Variation in language is multidimensional. In sections 3 and 4, we have looked at how variation in social structure is reflected in the sound patterns of language and how this variation is often indicative of language change in progress. We have also seen how geographical variation in language is caused by different levels of contact between different peoples at different times. In this section, we are interested in variation in words and in their origins, meanings and contexts of use. We'll also examine change in both the choice of words and the meanings of those words.

Borrowing words

What is the origin of words like shampoo, pizza, alcohol and curry? When did they enter the English language? And why? Almost certainly, you will be able to answer these questions for at least some of these words, but we can ask the same questions with respect to words which are much less ‘exotic’. According to published counts of word frequencies, the items listed in (210) are among the most frequently occurring nouns in English:

1. (210) people, way, water, word, man, day, part, place, things, years, number, name, home, air, line

All these words have been part of the English language for centuries, and while most of them date back to Germanic languages which preceded the separate development of English, some had their origins in Latin (part, place and air, for example). Throughout its history, English has been adding to its lexicon by acquiring new words from other, often unrelated, languages.

In the previous sections of this part of the book, we have introduced a large number of the tools used by linguists when they examine words and their structure in a range of languages. From now on, we seek to apply some of these tools, beginning with the child's acquisition of words. Like most aspects of first language acquisition, this process, once started, is something that parents and other adults take very much for granted. The very first strings of sounds produced by the child which are recognised as words are greeted with great acclaim, but from then on sight is often lost of the child's massive achievement.

In considerations of first language acquisition, it is customary to be concerned with questions of order. For example, if we suppose that part of what is involved in acquiring a language is the establishment of appropriate word classes and assigning specific words to those classes, we can immediately ask whether there is evidence that children acquire word classes in a particular order. Assuming a positive answer to this question immediately gives rise to a second, more difficult question: why? Pursuit of the first question is a largely descriptive enterprise, which could be viewed as a prerequisite to seriously posing the second; answers to the second question will, if adequate, provide us with an explanatory account of some aspect of acquisition.

The previous section has concentrated almost entirely on English morphological phenomena. In fact, languages differ considerably in the extent and nature of the morphological processes employed in their grammars. Vietnamese, for example, has no bound morphemes, so that the only morphology in the language is compounding. By contrast, there are languages in which morphology is extremely intricate and accounts for much of the grammar's complexity. In this section, we will look at some examples of the types of morphological system that are found in the languages of the world, and the kinds of functions realised by that morphology. A range of the examples we consider will be seen to provide further support for the Separation Hypothesis introduced at the end of the previous section.

The agglutinative ideal

In the last century, linguists introduced a classification of morphological systems which is still often referred to today. This classification distinguished isolating, agglutinating and inflectional languages. We start with isolating languages. These, exemplified by Vietnamese, Chinese and a number of other Far Eastern languages, as well as a number of West African languages, have few, if any, bound morphemes. Thus, in Vietnamese, there is no morpheme corresponding to English -er in driver, this concept being conveyed by a compound with roughly the structure ‘drive + person’.

At the other extreme are languages such as Turkish, Finnish, Hungarian, the Bantu languages of Africa, many languages of the Americas and Australasia and most of the languages of Russia.

In the introduction (pp. 11ff.), we offered some preliminary remarks on the types of language disorders which are of most interest to the linguist. These are aphasia and Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and it is important that we re-emphasise a very important difference between these. Aphasia is a disorder of language and speech that is caused by a brain lesion which may be due to an accident or a stroke, after language has been acquired in the normal way; before the brain lesion occurred, aphasics had normally functioning language systems. By contrast, SLI is a term covering disorders in the normal acquisition of language without there being any clear primary deficit. Despite their linguistic problems, SLI children and adults have normal non-verbal IQs, no hearing deficits and no obvious emotional or behavioural disturbances; unlike aphasics, SLI subjects have never acquired language in the normal way.

Aphasia provides us with a potentially valuable source of information as to how linguistic representations are implemented in the brain. It is reasonable to suppose that we might learn how a machine (or any other physical device, such as the human brain) works by investigating how it goes wrong. In aphasic patients, there is typically some residual language left after brain damage, indicating that the knowledge of language can be selectively impaired by brain lesions, and it is by carefully studying the range and nature of such selective impairments that we hope to learn something about the interconnections of the brain mechanisms underlying language.

In the previous section, we have referred to both derivational and inflectional processes which enable us to form words from other words. The field of linguistics that examines the internal structure of words and processes of word formation is known as morphology, and in this section we shall introduce some of the important ideas in this domain by illustrating their application to English word structure.

Morphemes

Many words in English can easily be split into smaller components. Consider words like reader, printer and illustrator. These are all nouns related to the verbs read, print and illustrate, and they all mean roughly ‘person or instrument that Verb-s’. Clearly, it is the ending -er (with its alternative spelling -or in certain words) which conveys this new aspect of meaning and we can say that -er/-or creates a new noun from a verb. We can also create new verbs from verbs, as illustrated by pairs such as read ∼ re-read, print ∼ re-print and illustrate ∼ re-illustrate. Here, the new verb begins with re- and means ‘to Verb something again’. In both these cases, the complex word consists of a number of components, each with its own meaning. We call such components morphemes, and to make them easier to identify we can separate them by means of a hyphen (e.g. read-er). You will often see the morpheme described as the minimal linguistic sign. What this means is that the morpheme is the smallest component of a word which contributes to its meaning.

We began section 2 by asking how many sounds there are in English, but we found there were various practical difficulties in responding to this question and never arrived at an answer. There is a further reason why the question can't be answered straightforwardly, and understanding this is our first concern in this section. In fact, speech sounds can differ from each other in a non-discrete, continuous fashion. We can see this particularly easily in the vowel system. One of the main differences between the [iː] of read [ɹiːd] and the [ɪ] of rid [ɹɪd] is length. But just how long is a long vowel? An emphatic pronunciation of read, say in a plaintive ‘Leave me alone – I'm trying to READ’, has a much longer vowel than a non-emphatic pronunciation. The precise length of any vowel will depend on the rate of speaking, degree of emphasis and so on. A similar case is presented by the aspirated plosives. In any dialect, a [ph] sound, as in the word pit, will be aspirated to a greater or lesser extent depending on the degree of emphasis. We see, therefore, that there is a sense in which sounds form a continuum; from this perspective, there is an infinite number of speech sounds in any language.

Phonemes

Fortunately, there is another perspective from which sounds are discrete units or segments, and we can come to terms with this by asking what is the difference between the words pit and bit?

The information that is contained in appendices 2 and 3 is a slightly modified version of material appearing in Andrew Spencer's Phonology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). The authors are grateful to Blackwell for their permission to use this material.

List of distinctive features

This list includes definitions of the binary features used in this book as well as a number of others in common use which you will come across in wider reading.

One of the tasks facing a child learning his or her language is to figure out the sound system. This involves learning how to distinguish all the linguistically important differences, and also how to produce them. It's rather easier to record what small children say than to determine what they understand, so most systematic research has examined production. At the same time, it is widely believed that children's phonological perception runs ahead of their productive abilities, and this mismatch between perception and production will take on considerable significance as our discussion proceeds. Because most of the relevant research has been conducted on English-speaking children, we shall restrict ourselves to the acquisition of English.

Early achievements

It is remarkable that children seem to be innately disposed to perceive the sounds of language. In an ingenious series of experiments, Peter Eimas and his colleagues have shown that very young babies can hear the sorts of distinctions that are often used in languages and to which we have given some attention in the previous section. The techniques revolve around one idea: a baby quickly gets bored unless something different happens in its environment. Experimenters therefore play a series of identical sounds to a baby, say the syllable [pa]. At first the baby is interested and turns its head to the sound. As the sounds are repeated, it loses interest and stops turning its head.

The Principles and Parameters Theory (PPT) outlined at the end of section 22 has interesting implications for the development of a theory of language acquisition, and in particular raises the question of what it is that children have to learn about the syntax of their native language? Clearly, a major part of the task of acquiring a first language involves lexical learning (i.e. learning words and their idiosyncratic properties, see section 13). However, the question we shall focus on here is what structural learning is involved in first language acquisition – i.e. what children have to learn about the structure of sentences in the language they are acquiring. (Note that we shall be concerned here only with how children acquire their native languages, not with the very different question of how children or adults acquire foreign languages.)

Within the PPT model, certain aspects of sentence structure are assumed to be determined by UG principles (i.e. principles of Universal Grammar) and hence are invariant across languages. If we further assume that principles of UG are part of the child's innately endowed language faculty, it follows that universal aspects of sentence structure will not have to be learned (see the Introduction, pp. 7–8). For example, if clauses are universally CP+TP+VP structures and this is part of the child's innate linguistic competence at birth, it will not have to be learned.

With the exception of the Sign Languages used by the deaf, and written languages, the languages with which most of us are familiar rely on the medium of sound. Sign Languages are extremely interesting, exhibiting all the complexities of spoken languages, but their serious study requires the introduction of a considerable amount of specialised terminology for which we do not have space in an introductory book of this kind. As for written languages, they too have many fascinating features, but they are regarded as secondary to spoken languages for a number of reasons. For instance, children are explicitly taught to read and write sometime after they acquire a spoken language, and many cultures have never employed writing systems. Thus, a focus on sounds is entirely appropriate, and this part of the book is devoted to discussion of the way in which the sound systems of languages are organised and the role of such systems in the acquisition and processing of languages. We will also consider the ways in which sound systems differ from one dialect or variety of a given language to another and the changes that we can identify in the sound system of a given language over time.

Before we can discuss any aspect of the sound system of a language, we need a systematic way of describing and transcribing speech sounds, and in section 2 we introduce a standard transcription system, while explaining how the more important speech sounds are produced.

A substantial proportion of the terminology we need in order to embark on the study of syntax has already been introduced, particularly in section 9. However, there are some additional notions which are important for us to understand, so in this section we shall introduce these, integrating them with ideas with which we are already familiar.

Categories and functions

It is traditionally said that sentences are structured out of words, phrases and clauses, each of which belongs to a specific grammatical category and serves a specific grammatical function within the sentence containing it. The lexical and functional categories from section 9 are examples of grammatical categories, and as our discussion proceeds, we shall see how phrases and clauses can be categorised. The smallest type of sentence which we can produce is one containing a single clause, such as (221):

1. (221) John smokes

This comprises the noun John, which is traditionally claimed to function as the subject of the clause (in that it denotes the person performing the act of smoking), and the verb smokes, which functions as the predicate of the clause (in that it describes the act being performed). Consider next the slightly longer clause in (222):

1. (222) John smokes cigars

Here we have the subject John, the predicate smokes and a third item, cigars, which is the complement (cigars refers to the entities on which the act of smoking is being performed).