definition of linguistics essay

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Educational Linguistics

Introduction, early foundational works: mid-1960s to early 1980s.

• Deepening Foundations: 1980s-1990s
• Reference Works in Educational Linguistics
• Journals in Educational Linguistics
• Book Series and Web Resources in Educational Linguistics
• Research Methodology and Ethics: Ways of Knowing, Being, Seeing
• Language Development and Communicative Repertoire
• Language Teaching and Teacher Education
• Language and Discourse
• Language Diversity and Inequality
• Language Policy and Decolonizing Education
• Language Ecology and Language Revitalization
• Language and Identity

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• Psycholinguistic Perspectives on Second Language Acquisition and Bilingualism
• Register and Register Variation
• Representation and Processing of Multi-Word Expressions in First and Second Language Speakers
• Second Language Pragmatics
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Educational Linguistics by Nancy H. Hornberger LAST MODIFIED: 26 May 2022 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199772810-0291

Educational linguistics is a field of research, theory, policy, and practice whose essential concern is the teaching and learning of language. Integrally tied to the emergence of sociolinguistics in the 1960s, educational linguistics encompasses not only the linguistic, pedagogical, and developmental aspects of language teaching and learning but also the social identities, meanings, relationships, contexts, and roles of language in (language) teaching and learning. Similarly, our attention is not only on classroom teachers and learners, but the whole gamut of social settings and agents, including policymakers, families, schools, workplaces, religious institutions, communities, societies, and more—and whether real-time or virtual and oral, written, or digital. Critically, not only these social dimensions but the ways in which they are infused with and influential on relations of power are foundational in educational linguistics. From its earliest days up to the present, there has been a productive tension between the named field of educational linguistics and the many scholars and practitioners who “do” educational linguistics but may not call themselves educational linguists. Indeed, few of the earliest scholarly giants whose work is at the foundation of the field called it educational linguistics; and today, educational linguists usually claim it as just one of their multiple identities along with applied linguist, anthropological linguist, sociolinguist, or other. The bibliography begins, then, with the sections Early Foundational Works: Mid-1960s to Early 1980s and Reference Works in Educational Linguistics , moving on from there to consider Journals in Educational Linguistics and Book Series and Web Resources in Educational Linguistics followed by Research Methodology and Ethics: Ways of Knowing, Being, Seeing . After this, seven thematic sections cover foundational areas of the field, with a sample of recent publications which capture current educational linguistics at its “heart.” In light of the large scope of the field, and given the space constraints and purpose of Oxford Bibliographies —to provide researchers and students with selective guides through the literature on a given topic—the focus is primarily on publications from 2001 forward in the thematic sections, and on influential and breakthrough pieces throughout. To be sure, there is an inevitable bias in selection, but also a hope that the University of Pennsylvania’s long-term experience in educational linguistics serves as testing ground for defining critical concepts in the field. I acknowledge here with gratitude the assistance and support of my PhD student Sarah-Lee Gonsalves at multiple stages of this project. Not only did her enthusiasm play a role in my undertaking the essay, but her perspective and experience as a newly emerging scholar in educational linguistics helped shape my decisions about what to include (or not), while her dedication and expertise in annotating have left their mark in nearly every entry.

Educational linguistics’ most seminal piece is arguably Hymes 1972 , first presented as a lecture at the 1966 Research Planning Conference on Language Development among Disadvantaged Children at Yeshiva University’s Ferkauf Graduate School of Education. As Courtney Cazden points out in the Anthropology and Education Quarterly (2011, issue 42.4) honoring Hymes, this was the time of the US civil rights movement and the inauguration of Head Start, when the US Office of Education was very interested in how the language of “disadvantaged” children (understood then as nonstandard-speaking African American children) might play a role in their school success or failure. Hymes’s proposal of a communicative competence that is as much about the social functions of language as about its grammatical accuracy was perhaps a response not just to Chomsky’s ideal speaker-hearer but also to the political climate of the time. Smitherman 1979 takes up this vision, writing on the legitimacy of black language and the need for new paradigms of educational linguistics research and pedagogy. Language, clearly, is at the core of educational linguistics and the field reflects and contributes to evolving understandings of the complexities of language and communicative competence. Fishman 1982 , on age-old challenges of language diversity and education, frames language as part of, index of, and symbol of ethnicity and culture, i.e., what the author calls “peopleness relatedness” or the sense of being part of a particular people, doing the things that this people traditionally does, and knowing (appreciating, sensing, feeling, intuiting) things this people claims to know; he goes on to discuss alternative historical and contemporary stances toward ethnicities as transitional, enduring, or separate but shareable. Other seminal essays and books from those first decades of the as-yet-unnamed field put forth concepts that also became critical to the field: Gumperz 1968 , on verbal repertoire in multilingual speech communities; Freire 1970 on conscientizaçaõ “political consciousness-raising” in adult literacy; Philips 1972 on non-verbal communication and home-school mismatch in communicative participation structures; Haugen 1973 on the curse of language used as a basis for social discrimination; Erickson 1975 on gatekeeping encounters and situated social identity in educational counseling; Halliday 1975 on children’s language acquisition as learning how to mean; Cummins 1979 on linguistic interdependence and thresholds hypotheses in bilingual language development; Hymes 1980 on the centrality of language and culture in education; and Heath 1982 on literacy events in home contexts.

Cummins, Jim. 1979. Linguistic interdependence and the educational development of bilingual children. Educational Research 49.2: 222–251.

DOI: 10.3102/00346543049002222

The article outlines a theoretical framework that examines a confluence of factors (sociocultural and linguistic) in a given context, to advance an understanding of how educational programs impact the cognitive and academic development of bilingual children. Cummins challenges simplistic notions of linguistic mismatch per se as an explanation for language minority children’s poor academic achievement, advocating rather for additive bilingual programs that promote literacy in both children’s first and second languages.

Erickson, Frederick. 1975. Gatekeeping and the melting pot: Interaction in counseling encounters. Harvard Educational Review 45.1: 44–70.

DOI: 10.17763/HAER.45.1.G2X156R1K00W5037

This groundbreaking microethnographic study of situated social identity in educational gatekeeping encounters explores how race, ethnicity, and communicative styles mediate student-counselor relationships in junior college counseling interviews and consequently impact student trajectories for progression into careers and further study. Erickson suggests that counselors’ greater awareness of co-memberships at play during their interactions with students could improve their ability to support and advise students.

Fishman, Joshua. 1982. Sociolinguistic foundations of bilingual education. Bilingual Review/La Revista Bilingüe 9.1: 1–35.

This historical overview of sociology and sociolinguistics discusses the advent of bilingual education in traditionally monolingual education systems. Using comparative examples from North America, Europe, and former colonies, the essay specifically explores linguistic variation and mass formal education, and the implications of language status and language planning for bilingual education. Fishman concludes that societal support is crucial for the success of bilingual education.

Freire, Paulo. 1970. The adult literacy process as cultural action for freedom. Harvard Educational Review 40:205–225.

DOI: 10.17763/HAER.40.2.Q7N227021N148P26

This seminal article, both visionary and supremely practical, challenges framings of adult literacy as solely a technical skill and instead calls for a pedagogical shift to see literacy as a transformative social practice. Informed by his experiences in adult literacy education in the complex and highly inequitable multilingual ecology of the Brazilian northeast of the 1960s, Freire calls for more community centered and collaborative approaches to literacy, that advocate for cultural action to seek liberation from historical and contemporary injustice and oppression.

Gumperz, John J. 1968. The speech community. In International encyclopedia of the social sciences . Edited by David L. Sills, 381–386. New York: Macmillan.

In this seminal article, the author highlights the speech community as the center of socially embedded linguistic analysis, tracing the origins of this analysis to the study of dialectology and describing its subsequent development. Gumperz introduces the concept of verbal repertoire as the totality of dialects (regional and social) and superposed variants (e.g., register and style) in a speech community and explores considerations for promoting social change.

Halliday, Michael A. K. 1975. Learning how to mean: Explorations in the development of language . London: Edward Arnold.

Arguing that children are active agents in their own language development, Halliday sets forth his framework for a functional, or sociolinguistic, account of the early development of a child’s mother tongue. Draws on intensive study of the language of his son, Nigel, from nine to eighteen months, to describe and document the child’s learning to mean by expressing instrumental “I want,” regulatory “do as I tell you,” interactional “me and you,” personal “here I come,” heuristic “tell me why,” imaginative “let’s pretend,” and informative “I’ve got something to tell you” functions in approximately that order.

Haugen, Einar. 1973. The curse of Babel. Daedalus 102.3: 47–57.

Challenging narratives on the impact of linguistic diversity, Haugen traces interpretations of the disadvantages of linguistic diversity to the biblical case of the Tower of Babel. Arguing for a reinterpretation, the essay presents the cases of bilingual education in the United States and of the Lapps and Finnish bilingual speakers in Norrbotten, Sweden, and advances the idea that linguistic diversity is never a problem unless it is used as a basis for discrimination.

Heath, Shirley Brice. 1982. What no bedtime story means: Narrative skills at home and school. Language in Society 11.1: 49–76.

DOI: 10.1017/S0047404500009039

A foundational ethnographic study examining the varied literacy practices in student communities and how these compare to practices encountered in the classroom. Observations in three communities of differing socioeconomic and racial compositions reveal that understandings of what is considered a literacy event varied by community. These findings suggest that this variation should be considered by educators and researchers since it has implications for student development, assessment, and educational achievement.

Hymes, Dell H. 1972. On communicative competence. In Sociolinguistics: Selected readings. Edited by J. B. Pride and Janet Holmes, 269–293. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Addressing how a child comes to produce and understand “any and all” the grammatical sentences of a language, Hymes proposes “communicative competence” to capture a broad sociolinguistic vision concerning “whether (and to what degree)” a linguistic action is formally possible, physically and culturally feasible, contextually appropriate, and actually done. The author suggests three interrelated concepts, emergent in sociolinguistics at the time, as relevant to describing communicative competence, namely verbal repertoire, linguistic routines, and domains of language behavior.

Hymes, Dell H. 1980. Language in education: Ethnolinguistic essays . Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.

Several of Hymes’s early and influential essays articulating a sociolinguistic approach to language and education from a perspective influenced by anthropology, linguistics, and folklore studies. Focus is on the construction of social life and inequalities through language as an evolving and dynamic process and exploration of how schools reflect these larger social influences. Hymes proposes ethnographic monitoring as an important means of evaluating bilingual education programs.

Philips, Susan. 1972. Participant structures and communicative competence: Warm Springs children in community and classroom. In Functions of language in the classroom . Edited by Courtney Cazden, Vera John, and Dell Hymes, 370–394. New York: Teachers College Press.

This study reveals how divergent Native American and non–Native American participation structures lead to an incomplete assessment of student language competence by teachers. Philips argues that teachers should not assume that knowledge of a language necessarily implies a familiarity with a wide range of participant structures beyond students’ communities and this may be the motivation behind student silence and reluctant participation.

Smitherman, Geneva. 1979. Toward educational linguistics for the first world. College English 41.2: 202–211.

DOI: 10.2307/376407

Smitherman argues for a study of Ebonics that stresses communicative competence rather than phonology and syntax, an ideology that recognizes that knowledge is for all and not just a select few, and a radically new pedagogy that recognizes the legitimacy of Black language and culture. She articulates three interrelated dimensions educators and linguists must pursue together to achieve such a pedagogy: theory and research, policy and planning, and implementation and practice.

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How to Write a Linguistics Essay

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• Geoffrey Finch  

Part of the book series: Palgrave Study Guides:Literature

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For most of us this is where the crunch really comes. Reading about the subject is OK but having to write something intelligible about it is another matter. All that terminology, those diagrams! Well it isn’t so difficult provided you bear in mind a few basic rules. It’s the purpose of this chapter to say what these are.

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Finch, G. (2003). How to Write a Linguistics Essay. In: How to Study Linguistics. Palgrave Study Guides:Literature. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-80213-1_7

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2 Chapter 2: Introduction to Linguistics

Learning outcomes.

After studying this chapter, you should be able to discuss:

• the definition of linguistics and what makes it a science
• the difference between descriptive and prescriptive approaches to language
• the concept of mental grammar
• the ways in which English is creative or generative
• the universal properties of language
• the connection between language and culture and how power and authority are connected to language
• the ways that language changes over time

Introduction to Linguistics

Linguistics is one of those subjects that not many people have heard of, so you might well be wondering exactly what it is. The simplest definition of Linguistics is that it’s the science of language .

This is a simple definition, but it contains some very important words. First, when we say that linguistics is a science, that doesn’t mean you need a lab coat and safety goggles to do linguistics.  Instead, what it means is that the way we ask questions to learn about language uses a scientific approach.

The scientific way of thinking about language involves making systematic, empirical observations .  There’s another important word:   empirical means that we observe data to find the evidence for our theories.

All scientists make empirical observations: botanists observe how plants grow and reproduce. Chemists observe how substances interact with other. Linguists observe how people use their language.

A crucial thing to keep in mind is that the observations we make about language use are NOT value judgments.  Lots of people in the world — like your high school English teacher, various newspaper columnists, maybe your grandparents, and maybe even some of your friends — make judgments about how people use language.  But linguists don’t. A short-hand way of saying this is that linguists have a descriptive approach to language, not a prescriptive approach. We describe what people do with their language, but we don’t prescribe how they should or shouldn’t do it.

This descriptive approach is consistent with a scientific way of thinking. Think about an entomologist who studies beetles.  Imagine that scientist observes that a species of beetle eats leaves.  She’s not going to judge that the beetles are eating wrong, and tell them that they’d be more successful in life if only they eat the same thing as ants.  No — she observes what the beetle eats and tries to figure out why:  she develops a theory of why the beetle eats this plant and not that one. In the same way, linguists observe what people say and how they say it, and come up with theories of why people say certain things or make certain sounds but not others.

In the following video, a professor of linguistics ponders the question, “Is linguistics a science?”

In our simple definition of linguistics, there’s another important word we need to focus on:  linguistics is the science of human language . There are plenty of species that communicate with each other in an impressive variety of ways, but in linguistics, our job is to focus on the unique system that humans use. It turns out that humans have some important differences to all other species that make our language unique.

First, what we call the articulatory system : our lungs, larynx & vocal folds, and the shape of our tongue, teeth, lips, nose, all enable us to produce speech.  No other species can do this in the way we can, not even our closest genetic relatives the chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans.

Second, our auditory system is special:  our ears are sensitive to exactly the frequencies that are most common in human speech.  There are other species that have similar patterns of auditory sensitivity, but human newborns pay special attention to human speech, even more so than synthetic speech that is matched for acoustic characteristics.

And most important of all, our neural system is special: no other species has a brain as complex and densely connected as ours with so many connections dedicated to producing and understanding language.

Humans’ language ability is different from all other species’ communication systems, and linguistics is the science that studies this unique ability.

Elements of Linguistics

We know now that Linguistics is the scientific study of human language.  It’s also important to know that linguistics is one member of the broad field that is known as cognitive science .

The cognitive sciences are interested in what goes in the mind.  And in linguistics, we’re specifically interested in how our language knowledge is represented and organized in the human mind.

Think about this:  you and I both speak English. I’m writing in English right here in this chapter, and you’re reading the words and understanding me. Right now I’ve got some idea in my mind that I want to express. If I were speaking, I’d be squeezing the air out of my lungs, vibrating my vocal folds, and manipulating parts of my mouth to produce sounds. In response to the sound coming from my mouth, your eardrums would vibrate and send signals to your brain, with the result that the idea in your mind is something similar to the idea that was in my head.

There must be something that your mind and my mind have in common to allow that to happen: some shared system that allows us to understand each other’s ideas when we speak.  In linguistics, we call that system the mental grammar, and our primary goal is to find out what that shared system is like.

The following is a fascinating explanation of language and how it shapes the way we think.

All speakers of all languages have a mental grammar:  the shared system that lets speakers of a language understand each other.  In this text, we devote most of our attention to the five core pieces of the mental grammar of English: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics.

Creativity of Language

Probably the most fundamental property of human language is creativity .  When we say that human languages are creative, we don’t just mean that you can use them to write beautiful poems and great works of literature.

When we say that human language is creative, we mean a couple of different things:

First, every language can express any possible concept.

That notion might surprise you at first.  I often see magazine articles or blog posts that talk about supposedly untranslatable words that exist in other languages but that don’t exist in English.  A quick search online leads me to these gems:

Kummerspeck is the German word for excess weight gained from emotional overeating.

In Inuktitut, iktsuarpok is that feeling of anticipation when you’re waiting for someone to show up at your house and you keep going outside to see if they’re there yet.

And in Tagalog, gigil is the word for the urge to squeeze something that is irresistibly cute.

So if you believe that kind of article, it might seem like some concepts are restricted to certain languages.  But think about it: Just because English doesn’t have one single word that means “the urge to squeeze something cute” doesn’t mean that English-speakers can’t understand the concept of wanting to squeeze something cute. As soon as I described it using the English phrase “the urge to squeeze something cute” you understood the concept!  It just takes more than one word to express it!  The same is true of every language:  all of the world’s languages can express all concepts.

The other side of the creativity of language is even more interesting.  Every language can generate an infinite number of possible new words and sentences.

Every language has a finite set of words in it.  A language’s vocabulary might be quite large, but it’s still finite.  And every language has a small and finite set of principles for combining those words.

But every language can use that finite vocabulary and that finite set of principles to generate an infinite number of sentences, new sentences every single day.

Likewise, every language has a finite set of sounds and a finite set of principles for combining those sounds. Every language can use those finite resources to generate an infinite number of possible new words in that language.

Because human languages are all capable of generating new words and generating new sentences, we say that human grammar is generative .

Remember that when we use the word “grammar” in linguistics, we’re talking not about the prescriptive rules that your Grade 6 teacher tried to make you follow, but about mental grammar , the things in our minds that all speakers of a language have in common that allow us to understand each other.  Mental grammar is generative.

The final, and possibly the most important thing to know about the creativity of language is that it is governed by systematic principles. Every fluent speaker of a language uses systematic principles to combine sounds to form words and to combine words to form sentences. In this text, we’ll use the tools of systematic observation to discover what these systematic principles are.

Fundamental Truths about Language

Because everybody speaks a language, just about everybody has opinions about language. But there are lots of things that are commonly believed about language that just aren’t true.

You might have heard someone say that a given language has no grammar.  I’ve heard people try to argue that Chinese has no grammar, that English has no grammar, that the languages spoken by Indigenous people who live in what is currently Canada have no grammar, even that Swiss German has no grammar.

When people say this, they might mean a few different things.  Sometimes they just mean that there’s not much variation in the forms of words, which is true of Chinese, but the grammar of Chinese has lots of complexity in its sound system.

But sometimes people who argue that a language has no grammar are actually trying to claim that that language is inferior in some way.

The truth is that all languages have grammar . All languages have a sound system, a system for forming words, a way of organizing words into sentences, a systematic way of assigning meanings. Even languages that don’t have writing systems or dictionaries or published books of rules still have speakers who understand each other; that means they have a shared system, a shared mental grammar.

When we’re investigating mental grammar, it doesn’t matter whether a language has a prestigious literature or is spoken by powerful people. Using linguists’ techniques for making scientific observations about language, we can study the phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics of any language.

Another opinion that you might have heard about language is that some languages are better than others. Maybe you’ve heard someone say, “Oh, I don’t speak real Italian, just a dialect,” implying that the dialect is not as good as so-called real Italian.  Or maybe you’ve heard someone say that Québec French is just sloppy; it’s not as good as the French they speak in France.  Or maybe you’ve heard someone say that nobody in Newfoundland can speak proper English, or nobody in Texas speaks proper English, or maybe even nobody in North America speaks proper English and the only good English is the Queen’s English that they speak in England.

The truth is that all languages are equally valid . Just as we said that all languages have grammar, it’s also the case that there’s no way to say that one grammar is better or worse than another grammar.  Remember that linguistics takes a scientific approach to language, and scientists don’t rate or rank the things they study.  Ichthyologists don’t rank fish to say which species is more correct at being a fish, and astronomers don’t argue over which galaxy is more posh. In the same way, linguists don’t assign a value to any language or variety or dialect.

It is the case, though, that plenty of people do attribute value to particular dialects or varieties, and sociolinguistic research tells us that there can be negative or positive social consequences for people who speak certain varieties. When people say that British English is better than American English, for example, they’re making a social judgment, based on politics, history, economics, or snobbery.  But there is no linguistic basis for making that value judgment.

Universal Properties of Language

One of the common misconceptions about language arose when scholars first started doing linguistics. At first, they focused on the languages that they knew, which were mostly the languages that were spoken in Europe. The grammars of those languages had a lot in common because they all evolved from a common ancestor, which we now call Proto-Indo-European. When linguists started learning about the languages spoken in other parts of the world, they thought at first that these languages were so unfamiliar, so unusual, so weird, that they speculated that these languages had nothing at all in common with the languages of Europe.

Linguists have now studied enough languages to know that in spite of the many differences between languages, there are some universal properties that are common to all human languages . The field of linguistic typology studies the properties that languages have in common even across languages that they aren’t related to. Some of these universal properties are at the level of phonology, for example, all languages have consonants and vowels. Some of these universals are at the level of morphology and syntax.  All languages make a distinction between nouns and verbs.  In nearly all languages, the subject of a sentence comes before the verb and before the object of the sentence.  We’ll discover more of these universals as we proceed through the chapters.

A very common belief that people have about language is something you might have heard from your grandparents or your teachers. Have you heard them say, “Kids these days are ruining English! They should learn to speak properly!”  Or if you grew up speaking Mandarin, maybe you heard the same thing, “Those teenagers are ruining Mandarin! They should learn to speak properly!” For as long as there has been language, there have been people complaining that young people are ruining it, and trying to force them to speak in a more old-fashioned way. Some countries like France and Germany even have official institutes that make prescriptive rules about what words and sentence structures are allowed in the language and which ones aren’t allowed.

The truth is that every language changes over time . Languages are spoken by humans, and as humans grow and change, and as our society changes, our language changes along with it. Some language change is as simple as in the vocabulary of a language: we need to introduce new words to talk about new concepts and new inventions. For example, the verb google didn’t exist when I was an undergraduate student, but now googling is something I do every day. Language also changes in they we pronounce things and in the way we use words and form sentences.  In a later chapter, we’ll talk about some of the things that are changing in Canadian English.

Another common belief about language is the idea that you can’t learn a language unless someone teaches you the rules, either in a language class or with a textbook or a software package. This might be partially true for learning a language as an adult: it might be hard to do it on your own without a teacher.  But think about yourself as a kid. Whatever language you grew up speaking, whether it’s English or French or Mandarin or Arabic or Tamil or Serbian, you didn’t have to wait until kindergarten to start speaking. You learned the language from infancy by interacting with the people around you who spoke that language. Some of those people around you might have taught you particular words for things, but they probably weren’t teaching you, “make the [f] sound by putting your top teeth on your bottom lip” or “make sure you put the subject of the sentence before the verb”.  And by the time you started school you were perfectly fluent in your language. In some parts of the world, people never go to school and never have any formal instruction, but they still speak their languages fluently.

That’s because almost everything we know about our language — our mental grammar — is unconscious knowledge that’s acquired implicitly as children.  Much of your knowledge of your mental grammar is not accessible to your conscious awareness . This is kind of a strange idea:  how can you know something if you’re not conscious of knowing it? Many things that we know are indeed conscious knowledge. For example, if I asked you, you could explain to me how to get to your house, or what the capital of Canada is, or what the difference is between a cow and a horse. But our mind also has lots of knowledge that is not fully conscious. You probably can’t explain very clearly how to control your muscles to climb stairs, or how to recognize the face of someone you know, or how to form complex sentences in your native language, and yet you can do all of these things easily and fluently, and unconsciously. A lot of our job when we study Linguistics is to make explicit the things that you already know implicitly.  This is exactly what makes linguistics challenging at first, but it’s also what makes it fun!

The Power of Language

Language and communication are embedded in cultural power systems. For example, in American English, those who use the phrase “I ain’t” instead of “I am not” are judged for not speaking “properly” and using standard American English. In many languages, how people speak can be a marker of which social group they belong to, as speech is influenced by gender, age, class, and ethnicity.  Those who use the phrase “I ain’t” are generally thought of as being less educated, belonging to a lower social class, than those who say “I am not.”

Here’s a clip from the Hallmark movie, The Makeover (a take on Singing in the Rain ), in which Elliot Dolittle must change his accent in order to be acceptable as a political candidate:

We see many examples of ways in which people are empowered, or diminished, because of how they speak English in literature, as well as in film. For example, consider Amy Tan’s essay, “Mother Tongue,” which is based off of a speech she gave talking about her novel, Joy Luck Club .

“Mother Tongue”

“ Mother Tongue ” (online location)

Correct citation: Tan, Amy. “Mother Tongue.” The Threepenny Review , no. 43, 1990, pp. 7–8. Sharett Brown , http://www.u.arizona.edu/~sab4949/mother.html. Accessed 2 May 2021.

While the Yavapai College Library does not have access to this essay, YC students can read the essay as originally published by clicking on the link and then choosing the Red “Read Online” button (you may have to login to YC first):

<a href=”//www-jstor-org.proxy.yc.edu/stable/4383908e”Mother Tongue”

Sometimes languages are used to create a sense of intimacy among a certain group, as Richard Rodriguez describes in the clip below:

Even if we don’t speak a different language than English, no one speaks the same way all the time in every social setting. When I am in the South for long periods of time, my speech changes, and my accent becomes more pronounced. Similarly, you probably do not speak to your grandparents the same way you speak to your peers. This is called code-switching . The study of these different ways of speaking and connections to power relations and social groups is called sociolinguistics .

Although society may stigmatize some forms of speech, (think about the overuse of “like” by teenage girls influenced by the way girls in the Valley of California began speaking in the 1980s)…

…there’s not a scientific sense in which one grammatical pattern or an accent is better or worse than another. Communication is about relaying messages. If the message can be understood, then it is an effective form of communication. If you say, “I ain’t going to read this chapter,” I know what you are trying to convey.

Languages are spectrums. All forms of language are equally functional and equally valid forms of communication. This isn’t a political statement, but it has political implications because of the power systems embedded in language. Consider the way some New Yorkers’ speak, not pronouncing the “r” in words (“fourth floor” sounds like “fawth floah”). This way of speaking is found primarily among working-class New Yorkers and would not be considered Standard American English (think about how newscasters speak) ( Labov, 1972 ). But, the same practice of not pronouncing the “r” is considered posh and the standard in the United Kingdom. Called “Received Pronunciation,” this is the way the Royal Family and British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) newscasters speak ( Light, 2018 ).

Language Changes: Descriptive vs Prescriptive

Every part of a language’s grammar can change, but some of these changes are faster than others, and some are more noticeable. The lexicon is the vocabulary of a language — what words are in the language. New words enter English all the time as new technologies and concepts emerge, and dictionary editors like to publish lists of the new words they’ve added. This list shows a handful of words that were added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2020:  beardo , awesomesauce , mentionitis , self-isolate , PPE (for personal protective equipment), and, thirsty ? Surely the word thirsty was in the Dictionary before 2020!? Yes, it was, with the meaning of “wanting something to drink”, but a new meaning was added in 2020 — if you don’t know that new meaning you might want to look it up.

Jack Chambers, a linguist at the University of Toronto, conducted a large-scale study of Canadian English and how it has changed over time. One part of his study asked people to say words that started with a “wh”: words like where, whine, whale, wheel . Then he analyzed his findings according to how old his participants were. When Chambers was doing his research, people who had been born before 1920 were in their 80s. For this age group, more than half of them have the voiceless [ʍ] at the beginning of these wh-words. So for this group, whine sounds different from wine . For the next younger group, the pattern is about the same, but for each successively younger group, the proportion of people who pronounce a wh-word with a voiceless [ʍ] drops off. So for the people who were in their late teens and early twenties when Chambers interviewed them, only about 10% pronounced whine differently from wine . By looking at this snapshot across different age groups, we can get a picture of how Canadian English has changed over time.

Languages might also change in their morphology and syntax, though these changes tend to happen very slowly indeed. Let’s look at a couple of changes that are in progress right now. The first one I want to look at has to do with the word because . Suppose I start a sentence like this, “Alex took an umbrella because…” and I ask you to finish it. You might finish it by appending another whole sentence, “because it was raining”. Or you might choose a prepositional phrase that starts with of , “because of the rain”. Both of these options have been available in English syntax for centuries. But a new option is emerging. If you’re young, or if you spend a lot of time online, you might finish this sentence just, “because thunderstorm”, with just a plain old noun phrase. This change seems to have started on Craigslist in 2011, with an ad for a car that was “completely stripped inside because race car,” and now forms the title of the book Because Internet , in which linguist Gretchen McCulloch documents the ways that the internet has changed how we use language.

The last change I want to talk about is also happening in the morphosyntax of English, in the pronoun system. But first we need to look at a change that happened hundreds of years ago. In the 16th century, English used to have two ways of saying “you”. If you were talking to a group of people, you’d say you  just like we do now. But if you were talking to just one person, you’d address them as thou or thee , as in, “What classes art thou taking this term?” or “I really like thy new haircut”. By the 17th century, thou and thee had all but disappeared and were only reserved for conversations with people you’re very close to. So the word you was used for both singular and plural. In modern English, we don’t have thou or thee at all unless we’re trying to be funny or old-fashioned. But it can be pretty useful to have a way of distinguishing between singular and plural, so some varieties of spoken English have other plural forms, like y’all or you guys or youse ….or even all y’all. Maybe your variety of English has one of these.

So that change in the pronoun system happened hundreds of years ago without incident. These days a different change is happening, this time to the third person pronoun they . For centuries, they has been used as a plural pronoun, to refer to a group of people, as in, “The children said they played soccer all afternoon”. And it’s also very common to use they when we don’t know how many people are involved. You might hear someone say, “Whoever was in here, he or she or they made a big mess” but it would sound very formal and stuffy. The same is true if you’re talking about one person whose identity you don’t know, or if it just isn’t relevant — maybe I’m telling one of my colleagues, “One of my students told me they were locked out of their email”. There’s only one student, but their identity isn’t relevant to the story, so I just refer to them as they . This so-called singular they has also been in English for centuries — you can see that it’s documented as far back as the fifteenth century, in contexts that are really clearly singular: each of them , a man , a person . The change that’s in progress right now is to use they for a single person whose identity we do know, either because they’re non-binary and use they/them pronouns or because we’re choosing not to specify their gender. When I poll students, that is, people in their 20s, I usually find that about half of them have this specific-singular- they in their mental grammar, and about half don’t. So it’s a change that’s unfolding right now.

As always, when language changes, some prescriptivists get quite uptight about it. The Chicago Manual of Style tells people “it is still considered ungrammatical”, and the AP Stylebook tells you it’s “acceptable in limited cases,” but they’d really prefer if you didn’t use it. And then there are the extremely crabby folks like one author who claimed it hurt her ears and burned her eyes, poor thing! But no matter how much the prescriptivists yell, specific-singular- they is getting used more and more widely. In 2015 the American Dialect Society voted it the Word of the Year; the Globe & Mail added it to its style guide in 2017; and it was the Merriam-Webster Dictionary’s Word of the Year in 2019. And linguists are paying attention to how this part of English grammar is changing. Bronwyn Bjorkman found that English-speakers with a conservative grammar didn’t use they in this way, but those with an “innovative” grammar did. Kirby Conrod found in their dissertation that older people were less likely to use it and younger people were more likely, and Lex Konnelly just published a paper tracking the three stages of grammatical change that are unfolding.

While your composition instructor might have been very prescriptive because their job was to help you become a better writer for academia, in linguistics, we focus on describing language, not determining what is correct. The following video contains a great description of the difference between prescriptivism and descriptivism.

I said earlier that this change is happening no matter how much it bothers the prescriptivists. No one can stop language from changing. But can we make it happen faster? After all, grammar is people — if everyone woke up tomorrow and started calling a dog a “blimlimlim,” the dictionaries couldn’t stop us! The way that language changes is for people to change how they use it.

Attributions

Content adapted from the following:

Essentials of Linguistics by Catherine Anderson licensed CC BY SA 4.0 .

Language and Communication by Taylor Livingston licensed CC BY NC .

More than Words: The Intersection of Language and Culture Copyright © 2022 by Dr. Karen Palmer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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• Department of Linguistics >

What is Linguistics?

Linguistics is the scientific study of language, and its focus is the systematic investigation of the properties of particular languages as well as the characteristics of language in general. It encompasses not only the study of sound, grammar and meaning, but also the history of language families, how languages are acquired by children and adults, and how language use is processed in the mind and how it is connected to race and gender. With close connections to the humanities, social sciences and the natural sciences, linguistics complements a diverse range of other disciplines such as anthropology, philosophy, psychology, sociology, biology, computer science, health sciences, education and literature. The subfield of Applied Linguistics emphasizes the use of linguistic concepts in the classroom to help students improve their ability to communicate in their native language or a second language.

Vowel chart of the Smith-Trager phonemic system, on display in Baldy Hall, created by  Henry Lee Smith and eorge L. Trager  in 1951.

Important subfields of linguistics include:

• Phonetics - the study of how speech sounds are produced and perceived
• Phonology - the study of sound patterns and changes 
• Morphology - the study of word structure
• Syntax - the study of sentence structure
• Semantics - the study of linguistic meaning
• Pragmatics - the study of how language is used in context
• Historical Linguistics - the study of language change
• Sociolinguistics - the study of the relation between language and society
• Computational Linguistics - the study of how computers can process human language
• Psycholinguistics - the study of how humans acquire and use language

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14 Linguistic Knowledge

• Published: January 2012
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It is a truism that speakers of a language “know” the language. Many in philosophy and linguistics make a propositional assumption about this knowledge: it is knowledge that. Sometimes the knowledge is taken to be the sort expressed by general statements such as syntactic theories (grammars) and truth theories, sometimes the sort expressed by singular statements about particular linguistic facts that express the speaker's intuitions. The contrasting view that a speaker's linguistic knowledge is mere knowledge how has been famously rejected by Chomsky. Some have urged that the knowledge is something in between how and that, some sort of tacit knowledge. This chapter finds the philosophical arguments in favor of (explicit) propositional assumptions thin and unpersuasive whereas those against are powerful. The empirical evidence from psychology is decisive against them, given that linguistic competence is a skill and hence procedural knowledge. As a first approximation, linguistic competence consists in mere knowledge how.

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Philosophy of Linguistics

Philosophy of linguistics is the philosophy of science as applied to linguistics. This differentiates it sharply from the philosophy of language, traditionally concerned with matters of meaning and reference.

As with the philosophy of other special sciences, there are general topics relating to matters like methodology and explanation (e.g., the status of statistical explanations in psychology and sociology, or the physics-chemistry relation in philosophy of chemistry), and more specific philosophical issues that come up in the special science at issue (simultaneity for philosophy of physics; individuation of species and ecosystems for the philosophy of biology). General topics of the first type in the philosophy of linguistics include:

• What the subject matter is,
• What the theoretical goals are,
• What form theories should take, and
• What counts as data.

Specific topics include issues in language learnability, language change, the competence-performance distinction, and the expressive power of linguistic theories.

There are also topics that fall on the borderline between philosophy of language and philosophy of linguistics: of “linguistic relativity” (see the supplement on the linguistic relativity hypothesis in the Summer 2015 archived version of the entry on relativism ), language vs. idiolect , speech acts (including the distinction between locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts), the language of thought, implicature, and the semantics of mental states (see the entries on analysis , semantic compositionality , mental representation , pragmatics , and defaults in semantics and pragmatics ). In these cases it is often the kind of answer given and not the inherent nature of the topic itself that determines the classification. Topics that we consider to be more in the philosophy of language than the philosophy of linguistics include intensional contexts, direct reference, and empty names (see the entries on propositional attitude reports , intensional logic , rigid designators , reference , and descriptions ).

This entry does not aim to provide a general introduction to linguistics for philosophers; readers seeking that should consult a suitable textbook such as Akmajian et al. (2010) or Napoli (1996). For a general history of Western linguistic thought, including recent theoretical linguistics, see Seuren (1998). Newmeyer (1986) is useful additional reading for post-1950 American linguistics. Tomalin (2006) traces the philosophical, scientific, and linguistic antecedents of Chomsky’s magnum opus (1955/1956; published 1975), and Scholz and Pullum (2007) provide a critical review. Articles that have focused on the philosophical implications of generative linguistics include Ludlow (2011) and Rey (2020). For recent articles on the philosophy of linguistics more generally, Itkonen (2013) discusses various aspects of the field from its early Greek beginnings, Pullum (2019) details debates that have engaged philosophers from 1945 to 2015, and Nefdt (2019a) discusses connections with contemporary issues in the philosophy of science.

1.1 The Externalists

1.2 the emergentists, 1.3 the essentialists, 1.4 comparing the three approaches, 2.1 competence and performance, 2.2 ‘i-language’ and ‘e-language’, 2.3 the faculty of language in narrow and broad senses, 2.4 linguistic ontology, 2.5 components of linguistic theories, 3.1 acrimony over linguistic intuitions, 3.2 grammaticality and acceptability judgments, 3.3 assessing degrees of acceptability, 3.4 informal and experimental elicitation, 3.5 what informal methods actually are, 3.6 corpus data, 4.1 linguistic nativism, 4.2 language learnability, 5.1 phylogenetic emergence, 5.2 historical evolution, other internet resources, related entries.

• Supplement on Whorfianism

1. Three Approaches to Linguistic Theorizing: Externalism, Emergentism, and Essentialism

The issues we discuss have been debated with vigor and sometimes venom. Some of the people involved have had famous exchanges in the linguistics journals, in the popular press, and in public forums. To understand the sharp disagreements between advocates of the approaches it may be useful to have a sketch of the dramatis personae before us, even if it is undeniably an oversimplification.

We see three tendencies or foci, divided by what they take to be the subject matter, the approach they advocate for studying it, and what they count as an explanation. We characterize them roughly in Table 1.

Table 1. Three Approaches to the Study of Language

A broad and varied range of distinct research projects can be pursued within any of these approaches; one advocate may be more motivated by some parts of the overall project than others are. So the tendencies should not be taken as sharply honed, well-developed research programs or theories. Rather, they provide background biases for the development of specific research programs—biases which sometimes develop into ideological stances or polemical programs or lead to the branching off of new specialisms with separate journals. In the judgment of Phillips (2010), “Dialog between adherents of different approaches is alarmingly rare.”

The names we have given these approaches are just mnemonic tags, not descriptions. The Externalists, for example, might well have been called ‘structural descriptivists’ instead, since they tend to be especially concerned to develop models that can be used to predict the structure of natural language expressions. The Externalists have long been referred to by Essentialists as ‘empiricists’ (and sometimes Externalists apply that term to themselves), though this is misleading (see Scholz and Pullum 2006: 60–63): the ‘empiricist’ tag comes with an accusation of denying the role of learning biases in language acquisition (see Matthews 1984, Laurence and Margolis 2001), but that is no part of the Externalists’ creed (see e.g. Elman 1993, Lappin and Shieber 2007).

Emergentists are also sometimes referred to by Essentialists as ‘empiricists’, but they either use the Emergentist label for themselves (Bates et al. 1998, O’Grady 2008, MacWhinney 2005) or call themselves ‘usage-based’ linguists (Barlow and Kemmer 2002, Tomasello 2003) or ‘construction grammarians’ (Goldberg 1995, Croft 2001). Newmeyer (1991), like Tomasello, refers to the Essentialists as ‘formalists’, because of their tendency to employ abstractions, and to use tools from mathematics and logic.

Despite these terminological inconsistencies, we can look at what typical members of each approach would say about their vision of linguistic science, and what they say about the alternatives. Many of the central differences between these approaches depend on what proponents consider to be the main project of linguistic theorizing, and what they count as a satisfying explanation.

Many researchers—perhaps most—mix elements from each of the three approaches. For example, if Emergentists are to explain the syntactic structure of expressions by appeal to facts about the nature of the use of symbols in human communication, then they will presuppose a great deal of Externalist work in describing linguistic patterns, and those Externalists who work on computational parsing systems frequently use (at least as a starting point) rule systems and ‘structural’ patterns worked out by Essentialists. Certainly, there are no logical impediments for a researcher with one tendency from simultaneously pursuing another; these approaches are only general centers of emphasis.

If one assumes, with the Externalists, that the main goal of a linguistic theory is to develop accurate models of the structural properties of the speech sounds, words, phrases, and other linguistic items, then the clearly privileged information will include corpora (written and oral)—bodies of attested and recorded language use (suitably idealized). The goal is to describe how this public record exhibits certain (perhaps non-phenomenal) patterns that are projectable.

American structural linguistics of the 1920s to 1950s championed the development of techniques for using corpora as a basis for developing structural descriptions of natural languages, although such work was really not practically possible until the wide-spread availability of cheap, powerful, and fast computers. André Martinet (1960: 1) notes that one of the basic assumptions of structuralist approaches to linguistics is that “nothing may be called ‘linguistic’ that is not manifest or manifested one way or another between the mouth of the speaker and the ears of the listener”. He is, however, quick to point out that “this assumption does not entail that linguists should restrict their field of research to the audible part of the communication process—speech can only be interpreted as such, and not as so much noise, because it stands for something else that is not speech.”

American structuralists—Leonard Bloomfield in particular—were attacked, sometimes legitimately and sometimes illegitimately, by certain factions in the Essentialist tradition. For example, it was perhaps justifiable to criticize Bloomfield for adopting a nominalist ontology as popularized by the logical empiricists. But he was later attacked by Essentialists for holding anti-mentalist views about linguistics, when it is arguable that his actual view was that the science of linguistics should not commit itself to any particular psychological theory. (He had earlier been an enthusiast for the mentalist and introspectionist psychology of Wilhelm Wundt; see Bloomfield 1914.)

Externalism continues to thrive within computational linguistics, where the American structuralist vison of studying language through automatic analysis of corpora has enjoyed a recrudescence, and very large, computationally searchable corpora are being used to test hypotheses about the structure of languages (see Sampson 2001, chapter 1, for discussion).

Emergentists aim to explain the capacity for language in terms of non-linguistic human capacities: thinking, communicating, and interacting. Edward Sapir expressed a characteristic Emergentist theme when he wrote:

Language is primarily a cultural or social product and must be understood as such… It is peculiarly important that linguists, who are often accused, and accused justly, of failure to look beyond the pretty patterns of their subject matter, should become aware of what their science may mean for the interpretation of human conduct in general. (Sapir 1929: 214)

The “pretty patterns” derided here are characteristic of structuralist analyses. Sociolinguistics, which is much closer in spirit to Sapir’s project, studies the influence of social and linguistic structure on each other. One particularly influential study, Labov (1966), examines the influence of social class on language variation. Other sociolinguists examine the relation between status within a group on linguistic innovation (Eckert 1989). This interest in variation within languages is characteristic of Emergentist approaches to the study of language.

Another kind of Emergentist, like Tomasello (2003), will stress the role of theory of mind and the capacity to use symbols to change conspecifics’ mental states as uniquely human preadaptations for language acquisition, use, and invention. MacWhinney (2005) aims to explain linguistic phenomena (such as phrase structure and constraints on long distance dependencies) in terms of the way conversation facilitates accurate information-tracking and perspective-switching.

Functionalist research programs generally fall within the broad tendency to approach the study of language as an Emergentist. According to one proponent:

The functionalist view of language [is] as a system of communicative social interaction… Syntax is not radically arbitrary, in this view, but rather is relatively motivated by semantic, pragmatic, and cognitive concerns. (Van Valin 1991, quoted in Newmeyer 1991: 4; emphasis in original)

And according to Russ Tomlin, a linguist who takes a functionalist approach:

Syntax is not autonomous from semantics or pragmatics…the rejection of autonomy derives from the observation that the use of particular grammatical forms is strongly linked, even deterministically linked, to the presence of particular semantic or pragmatic functions in discourse. (Tomlin 1990, quoted by Newmeyer (1991): 4)

The idea that linguistic form is autonomous, and more specifically that syntactic form (rather than, say, phonological form) is autonomous, is a characteristic theme of the Essentialists. And the claims of Van Valin and Tomlin to the effect that syntax is not independent of semantics and pragmatics might tempt some to think that Emergentism and Essentialism are logically incompatible. But this would be a mistake, since there are a large number of nonequivalent autonomy of form theses.

Even in the context of trying to explain what the autonomy thesis is, Newmeyer (1991: 3) talks about five formulations of the thesis, each of which can be found in some Essentialists’ writings, without (apparently) realizing that they are non-equivalent. One is the relatively strong claim that the central properties of linguistic form must not be defined with essential reference to “concepts outside the system”, which suggests that no primitives in linguistics could be defined in psychological or biological terms. Another takes autonomy of form to be a normative claim: that linguistic concepts ought not to be defined or characterized in terms of non-linguistic concepts. The third and fourth versions are ontological: one denies that central linguistic concepts should be ontologically reduced to non-linguistic ones, and the other denies that they can be. And in the fifth version the autonomy of syntax is taken to deny that syntactic patterning can be explained in terms of meaning or discourse functions.

For each of these versions of autonomy, there are Essentialists who agree with it. Probably the paradigmatic Essentialist agrees with them all. But Emergentists need not disagree with them all. Paradigmatic functionalists like Tomlin, Van Valin and MacWhinney could in principle hold that the explanation of syntactic form, for example, will ultimately be in terms of discourse functions and semantics, but still accept that syntactic categories cannot be reduced to non-linguistic ones.

If Leonard Bloomfield is the intellectual ancestor of Externalism, and Sapir the father of Emergentism, then Noam Chomsky is the intellectual ancestor of Essentialism. The researcher with predominantly Essentialist inclinations aims to identify the intrinsic properties of language that make it what it is. For a huge majority of practitioners of this approach—researchers in the tradition of generative grammar associated with Chomsky—this means postulating universals of human linguistic structure, unlearned but tacitly known, that permit and assist children to acquire human languages. This generative Essentialism has a preference for finding surprising characteristics of languages that cannot be inferred from the data of usage, and are not predictable from human cognition or the requirements of communication.

Rather than being impressed with language variation, as are Emergentists and many Externalists, the generative Essentialists are extremely impressed with the idea that very young children of almost any intelligence level, and just about any social upbringing, acquire language to the same high degree of mastery. From this it is inferred that there must be unlearned features shared by all languages that somehow assist in language acquisition.

A large number of contemporary Essentialists who follow Chomsky’s teaching on this matter claim that semantics and pragmatics are not a central part of the study of language. In Chomsky’s view, “it is possible that natural language has only syntax and pragmatics” (Chomsky 1995: 26); that is, only “internalist computations and performance systems that access them”; semantic theories are merely “part of an interface level” or “a form of syntax” (Chomsky 1992: 223).

Thus, while Bloomfield understood it to be a sensible practical decision to assign semantics to some field other than linguistics because of the underdeveloped state of semantic research, Chomsky appears to think that semantics as standardly understood is not part of the essence of the language faculty at all. (In broad outline, this exclusion of semantics from linguistics comports with Sapir’s view that form is linguistic but content is cultural.)

Although Chomsky is an Essentialist in his approach to the study of language, excluding semantics as a central part of linguistic theory clearly does not follow from linguistic Essentialism (Katz 1980 provides a detailed discussion of Chomsky’s views on semantics). Today there are many Essentialists who do hold that semantics is a component of a full linguistic theory.

For example, many linguists today are interested in the syntax-semantics interface—the relationship between the surface syntactic structure of sentences and their semantic interpretation. This area of interest is generally quite alien to philosophers who are primarily concerned with semantics only, and it falls outside of Chomsky’s syntactocentric purview as well. Linguists who work in the kind of semantics initiated by Montague (1974) certainly focus on the essential features of language (most of their findings appear to be of universal import rather than limited to the semantic rules of specific languages). Useful works to consult to get a sense of the modern style of investigation of the syntax-semantics interface would include Partee (1975), Jacobson (1996), Szabolcsi (1997), Chierchia (1998), Steedman (2000).

The discussion so far has been at a rather high level of abstraction. It may be useful to contrast the three tendencies by looking at how they each would analyze a particular linguistic phenomenon. We have selected the syntax of double-object clauses like Hand the guard your pass (also called ditransitive clauses), in which the verb is immediately followed by a sequence of two noun phrases, the first typically denoting a recipient and the second something transferred. For many such clauses there is an alternative way of expressing roughly the same thing: for Hand the guard your pass there is the alternative Hand your pass to the guard , in which the verb is followed by a single object noun phrase and the recipient is expressed after that by a preposition phrase with to . We will call these recipient-PP clauses.

1.4.1 A typical Essentialist analysis

Larson (1988) offers a generative Essentialist approach to the syntax of double-object clauses. In order to provide even a rough outline of his proposals, it will be very useful to be able to use tree diagrams of syntactic structure. A tree is a mathematical object consisting of a set of points called nodes between which certain relations hold. The nodes correspond to syntactic units; left-right order on the page corresponds to temporal order of utterance between them; and upward connecting lines represent the relation ‘is an immediate subpart of’. Nodes are labeled to show categories of phrases and words, such as noun phrase (NP); preposition phrase (PP); and verb phrase (VP). When the internal structure of some subpart of a tree is basically unimportant to the topic under discussion, it is customary to mask that part with an empty triangle. Consider a simple example: an active transitive clause like (Ai) and its passive equivalent (Aii).

A tree structure for (Ai) is shown in (T1).

In analyses of the sort Larson exemplifies, the structure of an expression is given by a derivation , which consists of a sequence of successively modified trees. Larson calls the earliest ones underlying structures. The last (and least abstract) in the derivation is the surface structure, which captures properties relevant to the way the expression is written and pronounced. The underlying structures are posited in order to better identify syntactic generalizations. They are related to surface structures by a series of operations called transformations (which generative Essentialists typically regard as mentally real operations of the human language faculty).

One of the fundamental operations that a transformation can effect is movement , which involves shifting a part of the syntactic structure of a tree to another location within it. For example, it is often claimed that passive clauses have very much the same kinds of underlying structures as the synonymous active clauses, and thus a passive clause like (Aii) would have an underlying structure much like (T1). A movement transformation would shift the guard toward the end of the clause (and add by ), and another would shift my pass into the position before the verb. In other words, passive clauses look much more like their active counterparts in underlying structure.

In a similar way, Larson proposes that a double-object clause like (B.ii) has the same underlying structure as (B.i).

Moreover, he proposes that the transformational operation of deriving the surface structure of (B.ii) from the underlying structure of (B.i) is essentially the same as the one that derives the surface structure of (A.ii) from the underlying structure of (A.i).

Larson adopts many assumptions from Chomsky (1981) and subsequent work. One is that all NPs have to be assigned Case in the course of a derivation. (Case is an abstract syntactic property, only indirectly related to the morphological case forms displayed by nominative, accusative, and genitive pronouns. Objective Case is assumed to be assigned to any NP in direct object position, e.g., my pass in (T1), and Nominative Case is assigned to an NP in the subject position of a tensed clause, e.g., the guard in (T1).)

He also makes two specific assumptions about the derivation of passive clauses. First, Case assignment to the position immediately after the verb is “suppressed”, which entails that the NP there will not get Case unless it moves to some other position. (The subject position is the obvious one, because there it will receive Nominative Case.) Second, there is an unusual assignment of semantic role to NPs: instead of the subject NP being identified as the agent of the action the clause describes, that role is assigned to an adjunct at the end of the VP (the by -phrase in (A.ii); an adjunct is a constituent with an optional modifying role in its clause rather than a grammatically obligatory one like subject or object).

Larson proposes that both of these points about passive clauses have analogs in the structure of double-object VPs. First, Case assignment to the position immediately after the verb is suppressed; and since Larson takes the preposition to to be the marker of Case, this means in effect that to disappears. This entails that the NP after to will not get Case unless it moves to some other position. Second, there is an unusual assignment of semantic role to NPs: instead of the direct object NP being identified as the entity affected by the action the clause describes, that role is assigned to an adjunct at the end of the VP.

Larson makes some innovative assumptions about VPs. First, he proposes that in the underlying structure of a double-object clause the direct object precedes the verb , the tree diagram being (T2).

This does not match the surface order of words ( showed my pass to the guard ), but it is not intended to: it is an underlying structure. A transformation will move the verb to the left of my pass to produce the surface order seen in (B.i).

Second, he assumes that there are two nodes labeled VP in a double-object clause, and two more labeled V′, though there is only one word of the verb (V) category. (Only the smaller VP and V′ are shown in the partial structure (T2).)

What is important here is that (T2) is the basis for the double-object surface structure as well. To produce that, the preposition to is erased and an additional NP position (for my pass ) is attached to the V′, thus:

The additional NP is assigned the affected-entity semantic role. The other NP ( the guard ) does not yet have Case; but Larson assumes that it moves into the NP position before the verb. The result is shown in (T4), where ‘ e ’ marks the empty string left where some words have been moved away:

Larson assumes that in this position the guard can receive Case. What remains is for the verb to move into a higher V position further to its left, to obtain the surface order:

The complete sequence of transformations is taken to give a deep theoretical explanation of many properties of (B.i) and (B.ii), including such things as what could be substituted for the two NPs, and the fact there is at least rough truth-conditional equivalence between the two clauses.

The reader with no previous experience of generative linguistics will have many questions about the foregoing sketch (e.g., whether it is really necessary to have the guard after showed in (T3), then the opposite order in (T4), and finally the same order again in (T5)). We cannot hope to answer such questions here; Larson’s paper is extremely rich in further assumptions, links to the previous literature, and additional classes of data that he aims to explain. But the foregoing should suffice to convey some of the flavor of the analysis.

The key point to note is that Essentialists seek underlying symmetries and parallels whose operation is not manifest in the data of language use. For Essentialists, there is positive explanatory virtue in hypothesizing abstract structures that are very far from being inferrable from performance; and the posited operations on those structures are justified in terms of elegance and formal parallelism with other analyses, not through observation of language use in communicative situations.

1.4.2 A typical Emergentist analysis

Many Emergentists are favorably disposed toward the kind of construction grammar expounded in Goldberg (1995). We will use her work as an exemplar of the Emergentist approach. The first thing to note is that Goldberg does not take double-object clauses like (B.ii) to be derived alternants of recipient-PP structures like (B.i), the way Larson does. So she is not looking for a regular syntactic operation that can relate their derivations; indeed, she does not posit derivations at all. She is interested in explaining correlations between syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of clauses; for example, she asks this question:

How are the semantics of independent constructions related such that the classes of verbs associated with one overlap with the classes of verbs associated with another? (Goldberg 1995: 89)

Thus she aims to explain why some verbs occur in both the double-object and recipient-PP kinds of expression and some do not.

The fundamental notion in Goldberg’s linguistic theory is that of a construction . A construction can be defined very roughly as a way of structurally composing words or phrases—a sort of template—for expressing a certain class of meanings. Like Emergentists in general, Goldberg regards linguistic theory as continuous with a certain part of general cognitive psychological theory; linguistics emerges from this more general theory, and linguistic matters are rarely fully separate from cognitive matters. So a construction for Goldberg has a mental reality: it corresponds to a generalized concept or scenario expressible in a language, annotated with a guide to the linguistic structure of the expression.

Many words will be trivial examples of constructions: a single concept paired with a way of pronouncing and some details about grammatical restrictions (category, inflectional class, etc.); but constructions can be much more abstract and internally complex. The double-object construction, which Goldberg calls the Ditransitive Construction, is a moderately abstract and complex one; she diagrams it thus (p. 50):

This expresses a set of constraints on how to use English to communicate the idea of a particular kind of scenario. The scenario involves a ternary relation CAUSE-RECEIVE holding between an agent ( agt ), a recipient ( rec ), and a patient ( pat ). PRED is a variable that is filled by the meaning of a particular verb when it is employed in this construction.

The solid vertical lines downward from agt and pat indicate that for any verb integrated into this construction it is required that its subject NP should express the agent participant, and the direct object (OBJ 2 ) should express the patient participant. The dashed vertical line downward from rec signals that the first object (OBJ) may express the recipient but it does not have to—the necessity of there being a recipient is a property of the construction itself, and not every verb demands that it be made explicit who the recipient is. But if there are two objects, the first is obligatorily associated with the recipient role: We sent the builder a carpenter can only express a claim about the sending of a carpenter over to the builder, never the sending of the builder over to where a carpenter is.

When a particular verb is used in this construction, it may have obligatory accompanying NPs denoting what Goldberg calls “profiled participants” so that the match between the participant roles ( agt , rec , pat ) is one-to-one, as with the verb hand . When this verb is used, the agent (‘hander’), recipient (‘handee’), and item transferred (‘handed’) must all be made explicit. Goldberg gives the following diagram of the “composite structure” that results when hand is used in the construction:

Because of this requirement of explicit presence, Hand him your pass is grammatical, but * Hand him is not, and neither is * Hand your pass . The verb send , on the other hand, illustrates the optional syntactic expression of the recipient role: we can say Send a text message , which is understood to involve some recipient but does not make the recipient explicit.

The R notation relates to the fact that particular verbs may express either an instance of causing someone to receive something, as with hand , or a means of causing someone to receive something, as with kick : what Joe kicked Bill the ball means is that Joe caused Bill to receive the ball by means of a kicking action.

Goldberg’s discussion covers many subtle ways in which the scenario communicated affects whether the use of a construction is grammatical and appropriate. For example, there is something odd about ? Joe kicked Bill the ball he was trying to kick to Sam : the Ditransitive Construction seems best suited to cases of volitional transfer (rather than transfer as an unexpected side effect of a blunder). However, an exception is provided by a class of cases in which the transfer is not of a physical object but is only metaphorical: That guy gives me the creeps does not imply any volitional transfer of a physical object.

Metaphorical cases are distinguished from physical transfers in other ways as well. Goldberg notes sentences like The music lent the event a festive air , where the music is subject of the verb lend despite the fact that music cannot literally lend anything to anyone.

Goldberg discusses many topics such as metaphorical extension, shading, metonymy, cutting, role merging, and also presents various general principles linking meanings and constructions. One of these principles, the No Synonymy Principle, says that no two syntactically distinct constructions can be both semantically and pragmatically synonymous. It might seem that if any two sentences are synonymous, pairs like this are:

Yet the two constructions cannot be fully synonymous, both semantically and pragmatically, if the No Synonymy Principle is correct. And to support the principle, Goldberg notes purported contrasts such as this:

There is a causation-as-transfer metaphor here, and it seems to be compatible with the double object construction but not with the recipient-PP. So (in Goldberg’s view) the two are not fully synonymous.

It is no part of our aim here to provide a full account of the content of Goldberg’s discussion of double-object clauses. But what we want to highlight is that the focus is not on finding abstract elements or operations of a purely syntactic nature that are candidates for being essential properties of language per se. The focus for Emergentists is nearly always on the ways in which meaning is conveyed, the scenarios that particular constructions are used to communicate, and the aspects of language that connect up with psychological topics like cognition, perception, and conceptualization.

1.4.3 A typical Externalist analysis

One kind of work that is representative of the Externalist tendency is nicely illustrated by Bresnan et al. (2007) and Bresnan and Ford (2010). Bresnan and her colleagues defend the use of corpora—bodies of attested written and spoken texts. One of their findings is that a number of types of expressions that linguists have often taken to be ungrammatical do in fact turn up in actual use. Essentialists and Emergentists alike have often, purely on the basis of intuition, asserted that sentences like John gave Mary a kiss are grammatical but sentences like John gave a kiss to Mary are no, as we see above with Goldberg’s (D)(ii). Bresnan and her colleagues find numerous occurrences of the latter sort on the World Wide Web, and conclude that they are not ungrammatical or even unacceptable, but merely dispreferred.

Bresnan and colleagues used a three-million-word collection of recorded and transcribed spontaneous telephone conversations known as the Switchboard corpus to study the double-object and recipient-PP constructions. They first annotated the utterances with indications of a number of factors that they thought might influence the choice between the double-object and recipient-PP constructions:

• Discourse accessibility of NPs: does a particular NP refer to something already mentioned, or to something new to the discourse?
• Relative lengths of NPs: what is the difference in number of words between the recipient NP and the transferred-item NP?
• Definiteness: are the recipient and transferred-item NPs definite like the bishop or indefinite like some members
• Animacy: do the recipient and transferred-item NPs denote animate beings or inanimate things?
• Pronominality: are the recipient and transferred-item NPs pronouns?
• Number: are the recipient and transferred-item NPs singular or plural?
• person: are the recipient and transferred-item NPs first-person or second-person pronouns, or third person?

They also coded the verb meanings by assigning them to half a dozen semantic categories:

• Abstract senses ( give it some thought );
• Transfer of possession ( give him an armband );
• Future transfer of possession ( I owe you a dollar );
• Prevention of possession ( They denied me my rights );
• Communication verb sense ( tell me your name ).

They then constructed a statistical model of the corpus: a mathematical formula expressing, for each combination of the factors listed above, the ratio of the probabilities of the double object and the recipient-PP. (To be precise, they used the natural logarithm of the ratio of p to 1 − p , where p is the probability of a double-object or recipient-PP in the corpus being of the double-object form.) They then used logistic regression to predict the probability of fit to the data.

To determine how well the model generalized to unseen data, they divided the data randomly 100 times into a training set and a testing set, fit the model parameters on each training set, and scored its predictions on the unseen testing set. The average percent of correct predictions on unseen data was 92%. All components of the model except number of the recipient NP made a statistically significant difference—almost all at the 0.001 level.

What this means is that knowing only the presence or absence of the sort of factors listed above they were reliably able to predict whether double-object or recipient-PP structures would be used in a given context, with a 92% score accuracy rate.

The implication is that the two kinds of structure are not interchangeable: they are reliably differentiated by the presence of other factors in the texts in which they occur.

They then took the model they had generated for the telephone speech data and applied it to a corpus of written material: the Wall Street Journal corpus (WSJ), a collection of 1987–9 newspaper copy, only roughly edited. The main relevant difference with written language is that the language producer has more opportunity to reflect thoughtfully on how they are going to phrase things. It was reasonable to think that a model based on speech data might not transfer well. But instead the model had 93.5% accuracy. The authors conclude is that “the model for spoken English transfers beautifully to written”. The main difference between the corpora was found to be a slightly higher probability of the recipient-PP structure in written English.

In a very thorough subsequent study, Bresnan and Ford (2010) show that the results also correlate with native speakers’ metalinguistic judgments of naturalness for sentence structures, and with lexical decision latencies (speed of deciding whether the words in a text were genuine English words or not), and with a sentence completion task (choosing the most natural of a list of possible completions of a partial sentence). The results of these experiments confirmed that their model predicted participants’ performance.

Among the things to note about this work is that it was all done on directly recorded performance data: transcripts of people speaking to each other spontaneously on the phone in the case of the Switchboard corpus, stories as written by newspaper journalists in the case of WSJ, measured responses of volunteer subjects in a laboratory in the case of the psycholinguistic experiments of Bresnan and Ford (2010). The focus is on identifying the factors in linguistic performance that permit accurate prediction of future performance, and the methods of investigation have a replicability and checkability that is familiar in the natural sciences.

However, we should make it clear that the work is not some kind of close-to-the-ground collecting and classifying of instances. The models that Bresnan and her colleagues develop are sophisticated mathematical abstractions, very far removed from the records of utterance tokens. They claim that these models “allow linguistic theory to solve more difficult problems than it has in the past, and to build convergent projects with psychology, computer science, and allied fields of cognitive science” (Bresnan et al. 2007: 69).

1.4.4 Conclusion

It is important to see that the contrast we have drawn here is not just between three pieces of work that chose to look at different aspects of the phenomena associated with double-object sentences. It is true that Larson focuses more on details of tree structure, Goldberg more on subtle differences in meaning, and Bresnan et al. on frequencies of occurrence. But that is not what we are pointing to. What we want to stress is that we are illustrating three different broad approaches to language that regard different facts as likely to be relevant, and make different assumptions about what needs to be accounted for, and what might count as an explanation.

Larson looks at contrasts between different kinds of clause with different meanings and see evidence of abstract operations affecting subtle details of tree structure, and parallelism between derivational operations formerly thought distinct.

Goldberg looks at the same facts and sees evidence not for anything to do with derivations but for the reality of specific constructions—roughly, packets of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic information tied together by constraints.

Bresnan and her colleagues see evidence that readily observable facts about speaker behavior and frequency of word sequences correlate closely with certain lexical, syntactic, and semantic properties of words.

Nothing precludes defenders of any of the three approaches from paying attention to any of the phenomena that the other approaches attend to. There is ample opportunity for linguists to mix aspects of the three approaches in particular projects. But in broad outline there are three different tendencies exhibited here, with stereotypical views and assumptions roughly as we laid them out in Table 1.

2. The Subject Matter of Linguistic Theories

The complex and multi-faceted character of linguistic phenomena means that the discipline of linguistics has a whole complex of distinguishable subject matters associated with different research questions. Among the possible topics for investigation are these:

• the capacity of humans to acquire, use, and invent languages;
• the abstract structural patterns (phonetic, morphological, syntactic, or semantic) found in a particular language under some idealization;
• systematic structural manifestations of the use of some particular language;
• the changes in a language or among languages across time;
• the psychological functioning of individuals who have successfully acquired particular languages;
• the psychological processes underlying speech or linguistically mediated thinking in humans;
• the evolutionary origin of (i), and/or (ii).

There is no reason for all of the discipline of linguistics to converge on a single subject matter, or to think that the entire field of linguistics cannot have a diverse range of subject matters. To give a few examples:

• The influential Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1916) distinguished between langue , a socially shared set of abstract conventions (compare with (ii)) and parole , the particular choices made by a speaker deploying a language (compare (iii)).
• The anthropological linguist Edward Sapir (1921, 1929) thought that human beings have a seemingly species-universal capacity to acquire and use languages (compare (i)), but his own interest was limited to the systematic structural features of particular languages (compare (ii)) and the psychological reality of linguistic units such as the phoneme (an aspect of (vi)), and the psychological effects of language and thought (an aspect of (v)).
• Bloomfield (1933) showed a strong interest in historical linguistic change (compare (iv)), distinguishing that sharply (much as Saussure did) from synchronic description of language structure ((ii) again) and language use (compare (iii)), arguing that the study of (iv) presupposed (vi).
• Bloomfield famously eschewed all dualistic mentalistic approaches to the study of language, but since he rejected them on materialist ontological grounds, his rejection of mentalism was not clearly a rejection of (vi) or (vii): his attempt to cast linguistics in terms of stimulus-response psychology indicates that he was sympathetic to the Weissian psychology of his time and accepted that linguistics might have psychological subject matter.
• Zellig Harris, on the other hand, showed little interest in the psychology of language, concentrating on mathematical techniques for tackling (ii).

Most saliently of all, Harris’s student Chomsky reacted strongly against indifference toward the mind, and insisted that the principal subject matter of linguistics was, and had to be, a narrow psychological version of (i), and an individual, non-social, and internalized conception of (ii).

In the course of advancing his view, Chomsky introduced a number of novel pairs of terms into the linguistics literature: competence vs. performance (Chomsky 1965); ‘I-language’ vs. ‘E-language’ (Chomsky 1986); the faculty of language in the narrow sense vs. the and faculty of language in the broad sense (the ‘FLN’ and ‘FLB’ of Hauser et al. 2002). Because Chomsky’s terminological innovations have been adopted so widely in linguistics, the focus of sections 2.1–2.3 will be to examine the use of these expressions as they were introduced into the linguistics literature and consider their relation to (i)–(vii).

Essentialists invariably distinguish between what Chomsky (1965) called competence and performance . Competence is what knowing a language confers: a tacit grasp of the structural properties of all the sentences of a language. Performance involves actual real-time use, and may diverge radically from the underlying competence, for at least two reasons: (a) an attempt to produce an utterance may be perturbed by non-linguistic factors like being distracted or interrupted, changing plans or losing attention, being drunk or having a brain injury; or (b) certain capacity limits of the mechanisms of perception or production may be overstepped.

Emergentists tend to feel that the competence/performance distinction sidelines language use too much. Bybee and McClelland put it this way:

One common view is that language has an essential and unique inner structure that conforms to a universal ideal, and what people say is a potentially imperfect reflection of this inner essence, muddied by performance factors. According to an opposing view…language use has a major impact on language structure. The experience that users have with language shapes cognitive representations, which are built up through the application of general principles of human cognition to linguistic input. The structure that appears to underlie language use reflects the operation of these principles as they shape how individual speakers and hearers represent form and meaning and adapt these forms and meanings as they speak. (Bybee and McClelland 2005: 382)

And Externalists are often concerned to describe and explain not only language structure, but also the workings of processing mechanisms and the etiology of performance errors.

However, every linguist accepts that some idealization away from the speech phenomena is necessary. Emergentists and Externalists are almost always happy to idealize away from sporadic speech errors. What they are not so keen to do is to idealize away from limitations on linguistic processing and the short-term memory on which it relies. Acceptance of a thoroughgoing competence/performance distinction thus tends to be a hallmark of Essentialist approaches, which take the nature of language to be entirely independent of other human cognitive processes (though of course capable of connecting to them).

The Essentialists’ practice of idealizing away from even psycholinguistically relevant factors like limits on memory and processing plays a significant role in various important debates within linguistics. Perhaps the most salient and famous is the issue of whether English is a finite-state language.

The claim that English is not accepted by any finite-state automaton can only be supported by showing that every grammar for English has center- embedding to an unbounded depth (see Levelt 2008: 20–23 for an exposition and proof of the relevant theorem, originally from Chomsky 1959). But even depth-3 center-embedding of clauses (a clause interrupting a clause that itself interrupts a clause) is in practice extraordinarily hard to process. Hardly anyone can readily understand even semantically plausible sentences like Vehicles that engineers who car companies trust build crash every day . And such sentences virtually never occur, even in writing. Karlsson (2007) undertakes an extensive examination of available textual material, and concludes that depth-3 center-embeddings are vanishingly rare, and no genuine depth-4 center-embedding has ever occurred at all in naturally composed text. He proposes that there is no reason to regard center-embedding as grammatical beyond depth 3 (and for spoken language, depth 2). Karlsson is proposing a grammar that stays close to what performance data can confirm; the standard Essentialist view is that we should project massively from what is observed, and say that depth- n center-embedding is fully grammatical for all n .

Chomsky (1986) introduced into the linguistics literature two technical notions of a language: ‘E-Language’ and ‘I-Language’. He deprecates the former as either undeserving of study or as a fictional entity, and promotes the latter as the only scientifically respectable object of study for a serious linguistics.

2.2.1 ‘E-language’

Chomsky’s notion ‘E-language’ is supposed to suggest by its initial ‘E’ both ‘extensional’ (concerned with which sentences happen to satisfy a definition of a language rather than with what the definition says) and ‘external’ (external to the mind, that is, non-mental). The dismissal of E-language as an object of study is aimed at critics of Essentialism—many but not all of those critics falling within our categories of Externalists and Emergentists.

Extensional . First, there is an attempt to impugn the extensional notion of a language that is found in two radically different strands of Externalist work. Some Externalist investigations are grounded in the details of attested utterances (as collected in corpora), external to human minds. Others, with mathematical or computational interests, sometimes idealize languages as extensionally definable objects (typically infinite sets of strings) with a certain structure, independently of whatever device might be employed to characterize them. A set of strings of words either is or is not regular (finite-state), either is or is not recursive (decidable), etc., independently of forms of grammar statement. Chomsky (1986) basically dismissed both corpus-based work and mathematical linguistics simply on the grounds that they employ an extensional conception of language that is, a conception that removes the object of study from having an essential connection with the mental.

External . Second, a distinct meaning based on ‘external’ was folded into the neologism ‘E-language’ to suggest criticism of any view that conceives of a natural language as a public, intersubjectively accessible system used by a community of people (often millions of them spread across different countries). Here, the objection is that languages as thus conceived have no clear criteria of individuation in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. On this conception, the subject matter of interest is a historico-geographical entity that changes as it is transmitted over generations, or over mountain ranges. Famously, for example, there is a gradual valley-to-valley change in the language spoken between southeastern France and northwestern Italy such that each valley’s speakers can understand the next. But the far northwesterners clearly speak French and the far southeasterners clearly speak Italian. It is the politically defined geographical border, not the intrinsic properties of the dialects, that would encourage viewing this continuum as two different languages.

Perhaps the most famous quotation by any linguist is standardly attributed to Max Weinreich (1945): ‘A shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot’ (‘A language is a dialect with an army and navy’; he actually credits the remark to an unnamed student). The implication is that E-languages are defined in terms of non-linguistic, non-essential properties. Essentialists object that a scientific linguistics cannot tolerate individuating French and Italian in a way that is subject to historical contingencies of wars and treaties (after all, the borders could have coincided with a different hill or valley had some battle had a different outcome).

Considerations of intelligibility fare no better. Mutual intelligibility between languages is not a transitive relation, and sometimes the intelligibility relation is not even symmetric (smaller, more isolated, or less prestigious groups often understand the dialects of larger, more central, or higher-prestige groups when the converse does not hold). So these sociological facts cannot individuate languages either.

Chomsky therefore concludes that languages cannot be defined or individuated extensionally or mind-externally, and hence the only scientifically interesting conception of a ‘language’ is the ‘I-language’ view (see for example Chomsky 1986: 25; 1992; 1995 and elsewhere). Chomsky says of E-languages that “all scientific approaches have simply abandoned these elements of what is called ‘language’ in common usage” (Chomsky 1988, 37); and “we can define E-language in one way or another or not at all, since the concept appears to play no role in the theory of language” (Chomsky 1986: 26; in saying that it appears to play no role in the theory of language, here he means that it plays no role in the theory he favours).

This conclusion may be bewildering to non-linguists as well as non-Essentialists. It is at odds with what a broad range of philosophers have tacitly assumed or explicitly claimed about language or languages: ‘[A language] is a practice in which people engage…it is constituted by rules which it is part of social custom to follow’ (Dummett 1986: 473–473); ‘Language is a set of rules existing at the level of common knowledge’ and these rules are ‘norms which govern intentional social behavior’ (Itkonen 1978: 122), and so on. Generally speaking, those philosophers influenced by Wittgenstein also take the view that a language is a social-historical entity. But the opposite view has become a part of the conceptual underpinning of linguistics for many Essentialists.

Failing to have precise individuation conditions is surely not a sufficient reason to deny that an entity can be studied scientifically. ‘Language’ as a count noun in the extensional and socio-historical sense is vague, but this need not be any greater obstacle to theorizing about them than is the vagueness of other terms for historical entities without clear individuation conditions, like ‘species’ and ‘individual organism’ in biology.

At least some Emergentist linguists, and perhaps some Externalists, would be content to say that languages are collections of social conventions, publicly shared, and some philosophers would agree (see Millikan 2003, for example, and Chomsky 2003 for a reply). Lewis (1969) explicitly defends the view that language can be understood in terms of public communications, functioning to solve coordination problems within a group (although he acknowledges that the coordination could be between different temporal stages of one individual, so language use by an isolated person is also intelligible; see the appendix “Lewis’s Theory of Languages as Conventions” in the entry on idiolects , for further discussion of Lewis). What Chomsky calls E-languages, then, would be perfectly amenable to linguistic or philosophical study. Santana (2016) makes a similar argument in terms of scientific idealization. He argues that since all sciences idealize their targets, Chomsky needs to do more to show why idealizations concerning E-languages are illicit (see also Stainton 2014).

2.2.2 ‘I-language’

Chomsky (1986) introduced the neologism ‘I-language’ in part to disambiguate the word ‘grammar’. In earlier generative Essentialist literature, ‘grammar’ was (deliberately) ambiguous between (i) the linguist’s generative theory and (ii) what a speaker knows when they know a language. ‘I-language’ can be regarded as a replacement for Bever’s term ‘psychogrammar’ (see also George 1989): it denotes a mental or psychological entity (not a grammarian’s description of a language as externally manifested).

I-language is first discussed under the sub-heading of ‘internalized language’ to denote linguistic knowledge. Later discussion in Chomsky 1986 and 1995 makes it clear that the ‘I’ of ‘I-language’ is supposed to suggest at least three English words: ‘individual’, ‘internal’, and ‘intensional’. And Chomsky emphasizes that the neologism also implies a kind of realism about speakers’ knowledge of language.

Individual . A language is claimed to be strictly a property of individual human beings—not groups. The contrast is between the idiolect of a single individual, and a dialect or language of a geographical, social, historical, or political group. I-languages are properties of the minds of individuals who know them.

Internal . As generative Essentialists see it, your I-language is a state of your mind/brain. Meaning is internal—indeed, on Chomsky’s conception, an I-language

is a strictly internalist, individualist approach to language, analogous in this respect to studies of the visual system. If the cognitive system of Jones’s language faculty is in state L, we will say that Jones has the I-language L. (Chomsky 1995: 13)

And he clarifies the sense in which an I-language is internal by appealing to an analogy with the way the study of vision is internal:

The same considerations apply to the study of visual perception along lines pioneered by David Marr, which has been much discussed in this connection. This work is mostly concerned with operations carried out by the retina; loosely put, the mapping of retinal images to the visual cortex. Marr’s famous three levels of analysis—computational, algorithmic, and implementation—have to do with ways of construing such mappings. Again, the theory applies to a brain in a vat exactly as it does to a person seeing an object in motion. (Chomsky 1995: 52)

Thus, while the speaker’s I-language may be involved in performing operations over representations of distal stimuli—representations of other speaker’s utterances—I-languages can and should be studied in isolation from their external environments.

Although Chomsky sometimes refers to this narrow individuation of I-languages as ‘individual’, he clearly claims that I-languages are individuated in isolation from both speech communities and other aspects of the broadly conceived natural environment:

Suppose Jones is a member of some ordinary community, and J is indistinguishable from him except that his total experience derives from some virtual reality design; or let J be Jones’s Twin in a Twin-Earth scenario. They have had indistinguishable experiences and will behave the same way (in so far as behavior is predictable at all); they have the same internal states. Suppose that J replaces Jones in the community, unknown to anyone except the observing scientist. Unaware of any change, everyone will act as before, treating J as Jones; J too will continue as before. The scientist seeking the best theory of all of this will construct a narrow individualist account of Jones, J, and others in the community. The account omits nothing… (Chomsky 1995: 53–54)

This passage can also be seen as suggesting a radically intensionalist conception of language.

Intensional . The way in which I-languages are ‘intensional’ for Chomsky needs a little explication. The concept of intension is familiar in logic and semantics, where ‘intensional’ contrasts with ‘extensional’. The extension of a predicate like blue is simply the set of all blue objects; the intension is the function that picks out in a given world the blue objects contained therein. In a similar way, the extension of a set can be distinguished from an intensional description of the set in terms of a function: the set of integer squares is {1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, …}, and the intension could be given in terms of the one-place function f such that f ( n ) = n × n . One difference between the two accounts of squaring is that the intensional one could be applied to a different domain (any domain on which the ‘×’ operation is defined: on the rationals rather than the integers, for example, the extension of the identically defined function is a different and larger set containing infinitely many fractions).

In an analogous way, a language can be identified with the set of all and only its expressions (regardless of what sort of object an expression is: a word sequence, a tree structure, a complete derivation, or whatever), which is the extensional view; but it can also be identified intensionally by means of a recipe or formal specification of some kind—what linguists call a grammar. Ludlow (2011) considers the first I (individual) to be the weakest link and thus the most expendable. He argues in its stead for a concept of a “Ψ-language” which allows for the possibility of the I-language relating to external objects either constitutively or otherwise.

In natural language semantics, an intensional context is one where substitution of co-extensional terms fails to preserve truth value ( Scott is Scott is true, and Scott is the author of Waverley is true, but the truth of George knows that Scott is Scott doesn’t guarantee the truth of George knows that Scott is the author of Waverly , so knows that establishes an intensional context).

Chomsky claims that the truth of an I-language attribution is not preserved by substituting terms that have the same extension. That is, even when two human beings do not differ at all on what expressions are grammatical, it may be false to say that they have the same I-language. Where H is a human being and L is a language (in the informal sense) and R is the relation of knowing (or having, or using) that holds between a human being and a language, Chomsky holds, in effect, that R establishes an intensional context in statements of the theory:

[F]or H to know L is for H to have a certain I-language. The statements of the grammar are statements of the theory of mind about the I-language, hence structures of the brain formulated at a certain level of abstraction from mechanisms. These structures are specific things in the world, with their properties… The I-language L may be the one used by a speaker but not the I-language L′ even if the two generate the same class of expressions (or other formal objects) … L′ may not even be a possible human I-language, one attainable by the language faculty. (Chomsky 1986: 23)

The idea is that two individuals can know (or have, or use) different I-languages that generate exactly the same strings of words, and even give them exactly the same structures. This situation forms the basis of Quine’s (1972) infamous critique of the psychological reality of generative grammars (see Johnson 2015 for a solution in terms of invariance of ‘behaviorally equivalent grammar formalisms, to use Quine’s terminology, see also Nefdt 2021 for a similar resolution in terms of structural realism in the philosophy of science).

The generative Essentialist conception of an I-language is antithetical to Emergentist research programs. If the fundamental explanandum of scientific linguistics is how actual linguistic communication takes place, one must start by looking at both internal (psychological) and external (public) practices and conventions in virtue of which it occurs, and consider the effect of historical and geographic contingencies on the relevant underlying processes. That would not rule out ‘I-language’ as part of the explanans; but some Emergentists seem to be fictionalists about I-languages, in an analogous sense to the way that Chomsky is a fictionalist about E-languages. Emergentists do not see a child as learning a generative grammar, but as learning how to use a symbolic system for propositional communication. On this view grammars are mere artifacts that are developed by linguists to codify aspects of the relevant systems, and positing an I-language amounts to projecting the linguist’s codification illegitimately onto human minds (see, for example, Tomasello 2003).

The I-language concept brushes aside certain phenomena of interest to the Externalists, who hold that the forms of actually attested expressions (sentences, phrases, syllables, and systems of such units) are of interest for linguistics. For example, computational linguistics (work on speech recognition, machine translation, and natural language interfaces to databases) must rely on a conception of language as public and extensional; so must any work on the utterances of young children, or the effects of word frequency on vowel reduction, or misunderstandings caused by road sign wordings. At the very least, it might be said on behalf of this strain of Externalism (along the lines of Soames 1984) that linguistics will need careful work on languages as intersubjectively accessible systems before hypotheses about the I-language that purportedly produces them can be investigated.

It is a highly biased claim that the E-language concept “appears to play no role in the theory of language” (Chomsky 1986: 26). Indeed, the terminological contrast seems to have been invented not to clarify a distinction between concepts but to nudge linguistic research in a particular direction.

In Hauser et al. (2002) (henceforth HCF) a further pair of contrasting terms is introduced. They draw a distinction quite separate from the competence/performance and ‘I-language’/‘E-language’ distinctions: the “language faculty in the narrow sense” (FLN) is distinguished from the “language faculty in the broad sense” (FLB). According to HCF, FLB “excludes other organism-internal systems that are necessary but not sufficient for language (e.g., memory, respiration, digestion, circulation, etc.)” but includes whatever is involved in language, and FLN is some limited part of FLB (p. 1571) This is all fairly vague, but it is clear that FLN and FLB are both internal rather than external, and individual rather than social.

The FLN/FLB distinction apparently aims to address the uniqueness of one component of the human capacity for language rather than (say) the content of human grammars. HCF say (p. 1573) that “Only FLN is uniquely human”; they “hypothesize that most, if not all, of FLB is based on mechanisms shared with nonhuman animals”; and they say:

[T]he computations underlying FLN may be quite limited. In fact, we propose in this hypothesis that FLN comprises only the core computational mechanisms of recursion as they appear in narrow syntax and the mappings to the interfaces. (ibid.)

The components of FLB that HCF hypothesize are not part of FLN are the “sensory-motor” and “conceptual-intentional” systems. The study of the conceptual-intentional system includes investigations of things like the theory of mind; referential vocal signals; whether imitation is goal directed; and the field of pragmatics. The study of the sensory motor system, by contrast, includes “vocal tract length and formant dispersion in birds and primates”; learning of songs by songbirds; analyses of vocal dialects in whales and spontaneous imitation of artificially created sounds in dolphins; “primate vocal production, including the role of mandibular oscillations”; and “[c]ross-modal perception and sign language in humans versus unimodal communication in animals”.

It is presented as an empirical hypothesis that a core property of the FLN is “recursion”:

All approaches agree that a core property of FLN is recursion, attributed to narrow syntax…FLN takes a finite set of elements and yields a potentially infinite array of discrete expressions. This capacity of FLN yields discrete infinity (a property that also characterizes the natural numbers). (HCF, p. 1571)

HCF leave open exactly what the FLN includes in addition to recursion. It is not ruled out that the FLN incorporates substantive universals as well as the formal property of “recursion”. But whatever “recursion” is in this context, it is apparently not domain-specific in the sense of earlier discussions by generative Essentialists, because it is not unique to human natural language or defined over specifically linguistic inputs and outputs: it is the basis for humans’ grasp of the formal and arguably non-natural language of arithmetic (counting, and the successor function), and perhaps also navigation and social relations. It might be more appropriate to say that HCF identify recursion as a cognitive universal, not a linguistic one. And in that case it is difficult to see how the so-called ‘language faculty’ deserves that name: it is more like a faculty for cognition and communication.

This abandonment of linguistic domain-specificity contrasts very sharply with the picture that was such a prominent characteristic of the earlier work on linguistic nativism, popularized in different ways by Fodor (1983), Barkow et al. (1992), and Pinker (1994). And yet the HCF discussion of FLN seems to incline to the view that human language capacities have a unique human (though not uniquely linguistic) essence.

The FLN/FLB distinction provides earlier generative Essentialism with an answer (at least in part) to the question of what the singularity of the human language faculty consists in, and it does so in a way that subsumes many of the empirical discoveries of paleoanthropology, primatology, and ethnography that have been part of highly influential in Emergentist approaches as well as neo-Darwinian Essentialist approaches. A neo-Darwinian Essentialist like Pinker will accept that the language faculty involves recursion, but also will also hold (with Emergentists) that human language capacities originated, via natural selection, for the purpose of linguistic communication.

Thus, over the years, those Essentialists who follow Chomsky closely have changed the term they use for their core subject matter from ‘linguistic competence’ to ‘I-language’ to ‘FLN’, and the concepts expressed by these terms are all slightly different. In particular, what they are counterposed to differs in each case.

The challenge for the generative Essentialist adopting the FLN/FLB distinction as characterized by HCF is to identify empirical data that can support the hypothesis that the FLN “yields discrete infinity”. That will mean answering the question: discrete infinity of what? HCF write that FLN “takes a finite set of elements and yields a potentially infinite array of discrete expressions” (p. 1571), which makes it clear that there must be a recursive procedure in the mathematical sense, perhaps putting atomic elements such as words together to make internally complex elements like sentences (“array” should probably be understood as a misnomer for ‘set’). But then they say, somewhat mystifyingly:

Each of these discrete expressions is then passed to the sensory-motor and conceptual-intentional systems, which process and elaborate this information in the use of language. Each expression is, in this sense, a pairing of sound and meaning. (HCF, p. 1571)

But the sensory-motor and conceptual-intentional systems are concrete parts of the organism: muscles and nerves and articulatory organs and perceptual channels and neuronal activity. How can each one of a “potentially infinite array” be “passed to” such concrete systems without it taking a potentially infinite amount of time? HCF may mean that for any one of the expressions that FLN defines as well-formed (by generating it) there is a possibility of its being used as the basis for a pairing of sound and meaning. This would be closer to the classical generative Essentialist view that the grammar generates an infinite set of structural descriptions; but it is not what HCF say.

At root, HCF is a polemical work intended to identify the view it promotes as valuable and all other approaches to linguistics as otiose.

In the varieties of modern linguistics that concern us here, the term “language” is used quite differently to refer to an internal component of the mind/brain (sometimes called internal language or I-language).… However, this biologically and individually grounded usage still leaves much open to interpretation (and misunderstanding). For example, a neuroscientist might ask: What components of the human nervous system are recruited in the use of language in its broadest sense? Because any aspect of cognition appears to be, at least in principle, accessible to language, the broadest answer to this question is, probably, “most of it.” Even aspects of emotion or cognition not readily verbalized may be influenced by linguistically based thought processes. Thus, this conception is too broad to be of much use. (HCF, p. 1570)

It is hard to see this as anything other than a claim that approaches to linguistics focusing on anything that could fall under the label ‘E-language’ are to be dismissed as useless.

Some Externalists and Emergentists actually reject the idea that the human capacity for language yields “a potentially infinite array of expressions”. It is often pointed out by empirically inclined computational linguists that in practice there will only ever be a finite number of sentences to be dealt with (though the people saying this may underestimate the sheer vastness of the finite set involved). And naturally, for those who do not believe there are generative grammars in speakers’ heads at all, it holds a fortiori that speakers do not have grammars in their heads generating infinite languages (see Nefdt 2019c for a scientific modeling perspective on the infinity postulate). Externalists and Emergentists tend to hold that the “discrete infinity” that HCF posits is more plausibly a property of the generative Essentialists’ model of linguistic competence, I-language, or FLN, than a part of the human mind/brain. This does not mean that non-Essentialists deny that actual language use is creative, or (of course) that they think there is a longest sentence of English. But they may reject the link between linguistic productivity or creativity and the mathematical notion of recursion (see Pullum and Scholz 2010).

HCF’s remarks about how FLN “yields” or “generates” a specific “array” assume that languages are clearly and sharply individuated by their generators. They appear to be committed to the view that there is a fact of the matter about exactly which generator is in a given speaker’s head. Emergentists tend not to individuate languages in this way, and may reject generative grammars entirely as inappropriately or unacceptably ‘formalist’. They are content with the notion that the common-sense concept of a language is vague, and it is not the job of linguistic theory to explain what a language is, any more than it is the job of physicists to explain what material is, or of biologists to explain what life is. Emergentists, in particular, are interested not so much in identifying generators, or individuating languages, but in exploring the component capacities that facilitate linguistic communication, and finding out how they interact.

Similarly, Externalists are interested in the linguistic structure of expressions, but have little use for the idea of a discrete infinity of them, a view that is not, and cannot be empirically supported, unless one thinks of simplicity and elegance of theory as empirical matters. They focus on the outward manifestations of language, not on a set of expressions regarded as a whole language—at least not in any way that would give a language a definite cardinality. Zellig Harris, an archetypal Externalist, is explicit that the reason for not regarding the set of utterances as finite concerns the elegance of the resulting grammar: “If we were to insist on a finite language, we would have to include in our grammar several highly arbitrary and numerical conditions” (Harris 1957: 208). Infinitude, on his view is an unimportant side consequence of setting up a sentence-generating grammar in an uncluttered and maximally elegant way, not a discovered property of languages (see Pullum and Scholz 2010 for further discussion).

Not all Essentialists agree that linguistics studies aspects of what is in the mind or aspects of what is human. There are some who do not see language as either mental or human, and certainly do not regard linguists as working on a problem within cognitive psychology or neurophysiology. The debate on the ontology of language has seen three major options emerging in the literature. Besides the mentalism of Chomskyan linguistics, Katz (1981), Katz and Postal (1991) and Postal (2003) proffered a platonistic alternative and finally nominalism was proposed by Devitt (2006).

However, the Katzian trichotomy is no longer a useful characterisation of the state-of-the-art in linguistic ontology. For one thing, Katzian-style linguistic Platonism has very few if any extant adherents. One reason for this situation is that linguistic platonists attempt to restage the debate on the foundations and metaphysics of natural language within the philosophy of mathematics (see Katz 1996). But even if this move was legitimate, it would only have opened up a range of possibilities including nominalism (Field 1980; Azzouni 2004), structuralism (Hellman 1989; Shapiro 2007; Nefdt 2016), and forms of mentalism in the guise of intuitionism. For instance, while Richard Montague is often attributed with the view that linguistics can be viewed as a branch of mathematics, it is unclear whether or not he endorsed a platonistic ontology. Devitt (2006: 26) describes the possibility of a ‘methodological platonism’ in the following manner:

It is often convenient to talk of objects posited by these theories as if they were types not tokens, as if they were Platonic objects, but this need be nothing more than a manner of speaking: when the chips are down the objects are part of the spatiotemporal physical world.

Devitt’s nominalism or ‘linguistic conception’ was not around at the time of the original Katzian tripartite analysis. He argues that linguistics is an empirical science which studies languages as they are spoken by linguistic communities and viewing sentences as ‘idealised tokens’. Devitt’s ‘linguistic view’ (as opposed to the ’psychological view’ or Chomskyan mentalism) claims that grammars map onto behavioural output of language production, of which speakers are generally ignorant.

Katz took nominalism to have been refuted by Chomsky in his critiques of American structuralists in the 1960s. But, in Katz’s opinion, Chomsky had failed to notice that conceptualism was infected with many of the same faults as nominalism, because it too localized language spatiotemporally (in contingently existing, finite, human brains). Since contemporary Minimalist theories share in the earlier ontological commitment, Katz’ argument would presumably extent to them. Through an argument by elimination, Katz concluded that only platonism remained, and must be the correct view to adopt. But this is a false trichotomy and besides predating Devitt’s more philosophically grounded nominalism, it also fails to take linguistic pluralism into account.

Recent adherents of pluralism are Stainton (2014) and Santana (2016). Santana (2016) argues in favour of a pluralistic ontology for natural language based on all of the major foundational approaches, including sociolinguistic ontology. His approach is thoroughly naturalistic in asking the ontological question through the lens of “what sort of roles the concept of language plays in linguistic theory and practice” (Santana, 2016: 501).

The first thing Santana does is to separate the discussion into two related questions, one scientific and the other metascientific or ‘descriptive’ and ‘normative’ in his terms. He claims that “[l]anguage, the scientific concept, is thus descriptively whatever it is that linguists take as their primary object of study, and normatively whatever it is they should be studying” (Santana, 2016: 501). Eventually he advocates a union of various ontologies based on the ineliminable status of each perspective (in that way the oppose of Katz’ eliminative strategy).

Stainton (2014) similarly proposes a pluralistic ontology but with a more intersectional approach. His additional argument relates to how all of the views are indeed compatible. This argument is a response to an immediate objection along the lines of Postal (2003, 2009) as to the incompatibility of the various ontologies associated with mentalism, Platonism, physicalism and public language views. Stainton begins the pluralist apology in this way.

There is an obvious rebuttal on behalf of pluralism, namely that “the linguistic” is a complex phenomenon with parts that belong to distinct ontological categories. This shouldn’t surprise, since even “the mathematical” is like this: Two wholly physical dogs plus two other wholly physical dogs yields four dogs; there certainly is the mental operation of multiplying 26 by 84, the mental state of thinking about the square root of 7, and so on. (2014: 5)

His main argument against incompatibility, and in favour of intersection, is that the former rests on an equivocation of the terms ‘mental’, ‘abstract’ and even ‘physical’. Once the equivocation is cleared up, it is argued, hybrid ontological objects are licensed. The argument goes that appreciating the nuanced physical and mental and what he calls ‘abstractish’ nature of natural language will dissolve worries about ontological inconsistency and open the door for intersection. Consider some other members of this category of objects.

Indeed, our world is replete with such hybrid objects: psychocultural kinds (e.g. dining room tables, footwear, bonfires, people, sport fishing [...]; intellectual artifacts (college diplomas, drivers’ licenses, the Canadian dollar [...]; and institutions (MIT’s Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, Disneyworld [...] (Stainton, 2014: 6).

Despite the decline in interest in the ontology of language itself, philosophers have recently embraced a subset of this debate in the philosophy of linguistic objects with a special focus on words. There is a recent debate in philosophy on the philosophy of what Rey (2006, 2020) calls ‘Standard Linguistic Entities’ (SLEs) or tokens of word, sentence, morpheme, and phonemes types. Rey then defines a position called ’physical tokenism’ or PT as the assumption that SLEs can be identified with physical (acoustic) spatio-temporal phenomena. He doesn’t think that SLEs share the same kind of existence as his trusty Honda. In fact he thinks that they are ‘intentional inexistents’ (borrowed from Brentano, see the SEP entry on ‘Brentano’s Theory of Judgement, see also the section entitled ‘Intentional Inexistence’ in the entry on Intentionality ) or purely intentional uses of the term ‘represents’ which denote fictions of a particular sort. Linguistic theory according to him is only committed to the intentional contents of things like nouns, verbs, verb phrases etc. where “an (intentional) content is whatever we understand x to be when we use the idiom ‘represent(ation of) x’ but there is no real x” (2006: 242).

There has been some theoretical work on the nature of entities like phrases and words in linguistics. For example, Ross (2010) argues that the concept of parts of speech is fuzzy. Similarly, Szabó (2015) rejects the idea that parts of speech should be identified by distributional analysis as is common in syntax. Instead he offers a semantic approach based on predicate logic where the aim is to model the major lexical categories directly in terms of open class constants. This, he claims, results in a reduction of the gap between grammar and logic. So, for instance, nouns become not types corresponding to distributionally defined syntactic objects but rather open lexical constants used for reference such that the semantic clause only needs to involve a universal quantifier and a variable specified in terms of reference. Verbs, on the other hand, are constants which purport to predicate (for more details, see Szabó 2015 and Nefdt 2020). For Haspelmath (2011) a central problem is the concept of wordhood. He identifies ten morphosyntactic criteria for words as the best possible candidates over seemingly inferior semantic or phonological options. He shows all of them to be wanting, with the result among other things being that “the notion of lexical integrity is not well supported and should not be appealed to in explaining grammatical phenomena” (Haspelmath, 2011: 33). The very notion of wordhood, although intuitive and central, is unclear upon further scrutiny. Yet, in linguistics there is continual hope for a resolution, that there is something more than essential inexistence at stake. Haspelmath thinks this is a vain hope, and attributes it to the influence of orthography on the thought of linguist researchers.

Philosophers have been traditionally interested in the metaphysics of SLEs with a special focus on the ontological status of words. Interestingly, this literature showcases variations on the foundational debates on the ontology of language. As Miller (2020) notes:

Words play various roles in our lives. Some insult, some inspire, and words are central to communication. The aim of an ontology of words is to determine what entities, if any, can play those roles and possess (or instantiate) these properties. (2)

However the positions advocated are somewhat more nuanced than the original Katzian trichotomy suggests. They usually start with the problem of word individuation expressed in the following manner:

Think of the following line: A rose is a rose is a rose. How many words are there in this line? If we were to count words themselves, not their instances, the answer is three: rose, is, and a. If we were to count the concrete instances we see on a piece of paper, the answer is eight. The line, however, can be taken as an abstract type; a sequence of shapes. (Irmak, 2019: 1140)

Further complications are introduced by reference to words like “color” and “colour”. Here the idea is that the phonological profile of a word is a guide to its identity. But this fails in other cases.

Now take the name MOHAMMED. Since Arabic does not notate vowels, the name has been transcribed in a wide variety of ways in English, and some of such transcriptions present important discrepancies: For example, “Mohammad” and “Mehmood.” Even if we know that they originated from the same source, the difference between the two forms is considerable, and intuitions about their being variants of the same name are less clear. What is the point up to which differences in spelling are consistent with word identity? (Gasparri, 2021: 594)

Word individuation goes beyond this initial characterisation and it is not always clear how the many accounts deal with the more complex questions directly in their metaphysical pursuits. For instance, issues not usually mentioned in the literature, but which seem equally important are related to whether pitch in ‘They poured pitch all over the parking lot’ and ‘The players swarmed the pitch after they won the game’ are different words. What about words within different syntactic categories, such as ‘watch’ (time-telling device) and ‘watch’ (observe)? Are “ain’t” and “isn’t” and “aren’t” different words? What about simple cases of inflectional morphology such as like ‘toy’ and ‘toys’?

According to Nefdt (2019b), the identity of a word is tied to its role in the sentence structure. In which case, “ain’t” and “isn’t” come out as the same word (at least in the singular use) but ‘watch’ (noun) and ‘watch’ (verb) do not. However, counterintuitively, his account might license the identity of words like ‘truck’ and ‘lorry’.

There are two strong but separate traditions which can both lay claim to being the ‘received position’. Within linguistics, the idea of a word as a LEXEME or mental dictionary entry is commonplace (with stipulations for senses, irregular forms, and selectional criteria). Most introductory textbooks assume something of this sort. In the philosophical literature, on the other hand, a mild or methodological version of platonism is often presupposed. This view has it that words can be separated into types and tokens, where the former lack specific spatiotemporal features and the latter instantiate these forms somehow.

The latter intuition seems to characterize most views on the ontology of words. Bromberger (1989) defines what he calls “the Platonic Relationship Principle” or the principle that allows us to ‘impute properties to types after observing and judging some of their tokens’ (Bromberger 1989, 62). While Bromberger (1989, 2011) represents the pinnacle of the classical philosophy of linguistics approach to these questions. In a more metaphysical mode, David Kaplan (1990, 2011) constructs a thoroughly physicalist proposal in which words are modelled in terms of a stages and continuants:

I propose a quite different model according to which utterances and inscriptions are stages of words, which are the continuants made up of these interpersonal stages along with some more mysterious intrapersonal stages. (Kaplan 1990: 98)

For him, what individuates words is the intention of the user (see Cappelen (1999) for an objection to intentional accounts tout court). Unfortunately, fascinating as Kaplan’s proposal is, it does not attempt to reflect on linguistic theory directly. In fact, one major criticism of his view, courtesy of Hawthorne and Lepore (2011), is that it fails to account for uninstantiated word-types whose existence is guaranteed by derivational morphology, whether or not they’ve been tokened or baptized in the real world. Other notable accounts are Wetzel’s (2009) Platonism (see the SEP entry on abstract objects ) and Szabó’s (1999) representational/nominalist view.

The philosophy of words has recently seen a resurgence in interest among philosophers, especially on the ontological issues. Miller (2021), for example, attempts to apply a bundle theory to the task of word individuation and identification. Irmak (2019) suggests that words are abstract artifacts (similarly to Katz and Wetzel) but insists that they are more akin to musical scores or works of fiction which have temporal components (“temporal abstracta” as he calls it). Mallory (2020) advocates the position that words are not really objects in the ordinary sense. However, he opts for an action-theoretic approach in which tokens provide instructions for the performance of action-types where our normal understanding of ‘word’ is to be identified with those types. His view is overtly naturalistic and focuses on the concept of words which is drawn from contemporary linguistic theory. Similarly, Nefdt (2019b) proffers a mathematical structuralist interpretation of SLEs in which the definition of words is continuous with the ontology of phrases and sentences. Here he follows Jackendoff (2018) who uses model-theoretic (Pullum 2013) or constraint-based grammar formalisms to argue for a continuum between words and linguistic rules. In other words, these latter two authors reject the idea that words are somehow sui generis entities in need of discontinuous explanation. Gasparri (2020) suggests pluralism is a more solid foundation for the ontology of words. He evaluates both “bundlistic” views such as Miller’s and causal-historical accounts such as Irmak’s before offering an alternative “view that there is a plurality of epistemically virtuous ways of thinking about the nature of words” (608).

These are of course complex issues and they offer a lens through which to appreciate the erstwhile debate on the ontology of language but with a contemporary and more focused flavor. Not all of the authors who work on the philosophy of words consider the role of linguistic theory to be central. Hence their work might be related but it does not quite qualify as the philosophy of linguistics, where this is viewed as a subfield of the philosophy of science. By contrast, we have focused on the authors who directly engage with linguistic theory in their accounts of the ontology of SLEs. There is also no clear mapping between the various ontological accounts mentioned here and the characterizations of linguistic theorizing in terms of Externalism, Emergentism and Essentialism. No particular metaphysical view unifies any of our three groupings. For example, not all Externalists incline toward nominalism; numerous Emergentists as well as most Essentialists take linguistics to be about mental phenomena; and our Essentialists include Katz’s platonism alongside the Chomskyan ‘I-language’ advocates and pluralists embrace aspects of all of the above.

Linguists’ conception of the components of the study of language contrast with philosophers’ conceptions (even those of philosophers of language) in at least three ways. First, linguists are often intensely interested in small details of linguistic form in their own right. Second, linguists take an interest in whole topic areas like the internal structure of phrases, the physics of pronunciation, morphological features such as conjugation classes, lexical information about particular words, and so on—topics in which there is typically little philosophical payoff. And third, linguists are concerned with relations between the different subsystems of languages: the exact way the syntax meshes with the semantics, the relationship between phonological and syntactic facts, and so on.

With regard to form, philosophers broadly follow Morris (1938), a foundational work in semiotics, and to some extent Peirce (see SEP entry: Peirce, semiotics), in thinking of the theory of language as having three main components:

• syntax , which treats of the form of signs;
• semantics , which deals with the relations of signs to their denotations; and
• pragmatics , which concerns the contextualized use of interpreted signs.

Linguists, by contrast, following both Sapir (1921) and Bloomfield (1933), treat the syntactic component in a more detailed way than Morris or Peirce, and distinguish between at least three kinds of linguistic form: the form of speech sounds (phonology), the form of words (morphology), and the form of sentences. (If syntax is about the form of expressions in general, then each of these would be an element of Morris’s syntax.)

Emergentists in general deny that there is a distinction between semantics and pragmatics—a position that is familiar enough in philosophy: Quine (1987: 211), for instance, holds that “the separation between semantics and pragmatics is a pernicious error.” And generally speaking, those theorists who, like the later Wittgenstein, focus on meaning as use will deny that one can separate semantics from pragmatics. Emergentists such as Paul Hopper & Sandra Thompson agree:

[W]hat is called semantics and what is called pragmatics are an integrated whole. (Hopper and Thompson 1993: 372)

Some Essentialists—notably Chomsky—also deny that semantics can be separated from pragmatics, but unlike the Emergentists (who think that semantics-pragmatics is a starting point for linguistic theory), Chomsky (as we noted briefly in section 1.3) denies that semantics and pragmatics can have any role in linguistics:

It seems that other cognitive systems—in particular, our system of beliefs concerning things in the world and their behavior—play an essential part in our judgments of meaning and reference, in an extremely intricate manner, and it is not at all clear that much will remain if we try to separate the purely linguistic components of what in informal usage or even in technical discussion we call ‘the meaning of [a] linguistic expression.’ (Chomsky 1979; 142)

Regarding the theoretical account of the relation between words or phrases and what speakers take them to refer to, Chomsky says, “I think such theories should be regarded as a variety of syntax” (Chomsky 1992: 223).

Not every Essentialist agrees with Chomsky on this point. Many believe that every theory should incorporate a linguistic component that yields meanings, in much the same way that many philosophers of language believe there to be such a separate component. Often, although not always, this component amounts to a truth-theoretic account of the values of syntactically-characterized sentences. This typically involves a translation of the natural language sentence into some representation that is “intermediate” between natural language and a truth-theory—perhaps an augmented version of first-order logic, or perhaps a higher-order intensional language. The Essentialists who study semantics in such ways usually agree with Chomsky in seeing little role for pragmatics within linguistic theory. But their separation of semantics from pragmatics allows them to accord semantics a legitimacy within linguistics itself, and not just in psychology or sociology.

Such Essentialists, as well as the Emergentists, differ in important ways from classical philosophical logic in their attitudes towards “the syntactic-semantic interface”, however. Philosophers of language and logic who are not also heavily influenced by linguistics tend to move directly—perhaps by means of a “semantic intuition” or perhaps from an intuitive understanding of the truth conditions involved—from a natural language sentence to its “deep, logical” representation. For example, they may move directly from (EX1) to (LF1):

And from there perhaps to a model-theoretic description of its truth-conditions. A linguist, on the other hand, would aim to describe how (EX1) and (LF1) are related. From the point of view of a semantically-inclined Essentialist, the question is: how should the syntactic component of linguistic theory be written so that the semantic value (or, “logical form representation”) can be assigned? From some Emergentist points of view, the question is: how can the semantic properties and communicative function of an expression explain its syntactic properties?

Matters are perhaps less clear with the Externalists—at least with those who identify semantic value with distribution in terms of neighboring words (there is a tradition stemming from the structuralists of equating synonymy with the possibility of substitution in all contexts without affecting acceptability).

Matters are in general quite a bit more subtle and tricky than (EX1) might suggest. Philosophers have taken the natural language sentence (EX2) to have two logical forms, (LF2a) and (LF2b):

But for the linguist interested in the syntax-semantics interface, there needs to be some explanation of how (LF2a) and (LF2b) are associated with (EX2). It could be a way in which rules can derive (LF2a) and (LF2b) from the syntactic representation of (EX2), as some semantically-inclined Essentialists would propose, or a way to explain the syntactic properties of (EX2) from facts about the meanings represented by (LF2a) and (LF2b), as some Emergentists might want. But that they should be connected up in some way is something that linguists would typically count as non-negotiable.

3. Linguistic Methodology and Data

The strengths and limitations of different data gathering methods began to play an important role in linguistics in the early to mid-20th century. Voegelin and Harris (1951: 323) discuss several methods that had been used to distinguish Amerindian languages and dialects:

• Informal elicitation : asking an informant for a metalinguistic judgment on an expression. [E.g., “Is this sentence grammatical?” “Do these two sentences mean the same thing?”]
• Corpus collection : gathering a body of naturally occurring utterances.
• Controlled experimentation : testing informants in some way that directly gauges their linguistic capacities.

They note that the anthropological linguists Boas and Sapir (who we take to be proto-Emergentists) used the ‘ask the informant’ method of informal elicitation, addressing questions “to the informant’s perception rather than to the data directly” (1951: 324). Bloomfield (the proto-Externalist), on the other hand, worked on Amerindian languages mostly by collecting corpora, with occasional use of monolingual elicitation.

The preferred method of Essentialists today is informal elicitation, including elicitation from oneself. Although the techniques for gathering data about speakers and their language use have changed dramatically over the past 60 or more years, the general strategies have not: data is still gathered by elicitation of metalinguistic judgments, collection of corpus material, or direct psychological testing of speakers’ reactions and behaviors. Different linguists will have different preferences among these techniques, but it is important to understand that data could be gathered in any of the three ways by advocates of any tendency. Essentialists, Emergentists, and Externalists differ as much on how data is interpreted and used as on their views of how it should be gathered.

A wide range of methodological issues about data collection have been raised in linguistics. Since gathering data by direct objective experimental testing of informants is a familiar practice throughout the social, psychological, medical, and biological sciences, we will say little about it here, focusing instead on these five issues about data:

• Disputes over the use of linguistic intuitions as linguistic data;
• Differences between grammaticality and acceptability judgments;
• Differences between scales for measuring acceptability judgments;
• Debates about the reliability of informal judgment elicitation methods; and
• Issues concerning the relevance and reliability of corpus evidence.

The debate in linguistics over the use of linguistic intuitions (elicited metalinguistic judgments) as data, and how that data should be collected has resulted in enduring, rancorous, often ideologically tinged disputes over the past 45 years. The disputes are remarkable, if only for their fairly consistent venomous tone.

At their most extreme, many Emergentists and some Externalists cast the debate in terms of whether linguistic intuitions should ever count as evidence for linguistic theorizing. And many Essentialists cast it in terms of whether anything but linguistic intuitions are ever really needed to support linguistic theorizing.

The debate focuses on the Essentialists’ notion of a mental grammar, since linguistic intuitions are generally understood to be a consequence of tacit knowledge of language. Emergentists who deny that speakers have innate domain-specific grammars (competence, I-languages, or FLN) have raised a diverse range of objections to the use of reports of intuitions as linguistic data – though Devitt (2006) offers an account of linguistic intuitions that does not base them on inferred tacit knowledge of competence grammars. The following passages are representative Emergentist critiques of ‘intuitions’ (elicited judgments):

Generative linguists typically respond to calls for evidence for the reality of their theoretical constructs by claiming that no evidence is needed over and above the theory’s ability to account for patterns of grammaticality judgments elicited from native speakers. This response is unsatisfactory on two accounts. First, such judgments are inherently unreliable because of their unavoidable meta-cognitive overtones… Second, the outcome of a judgment (or the analysis of an elicited utterance) is invariably brought to bear on some distinction between variants of the current generative theory, never on its foundational assumptions. (Edelman and Christiansen 2003: 60) The data that are actually used toward this end in Generative Grammar analyses are almost always disembodied sentences that analysts have made up ad hoc, … rather than utterances produced by real people in real discourse situations… In diametric opposition to these methodological assumptions and choices, cognitive-functional linguists take as their object of study all aspects of natural language understanding and use… They (especially the more functionally oriented analysts) take as an important part of their data not disembodied sentences derived from introspection, but rather utterances or other longer sequences from naturally occurring discourse. (Tomasello 1998: xiii) [T]he journals are full of papers containing highly questionable data, as readers can verify simply by perusing the examples in nearly any syntax article about a familiar language. (Wasow and Arnold 2005: 1484)

It is a common Emergentist objection that linguistic intuitions (taken to be reports of elicited judgments of the acceptability of expressions not their grammaticality) are bad data points because not only are they not usage data, i.e., they are metalinguistic, but also because they are linguists’ judgments about invented example sentences. On neither count would they be clear and direct evidence of language use and human communicative capacities—the subject matter of linguistics on the Emergentist view. A further objection is to their use by theorists to the exclusion of all other kinds of evidence. For example,

[Formal linguistics] continues to insist that its method for gathering data is not only appropriate, but is superior to others. Occasionally a syntactician will acknowledge that no one type of data is privileged, but the actual behavior of people in the field belies this concession. Take a look at any recent article on formal syntax and see whether anything other than the theorist’s judgments constitute the data on which the arguments are based. (Ferreira 2005: 372)

“Formal” is Emergentist shorthand for referring to generative linguistics. And it should be noted that the practice by Essentialists of collapsing various kinds of acceptability judgments under the single label ‘intuitions’ masks important differences. In principle there might be significant differences between the judgments of (i) linguists with a stake in what the evidence shows; (ii) linguists with experience in syntactic theory but no stake in the issue at hand; (iii) non-linguist native speakers who have been tutored in how to provide the kinds of judgments the linguist is interested in; and (iv) linguistically naïve native speakers.

Many Emergentists object to all four kinds of reports of intuitions on the grounds that they are not direct evidence language use. For example, a common objection is based on the view that

[T]he primary object of study is the language people actually produce and understand. Language in use is the best evidence we have for determining the nature and specific organization of linguistic systems. Thus, an ideal usage-based analysis is one that emerges from observation of such bodies of usage data, called corpora.… Because the linguistic system is so closely tied to usage, it follows that theories of language should be grounded in an observation of data from actual uses of language. (Barlow and Kemmer 2002, Introduction)

But collections of linguists’ reports of their own judgments are also criticized by Emergentists as “arm-chair data collection,” or “data collection by introspection”. All parties tend to call this kind of data collection “informal”—though they all rely on either formally or informally elicited judgments to some degree.

On the other side, Essentialists tend to deny that usage data is adequate evidence by itself:

More than five decades of research in generative linguistics have shown that the standard generative methodology of hypothesis formation and empirical verification via judgment elicitation can lead to a veritable goldmine of linguistic discovery and explanation. In many cases it has yielded good, replicable results, ones that could not as easily have been obtained by using other data-gathering methods, such as corpus-based research…[C]onsider the fact that parasitic gap constructions…are exceedingly rare in corpora…. [T]hese distributional phenomena would have been entirely impossible to distill via any non-introspective, non-elicitation based data gathering method. Corpus data simply cannot yield such a detailed picture of what is licit and, more crucially, what is not licit for a particular construction in a particular linguistic environment. (den Dikken et al. 2007: 336)

And Essentialists often seem to deny that they are guilty of what the Emergentist claims they are guilty of. For example, Chomsky appears to be claiming that acceptability judgments are performance data, i.e. evidence of use:

Acceptability is a concept that belongs to the study of performance, whereas grammaticalness belongs to the study of competence… Like acceptability, grammaticalness is, no doubt, a matter of degree…but the scales of grammaticalness and acceptability do not coincide. Grammaticalness is only one of many factors that interact to determine acceptability. (Chomsky 1965: 11)

Chomsky means to deny that acceptability judgments are direct evidence of linguistic competence . But it does not follow from this that elicited acceptability judgments are direct evidence of language use.

And as for the charge of “arm-chair” collection methods, some Essentialists claim to have shown that such methods are as good as more controlled experimental methods. For example, Sprouse and Almeida report:

[W]e empirically assess this claim by formally testing all 469 (unique, US-English) data points from a popular syntax textbook (Adger 2003) using 440 naïve participants, two judgment tasks (magnitude estimation and yes–no), and three different types of statistical analyses (standard frequentist tests, linear mixed effects models, and Bayes factor analysis). The results suggest that the maximum discrepancy between traditional methods and formal experimental methods is 2%. This suggests that … the minimum replication rate of these 469 data points is 98%. (Spouse and Almeida 2012, p. 609, abstract)

This can be read as defending either Essentialists’ consulting of their own intuitions simpliciter, or their self-consultation of intuitions on uncontroversial textbook cases only. The former is much more controversial than the later.

One might also wonder whether an error rate of 2% really is appropriate for the primary data presented in an elementary textbook. If a geography textbook misidentified 2–3% of the rivers of the continental United States, or gave incorrect locations for them, or incorrectly reported their lengths, it would forfeit our trust. Analogous claims could be made about any elementary textbook in other fields: an elementary English literature textbook that misidentified the authors of 2% of the books discussed, or their years of publication, etc.

Finally, both parties of the debate engage in ad hominem attacks on their opponents. Here is one example of a classic ad hominem or tu quoque attack on Emergentists in defense of constructed examples by Essentialists:

[The charge made concerning “armchair data collection”] implies that there is something intrinsic to generative grammar that invites partisans of that framework to construct syntactic theories on the evidence of a single person’s judgments. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The great bulk of publications in cognitive and functional linguistics follow the same practice. Of course, rhetorically many of the latter decry the use of linguists’ own intuitions as data. For example, in … an important collections [sic] of papers in cognitive-functional linguistics, … only two contributors to the volume … present segments of natural discourse, neither filling even a page of text. All of the other contributors employ examples constructed by the linguists themselves. It is quite difficult to find any work in cognitive linguistics (and functional linguists are only slightly better) that uses multiple informants. It seems almost disingenuous … to fault generativists for what (for better or worse) is standard practice in the field, regardless of theoretical allegiance. (Newmeyer 2007: 395)

Clearly, the mere fact that some Emergentists may in practice have made use of invented examples in testing their theories does not tell against any cogent general objections they may have offered to such practice. What is needed is a decision on the methodological point, not just a cry of “You did it too!”.

Given the intolerance of each other’s views, and the crosstalk present in these debates, it is tempting to think that Emergentism and Essentialism are fundamentally incompatible on what counts as linguistic data, since their differences are based on their different views of the subject matter of linguistics, and what the phenomena and goals of linguistic theorizing are. There is no doubt that the opposing sides think that their respective views are incompatible. But this conclusion may well be too hasty. In what follows, we try to point to a way that the dispute could be ameliorated, if not adjudicated.

Essentialists who accept the competence/performance distinction of Chomsky (1965) traditionally emphasize elicited acceptability judgment data (although they need not reject data that is gathered using other methods). But as Cowart notes:

In this view, which exploits the distinction between competence and performance, the act of expressing a judgment of acceptability is a kind of linguistic performance. The grammar that a [generative Essentialist] linguistic theory posits in the head of a speaker does not exercise exhaustive control of judgments… While forming a sentence judgment, a speaker draws on a variety of cognitive resources… The resulting [acceptability] judgments could pattern quite differently than the grammaticality values we might like them to reflect. (Cowart 1997: 7)

The grammaticality of an expression, on the standard generative Essentialist view, is the status conferred on it by the competence state of an ideal speaker. But competence can never be exercised or used without potentially interfering performance factors like memory being exercised as well. This means that judgments about grammaticality are never really directly available to the linguist through informant judgments: they have to be inferred from judgments of acceptability (along with any other relevant evidence). Nevertheless, Essentialists do take acceptability judgments to provide fairly good evidence concerning the character of linguistic competence. In fact the use of informally gathered acceptability judgment data is a hallmark of post-1965 Essentialist practice.

It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that only Essentialists make use of such judgments. Many contemporary Externalists and Emergentists who reject the competence/performance distinction still use informally gathered acceptability judgments in linguistic theorizing, though perhaps not in theory testing. Emergentists tend to interpret experimentally gathered judgment data as performance data reflecting the interactions between learned features of communication systems and general learning mechanisms as deployed in communication. And Externalists use judgment data for corpus cleaning (see below).

It should be noted that sociolinguists and anthropological linguists (and we regard them as tending toward Emergentist views) often informally elicit informant judgments not only about acceptability but also about social and regional style and variation, and meaning. They may ask informants questions like, “Who would typically say that?”, or “What does X mean in context XYZ?”, or “If you can say WXY, can you say WXZ?” (see Labov 1996: 77).

A generative grammar gives a finite specification of a set of expressions. A psychogrammar, to the extent that it corresponds to a generative grammar, might be thought to equip a speaker to know (at least in principle) absolutely whether a string is in the language. However, elicited metalinguistic judgments are uncontroversially a matter of degree. A question arises concerning the scale on which these degrees of acceptability should be measured.

Linguists have implicitly worked with a scale of roughly half a dozen levels and types of acceptability, annotating them with prefixed symbols. The most familiar is the asterisk, originally used simply to mark strings of words as ungrammatical, i.e., as not belonging to the language at all. Other prefixed marks have gradually become current:

But other annotations have been used to indicate a gradation in the extent to which some sentences are unacceptable. No scientifically validated or explicitly agreed meanings have been associated with these marks, but a tradition has slowly grown up of assigning prefixes such as those in Table 2 to signify degrees of unacceptability:

Table 2: Prefixes used to mark levels of acceptability

Such markings are often used in a way that suggests an ordinal scale , i.e. a partial ordering that is silent on anything other than equivalence in acceptability or ranking in degree of unacceptability.

By contrast, Bard et al. (1996: 39) point out, it is possible to use interval scales , which additionally measure distance between ordinal positions. Interval scales of acceptability would measure relative distances between strings—how much more or less acceptable one is than another. Magnitude estimation is a method developed in psychophysics to measure subjects’ judgments of physical stimuli on an interval scale. Bard et al. (1996) adapted these methods to linguistic acceptability judgments, arguing that interval scales of measurement are required for testing theoretical claims that rely on subtle judgments of comparative acceptability. An ordinal scale of acceptability can represent one expression as being less acceptable than another, but cannot support quantitative questions about how much less. Many generative Essentialist theorists had been suggesting that violation of different universal principles led to different degrees of unacceptability. According to Bard et al. (34–35), because there may be “disproportion between the fineness of judgments people can make and the symbol set available for recording them” it will not suffice to use some fixed scale such as this one:

? < ?? < ?* < * < **

indicating absolute degrees of unacceptability. Degrees of relative unacceptability must be measured. This is done by asking the informant how much less acceptable one string is than another.

Magnitude estimation can be used with both informal and experimental methods of data collection. And data that is measured using interval scales can be subjected to much more mathematically sophisticated tests and analyses than data measured solely by an ordinal scale, provided that quantitative data are available.

It should be noted that the value of applying magnitude estimation to the judgment of acceptability has been directly challenged in two recent papers. Weskott and Fanselow (2011) and Sprouse (2011) both present critiques of Bard et al. (1996). Weskott and Fanselow compared magnitude estimation data to standard judgments on binary and 7-point scales, and claim that magnitude estimation does not yield more information than other judgment tasks, and moreover can produce spurious variance. And Sprouse, on the basis of recent formalizations of magnitude estimation in the psychophysics literature, presents experimental evidence that participants cannot make ratio judgments of acceptability (for example, a judgment that one sentence is precisely half as acceptable as another), which suggests that the magnitude estimation task probably provides the same interval-level data as other judgment tasks.

Part of the dispute over the reliability of informal methods of acceptability judgment elicitation and collection is between different groups of Essentialists. Experimentally trained psycholinguists advocate using and adapting various experimental methods that have been developed in the cognitive and behavioral sciences to collect acceptability judgments. And while the debate is often cast in terms of which method is absolutely better, a more appropriate question might be when one method is to be preferred to the others. Those inclined toward less experimentally controlled methods point out that there are many clear and uncontroversial acceptability judgments that do not need to be shown to be reliable. Advocates of experimental methods point out that many purportedly clear, uncontroversial judgments have turned out to be unreliable, and led to false empirical generalizations about languages. Both seem to be right in different cases.

Chomsky has frequently stated his view that the experimental data-gathering techniques developed in the behavioral sciences are neither used nor needed in linguistic theorizing. For example:

The gathering of data is informal; there has been little use of experimental approaches (outside of phonetics) or of complex techniques of data collection and data analysis of a sort that can easily be devised, and that are widely used in the behavioral sciences. The arguments in favor of this informal procedure seem to me quite compelling; basically, they turn on the realization that for the theoretical problems that seem most critical today, it is not at all difficult to obtain a mass of crucial data without use of such techniques. Consequently, linguistic work, at what I believe to be its best, lacks many of the features of the behavioral sciences. (Chomsky 1969: 56)

He also expressed the opinion that using experimental behavioral data collection methods in linguistics “would be a waste of time and energy” (1969: 81).

Although many Emergentists—the intellectual heirs of Sapir—would accept ‘ask-the-informant’ data, we might expect them to tend to accept experimental data-gathering methods that have been developed in the social sciences. There is little doubt that strict followers of the methodology preferred by Bloomfield in his later career would disapprove of ‘ask the informant’ methods. Charles Hockett remarked:

A language, as a set of habits, is a fragile thing, subject to minor modification in the slightest breeze of circumstance; this, indeed, is its great source of power. But this is also why the transformationalists (like the rest of us!), using themselves as informants, have such a hard time deciding whether certain candidates for sentencehood are really ‘in their dialect’ or not; and it is why Bloomfield, in his field work, would never elicit paradigms, for fear he would induce his informant to say something under the artificial conditions of talking with an outsider that he would never have said in his own everyday surroundings. (Hockett 1968: 89–90, fn. 31)

We might expect Bloomfield, having abandoned his earlier Wundtian psychological leanings, to be suspicious of any method that could be cast as introspective. And we might expect many contemporary Externalists to prefer more experimentally controlled methods too. (We shall see below that to some extent they do.)

Derwing (1973) was one early critic of Chomsky’s view (1969) that experimentally controlled data collection is useless; but it was nearly 25 years before systematic research into possible confounding variables in acceptability judgment data started being conducted on any significant scale. In the same year that Bard et al. (1996) appeared, Carson Schütze (1996) published a monograph with the following goal statement:

I aim to demonstrate…that grammaticality judgments and other sorts of linguistic intuition, while indispensable forms of data for linguistic theory, require new ways of being collected and used. A great deal is known about the instability and unreliability of judgments, but rather than propose that they be abandoned, I endeavor to explain the source of their shiftiness and how it can be minimized. (1996: 1)

In a similar vein, Wayne Cowart stated that he wanted to “describe a family of practical methods that yield demonstrably reliable data on patterns of sentence acceptability.” He observes that the stability and reliability of acceptability judgment collection is

complicated by the fact that there seems to be no consensus on how to gather judgments apart from a widespread tolerance for informal methods in which the linguist consults her own intuitions and those of the first handy informant (what we might call the “Hey, Sally” method). (Cowart 1997: 2)

Schütze also expresses the importance of using experimental methods developed in cognitive science:

[M]y claim is that none of the variables that confound metalinguistic data are peculiar to judgments about language. Rather they can be shown to operate in some other domain in a similar way. (This is quite similar to Valian’s (1982) claim that the data of more traditional psychological experiments have all the same problems that judgment data have.) (Schütze 1996: 14)

The above can be read as sympathetic to the Essentialist preference for elicited judgments.

Among the findings of Schütze and Cowart about informal judgment collection methods are these:

• There is really no agreement in linguistics on what counts as an informal method (though note that Sprouse and Almeida 2012 are much more comfortable with the informal method of consulting one's own intuitions of grammaticality).
• The collection of acceptability judgment data is just as vulnerable to the influence of extraneous variables as are other kinds of psychological data.
• Judgment samples can be biased in informal judgment collection.
• Experimenter bias is often not controlled for in informal judgment collection.
• Judgment materials are often not carefully prepared to present a relevant, well-ordered, contrasting set of minimal pairs.
• The instability of one-off speaker judgments can be controlled for by gathering judgments from a given speaker across time.

Although Schütze (1996) and Cowart (1997) are both critical of traditional Essentialist informal elicitation methods, their primary concern is to show how the claims of Essentialist linguistics can be made less vulnerable to legitimate complaints about informal data collection methods. Broadly speaking, they are friends of Essentialism. Critics of Essentialism have raised similar concerns in less friendly terms, but it is important to note that the debate over the reliability of informal methods is a debate within Essentialist linguistics as well.

Informal methods of acceptability judgment data have often been described as excessively casual. Ferreira described the informal method this way:

An example sentence that is predicted to be ungrammatical is contrasted with some other sentence that is supposed to be similar in all relevant ways; these two sentences constitute a “minimal pair”. The author of the article provides the judgment that the sentence hypothesized to be bad is in fact ungrammatical, as indicated by the star annotating the example. But there are serious problems with this methodology. The example that is tested could have idiosyncratic properties due to its unique lexical content. Occasionally a second or third minimal pair is provided, but no attempt is made to consider the range of relevant extraneous variables that must be accounted for and held constant to make sure there isn’t some correlated property that is responsible for the contrast in judgments. Even worse, the “subject” who provides the data is not a naïve informant, but is in fact the theorist himself or herself, and that person has a stake in whether the sentence is judged grammatical or ungrammatical. That is, the person’s theory would be falsified if the prediction were wrong, and this is a potential source of bias. (Ferreira 2005: 372)

(It would be appropriate to read ‘grammatical’ and ‘grammaticality’ in Ferreira’s text as meaning ‘acceptable’ and ‘acceptability’.)

This critical characterization exemplifies the kind of method that Schütze and Cowart aimed to improve on. More recently, Gibson and Fedorenko describe the traditional informal method this way:

As has often been noted in recent years (Cowart, 1997; Edelman & Christiansen, 2003; Featherston, 2007; Ferreira, 2005; Gibson & Fedorenko, 2010a; Marantz, 2005; Myers, 2009; Schütze, 1996; Wasow & Arnold, 2005), the results obtained using this method are not necessarily generalisable because of (a) the small number of experimental participants (typically one); (b) the small number of experimental stimuli (typically one); (c) cognitive biases on the part of the researcher and participants; and (d) the effect of the preceding context (e.g., other constructions the researcher may have been recently considering). (Gibson and Fedorenko, 2013)

While some Essentialists have acknowledged these problems with the reliability of informal methods, others have, in effect, denied their relevance. For example, Colin Phillips (2010) argues that “there is little evidence for the frequent claim that sloppy data-collection practices have harmed the development of linguistic theories”. He admits that not all is epistemologically well in syntactic theory, but adds, “I just don’t think that the problems will be solved by a few rating surveys.” He concludes:

I do not think that we should be fooled into thinking that informal judgment gathering is the root of the problem or that more formalized judgment collection will solve the problems. (Phillips 2010: 61)

To suggest that informal methods are as fully reliable as controlled experimental ones would be a serious charge, implying that researchers like Bard, Robinson, Sorace, Cowart, Schütze, Gibson, Fedorenko, and others have been wasting their time. But Phillips actually seems to be making a different claim. He suggests first that informally gathered data has not actually harmed linguistics, and second that linguists are in danger of being “fooled” by critics who invent stories about unreliable data having harmed linguistics.

The harm that Phillips claims has not occurred relates to the charge that “mainstream linguistics” (he means the current generative Essentialist framework called ‘Minimalism’) is “irrelevant” to broader interests in the cognitive sciences, and has lost “the initiative in language study”. Of course, Phillips is right in a sense: one cannot insure that experimental judgment collection methods will address every way in which Minimalist theorizing is irrelevant to particular endeavors (language description, language teaching, natural language processing, or broader questions in cognitive psychological research). But this claim does not bear on what Schütze (1996) and Cowart (1997) show about the unreliability of informal methods.

Phillips does not fully accept the view of Chomsky (1969) that experimental methods are useless for data gathering (he says, “I do not mean to argue that comprehensive data gathering studies of acceptability are worthless”). But his defense of informal methods of data collection rests on whether these methods have damaged Essentialist theory testing:

The critiques I have read present no evidence of the supposed damage that informal intuitions have caused, and among those who do provide specific examples it is rare to provide clear evidence of the supposed damage that informal intuitions have caused… What I am specifically questioning is whether informal (and occasionally careless) gathering of acceptability judgments has actually held back progress in linguistics, and whether more careful gathering of acceptability judgments will provide the key to future progress.

Either Phillips is fronting the surprising opinion that generative theorizing has never been led down the wrong track by demonstrably unreliable data, or he is changing the subject. And unless clear criteria are established for what counts as “damage” and “holding back,” Phillips is not offering any testable hypothesis about data collection methodology. For example, Phillips discounts the observation of Schütze (1996) that conflicting judgments of relative unacceptability of violations of two linguistic universals held back the development of Government and Binding (GB), on the grounds that two sets of conflicting judgments and their analyses “are now largely forgotten, supplanted by theories that have little to say about such examples.” But the fact that the proposed universals are discarded principles of UG is irrelevant to the effect that unreliable data once had on the (now largely abandoned) GB theory. A methodological concern cannot be dismissed on the basis of a move to a new theory that abandons the old theory but not its methods!

More recently, Bresnan (2007) claims that many theoretical claims have arguably been supported by unreliable informally gathered syntactic acceptability judgments. She observes:

Erroneous generalizations based on linguistic intuitions about isolated, constructed examples occur throughout all parts of the grammar. They often seriously underestimate the space of grammatical possibility (Taylor 1994, 1996, Bresnan & Nikitina 2003, Fellbaum 2005, Lødrup 2006, among others), reflect relative frequency instead of categorical grammaticality (Labov 1996, Lapata 1999, Manning 2003), overlook complex constraint interactions (Green 1971, Gries 2003) and processing effects (Arnon et al. 2005a, b), and fail to address the problems of investigator bias (Labov 1975, Naro 1980, Chambers 2003: 34) and social intervention (Labov 1996, Milroy 2001, Cornips & Poletto 2005). (Bresnan 2007: 301)

Her discussion supports the view that various highly abstract theoretical hypotheses have been defended through the use of generalizations based on unreliable data.

The debate over the harm that the acceptance of informally collected data has had on theory testing is somewhat difficult to understand for Essentialist, Externalist, and Emergentist researchers who have been trained in the methods of the cognitive and behavioral sciences. Why try to support one’s theories of universal grammar, or of the grammars of particular languages, by using questionably reliable data?

One clue might be found in Culicover and Jackendoff (2010), who write:

[T]heoreticians’ subjective judgments are essential in formulating linguistic theories. It would cripple linguistic investigation if it were required that all judgments of ambiguity and grammaticality be subject to statistically rigorous experiments on naive subjects. (Culicover and Jackendoff 2010)

The worry is that use of experimental methods is so resource consumptive that it would impede the formulation of linguistic theories. But this changes the subject from the importance of using reliable data as evidence in theory testing to using only experimentally gathered data in theory formulation . We are not aware of anyone who has ever suggested that at the stage of hypothesis development or theory formulation the linguist should eschew intuition. Certainly Bard et al., Schütze, Cowart, Gibson & Fedorenko, and Ferreira say no such thing. The relevant issue concerns what data should be used to test theories, which is a very different matter.

We noted earlier that there are clear and uncontroversial acceptability judgments, and that these judgments are reliable data. The difficulty lies in distinguishing the clear, uncontroversial, and reliable data from what only appears to be clear, uncontroversial, and reliable to a research community at a time. William Labov, the founder of modern quantitative sociolinguistics, who takes an Emergentist approach, proposed a set of working methodological principles in Labov (1975) for adjudicating when experimental methods should be employed.

The Consensus Principle : If there is no reason to think otherwise, assume that the judgments of any native speaker are characteristic of all speakers. The Experimenter Principle : If there is any disagreement on introspective judgments, the judgments of those who are familiar with the theoretical issues may not be counted as evidence. The Clear Case Principle : Disputed judgments should be shown to include at least one consistent pattern in the speech community or be abandoned. If differing judgments are said to represent different dialects, enough investigation of each dialect should be carried out to show that each judgment is a clear case in that dialect. (Labov 1975, quoted in Schütze 1996: 200)

If we accept that ‘introspective judgments’ are acceptability judgments, then Labov’s rules of thumb are guides for when to deploy experimental methods, although they no doubt need refinement. However, it seems vastly more likely that careful development of such methodological rules of thumb can serve to improve the reliability of linguistic data and adjudicate these methodological disputes that seem largely independent of any particular approach to linguistics.

In linguistics, the goal of collecting corpus data is to identify and organize a representative sample of a written and/or spoken variety from which characteristics of the entire variety or genre can be induced. Concordances of word usage in linguistic context have long been used to aid in the translation and interpretation of literary and sacred texts of particular authors (e.g. Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas) and of particular texts (e.g. the Torah, the rest of the Old Testament, the Gospels, the Epistles). Formal textual criticism, the identification of antecedently existing oral traditions that were later redacted into Biblical texts, and author identification (e.g. figuring out which of the Epistles were written by Paul and which were probably not) began to develop in the late 19th century.

The development of computational methods for collecting, analyzing, and searching corpora have seen rapid development as computer memory has become less expensive and search and analysis programs have become faster. The first computer searchable corpus of American English, the Brown Corpus, developed in the 1960s, contained just over one million word tokens. The British National Corpus (BNC) is a balanced corpus containing over 100 million words—a hundredfold size increase—of which 90% is written prose published from 1991 to 1994 and 10% is spoken English. Between 2005 and 2007, billion-word corpora were released for British English (ukWaC), German (deWaC), and Italian (itWaC)—a thousand times bigger than the Brown corpus. And the entire World Wide Web probably holds about a thousand times as much as that—around a trillion words. Thus corpus linguistics has gone from megabytes of data (∼ 10 3 kB) to terabytes of data (∼ 10 9 kB) in fifty years.

Just as a central issue concerning acceptability judgment data concerns its reliability as evidence for empirical generalizations about languages or idiolects, a central question concerning the collection of corpus data concerns whether or not it is representative of the language variety it purports to represent. Some linguists make the criterion of representativeness definitional: they call a collection of samples of language use a corpus only if it has been carefully balanced between different genres (conversation, informal writing, journalism, literature, etc.), regional varieties, or whatever.

But corpora are of many different kinds. Some are just very large compilations of text from individual sources such as newspapers of record or the World Wide Web—compilations large enough for the diversity in the source to act as a surrogate for representativeness. For example, a billion words of a newspaper, despite coming from a single source, will include not only journalists’ news reports and prepared editorials but also quoted speech, political rhetoric, humor columns, light features, theater and film reviews, readers’ letters, fiction items, and so on, and will thus provide examples of a much wider variety of styles than one might have thought.

Corpora are cleaned up through automatic or manual removal of such elements as numerical tables, typographical slips, spelling mistakes, markup tags, accidental repetitions ( the the ), larger-scale duplications (e.g., copies on mirror sites), boilerplate text ( Opinions expressed in this email do not necessarily reflect …), and so on (see Baroni et al. 2009 for a fuller discussion of corpus cleaning).

The entire web itself can be used as a corpus to some degree, despite its constantly changing content, its multilinguality, its many tables and images, and its total lack of quality control; but when it is, the outputs of searches are nearly always cleaned by disregarding unwanted results. For example, Google searches are blind to punctuation, capitalization, and sentence boundaries, so search results for to be will unfortunately include irrelevant cases, such as where a sentence like Do you want to? happens to be followed by a sentence like Be careful .

Corpora can be annotated in ways that permit certain kinds of analysis and grammar testing. One basic kind of annotation is part-of-speech tagging, in which each word is labeled with its syntactic category. Another is lemmatization, which classifies the different morphologically inflected forms of a word as belonging together ( goes , gone , going , and went belong with go , for example). A more thoroughgoing kind of annotation involves adding markup that encodes trees representing their structure; an example like That road leads to the freeway might be marked up as a Clause within which the first two words make up a Noun Phrase (NP), the last four constitute a Verb Phrase (VP), and so on, giving a structural analysis represented thus:

Such a diagram is isomorphic to (and the one shown was computed directly from) a labeled bracketing like this:

(.Clause. (.NP. (.D. ‘that’ ) (.N. ‘road’ ) ) (.VP. (.V. ‘leads’ ) (.PP. (.P. ‘to’ ) (.NP. (.D. ‘the’ ) (.N. ‘freeway’ ) ) ) ) )

and this in turn could be represented in a markup language like XML as:

A corpus annotated with tree structure is known as a treebank . Clearly, such a corpus is not a raw record of attested utterances at all; it is a combination of a collection of attested utterances together with a systematic attempt at analysing their structure. Whether the analysis is added manually or semi-automatically, it is ultimately based on native speaker judgments. (Treebanks are often developed by graduate student annotators tutored by computational linguists; naturally, consistency between annotators is an issue that needs regular attention. See Artstein and Poesio, 2008, for discussion of the methodological issues.).

One of the purposes of a treebank is to permit the further investigation of a language and the checking of further linguistic hypotheses by searching a large database of previously established analyses. It can also be used to test grammars, natural language processing systems, or machine learning programs.

Going beyond syntactic parse trees, it is possible to annotate corpora further, with information of a semantic and pragmatic nature. There is ongoing computational linguistic research aimed at discovering whether, for example, semantic annotation that is semi-automatically added might suffice for recognition of whether a product review is positive or negative (what computational linguists call ‘sentiment analysis’).

Notice, then, that using corpus data does not mean abandoning or escaping from the use of intuitions about acceptability or grammatical structure: the results of a corpus search are generally filtered through the judgments of an investigator who decides which pieces of corpus data are to be taken at face value and which are just bad hits or irrelevant noise.

Difficult methodological issues arise in connection with the collection, annotation, and use of corpus data. For example, there is the issue of extremely rare expression tokens. Are they accurately recorded tokens of expression types that turn up only in consequence of sporadic errors and should be dismissed as irrelevant unless the topic of interest is performance errors? Are they due to errors in the compilation of the corpus itself, corresponding to neither accepted usage nor sporadic speech errors? Or are they perfectly grammatical but (for some extraneous reason) very rare, at least in that particular corpus?

Many questions arise about what kind of corpus is best suited to the research questions under consideration, as well as what kind of annotation is most appropriate. For example, as Ferreira (2005: 375) points out, some large corpora, insofar as they have not been cleaned of speech errors, provide relevant data for studying the distribution of speech disfluencies. In addition, probabilistic information about the relation between a particular verb and its arguments has been used to show that “verb-argument preferences [are] an essential part of the process of sentence interpretation” (Roland and Jurafsky 2002: 325): acceptability judgments on individual expressions do not provide information about the distribution of a verb and its arguments in various kinds of speech and writing. Studying conveyed meaning in context and identification of speech acts will require a kind of data that decontextualized acceptability judgments do not provide but semantically annotated corpora might.

Many Essentialists have been skeptical of the reliability of uncleaned, unanalyzed corpus data as evidence to support linguistic theorizing, because it is assumed to be replete with strings that any native speaker would judge unacceptable. And many Emergentists and Externalists, as well as some Essentialists, have charged that informally gathered acceptability judgments can be highly unreliable too. Both worries are apposite; but the former does not hold for adequately cleaned and analyzed corpora, and the latter does not hold for judgment data that has been gathered using appropriately controlled methods. In certain contested cases of acceptability, it will of course be important to use both corpus and controlled elicitation methods to cross-compare.

Notice that we have not in any way suggested that our three broad approaches to linguistics should differ in the kinds of data they use for theory testing: Essentialists are not limited to informal elicitation; nor are Emergentists and Externalists denied access to it. In matters of methodology, at least, there is in principle an open market—even if many linguists seem to think otherwise.

4. Language Acquisition

The three approaches to linguistic theorizing have at least something to say about how languages are acquired, or could in principle be acquired. Language acquisition has had a much higher profile since generative Essentialist work of the 1970s and 1980s gave it a central place on the agenda for linguistic theory.

Research into language acquisition falls squarely within the psychology of language; see the entry on language and innateness . In this section we do not aim to deal in detail with any of the voluminous literature on psychological or computational experiments bearing on language acquisition, or with any of the empirical study of language acquisition by developmental linguists, or the ‘stimulus poverty’ argument for the existence of innate knowledge about linguistic structure (Pullum and Scholz 2002). Our goals are merely to define the issue of linguistic nativism , set it in context, and draw morals for our three approaches from some of the mathematical work on inductive language learning.

The reader with prior acquaintance with the literature of linguistics will notice that we have not made reference to any partitioning of linguists into two camps called ‘empiricists’ and ‘rationalists’ (see e.g. Matthews 1984, Cowie 1999). We draw a different distinction relating to the psychological and biological prerequisites for first language acquisition. It divides nearly all Emergentists and Externalists from most Essentialists. It has often been confused with the classical empiricist/rationalist issue.

General nativists maintain that the prerequisites for language acquisition are just general cognitive abilities and resources. Linguistic nativists , by contrast, claim that human infants have access to at least some specifically linguistic information that is not learned from linguistic experience. Table 3 briefly sketches the differences between the two views.

Table 3: General and linguistic nativism contrasted

There does not really seem to be anyone who is a complete non-nativist: nobody really thinks that a creature with no unlearned capacities at all could acquire a language. That was the point of the much-quoted remark by Quine (1972: 95–96) about how “the behaviorist is knowingly and cheerfully up to his neck in innate mechanisms of learning-readiness”. Geoffrey Sampson (2001, 2005) is about as extreme an opponent of linguistic nativism as one can find, but even he would not take the failure of language acquisition in his cat to be unrelated to the cognitive and physical capabilities of cats.

The issue on which empirical research can and should be done is whether some of the unlearned prerequisites that humans enjoy have specifically linguistic content. For a philosophically-oriented discussion of the matter, see chapters 4–6 of Stainton (2006). For extensive debate about “the argument from poverty of the stimulus”, see Pullum and Scholz (2002) together with the six critiques published in the same issue of The Linguistic Review and the responses to those critiques by Scholz and Pullum (2002).

Linguists have given considerable attention to considerations of in-principle learnability —not so much the course of language acquisition as tracked empirically (the work of developmental psycholinguists) but the question of how languages of the human sort could possibly be learned by any kind of learner. The topic was placed squarely on the agenda by Chomsky (1965); and a hugely influential mathematical linguistics paper by Gold (1967)has dominated much of the subsequent discussion.

4.2.1 The Gold paradigm

Gold began by considering a reformulation of the standard philosophical problem of induction. The trouble with the question ‘Which hypothesis is correct given the totality of the data?’ is of course the one that Hume saw: if the domain is unbounded, no finite amount of data can answer the question. Any finite body of evidence will be consistent with arbitrarily many hypotheses that are not consistent with each other. But Gold proposed replacing the question with a very different one: Which tentative hypothesis is the one to pick , given the data provided so far, assuming a finite number of wrong guesses can be forgiven?

Gold assumed that the hypotheses, in the case of language learning, were generative grammars (or alternatively parsers; he proves results concerning both, but for brevity we follow most of the literature and neglect the very similar results on parsers). The learner’s task is conceived of as responding to an unending input data stream (ultimately complete, in that every expression eventually turns up) by enunciating a sequence of guesses at grammars.

Although Gold talks in developmental psycholinguistic terms about language learners learning grammars by trial and error, his extremely abstract proofs actually make no reference to the linguistic content of languages or grammars at all. The set of all finite grammars formulable in any given metalanguage is computably enumerable, so grammars can be systematically numbered. Inputs—grammatical expressions from the target language—can also be numerically encoded. We end up being concerned simply with the existence or non-existence of certain functions from natural number sequences to natural numbers.

A successful learner is one who uses a procedure that is guaranteed to eventually hit on a correct grammar. For single languages, this is trivial: if the target language is L and it is generated by a grammar G , then the procedure “Always guess G ” does the job, and every language is learnable. What makes the problem interesting is applying it to classes of grammars. A successful learner for a class C is one who uses a procedure that is guaranteed to succeed no matter what grammar from C is the target and no matter what the data stream is like (as long as it is complete and contains no ungrammatical examples).

Gold’s work has interesting similarities with earlier philosophical work on inductive learning by Hilary Putnam (1963; it is not clear whether Gold was aware of this paper). Putnam gave an informal proof of a sort of incompleteness theorem for inductive regularity-learning devices: no matter what algorithm is used in a machine for inducing regularities from experience, and thus becoming able to predict events, there will always be some possible environmental regularities that will defeat it. (As a simple example, imagine an environment giving an unbroken sequence of presentations all having some property a . If there is a positive integer n such that after n presentations the machine will predict that presentation number n + 1 will also have property a , then the machine will be defeated by an environment consisting of n presentations of a followed by one with the incompatible property b —the future need not always resemble the past. But if on the other hand there is no such n , then an environment consisting of an unending sequence of a presentations will defeat it.)

Gold’s theorems are founded on certain specific idealizing assumptions about the language learning situation, some of which are intuitively very generous to the learner. The main ones are these:

• Pre-set grammar class . A class of grammars from among which to select is fixed ab initio, and the learner’s strategy can be one that only works for that class.
• Pre-set vocabulary . A finite universal vocabulary of elements V is fixed ab initio, and the learner can rely on not encountering any other elements (though the learner does not know which subset of V is used in the target language).
• Unending input . The input (the evidence presented to the learner) goes on forever—though it may contain arbitrary repetitions, and a successful learner will always reach a point where no future evidence will cause a change of guess.
• Exhaustive evidence . Ultimately every expression in the language will appear in the evidence presented to the learner.
• No noise . Every input example is a grammatical expression of the target language.
• No ordering restrictions . Any expression may appear at any point in the input data stream.
• No memory limit . The learner can remember every expression ever presented.
• No time limit . Learning must be achieved after some finite time, but no fixed bound is set in advance.
• Generative grammar target . What is ultimately learned is a generative grammar.
• No statistics . Frequency of particular expressions in the input plays no role in the learning process.

The most celebrated of the theorems Gold proved (using some reasoning remarkably similar to that of Putnam 1963) showed that a language learner could be similarly hostage to malign environments. Imagine a learner being exposed to an endless and ultimately exhaustive sequence of presented expressions from some target language—Gold calls such a sequence a ‘text’. Suppose the learner does not know in advance whether the language is infinite, or is one of the infinitely many finite languages over the vocabulary V . Gold reasons roughly thus:

• There must be some n such that an environment consisting of a sequence of n presented expressions all taken from a certain finite language L 1 (possibly with many repetitions) will cause the learner to guess the target language is L 1 . (If there is not, then we already know how to baffle the learner: the learner will be unable to learn L 1 from any text.)
• But if there is such an n , then the learner will be baffled by any infinite target language that is a superset of them all: a text consisting of n presentations of expressions from L 1 followed by n presentations of a slightly larger finite language L 2 , and so on forever (there is no largest finite language, and ex hypothesi the learner will keep trying them all).

Leaping too soon to the conclusion that the target language is infinite will be disastrous, because there will be no way to retrench: no presented examples from a finite language L k will ever conflict with the hypothesis that the target is some infinite superset of L k .

The relevance of all this to the philosophy of linguistics is that the theorem just sketched has been interpreted by many linguists, psycholinguists, and philosophers as showing that humans could not learn languages by inductive inference based on examples of language use, because all of the well-known families of languages defined by different types of generative grammar have the crucial property of allowing grammars for every finite language and for at least some infinite supersets of them. But Gold’s paper has often been over-interpreted. A few examples of the resultant mistakes follow.

It’s not about underdetermination . Gold’s negative results are sometimes wrongly taken to be an unsurprising reflection of the underdetermination of theories by finite bodies of evidence (Hauser et al. 2002 seem to make this erroneous equation on p. 1577; so do Fodor and Crowther 2002, implicitly—see Scholz and Pullum 2002, 204–206). But the failure of text-identifiability for certain classes of languages is different from underdetermination in a very important way, because there are infinite classes of infinite languages that are identifiable from text. The first chapter of Jain et al. (1999) discusses an illustrative example (basically, it is the class containing, for all n > 0, the set of all strings with length greater than n ). There are infinitely many others. For example, Shinohara (1990) showed that for any positive integer n the class of all languages generated by a context-sensitive grammar with not more than n rules is learnable from text.

It’s not about stimulus poverty . It has also sometimes been assumed that Gold is giving some kind of argument from poverty of the stimulus (there are signs of this in Cowie 1999, 194ff; Hauser et al. 2002, 1577; and Prinz 2002, 210). This is very clearly a mistake (as both Laurence and Margolis 2001 and Matthews 2007 note): in Gold’s text-learning scenario there is no stimulus poverty at all. Every expression in the language eventually turns up in the learner’s input.

It’s not all bad news . It is sometimes forgotten that Gold established a number of optimistic results as well as the pessimistic one about learning from text. Given what he called an ‘informant’ environment rather than a text environment, we see strikingly different results. An informant environment is an infinite sequence of presentations sorted into two lists, positive instances (expressions belonging to the target language) and negative instances (not in the language). Almost all major language-theoretic classes are identifiable in the limit from an informant environment (up to and including the class of all languages with a primitive recursive characteristic function, which comes close to covering any language that could conceivably be of linguistic interest), and all computably enumerable languages become learnable if texts are allowed to be sequenced in particular ways (see the results in Gold 1967 on ‘anomalous text’).

Gold did not give a necessary condition for a class to be identifiable in the limit from text, but Angluin (1980) later provided one (in a result almost but not quite obtained by Wexler and Hamburger 1973). Angluin showed that a class C is text-identifiable iff every language L in C has a finite “telltale” subset T such that if T is also proper subset of some other language in C , that other language is not a proper subset of L . This condition precludes guessing too large a language. Once all the members of the telltale subset for L have been received as input, the learner can safely make L the current conjecture. The language to be identified must be either L or (if subsequent inputs include new sentences not in L ) some larger language, but it can’t be a proper subset of L .

Johnson (2004) provides a useful review of several other misconceptions about Gold’s work; e.g., the notion that it might be the absence of semantics from the input that makes identification from text impossible (this is not the case).

4.2.2 Gold’s paradox

Some generative Essentialists see a kind of paradox in Gold’s results—a reductio on one or more of the assumptions he makes about in-principle learnability. To put it very crudely, learning generative grammars from presented grammatical examples seems to have been proved impossible, yet children do learn their first languages, which for generative Essentialists means they internalize generative psychogrammars, and it is claimed to be an empirical fact that they get almost no explicit evidence about what is not in the language (Brown and Hanlon 1970 is invariably cited to support this). Contradiction. Gold himself suggested three escape routes from the apparent paradox:

• Assume tighter limits on the pre-set grammar class. Perhaps, for example, learners have an ‘innate’ grasp of some definition of the pre-set grammar class that guarantees its learnability. (For example, identifiability in the limit from text could be guaranteed by ensuring that the class of candidate languages does not contain both (a) some infinite set of finite languages and (b) some infinite language that is the union of all of them.)
• Assume learners get systematic information about what is not in the language (perhaps indirectly, in ways not yet recognized), so that the environment is of the informant type rather than the text type.
• Assume some helpful feature is present in learning environments. The ‘no order restrictions’ assumption might be false: there could be regularities in the order of expressions in texts that can support inferences about what is ungrammatical.

All three of these paths have been subsequently explored. Path (1) appealed to generative Essentialists. Chomsky (1981) suggested an extreme restriction: that universal grammar permitted only finitely many grammars. This claim (for which Chomsky had little basis: see Pullum 1983) would immediately guarantee that not all finite languages are humanly learnable (there are infinitely many finite languages, so for most of them there would be no permissible grammar). Osherson and Weinstein (1984) even proved that under three fairly plausible assumptions about the conditions on learning, finiteness of the class of languages is necessary—that is, a class must be finite if it is to be identifiable from text. However, they also proved that this is not sufficient: there are very small finite classes of languages that are not identifiable from text, so it is logically possible for text-identification to be impossible even given only a finite number of languages (grammars). These two results show that Chomsky’s approach cannot be the whole answer.

Path (2) proposes investigation of children’s input with an eye to finding covert sources of negative evidence. Various psycholinguists have pursued this idea; see the entry on language and innateness in this encyclopedia, and (to cite one example) the results of Chouinard and Clark (2003) on hitherto unnoticed sources of negative evidence in the infant’s linguistic environment, such as parental corrections.

Path (3) suggests investigating the nature of children’s linguistic environments more generally. Making evidence available to the learner in some fixed order can certainly alter the picture quite radically (Gold proved that if some primitive-recursive generator controls the text it can in effect encode the identity of the target language so that all computably enumerable languages become identifiable from text). It is possible in principle that limitations on texts (or on learners’ uptake) might have positive rather than negative effects on learnability (see Newport 1988; Elman 1993; Rohde and Plaut 1999; and the entry on language and innateness ).

4.2.3 The claimed link to ‘rationalism’ versus ‘empiricism’

Gold’s suggested strategy of restricting the pre-set class of grammars has been interpreted by some as a defense of rationalist rather than empiricist theories of language acquisition. For example, Wexler and Culicover state:

Empiricist theory allows for a class of sensory or peripheral processing mechanisms by means of which the organism receives data. In addition, the organism possesses some set of inductive principles or learning mechanisms…Rationalist theory also assumes that a learner has sensory mechanisms and inductive principles. But rationalist theory assumes that in addition the learner possesses a rich set of principles concerning the general nature of the ability that is to be learned. (Wexler and Culicover 1980: 5)

Wexler and Culicover claim that ‘empiricist’ learning mechanisms are both weak and general: not only are they ‘not related to the learning of any particular subject matter or cognitive ability’ but they are not ‘limited to any particular species’. It is of course not surprising that empiricist learning fails if it is defined in a way that precludes drawing a distinction between the cognitive abilities of humans and fruit flies.

Equating Gold’s idea of restricting the class of grammars with the idea of a ‘rationalist’ knowledge acquisition theory, Wexler and Culicover try to draw out the consequences of Gold’s paradigm for the Essentialist linguistic theory of Chomsky (1965). They show how a very tightly restricted class of transformational grammars could be regarded as text-identifiable under extremely strong assumptions (e.g., that all languages have the same innately known deep structures).

Matthews (1984) follows Wexler and Culicover’s lead and draws a more philosophically oriented moral:

The significance of Gold’s result becomes apparent if one considers that (i) empiricists assume that there are no constraints on the class of possible languages (besides perhaps that natural languages be recursively enumerable), and (ii) the learner employs a maximally powerful learning strategy—there are no strategies that could accomplish what that assumed by Gold cannot. These two facts, given Gold’s unsolvability result for text data, effectively dispose of the empiricist claim that there exists a ‘discovery procedure’. (1989: 60)

The actual relation of Gold’s results to the empiricism/rationalism controversy seems to us rather different. Gold’s paradigm looks a lot more like a formalization of so-called ‘rationalism’. The fixed class of candidate hypotheses (grammars) corresponds to what is given by universal grammar—the innate definition of the essential properties of language. What Gold actually shows, therefore, is not “the plausibility of rationalism” but rather the inadequacy of a huge range of rationalist theories: under a wide range of different choices of universal grammar, language acquisition appears to remain impossible.

Moreover, Matthews ignores (as most linguists have) the existence of large and interesting classes of languages that are text-identifiable.

Gold’s result, like Putnam’s earlier one, does show that a certain kind of trial-and-error inductive learning is insufficient to permit learning of arbitrary environmental regularities. There has to be some kind of initial bias in the learning procedure or in the data. But ‘empiricism’, the supposed opponent of ‘rationalism’, is not to be equated with a denial of the existence of learning biases. No one doubts that humans have inductive biases. To quote Quine again, “Innate biases and dispositions are the cornerstone of behaviorism, and have been studied by behaviorists” (1972: 95–96). As Lappin and Shieber (2007) stress, there cannot be such a thing as a learning procedure (or processing mechanism) with no biases at all.

The biases posited in Emergentist theories of language acquisition are found, at least in part, in the non-linguistic social and cognitive bases of human communication. And the biases of Externalist approaches to language acquisition are to be found in the distributional and stochastic structure of the learning input and the multitude of mechanisms that process that input and their interactions. All contemporary approaches to language acquistion have acknowledged Gold’s results, but those results do not by themselves vindicate any one of our three approaches to the study of language.

Gold’s explicit equation of acquiring a language with identifying a generative grammar that exactly generates it naturally makes his work seem relevant to generative Essentialists (though even for them, his results do not provide anything like a sufficient reason for adopting the linguistic nativist position). But another key assumption, that nothing about the statistical structure of the input plays a role in the acquisition process, is being questioned by increasing numbers of Externalists, many of whom have used Bayesian modeling to show that the absence of positive evidence can function as a powerful source of (indirect) negative evidence: learning can be driven by what is not found as well as by what is (see e.g. Foraker et al. (2009)).

Most Emergentists simply reject the assumption that what is learned is a generative grammar. They see the acquisition task as a matter of learning the details of an array of constructions (roughly, meaning-bearing ways of structurally composing words or phrases) and how to use them to communicate. How such learning is accomplished needs a great deal of further study, but Gold’s paper did not show it to be impossible.

5. Language Evolution

Over the past three decades a large amount of work has been done on topics to which the term ‘language evolution’ is attached, but there are in fact four distinct such topics:

• the phylogenetic emergence of non-human communication capacities, systems, and behaviors in various animals;
• the phylogenetic emergence of uniquely human communication capacities, systems, and behaviors;
• the phylogenetic emergence, unique in humans, of the capacity (or capacities) to develop , acquire , and use language;
• the course of historical evolution through intergenerational changes in particular languages as they are acquired and used by humans.

Emergentists tend to regard any of the topics (a)–(d) as potentially relevant to the study of language evolution. Essentialists tend to focus solely on (c). Some Essentialists even deny that (a) and (b) have any relevance to the study of (c); for example:

There is nothing useful to be said about behavior or thought at the level of abstraction at which animal and human communication fall together… [H]uman language, it appears, is based on entirely different principles. This, I think, is an important point, often overlooked by those who approach language as a natural, biological phenomenon; in particular, it seems rather pointless, for these reasons, to speculate about the evolution of human language from simpler systems… (Chomsky 1968: 62)

Other generative Essentialists, like Pinker and Bloom (1990) and Pinker and Jackendoff (2005), seem open to the view that even the most elemental aspects of topic (b) can be directly relevant to the study of (c). This division among Essentialists reflects a division among their views about the role of adaptive explanations in the emergence of (b) and especially (c). For example:

We know very little about what happens when 10 10 neurons are crammed into something the size of a basketball, with further conditions imposed by the specific manner in which this system developed over time. It would be a serious error to suppose that all properties, or the interesting properties of the structures that evolved, can be ‘explained’ in terms of ‘natural selection’. (Chomsky 1975:59, quoted by Newmeyer 1998 and Jackendoff 2002)

The view expressed here that all (or even most) interesting properties of the language faculty are not adaptations conflicts with the basic explanatory strategy of evolutionary psychology found in the neo-Darwinian Essentialist views of Pinker and Bloom. Piattelli-Palmarini (1989), following Chomsky, adopts a fairly standard Bauplan critique of adaptationism. On this view the language faculty did not originate as an adaptation, but more plausibly “may have originally arisen for some purely architectural or structural reason (perhaps overall brain size, or the sheer duplication of pre-existing modules), or as a by product of the evolutionary pressures” (p. 19), i.e., it is a kind of Gouldian spandrel.

More recently, some Essentialist-leaning authors have rejected the view that no analogies and homologies between animal and human communication are relevant to the study of language. For example, in the context of commenting on Hauser et al. (2002), Tecumseh Fitch (2010) claims that “Although Language, writ large, is unique to our species (many probably most) of the mechanisms involved in language have analogues or homologues in other animals.” However, the view that the investigation of animal communication can shed light on human language is still firmly rejected by some. For example, Bickerton (2007: 512) asserts that “nothing resembling human language could have developed from prior animal call systems.”

Bickerton fronts the following simple argument for his view:

If any adaptation is unique to a species, the selective pressure that drove it must also be unique to that species; otherwise the adaptation would have appeared elsewhere, at least in rudimentary form. (2007: 514)

Thus, the mere fact that language is unique to humans is sufficient to rule out monkey and primate call systems as preadapations for language. But, contra Bickerton, a neo-Darwinian like Jackendoff (2002) appeals to the work of Dunbar (1998), Power (1998), Worden (1998) to provide a selectionist story which assumes that cooperation in hunting, defense (Pinker and Bloom 1990), and “ ‘social grooming’ or deception” are selective forces that operated on human ancestors to drive increases in expressive power that distinguishes non-human communication and human linguistic capacities and systems. Bickerton (2014), however, combines aspects of Essentialism, Emergentism, and Externalism by taking equal parts of Minimalism, primatology, and cultural evolution into a more holistic account. He specifically tailors a niche construction theory to explain the emergence of displaced, discrete symbolization in a particular kind of primate, namely human beings. He thus allows for (a) and (b) to figure in an explanation of (c). This is somewhat of a departure from his earlier positions.

Within the general Essentialist camp, language evolution has taken center stage since the inception of the Minimalist Program. An explanation of the evolution of language now became one of the main theoretical driving forces behind linguistic theory and explanation. Again, the focus seems to have stayed largely on (c). Berwick and Chomsky explicitly state:

At some time in the very recent past, apparently sometime before 80,000 years ago, if we can judge from associated symbolic proxies, individuals in a small group of hominids in East Africa underwent a minor biological change that provided the operation Merge-an operation that takes human concepts as computational atoms and yields structured expressions that, systematically interpreted by the conceptual system, provide a rich language of thought. (2016: 87)

Such theories rely heavily on the possibility of the evolution of language being explained in terms of saltation or random mutation. This postulate has come under significant scrutiny (see Steedman 2017). Saltation views, however, rely on one of the core assumptions mentioned in the quote above, i.e. that language evolved circa 100 000 years old. This central claim has recently been challenged by Everett (2017) who cites paleontological evidence from the alleged nautical abilities of Homo Erectus to dismantle this timeline. If true, this would mean that language evolved around two million years ago and random mutation need not be the only viable explanation as many in the Essentialist framework assume (see Progovac 2015 for a particular gradualist account).

While generative Essentialists debate among themselves about the plausibility of adaptive explanations for the emergence of essential features of a modular language capacity, Emergentists are perhaps best characterized as seeking broad evolutionary explanations of the features of languages (topic (c)) and communicative capacities (topics (b) and (c)) conceived in non-essentialist, non-modular ways. And as theorists who are committed to exploring non-modular views of linguistic capacities (topic (c)), the differences and similarities between (a) and (b) are potentially relevant to (c).

Primatologists like Cheney and Seyfarth, psychologists like Tomasello, anthropologists like Terrence Deacon, and linguists like Phillip Lieberman share an interest in investigating the communicative, anatomical, and cognitive characteristics of non-human animals to identify biological differences between humans, and monkeys and primates. In the following paragraph we discuss Cheney and Seyfarth (2005) as an example, but we could easily have chosen any of a number of other theorists.

Cheney and Seyfarth (2005) emphasize that non-human primates have a small, stimulus specific repertoire of vocal productions that are not “entirely involuntary,” and this contrasts with their “almost openended ability to learn novel sound-meaning pairs” (p. 149). They also emphasize that vocalizations in monkeys and apes are used to communicate information about the vocalizer, not to provide information intended to “rectify false beliefs in others or instruct others” (p. 150). Non-human primate communication consists in the mainly involuntary broadcasting of the vocalizer’s current affective state. Moreover, although Cheney and Seyfarth recognize that the vervet monkey’s celebrated call system (Cheney and Seyfarth 1990) is “functionally referential” in context, their calls have no explicit meaning since they lack “any propositional structure”. From this they conclude:

The communication of non-human animals lacks three features that are abundantly present in the utterances of young children: a rudimentary ability to attribute mental states different from their own to others, the ability to generate new words, and lexical syntax. (2005: 151)

By ‘lexical syntax’ Cheney and Seyfarth mean a kind of semantic compositionality of characteristic vocalizations. If a vocalization (call) were to have lexical syntax, the semantic significance of the whole would depend on the relation of the structure of parts of the call to the structure of what they signify. The absence of ‘lexical syntax’ in call systems suggests that it is illegitimate to think of them as having anything like semantic structure at all.

Despite the rudimentary character of animal communication systems when compared with human languages, Cheney and Seyfarth argue that monkeys and apes exhibit at least five characteristics that are pre-adaptations for human communication:

• their vocalizations are representational;
• they have competitive/cooperative relations in which alliances, friendships, and rivalries that “create selective pressures for the kind of complex, abstract conceptual abilities that are likely to have proceeded the earlier linguistic communication”;
• because of (ii), their representations of social relations between individuals and themselves are hierarchally structured;
• certain monkeys, e.g. baboons, have open-ended, rule-governed systems of social knowledge;
• their knowledge is propositional.

It is, of course, controversial to claim that monkeys have rule-governed propositional social knowledge systems as claimed in (iv) and (v). For instance, Tomasello’s (2008) ‘Cooperative Communication’ approach makes a case for primate intentional systems not based on their vocalizations but on their gestural systems. Therein he claims that “great ape gestural communication shares with human linguistic communication foundational aspects of its manner of functioning, namely, the intentional and flexible use of learned communicative signals” (2008: 21).

But Emergentists, Externalists, and Essentialists could all, in principle, agree that there are both unique characteristics of human communicative capacities and characteristics of such capacities that are shared with non-humans. For example, by the age of one, human infants can use direction of gaze and focus of attention to infer the referent of a speaker’s utterance (Baldwin and Moses 1994). By contrast, this sort of social referencing capacity in monkeys and apes is rudimentary. This suggests that a major component of humans’ capacity to infer a specific referent is lacking in non-humans.

Disagreements between the approaches might be due to the perceived significance of non-human communicative capacities and their relation to uniquely human ones.

We mentioned earlier that both early 20th-century linguistics monographs and contemporary introductory textbooks include discussions of historical linguistics, i.e., that branch that studies the history and prehistory of changes in particular languages, how they are related to each other, and how and why they change. Again, this topic is distinct from the emergence of language in hominoid species and concerns mostly the linguistic changes that have occurred over a much shorter period within languages.

The last decade has seen two kinds of innovations related to studying changes in particular languages. One, which we will call ‘linguistic phylogeny’, concerns the application of stochastic phylogenetic methods to investigate prehistoric population and language dispersion (Gray and Jordan 2000, Gray 2005, Atkinson and Gray 2006, Gray et al. 2009). These methods answer questions about how members of a family of languages are related to each other and dispersed throughout a geographic area. The second, which we will call the effects of transmission, examines how interpreted artificial languages (sets of signifier/signified pairs) change under a range of transmission conditions (Kirby et al. 2008, Kirby 2001, Hurford 2000), thus providing evidence about how the process of transmission affects the characteristics, especially the structure, of the transmitted interpreted system.

5.2.1 Linguistic phylogeny

Russell Gray and his colleagues have taken powerful phylogenetic methods that were developed by biologists to investigate molecular evolution, and applied them to linguistic data in order to answer questions about the evolution of language families. For example, Gray and Jordan (2000) used a parsimony analysis of a large language data set to adjudicate between competing hypotheses about the speed of the spread of Austronesian languages through the Pacific. More recently, Greenhill et al. (2010) used a NeighbourNet analysis to evaluate the relative rates of change in the typological and lexical features of Austronesian and Indo-European. These results bear on hypotheses about the relative stability of language types over lexical features of those languages, and how far back in time that stability extends. If there were highly conserved typological and lexical features, then it might be possible to identify relationships between languages that date beyond the 8000 (plus or minus 2000) year limit that is imposed by lexical instability.

5.2.2 Effects of transmission

The computational and laboratory experiments of Kirby and his collaborators have shown that under certain conditions of iterated learning, any given set of signifier/signified pairs in which the mapping is initially arbitrary will change to exhibit a very general kind of compositional structure. Iterated learning has been studied in both computational and laboratory experiments by means of diffusion chains, i.e., sequences of learners. A primary characteristic of such sequences of transmission is that what is transmitted from learner to learner will change in an iterated learning environment, in a way that depends on the conditions of transmission.

The children’s game called ‘Telephone’ in the USA (‘Chinese Whispers’ in the UK), provides an example of diffusion chains under which what is transmitted is not stable. In a diffusion chain learning situation what a chain member has actually learned from an earlier member of the chain is presented as the input to the next learner, and what that learner has actually learned provides the input to the following learner. In cases where the initial learning task is very simple: i.e., where what is transmitted is both simple, completely transmitted, and the transmission channel is not noisy, what is transmitted is stable over iterated transmissions even in cases when the participants are young children and chimpanzees (Horner et al. 2006). That is, there is little change in what is transmitted over iterated transmissions. However, in cases where what is transmitted is only partially presented, very complex, or the channel is noisy, then there is a decrease in the fidelity of what is transmitted across iterations just like there is in the children’s game of Telephone.

What Kirby and colleagues show is that when the initial input to a diffusion chain is a reasonably complex set of arbitrary signal/signifier pairs, e.g. one in which 27 complex signals of 6 letters are randomly assigned to 27 objects varying on dimensions of color, kind of motion, and shape, what is transmitted becomes more and more compositional over iterated transmission. Here, ‘compositional’ is being used to refer to the high degree to which sub-strings of the signals come to be systematically paired with specific phenomenal sub-features of what is signified. The transmission conditions in these experiments were free of noise, and for each iteration of the learning task only half of the possible 27 signifier/signified pairs were presented to participants. Under this kind of transmission bottleneck a high degree of sign/signified structure emerged.

A plausible interpretation of these results is that the developing structure of the collection of signs is a consequence of the repeated forced inference by participants from 14 signs and signifieds in the training set to the entire set of 27 pairs. A moral could be that iterated forced prediction of the sign/signified pairs in the entire set, on the basis of exposure to only about half of them, induced the development of a systematic, compositional structure over the course of transmission. It is reasonable to conjecture that this resulting structure reflects effects of human memory, not a domain-specific language module—although further work would be required to rule out many other competing hypotheses.

Thus Kirby and his colleagues focus on something very different from the prerequisites for language emergence. Linguistic nativists have been interested in how primates like us could have become capable of acquiring systems with the structural properties of natural languages. Kirby and his colleagues (while not denying that human cognitive evolution is of interest) are studying how languages evolve to be capable of being acquired by primates like us .

5.2.3 Trends in the Philosophy of Language Evolution

Lastly, language evolution has amassed a great deal of interdisciplinary work in recent times. This has allowed philosophers to directly contribute to this emerging field. The trends in the philosophical work have only loosely followed the Externalist, Emergentist and Essentialist divisions we advocate here. Most philosophical work has largely been focused on Emergentist conceptions within the evolution of linguistic meaning specifically.

Bar-On (2013) distinguishes between Gricean and Post-Gricean approaches to the evolution of language. The former requires an attribution of Gricean speaker meaning to our languageless ancestors which in turn seems to assume intentional actions govern by rationality (‘nonnatural meaning’). This task is as fraught as explaining the evolution of language itself. She thus proposes the latter, specifically a Post-Gricean (Orrigi and Sperber 2000) approach which takes expressive communication (found widely in non-human animal species) as a basis for the emergence of linguistic meaning between signalers and receivers. She states:

Expressive communication, I will argue, exhibits features that foreshadow significant aspects of linguistic communication. In its domain, we can identify legitimate natural precursors of meaningful linguistic communication. (For present purposes, by ‘legitimate natural precursors’, I mean behavioral interactions that at least: a. can be found in the natural world; b. go beyond Tomasello’s mere ‘communicative displays’; c. do not depend on crediting the relevant creatures with language-like propositional thought or post-Gricean communicative intentions, and; d. exhibit features that foreshadow important semantic and pragmatic features of linguistic communication so in that sense are proto-semantic and proto-pragmatic.) (2013: 354)

Recent work in Evolutionary Game Theory has also lent credence to the emergence of signaling systems involving non-intentional states. Taking Lewis (1969) as a spring-board, Skyrms (2010) investigates the structure of signaling behavior beyond the existence of mutual conventions. His framework starts from the most basic non-trivial cases and gradually introduces complexity (such as deception and the introduction of new signals etc.). Skyrms’ account views propositional or semantic content as a special case of informational content thereby reintroducing information theory as a tool to philosophers of language and linguistics interested in the emergence of linguistic communication and/or semantic meaning.

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analysis | assertion | compositionality | defaults in semantics and pragmatics | descriptions | empiricism: logical | idiolects | innate/acquired distinction | innateness: and language | language of thought hypothesis | linguistics: computational | logic: intensional | mental representation | pragmatics | propositional attitude reports | reference | relativism | rigid designators

Acknowledgments

The authors are very grateful to the two SEP referees, Tom Wasow and William Starr, who provided careful reviews of our drafts; to Bonnie Webber and Zoltan Galsi for insightful comments and advice; and to Dean Mellow for some helpful corrections. BCS was the lead author of this article throughout the lengthy period of its preparation, and worked on it in collaboration with FJP and GKP until the post-refereeing revision was submitted at the end of April 2011. She died two weeks later, on May 14. FJP and GKP oversaw the few final corrections that were made when the HTML version was first published in September 2011.

Copyright © 2024 by Barbara C. Scholz Francis Jeffry Pelletier < francisp @ ualberta . ca > Geoffrey K. Pullum < pullum @ gmail . com > Ryan Nefdt < ryan . nefdt @ uct . ac . za >

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Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

Essentials of Linguistics, 2nd Edition - 2nd Edition

(13 reviews)

Catherine Anderson, Hamilton, Ontario

Bronwyn Bjorkman, Kingston, Ontario

Derek Denis, Mississauga, Ontario

Copyright Year: 2022

ISBN 13: 9781927565506

Publisher: eCampusOntario

Language: English

Formats Available

Conditions of use.

Learn more about reviews.

Reviewed by Ivy Hauser, Assistant Professor, University of Texas at Arlington on 3/15/24

Very comprehensive introduction to linguistics textbook. The 4/5 is because I think some parts are too comprehensive (at least for the one-semester course where I teach intro ling). I've been using it for several courses now, including the first... read more

Comprehensiveness rating: 4 see less

Very comprehensive introduction to linguistics textbook. The 4/5 is because I think some parts are too comprehensive (at least for the one-semester course where I teach intro ling). I've been using it for several courses now, including the first edition. As a phonologist, I appreciate the revisions in the second edition on the phonetics and phonology sections. They removed some of the more technical/theoretical elements that I typically reserve for upper-level courses (e.g. distinctive features). The only exception is the syntax chapter, which is much more comprehensive than needed for an introductory textbook in my opinion. That chapter feels more like a textbook for an undergraduate syntax class, not a chapter for the two weeks I can spend on syntax in my intro course. I don't cover 90% of it and typically give the students additional resources on the basics that I wish were covered in more detail (phrase structure rules/trees, etc.).

Content Accuracy rating: 5

The technical content is accurate and up to date with current developments in the field.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 5

The book is highly relevant for introductory linguistics courses in more theory oriented program (as opposed to applied/TESOL introduction to linguistics). Some of the examples are specific to the Canadian context, but my American students can easily understand them. The approaches taken are standard and unlikely to become outdated quickly.

Clarity rating: 5

Prose is clear and easy to understand for intro students. I receive multiple comments each semester about how the students appreciate the videos and clear prose.

Consistency rating: 5

We haven't found any inconsistencies in terminology or formalism (which is a commendable feat for a linguistics resource!). Some of the formalism used switched between edition 1 and 2, so just a heads up to anyone switching from one edition to another. Occasionally my students will find links to the first edition and read that instead.

Modularity rating: 5

Modularity is excellent. We link the exact assigned sections from the Canvas page and students never have trouble finding the reading or figuring out what is assigned. Very easy to navigate.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 5

It follows the standard order of topics for intro linguistics. Many chapters seem to follow a data-first approach and only introduce formalism and analytical tools at the end of the chapter. I like this and try to do the same in my own teaching but in some chapters the formalism and analysis parts came very late and I had to assign readings in a different order than presented in the text to ensure students had the analytical skills needed for homeworks.

Interface rating: 5

Interface is good and easy to navigate.

Grammatical Errors rating: 5

We haven't found any major grammatical errors.

Cultural Relevance rating: 5

The book does an great job using examples from different languages and social groups. This has been expanded in the second edition with much more sign language content and sections devoted to cultural impacts of language science.

Thank you Essentials of Linguistics creators for this resource! It has worked well in my courses and provided those ~100 students with a no-cost textbook.

Reviewed by Senyung Lee, Assistant Professor, Northeastern Illinois University on 4/24/23

The book covers the major branches of linguistics: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics. The book does not include a chapter on pragmatics, which is one branch of linguistics. In this regard, the book does not fully cover all 6... read more

The book covers the major branches of linguistics: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics. The book does not include a chapter on pragmatics, which is one branch of linguistics. In this regard, the book does not fully cover all 6 branches of linguistics. For an undergraduate level, introductory linguistics course, the book’s coverage seems enough. However, this book is probably not appropriate for graduate-level introductory linguistics courses, in terms of comprehensiveness.

Content Accuracy rating: 4

The content seems accurate. It should be noted that this book covers Canadian English, and the author makes it very clear about it, so there is no confusion. In Chapter 8: Forming Sentences, which covers syntax, the content is greatly simplified to the extent that it is easily accessible to undergraduate students. Even though the content generally seems error-free, given the depth and breadth of knowledge in each branch of linguistics, it does seem a bit too simplified. Nevertheless, it seems appropriate for undergraduate students who have never studied linguistics before.

The content seems up-to-date. This is a second edition of the book, which was published in 2022. Thus, it doesn’t seem that the text will become obsolete within any short period of time. In addition, each branch of linguistics that was covered in this book is a fairly well-established area, and even if it needs updates in the near future, I don’t think the updates will have any significant departures from the current contents.

Clarity seems to be one of the strengths of this textbook. The language used in this textbook is very clear and accessible. There is no jargon, and whenever the author introduces a new topic, she gives further explanation using simple language. This makes linguistics, a field of study that can be quite comprehensive and intimidating to undergraduate students, easily accessible.

The text is consistent in terms of language and terminology in linguistics. Students will not be confused with any of the terms being used across chapters and framework of the contents.

Modularity is another strength of this textbook. The book is highly modularized. Each chapter consists of short, small sections, so students will not be overwhelmed. Also, each page has enough margins, and the texts are not too small, which makes reading easier and pleasant. That is, the text is not condensed or dense to the extent that it overwhelms students.

The organization of the topics is another strength. The book starts with an introduction chapter, then introduces sounds (phonetics and phonology), words (morphology), sentence structures (syntax), then meaning (semantics). This organization seems logical and reasonable because it starts from the smallest language unit of analysis and moves to larger units of analysis. This is how I have been teaching the introductory-level linguistics course as well.

I think the interface is the biggest strength of this textbook. First of all, there are three different formats available: eBook, PDF, and online. Having three options seems great because students can choose whatever format that works best for their learning styles. No matter the format, it’s very easy to navigate from one chapter to another, and from one section to another. There’s no distortion of any images or charts in the text.

The text is free from grammatical errors or unclear language. The author herself is a linguist, and the language is clear, accurate, and professional.

The text does not have any insensitive or offensive contents. The author makes it very clear from the beginning of the book (and throughout the book) that the book uses examples of Canadian English, and the fact that there are differences among different varieties of English. Examples are neutral and appropriate, and I don’t see any potential issues of any particular group of readers being offended by insensitiveness.

I think this textbook is a good choice for an undergraduate, introductory linguistics course, especially for students who are not majoring in linguistics.

One thing that I’d like to comment on is about exercises. There are exercise questions at the end of each chapter, but there are only a few of them. It’s still great that there are exercise questions and answers available at the end of the book for students’ self-study. However, linguistics can be quite technical, and needs a lot of practice. I wish there were more exercise questions so that students could check their comprehension as they read along each section of the chapter.

In addition, I wish there was a chapter on “pragmatics” at the end of the book. Pragmatics is also an important branch of linguistics that should not be overlooked. I understand that covering all the contents in the book can be quite a lot as it is, but I think it’s important to let readers know that linguistics also covers a study of the “use” of language in context.

Reviewed by John Hellermann, Professor, Portland State University on 9/1/22

Essentials of Linguistics is a fine online textbook to introduce the basics of linguistics to any university-level student without prior knowledge of linguistics and I thank the author for making it available at no cost to students. The coverage... read more

Comprehensiveness rating: 5 see less

Essentials of Linguistics is a fine online textbook to introduce the basics of linguistics to any university-level student without prior knowledge of linguistics and I thank the author for making it available at no cost to students.

The coverage of the five key areas (phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics) is all pretty complete for an introductory textbook. The section on Gricean Maxims and indexicality are better than many other introductory textbooks, (except for the one odd comment about what counts as personal deixis). The bias against language use (like many other introductory textbooks) is seen here with no mention of speech act theory or interaction. Introductory textbooks often attempt to have a chapter on all areas of linguistics and those texts can serve as reference books for students. But what can actually be learned in one class of all that material is questionable. We have 10-week terms and find that in that amount of time we can only use about one third of the material in many introductory textbooks. Rather than treating topics like psycholinguistics or language acquisition in separate chapters, EOL has those topics interspersed throughout the textbook in relevant places. That said, I like the fact that there is a separate chapter on indigenous languages of North America. The text provides an effective index. There could be more exercises at the end of each chapter but I have plenty of supplementary problems and that is likely what the author intended.

Although in an introductory textbook, we cannot expect a range of theoretical perspectives to be even outlined but the theoretical grounding should be made explicit because students want to know. This text is grounded in an individualist, brain-centered approach to linguistics. The author does not state that theoretical bias explicitly but that is common practice in linguistics.

The content is accurate. The question of bias is tricky. It is grounded in a particular theoretical perspective of language and is consistent. I sometimes refer to that as a bias but I do not mean that in a pejorative sense.

The content is up-to-date but not overly trendy and this will not be dated in the near future.

The language is very accessible for someone without prior knowledge of linguistics. Technical jargon is necessary and it is explained.

The text is consistent in the claims made about how language works.

In general, the textbook has a flat structure (which is helpful for many students) breaking out key concepts into several chapters. For example, in a topic like ‘phonetics’, we have one chapter with sound production mechanisms and articulation and a second on IPA, suprasegmentals, and articulatory processes. To cover the five main topics (phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics) is done in 10 chapters, rather than five.

The organization is logical.

Interface rating: 4

It was easy to navigate through the text both online and in pdf format with clear chapter names, headings, and subheadings. The only reason I give this section 4 rather than 5 is that I believe the online text could have used animation more to illustrate concepts, for example articulation, movement in syntax etc

I saw no infelicities regarding register, spelling conventions, etc

The text is not culturally insensitive or offensive in any way that I could see. There are few visual images of people but of those, people of color are represented. Names used have come from a range of ethnicities/histories.

I thank the author again. Unfortunately, regarding my wish for more animation in the online version, I cannot offer any help.

Reviewed by Ariana Bancu, Assistant Professor, Northeastern Illinois University on 5/7/20

The areas and ideas presented in each chapter are covered appropriately and accurately. The text is comprehensive and accessible to students without prior knowledge of linguistics. Main theoretical areas of linguistics, i.e. phonetics, phonology,... read more

The areas and ideas presented in each chapter are covered appropriately and accurately. The text is comprehensive and accessible to students without prior knowledge of linguistics. Main theoretical areas of linguistics, i.e. phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, are covered in-depth, while some areas that are arguably essential to linguistics such as sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, language contact, etc., are only touched upon, but there are no chapters dedicated to them.

The content is accurate and error-free. The content is slightly biased towards Canadian English and Canadian linguistic diversity, but the author uses examples from various languages as well.

The content is up-to-date and relies on widely accepted theoretical approaches in linguistics that are unlikely to change anytime soon.

The book is very clear and accessible. Technical terminology and new concepts are well explained and supported with examples.

The terminology and frameworks presented in the book are consistent throughout the text.

Each chapter is divided into subchapters, which, in turn, are accompanied by a video lecture that is a narration of the text in the subchapter. Thus, students are able to obtain information either by reading the text or by watching the video lecture. Each subchapter has a short quiz so that students can check their knowledge of the covered material.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 4

The book is well organized; the different topics are covered in a cohesive manner. The last chapter on indigenous languages in Canada covers very important topics related to linguistic diversity and language policies that are relevant to students outside of Canada as well. The last chapter adds to the more theoretical topics that have already been covered by discussing the link between language and society, but the transition into this chapter seems a bit abrupt.

The text is free of interface issues, videos, images, and charts presented in the text appear to be clear and work well in the online format. Links to video lectures are provided in the PDF version and images and charts are clear.

The text is free of grammatical errors.

It is somewhat obvious through various examples in the text that the book is meant for Canadian students. However, the text draws on examples from a variety of widely known and lesser-known languages from different continents and it highlights the fact that all languages are equivalent from a linguistic point of view.

This is a great textbook for linguistics classes that are oriented towards linguistic analysis meant for students without any prior knowledge in linguistics. It is a good introductory text to linguistics, but it doesn't cover some of the topics (e.g. origins of language, human language vs. animal communication, language and society, language and identity, language and cognition) that students tend to enjoy more than linguistic analysis in an introductory class.

Reviewed by Tatiana Nekrasova-Beker, Assistant Professor , Colorado State University on 11/18/19

The textbook offers a general overview of the major topics in linguistics, including phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. The textbook also includes a chapter on indigenous languages in Canada, which could be an interesting... read more

The textbook offers a general overview of the major topics in linguistics, including phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. The textbook also includes a chapter on indigenous languages in Canada, which could be an interesting addition to the typical content covered in introductory level linguistics courses offered at institutions in Canada. I am a bit surprised the textbook does not address the topics of pragmatics or language variation, which, in my opinion, would have offered a more comprehensive treatment of topics in linguistics.

Pages 131-132 of a printed version (section 4.1) include a note about an error in the video. Otherwise, I did not notice any factual errors in this text.

The online version of the textbook includes video components in which the author is delivering mini-lectures with clear explanations and interesting examples. Considering the potential target audience for this textbook, the manner of content delivery is very relevant and will be appealing to students with various learning styles.

Clarity rating: 4

The content of some of the chapters might be confusing if students are working with a pdf version of the textbook, as the script does not include any visuals and it is hard to understand what the lecturer is referring to without any visual support (e.g., in chapter 10 when the author discussed the elements of word meaning). Also, there are very few references to empirical studies that are included directly in the text. In some sections, the findings are discussed but the research is referred to as “one study” or “researchers” without a clear indication of when those studies were conducted and by whom (e.g., p. 334 — a study in Montreal, also research discussed in section 10.3). This would make it difficult to track down the original work, in addition to not providing proper credits to the researchers.

Most chapters are developed following the same format: an overview of unit objectives, a lecture component for each chapter section (a video with a script in the online version) followed by a quiz, a set of activities to apply concepts to real-world scenarios, and a brief summary of the unit at the end. Because the content is presented in a very consistent manner, it would be easy to assign chapters for independent student work.

Each chapter is organized as a stand-alone unit. While the content is presented following a typical sequence (i.e., general introduction to the study of language - speech sounds - word forms, etc.), some chapters can also be assigned separately (e.g., as an additional resource to supplement instruction).

In the pdf version of the textbook, each section of each chapter is numbered (in addition to the traditional numbering, such as, Chapter 2, section 2.1, etc.). This double-numbering (for example, a section in chapter 2 is numbered as “8. 2.2 Articulation”) is a bit confusing. Each chapter is organized following the same format. It would be helpful if the chapters included a glossary and a list of key words covered in the chapter as well as a list of additional readings and/or useful resources to explore further. I am not sure how the reference section was composed, because some of the research work mentioned in the chapters is not cited in the references (e.g., research on how babies distinguish sounds in chapter 5).

Back Matter: includes two sections (Testing Keys and Keys) that present identical content… I am not sure if this is done intentionally. Once you select a chapter to view (online), the content panel disappears, so it is not very easy to go between sections of the book (and within a single chapter too), as a reader would need to scroll back to the content and then open that menu again to select a different section. I appreciated that a student is able to read the transcript of the recorded text (in case if the internet connection is not available). Also, a link to the answer sections makes it easy to check the answers as one is listening to the video and going through the questions. At some point when I was viewing the videos from the textbook site, one of the videos for chapter 1 went mute (and I had good internet connection). I had to go to the youtube channel to continue watching the video. In the pdf version, some tables are cut off (e.g., p.161, ex. 3; p.205; p.257).

The text is free of grammatical errors. The language is clear and accessible.

Cultural Relevance rating: 4

The last chapter on indigenous languages in Canada offers interesting cultural information, but this content might not be relevant to pedagogical contexts outside of Canada (as several previous reviewers have noted already). A logical addition to this text would be a chapter on cross-linguistic pragmatics or language variation to make it more appealing to a wider audience.

Reviewed by Jane Hardy, Associate Professor, Wabash College on 8/18/19

The text provides a comprehensive introduction to phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. However, it does not adequately cover sociolinguistics or historical linguistics, which are usually included in introductory linguistics... read more

Comprehensiveness rating: 3 see less

The text provides a comprehensive introduction to phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. However, it does not adequately cover sociolinguistics or historical linguistics, which are usually included in introductory linguistics courses. "Accent" is discussed in Chapter 2, but other features of language variation are not included. I did not see an index or glossary, both of which would be welcome additions.

The linguistic content is accurate and I did not perceive any bias.

The content is up-to-date and should remain relevant for some time. There are a few examples that will eventually become outdated (such as hockey players or the prime minister), but these are minor and can easily be updated.

The text is very clearly written and will be highly accessible to undergraduate students. The author builds gradually on new concepts, and new terminology is explained with examples.

Consistency rating: 4

The text is consistent in the organization of chapters and use of terminology. However, I agree with an earlier reviewer that the section on indigenous languages, while interesting and relevant, feels somewhat disconnected since it does not incorporate many of the formal features of linguistics covered in the earlier sections.

The textbook is divided into relatively short, self-contained sections, each with its own comprehension checks. It would be easy for an instructor to assign sections in a different order.

Topics are presented in the standard order, starting with phonetics and phonology, and then moving to morphology and syntax. As noted above on modularity, an instructor could easily assign chapters in a different order if desired.

For the most part, it is easy to navigate among the text, videos, questions, and answer keys. The only exceptions are a few places in the text where the reader is directed to materials from How Language Works: The Cognitive Science of Linguistics. At these points, the reader is directed to a table of contents and has to search for the corresponding sections.

I detected a few minor typos, but otherwise the writing is grammatical.

The text is culturally sensitive. The section on indigenous languages in Canada provides a much needed viewpoint on linguistic diversity, minority languages, and government oppression of indigenous peoples and language rights.

This is a clear and highly accessible introductory text for undergraduate students. The presentation of basic concepts in phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax are clearly presented and easy to follow. The modularity of the chapters and the inclusion of video lectures that are fully transcribed make the text flexible and appropriate for use in different instructional formats. Comprehension exercises are interspersed throughout the text, although I would probably want to supplement these with additional practice. One drawback of the book is that it does not include chapters on sociolinguistics or historical linguistics. For those of us who teach in the United States, the focus on Canadian English and indigenous languages of Canada might make the book less appealing to our U.S students. Overall, however, this is an outstanding introductory text that could easily suit the needs of students outside of Canada with some occasional explanation and supplemental materials.

Reviewed by Walter Sistrunk, Assistant Professor, LaGuardia Community College (LAGCC ) on 5/14/19, updated 7/2/19

The textbook covers the major areas of linguistics which are essential to understanding other subareas of the field such as historical linguistics and sociolinguistics. However, the aforementioned are not covered in this textbook. Despite... read more

The textbook covers the major areas of linguistics which are essential to understanding other subareas of the field such as historical linguistics and sociolinguistics. However, the aforementioned are not covered in this textbook. Despite omission, author successfully intersperses aspects of psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, language acquisition, and second language acquisitions in the chapters that cover phonology, morphology and syntax. Also, the author directly deals social issues such as language contact, linguistic discrimination, language preservation, revitalization, documentation, and alludes to issues involving race and social justice which is a developing area of raciolinguistics.

The content of this textbook is very accessible to first year students who are interested in linguistics or who have to take a Science or liberal arts elective. The textbook provides information that is accurate and consistent with current theory.

The textbook presents current research on indigenous languages of North America, which is an underserved areas of study, uses modern theories of linguistics, and provides illustration that are relevant and up to date.

The language of this textbook is accessible to first year students and the style in which the author writes is conducive to the colloquial speech used in the modern day classroom.

The textbook is easy to navigate and features hypertext links through out. The chapters are evenly divided into palpable sections with activities to complete at the end of each.

The textbook is easy to navigate, it features hypertext links through out. Chapters as evenly divided into palable sections with activities to complete at the end of each.

The topics in the textbook proceed in the order commonly taken up in linguistics, which follows the order in which language is acquired beginning with phonetic, phonology, morphology, syntax, and ends with semantics.

The textbook does not contain any insensitive or offensive use of language. It provides a much needed treatment of indigenous languages in the Canadian North American region.

To my knowledge, there are no grammatical errors present in the textbook.

The textbook does not contain in insentive or offensive use of language. It provides a much need treatment of indigenous languages in the Canadian North American regions.

This is a great introductory textbook for Linguistics.

Reviewed by Sandra Leonard, Assistant Professor, Kuztown University on 5/4/19, updated 11/9/20

Very useful introduction to the main subcategories of linguistics. Some additional units on sociolinguistics, pragmatics, writing systems, and sign language would be useful. read more

Very useful introduction to the main subcategories of linguistics. Some additional units on sociolinguistics, pragmatics, writing systems, and sign language would be useful.

The book seems to be accurate as far as I can discern.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 4

Very relevant. Some references are geared towards this current moment with exercises referencing current geopolitics and famous people.

Very easy to read and understand with a clear organizational structure. All terms are fully introduced.

Excellent consistency.

Excellent use of short sections, breaking up subjects and checking knowledge with frequent exercises.

Fantastic organization, all topics clearly presented.

No problems with interface that I can detect. I appreciate the fact that most charts are machine-readable for students with disabilities.

No grammatical "errors" that I can detect.

Very inclusive, though focused on Canadian English.

This is a well-presented introduction to linguistics that is very accessible for introductory students. The text is extremely well-organized, making use of multiple modes of presentation that compliment one another. I particularly appreciate the accessibility of this text with fully-transcribed video lectures, charts that are able to be text-selected and machine-read. Each section is complimented by a few exercises with a link to answers so students can check their understanding as they read. The one possible problem that I can see (at least in my case, since I am American) is that the book focuses on Canadian English. Fortunately, there are plenty of American resources for linguistics, so I will still be using this textbook with just a few resources to compliment it. This is a fantastic find!

Reviewed by Gonzalo Campos-Dintrans, Assistant Professor, University of Mary Washington on 4/30/19

The explanations are very clear and adequate as an introductory source. The comprehension exercises help the reader and can also help the instructor check for students' comprehension. The video segments facilitate understanding as well. read more

The explanations are very clear and adequate as an introductory source. The comprehension exercises help the reader and can also help the instructor check for students' comprehension. The video segments facilitate understanding as well.

The content is clear throughout. The book has a cognitive approach to language and it focuses on generative linguistics. For linguists who work on other approaches to language, some sections will still prove very useful, especially the section on native languages.

It provides the essentials of generative linguistics. The section of phonology will stay updated for a long time, the contents of syntax might be outdated but only because generative syntax theory is dynamic.

It is very clear and scaffolded

It is an introductory book to generative linguistics with a strong emphasis on phonology and phonetics. However, the last section of the book is on indigenous languages in Canada, which adds value to the book but it in a way that feels a bit disconnected from the rest, since it does not include many of the formal aspects previously seen and it is mostly the transcript of an interview. Nonetheless, there are exercises that make the student/reader put into practice what they have previously learned.

Each section is written and organized in such a way that it is possible to assign only certain sections, that is, specific chapters. The only odd thing is that each chapter is also called a "Part", e.g., "Part X. Chapter 10: Word Meaning", instead of simply "Chapter 10". In future editions, it might be useful to add commonly used names in linguistics to each chapter, e.g., "syntax" for chapter 8.

The book follows the conventional sequence: sounds, words, phrases, sentences.

The link to the videos work well once the book is downloaded from the pdf. The preset volume level is low for some videos The message "A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text" is a little odd. Overall, I had no issues reading it from my computer. The table on p. 205 seems chopped.

It is well written, I saw no grammatical errors.

The text is not culturally insensitive as far as I could see

This is a very useful introductory book to generative linguistics. However, the first part is inclusive of many linguistics approaches to language, especially tackling common misconceptions about what linguists do. The section on phonetics and phonology are well developed, but much more so than other sections of the book. The last section, on indigenous languages, can also be used for approaches other than generative. The explanations on parts of speech are very clear and intuitive, and can be used for L2 teaching or basic grammar courses. The fact that it is an electronic book allows for some nice features: jumping between sections, searching for terms, and links to short videos. All videos come with a script so the reader can choose to watch or read them. The comprehension exercises and the accessibility of the answers make it user friendly. It is a very good supplementary textbook. In describing verb agreement (p.192), where both Spanish and French are mentioned, only the French forms are used to illustrate agreement, but this is a bit odd because orally, Spanish has more differences than French, and can indeed, drop subject pronouns.

Reviewed by Leslie Cochrane, Senior Lecturer of English and Linguistics, College of William & Mary on 4/26/19

As the author's summary and other reviews have stated, this textbook covers several subfields of linguistics but not all. Sociolinguistics is mentioned by name precisely once. Some attention is paid to variation, but the discussion is mostly under... read more

As the author's summary and other reviews have stated, this textbook covers several subfields of linguistics but not all. Sociolinguistics is mentioned by name precisely once. Some attention is paid to variation, but the discussion is mostly under the term "accent" and within the English language, rather than highlighting that all languages have varieties that differ in morphology, syntax, and lexicon as well as in "accent". While not every topic can be covered in depth, a linguistics textbook that doesn't include this major subfield wouldn't work by itself for my introductory course. There is also nothing about signed languages. The section on indigenous languages and language revitalisation (focusing on Mohawk) is a valuable unit, though more specific than the rest of the text.

The content is accurate and written from a disciplinary perspective.

The content is up-to-date and should remain relevant.

The book is clearly and engagingly written. The conversational tone is a major strength in an introductory textbook.

The chapters are well-structured and important terms are consistently bolded.

The chapters are a good length to be assigned as class readings. Some explanations are ordered differently than how I would assign them. For example, in the syntax chapter, tree diagrams are explained before the concept of constituents is introduced. However, it would be relatively straightforward to tailor readings by assigning specific sections of chapters.

The chapter order makes sense. A glossary and/or index would be helpful.

The interface seemed clear and easy to use. I was able to watch the embedded videos.

As the author's summary states, the book is aimed at anglophone Canadian students. It could be assigned to students in the United States without any changes beyond mentioning this fact and bringing local examples up in class.

On the whole, this is a valuable resource for an introductory linguistics course that could be supplemented with readings on sociolinguistics and signed languages.

Reviewed by Monika Ekiert, Associate Professor, LaGuardia CC, City University of New York on 1/10/19

The textbook's strength lies in the comprehensive review of the following areas of linguistics: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. The textbook does not sufficiently address other areas typically covered in introductory... read more

The textbook's strength lies in the comprehensive review of the following areas of linguistics: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. The textbook does not sufficiently address other areas typically covered in introductory courses in linguistics, but, as the title suggests, the aim was to cover the essentials.

Linguistic content is accurate in the textbook.

The textbook content is relevant in 2019 and will not age any time soon. The main topic deals with the foundations of linguistics as a science and will stand the test of time. The Canadian references are both the strength and the weakness of this text: they contextualize the usage within Canadian English but also limit the usability of the textbook outside of Canada/North America.

This is a very clearly written text with enough examples to introduce, situate, and contextualize linguistic terminology. It is written with a lay audience in mind and can be used successfully in introductory courses in linguistics.

The chapters and the units are very consistently organized with video and practice supplements guiding the reader.

Modularity rating: 4

The text is easily adaptable thanks to the modular organization. The chapter lengths are very appropriate for college students in introductory courses. The units within chapters allow some reordering. For example, I would have liked the chapters on language acquisition to be more condensed, but with some reordering personal preferences of the instructors can be easily accommodated.

The content in the textbook is ordered in a canonical and predictable ways for any instructor of linguistics. Textbook modularity allows for easy reordering and supplementation.

The text worked well for me both online and as a PDF. One needs a reliable Internet access to use the YouTube videos which contain important complementary additions to the printed text.

Text presentation is free of language errors.

As mentioned earlier, the Canadian references are both the strength and the weakness of this text: they contextualize the usage within Canadian English but also limit the usability of the textbook outside of Canada/North America.

The textbook can serve as the main text in an introductory course in linguistics, but, depending on the syllabus, some supplemental materials may be needed for the topics that may not be considered as interesting by generative linguists, such as social use of language (discourse analysis, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, and language literacy). It is very effective in explaining the topics that it does address. The text is aimed at the Canadian learner with a focus on Canadian English. Some adaptation is needed to use it in the United States, for example. Overall, this is an excellent introductory text in linguistics and first of its kind on the Open Textbook Network.

Reviewed by Nick Dobson, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Augustana College on 11/13/18

The text doesn't aim to be comprehensive, omitting, for example, historical linguistics, pragmatics, and conversation structures. As far as I can tell, there is no index and no glossary. read more

The text doesn't aim to be comprehensive, omitting, for example, historical linguistics, pragmatics, and conversation structures. As far as I can tell, there is no index and no glossary.

The few errors I observed were already noted in the text.

The text is current. I can imagine updates that would supplement the material by expanding the topics discussed, but I don't think material will go out of date.

The text is very approachable for a general audience, & I can imagine it working well even with students in their 1st or 2nd years.

The chapters are all structured in similar ways, and chapters look forward to new material & backward to learned material effectively.

The chapter lengths are reasonable for college students, and material in each chapter can easily be covered in 1 or 2 class periods. The materials follow a logical sequence that would still allow some reordering.

The text follows a logical order, starting with phonetics and working toward ever larger units of meaning.

The text worked well for me both online and as a PDF. The only significant issue I can foresee would involve using the PDF without access to the internet. The YouTube videos contain some explanatory material not present in the transcriptions of the videos, so lack of access to the internet would reduce the effectiveness of the explanations.

I didn't notice any grammatical errors.

The text explicitly addresses indigenous languages of Canada and how other non-Western languages can be approached by Western observers.

The text doesn't set out to be comprehensive. It is very effective in explaining the topics that it does address. My biggest concern for classroom use as a main text is that it doesn't include many problem sets for students to work through.

Reviewed by Rosa Maria Castaneda, Associate Professor , Fort Hays State University on 10/27/18

The text provides videos and audio scripts to illustrate aspects relevant to the topic in discussion. read more

The text provides videos and audio scripts to illustrate aspects relevant to the topic in discussion.

To the best of my knowledge, the information presented in the text is accurate. Indigenous languages cover only those from Canada.

It is unlikely that the text will become obsolete since the main topic deals with the foundations of linguistics as a science.

The text is written with clarity and provides many examples too illustrates the main ideas.

The text is consistent in its presentation of the topic, followed by an audio and audio script, practice exercises and answers.

The text is divided between thirteen chapters, each of the chapters contains subchapters of smaller easier to read and follow sections.

Very well organized and didactic in my opinion.

The interface of the book does not display features that may distract the reader. Images and charts are clear and well presented.

No noticeable grammatical errors.

The section of indigenous languages covers indigenous languages of Canada only.

The text is an excellent resource for an introductory course in linguistics at the beginner or intermediate level. Every chapter in the text contains clear and didactic videos with video scripts, illustrations, IPA charts, that better illustrate the topics under examination. The text is aimed at the Canadian learner with a focus on Canadian English, however, the material can be used for any type of linguistics learner. In addition, this resource can be useful as a standalone or as a supplemental teaching material.

Table of Contents

• About the Authors
• Acknowledgements
• A Note to Instructors
• Chapter 1: Human Language and Language Science
• Chapter 2: Language, Power, and Privilege 
• Chapter 3: Phonetics
• Chapter 4: Phonology
• Chapter 5: Morphology
• Chapter 6: Syntax
• Chapter 7: Semantics
• Chapter 8: Pragmatics
• Chapter 9: Reclaiming Indigenous Languages
• Chapter 10: Language Variation and Change
• Chapter 11: Child Language Acquisition
• Chapter 12: Adult Language Learning
• [In progress] Chapter 13: Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics
• Appendix 1: PSRs and Flat Tree Structures
• Check Yourself Questions

Ancillary Material

About the book.

This Second Edition of Essentials of Linguistics is considerably revised and expanded, including several new chapters, diverse language examples from signed and spoken languages, enhanced accessibility features, and an orientation towards equity and justice. While the primary audience is Canadian students of Introduction to Linguistics, it is also suitable for learners elsewhere, in online, hybrid, or in-person courses.

About the Contributors

Catherine Anderson (she/her) is an Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, in the Department of Linguistics & Languages and the Director of the Gender & Social Justice program at McMaster University. She earned a PhD in Linguistics from Northwestern University in 2004, and a BA from McMaster in the department where she is now a faculty member. The thread that connects her wide-ranging teaching and research interests is partnership: collaborating with learners and colleagues to further justice and to make learning accessible and enjoyable. Catherine lives with her wife and their twin teenage sons in Hamilton, on the territory governed by the Dish With One Spoon wampum agreement between the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe Nations.

Bronwyn Bjorkman (she/her) is an Associate Professor, Research Stream, in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Queen’s University, located in the traditional shared territories of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe peoples. She received her PhD from MIT in 2011. Her research explores the interfaces between phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics, focusing on how how information is represented and transferred between formal modules of grammar. Her research has appeared in journals such as Linguistic Inquiry, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, and Glossa. The COVID-19 pandemic shifted her belief in the value of virtual and remote community into ongoing work on building meaningful social connection into hybrid and virtual events both inside and outside academia. 

Derek Denis (he/him) is a tenure-stream, Assistant Professor, in the Department of Language Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga, located within Dish With One Spoon territory and the treaty lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit. He received his PhD from the University of Toronto in 2015. His research examines language change and innovation from variationist and sociocultural linguistic perspectives, most recently focussing on the influence of immigrant youth in the emergence of a multiethnolect in Toronto. His work has appeared in Language, Language Variation and Change, American Speech, and the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development among venues. He lives in Toronto but spends as much time as possible at the cottage with his partner.

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Definition and Examples of Text in Language Studies

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• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

In linguistics, the term text refers to:

• The original words of something written, printed, or spoken, in contrast to a summary or paraphrase .
• A coherent stretch of language that may be regarded as an object of critical analysis .

Text linguistics refers to a form of discourse analysis —a method of studying written or spoken language—that is concerned with the description and analysis of extended texts (those beyond the level of the single sentence ). A text can be any example of written or spoken language, from something as complex as a book or legal document to something as simple as the body of an email or the words on the back of a cereal box.

In the humanities, different fields of study concern themselves with different forms of texts. Literary theorists, for example, focus primarily on literary texts—novels, essays, stories, and poems. Legal scholars focus on legal texts such as laws, contracts, decrees, and regulations. Cultural theorists work with a wide variety of texts, including those that may not typically be the subject of studies, such as advertisements, signage, instruction manuals, and other ephemera.

Text Definition

Traditionally, a text is understood to be a piece of written or spoken material in its primary form (as opposed to a paraphrase or summary). A text is any stretch of language that can be understood in context. It may be as simple as 1-2 words (such as a stop sign) or as complex as a novel. Any sequence of sentences that belong together can be considered a text.

Text refers to content rather than form; for example, if you were talking about the text of "Don Quixote," you would be referring to the words in the book, not the physical book itself. Information related to a text, and often printed alongside it—such as an author's name, the publisher, the date of publication, etc.—is known as paratext .

The idea of what constitutes a text has evolved over time. In recent years, the dynamics of technology—especially social media—have expanded the notion of the text to include symbols such as emoticons and emojis. A sociologist studying teenage communication, for example, might refer to texts that combine traditional language and graphic symbols.

Texts and New Technologies

The concept of the text is not a stable one. It is always changing as the technologies for publishing and disseminating texts evolve. In the past, texts were usually presented as printed matter in bound volumes such as pamphlets or books. Today, however, people are more likely to encounter texts in digital space, where the materials are becoming "more fluid," according to linguists David Barton and Carmen Lee:

" Texts can no longer be thought of as relatively fixed and stable. They are more fluid with the changing affordances of new media. In addition, they are becoming increasingly multimodal and interactive. Links between texts are complex online, and intertextuality is common in online texts as people draw upon and play with other texts available on the web."

An example of such intertextuality can be found in any popular news story. An article in The New York Times , for example, may contain embedded tweets from Twitter, links to outside articles, or links to primary sources such as press releases or other documents. With a text such as this, it is sometimes difficult to describe what exactly is part of the text and what is not. An embedded tweet, for instance, may be essential to understanding the text around it—and therefore part of the text itself—but it is also its own independent text. On social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as blogs and Wikipedia, it is common to find such relationships between texts.

Text Linguistics

Text linguistics is a field of study where texts are treated as communication systems. The analysis deals with stretches of language beyond the single sentence and focuses particularly on context, i.e. information that goes along with what is said and written. Context includes such things as the social relationship between two speakers or correspondents, the place where communication occurs, and non-verbal information such as body language. Linguists use this contextual information to describe the "socio-cultural environment" in which a text exists.

• Barton, David, and Carmen Lee. "Language Online: Investigating Digital Texts and Practices." Routledge, 2013.
• Carter, Ronald, and Michael McCarthy. "Cambridge Grammar of English." Cambridge University Press, 2006.
• Ching, Marvin K. L., et al. "Linguistic Perspectives on Literature." Routledge, 2015.
• How and When to Paraphrase Quotations
• Definition and Examples of Syntax
• What Is Parsing? Definition and Examples in English Grammar
• Texting (Text Messaging)
• Definition and Examples of Linguists
• What Are Utterances in English (Speech)?
• Definition and Examples of Interjections in English
• Speech in Linguistics
• Definition and Examples of Dialect in Linguistics
• Definition and Examples of Direct Quotations
• English Usage (Grammar)
• English Language Sentence Structure
• Definition and Examples of Text Linguistics
• Definition and Examples of Referents in English Grammar
• What Is British English (BrE)?

Home — Essay Samples — Science — Language and Linguistics — Linguistics

Essays on Linguistics

Writing an essay on Linguistics is important for several reasons. Firstly, it allows the writer to demonstrate their understanding of language and its structure, which is a crucial aspect of communication. Secondly, it provides an opportunity to explore various theories and concepts within Linguistics, helping to deepen one's knowledge of the subject. Finally, writing an essay on Linguistics can also contribute to the overall body of knowledge within the field, as it allows for the dissemination of new ideas and research findings.

When writing an essay on Linguistics, it is important to consider the following tips:

• Define your topic: Clearly define the specific aspect of Linguistics that you will be addressing in your essay. This will help you to focus your research and ensure that your essay remains coherent and well-structured.
• Conduct thorough research: Take the time to gather a wide range of sources, including academic papers, books, and scholarly articles. This will provide you with a comprehensive understanding of the topic and enable you to present a well-informed argument.
• Organize your thoughts: Before you start writing, create an outline that outlines the main points and arguments that you will be making in your essay. This will help you to stay focused and ensure that your essay flows logically.
• Support your arguments: Use evidence and examples to support your arguments. This could include citing research studies, linguistic data, or real-life examples of language use.
• Edit and revise: Once you have completed your first draft, take the time to edit and revise your essay. Check for grammar and spelling errors, and ensure that your argument is clear and well-supported.

What Makes a Good Linguistics essay topic

When it comes to choosing a topic for a linguistics essay, it's important to consider a few key factors. Firstly, brainstorming is essential. Think about your interests, current issues in the field of linguistics, and any recent research that has caught your attention. Consider the level of complexity you want to tackle and the availability of credible sources for your chosen topic. Additionally, a good linguistics essay topic should be relevant, thought-provoking, and have the potential to contribute to the existing body of knowledge in the field.

Best Linguistics Essay Topics

• The impact of technology on language evolution
• The role of cultural and societal influences on language development
• The linguistic challenges and opportunities of multilingualism
• The relationship between language and cognitive processes
• The future of endangered languages in a globalized world
• The linguistic implications of artificial intelligence and machine learning
• The influence of gender on language use and perception
• The linguistic analysis of political discourse and rhetoric
• The intersection of language and identity in immigrant communities
• The linguistic representation of emotions and feelings
• The role of language in shaping individual and collective memory
• The linguistic strategies for persuasion and manipulation in advertising
• The impact of linguistic diversity on educational practices
• The linguistic analysis of online communication and social media
• The language of humor and its cross-cultural variations
• The linguistic patterns in the speech of individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders
• The linguistic implications of code-switching and language mixing
• The role of language in the construction of power dynamics and social hierarchies
• The linguistic analysis of nonverbal communication and body language
• The linguistic representation of time and space in different cultures

Linguistics Essay Topics Prompts

• Imagine a world without language. How would human communication and interaction be affected?
• Explore the linguistic challenges and opportunities of creating a universal language.
• Create a linguistic analysis of a popular song or piece of literature.
• Investigate the linguistic strategies used in political speeches to evoke specific emotions and reactions.
• Consider the linguistic implications of the growing trend of voice-activated technology and virtual assistants.

By considering these prompts and unique topics, you can craft a compelling and thought-provoking linguistics essay that stands out from the crowd.

Analysis of Penelope Eckert and Mcconnell-genet's "Learning to Be"

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How and Why Anthropological Linguistics is Related to Ethnocentrism

Children’s first language acquisition under the scope of noam chomsky’s nativist theory, connection between language and self-concept, semantics as the field of linguistics, my passion of french language and linguistics, language and individual identity in society, factors that govern the acquisition of language, analysis of english and urdu clause, the eight parts of speech in english language, david foster wallace and his perspective on american life in connection to authority, a study on the tactics of linguistic phenomenon, emerging technology to address language barriers in urban areas, theoretical perspectives on plural morphology, a rhetorical analysis: linguistic power dynamics in oleanna, understanding language: acquisition and loss, the comparison of grammars in noam chomsky's syntactic structures theory, relations between the translators and linguists, noam chomsky and his theory of language acquisition device, language online by david barton and carmen lee: impact of the internet on the learning of language, application of neuroscience in the english learning class, relevant topics.

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Branches of Linguistics | Definitions, Scope, Important Aspects, Branches, Top Universities, Career Options

Branches of Linguistics: Whatever you try to speak and communicate is difficult. Human language is complex knowledge and abilities that enable the speaker to communicate with others. Thus they share their ideas, views, emotions, and desires with others. The way you speak depicts your expressions and feelings. Linguistic is the study of the science of languages. It defines how languages originated over time, how it is acquired, and what a person feels while expressing it.

Linguistics is a matter which deals with the nature of language. What do humans have in common? How different languages evolved. How different are human languages? How do you become familiar with a language in such a short time? Also, it deals with the limitations that a language has. In all, linguistics is a wide area of study which clears your usual doubts.

The below blog will help you understand the in-depth concept of linguistics, Macro and Micro Branches Of Linguistics, its key features, advantages, and how linguistics deals with a good career. More to know

How Will You Define Linguistics?

• What Are The Different Branches Of Linguistics and definitions?

Top Universities That Offer Linguistics Study

How linguistics bring better career options.

• What Is The Scope Of Linguistics?
• Faqs on Scope and Branches of Linguistics 

The study of different languages deals with linguistics. You make different analyses, form a different perception in your mind, and learn the different contexts of languages while dealing with them. Linguistics is a wide area of study which makes you understand the nature of a language, how humans learn them, and how it has evolved. Your language states what you feel and express. Also, know how a language can put on the fire to bring up better communication. Also, Linguistics deals with the cognitive processes that play an important role when we are learning a language.

Important Aspects of Linguistics

Important aspects of Linguistics that deals with the structure of a language

• Phonetics:  It is the study of speech sounds, thinking about their physical aspects.
• Phonology: It is the study sounds that a person makes while speaking.
• Syntax : Syntax is the formation of sentences.
• Morphology : Morphology deals with the formation of words.
• Semantics: It is the study of certain meanings.
• Pragmatics : It is the study of using a language.

Also, you will learn how different economic, social, political, cultural, and historical factors bring a change in your language and tone.

What are the Different Branches of Linguistics and its Definition?

Linguistics is a very vast topic to deal with. Thus there are different subfields formed, which are known as branches of linguistics. Different interdisciplinary branches of linguistics are:

• Historical Linguistics
• Applied Linguistics
• Sociolinguistics
• Computational Linguistics
• Psycholinguistics
• Comparative Linguistics

Let us study each one in detail:

• Historical Linguistics: Historical Linguistics defines the evolution of languages over a span of time. Also, what changes a language has to undergo from the past many years. Also, you will understand what the different languages that evolved over the years are.
• Applied Linguistics: Applied Linguistics is the branch that deals with a problem-solving way in language and to provide better real-life issues related to the language. It is a combined knowledge field that gains knowledge from other branches, including psychology, sociology, anthropology.
• Socio Linguistics: It deals with the effects of society and the social life of a person on his language. Also, it deals with the effects of the interaction between languages.
• Computational Linguistics: This factor is concerned with the perception and study of written and spoken languages. In computer science, it deals with coding and programming skills.
• Psycholinguistics: It deals with the study of various psychological factors that include how humans use and speak their language.
• Comparative Linguistics: It defines how a language is similar and different from others. It deals with the properties of a language and its origin. Also, it deals with developing languages that are two or more languages having the same parent.
• Stylistics: It deals with the study and interpretation of your tone. However, it does not limit symbolism, regional accents, dialogues, rhyme, sentence structure, etc.

Until now, we have studied different linguistics branches; you will now study how you can specialize in a language and its study. There are several universities in the world that deal with the special study of these concepts. Below are the listed top universities that offer the best study in linguistics.

• The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) (United States)
• University of Maryland, College Park
• Stanford University
• The University of California, Berkeley (UCB)
• University of Oxford (UK)
• Harvard University
• University of Cambridge
• The University of Edinburgh
• University of Massachusetts Amherst
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Also Check: Modes of Communication

Whatever your study will surely bring success and good career opportunities if done with full determination. The study of languages also brings wide options for having a flashing career. You are welcomed to take up different jobs in different sectors, including education, publishing, and language services. Below are the listed job options after studying linguistics:

• Speech Therapist
• Social Researcher
• Lexicographer
• Teaching Assistant
• Language Translator
• Public Librarian
• Research Associate
• Accent Coach
• Interpreter
• Copy Editor
• Proofreader
• Language Teacher
• Audiologist

What is the Scope of Linguistics?

The topic of linguistics is never-ending. As communication is an important part of human life, evolution in a language keeps entering. Every day we cross thousands of new words to learn. Linguistics brings an advanced scope to human life. Below are the listed subfields of scope in linguistics:

In our entire life, linguistics has real-life applications. It has provided an extensive scope of study and explore a bit more and learn the language’s nature. It brings shining future career options for you.

Do Refer: 50 Difficult Words with Meanings 

Employment Options in Linguistics

Below are the listed fields of employment after studying linguistics:

• Lexicography
• Historical Research
• Anthropology
• Speech and Language Therapy
• Linguistics Research
• Computer Science and Programming
• Social Psychology
• Editing, Proofreading & Translations

FAQ’s on Scope and Branches of Linguistics

Question 1. What are the primary important branches of linguistics?

Answer: Branches of linguistics are like their subparts which includes:

Question 2. What is the main purpose of studying linguistics?

Answer: Linguistics deals with the advancement in knowledge transfer. It deals with the study of intellectual interaction among people. You will understand how people communicate, their feelings while they speak, and why it is important to communicate. Also, you will understand how two languages are similar and dissimilar to each other.

Question 3. What is the branch of linguistics that studies meaning?

Answer: Semantics is the branch of linguistics that is concentrated on the study of the meanings of words.

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