? (a, the)
7. N ? (boy, man, book, etc.)
If we introduce the initial symbol S into this system, then construing each arrow as the instruction to rewrite the left-hand symbol with the elements on the right (and where the elements are bracketed, to rewrite it as one of the elements), we can construct derivations of English sentences. If we keep applying the rules to generate strings until we have no elements in our strings that occur on the left-hand side of a rewrite rule, we have arrived at a “terminal string.” For example, starting with S and rewriting according to the rules mentioned above, we might construct the following simple derivation of the terminal string underlying the sentence “The boy will read the book”:
S
NP + VP (by rule 1)
Art + N + VP (by rule 2)
Art + N + Aux + V + NP (by rule 3)
Art + N + Aux + V + Art + N
(by rule 2)
the + boy + will + read + the + book
(by rules 4, 5, 6, and 7)
The information contained in this derivation can be represented graphically in a tree diagram of the following form:

This “phrase marker” is Chomsky’s representation of the syntax of the sentence “The boy will read the book.” It provides a description of the syntactical structure of the sentence. Phrase structure rules of the sort I have used to construct the derivation were implicit in at least some of the structuralist grammars; but Chomsky was the first to render them explicit and to show their role in the derivations of sentences. He is not, of course, claiming that a speaker actually goes consciously or unconsciously through any such process of applying rules of the form “rewrite X as Y” to construct sentences. To construe the grammarian’s description this way would be to confuse an account of competence with a theory of performance.
But Chomsky does claim that in some form or other the speaker has “internalized” rules of sentence construction, that he has “tacit” or “unconscious” knowledge of grammatical rules, and that the phrase structure rules constructed by the grammarian “represent” his competence. One of the chief difficulties of Chomsky’s theory is that no clear and precise answer has ever been given to the question of exactly how the grammarian’s account of the construction of sentences is supposed to represent the speaker’s ability to speak and understand sentences, and in precisely what sense of “know” the speaker is supposed to know the rules of the grammar.
Phrase structure rules were, as I have said, already implicit in at least some of the structuralist grammars Chomsky was attacking in Syntactic Structures. One of his earliest claims was that such rules, even in a rigorous and formalized deductive model such as we have just sketched, were not adequate to account for all the syntactical facts of natural languages. The entering wedge of his attack on structuralism was the claim that phrase structure rules alone could not account for the various sorts of cases such as “I like her cooking” and “John is eager to please.”
First, within such a grammar there is no natural way to describe the ambiguities in a sentence such as “I like her cooking.” Phrase structure rules alone would provide only one derivation for this sentence; but as the sentence is syntactically ambiguous, the grammar should reflect that fact by providing several different syntactical derivations and hence several different syntactical descriptions.
Secondly, phrase structure grammars have no way to picture the differences between “John is easy to please” and “John is eager to please.” Though the sentences are syntactically different, phrase structure rules alone would give them similar phrase markers.
Thirdly, just as in the above examples surface similarities conceal underlying differences that cannot be revealed by phrase structure grammar, so surface differences also conceal underlying similarities. For example, in spite of the different word order and the addition of certain elements, the sentence “The book will be read by the boy” and the sentence “The boy will read the book” have much in common: they both mean the same thing—the only difference is that one is in the passive mood and the other in the active mood. Phrase structure grammars alone give us no way to picture this similarity. They would give us two unrelated descriptions of these two sentences.
To account for such facts, Chomsky claims that in addition to phrase structure rules the grammar requires a second kind of rule, “transformational” rules, which transform phrase markers into other phrase markers by moving elements around, by adding elements, and by deleting elements. For example, by using Chomsky’s transformational rules, we can show the similarity of the passive to the active mood by showing how a phrase marker for the active mood can be converted into a phrase marker for the passive mood. Thus, instead of generating two unrelated phrase markers by phrase structure rules, we can construct a simpler grammar by showing how both the active and the passive can be derived from the same underlying phrase marker.
To account for sentences like “I like her cooking” we show that what we have is not just one phrase marker but several different underlying sentences each with a different meaning, and the phrase markers for these different sentences can all be transformed into one phrase marker for “I like her cooking.” Thus, underlying the one sentence “I like her cooking” are phrase markers for “I like what she cooks,” “I like the way she cooks,” “I like the fact that she cooks,” etc. For example, underlying the two meanings, “I like what she cooks” and “I like it that she is being cooked,” are the two phrase markers:[3]

Different transformational rules convert each of these into the same derived phrase marker for the sentence “I like her cooking.” Thus, the ambiguity in the sentence is represented in the grammar by phrase markers of several quite different sentences. Different phrase markers produced by the phrase structure rules are transformed into the same phrase marker by the application of the transformational rules.
Because of the introduction of transformational rules, grammars of Chomsky’s kind are often called “transformational generative grammars” or simply “transformational grammars.” Unlike phrase structure rules which apply to a single left-hand element in virtue of its shape, transformational rules apply to an element only in virtue of its position in a phrase marker: instead of rewriting one element as a string of elements, a transformational rule maps one phrase marker into another. Transformational rules therefore apply after the phrase structure rules have been applied; they operate on the output of the phrase structure rules of the grammar.
Corresponding to the phrase structure rules and the transformational rules respectively are two components to the syntax of the language, a base component and a transformational component. The base component of Chomsky’s grammar contains the phrase structure rules, and these (together with certain rules restricting which combinations of words are permissible so that we do not get nonsense sequences like “The book will read the boy”) determine the deep structure of each sentence. The transformational component converts the deep structure of the sentence into its surface structure. In the example we just considered, “The book will be boy” and the sentence “The boy will read the book,” two surface structures are derived from one deep structure. In the case of “I like her cooking,” one surface structure is derived from several different deep structures.
At the time of the publication of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax it seemed that all of the semantically relevant parts of the sentence, all the things that determine its meaning, were contained in the deep structure of the sentence. The examples we mentioned above fit in nicely with this view. “I like her cooking” has different meanings because it has different deep structures though only one surface structure; “The boy will read the book” and “The book will be read by the boy” have different surface structures, but one and the same deep structure, hence they have the same meaning.
This produced a rather elegant theory of the relation of syntax to semantics and phonology: the two components of the syntax, the base component and the transformational component, generate deep structures and surface structures respectively. Deep structures are the input to the semantic component, which describes their meaning. Surface structures are the input to the phonological component, which describes their sound. In short, deep structure determines meaning, surface structure determines sound. Graphically the theory of a language was supposed to look like this:

The task of the grammarian is to state the rules that are in each of the little boxes. These rules are supposed to represent the speaker’s competence. In knowing how to produce and understand sentences, the speaker, in some sense, is supposed to know or to have “internalized” or have an “internal representation of” these rules.
The elegance of this picture has been marred in recent years, partly by Chomsky himself, who now concedes that surface structures determine at least part of meaning, and more radically by the younger Turks, the generative semanticists, who insist that there is no boundary between syntax and semantics and hence no such entities as syntactic deep structures.
III
Seen as an attack on the methods and assumptions of structural linguistics, Chomsky’s revolution appears to many of his students to be not quite revolutionary enough. Chomsky inherits and maintains from his structuralist upbringing the conviction that syntax can and should be studied independently of semantics; that form is to be characterized independently of meaning. As early as Syntactic Structures he was arguing that “investigation of such [semantic] proposals invariably leads to the conclusion that only a purely formal basis can provide a firm and productive foundation for the construction of grammatical theory.”[4]
The structuralists feared the intrusion of semantics into syntax because meaning seemed too vaporous and unscientific a notion for use in a rigorous science of language. Some of this attitude appears to survive in Chomsky’s persistent preference for syntactical over semantic explanations of linguistic phenomena. But, I believe, the desire to keep syntax autonomous springs from a more profound philosophical commitment: man, for Chomsky, is essentially a syntactical animal. The structure of his brain determines the structure of his syntax, and for this reason the study of syntax is one of the keys, perhaps the most important key, to the study of the human mind.
It is of course true, Chomsky would say, that men use their syntactical objects for semantic purposes (that is, they talk with their sentences), but the semantic purposes do not determine the form of the syntax or even influence it in any significant way. It is because form is only incidentally related to function that the study of language as a formal system is such a marvelous way of studying the human mind.
It is important to emphasize how peculiar and eccentric Chomsky’s overall approach to language is. Most sympathetic commentators have been so dazzled by the results in syntax that they have not noted how much of the theory runs counter to quite ordinary, plausible, and common-sense assumptions about language. The commonsense picture of human language runs something like this. The purpose of language is communication in much the same sense that the purpose of the heart is to pump blood. In both cases it is possible to study the structure independently of function but pointless and perverse to do so, since structure and function so obviously interact. We communicate primarily with other people, but also with ourselves, as when we talk or think in words to ourselves. Human languages are among several systems of human communication (some others are gestures, symbol systems, and representational art) but language has immeasurably greater communicative power than the others.
We don’t know how language evolved in human prehistory, but it is quite reasonable to suppose that the needs of communication influenced the structure. For example, transformational rules facilitate economy and so have survival value: we don’t have to say, “I like it that she cooks in a certain way,” we can say, simply, “I like her cooking.” We pay a small price for such economies in having ambiguities, but it does not hamper communication much to have ambiguous sentences because when people actually talk the context usually sorts out the ambiguities. Transformations also facilitate communication by enabling us to emphasize certain things at the expense of others: we can say not only “Bill loves Sally” but also “It is Bill that loves Sally” and “It is Sally that Bill loves.” In general an understanding of syntactical facts requires an understanding of their function in communication since communication is what language is all about.
Chomsky’s picture, on the other hand, seems to be something like this: except for having such general purposes as the expression of human thoughts, language doesn’t have any essential purpose, or if it does there is no interesting connection between its purpose and its structure. The syntactical structures of human languages are the products of innate features of the human mind, and they have no significant connection with communication, though, of course, people do use them for, among other purposes, communication. The essential thing about languages, their defining trait, is their structure. The so-called “bee language,” for example, is not a language at all because it doesn’t have the right structure, and the fact that bees apparently use it to communicate is irrelevant. If human beings evolved to the point where they used syntactical forms to communicate that are quite unlike the forms we have now and would be beyond our present comprehension, then human beings would no longer have language, but something else.
For Chomsky language is defined by syntactical structure (not by the use of the structure in communication) and syntactical structure is determined by innate properties of the human mind (not by the needs of communication). On this picture of language it is not surprising that Chomsky’s main contribution has been to syntax. The semantic results that he and his colleagues have achieved have so far been trivial.
Many of Chomsky’s best students find this picture of language implausible and the linguistic theory that emerges from it unnecessarily cumbersome. They argue that one of the crucial factors shaping syntactic structure is semantics. Even such notions as “a grammatically correct sentence” or a “well-formed” sentence, they claim, require the introduction of semantic concepts. For example, the sentence “John called Mary a Republican and then SHE insulted HIM” [5] is a wellformed sentence only on the assumption that the participants regard it as insulting to be called a Republican.
Much as Chomsky once argued that structuralists could not comfortably accommodate the syntactical facts of language, so the generative semanticists now argue that his system cannot comfortably account for the facts of the interpenetration of semantics and syntax. There is no unanimity among Chomsky’s critics—Ross, Postal, Lakoff, McCawley, Fillmore (some of these are among his best students)—but they generally agree that syntax and semantics cannot be sharply separated, and hence there is no need to postulate the existence of purely syntactical deep structures.
Those who call themselves generative semanticists believe that the generative component of a linguistic theory is not the syntax, as in the above diagrams, but the semantics, that the grammar starts with a description of the meaning of a sentence and then generates the syntactical structures through the introduction of syntactical rules and lexical rules. The syntax then becomes just a collection of rules for expressing meaning.
It is too early to assess the conflict between Chomsky’s generative syntax and the new theory of generative semantics, partly because at present the arguments are so confused. Chomsky himself thinks that there is no substance to the issues because his critics have only rephrased his theory in a new terminology.[6]
But it is clear that a great deal of Chomsky’s over-all vision of language hangs on the issue of whether there is such a thing as syntactical deep structure. Chomsky argues that if there were no deep structure, linguistics as a study would be much less interesting because one could not then argue from syntax to the structure of the human mind, which for Chomsky is the chief interest of linguistics. I believe on the contrary that if the generative semanticists are right (and it is by no means clear that they are) that there is no boundary between syntax and semantics and hence no syntactical deep structures, linguistics if anything would be even more interesting because we could then begin the systematic investigation of the way form and function interact, how use and structure influence each other, instead of arbitrarily assuming that they do not, as Chomsky has so often tended to assume.
It is one of the ironies of the Chomsky revolution that the author of the revolution now occupies a minority position in the movement he created. Most of the active people in generative grammar regard Chomsky’s position as having been rendered obsolete by the various arguments concerning the inter-action between syntax and semantics. The old time structuralists whom Chomsky originally attacked look on with delight at this revolution within the revolution, rubbing their hands in glee at the sight of their adversaries fighting each other. “Those TG [transformational grammar] people are in deep trouble,” one warhorse of the old school told me. But the traditionalists are mistaken to regard the fight as support for their position. The conflict is being carried on entirely within a conceptual system that Chomsky created. Whoever wins, the old structuralism will be the loser.
IV
The most spectacular conclusion about the nature of the human mind that Chomsky derives from his work in linguistics is that his results vindicate the claims of the seventeenth-century rationalist philosophers, Descartes, Leibniz, and others, that there are innate ideas in the mind. The rationalists claim that human beings have knowledge that is not derived from experience but is prior to all experience and determines the form of the knowledge that can be gained from experience. The empiricist tradition by contrast, from Locke down to contemporary behaviorist learning theorists, has tended to treat the mind as a tabula rasa, containing no knowledge prior to experience and placing no constraints on the forms of possible knowledge, except that they must be derived from experience by such mechanisms as the association of ideas or the habitual connection of stimulus and response. For empiricists all knowledge comes from experience, for rationalists some knowledge is implanted innately and prior to experience. In his bluntest moods, Chomsky claims to have refuted the empiricists and vindicated the rationalists.
His argument centers around the way in which children learn language. Suppose we assume that the account of the structure of natural languages we gave in Section II is correct. Then the grammar of a natural language will consist of a set of phrase structure rules that generate underlying phrase markers, a set of transformational rules that map deep structures onto surface structures, a set of phonological rules that assign phonetic interpretations to surface structures, and so on. Now, asks Chomsky, if all of this is part of the child’s linguistic competence, how does he ever acquire it? That is, in learning how to talk, how does the child acquire that part of knowing how to talk which is described by the grammar and which constitutes his linguistic competence?
Notice, Chomsky says, several features of the learning situation: The information that the child is presented with—when other people address him or when he hears them talk to each other—is limited in amount, fragmentary, and imperfect. There seems to be no way the child could learn the language just by generalizing from his inadequate experiences, from the utterances he hears. Furthermore, the child acquires the language at a very early age, before his general intellectual faculties are developed.
Indeed, the ability to learn a language is only marginally dependent on intelligence and motivation—stupid children and intelligent children, motivated and unmotivated children, all learn to speak their native tongue. If a child does not acquire his first language by puberty, it is difficult, and perhaps impossible, for him to learn one after that time. Formal teaching of the first language is unnecessary: the child may have to go to school to learn to read and write but he does not have to go to school to learn how to talk.
Now, in spite of all these facts the child who learns his first language, claims Chomsky, performs a remarkable intellectual feat: in “internalizing” the grammar he does something akin to constructing a theory of the language. The only explanation for all these facts, says Chomsky, is that the mind is not a tabula rasa, but rather, the child has the form of the language already built into his mind before he ever learns to talk. The child has a universal grammar, so to speak, programmed into his brain as part of his genetic inheritance. In the most ambitious versions of this theory, Chomsky speaks of the child as being born “with a perfect knowledge of universal grammar, that is, with a fixed schematism that he uses,…in acquiring language.”[7] A child can learn any human language on the basis of very imperfect information. That being the case, he must have the forms that are common to all human languages as part of his innate mental equipment.
As further evidence in support of a specifically human “faculté de langage” Chomsky points out that animal communication systems are radically unlike human languages. Animal systems have only a finite number of communicative devices, and they are usually controlled by certain stimuli. Human languages by contrast, all have an infinite generative capacity and the utterances of sentences are not predictable on the basis of external stimuli. This “creative aspect of language use” is peculiarly human.
One traditional argument against the existence of an innate language learning faculty is that human languages are so diverse. The differences between Chinese, Nootka, Hungarian, and English, for example, are so great as to destroy the possibility of any universal grammar, and hence languages could only be learned by a general intelligence, not by any innate language learning device. Chomsky has attempted to turn this argument on its head: In spite of surface differences, all human languages have very similar underlying structures; they all have phrase structure rules and transformational rules. They all contain sentences, and these sentences are composed of subject noun phrases and predicate verb phrases, etc.
Chomsky is really making two claims here. First, a historical claim that his views on language were prefigured by the seventeenth-century rationalists, especially Descartes. Second, a theoretical claim that empiricist learning theory cannot account for the acquisition of language. Both claims are more tenuous than he suggests. Descartes did indeed claim that we have innate ideas, such as the idea of a triangle or the idea of perfection or the idea of God. But I know of no passage in Descartes to suggest that he thought the syntax of natural languages was innate. Quite the contrary, Descartes appears to have thought that language was arbitrary; he thought that we arbitrarily attach words to our ideas. Concepts for Descartes are innate, whereas language is arbitrary and acquired. Furthermore Descartes does not allow for the possibility of unconscious knowledge, a notion that is crucial to Chomsky’s system. Chomsky cites correctly Descartes’s claim that the creative use of language distinguishes man from the lower animals. But that by itself does not support the thesis that Descartes is a precursor of Chomsky’s theory of innate ideas.
The positions are in fact crucially different. Descartes thought of man as essentially a language-using animal who arbitrarily assigns verbal labels to an innate system of concepts. Chomsky, as remarked earlier, thinks of man as essentially a syntactical animal producing and understanding sentences by virtue of possessing an innate system of grammar, triggered in various possible forms by the different human languages to which he has been exposed. A better historical analogy than with Descartes is with Leibniz, who claimed that innate ideas are in us in the way that the statue is already prefigured in a block of marble. In a passage of Leibniz Chomsky frequently quotes, Leibniz makes
…the comparison of a block of marble which has veins, rather than a block of marble wholly even, or of blank tablets, i.e., of what is called among philosophers, a tabula rasa. For if the soul resembles these blank tablets, truth would be in us as the figure of Hercules is in the marble, when the marble is wholly indifferent to the reception of this figure or some other. But if there were veins in the block which would indicate the figure of Hercules rather than other figures, this block would be more determined thereto, and Hercules would be in it as in some sense innate, although it would be needful to labor to discover these veins, to clear them by polishing, and by cutting away what prevents them from appearing. Thus, it is that ideas and truths are for us innate, as inclinations, dispositions, habits, or natural potentialities, and not as actions, although these potentialities are always accompanied by some actions, often insensible, which correspond to them.[8]
But if the correct model for the notion of innate ideas is the block of marble that contains the figure of Hercules as “disposition,” “inclination,” or “natural potentiality,” then at least some of the dispute between Chomsky and the empiricist learning theorists will dissolve like so much mist on a hot morning. Many of the fiercest partisans of empiricist and behaviorist learning theories are willing to concede that the child has innate learning capacities in the sense that he has innate dispositions, inclinations, and natural potentialities. Just as the block of marble has the innate capacity of being turned into a statue, so the child has the innate capacity of learning. W. V. Quine, for example, in his response to Chomsky’s innateness hypothesis argues, “The behaviorist is knowingly and cheerfully up to his neck in innate mechanisms of learning readiness.” Indeed, claims Quine, “Innate biases and dispositions are the cornerstone of behaviorism.”[9]
If innateness is the cornerstone of behaviorism what then is left of the dispute? Even after all these ecumenical disclaimers by behaviorists to the effect that of course behaviorism and empiricism require innate mechanisms to make the stimulus-response patterns work, there still remains a hard core of genuine disagreement. Chomsky is arguing not simply that the child must have “learning readiness,” “biases,” and “dispositions,” but that he must have a specific set of linguistic mechanisms at work. Claims by behaviorists that general learning strategies are based on mechanisms of feedback, information processing, analogy, and so on are not going to be enough. One has to postulate an innate faculty of language in order to account for the fact that the child comes up with the right grammar on the basis of his exposure to the language.
The heart of Chomsky’s argument is that the syntactical core of any language is so complicated and so specific in its form, so unlike other kinds of knowledge, that no child could learn it unless he already had the form of the grammar programmed into his brain, unless, that is, he had “perfect knowledge of a universal grammar.” Since there is at the present state of neurophysiology no way to test such a hypothesis by inspection of the brain, the evidence for the conclusion rests entirely on the facts of the grammar. In order to meet the argument, the anti-Chomskyan would have to propose a simpler grammar that would account for the child’s ability to learn a language and for linguistic competence in general. No defender of traditional learning theory has so far done this (though the generative grammarians do claim that their account of competence is much simpler than the diagram we drew in Section II above).
The behaviorist and empiricist learning theorist who concedes the complexity of grammar is faced with a dilemma: either he relies solely on stimulus-response mechanisms, in which case he cannot account for the acquisition of the grammar, or he concedes, à la Quine, that there are innate mechanisms which enable the child to learn the language. But as soon as the mechanisms are rich enough to account for the complexity and specificity of the grammar, then the stimulus-response part of the theory, which was supposed to be its core, becomes uninteresting; for such interest as it still has now derives entirely from its ability to trigger the innate mechanisms that are now the crucial element of the learning theory. Either way, the behaviorist has no effective reply to Chomsky’s arguments.
V
The weakest element of Chomsky’s grammar is the semantic component, as he himself repeatedly admits.[10] But while he believes that the semantic component suffers from various minor technical limitations, I think that it is radically inadequate; that the theory of meaning it contains is too impoverished to enable the grammar to achieve its objective of explaining all the linguistic relationships between sound and meaning.
Most, though not all, of the diverse theories of meaning advanced in the past several centuries from Locke to Chomsky and Quine are guilty of exactly the same fallacy. The fallacy can be put in the form of a dilemma for the theory: either the analysis of meaning itself contains certain of the crucial elements of the notion to be analyzed, in which case the analysis fails because of circularity; or the analysis reduces the thing to be analyzed into simpler elements which lack its crucial features, in which case the analysis fails because of inadequacy.
Before we apply this dilemma to Chomsky let us see how it works for a simple theory of meaning such as is found in the classical empirical philosophers, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. These great British empiricists all thought that words got their meaning by standing for ideas in the mind. A sentence like “The flower is red” gets its meaning from the fact that anyone who understands the sentence will conjoin in his mind an idea of a flower with an idea of redness. Historically there were various arguments about the details of the theory (e.g., were the ideas for which general words stood themselves general ideas or were they particular ideas that were made “general in their representation”?). But the broad outlines of the theory were accepted by all. To understand a sentence is to associate ideas in the mind with the descriptive terms in the sentence.
But immediately the theory is faced with a difficulty. What makes the ideas in the mind into a judgment? What makes the sequence of images into a representation of the speech act of stating that the flower is red? According to the theory, first I have an idea of a flower, then I have an idea of redness. So far the sequence is just a sequence of unconnected images and does not amount to the judgment that the flower is red, which is what is expressed in the sentence. I can assume that the ideas come to someone who understands the sentence in the form of a judgment, that they just are somehow connected as representing the speech act of stating that the flower is red—in which case we have the first horn of our dilemma and the theory is circular, since it employs some of the crucial elements of the notion of meaning in the effort to explain meaning. Or on the other hand if I do not assume the ideas come in the form of a judgment then I have only a sequence of images in my mind and not the crucial feature of the original sentence, namely, the fact that the sentence says that the flower is red—in which case we have the second horn of our dilemma and the analysis fails because it is inadequate to account for the meaning of the sentence.
The semantic theory of Chomsky’s generative grammar commits exactly the same fallacy. To show this I will first give a sketch of what the theory is supposed to do. Just as the syntactical component of the grammar is supposed to describe the speaker’s syntactical competence (his knowledge of the structure of sentences) and the phonological component is supposed to describe his phonological competence (his knowledge of how the sentences of his language sound), so the semantic component is supposed to describe the speaker’s semantic competence (his knowledge of what the sentences mean and how they mean what they mean).
The semantic component of a grammar of a language embodies the semantic theory of that language. It consists of the set of rules that determine the meanings of the sentences of the language. It operates on the assumption, surely a correct one, that the meaning of any sentence is determined by the meaning of all the meaningful elements of the sentence and by their syntactical combination. Since these elements and their arrangement are represented in the deep structure of the sentence, the “input” to the semantic component of the grammar will consist of deep structures of sentences as generated by the syntactic component, in the way we described in Section II.
The “output” is a set of “readings” for each sentence, where the readings are supposed to be a “semantic representation” of the sentence; that is, they are supposed to be descriptions of the meanings of the sentence. If for example a sentence has three different meanings the semantic component will duplicate the speaker’s competence by producing three different readings. If the sentence is nonsense the semantic component will produce no readings. If two sentences mean the same thing, it will produce the same reading for both sentences. If a sentence is “analytic,” that is, if it is true by definition because the meaning of the predicate is contained in the meaning of the subject (for example, “All bachelors are unmarried” is analytic because the meaning of the subject “bachelor” contains the meaning of the predicate “unmarried”), the semantic component will produce a reading for the sentence in which the reading of the predicate is contained in the reading of the subject.
Chomsky’s grammarian in constructing a semantic component tries to construct a set of rules that will provide a model of the speaker’s semantic competence. The model must duplicate the speaker’s understanding of ambiguity, synonymy, nonsense, analyticity, self-contradiction, and so on. Thus, for example, consider the ambiguous sentence “I went to the bank.” As part of his competence the speaker of English knows that the sentence is ambiguous because the word “bank” has at least two different meanings. The sentence can mean either I went to the finance house or I went to the side of the river. The aim of the grammarian is to describe this kind of competence; he describes it by constructing a model, a set of rules, that will duplicate it. His semantic theory must produce two readings for this sentence.
If, on the other hand, the sentence is “I went to the bank and deposited some money in my account” the semantic component will produce only one reading because the portion of the sentence about depositing money determines that the other meaning of bank—namely, side of the river—is excluded as a possible meaning in this sentence. The semantic component then will have to contain a set of rules describing which kinds of combinations of words make which kind of sense, and this is supposed to account for the speaker’s knowledge of which kinds of combinations of words in his language make which kind of sense.
All of this can be, and indeed has been; worked up into a very elaborate formal theory by Chomsky and his followers; but when we have constructed a description of what the semantic component is supposed to look like, a nagging question remains: What exactly are these “readings”? What is the string of symbols that comes out of the semantic component supposed to represent or express in such a way as to constitute a description of the meaning of a sentence?
The same dilemma with which we confronted Locke applies here: either the readings are just paraphrases, in which case the analysis is circular, or the readings consist only of lists of elements, in which case the analysis fails because of inadequacy; it cannot account for the fact that the sentence expresses a statement. Consider each horn of the dilemma. In the example above when giving two different readings for “I went to the bank” I gave two English paraphrases, but that possibility is not open to a semantic theory which seeks to explain competence in English, since the ability to understand paraphrases presupposes the very competence the semantic theory is seeking to explain. I cannot explain general competence in English by translating English sentences into other English sentences. In the literature of the Chomskyan semantic theorists, the examples given of “readings” are usually rather bad paraphrases of English sentences together with some jargon about “semantic markers” and “distinguishers” and so on.[11] We are assured that the paraphrases are only for illustrative purposes, that they are not the real readings.
But what can the real readings be? The purely formal constraints placed on the semantic theory are not much help in telling us what the readings are. They tell us only that a sentence that is ambiguous in three ways must have three readings, a nonsense sentence no readings, two synonymous sentences must have the same readings, and so on. But so far as these requirements go, the readings need not be composed of words but could be composed of any formally specifiable set of objects. They could be numerals, piles of stones, old cars, strings of symbols, anything whatever. Suppose we decide to interpret the readings as piles of stones. Then for a three-ways ambiguous sentence the theory will give us three piles of stones, for a nonsense sentence, no piles of stones, for an analytic sentence the arrangement of stones in the predicate pile will be duplicated in the subject pile, and so on. There is nothing in the formal properties of the semantic component to prevent us from interpreting it in this way. But clearly this will not do because now instead of explaining the relationships between sound and meaning the theory has produced an unexplained relationship between sounds and stones.
When confronted with this objection the semantic theorists always make the same reply. Though we cannot produce adequate readings at present, ultimately the readings will be expressed in a yet to be discovered universal semantic alphabet. The elements in the alphabet will stand for the meaning units in all languages in much the way that the universal phonetic alphabet now represents the sound units in all languages. But would a universal semantic alphabet escape the dilemma? I think not.
Either the alphabet is a kind of a new artificial language, a new Esperanto, and the readings are once again paraphrases, only this time in the Esperanto and not in the original language; or we have the second horn of the dilemma and the readings in the semantic alphabet are just a list of features of language, and the analysis is inadequate because it substitutes a list of elements for a speech act.
The semantic theory of Chomsky’s grammar does indeed give us a useful and interesting adjunct to the theory of semantic competence, since it gives us a model that duplicates the speaker’s competence in recognizing ambiguity, synonymy, nonsense, etc. But as soon as we ask what exactly the speaker is recognizing when he recognizes one of these semantic properties, or as soon as we try to take the semantheory as a general account of semantic competence, it cannot cope with the dilemma. Either it gives us a sterile formalism, an uninterpreted list of elements, or it gives us paraphrases, which explain nothing.
Various philosophers working on an account of meaning in the past generation[12] have provided us with a way out of this dilemma. But to accept the solution would involve enriching the semantic theory in ways not so far contemplated by Chomsky or the other Cambridge grammarians. Chomsky characterizes the speaker’s linguistic competence as his ability to “produce and understand” sentences. But this is at best very misleading: a person’s knowledge of the meaning of sentences consists in large part in his knowledge of how to use sentences to make statements, ask questions, give orders, make requests, make promises, warnings, etc., and to understand other people when they use sentences for such purposes. Semantic competence is in large part the ability to perform and understand what philosophers and linguists call speech acts.
Now if we approach the study of semantic competence from the point of view of the ability to use sentences to perform speech acts, we discover that speech acts have two properties, the combination of which will get us out of the dilemma: they are governed by rules and they are intentional. The speaker who utters a sentence and means it literally utters it in accordance with certain semantic rules and with the intention of invoking those rules to render his utterance the performance of a certain speech act.
This is not the place to recapitulate the whole theory of meaning and speech acts,[13] but the basic idea is this. Saying something and meaning it is essentially a matter of saying it with the intention to produce certain effects on the hearer. And these effects are determined by the rules that attach to the sentence that is uttered. Thus, for example, the speaker who knows the meaning of the sentence “The flower is red” knows that its utterance constitutes the making of a statement. But making a statement to the effect that the flower is red consists in performing an action with the intention of producing in the hearer the belief that the speaker is committed to the existence of a certain state of affairs, as determined by the semantic rules attaching to the sentence.
Semantic competence is largely a matter of knowing the relationships between semantic intentions, rules, and conditions specified by the rules. Such an analysis of competence may in the end prove incorrect, but it is not open to the obvious dilemmas I have posed to classical empiricist and Chomskyan semantic theorists. It is not reduced to providing us with paraphrase or a list of elements. The glue that holds the elements together into a speech act is the semantic intentions of the speaker.
The defect of the Chomskyan theory arises from the same weakness we noted earlier, the failure to see the essential connection between language and communication, between meaning and speech acts. The picture that underlies the semantic theory and indeed Chomsky’s whole theory of language is that sentences are abstract objects that are produced and understood independently of their role in communication. Indeed, Chomsky sometimes writes as if sentences were only incidentally used to talk with.[14] I am claiming that any attempt to account for the meaning of sentences within such assumptions is either circular or inadequate.
The dilemma is not just an argumentative trick, it reveals a more profound inadequacy. Any attempt to account for the meaning of sentences must take into account their role in communication, in the performance of speech acts, because an essential part of the meaning of any sentence is its potential for being used to perform a speech act. There are two radically different conceptions of language in conflict here: one, Chomsky’s, sees language as a self-contained formal system used more or less incidentally for communication. The other sees language as essentially a system for communication.
The limitations of Chomsky’s assumptions become clear only when we attempt to account for the meaning of sentences within his system, because there is no way to account for the meaning of a sentence without considering its role in communication, since the two are essentially connected. So long as we confine our research to syntax, where in fact most of Chomsky’s work has been done, it is possible to conceal the limitations of the approach, because syntax can be studied as a formal system independently of its use, just as we could study the currency and credit system of an economy as an abstract formal system independently of the fact that people use money to buy things with or we could study the rules of baseball as a formal system independently of the fact that baseball is a game people play. But as soon as we attempt to account for meaning, for semantic competence, such a purely formalistic approach breaks down, because it cannot account for the fact that semantic competence is mostly a matter of knowing how to talk, i.e., how to perform speech acts.
The Chomsky revolution is largely a revolution in the study of syntax. The obvious next step in the development of the study of language is to graft the study of syntax onto the study of speech acts. And this is indeed happening, though Chomsky continues to fight a rearguard action against it, or at least against the version of it that the generative semanticists who are building on his own work now present.
There are, I believe, several reasons why Chomsky is reluctant to incorporate a theory of speech acts into his grammar: First, he has a mistaken conception of the distinction between performance and competence. He seems to think that a theory of speech acts must be a theory of performance rather than of competence, because he fails to see that competence is ultimately the competence to perform, and that for this reason a study of the linguistic aspects of the ability to perform speech acts is a study of linguistic competence. Secondly, Chomsky seems to have a residual suspicion that any theory that treats the speech act, a piece of speech behavior, as the basic unit of meaning must involve some kind of a retreat to behaviorism. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is one of the ironies of the history of behaviorism that behaviorists should have failed to see that the notion of a human action must be a “mentalistic” and “introspective” notion since it essentially involves the notion of human intentions.
The study of speech acts is indeed the study of a certain kind of human behavior, but for that reason it is in conflict with any form of behaviorism, which is conceptually incapable of studying human behavior. But the third, and most important reason, I believe, is Chomsky’s only partly articulated belief that language does not have any essential connection with communication, but is an abstract formal system produced by the innate properties of the human mind.
Chomsky’s work is one of the most remarkable intellectual achievements of the present era, comparable in scope and coherence to the work of Keynes or Freud. It has done more than simply produce a revolution in linguistics; it has created a new discipline of generative grammar and is having a revolutionary effect on two other subjects, philosophy and psychology. Not the least of its merits is that it provides an extremely powerful tool even for those who disagree with many features of Chomsky’s approach to language. In the long run, I believe his greatest contribution will be that he has taken a major step toward restoring the traditional conception of the dignity and uniqueness of man.

1.1 ‘Surveys’ of ‘linguistic theory’ have become so numerous that a new one calls for some justification. It seems to me that even though linguistics is about language, the major works in linguistic theory have seldom been analysed and synthesized as language, specifically: as a mode of discourse seeking to circumscribe language by means of language. Perhaps this lack is due in part to the limitations imposed by theorists who did not address discourse as a linguistic phenomenon, or only marginally so. Perhaps too, it was tacitly assumed that theories do not critically depend on the language in which they happen to be expounded. Today, however, discourse has become a major area of concern; and the dependence of concepts and arguments on the discourse that constitutes them is widely acknowledged.
1.2 Therefore, to examine linguistic theories as discourse constructions is by no means to discount their conceptual importance, but to insist on attending very carefully to the emergence of those conceptions within the original discourse before proceeding on to the more usual stages of abstraction and paraphrase. This insistence can be particularly instrumental in tracing the development of terminology, and the continuity, evolution, or change in the major lines of argument not merely between theorists, but within the work of an individual theorist.
1.3 On the whole, the history of the ‘science of language’ has not been unmanageably diffuse. Major theoretical works and frameworks have not been overly numerous. And on the whole, the discipline has been fairly parsimonious in its theorizing, indeed resolutely so in the face of the complexity of language. Yet we can certainly not claim that the problems addressed by our predecessors have by now vanished or been completely resolved. Instead, we frequently sense a need to return to those problems and re-examine the principles set forth decades ago to approach them.
1.4 In that situation, surveys of linguistic theory should be cautious about imposing an artificial, retrospective sense of order and direction on the discipline by distilling out a few main ‘ideas’, ‘schools’, ‘trends’, or ‘paradigms’. That method can abbreviate or conceal the complexity and diversity of scientific interaction and discourse. A counterbalance could be attained by surveying linguistics as a ‘model science’ perpetually in the process of situating itself in respect to language.
1.5 Such a survey is a problematic and arduous project, but I hold it to be urgent for several reasons. First, many of the issues in linguistics that preoccupy linguistic theorists today were recognized and deliberated by our predecessors. We cannot get a full sense of our domain by reducing the works of the founders to a handful of precepts and slogans, without due regard for the overall argument and context, including important qualifications and reservations. That strategy tends to covert complicated, energizing research programmes too eagerly into inhibiting new orthodoxies. And in hindsight, we may get the utterly mistaken impression that linguistics did not properly appreciate the depth and difficulty of the issues.
1.6 Second, linguistic theory is essentially a domain of work in progress, a discipline always in search of itself. Leading theorists often voiced their dissatisfaction with the state of linguistics as they saw it (13.3). But if we construe their discontent as a pretext for writing off the past, we incur the risk of repeating the same shortcomings they perceived and strove to alleviate.
1.7 Third, certain signs indicate that linguistic theory has for some years been moving into a phase of stagnation and diminishing returns. Despite decades of effort, the relations between theory and practice, between model and domain, or between method and evidence, have not been definitively established, and seem to be shifted once again by every new school or trend. In consequence, the history of the discipline may appear discontinuous and non-cumulative, with research projects typically clustered around sporadic bursts of theorizing. The status of theoretical entities, even such central ones as ‘word’ and ‘sentence’, remains in dispute. No consensus obtains about the future trends and modifications that linguistics should undergo. In such a state of affairs, we cannot merely wait to see what develops in day-to-day research and discussion. We need to draw up the theoretical balance sheets of past investigations. Surveying the major issues and problems of the discipline through their treatment in the discourse foundational works can be an inaugural step in planning for future research on a truly comprehensive and organized scale.
1.8 All linguists share at least one special predicament: they can get evidence only from their own encounters with language, with and within some mode of discourse (cf. 13.1, 48). The system never steps forward to be ‘observed’ in some concrete selfhood; and data are not data until they have been understood as language. In consequence, linguists deal with data in whose constitution and interpretation they are always to some degree involved, at least behind the scenes. Since language is so extraordinarily sensitive to how it is used, it may assume different appearances depending on how it is grasped. We therefore need to expand our scope from ‘looking at language’ to ‘looking at linguists looking at language’ and in particular talking or writing about it. We cannot eliminate the linguist’s perspective, but we can scrutinize it by asking how human beings, whether linguists or ordinary speakers, abstract systematic knowledge from language experience and at the same time apply systematic knowledge in order to relate experience to language (cf. 13.44).
1.9 That you must ‘know language’ to ‘understand language’ and vice versa is a truism, but by no means an insignificant one. We seem to confront a peculiarly vicious circularity enshrouding the question of how we might approach language from the ‘outside’: how children or linguists or anybody else can reach the ‘critical mass’, the stage of ‘knowing’ the system behind or beyond the individual uses of language (13.38). Much of that knowledge is concealed from conscious awareness during everyday discourse, and the prospects for making it conscious and explicit are by nature precarious (13.49). To observe yourself observing language, to watch or hear yourself thinking, to grasp your own understanding — all these acts are easily beset by paradox or infinite regress. We can, however, subject the discourse of those engaged in such acts to steadily more circumspect and integrative scrutiny, thereby adding fresh emphasis to our perenniel insistence on the centrality of language (cf. 13.22).
1.10 My survey accordingly proceeds by arranging and presenting the discourse, the statements and arguments, of representative theorists in linguistics of this century, sticking as close as is feasible to their actual wordings, especially where major points are expressed. By this expedient, I hoped to restrict my own role in increasing or complicating the mediation between linguistics and language, as I would have had to do had I paraphrased and summarized the sources in my own words. Though admittedly laborious, this method may help to reanimate the complex flow of the discourse in the gradually emerging discipline, to focus on characteristic moves, and to retrace the key terms as they gain or lose currency. Proceeding by author rather than by ‘school’ may help to accentuate individual views, voices, and personalities, and thus to re-experience some of the momentum and perplexity of repeated confrontations with the recalcitrant problems that the study of language necessarily raises.
1.11 Due to this gallery of problems, a general book on linguistics tends to have the character of a performance, raising and responding to typical questions , such as:
Where does linguistics stand among the other disciplines?
Which aspects of language deserve to be put in focus, and which ones are of lesser interest?
What means or methods are recommended or rejected?
How do linguists gather data, and how can they check their own estimation of it against other sources?
How are examples brought to bear on theoretical issues and abstractions?
What are the fundamental units and structures of language?
What is the theoretical status of traditional concepts such as ‘word’, ‘phrase’, and ‘sentence’?
We shall be seeing quite a spectrum of potential answers, some explicit, others merely implicit. Few of the answers will seem definitive, since they depend on the goals and aspirations of the particular theorist, and these are by no means uniform (cf. 13.58, 60ff). Still, considering such a spectrum assembled in one volume may shed light on the nature of the questions, whatever the eventual answers we may yet select.
1.12 It was rather agonizing to decide which ‘fundamental works’ should be used, given the unmanageably large number worthy of inquiry. My selection was guided by two major criteria. First, these works were influential in the general development of theories or models, as attested for instance by frequent citation. Second, these works propound such a wide range of positions and issues that we can profit by bringing them into explicit interaction with each other.
1.13 My treatment is only roughly in chronological order, because the works and their spans of influence sometimes overlapped in time, and because some influences emerge more clearly through direct follow-ups, e.g. Bloomfield to Pike, Hjelmslev to Chomsky, and Firth to Halliday. However, similar arguments and conceptions also appear where we cannot trace such influences, or at least none that the authors acknowledge. Conversely, demonstrable influences do not necessarily promote agreement, and successors may differ from their predecessors or teachers on major issues.
1.14 Obviously, my selection could have been different or larger. But the approach proved to require such detailed attention to each work and theorist that I lacked the space to include more of them. For motives of size, I regretfully deleted a chapter on Terry Winograd, a major thinker both in linguistics and in artifical intelligence. I also deeply regretted not being able to deal with such undeniably influential linguists as Emile Benveniste, Dwight Bolinger, Wallace Chafe, Simon Dik, Charles Fillmore, Charles Carpenter Fries, Hans Glinz, Joseph Grimes, Z.S. Harris, Roman Jakobson, Daniel Jones, William Labov, George Lakoff, Robert E. Longacre, Aleksei Leontev, Nikolai Marr, Andre Martinet, Vilem Mathesius, Ivan Meshchaninov, Nikolai Trubetzkoy, or Leo Weisgerber. Also, I would have liked to include such precursors and pioneers as Franz Bopp, Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, Samuel Haldeman, Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt, Hermann Paul, Rasmus Rask, Henry Sweet, Dwight Whitney, etc. And major figures from neighbouring disciplines also deserve such attention: semioticians such as Julia Kristeva, Jurij Lotman, Charles Morris, Charles Peirce, Thomas Sebeok, etc.; or language philosophers such as John Austin, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Paul Grice, Martin Heidegger, Alfred Korzybski, Jacques Lacan, John Searle, Ludwig Wittgenstein, etc.; or logicians such as Rudolf Carnap, Max Cresswell, Richard Montague, Janos Petofi, Alfred Tarski, Lotfi Zadeh, etc.; or psychologists and psycholinguists like Philip N. Johnson-Laird, Alexander Luria, William Levelt, William Marslen-Wilson, George Miller, Charles Osgood, etc.; sociologists like Basil Bernstein, Erving Goffman, Harvey Sacks, Emmanuel Schegloff, etc.; anthropologists such as Edmund Leach, Bronislaw Malinowski, Claude Levi-Strauss, etc.; or analysts of narrative and literary or poetic discourse such as Roland Barthes, Algridas Greimas, Tzvetan Todorov, etc. Though I had to exclude all these figures, I glean some comfort from the fact that I have made use of their work in my previous writings, and from the hope that I may give them more attention in the future.

Let us now move on to another major structural aspect of language, syntax. The word syntax derives from the Greek word syntaxis, which means arrangement. Morphology deals with word formation out of morphemes; syntax deals with phrase and sentence formation out of words.
What is a sentence?
Although everyone knows or thinks they know what a word is and what a sentence is, both terms defy exact definition. The sentence as a linguistic concept has been defined in over 200 different ways, none of them completely adequate. Here are the most important attempts at defining the sentence:
The traditional, or common sense definition states that a sentence is a group of words that expresses a thought . The problem comes in defining what a thought is. The phrase an egg expresses a thought but is it a sentence? A sentence like I closed the door because it was cold expresses two thoughts and yet it is one sentence.
Another definition is that a sentence is a group of words expressing a topic (old information) and some comment (new information) about that topic: John left. (Notice how intonation–which is a part of phonology–interacts closely with syntax in delimiting topic from comment–another example of the grammatical interconnectedness of all the so called levels of language.) The problem with the topic-comment definition is that many sentences have no clear topic and comment structure: It’s raining.
The grammatical definition of the sentence is the largest unit to which syntactic rules can apply. In terms of syntactic categories, most sentences–at least in English– can be divided into a subject and a predicate. This applies to sentences with or without a clear topic/comment structure: John —left. Many sentences have no clear topic and comment structure: It–is raining. (The word it here is the so-called dummy it used to fill the subject slot for impersonal verbs in English; cf. prshí, snezí.)
Another problem with grammatical, or syntactic, definitions of the sentence is that not all sentences–even in English–are divisible into subject and predicate. Some sentence types make no internal syntactic structure; there is no distinction between subject and predicate:
a) Emotive sentences such as Gee! Wow. Darn! Yes! No!
b) Imperatives: Go! Leave! Taxi! All aboard! Down with alcohol!
c) Elliptic sentences: Who took the car? John.
d) small talk phrases: Hello. Good-bye. Good morning.
In polysynthetic languages the single word serve as a complete sentence much more frequently. In such languages, morphology rather than syntax usually expresses the distinction between subject and predicate.
Types of sentences containing a subject and a predicate
Syntax usually examines sentences that have a clear inner division into subject and predicate. There are 3 types of subject/predicate structured sentences:
a) a simple sentence contains at least one subject and one predicate: John read Pushkin.
b) a compound sentence is two or more simple sentences joined into a single sentence: John read Pushkin and Mary read Updike. Each simple sentence maintains its own internal syntactic structure. They may be joined by a coordinating conjunction such as and or or, or asyndetically (without a conjunction).
c) a complex sentence is a sentence in which one of the syntactic roles is played by an embedded sentence: I made students read Chomsky. The simple sentence students read Chomsky plays the role of object of the verb made. Because the syntax of the two parts of a complex sentence is intertwined, it is often not possible to divide them into two free-standing simple sentences. *I made. Students read Chomsky. I saw Mary run.
Complex sentences, then, are said to consist of a main clause, with a subordinate clause imbedded into its structure (the subordinate clause is often referred to as an imbedded sentence). In phrase structure notation a subordinate clause, or imbedded sentence, is notated as S’, pronounced s-bar.
The word that connects a subordinate clause to a main clause, such as the word that in the previous example, is known as a subordinate conjunction; in syntactic analysis a subordinate conjunction is known as a complementizer, and is notated as Comp. In some English complex sentences the complementizer is optional, in others obligatory: I know (that) you snore. vs. I hate when you snore (if the complementizer has a temporal meaning it can’t be left out.)
Parts of speech
Words and phrases can be grouped according to their sentence building functions. Syntactic classes of words are traditionally called parts of speech. English has the following parts of speech: verb, noun, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, verbal particle (the off in turn off the light), article.
Note the following test to determine what is a preposition and what is a verbal particle in English:
a). The mouse ran up the clock–Up the clock he ran. (Prepositional phrases can be fronted).
b.) The man ran up a big bill.–*Up the big bill he ran. (Verbal particles cannot.) Also: The mouse ran up it (pronoun is object of the prep and can follow the preposition) but not *The mouse ran it up. But, The man ran it up (pronoun is object of the verb and follows the verb) not *The man ran up it.
Not all languages have the same parts of speech. Many languages have postpositions rather than prepositions, like Georgian skolashi, to school; skoladan, from school. Serbo-Croatian, Slovak and many other languages have clitics (clitics are affixes attached to phrases instead of single words). Dal som knigu prijatel’ovi/ Knigu som dal prijatel’ovi/ Prijatel’ovi som dal knigu. I gave it to my friend. Spanish uses the object marking clitics le and lo after verbs: Dice mi lo.
A common assertion is that all languages have at least nouns and verbs. It is true that all languages have some means of conveying information as a concept or as an event, but what a noun or verb is differs from language to language. In the Salishan languages of the Puget Sound, a single word can be translated into English as village and a village exist or there is a village; in other words, morphemes denoting stationary concepts are often bound roots that require verbal affixes to stand as words. So parts of speech–even nouns and verbs– turn out to be at best fuzzy categories across languages, not identical or even present in every language. Some people thing of parts of speech or grammatical categories as similar to protons, electrons and neutrons in how they contribute to the structure of languages, but such is not the case. The form/meaning connections differ from language to language. There are universal tendencies, but these do not seem to be absolute universal properties.
Parts of speech are based on syntactic function, not concrete, extra-linguistic meaning. Notice that words is different syntactic classes can have the same concrete meaning and differ only in their ability to combine with other words: The sky darkens, the darkening of the sky, a dark sky, the darkness of the sky.
Thus syntactic patterns as well as syntactic categories cannot be said to be limited to any concrete real-world meaning; they are linguistic structures relevant for expressing meaning and yet have no specific meaning of their own. Note Chomsky’s famous semantically anomalous statement: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. This sentence is utter nonsense but it is nonsense stated in English and conforms perfectly to a complex set rules of English syntax; thus one is tempted to devise a surrealist interpretation of it. The utterance *green sleep colorless furiously ideas is not a sentence of English at all and even the most imaginative person could not devise a meaning for it.
Syntactic atoms
The basic unit of syntax is not the word, but the syntactic atom, defined as a structure that fulfills a basic syntactic function. Syntactic atoms may be either a single word or a phrase that fulfills a single syntactic function.
Fido ate the bone.
The dog ate the bone.
The big yellow dog ate the bone.
Our dog that we raised from a puppy ate the bone.
Elements with syntactic equivalence all belong to the same type of syntactic atom (NP, VP)
A language also contains specific rules for properly connecting syntactic atoms to form sentences–these are called phrase structure rules (look at problem 5 on page 116). The sentence: The big yellow dog ate the bone. is well formed because it uses the parts of speech in a way that conforms to the rules of English syntax. The string of words: big the ate bone dog yellow the, is not a sentence because it violates syntactic rules. It is often not even possible to assign any meaning to a syntactically ill-formed utterance.
This is why the syntactic rules of a language can be followed perfectly to produce illogical or semantically highly improbable sentences: The bone ate the big yellow dog. Since a new context could be imagined to render such a statement at least fictionally logical, it is fortunate that our language has a ready made means of expressing it. The fact that syntactic structures are not restricted in the meanings they may express is one reason why we can so easily produce novel sentences never before heard. The semantic independence of the phrase structure rules is one of the main factors that provides for the infinite creativity of human language. Animal systems don’t have any structural units that are meaningful yet totally independent of meaning.
Syntactic Relations and phrase structure rules
Let’s examine syntactic relations within English sentences. One approach is to divide the words of a sentence into phrases (defined as words closely associated with one another syntactically). This technique is know as parsing. The most fundamental division is between subject and predicate. (of course, this is because we are cheating and ignoring sentence types that lack this division). Phrases containing different parts of speech can serve one and the same function.
The big yellow dog //ate /bones
He //ate the old bone.
The big yellow dog //slept.
The dog //growled at John.
Each of these sentences consists of a subject and a predicate. But in each sentence different syntactic types of words or combinations of words constitute subject and predicate. Different combinations of parts of speech fulfilling the same syntactic function are said to be syntactically equivalent. It is possible to write rules describing syntactic equivalence. These rules are called phrase structure rules. These rules use special symbols designed exclusively for syntactic descriptions. Grammatical terms or graphic notation devices devised to describe language structure are examples of meta-language, defined roughly as language about language. The syntactic metalanguage used in writing phrase structure rules involves mainly abbreviations from English words for parts of speech.
S–> NP VP A sentence consists of a noun phrase and a verb phrase. (These correspond to subject and predicate.)
NP–> (art) (adj) N or NP –> pronoun
(Go over exercise 5 on page116 in the textbook.)
Phrase structure rules are said to be recursive. That is, identical elements in the structure of a phrase can repeat. These repeating elements are sometimes known as parallel items in a series:
Parallel subjects: the sentence John came–John, Bill, and Mary came. is a simple sentence with a recursive subject. (Compare John came and Bill came which is a compound sentence each part of which has a simple subject.)
Parallel verbs: Caesar came, saw, and conquered.
Parallel modifiers:
adverbs: a very good book–a very, very good book; or
adjectives: a green and red and pink and blue book.
Parallel compound sentences:I came and Bill came and Mary came and…
Multiple subordinate clauses in a complex sentence: I know an old lady who swallowed a fly which was chased by her cat who had been bored because there was nothing to do in the house that Jack built when he. . .
Remember the ability of syntactic elements to occur in multiples is known as recursion.
It is possible to write an entire book consisting of just one single recursive complex sentence. The property of recursion means that it is impossible to propose limits on the length of sentences. No one will ever be able to state with certainty what the longest possible sentence can be. There are a limited number of words in each language, but a potentially infinite number of sentences. This realization prompted 19th century German linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt to say: “Language makes infinite use of finite means.” Such a statement could not be made about animal systems of communication, in which the number of messages is strictly limited.
The syntax/morphology interface/ Day two
1) The syntactic atom is the basic unit of syntax; syntactic structures are made up of other syntactic structures; although syntax is separate from meaning (we can have syntactically correct sentences which are utterly anomalous semantically, it is not possible to separate syntax from morphology compeletely: there are some instances where specific phrase structure rules are constrained semantically, for instance in VP = V + NP (Subcategorization rules for verbal complements).
Let’s take a closer look at verb phrases, which are more complex than noun phrases. First of all, VP can = a single verb (V) He ate; or the verb may have an auxillary (aux): He was eating, He has eaten; or the verb clause might contain verb + dependent words. There are several types of verb-dependent words, known collectively as verbal complements: He ate yesterday (Adv); He ate meat (NP); He ate in the cafe. (PP) Object noun phrases, prepositional phrases, and adverbs all fulfill the same syntactic function–the verb complement. (Yesterday we noted that in language typology the complement is notated as O.
The noun phrase complements of action verbs are called direct objects: He kicked the ball. Verbs that can take a direct object are called transitive verbs. Some transitive verbs are obligatorily transitive: that is, they cannot be used without a complement: *He made. Other transitive verbs may omit the object: I write vs. I write a letter.
Verbs that cannot take a direct object at all are called intransitive. For instance, the verb sleep cannot take a direct object complement: He slept (yesterday, at home), but not * He slept a fish.
The complements of linking verbs are called predicate nominals, which may be either nouns or adjectives: John arrived healthy. We became ill.
Sometimes the same verb can have two different meanings, one requiring a direct object, the other a predicate nominal: We smelled the roses. The chef made (created) a good salad. vs. The roses smelled good. He made (became) a good chef.
The study of what grammatical form may or may not be used after a verb is called verb government. It is also known as lexical subcategorization, the point being that it is not enough to know the meaning of a word and what part of speech the word belongs to. One must also know additional requirements about how the word may or must combine with other words in a phrase.
Mention that in polysynthetic languages this is part of morphology. (There is no clear division between morphology and syntax that can be drawn across all languages.) The division between syntax and morphology varies across languages.
Phrases and heads
Since they cannot be defined as having specific meanings, syntactic atoms (single words or whole phrases) are defined by how they interact with syntactic rules.
1) They do not allow reordering of their constituents, It’s the bone the dog ate. The bone, he ate it. (cleft sentences and sentences with left dislocation). You can’t front only part of a syntactic atom any more than you can change the order of morphemes in a word rewrite but not *write-re: *The big, he ate the bone. (NOTE: When used as examples, grammatically ill formed sentences and words are traditionally marked by an asterisk *. This also applies to morphologically ill formed words: *ingrun, *runre.)
2) One may not anaphorize, or substitute for, only a part of a morphologically complex syntactic atom (I like the tea’s flavor. I like its flavor. Here is coffee and here is a coffeepot I like its pot.)
3) Also, if a morphologically complex syntactic atom takes inflectional endings, then only the head can be so modified, not any of the subordinate constituents. (Workaholic–workaholiclike, *workedaholic, *workingaholic.)
The head of a syntactic atom can sometimes be a zero morpheme: withstand, grandstand, leaf–> maple leaf Toronto Maple Leafs, fly–> fly out (a window), a fly ball–to fly out (in baseball) He flied out.
Notice that noun phrases often have internal rules. English noun phrases observe a strict word order: article, adverb, adjective, noun. Noun phrase structure rules differ from language to language: In French, Hawaiian, and many other language the adjectives come after the noun. In many languages the form of articles or adjectives changes to reflect the gender of the noun. When words in a phrase change grammatically to accommodate one another the process is called concord or agreement. French is a good example: le petit garcon vs. la petite fille; German: das Haus; der Apfel; die Blume. In such cases we say that the noun is the head of the phrase, since it causes other words to change and yet remains unaffected by whatever adjective or article is added to it. In English, the head of the syntactic unit called the sentence is the subject NP, since the verb agrees with it and not the other way around. Each syntactic atom has its head.
Diagramming sentences, how to deal with ambiguity
Let’s now turn to instances of ambiguity in syntax. Sometimes a sentence or phrase allows for two different syntactic interpretations.
Parsing using parentheses to show syntactic relations can disambiguate such a phrase as: old men and women
Other sentences do not lend themselves to such a linear approach. Sometimes the words that belong to the same syntactic unit are separated by other words: The book that was lying under all the other books is the most interesting. Tree diagrams can be used to show such “long distance” grammatical relations.
Consider also the sentence The fish is too old to eat. Here, parsing and even tree diagramming cannot separate out the two potential meanings. In such cases of semantic ambiguity, paraphrases can be used to express two meanings hidden in a single linear form:
The fish is too old for the fish to eat. The fish is too old to be eaten.
Noam Chomsky, a linguist at MIT, became interested in the phenomenon of syntactic ambiguity. He noticed that languages contain systematic ways of paraphrasing sentences:
a.) Active sentences can regularly be turned into passives: The boy kicked the ball.–> the ball was kicked by the boy. (passive transformation)
b.) Statements can be regularly turned into questions: He is there? Is he there? (interrogative transformation)
He came to believe that such parallel syntactic means of expressing the same meaning were simply surface manifestations of deeper structural units of language. To study and describe such deep structures, he devised the theory of transformational grammar. The three main tenets of this theory are:
1) The surface forms of a language are reducible to a limited number of deep structures. The same deep structure is manifested in several different ways in actual sentences. This is similar to the use of the principle of allomorphs to describe morpheme variants.
2) These deep structures are universal–in other words, the same for all languages of the world; only the rules for deriving the surface forms from the deep structures differ from language to language.
3) The reason these deep structures are universal is that they are inborn, part of the human genetic code; being inborn they help children discover the surface forms of language so quickly.
Transformational grammar has maintained its popularity since 1957 when Noam Chomsky published his first book, Syntactic Structures. But major problems continue to dog the theory. The main problems are:
Transformational rules only work for sentences composed of separate noun and verb phrases. We have seen that not all sentences are of this type.
Mainly English data was used to find these supposedly universal deep structures. Usually one of the paraphrases is taken as the basic one and the other derived from it: cf. active and passive. But active is not more basic in all languages; Japanese uses the passive as its more basic form.
No deep structures have been described that would apply across all languages. Structural universals tend to be proposed, then disgarded as data from new languages disprove them. There seem to be universal tendencies in syntax, but no universal has yet been proven to exist that would be more specific than the general creativity in humans.
Thus, no real progress has been made in writing a universal grammar that would be applicable to all human languages, a sort of In chemistry we have the Periodic table of Elements–all substances on earth can be seen as compounds of a finite set of elements. Human language doesn’t seem to work this way, and no such table of universal grammar elements has been found.
Definitions of Grammar
Since sentence formation is the most obvious and frequent manifestation of creativity in any language, the syntactic rules of a language are often referred to as the grammar of the language. But morphology and phonology are also part of the grammar in that they, too, are creative tools.
Here it might be pertinent to mention a few other definitions of the term grammar that are widely used.
a) A descriptive grammar is a description of the structure of a language in all its aspects–morphology, syntax, phonology–which attempts do portray the language as accurately as possible in terms of how it is naturally used by speakers.
b) A prescriptive grammar is a description of a language which assigns value judgments to competing ways native speakers use in forming words or sentences. Prescriptive grammars do not attempt to describe the language as it is naturally spoken, but rather to tell the speakers how they best should speak it.
c) A third type, grammars of foreign languages written for second language learners fall in between the other two types. They represent attempts to describe a language as it is spoken by natives in order to tell non-natives how to speak it.
When thinking of grammar in the general, descriptive sense, remember that there is no absolute division between syntax, morphology, and phonology. Even in the same language these so called levels of language are not completely separate.
It is not always possible to separate phonology from syntax. For instance, certain phonological rules depend on syntax. Look at these examples from fast speech: What are you doing? where are = an auxiliary verb, becomes Whacha doin? But What are you? where are = the main verb of the predicate, can’t be run together as *Whacha? Similarly, I’m going to work now. (in the sense of I am planning to work now)–> I’m gonna work now. But I’m going to work now in the sense of setting out for work, can’t be contracted. The phonetic environment is the same; but syntactic class the words belong to affect which of them can and cannot be contracted.
Morphology and syntax also interact, as we have seen. Compound words are part of morphology, yet they are dependent on syntactic parameters, as well. Compound words or adj/noun combinations that act as single words can express different syntactic functions. One must understand these underlying syntactic functions to understand the meaning of the words: magnifying glass, falling star vs. looking glass, laughing gas.
The difficulty of completely separating morphology, syntax, and phonology is especially evident when comparing different languages. What in one language is a part of syntax in another language will be a part of morphology, a fact particularly evident when comparing analytic languages like Chinese to polysynthetic languages like Eskimo.

Introduction
Have you never asked yourself what is the real meaning of ‘language’? (linguistics) Why the words change? (the semantic change) Why one word is pronounced in this way? (phonetic/phonology) What differentiate the languages of world, for example, English from Italian or English from French etc? (phonological rules) Which rules are necessary for word formation or sentence formation? (morphology and syntax) What rules govern people’s behaviour? (pragmatics and speech acts) How can we analyse a poem, a critical essay, a piece of narrative passage?(textual analysis) Which rhetorical figures are the most important? (metaphor, metonymy, connotation, denotation, simile etc)

So, this course will introduce you to the ‘magic world’ of language with its peculiar features. You can ‘take a trip’ by discovering through a series of lessons a ‘new world’ accessible to all who already know the answers to the previous questions to those who have never posed this kind of question before. All this may happen thanks to the simplicity which concerns the structure of this course itself.

The new world called ‘linguistics’ is divided into the following subfields:

‘phonetics’
‘phonology’
‘morphology’
‘syntax’
‘semantics’
‘pragmatics’
‘textual analysis’.

A more deepened study will help you in the comprehension of ‘figurative language’ (metaphor, simile, connotation, denotation, etc.) and in the ‘seizing’ of the mystery of ‘semantic change’ which consequently lead you to the knowledge of the birth of a new word.

In this course, however, there would not be formal essays, and the lessons mix theory and practical advice. Each lessons is divided into eight sessions. The first session will be an overview (introduction) of lesson content. There are also schemes, examples, diagrams that will help you to better understand the topics. Exercises with keys will be included at the end of the lesson itself in order to check and help you in facing the difficulties shown by these subjects. The problems that may arise from the lessons give you the opportunity to post in the discussion area and interact with your tutor/instructor and other students.

At the end of the ‘trip’ you will be able to discover the main peculiar features which are represented by ‘linguistics’, you will be able to analyse at least a simple poem and use easily some rhetorical figures. Moreover there will be many indications that shall help you in this particular ‘travel’ (clearly in this case I am using a figurative language for instance a metaphor).

Apart from books, an internet bibliography which includes several sites where you can look at in case you want to deepen one of the topics treated during the course will be present and located at the end of each lesson.

Please note that this is an advanced level course in Linguistics, and should be taken by serious language students.

Introduction
This web page is intended for students who are following GCE Advanced level (AS and A2) syllabuses in English Language. This resource may also be of general interest to language students on university degree courses, trainee teachers and anyone with a general interest in language science.
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What is semantics?
Semantics is the study of meaning. It is a wide subject within the general study of language. An understanding of semantics is essential to the study of language acquisition (how language users acquire a sense of meaning, as speakers and writers, listeners and readers) and of language change (how meanings alter over time). It is important for understanding language in social contexts, as these are likely to affect meaning, and for understanding varieties of English and effects of style. It is thus one of the most fundamental concepts in linguistics. The study of semantics includes the study of how meaning is constructed, interpreted, clarified, obscured, illustrated, simplified negotiated, contradicted and paraphrased.
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Some important areas of semantic theory or related subjects include these:
• Symbol and referent
• Conceptions of meaning
• Words and lexemes
• Denotation, connotation, implication
• Pragmatics
• Ambiguity
• Metaphor, simile and symbol
• Semantic fields
• Synonym, antonym and hyponym
• Collocation, fixed expression and idiom
• Semantic change and etymology
• Polysemy
• Homonymy, homophones and homographs
• Lexicology and lexicography
• Thesauruses, libraries and Web portals
• Epistemology
• Colour
You will find explanations below of how each of these relates to the theoretical study of semantics.
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Symbol and referent
These terms may clarify the subject. A symbol is something which we use to represent another thing – it might be a picture, a letter, a spoken or written word – anything we use conventionally for the purpose. The thing that the symbol identifies is the referent. This may sometimes be an object in the physical world (the word Rover is the symbol; a real dog is the referent). But it may be something which is not at all, or not obviously, present – like freedom, unicorns or Hamlet.
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Conceptions of meaning
Words → things: This view is found in the Cratylus of Plato (427-347 BC). Words “name” or “refer to” things. It works well for proper nouns like London, Everton FC and Ford Fiesta. It is less clear when applied to abstractions, to verbs and to adjectives – indeed wherever there is no immediately existing referent (thing) in the physical world, to correspond to the symbol (word).
Words → concepts → things: This theory was classically expressed by C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards, in The Meaning of Meaning (1923). It states that there is no direct connection of symbol and referent, but an indirect connection in our minds. For each word there is a related concept.
The difficulty is in explaining what this concept is, and how it can exist apart from the word. In Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell imagines a society whose rulers remove disapproved thoughts by removing (from print and broadcasting) the corresponding words. However there are many real-world examples of concepts which came before the words which described or named them (hovercraft, Internet) or where the symbols have changed, but not the concepts they refer to (radio for wireless, Hoover for vacuum cleaner). This suggests that the concept is independent of particular language symbols.
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Stimuli → words → responses: Leonard Bloomfield outlines this theory in Language (1933). A stimulus (S) leads someone to a response (r), which is a speech act. To the hearer the speech act is also a stimulus (s), which leads to a response (R), which may be an action or understanding.
S → r……………..s → R
Jill is hungry, sees an apple (S) and asks Jack to bring it her (r). This new language stimulus, Jack’s hearing her (s) leads to his action (R) of bringing her the apple. Bloomfield’s behaviourist model leads to obvious problems – Jack doesn’t bring Jill the apple because of a quarrel years before, or he brings several apples and a glass of beer.
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Words and lexemes
As a lexical unit may contain more than one word, David Crystal has coined the term lexeme. This is usually a single word, but may be a phrase in which the meaning belongs to the whole rather than its parts, as in verb phrases tune in, turn on, drop out or noun phrase (a) cock up.
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Denotation
This is the core or central meaning of a word or lexeme, as far as it can be described in a dictionary. It is therefore sometimes known as the cognitive or referential meaning. It is possible to think of lexical items that have a more or less fixed denotation (sun, denoting the nearest star, perhaps) but this is rare. Most are subject to change over time. The denotation of silly is not today what it was in the 16th century, or even the 18th, when Coleridge referred to the silly buckets on the deck. Denotation is thus related to connotation, which leads to semantic change.
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Connotation
Theories of denotation and connotation are themselves subject to problems of definition. Connotation is connected with psychology and culture, as it means the personal or emotional associations aroused by words. When these associations are widespread and become established by common usage, a new denotation is recorded in dictionaries. A possible example of such change would be vicious. Originally derived from vice, it meant “extremely wicked”. In modern British usage it is commonly used to mean “fierce”, as in the brown rat is a vicious animal.
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Implication
This is meaning which a speaker or writer intends but does not communicate directly. Where a listener is able to deduce or infer the intended meaning from what has been uttered, this is known as (conversational) implicature. David Crystal gives this example:
Utterance: “A bus!” → Implicature (implicit meaning): “We must run.”
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Pragmatics
According to Professor Crystal, pragmatics is not a coherent field of study. It refers to the study of those factors which govern our choices of language – such as our social awareness, our culture and our sense of etiquette. How do we know how to address different people like the queen? How do we know how to express gratitude for a gift or hospitality?
Pragmatics can be illustrated by jokes or irony which rely on the contrast between expected and subsequently revealed meaning. Consider this example from a 1999 episode of Barry Levinson’s TV police drama, Homicide: Life on the Streets. (The TV audience is assumed to know police procedure for arresting suspects.) An arresting officer says to a suspect (whose hands are raised, so he is not resisting arrest): “You have the right to remain silent”. Instead of continuing with the reading of rights, the officer shoots the suspect. The audience enjoys the wordplay and the dramatic revelation of the officer’s real meaning, because pragmatics tells us what You have the right to remain silent normally leads to – more words and no bullets.
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Ambiguity
Ambiguity occurs when a language element has more than one meaning. If the ambiguity is in a single word it is lexical ambiguity. If in a sentence or clause, it is grammatical or structural ambiguity.
We can illustrate lexical ambiguity with an example from Sue Townsend’s Secret Diary of Adrian Mole. Adrian displays a notice in school, advertising a gay society. When a teacher rebukes him, Adrian asks what is wrong with a club for people who want to be jolly or happy.
Structural ambiguity can often be seen in punning headlines, like the wartime example CHURCHILL FLIES BACK TO FRONT. The late polar explorer, Dr. Vivian Fuchs, was the subject of a similar headline: DR. FUCHS OFF TO ANTARCTIC. In this case, the structural ambiguity is not present to a reader who knows standard spelling, but might confuse a hearer, if the headline is spoken aloud. The absence of linking grammatical words (articles, conjunctions, prepositions) in headlines makes such ambiguity likely.
Consider this example (from The Guardian’s sports supplement, Saturday November 20, 1999): Christie back under ban threat. Is back a noun (anatomy or position in rugby) or adverb? Is ban a verb, noun or attributive adjective? Is threat verb or noun? The reader’s prior knowledge gives the answer. Christie is the UK athlete, Linford Christie, who has been threatened with a ban previously. So back is short for is back and ban threat is a noun phrase, leading to the structural meaning: (Linford) Christie (is) back (=again) under (=subject to) (the) threat (of a) ban.
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A real-life forensic example comes from a cause célebre of the 1960s. Derek Bentley was hanged for murder after his accomplice, Christopher Craig (too young to hang) shot a policeman. Bentley allegedly shouted to Craig: “Let him have it”. Did this mean (as the prosecution claimed and the jury believed) “shoot him” (the victim) or (as the defence argued) “give it [= the gun] to him [= the policeman]”.
Another example that combines lexical and structural ambiguity is in a joke. Two men are looking at televisions in a shop-window. One says: “That’s the one I’d get!” Around the corner comes a Cyclops, who thumps him. The lexical ambiguity works best in speech – if we read it we must “hear” the speech to get the point. If you don’t understand the joke, tell it to some people who may see the point. If you still are puzzled, you may lack awareness of the denotation of Cyclops. They have only one eye. Get (like git) is an insult in some regional varieties of spoken English (especially in north-west England).
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Metaphor, simile and symbol
Metaphors are well known as a stylistic feature of literature, but in fact are found in almost all language use, other than simple explanations of physical events in the material world. All abstract vocabulary is metaphorical, but in most cases the original language hides the metaphor from us. Depends means “hanging from” (in Latin), pornography means “writing of prostitutes” (in Greek) and even the hippopotamus has a metaphor in its name, which is Greek for “river horse”. A metaphor compares things, but does not show this with forms such as as, like, or more [+qualifier] than. These appear in similes: fat as a pig, like two peas in a pod.
Everyday speech is marked by frequent use of metaphor. Consider the humble preposition on. Its primary meaning can be found in such phrases as on the roof, on the toilet, on top. But what relationship does it express in such phrases as on the fiddle, on call, on demand, on the phone, on the game, on telly, on fire, on heat, on purpose? Why not in? Launch denotes the naming of a ship and its entering service, but what does it mean to launch an attack, launch a new product, launch a new share-issue or even launch oneself at the ball in the penalty area?
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Personal computing abounds in metaphor, to suggest a semantic relationship with the real world – thus a user interface has a desktop, wallpaper and Windows, while a suite of useful programs is called Office. Bundles of data are files. Once they went in directories but now are grouped in folders. The Windows interface is an environment. The ideas of waste-disposal and environmental responsibility are both suggested by the recycle bin – the current metaphor for the program which organizes files after the user has deleted them temporarily.
A metaphor established by usage and convention becomes a symbol. Thus crown suggests the power of the state, press = the print news media and chair = the control (or controller) of a meeting.
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Semantic fields
In studying the lexicon of English (or any language) we may group together lexemes which inter-relate, in the sense that we need them to define or describe each other. For example we can see how such lexemes as cat, feline, moggy, puss, kitten, tom, queen and miaow occupy the same semantic field. We can also see that some lexemes will occupy many fields: noise will appear in semantic fields for acoustics, pain or discomfort and electronics (noise = “interference”). Although such fields are not clear-cut and coherent, they are akin to the kind of groupings children make for themselves in learning a language. An entertaining way to see how we organize the lexicon for ourselves is to play word-association games.
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Synonym, antonym and hyponym
Synonym and antonym are forms of Greek nouns which mean, respectively, “same name” and “opposed (or different) name”. We may find synonyms which have an identical reference meaning, but since they have differing connotations, they can never be truly synonymous. This is particularly the case when words acquire strong connotations of approval (amelioration) or disapproval (pejoration). We can see this by comparing terrorist with freedom fighter or agnostic (Greek) with ignoramus (Latin). Both of the latter terms express the meaning of a person who does not know (something). A pair which remains more truly synonymous (but might alter) would be sympathy (Greek) and compassion (Latin). Both mean “with [= having or showing] feeling”, as in the English equivalent, fellow feeling.
Some speakers will not be aware of synonyms, so cannot make a choice. But those with a wide lexicon will often choose between two, or among many, possible synonyms. This is an area of interest to semanticists. What are the differences of meaning in toilet, lavatory, WC, closet, privy, bog, dunny and so on?
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Intelligent reflection on the lexicon will show that most words do not have antonyms. When Baldric, in BBC TV’s Blackadder, attempts to write a dictionary he defines cat as “not a dog” – but the two are not antonyms. A cat is not a fish, banana, rainbow or planet, either – it is not anything, but a cat! We can contrast simple pairs like fat/thin but realize that both are relative to an assumed norm. Such lexeme pairs (for example: big/little, clever/stupid, brave/cowardly, hot/cold and beautiful/ugly) are gradable antonyms . True and false may show a clearer contrast. Clear either/or conditions are expressed by complementary antonyms: open/closed, dead/alive, on/off. Another kind (not really opposites at all) are pairs which go together, and represent two sides of a relation: these are converses or relational antonyms. Examples would be husband/wife, borrow/lend, murderer/victim, plaintiff/defendant.
Hyponymy is an inclusive relationship where some lexemes are co-hyponyms of another that includes them. As cutlery includes knife, fork, spoon (but not teacup) these are co-hyponyms of the parent or superordinating term. This traditional term denotes a grouping similar to a semantic field. So cod, guppy, salmon and trout are hyponyms for fish, while fleet has the hyponyms battleship, aircraft carrier, cruiser, destroyer and frigate.
David Crystal points out (Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language; page 105) that this is a linguistic, not a real-world, relationship – so it varies from one language to another. In English potato is a hyponym of vegetable but in German the lexeme Gemüse does not include Kartoffel (=potato).
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Collocation, fixed expression and idiom
Some words are most commonly found paired with other words, to create a semantic unit or lexeme. Thus false is often found together with passport, teeth or promise. These pairs are known as collocations. They are very helpful in establishing the meanings of the words in the pair. Porn is likely to be followed by film, mag, star or video. It may be collocated with actor, director or merchant but is less likely to be followed by customer, operative or minister. After estate you expect agent. How often have you seen whole new (whole new ball-game) as a collocation (here whole is redundant)? Think of collocations including these words: American, British, coffee, dirty, first, mad, millennium, native, Ninja, prime, police, rotten, speed, surf.
When words become grouped in almost predictable ways these are fixed expressions. Examples include jewel in the crown, desirable residence, criminal mastermind, world of work, address the issues, I put it to you.
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Sometimes the group is so well rooted in the language that the meanings of the component words are ignored, or metaphorical meanings (in dead metaphors) are never visualised. Such a group has a meaning that is not to be found in analysis of its parts, and is an idiom. Examples include: keep your nose clean, stick your nose/oar in, beneath your station, bed of roses, load of crap, not my cup of tea, a piece of cake, get on your high horse, off your own bat (frequent substitution of back shows the speaker is unaware of the original meaning) or skin of your teeth, get stuffed (what did this originally mean?).
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Semantic change and etymology
Over time lexemes may change their meaning. This kind of change is semantic change. Perhaps a connotation will take the place of the original denotation. More often a second (or third) meaning will develop side by side with the original. In time, this may come to be the primary reference meaning. Gay has both the sense of “happy” and “homosexual”. In spoken British English today the primary meaning is more likely to be the second of these. Queer has the sense of both “odd” and “homosexual”, but in contemporary spoken British English is more likely to have the first meaning. For both, however, the context of the lexeme may suggest the meaning.
Etymology is the systematic study and classification of word origins, especially as regards forms and meanings – it is therefore an important concept both for semantics and the study of language change. The etymology of a given lexeme denotes an account of its historical-linguistic origin.
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We can illustrate semantic change through the etymology of gentle. In the 14th century gentil had the meaning of “noble”, referring both to social class and to character. Because a noble person was supposed to be kind and considerate, the adjective today has the sense of “tender”, “careful” or “delicate”. The older meaning is preserved in gentleman, genteel and gentility. Until recently public toilets in the UK were designated Gentlemen or Ladies – where now we usually see a male or female picture representation. But these meanings live on in spoken English, as when someone says, perhaps in a public house, that she is off to the ladies’ or he is going to the gents’.
Villain has come to mean a wicked person, especially in drama or literature. Originally, it meant a person who farmed land under the feudal system. It is thus a class insult when used of the noble Romeo by Tybalt (“Thou art a villain”), or of the common Iago by Othello (“Villain, be sure thou prove my love a whore”). We may see how this leads to the modern meaning.
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The Old English and (related) Scandinavian words for a town give us modern forms such as by, burgh, borough and brough. From the German Hamburg came Hamburger, either a person of the town or a kind of sausage. This name was later used in the USA for a slice of the sausage in a bread cake. A mistaken belief that the initial ham refers to pig-meat has led to variants, such as beefburger, cheeseburger and veggieburger. Now burger alone denotes the food. Its earlier meaning of “resident of a town” is fading.
Holocaust has a fascinating etymology. It is a compound of two elements from classical Greek – holos (meaning “whole”, as in holistic, hologram) and kaustos (meaning “burnt”, as in caustic, hypocaust). It was first coined in writing by the translators of the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures made in Alexandria for King Ptolemy II in the third century BC. In its original context, the noun appears over two hundred times to translate Hebrew ’olâ (meaning literally “that which goes up”, that is, a sacrificial burnt offering). In modern times it has been used to denote the massive destruction, especially of people, in the world wars of the 20th century. Since the 1950s, it has been used more narrowly to denote the Nazis’ murder of European Jews between 1941 and 1945.
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As English contains hundreds of thousands of lexemes, etymology is a vast field of study, of which any examples will be pitifully few and probably not very representative. Many dictionaries will give etymological information. You should though be aware of false etymologies – interesting and plausible stories about word origins: I was told as a child that a bloke was originally a pregnant goldfish and a git a pregnant camel – but both accounts are false. There are similar stories told about quiz, of which the etymology is really unknown. On the other hand, there are some lexemes for which we have an exact etymology. Robot for example first appeared in 1921, in Karel Capek’s play Rossom’s Universal Robots, as the name of a mechanical servant. And Lewis Caroll made up many words in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, some of which, like chortled, have become established in the language. Use a good dictionary to check etymologies.
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Polysemy
Polysemy (or polysemia) is an intimidating compound noun for a basic language feature. The name comes from Greek poly (many) and semy (to do with meaning, as in semantics). Polysemy is also called radiation or multiplication. This happens when a lexeme acquires a wider range of meanings.
For example, paper comes from Greek papyrus. Originally it referred to writing material made from the papyrus reeds of the Nile, later to other writing materials, and now to things such as government documents, scientific reports, family archives or newspapers.
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Homonymy, homophones and homographs
Homonyms are different lexemes with the same form (written, spoken or both). For example, bank is both an elevated area of ground and a place or business where money is kept. You may think these are the same words, but this is not so, since the meaning is an essential feature of a word. In some cases, the same form (as with paper) has the same origin but this will not always be the case. The etymology of a lexeme will tell us where it comes from and how it acquired a given meaning.
Identity of form may apply to speech or writing only. David Crystal calls these forms “half” identical. They are:
• Homophones – where the pronunciation is the same (or close, allowing for such phonological variation as comes from accent) but standard spelling differs, as in flew (from fly), flu (“influenza”) and flue (of a chimney).
• Homographs – where the standard spelling is the same, but the pronunciation differs, as in wind (air movement or bend) or refuse (“rubbish” or “disallow”, stress falls on first and second syllable, respectively).
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Lexicology and lexicography
Lexicology is the systematic historical (diachronic) and contemporary (synchronic) study of the lexicon or vocabulary of a language. Lexicologists study semantics on a mass scale. Lexicography is the art and science of dictionary making. Lexicography also has a history. Although dictionary compilers today, as in the past, wish to create an authoritative reference work, their knowledge and understanding of language has changed radically. Different dictionaries serve very different purposes – some only give information about semantics (word meanings, descriptions or definitions) and orthography (standard spellings). Others give information about etymology, variants and change of meaning over time.
An unfortunate by-product of English teaching in the UK is a preoccupation with standard spelling forms to the exclusion of much else. Children are encouraged to use dictionaries for spell checking and not to learn about the language more generally. You should, with any dictionary, read the introduction to discover which principles have been used in compiling it, what models of language the compilers works from.
Is it, for example, broadly prescriptive or descriptive? Is it encyclopaedic, or does it exclude proper nouns? What variety or varieties of English does it include?
In checking an etymology cited above (git) I used three dictionaries – Funk and Wagnall’s New Practical Standard (US, 1946) the Pocket Oxford (1969) and the complete (1979) Oxford English Dictionary. None of these listed git. Modern dictionaries may well give a range of world Englishes. Dictionary functions built into computer software give the user a choice of different varieties – UK, US, Australia/New Zealand or International English.
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Thesauruses, libraries and Web portals
Students of semantics attempt to categorize and explain meaning in language. But there are other people who face a similar task. A thesaurus is a reference work in which words are arranged under general, then more specific semantic fields. As with much of language study there is a problem in making a linear representation of a complex model.
Libraries organize books under categories and sub-categories, the most popular model by far being the Dewey system named after its inventor. And portal sites on the World Wide Web organize information and links by (usually) a hierarchy of categories. These may all be helpful to you, in understanding semantic fields.
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Epistemology
This is the traditional name for the division of philosophy otherwise known as theory of knowledge. Epistemology underlies semantics in a fundamental way. Historically, it has had a profound influence on how we understand language. For example, a modern language scientist, looking at the class of words we think of as nouns, might wish to subdivide them further. But there is no very good reason to split them into those that denote physical and material realities and those that denote feelings and concepts – that is concrete and abstract nouns. This division comes from Plato, who divided things absolutely into the categories of mind (nous) and matter (physis). It breaks down when we apply it to modern phenomena, such as artificial intelligence.
Plato also divided things into universals and particulars. Some names represent a massive category of things, in which countless individual examples are included – boy, dog, car and cloud. Others are unique to one individual thing – Elvis Presley, Lassie, New York. In English and other European languages the word classes of common and proper nouns mark this distinction. In written English we signal that a word is a proper noun usually with initial capital letters. In written and spoken English, we also show it by omitting articles or determiners in many (not all) contexts, where a common noun would have these.
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But the distinction does not bear close scrutiny – many nouns which we capitalize stand for a wide category, not just a single individual, as with VW Beetle or Hoover. And what of eponyms – words named for a single individual, but now applied widely, as with sandwich, Wellington, boycott and quisling (look it up)?
At a more fundamental level, epistemology may help us decide whether the concepts of language are coherent and objective – as with word classes: are the notions of noun, verb, pronoun, adjective and so on logical as regards their referents?
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Colour
David Crystal (Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, p. 106) draws attention to the way the semantic field of colour shows “patterns of lexical use in English”, because the visible spectrum is a continuum. Crystal points out some interesting features of languages other than English, in identifying colour, such as the absence in Latin of lexemes for “brown” and “grey”. He suggests that modern English has eleven basic colour lexemes – white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange and grey. You may not agree with this – for example, you may think of orange and purple as secondary, being mixtures of or intermediate between others. Our sense of primary colours may come from the world around us – blue for the sky, green for grass and red for blood, for example.
The lexicon of colour is interesting when we study it historically (what colours are most frequent in the writings of Chaucer or Shakespeare) or in a special context. What names do manufacturers of paint or cosmetics favour? For parts of the body (especially hair) we have a special lexicon – hair is not yellow but blonde (the word indicates both hair colour or, as a noun, people with this colour of hair), brunette (although brown is also standard for males) and redhead (where red has a special colour denotation – not the scarlet or crimson it usually suggests). Another special lexicon (which may preserve historical differences) applies to horse colours – bay, grey (which denotes a horse more or less white) and chestnut.

OVERVIEW
Skills-oriented language teaching remains a common approach for classes as well as for self-learning, and computer-assisted language learning is no exception. In this unit, we look at how both tool and tutor software can be used to support specific skills. In particular, we will look at some websites that focus on these skill areas. Many of these are for free, but like everything else that’s free on the web, the sites need to be looked at carefully for their pedagogical value. Once you understand what they do, try to judge their fit to your potential students and your own teaching approach. You can also use them to get ideas for your own future CALL materials development.
The questions you should be trying to answer are the following:
1. What have teachers/developers done to teach the skill areas using computers?
2. To what extent does what they’ve done actually enhance learning?
3. And most important, how can you use these resources to support your students’ learning objectives?
A good set of links for all skills can be found at the Ohio Program of Intensive English site: www.ohiou.edu/esl/english/. Also, there are online language proficiency tests available, such as those by World English: http://www.world-english.org/english_test.htm.
ESL COLLECTIONS
Because of the enormous number of English teachers and learners, there are quite a few multi-skill collections for ESL.,A few, such as www.manythings.org by the Kelly brothers (http://aitech.ac.jp/~lkelly/ and http://aitech.ac.jp/~ckelly/) are mostly labors of love for students and colleagues around the world; often, however, these are commercial, aimed at getting “eyeballs” for advertisers. Some of these are divided by skills and have examples of web-based materials: see for example www.eslgold.com or http://esl.about.com or just type “ESL” plus the skill you’re interested in into Google. Collections for other commonly taught languages can be found in a similar way. One type of collection is a portal, which is a website that has a large number of links to other websites, such as www.rong-chang.com.
LISTENING
Listening is potentially one of the most promising areas for CALL development. This is because multimedia computing has everything standard audio and video have with the addition of a variety of meaning technologies such as text support, hyperlinked glossaries, and even translations. Listening activities typically involve presentations followed by comprehension questions–some also include full or partial dictations. One type of presentation specific to CALL is the punctuated presentation, in which the flow is interrupted at intervals to ask questions along the way. This in theory encourages more focused attention and allows a learner to get a check on understanding early in the activity. This technique was popularized in products by DynEd beginning around 1990. Surprisingly few multimedia programs have followed their example.
Examples of course website for two of my recent listening classes are at www.stanford.edu/~efs/693a/ and www.stanford.edu/~efs/693b/ The notes have both links and examples of listening assignments. An overview of listening on the web from a 2003 TESOL colloquium is available at www.stanford.edu/~efs/tesol03listening. Note that the list there includes a number of sites where you can find authentic audio or video materials supported by text. A good one for English for academic purposes is Uncommon Knowledge, featuring interviews and panel discussions with public policy experts (note: only the ones before 2006 have the text).
There are a number of useful dedicated ESL listening sites: three of my favorites are www.esl-lab.com, www.elllo.org, and www.lingual.net.
SPEAKING
In terms of direct practice of speaking, recent developments on the web have allowed for voice chat sites which make it possible for learners and teachers to interact through the Internet in distance education courses. Asynchronous speaking practice is possible through www.wimba.com, using Internet voice mail, or simply attaching sound files to email. There has also been interest recently in having students produce and publish podcasts. Many believe that putting students in front of a computer in groups of two or more will get them talking about the computer task and improve speaking fluency, although research has not always borne this out: like many other CALL activities, it depends on the students’ readiness and motivation. For tutorial CALL, practicing speaking has always been tricky. Auralog’s TellMeMore, www.auralog.com is an example of a program which allow some limited conversation simulation that gives something of the experience through the use of speech recognition software. Most programs simply rely on voice recording, with the learner simply recording a line from a dialogue and then comparing it with the native sample.
It has been suggested by many practitioners that using text-based chat supports the development of speaking skills indirectly due to the synchronous and informal nature of chat:. The most widely used indirect method for practicing speaking is simply to listen to conversational dialogues on disk or the web. See, for example, www.focusenglish.com/dialogues/conversation.html.
READING
Most reading instruction on disk and the web has involved the use of meaning technologies, such as hypertext glossaries, translations, and notes (on grammar, usage, culture).
Here are some other ways CALL can be used to support reading
• Just using the web: teachers give students tasks that require finding, comprehending and sometimes consolidating information on the web.
• Educational sites with ESL or adult literacy support: See the Learning Resources Adult Education Reading Site, http://literacyworks.org/learningresources/.
• Text reconstruction activities, such as Storyboard, cloze exercises (http://eslus.com/LESSONS/READING/READ.HTM), and jigsaw readings
• Timed or paced readings to develop speed, for example, www.readingsoft.com/.
• Multimedia reading, such as voice enhanced texts and dynamically illustrated material, found especially on CD-ROMs
• Student-produced material, such as the set of children’s stories written by high school Spanish students at www.northstar.k12.ak.us/schools/nph/historias/.
• Online graded readers such as those at www.eslreading.org/.
WRITING
Writing was revolutionized for everyone with word processing, and the addition of spell checkers has been quite helpful. Grammar and style checkers are much less useful to date, and using a thesaurus can be counterproductive if students aren’t trained in their limitations. Writing has also been a common skill taught as a course through distance education using the Internet.
Some other ways computers enhance writing instruction include the following.
• Use of email and discussion boards (see Unit 3) for fluency development.
• Online writing resources such as http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/esl/index.html and tutorials, like www.monash.edu.au/lls/llonline/writing/index.xml
• Blank screen (where the monitor is turned off and students type in their ideas without being distracted) and other production techniques, such as using graphic organizers or concept mapping: http://library.usu.edu/instruct/tutorials/cm/CMinstruction1.htm.
• Collaborative writing tasks. These are made easier today with tools such as an online word processor now available for free from Google: http://docs.google.com/
• Writing support practice (e.g., CALL activities with fill-ins for structured writing)
• Publication opportunities (both paper and web) as motivators. See Tom Robb’s classic description of an early web publishing project at www.cc.kyoto-su.ac.jp/~trobb/projects.html.
With respect to the last point, writing publication opportunities are readily available through Wikis and Blogs. Wikis are webpages that can be easily modified by multiple users (see, for example, Wikipedia: www.wikpedia.org) and are particularly good for collaborative projects, while blogs (weblogs) are online journals that individual students or groups can publish and allow others to leave comments on: see www.teachingenglish.org.uk/think/resources/blogging.shtml.
GRAMMAR
Grammar practice was perhaps the earliest use of CALL. Today grammar work is largely focused on the following:
• Workbook-style exercises (on disk and online): online examples can be seen at www.grammar-quizzes.com/.
• Grammar test prep materials (especially TOEFL www.toefl.com and TOEIC http://www.toeic.com)
• CD-ROMs accompanying grammar textbooks, like Focus on Grammar at www.pearsonlongman.com/ae/multimedia/programs/fog.htm and Azar’s grammar series www.azargrammar.com/materials/index.html.
• Online courses and references (e.g., Anthony Hughes’ Online English Grammar, http://www.edunet.com/english/grammar/index.cfm or www.scribd.com/doc/2586846/Anthony-Hughes-the-online-english-grammar)
• Hypertext-linked grammar notes accompanying readings
• Grammar portals such as www.esltower.com/
PRONUNCIATION
Pronunciation work is generally of three types.
• Listen, repeat/record, and compare. This option shows up in many multimedia programs and is analogous to the tape-based language lab technique in the audio-lingual method. However, the instantaneous response of digitized speech (no rewinding needed) makes the computer a more effective instrument for this. See http://international.ouc.bc.ca/pronunciation/dialog01.htm
• Visualization: wave form, pitch contour, spectrogram. The first and last are of questionable value. Wave forms are easy for a computer to produce, but they only clearly show the bands of intensity across time. This is most helpful in teaching rhythm. Spectrograms are most useful if they have high detail, which they generally don’t on CALL software, and they require training in phonetics to interpret them. However, visualization of pitch contour has been found to be quite helpful for some students in recognizing and producing both the patterns and ranges of intonation.
• ASR (automatic speech recognition) scoring. Here, the computer uses speech recognition software to grade accuracy. This can be useful, but there are a lot of technical problems–microphone quality, sound card quality, and background noise are all variables that can negatively affect the score, leading even native speakers to score as non-natives. For an example of a standardized test that uses ASR, see Ordinate’s PhonePass: www.ordinate.com. ASR and other is also used in Rosetta Stone, http://www.rosettastone.com.
In fact, the Rosetta Stone site (www.rosettastone.com) provides a good opportunity to explore all three types of pronunciation support, currently in their demo of Turkish. The sample lessons allow you to see intonation tracking as well as get a machine score of the closeness of your pronunciation to a native norm. It should be noted, however, that this scoring is not the same as a native speaker would give: sometimes a native speaker will even be marked low. There is a problem sometimes with the quality of the microphone, environmental noise, electronic or mechanical noise from the computer, and input settings for the microphone that can all effect the accuracy of speech recognition.
There are a number of commercial CD-ROMs for teaching pronunciation. These are generally superior to the text and tape alternatives. An example is Pronunciation in American English, www.amenglish.com/products/Pronunciation.cfm. There are also some useful sites with pronunciation support: one example is http://international.ouc.bc.ca/pronunciation/.
VOCABULARY
Vocabulary activities have been around since the early days of CALL in the form of electronic flashcards (linking L2 word to L1 translation or L2 word to L2 definition). Other common CALL implementations for vocabulary include the following.
• Hypertext dictionaries/glossaries. Babylon (www.babylon.com) is a commercial memory-resident dictionary system that runs in the background on your computer; www.voycabulary.com is a web application that automatically links items in a web page to a variety of dictionaries.
• Talking dictionaries: Longman, Oxford, and Newbury House have learner’s dictionaries with CD-ROMs that include pronunciation and sometimes other multimedia support. An online version is at www.ldoceonline.com.
• Concordance programs: these programs look for words in collections of texts, or corpora, and return examples of the word in the immediate context it occurs in: an online one is available at www.edict.com.hk/concordance/.
• Picture dictionaries: http://www.pdictionary.com/ has a picture dictionary for English, Spanish, French, German, and Italian. Of course the largest “picture dictionary” in the world is at http://images.google.com. Try alizarin, fennec and axolotl if you don’t know what they mean (or even if you do)
• Word lists and vocabulary tests for English: General service list, http://jbauman.com/gsl.html; Academic word list, www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/staff/averil-coxhead/awl/; Level tests, www.er.uqam.ca/nobel/r21270/levels/.