Introduction
Learning
a new language might not be all that easy, but there are many benefits for
example, learning English language. It is true that English has become a global
lingua franca over the past several decades. This fact, however, really should
have little effect on your decision to learn a foreign language. The attitude
that English alone is enough in fact creates self-imposed limitations. To
remain monolingual is to stunt your educational development, to restrict your
communication and thinking abilities, and to deny yourself the ability to fully
appreciate and understand the world in which you live. Learning another
language opens up new opportunities and gives you perspectives that you might
never have encountered otherwise.
To
become master of English language people should know what linguistics is.
Linguistics is an important part of learning foreign languages.
Linguistics is the scientific study of language.
The word was first used in the middle of the 19th century to emphasize the
difference between a newer approach to the study of language that was then
developing and the more traditional approach of philology
(Lyons, 2013).
Philology is
the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination
of literary criticism, history,
and linguistics (Peile, 2008). It
is more commonly defined as the study of literary texts and written records,
the establishment of their authenticity and their original form, and the
determination of their meaning. However, in this topic the writer does not want
to discuss about philology but linguistics. Here are five important parts of
linguistics such as phonology,
the sound system, morphology,
the structure of words, syntax,
the combination of words into sentences, semantics, the ways in which sounds and meanings of words, and
the pragmatics, the study of
how utterances are used in communicative acts.
Body
First,
Phonology is the system of speech sounds in a language or the system of sounds
itself. It likes phonetics that is study of the speech sounds. In fact, phonetics and phonology cover the field of
sentence utterance as the object.
Phonetics
is concerned with how sounds are produced; transmitted and perceived (we will
only look at the production of sounds). Phonology is concerned with how sounds function
in relation to each other in a language. In other words, phonetics is about
sounds of language, phonology about sound systems of language. Phonetics is a
descriptive tool necessary to the study of the phonological aspects of a
language.
Phonetics
and phonology are worth studying for several reasons. One is that as all study
of language, the study of phonology gives us insight into how the human mind
works. Two more reasons are that the study of the phonetics of a foreign
language gives us a much better ability both to hear and to correct mistakes
that we make, and also to teach pronunciation of the foreign language (in this
case English) to others (Forel & Puskás, 2005).
As
phonetics and phonology both deal with sounds, and as English spelling and English
pronunciation are two very different things, it is important that you keep in
mind that we are not interested in letters here, but in sounds. For instance,
English has not 5 or 6 but 20 different vowels, even if these vowels are all
written by different combinations of 6 different letters, "a, e, i, o, u,
y". The orthographic spelling of a word will be given in italics, e.g. please,
and the phonetic transcription between square brackets [pli:z]. Thus the
word please consists of three consonants, [p,l,z], and one vowel, [i:].
And sounds considered from the phonological point of view are put between
slashes.
Second,
Morphology is generally attributed to the German poet, novelist, playwright,
and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), who coined it early in
the nineteenth century in a biological context. Its etymology is
Greek: morph- means ‘shape, form’, and morphology is the study
of form or forms. In biology morphology refers to the study of the form
and structure of organisms, and in geology it refers to the study of the
configuration and evolution of land forms. In linguistics morphology refers
to the mental system involved in word formation or to the branch of linguistics
that deals with words, their internal structure, and how they are formed. To
illustrate what this means, let us consider the word waithood 'the stage
in a young college graduate's life when activities such as marrying and finding
a place to live are postponed until a job is found or enough money is saved'.
Third,
Syntax is the study of the way in which sentences are constructed from smaller
units called constituents; how sentences are related to each other. Syntax normally
means context-free syntax because of the almost universal use of context-free
grammars as a syntax specification mechanism. Syntax defines what sequences of
symbols are valid; syntactic validity is independent of any notion of what the
symbols mean. For example, a context-free syntax might say that A:=B+C is
syntactically valid, while A:=B+; is not. Context-free grammars are
described by productions in BNF (Backus naur Form, or
Backus Normal Form, named after John Backus and PeterNaur, major designers of
Algol-60).
Along
with sleeping, eating and drinking, talking is one of the most common of human
activities. Hardly a day goes by when we don’t talk, if only to ourselves! When
we speak, we utter a stream of sounds with a certain meaning, which our
interlocutors can process and understand, provided of course they speak the
same language. Apart from the spoken medium, language also exists in written
form. It then consists of a string of letters which form words, which in turn
make up sentences. If you have thought about language, you will have realized
that whether it is spoken or written, it has structure, and that it is not a
hotchpotch of randomly distributed elements. Instead, the linguistic
ingredients that language is made up of are arranged in accordance with a set
of rules. This set of rules we call the grammar of a language. Grammar is a
vast domain of inquiry and it will be necessary to limit ourselves to a sub domain.
In this book we will only be concerned with the part of grammar that concerns
itself with the structure of sentences. This is called syntax.
How
can we go about describing the structure of sentences? Well, before we can even
start, we will need to specify what we mean by ‘sentence’. This is not as
straightforward a question as it may seem, and linguists have come up with a
variety of definitions. In this book we will say that a sentence is a string of
words that begins in a capital letter and ends in a full stop, and is typically
used to express a state of affairs in the world. This definition is not unproblematic,
but will suffice for present purposes.
Let’s
now see what kinds of issues syntax deals with. First of all, one of the
principal concerns of syntax is theorderof words. In English we cannot string
words into a sentence randomly.
Fourth,
Semantics is the study of meaning in language. Another definition said that linguistic
semantics is the study of how languages organize and express meanings. This,
however, leaves us with a second question: what do we understand by “meaning”?
What is that “meaning” that is organized and expressed by languages? In very
general terms, speaking consists of communicating information: somebody (the
speaker) has something in his/her mind (an idea, a feeling, an intention, what not),
and decides to communicate it linguistically. Vocal noises are then emitted that
are heard by a second person (the hearer), who “translates” these noises back into
ideas, with the result being that this hearer somehow “knows” what the first person
had in mind. That “something” that was at first in the speaker’s mind and now
is also in the hearer’s mind is what we call meaning. What can it be? The problem
is that it can be virtually anything: objects (concrete, abstract or
imaginary), events and states (past, present, future or hypothetical), all sort
of properties of objects, feelings, emotions, intentions, locations, etc. We
can talk about anything we can think of (or perhaps almost). And if we were to
arrive at a rough idea of what meaning is, we would nevertheless have another
list of questions waiting in line. These are some of them, in no particular
order:
·
How exact is the “copy” of the meaning
that goes “from” the speaker “into” the hearer? That is, how faithful or
precise is linguistic communication?
·
How can the meaning of a given word or
expression be defined or measured?
·
Are there different types of meaning?
Fifth,
Pragmatics is the study of the aspects of meaning and language use that are
dependent on the speaker,
the addressee and
other features of the context of utterance,
such as the following:
·
The effect that the following have on
the speaker’s choice of expression and the addressee’s interpretation of an
utterance:
ü Context
of utterance
ü Generally
observed principles of communication
ü The
goals of the speaker
·
Programmatic concerns, such as
ü the
treatment of given versus
new information, including presupposition
ü deixis
ü speech acts, especially illocutionary
acts
ü implicature,
and
ü the
relations of meaning or function between portions of discourse(see interpropositional
relation) or turns of
conversation (see conversation
analysis).
Conclusion
Many
disciplines of cognitive science are concerned with these questions.
Linguistics, which is one of these disciplines, narrows down this question in
the following way. The crucial question of linguistics:
HOW
ARE FORM AND MEANING SYSTEMATICALLY RELATED IN AN ADEQUATE GRAMMAR OF NATURAL
LANGUAGE?
We
may distinguish different linguistic fields according to which part of this
question they focus on:
phonetics
phonology morphology
syntax semantics pragmatics
|_________________________________________________________|
Sounds meanings
The
physical side of linguistic utterances—the articulation and perception of
speech sounds (articulatory, acoustic and auditory)—is the domain of phonetics.
Phonology is the study of the sound patterns of human language. What are
the smallest meaning distinguishing units (=phonemes) in a given language? Morphology:
the structure of words and the smallest meaning-bearing units and how they combine
into words. Syntax: the formation of sentences, how words are combined to
larger units than words, to phrases and sentences. Semantics: Semantics is the
study of meaning expressed by elements of a language, characterizable as a
symbolic system.
Bibliography
Forel, C. A., & Puskás, G. (2005). Phonetics
and Phonology. Oldenburgh: University of Oldenburg.
Lyons, S. J. (2013, Agustus 4). Linguistics. Retrieved Desember
28, 2014, from Encyclopedia Britanica:
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/342418/linguistics
Peile, J. (2008). Philology. Harvard: Macmillan.
