Language is a system.
Every language is based on a set of structures that work based on systematic rules. The three basic structures as we will discuss them in this course are phonology, grammar, and lexicon. These structures combine with each other according to systematic rules that are established and non-random; they are observable and reproducible. We can establish what the rules of English are by observing how native English speakers speak. This is, in fact, how all native speakers of English learn to speak it. As children we observe how others use language: we internalize the system of sounds that are used (phonology), how these sounds are combined to create words (lexicon) and how these words can be put together to form meaningful utterances (grammar). If there were no system, then all utterances would be random and therefore meaningless. No one would be able to learn the rules, and thus no one would be able to understand what anyone else was saying.
This description of language as a system applies to all languages and all varieties of languages, whether the language of the most literate and wealthy members of societies, or the language of illiterate hunter-gatherers, or of any poor or lower class speakers dwelling in impoverished areas throughout the world. We know this because all languages are equally capable of being understood by their speakers. People who live in the Bronx have no difficulty communicating with other people who live there, just as people who live in the hills of Appalachia can easily communicate with other Appalachians. Many people think that certain languages, or certain varieties of a single language, are somehow better at communication than others, or that some language varieties are sloppier, simpler, or less emotional, or more violent, or more romantic, etc. than other languages. None of this is true. All languages are equally systematic and thus all are equally able to express the concepts needed by its community of speakers.
To understand in more detail how this system works, it is useful to break language up into three basic structures: Phonology, Grammar and Lexicon.
1. Phonology
This is the study of the sounds, or phones, we make in a language. When we listen to someone speak, their speech is uttered in a continuous stream; this continuous stream can be broken up into discrete segments of meaning. These segments are called phonemes. A phoneme is “the smallest meaningful unit of sound in a language.”
Perhaps the most important aspect of the definition of a phoneme is the word meaningful. Think about how many sounds we can make with our mouths, and how few of these we actually use to speak English. We can make all sorts of grunts, clicks, and other types of noises, but out of all these possible sounds, General American only uses about 39 specific and distinguishable (i.e., meaningful) sounds to form its utterances (this number might vary depending on your specific dialect of English; many of you who speak Western American English probably use only 38). When you hear someone speaking, you are able to break up their utterances into combinations of 39 discrete segments that you consider meaningful, and the other sounds are discarded as non-meaningful. These 39 sounds are the phonemes of English.
Other languages have their own set of phonemes which may differ drastically from those used in English, and some sounds are only used in a few languages. For example, very few languages have our “th” sounds. Some languages, like Xhosa and Khoekhoe, use clicks as phonemes (similar to the tsk tsk sound we make). Watch this very short video of someone explaining the four clicks in the Nama dialect of Khoekhoe.
Although we are able to make these sounds, and we can even use them to convey a meaning such as disapproval, they are not part of the phonemic system of English. We cannot combine clicks with other phonemes to create meaningful words.
There are also suprasegmental aspects of our phonology, that is, features above the level of the segments. One such suprasegmental is accent or stress, which plays a major role in creating meaning. For example, say this sentence four times, each time with the stress on a different word:
DID you kill him?
Did YOU kill him?
Did you KILL him?
Did you kill HIM?
The meaning of the sentence changes each time based entirely on the intonation pattern of the sentence. We will, however, not consider suprasegmental features in this course, since it is difficult to study their history before recording technology.
In summary, the phonemes we use in English are a system. We use a set number of phonemes, about 39, that we combine in certain ways and combinations, to form larger units, and we discard as non-meaningful all the other sounds we make vocally (grunts, throat-clearing, clicks, snorts, etc.). If we as English speakers did not agree which sounds are meaningful and which are meaningless, then the phoneme system of English would break down and become unsystematic, and communication with other English speakers would become impossible.
2. Grammar
Grammar is the system of rules that determine the forms of words and how they can be combined into meaningful sentences. This is quite different from the type of “grammar” one learns in school, which largely consists of rules of punctuation (and thus is outside our scope here) or of prescriptive rules governing stylistic usage and what is considered “proper.” Grammar as defined by linguists can be divided into two subsections: morphology and syntax.
Morphology is the study of the forms (morph means “form”) of English, the combination of phonemes into meaningful units, called morphemes. The definition of a morpheme is thus very similar to the definition of a phoneme: a morpheme is the smallest, meaningful unit of (lexical or grammatical) meaning. Take the word walk. It is a morpheme. We can’t make it any smaller (such as *w and *alk) and have it still mean anything. Now take the word walks. This word has two morphemes in it: walk and –s. We don’t consider –s a word, but it has meaning: it means that the verb is 3rd person singular, and that it is present tense. Walk is a free morpheme because it can stand on its own, whereas –s is a bound morpheme, because it can only appear when bound to another morpheme. There are many other bound morphemes we can add to walk: walk-er, walk-ed, walk-ing, walk-athon. These bound morphemes can be further subdivided. The ones like –s, -ed and –ing do not change the meaning of the word walk; instead, they only add grammatical information. These are called inflectional morphemes, because the grammatical syllables we put on the ends of words are called inflections. The morpheme –er that changes walk from a verb into a noun referring to “someone who performs the act of walking” is called a derivational morpheme, because an entirely new word with a new meaning is derived from it.
Syntax is “the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages” (Chomsky, Syntactic Structures, p. 11). It includes not only word order but also what types of words can be placed in which positions, the agreements between words (such as noun and verb), and other related subjects.
3. Lexicon
The lexicon or vocabulary is the last of the structural parts or systems of language. The lexicon is not only all the words of a language, but also all the prefixes or suffixes used in a language, that is, the lexicon of a language is all the morphemes of that language. Thus, luck is a member of the English lexicon, but so is the prefix un- and the suffix -y that you can use to create the word unlucky. Similarly, walk is a member of the English lexicon, but so are the suffixes -ed, -ing, and –s that you can use to create the words walked, walking, and walks. In the same way that phonology has phonemes and morphology has morphemes, the lexicon of a language has lexemes. A lexeme is a basic unit of lexical meaning, regardless of how many morphemes are used to create that meaning: Thus, walk, walks, walked, walking, and walker are all forms of the same lexeme WALK.
Semantics is the study of the meanings of these morphemes. This does not mean looking up all the words in a dictionary. Semantics, rather, deals with how words can mean, where they derive their meanings from (e.g., from mental images, from usage, etc), and with how these meanings can shift or change over time. The latter is the only part of semantics that we will be concerned with in this course. The lexicon is systematic in that specific words have specific meanings, and even when these meanings can be multiplied or can shift over time, they are not random.
Finally, I want to point out one thing missing in the above summary of the structural components of English. I have said nothing about graphics, the writing system of a language. This includes the type of writing (alphabet, hieroglyphs, etc.), the spelling (orthography), and the system of punctuation, etc. None of these are truly part of language as we have defined it here. Rather they are part of a method used to record language; in other words, they constitute a technology. We will study the technology of writing in this course because simply having the ability to write has had an impact on the history of English, but I will continue to repeat throughout the semester that “Writing is not language.”
