Introduction to simple Linguistics

Language is a means to communicate, it is a semiotic system. By that we

simply mean that it is a set of signs. Its A sign is a pair consistingin the
words
of Ferdinand de Saussureof a signifier and a signified. We prefer to call the
signifier the exponent and the signified the meaning. For example, in English
the
string /dog/ is a signifier, and its signified is, say, doghood, or the set of all
dogs.
(I use the slashes to enclose concrete signifiers, in this case sequences of
letters.)
Sign systems are ubiquitous: clocks, road signs, pictogramsthey all are
parts of sign systems. Language difers from them only in its complexity. This
explains
why language signs have much more internal structure than ordinary signs.
For
notice that language allows to express virtually every thought that we have,
and
the number of signs that we can produce is literally endless. Although one
may
find it debatable whether or not language is actually infinite, it is clear that
we
are able to understand utterances that we have never heard before. Every
year,
hundreds of thousands of books appear, and clearly each of them is new. If it
were the same as a previously published book this would be considered a
breach
of copyright! However, no native speaker of the language experiences
trouble
understanding them (apart from technical books).
It might be far fetched, though, to speak of an entire book as a sign. But
nothing speaks against that. Linguists mostly study only signs that consist of
just
one sentence. And this is what we shall do here, too. However, texts are
certainly
more than a sequence of sentences, and the study of discourse (which
includes
texts and dialogs) is certainly a very vital one. Unfortunately, even sentences
are
so complicated that it will take all our time to study them. The methods,
however,
shall be useful for discourse analysis as well.

In linguistics, language signs are constituted of four diferent levels, not just
two: phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. Semantics deals with
the meanings (what is signified), while the other three are all concerned with
the
exponent. At the lowest level we find that everything is composed from a
small
set of sounds, orwhen we writeof letters. (Chinese is exceptional in that
the
alphabet consists of around 50,000 letters, but each sign stands for a
syllablea
sequence of sounds, not just a single one.) With some exceptions (for
example
tone and intonation) every utterance can be seen as a sequence of sounds.
For
example, /dog/ consists of three letters (and three sounds): /d/, /o/ and /g/. In
order not to confuse sounds (and sound sequences) with letters we denote
the
sounds by enclosing them in square brackets. So, the sounds that make up
[dog]
are [d], [o] and [g], in that order. What is important to note here is that
sounds
by themselves in general have no meaning. The decomposition into sounds
has
no counterpart in the semantics. Just as every signifier can be decomposed
into
sounds, it can also be decomposed into words. In written language we can
spot the
words by looking for minimal parts of texts enclosed by blanks (or
punctuation
marks). In spoken language the definition of word becomes very tricky. The
part of linguistics that deals with how words are put together into sentences
is
called syntax. On the other hand, words are not the smallest meaningful
units of language. For example, /dogs/ is the plural of /dog/ and as such it is
formed by
a regular process, and if we only know the meaning of /dog/ we also know
the
meaning of /dogs/. Thus, we can decompose /dogs/ into two parts: /dog/ and
/s/.
The minimal parts of speech that bear meaning are called morphemes.
Often, it
is tacitly assumed that a morpheme is a part of a word; bigger chunks are
called
idioms. Idioms are /kick the bucket/, /keep taps on someone/, and so on.
The reason for this division is that while idioms are intransparent as far as
their

meaning is concerned (if you die you do not literally kick a bucket),
syntactically
they often behave as if they are made from words (for example, they inflect:
/John
kicked the bucket/).
So, a word such as dogs has four manifestations: its meaning, its sound
structure, its morphological structure and its syntactic structure. The levels
of
manifestation are also called strata. (Some use the term level of
representation.)
We use the following notation: the sign is given by enclosing the string in
brackets: dog. [dog]P denotes its phonological structure, [dog]M its
morphological
structure, [dog]L its syntactic structure and [dog]S its semantical structure. I
also use typewriter font for symbols in print. For the most part we analyse
language
as written language, unless otherwise indicated. With that in mind, we have
[dog]P = /dog/. The latter is a string composed from three symbols, /d/, /o/
and
/g/.
We begin with phonology and phonetics. It is important to understand the
diference
between phonetics and phonology. Phonetics is the study of actual sounds of
human languages, their production and their perception. It is relevant to
linguistics
for the simple reason that the sounds are the primary physical manifestation
of
language. Phonology on the other hand is the study of sound systems. The
diference
is roughly speaking this. There are countless diferent sounds we can make,
but only some count as sounds of a language, say English. Moreover, as far
as
English is concerned, many perceptibly distinct sounds are not considered
diferent.
The letter /p/, for example, can be pronounced in many diferent ways, with
more emphasis, with more loudness, with diferent voice onset time, and so
on.
From a phonetic point of view, these are all diferent sounds; from a
phonological
point of view there is only one (English) sound, or phoneme: [p].
The diference is very important though often enough it is not evident
whether

a phenomenon is phonetic in nature or phonological. English, for example,

has
a basic sound [t]. While from a phonological point of view there is only one
phoneme [t], there are infinitely many actual sounds that realize this
phoneme.
So, while there are infinitely many diferent sounds for any given language
there
are only finitely many phonemes, and the upper limit is around 120. English
has
40 (see Table 7). The diference can be illustrated also with music. There is a
continuum of pitches, but the piano has only 88 keys, so you can produce
only
88 diferent pitches. The chords of the piano are given, so that the basic
sound
colour and pitch cannot be altered. But you can still manipulate the loudness,
for example. Sheet music reflects this state of afairs in the same way as
written
language. The musical sounds are described by discrete signs, the keys.
Returning
now to language: the diference between various diferent realizations of the
letter
/t/, for example, are negligeable in English and often enough we cannot even
tell
the diference between them. Still, if we recorded the sounds and mapped
them
out in a spectrogram we could actually see the diference.