The Science of Everything Podcast - Episode 66: An Overview of Language Part 1

Episode Date: September 29, 2014

In this first of a two-part episode, I discuss the phenomenon of language. Here we consider phonetics, how sounds are produced and articulated, phonology, how different sounds are distinguished from one another and treated across different languages, morphology, how sounds are combined into units of meaning called morphemes, and in turn how these are combined into words, and syntax, how words are put together in accordance with particular rules to form sentences.

listening to The Science of Everything podcast, episode 66, an overview of language. I'm your host, James Fodor. In this episode, or what possibly will turn into two episodes, because I've got a fair bit of material here, but we'll see how we go. We're going to look at language, particularly I'm going to look at the various subfields of linguistics, and look at the various insights and perspectives that they bring to light on understanding how language works and what it is and how it functions. So, in particular, we're going to look in turn at phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics. These are all different sort of levels of analysing language building from the very simple and small aspects to the large and complicated ones. No real recommended pre-listened for this episode, although it will be a fair, or parts of it will be a fairly nice complement to the episode on knowledge representation, which was episode 64.

Okay, so without further ado, let's get right into. it. And before we begin, though, we must begin by defining what we mean by language, or at least having some sort of basic definition out there so that we know what we're talking about. Linguistics is the scientific study of language, and language, broadly speaking, is the human system for relating sounds or gestures or symbols and meaning. So language is an abstract system which places a relationship between some abstract thing. It could be a gesture, a science, a symbol, a squiggle, or a sound, or anything like that. It relates, so language relates to that abstract symbol to some sort of meaning,

which is, well, meaning in the head, in a sense, some cognitive attitude that we have to something. That's a very broad definition, but it's about as well as we can do in the short time we have available, and it's good enough for our purposes. There is a lot of controversy as to exactly how many languages there are in the world. There's something like 6,000, but it's difficult to classify. There's controversy as to exactly how complicated something has to get before it becomes language. That's related to the question of whether other animals have language. I think the general consensus is that they don't.

They have maybe proto-language at best, but it's not as complicated and as rich as human language is. And there are all sorts of other questions as well. But we're going to sort of sidestep them for now and just focus on these different subfields within linguistics and different components of language. Very important, though, to emphasize early on, that language is not the same as speech. Speech is a particular manifestation of language, or language can be instantiated in speech, but they're not the same. So you can instantiate language in written form, and through Braille, for example,

or even whistling sign language is just as much a language as any spoken language. So they're all different manifestations of the underlying broad category, or under-overarching concept, which is language, and that's what we're going to be looking at mostly today. That is the broad principle of language which can then be applied in many particular cases. There's also another important principle which I think is often misunderstood, is that linguists, some linguists do study the differences specifically in, say, syntax or grammar, or phonology or whatever, between the different languages around the world. But that's only one subset of language.

A lot of linguists study much broader principles, which are applicable across sort of all languages. or at least that's the idea. So being a linguist or knowing about linguistics doesn't necessarily have anything to do with being able to speak lots of different languages. You could be a perfectly good linguist and still be a monolingual

only speak one language. So they're quite different things. All right, that being said, let me now introduce you to the various subfields of linguistics which we're going to look at in turn throughout this episode or probably two episodes. Phenetics is, beginning at sort of the very basic the very basic level of the smallest components of language and then building up.

Phonetics is the study of the physical properties of speech, sound production, and perception. So this is most specifically related to speech, although I suppose you could potentially extend it to other aspects as well. So phonetics is concerned with understanding how speech is produced in the vocal cords, in the mouth, and how those sounds are transmitted through some medium, and then how they're detected and processed by the ear and the brain and so on. So it's really sort of physics-biology-based phonetics. One step up from there is phonology, which is the study of sounds as abstract elements in the speaker's mind

that can make a difference to meaning. That might sound similar to phonetics, but I'll explain later as to how those are different because they are actually quite distinct. Next level up from that is morphology, which doesn't study individual sounds, but studies groups of sounds joined together to form individual units of meaning.

So a phoneme is the, smallest unit of sound that's recognized in a language, and that's what's studied in phonology. Phonologists study phonemes, broadly speaking. A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning in a language, and that's what's studied in morphology. So a morpheme is often made up of more than one phoneme, more than one sound. The next level up from that is syntax, which is the study of how words combine to form grammatical sentences. Just as individual phonemes join together to form one morpheme, and then you can have more than one morpheme joining together to form a word. More than one word joins together to form

a sentence, but of course there are rules which determine how those words can be put together to form a correct sentence, and those are what is studied in syntax. Semantics, which is closely tied to syntax, but distinct from it, is the study of how meaning is instantiating language. So syntax will often just be concerned about, is a sentence grammatical or is it not grammatical? Where does the subject go and the object go, and what are the very abstract principles that govern how we can put these words together to form a grammatical sentence, but it often doesn't care too much about what the sentence means or how we extract meaning from that. Semantics is concerned with that question of meaning, and how we can get different meanings from the same sentence or the same meaning from different sentences. The next level up from semantics in terms of abstraction and generalization is pragmatics, which studies how utterances are used to communicate ideas, and in particular how context affects the meaning of utterances, and how that shapes how we understand what people are saying.

And finally, the broadest level of linguistics, which I'm going to consider here at least, is what I'm calling sociolinguistics, that you could give it slightly different terms as well, which is the study of how society, cultural norms and expectations affect the way that language is used and also the effects of language use on society.

So that's got to do with things like prestige dialects and things like that, the relationship between language and class and cultural identity and things like that. So those are the subfields that we're going to look at. These are all different sort of ways of understanding language, components of language, aspects to it, from the sort of very simplest combination of sounds up to the very broad level of society. And it's really quite absurdly ambitious for me to put all these in one podcast episode.

What I want us to do is to give an overview and outline of what language is about, what linguistics is about, to try and understand how things fit together. Obviously, I'm going to be making a lot of simplifications and skipping over a of things quite quickly. So this is only very much an introduction to these ideas. That being said, though, let's make a start, and we're going to start with the smallest field, which is phonetics. So this is the study of the production and transmission and perception of speech sounds specifically. Phonetics is, in turn, traditionally subdivided into three sub-areas, articulatory phonetics, acoustic phonetics, and auditory phonetics.

Articulatory phonetics is the study of the production of speech sounds by the the vocal tract and mouth of the speaker. And that's really where I think what I'll focus on mostly, because that's where the most interesting stuff in terms of language is found. Acoustic phonetics is the study of the physical transmission of speech sounds from speaker to listener, and that has really a lot of ideas related to physics of sounds and waveforms and even electrical engineering and things like that, which we've talked a little bit about it in some past episodes, and so I won't really focus on here. Auditory phonetics is the study of the reception and perception of speech sounds by the listener, and a lot of that relates to hearing, which we also discussed in a previous

episode, so you can look for that there. Now, one important concept in phonetics, which I want to mention, is that of the international phonetic alphabet, which is the most popular standard that is used in linguistics and related fields for representing the sounds that speakers make and the way that different words are pronounced in different languages. Just to motivate this, you might think, well, can't we just write the word down? The thing is, as particularly English speakers would have noticed, although this applies really to any language, the spelling of words and the form that they have when written,

this is called orthography, is very different to the way words are pronounced. In some cases, they're similar, but in a lot of cases they're quite different. Words that are spelled similarly can be pronounced in completely different ways, and similarly, words that are pronounced the same way can be spelled very differently. And also, orthography changes, differently to pronunciation. So we might change the way we spell a word, but not change the way we pronounce it, or vice versa. The pronunciation changes over time without the spelling changing. So there's really not a very close connection between orthography and pronunciation.

There are also many more different sounds that are made in languages than different symbols that we use to write things down. So you think about the letter A, for example, can be pronounced in all sorts of different ways, which are not very well represented by the single letter A. So in order to study the sound production more carefully, we need a more rigorous relationship where there's a one-to-one relationship between the sound and the symbol. This is unlike traditional writing systems where that almost never holds. And so this is where the international phonetic alphabet comes in. This is a way of representing all the different possible speech sounds that can be made by humans and which are found in language and giving a unique symbol to each one.

And there are lots and lots of different symbols, and I certainly don't know all of them, and it's pretty complicated. You should look up, I might post this on the Facebook page, an example of a piece of English which is written in normal English and then contrasted with writing it out in international phonetic alphabet in terms of how it's pronounced. And of course that will vary depending on the speaker and what type of accent they have, whereas the normal orthographic form is the same regardless of what type of how it's read. But it's quite interesting to see how different they are and how the representations vary. Okay, so having introduced that, I now want to talk a little bit about articulatory phonetics, which is how we produce speech sounds,

and more particularly the different types of speech sounds that are produced. Now, to produce any type of sound, there must be a movement of air, because that's what sound is. To produce sounds that people can interpret as words, the movement of air must pass through the vocal cords and vibrate the vocal cords, move up through the throat, into the mouth or the nose, and then leave the body and then propagate itself through the air. Now, essentially, the way we modulate the air as it's passing through our vocal cords in mouth and nose determines what type of sound will be produced. And there are basically three different ways that we can modulate these sounds.

We can modulate them by using our lips, by using our teeth, or by using our tongue and its position in the mouth, or, of course, a combination of these things. And we can also modulate them, I guess, through changing the air itself and how that's produced and the volume of and so on. But what I want to do here is just touch on a few of the key terms that are used to describe how these sounds are produced. Before we get to that, though, I need to define the difference between vowels and consonants. And you've almost certainly heard this before. In English, the vowels are A-E-I-O-U, and the consonants are everything else.

But what's the significance of these things? Vowels are actually extremely important. They're one of the most core ideas in phonetics and phonology. A vowel is basically speaking where we make a sound with an opal vocal tract so that there is, no buildup of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants where there is some sort of constriction or closure. So if you think of consonants like T and D and N and Z and R, there's always a constriction of air somewhere there, an F, a V, a B, P, M, you're always constricting the air somewhere, whereas O, E, I, there's

no constriction. The air is just coming out in slightly different ways, but that's the basic idea. And this dichotomy between vowels and consonants doesn't work perfectly because there are, particularly in some languages, sounds which kind of have aspects of both, and then there's the things that can act as sort of quasi-vows in English, like Wise, for example, can sort of act as vows in some words. But anyway, for our purposes, vowel is when there's no constriction, consonants, there's a constriction somewhere in the vocal tract. That's the basic distinction.

Now, consonants are much richer and more varied, because there are many different ways we can make constrictions, so I want to now move into, I now want to discuss briefly some of the different types of articulations. and words that are used to describe them. And this helps, I think, to understand the relationship between sounds and how some sounds are more similar than others. So, one term is bilabial. This simply means using both lips. Labial, referring to the lips and bi-meaning too.

So bilabial sounds in English are things like B and P and M. When you think about how you make those sounds, you're bringing both your lips together. B-p-p-m. So hence the sounds are referred to as bilabial sounds. labiodental sounds are articulated by touching the lip and teeth together. So, F and V are labiodental, because the bottom lip and upper teeth come together. Again, think about how you pronounce F and V, they're labiodental. Interdental, in English, is the TH sound, is produced by inserting the tip of the tongue between the teeth.

So, again, try and produce that sound without putting your tongue between your teeth. It's impossible because that's how you produce it. So that's an interdental sound. An alveolar sound are those that are produced where the tongue is raised sort of towards the top of the mouth in some way. So T-D-N-S-Z-L-R-R-R, the tongue is moved towards the top of the mouth in that way. It's going to be moved in a slightly different positions depending on the exact sound. A palatal is produced when you raise the front part of the tongue to the palate,

which is sort of the hard part of the top of your mouth. So in English, the Y sounds from like, yes, is produced like that, y, you have to move your sort of tongue up to the hard part of the palate. I think, perhaps a slightly better example, is the CH sound in German, which is pronounced, like in the word nicht, it just pronounced as a he. And again, to produce that sound, you have to move your tongue up to the hard part of the palette. And there are a few others as well, but those are sort of less well-known or less common.

In particular, there are some types of sounds that aren't really used in English, and so are very hard for English speakers to produce. And when they appear in other languages, they can be very difficult for English speakers to replicate. Okay, so that gives you a flavour of what phonetics is about, about understanding how, particularly articulatory phonetics, how the lips and the tongue and also the nose are used to produce different types of sounds. That reminds me, I wanted to say one more thing about different types of vowels. Nasal compared to oral vowels is an important distinction.

A nasal vowel is one produced when the sound is coming out of the nose, the nasal passages, whereas oral vows simply through the mouth. So if you say that a sound is nasalized, it means that it's produced by having some sound passing, sorry, some air passing through the naval passages. So that's another important distinction to make. But anyway, hopefully that gives you an idea of what type of things we study in articulatory phonetics and how they can contribute to understanding language. Moving on then from phonetics to phonology,

which is concerned with the systematic organization of sounds within languages. Now, it's important to understand how phonology is different to phonetics, because they sound similar and kind of are similar. They certainly relate to each other, but they're not the same. So phonetics studies the particular sounds themselves and how they are made and heard, in terms of really very physical phenomenon. Phonology studies phonemes. Phonemes are abstract cognitive units of sound, which are considered to be distinct within a particular language. So a phoneme is what can be described as the smallest unit that may, the smallest linguistic unit, that may bring about a change in meaning.

So if you change from one phoneme to another, even a single phoneme in a word or a sentence, it can potentially change the meaning of the sentence, or at least make it confusing. So one way of telling this is looking for what are called minimal pairs. You look for instances where changing just a single sound can change the meaning of the word, and that's how you can tell if that constitutes two different phonemes. So kill and kiss are the same except for the one phoneme at the end, the L to the S. And so that's how we can tell that those two phonemes exist in English, because those two words are different, just changing that one sound. To give an example of how phonetics differs from phonology,

you can have many different phonetic sounds, which are nonetheless considered by a particular language or speakers of a particular language to be the same phoneme. So an example is the letter P in English. It can be pronounced in at least two different ways, so-called aspirated and un-asperated or not aspirated. And that just basically means whether there's a puff of air when you pronounce it, a p-p-pah sound,

where there's a sort of a plosive production of air, is called aspiration. So when we say the word, when English speakers, say the word pot. Normally there's a sort of a plosion of air, so that's an aspirated p. However, in a word like spot, the p is not aspirated. If you hold your hand in front of your mouth, you won't, well, normally at least, you won't find very much air coming out when you pronounce the P and spot. It's almost a little bit more like a B in the sense that you don't have a big purr, a big burst of air. So pot and spot both have a P, and to English speakers, the sound is the same.

It's a pur sound. But actually, if you look at the way that it's a bit, produced in terms of articulatory phonetics, it's not the same exact sound. There's a difference. And in fact, other languages do make that distinction. Those two sounds are different phonemes to them, but in English they're what are called allophones of the same phoneme. That is, they're just different ways of saying the same phoneme. If you interchange them between spot and pot, it would sound maybe slightly odd to say them that way, but the meaning would be clear. It wouldn't change the meaning. On the other hand, if you interchange L and R, in English, then you get completely different words.

Library is a sensible word, but Ribery just doesn't make any sense. Someone might be able to work out what you were saying, but it would be different from interchanging the sounds of P and pot and spot. That might just be a slightly different way of saying it, whereas if you said Ribery, people would look at you funny, and if you're lucky, guess what you meant. So L and R are quite distinct phonemes in English.

But in other languages, like some Asian languages, these are not distinct phonemes. They are not distinguished. And as such, people who, from certain, or English-speaking cultures who learn English, have trouble making the distinction between L and R, because they're not separate phonemes in their first language. Another example is the, well, according to one source, six different ways in which the letter T, or the phoneme T can be pronounced in English.

So it can be pronounced as in cat or top, flapped, winter, or stop. Now, if you say those slowly and think about them, they're all slightly different ways of pronouncing it, but we don't distinguish between them in English. They're all the same phoneme. For the Mandarin speaker, however, there's a distinction between at least some of those. So the reason that these are considered to be different languages and others is essentially because children, when they're first-born and first-learning language, can make the distinction between all of these different sounds. But as a used language, some of these distinctions are important in terms of meaning and producing correct words, whereas others are not. Those are those that are. are important are emphasized, and so the children learn to make a distinction between them, and those that are not important are de-emphasized, and so essentially we become accustomed to hearing them interchangeably or just not making a distinction between them. So phonemes are abstractions of speech sounds, they're not the sounds themselves, so they don't have a direct phonetic transcription like you do in phonetics, where there's one sound, one symbol. It's not the same in terms of phonemes, because a single phonem can be pronounced in a lot of different

ways. What constitutes a phoneme depends on the particular language, and differs from one language to another, whereas phonetics, particular phonetic sounds, don't vary from one language to another. That is, how they're used might vary. Some sounds might be found in some languages, not others, but the sounds are universal. They just can be produced by anyone who puts their lips and tongue

and whatever in the right position. So phonemes are language-specific and can vary in the way that they sound, whereas phonetic units are not like that. So a single phoneme can be pronounced in lots of different ways, whereas a single phonetic unit is pronounced in exactly one way. Well, that's not quite true because there are still issues with, say, prosity and speed and volume and things like that in terms of phonetics, but we'll bracket those for the moment. So the sort of things that phonologists would study are looking for minimal pairs or other distinctions in languages to find out whether particular phonemes are present or absent.

Another thing that might be done is looking at language change, so how phenomic elements can arise in a language or be dropped from a language over time. So, for example, the sounds F and V, and V, used to be considered part of the aspects, or allophones, excuse me, is the proper word, aliphones of the same phoneme in English, but then later they came to be distinguished. So looking at how this changes over time is part of a field called historical linguistics, how languages change over time by changing the phonemes that are found in them. Okay, so that's enough on phonology. Let's move on to the next level up, morphology. Morphology is concerned with the identification and the study and description of particular morphemes in a language.

Now, a morpheme is usually considered to be the smallest grammatical unit in a language, which has some meaning to it. So phonemes are sort of the smallest unit of sound that's distinguished in a language, and changing the phoneme can change the meaning, but a phoneme by itself doesn't usually have any meaning. If I just say Puh or V, that doesn't mean anything. If I say something like word or when, for example, those are morphemes. They're also words, but they're morphemes. They're comprised of more than one phoneme. You put the phonem together in the right order, and what you get is a single meaningful unit. Now, a morpheme is not the same as a word.

A morpheme can be a word, but a morpheme can also be a component of a word. So generally longer words are made up of more than one morpheme, more than one meaningful unit. So morpheme itself is a word which has two morphemes in it. There's morph and then there's eam. The morph essentially refers to shape, and eam is just sort of a generic unit of linguistic structure. So there are similar to phonemes and many other eames. So to give another example, happiness has several different morphemes in it.

There's the happy part and the nis part, which tells us that it's a noun. The sort of classic example of one of the longest words in English, which is seldom used, but is nonetheless an actual word that has been used sometimes. anti-disestablishmentarianism has a whole bunch of morphemes in it. Anti-disst, ablish, or able-ishment. Anyway, you can break it down into all the different morphemes. Morphems can't necessarily sit by themselves as words. So N-S is a morpheme, N-E-S, which is a suffix appended to the end of a word to turn it into a noun.

But you can't just say Ness as a word that doesn't mean anything by itself. It does mean something by itself. It has a meaning as a single morphine, but you can't just say it as a single word. So it's important to make this distinction here. Even something as simple as the sound S to make a plural, that's actually a morpheme because it carries meaning by itself. Cat to cats, those are two different words,

which means slightly different things, and the S carries meaning by itself. In that case, it's a phoneme and it's a morphine, because it carries meaning, and it's also a single sound. It's a phoneme, whereas cat is a morpheme, but it's not a phonem because it's made. made up of a number of different sounds. So every word comprises one or more morphemes,

cats in that case, two morphemes cat plus s. We usually say that the root is the main part of the word that sort of stands by itself. So in that case, cat would be the morphine root and then the s would be the additional morpheme appended to fulfill some grammatical function in this case. So there is a distinction made between two different types of morphemes. Derivational morphemes are used when you change the semantic meaning or part of speech of the affected word by adding suffixes or prefixes or whatever to the root. So that's how you would turn happy into happiness. You change the part of speech.

Or kind into unkind, you change the meaning. Purpose into purposeful. Those would be derivational morphines. You're building words out of them. In flexual morphines are used to modify the tense of a verb or the number of a noun or things like that. So that's dog to dogs or wait to waited or things like that. Those are sort of less interesting. They're usually just more suffixes to the add-on to change the tense or something like that.

The derivational morphins are, I think, more interesting because you can sort of build those up and quite long, complex words. Now, it turns out that word is actually a sort of tricky concept in morphology, because it doesn't have a very clear definition. So, for example, sometimes there's a distinction drawn between a word and a word form. So a word would be the more abstract idea that's being conveyed. So in that sense, dog and dogs would be the same word. Whereas word form would refer to the specific way it's been instantiated and said.

So dog and dogs would be different word forms, but the same word. So verbs would be profitably analyzed in this way, because wait and waited would be the same word, but different word forms. You've just conjugated it differently. Whereas dog and dog catcher would be different, they refer to different things. So even though they both have the same word dog in them, you could talk about them as being different words. But of course the way we write out dog catchers with a space in between dog and catcher. But that's kind of arbitrary, really.

Dog catcher is really referring to a single thing there. It's not just two words put together. It's a single thing, a dog catcher. And so in some sense you could just call that whole thing a word. Indeed, we could hyphenate it if we wanted to, or just combine it together into a single compound word. It wouldn't really change anything in terms of how we use the word or what it means. So even this distinction between what is one word and two words is kind of arbitrary as well and difficult to define. consistently use a set of two or three words together to mean one particular thing. Is that one word or is it two words or what is it exactly? Is it a word or is it a word form? It gets very tricky. In German, for example, German is sort of well known for forming very long compound words where in English we would use multiple words to the same thing? So is this one word in English and one word in German and multiple words in English or is it really one word in English as well and we just sort of put spaces between? It's a bit arbitrary. It's a bit arbitrary.

as to how you catch that out. One interesting subfield in morphology is called word formation. So this is looking at the process of how words are formed and how they're built up from existing morphemes and other words. So shamelessness is an example. That's comprised of three morphemes. Shamelessness. We add them together to form a different word.

So that's called derivation. That's one way in which words can be formed. Another way is by blending different parts of words together. So an example of a blended word is brunch, which is when you combine breakfast and lunch, you sort of mush them together to form brunch, or smoke and fog, smog. It's different to derivation. Derivation is when you add prefixes or suffixes to existing words and build them up into a longer term, and so you can break it up into meaningful morphemes. Whereas breakfast, sorry, whereas brunch and smog, you can't really break them up into

their own component morphemes because they're not put together in a modular way like that. They're just sort of mushed together. They're blended together. So breakfast and lunch blend together to brunch, whereas shamelessness add together, concatenate together to form shamelessness. So that's the difference between derivation and blending. Then there are of course acronyms where we form a word from the initial letters of some phrase. Laser, for example, and most people don't know, is actually an acronym, or I suppose it was originally an acronym. We usually don't think of it as an acronym anymore, which stood for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, which is a description of the process by which laser light is produced.

So that's another way that words can be formed. A nilogism is interesting. These are completely new invented words that people just come up with. So quark is an example of that, which refers to a subatomic particle. It's just an invented word, essentially. There are also things called eponyms, which is a subcategory of neelogism. This is when a word for a particular thing or person comes to be used to describe something more general. So an example is Xerox.

That originally referred to a particular company, but now people just use it as a sort of a synonym of photocopying something. Orwellian. originally referred to George Orwell, the author of 1984, but now it's used as a generic term to refer to some sort of oppressive dictatorial regime or policy or something like that. There are also lone words where you borrow a word from another language, so English is renowned for doing this, English borrows words all over the place from different languages, cliches from French, for example, that's an example of a lone word. And there's Onomatopoeia, where the words imitate the sounds that they're supposed to describe. These are particularly used for sounds that animals make, like bar and woof and koku and things like that. Although, automatopoe is kind of interesting because different languages describe animal sounds in different ways,

so it's not exactly clear how much it's really imitating the sound, but there's at least some relationship there. Whereas there's clearly no relationship between tree and a tree. The sound has nothing to do with a tree, whereas the sound wolf does actually have something to do with the bark of a dog. There's some correlation there, but not perfect. Anyway, so those are some of the different ways that words can be formed in languages, and studying the morphemes can help us to understand what's going on there. All right, so that's enough on morphology. It's time to move up to the next level, from looking at words and parts of words up to sentences, putting words together into sentences. Syntax is one of the more formal areas, sub-aries of linguistics, because it's related to grammar and the formal rules that distinguish grammatical from ungrammatical sentences.

And it's very, very complicated, and we can unscatch the surface here, and I won't go into too many technicalities. There's just a few sort of key points that I want to hit on to give you a feel for what sort of, uh, things that are discussed in syntax and what type of understanding it can give us. It is important to understand, though, that syntax is not the same as prescriptive grammar. Prescriptive grammar is saying that this is a good sentence and this is not a well-form sentence, that you shouldn't speak in this way. So, prescriptive grammar are things like not starting a sentence with but, or not saying ain't, or things like that, things that are not considered to be good English or good, whatever

other language. That's prescriptive grammar, and that's not the same as syntax. In syntax, generally linguists don't actually care about that. They don't care about what speakers of a language think is good. That would almost be a part of sociolinguistics, which we'll get to. It's not what's good English or what sounds proper. It's just, what do people actually say and consider it to be grammatical? So, a sentence like, I ain't doing that, is not really a proper English sentence.

So a prescriptive grammarian would maybe say that that's not grammatical. But it is grammatical from a linguist sense, because a competent speaker of English would recognize that and judge it as being correct English, correct in the sense if it makes grammatical sense. It fits together as a well-formed sentence, even if it's not sort of a good sentence in some sense. But on the other hand, a sentence like, ain't won't dog, gonna, just doesn't make any sense at all. It's completely ungrammatical. No one would say that.

Whereas someone would say, I ain't goinga, but they wouldn't say, gonna I ain't. Well, maybe they would say that. But if you just imagine jumbling up the words from any sentence in a random order and asking, asking the question, is this a grammatical sentence? Every competent speaker of the language will say no, because it just is completely meaningless. The words are in completely the wrong order and it'll make any sense. That's different from saying, well, this is a well-formed sentence grammatically, and I understand what you're trying to say, but I sort of don't like the way you've said it. That's more what a prescriptive grammarian would say. So it is very important to keep those distinct because languages can get sort of a bit annoyed when those are conflated because they're really not the same at all. There's also a distinction which particularly was drawn by Chomsky, although ideas I think go back before him, about the difference between, well, Chomsky called it I language and E language. So that's written as a small, lowercase, E, or an I, and then a hyphen and then the word language.

So I language or E language. And it's basically distinguished, the basic idea is making a distinction between competence and performance in language. So I stands for internal and E stands for external. And the idea is that there's a distinction to be drawn between a person's internal representation of language, their linguistic competence, what they know and understand, and actual performance of language or manifestation of that competence, which is external language or e-language. And the idea is what we want to really study, or at least what Tomski was interested in, is the internal representation of the language. We're not interested in if the person happens to make a mistake in pronunciation or in grammar or something like that when they say something or when they write. What we're interested in is their internal representation and what their knowledge is, what their competence is with the language. So it's predicting what utterances would sound correct to native speakers of the language,

not what native speakers of language would happen to say in a given instance, because that's going to be affected by all sorts of factors, which we're not really very interested in about how much the person is concentrating and how quickly they're speaking in whom they're speaking to and on and on and on. We're interested in the real competence that's underpinning that, not the performance as such. Now, syntax is related to semantics because the form and structure of a sentence is, of course, going to be very directly related to its meaning, but they are not the same thing. You can study syntax without necessarily studying much about semantics, and Chomsky, Chomsky is a very famous linguist, by the way, if you haven't heard of him, look him up, because he's pretty much the man in linguistics. Chomsky famously gave the example of a sentence which is perfectly grammatical, which an English speaker will agree that, yes, it's grammatical.

makes sense, but it doesn't mean anything. So when I say it makes sense. What I mean is literally that it's a well-formed sentence. It adheres to the rules of the grammar, but it doesn't have any meaning. And the example of the sentence he gave is, colourless, green ideas sleep furiously. Now, if you think about this sentence, it is grammatical. It's got a subject and an object in the verb, and it all fits. But it doesn't make any sense. It's meaningless. So the idea here is that we can have a syntax without any semantics. And indeed, you can have semantics without a syntax as well, because I can convey meaning to you in many other ways other than merely by articulating a syntactically correct sentence. In fact, silence can convey a lot of meaning in many

contexts, but of course there's no syntax to that. So they are distinct. You can have one without the other. In many instances, though, of course, the meaning will depend on the syntax of the structure of the sentence, but I think it is useful to understand how they can distinct. One important idea that is useful in syntax, although it's more directly related to sort of old-style prescriptive grammar, but it's useful in syntax as well, is looking at different parts of speech, different functions that words can fulfill in sentences. So a big distinction there is between nouns and verbs.

Nouns name something. They refer to some entity or thing, quality or property, whereas a verb is some sort of action or occurrence or state of affairs. There are some people who have even criticized this very basic distinction as not being meaningful, and it's interesting if you think about it. Like, what exactly is it that walking and being have in common with each other versus police officers and happiness have in common as entities. I mean, why are those entities and being and walking and not entities?

I mean, when you think about it, this gets very philosophical. But anyway, usually we can draw a distinction between nouns which name things and verbs which relate to actions. And normally for a sentence to be grammatical, there needs to be a verb in there somewhere. You can't really have a sentence without some sort of verb in it. You can have sentences which have implied verbs, or whether, yeah, the verb is not stated, but it's implied, or there's some sort of contraction that's made or shortening, but it has to be there somewhere. Normally, a sentence has to have a subject, a verb and an object. So the subject is what is performing or doing the verb.

So, I went for a walk, I am the subject, because I did the walking. You went for a walk, you're the subject, because you did the walking. She gave me a bag of chips. She is the subject, because she's doing the giving. I'm not the subject. I'm not doing the giving. I'm not the one doing the verb. The object is the person to whom the verb is being done.

So, I have a dog. The dog is the object, because I, I being the subject, I have, the verb, a dog. Dog is the object, it's the thing that I have. So the really loose way of thinking about it is that the subject does the thing, does the verb, and the object has it done to them. I have a dog. I own a dog. Dog is the object.

I spoke to you. You are the object. Sometimes the same thing can be the subject and the object. So I wash myself, then I am the subject and the object. That's an example of what we call a reflexive sentence, and that's why we use the word myself. You don't say I wash me because me is not the correct form of the word there. We use myself when it's a reflexive sense, when you're doing it to yourself. But you shouldn't use myself in another context.

So as for myself, it's not really correct because you're not doing anything to yourself. But again, that's more a question of prescriptive. grammar than descriptive syntax. But anyway, that's subject and object, which is an important thing to understand. And a sentence generally has to have an object, a subject, an object, and a verb. Different languages will put those in different orders, and sometimes they can be implied, of course. Other parts of speech include pronouns, so these substitute for nouns or noun phrases. So them, it, he, those are all examples of pronouns. They substitute out for nouns. Or a noun phrase is just a bunch of words which put together form a noun like police officer.

for example, is a noun phrase, or that dog over there is actually a noun phrase, because I'm talking about that thing. An adjective is a word that qualifies a noun or a pronoun, so big, ugly, those are adjectives. A verb, as we said, it's an action, an adverb is a modifier of a verb, or it can also modify another adjective or another adverb, or a sentence more general, so very or really, those are adverbs. A preposition is, establishes the relation between things, basically, so in or two, or four, those are prepositions. Conjunctions link different components or sentences together or clauses in a sentence, so and or but, however, those are conjunctions, and interjections are essentially exclamations of things.

Ouch! Or, hey, those are interjections. Now, linguists have argued that this is a oversimplification of the parts of speech by presenting them in just these eight different categories, and there are actually many more of them. Adverb, they say, is a pretty lousy class because it's just a sort of a grab bag for everything else that doesn't fit anywhere else. And it's a bit dubious as to exactly what counts as a preposition. And some languages don't really seem to have prepositions in the same way that we do have in English. There are lots of debates about these sorts of things. I'm not as interested in those for our purposes here because I just want to give an overview of the different parts of speech.

And to give you a feel for how we analyze the structure of the sentence. Because what we do is we break it up into parts. We look at, well, what's the subject and what's the object and where's the verb? And then within the object and within the subject, we can break those down further. well, adjectives and nouns and things like that. So, I bought that dog over there. I is the subject. Bought is a form of the verb.

And that dog over there is the object. And then within that dog over there, the object, we can break it down into the dog, which is a noun, and over there, well, there is perhaps a preposition. Over there is maybe a prepositional phrase. And then I could throw an adjective, so that ugly dog over there, then that would be an adjective, and you break it down further and further.

You can nest clauses inside other clauses, so get more and more complicated. If you remember yesterday, that dog over there which I bought, which you also gave to me and that other person, you know, you can have lots of commas and nested clauses and it gets all very, very complicated. You can build these diagrams which are called phrase structure trees, which break the sentence down into its component parts. And it's also called passing, a way of passing, the sentence is making sense of what he's said. And it's interesting, some sentences can be parsed in multiple different ways, which gives completely different meanings. So a classic example of this is, let's eat grandma. Let's eat, grandma.

is, if you pass it in that way, what is being said is let's eat. So that's essentially an injunction to eat. Let us eat. Eat is the verb there, and us is the subject. And there's a comma, or imply comma, and grandma is essentially who is being addressed. It's an indication of whom we are speaking to. On the other hand, let's eat grandma. We are still the subject of that, but now there's an object, and the object is grandma,

so we're being instructed to eat grandma. Completely different meaning of the two sentences, even though that they're structure is the same, well, the structure is the same in the sense that the word order is the same, but if the structure is completely different in terms of the past trees, if you put this out in diagrams, we'd be analysing them in different ways. In one, grammar is the object, in another it's not the object, it's whom we're addressing. It's very interesting to see how we can disambiguate sentences by breaking them down into their pastries and looking at how they can be understood in different ways. One final point, which is a bit of a tangent from what I was just talking about,

but I would feel extremely remiss in not mentioning in a podcast about language. And this is Chomsky's Noam Chomsky's theory of universal grammar. This is his sort of really big idea. The idea is that the idea of universal grammar is something like that humans are born with some sort of innate grammar or syntax that somehow encoded into their brains or encoded into their genetics, I suppose, ultimately, which we then use to help us to understand language. And that's not saying that the grammar of every particular language in the world is the same.

Obviously, different languages have different specific grammatical rules. But the idea is that underpinning them all is a single common structure, sort of a deep structure, I think Tromsky referred to it as. And that's one of his key research interests is to try and work out what this deep structure is, what commonalities of structure there are across different languages. The reason, while there are a number of arguments put forward as to why this universal grammar must exist, one argument is what's called the poverty of the stimulus, that children learning language are not exposed to enough information to allow them to determine

the difference between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. And so there must be something sort of inbuilt into them, some genetically programmed knowledge that they come with, which allows them to make that determination. Another argument is that we're capable of understanding all sorts of sentences which have never been heard before. Sentences that are completely different to anything we've heard before, and yet we can still make sense of them, and that might be a bit easier to understand if we have this notion of innate grammar. And there are various other arguments put in favour of this as well, and I don't get into all of these here.

You could do a whole podcast episode on just this question alone. There are also many arguments against universal grammar, that the whole idea is silly and that there's no genetic mechanism for it, and that we don't see evidence of this cross-languages and so on and so on. But I just wanted to mention the idea of universal grammar so that you've heard of it, and it's something that will be discussed in linguistics if you look at syntax and things like that. Okay, so I think I will bring this first part of the episode to a conclusion. Next time I'll talk about the remaining issues of syntax and semantics and pragmatics,

and we'll look at how those shape language. Thanks for listening. Hopefully you've found this interesting. If you'd like to get in touch with me, my email address is Fods12 at gmail.com. That's F-O-D-S-1-2 at gmail.com. If you have questions or suggestions, feedback, or even just, you know, you want to say that you listen to the show and you enjoy it or you hate it or whatever. I love to hear from listeners, so please feel free to get in touch. Also, I would be exceptionally grateful if you would take a few minutes to jump onto iTunes and find the podcast and give a star review or a written review even better or both of those.

it really helps to improve the visibility of the podcast by giving those and keep it up in the search results and so on, which I really appreciate and is sort of the main thing that you can do if you would like to support the show. So thank you very much for listening, and I'll talk to you next time.