Introductory Linguistics

Introductory Linguistics

A draft textbook by Bruce P. Hayes

Department of Linguistics University of California, Los Angeles

Copyright 2015 by Bruce P. Hayes

This copyrighted draft textbook may be freely read by anyone. It may be used by any linguistics teacher for teaching purposes, under the condition that you notify the author by email (bhayes@humnet.ucla.edu) that you are using it. Comments and corrections, including from students, are welcome.

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Contents

Preface Chapter 1: Chapter 2: Chapter 3: Chapter 4: Chapter 5: Chapter 6: Chapter 7: Chapter 8: Chapter 9: Chapter 10: Chapter 11: Chapter 12: Chapter 13: Chapter 14: Chapter 15:

p. 3

What is Linguistics?

p. 4

Morphology

p. 18

Normative views of language

p. 60

Syntax I -- Phrase Structure

p. 69

Syntax II -- Transformations

p. 144

Syntax III -- Subcategorization and Wh- Movement

p. 158

Language Acquisition

p. 241

Review of Morphology and Syntax

p. 251

Semantics

p. 295

Phonetics

p. 355

Phonology I -- Phonemic Analysis

p. 394

Phonology II -- Optional Rules, Phonology/Morphology Interaction p. 427

Historical Linguistics

p. 455

Applications and Outlook

p. 512

More review problems

p. 520

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Preface

This text has been written by me, gradually over the years, for the course "Linguistics 20: Introduction to Linguistic Analysis", which I teach in my home department at UCLA. The course is meant to be a short introduction to "core" linguistics, by which I mean the analysis of language data using theory. (My department covers broader issues, such as language in society, in a separate course, "Introduction to Language".) To the extent that my text is successful, students will get a clear idea of the goals and character of linguistic analysis and will be well prepared to take on the various subfields of linguistics in later specialized courses.

My text follows mainstream thinking in linguistics in assuming that learning the field is best done through exercises in which students deal with language data, trying to nail down the pattern and express it clearly with rules. The course I teach includes weekly homeworks of this kind; these homeworks include the most ambitious problems. In this text there also 90 Study Exercises; some are interspersed at appropriate moments in the presentation; others are placed in Chapters 8 and 15, meant for pre-midterm and pre-final review. I have arranged the page breaks to make it convenient for students to try to solve the exercises themselves before consulting the printed answer.

The main purpose of the exercises is to help students make the essential transition from passive knowledge (material makes perfect sense when the professor or text explains it) to active knowledge (student can apply the theory in new contexts and make independent assessments). In truth, I also hope that the exercises will be not just a way of achieving control over the material but at least occasionally a source of intellectual pleasure. Most linguists I know enjoy the puzzles presented by language data and I hope that for the reader it will be the same.

My thanks go to the many students who have read through earlier versions of this text, often usefully pointing out errors. I also thank my many teaching assistants for their wisdom and firsthand experience, along with my colleagues Sandra Disner, Craig Melchert, and Jessica Rett for expert advice.

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Chapter 1: What is Linguistics?

1. What this book will be like

Linguistics is the science of language; it studies the structure of human languages and aims to develop a general theory of how languages work. The field is surprisingly technical; to describe languages in detail requires a fair amount of formal notation. A good parallel would be the field of symbolic logic, which uses a formal notation to understand the processes of reasoning and argumentation.

There are basically three things I hope you will get out of this book.

First, there is the subject matter itself, which is useful to know for people in many different fields, such as education, psychology, and computation. The course is also an introduction to linguistics for those who are going to major in it.

Second, the course involves some mental exercise, involving analysis of data from English and other languages. I doubt that anyone who doesn't go on in linguistics will remember much of the course material five years after they have graduated, but the analytical skills in which you will get practice will be (I hope) both more permanent and more useful.

Third, the course is intended to give a more realistic view of science and how it proceeds. The reason we can do this in linguistics is that it is a fairly primitive science, without an enormous body of well-established results. Because of this, we are less interested in teaching you a body of established knowledge; rather, our focus is on teaching you to decide what is right on your own, by looking at the data. All sciences are in this state of uncertainty at their frontiers; linguistics can give you a more authentically scientific experience in a beginning course.

2. Implicit and explicit knowledge of language; working with consultants

Linguists are constantly asked the question "How many languages do you speak?" This question is a little irritating, because it is largely irrelevant to what linguists are trying to do. The goals of linguistics are to describe and understand the structure of human languages; to discover the ways in which all languages are alike and the ways in which they may differ. The point is that even if one could speak all 8000 or so of the world's languages, one would not have solved any of the problems of linguistics.

The reason is this: speaking a language and knowing its structure are different things. In speaking a language, one uses thousands of grammatical rules without being aware of them; they are "unconscious knowledge." Linguists attempt to make explicit this unconscious knowledge by looking closely at the data of language. That is, they attempt to make the "implicit knowledge" of native speakers into explicit knowledge.

This goal implies one of the central methods of doing linguistic research, the consultant session. Quite often, a linguist will study the structure of language she does not speak; this is

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done by finding a native-speaker consultant to provide the data. The linguist normally asks the consultant a great number of questions. Some of them are simple and establish basic knowledge:

(1) "What is the word for "duck" in your language?"

Others look for the various different grammatical forms of the same word:

(2) "How would you say "two ducks"?

(This would be looking, perhaps, for how plurals are formed). Others involve whole sentences and often their meanings as well.

The crucial idea in a consultant session is that the linguist is thinking about structure--is making and checking hypotheses. The native speaker is most often trying simply to provide an honest and accurate report of how she speaks the language, and of her intuitions about meaning and other matters.

Obviously, the lines can be blurred a bit: sometimes the consultant (especially if she knows some linguistics), may want to suggest some hypotheses herself. And linguists sometimes "work on themselves," so that the dialogue across the consultant table becomes an internal dialogue in the mind of the linguist.1

The following example illustrates the method: for one particular area of English grammar, we get some native speaker intuitions, and work out a series of hypotheses for what the rules of English are. We'll assume without comment that we are working with a native speaker of English, and indeed, I believe that the data below are characteristic of intuitions of English native speakers.

The point of the analysis will be to illustrate a consistent truth about linguistics: the native speaker consultant doesn't know the answer. You cannot effectively ask the consultant to provide the linguistic analysis. However, the native speaker does have the tacit, intuitive knowledge that makes it possible to find the answer, or at least to get closer to it.

3. The reference of each other

In the sentence (3), a native speaker of English is likely to tell you that each other refers to we, and that it means something like, "I like you and you like me."

(3) We like each other. (4) Alice and Sue like each other.

In linguistics this is often called the reciprocal reading; i.e. it says we are in a state of reciprocal liking. Sentence (4) has a similar reciprocal reading.

1 In practice I and probably other linguists find this hard to do; it's just too much going on in your head at once. More important, it poses methodological problems; the data are likely to be contaminated by wishful thinking.

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Sentence (5) is a bizarre sentence, in that each other cannot logically refer to I.

(5) *I like each other.

The native speaker responds to it by saying, "That's weird/that's bizarre/you can't say that in English." We will say for present purposes that (5) is ungrammatical; that is, ill-formed. Following standard practice, I will place an asterisk before sentences that are ungrammatical

In (5), the ungrammaticality can be traced to the absence of any plausible interpretation for the sentence; since each other describes reciprocal actions, like this:

(6) X

Y

X

Y

Each other cannot be used unless the agent of the action is plural. But not all cases can be explained in this way. In (7), you can think of a meaning that the sentence could in principle have, but this meaning is not allowed by the rules of English grammar (think through what this meaning would be, then check yourself by reading this footnote2):

(7) *Alice and Sue think I like each other.

In other words, being grammatical and having a sensible meaning are two different things.

Sentence (7) shows the same thing: you can think up two logically possible meanings, but only one meaning is allowed by the rules of English.

(8) We believe they like each other.

Again, reason it through for yourself then read the footnote.3

We've now reached our basic point: there must be some rule of English that accounts for what each other can refer to, but it is a tacit rule. No one can look inside their mind to find out what the rule is; one can only look at the data and try to figure the rule out. Linguists have worked on this particular rule for some time, and have gradually made progress in stating the rule accurately. But we cannot claim to have a final answer.

I will present a partial answer here. We will need two preliminary definitions, both of which will come up later on in the course. Here is the first one:

2 John thinks I like Bill and Bill thinks I like John.

3 Possible meaning: if they refers, for instance to Bill and John, then We believe that Bill likes John and John likes Bill. Impossible meaning: I believe that John and Bill like you and you believe that John and Bill like me.

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(9) Defn.: clause

A clause is either a whole sentence or a sentence within a sentence

You can identify clauses because they generally have a subject and a verb, and they express some sort of proposition. We depict clauses by drawing brackets around them; labeled "S" for "sentence".

(10) [ We like each other. ]S (11) [ John and Bill like each other. ]S (12) *[ I like each other. ]S (13) *[ John and Bill think [I like each other. ]S]S (14) [ We believe [ they like each other. ]S]S

Note that clauses can have clauses inside them. In (13), there is a clause that expresses the content of John and Bill's thoughts (I like each other), and the whole thing is an (ungrammatical) clause that describes a state (John and Bill are having a particular thought.)

We also need to define noun phrases.

(15) Defn.: noun phrase A noun phrase is a complete syntactic unit that refers to a thing or a set of things.

So, in (10), we is a noun phrase, and each other is a noun phrase. In (7), John and Bill is a noun phrase4 and again so is each other.

With these definitions, we can write a tentative rule for what each other refers to:

(16) Each other reference rule

Each other can refer only to noun phrases that are inside the smallest clause containing it.

Like all proposed linguistic rules, this should be applied with great care, checking to see if it works. We can make our work more careful with appropriate graphics, like underlining the noun phrases and putting brackets around the clauses. Let's give it a try.

Consider first (14), We believe they like each other. We want each other to refer only to they, and not to we. We can underline and bracket in the appropriate way, and try drawing arrows indicating candidates for the reference of each other, like this:

4 Also, as a matter of fact, John is a noun phrase, and Bill is a noun phrase; they are noun phrases inside a bigger noun phrase. We will see quite a bit of this later on.

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(17) [We believe [they like each other.]S]S

ok impossible

Since the smallest clause containing each other is the smaller one, and it contains the noun phrase they, the theory predicts that each other should be able to refer to they and not to we. This seems to be correct; i.e. so far the theory is working.

Considering next John and Bill think I like each other. I suggest at this point you jot down the structure yourself (brackets, underlines, arrows), and check what you wrote against what you see in (18) on the next page.

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