Логинова Елена Георгиевна

8 lectures and 4 workshops

Lecture 1 27.10.2011

Linguistics is a large field, is a set of fields involving the scientific studying of language. It is the battle ground for anthropologists, philosophers, neurologists and other specialists and all of them seek to describe language and how it works from their own prospective. L is the most complex form of the human behavior. The goal of Ling is to explain how all the aspects of the L works.

Three main approaches to language:

1. Relationships between language and thought. L is the constant activity of the mind aimed at turning sounds into means of expressing thoughts (Humbolt) and feelings (Jespersen).

2. Communicative nature of L: L is the most frequently used and most highly developed form of human communication we possess (Crystal)

3. L as a system of signs – system of interdependent signs in which the value of each sign results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others (Saussure)

Some scholars try to combine all these approaches

L is a specifically human way of transmitting ideas, feelings and desires with the help of a system of arbitrary signs (Sapir).

Language is the inventory of human experience (Lockhart)

Without experience of other people’ speaking we would never learn language. Without experience of written text we would never learn about the world beyond our immediate environment.

L plays a special role in sorting out experience because it shapes cognition and is being shaped by it.

L can be seen as a structure and as a process of communication, as an instrument of gaining experience and as a reflection of this process.

Functions by Jacobson:

• Addressee-regulative

• Addresser – emotive

• Context – communicative

• Message – cognitive

• Contact – phatic

• Code – metalanguage – indicates the ability of language to explain, to name and criticize its own features/ Language is used as a coat in discussing language.

Metafunctions of any semiotic system (Kress and van Leeuwen)

• Ideational – to represent aspects of the experiential world outside its particular system of signs.

• Interpersonal – to project the relations between the producer of a sign and the receiver of that sign.

• Textual – to form texts, complexes of signs which cohere both internally and within the context in and for which they were produced.

Language as a system of signs and a structure

Saussure’s dichotomies:

• Langue (the L system) and parole (the act of speaking)

Langue is a “storehouse”, the sum of word-images stored in the minds of individuals. It is a social phenomenon.

Parole is the actual, concrete act of speaking on the part of an individual. It exists at a particular time and place and is opposed to langue, which exists apart from any particular manifestation of speech.

It is langue as a vast network of structures and systems – more important.

• Synchronic and diachronic approaches to language

System is an ordered set of elements or a group of interrelated parts and the term system can be applied only to the state of L at a certain moment of its development.

• Syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations between language units

Zvegintsev: THE TERM STRUCTURE IS MORE ADEQUATE

Benvennist: a structure is a certain arrangement of interconnected elements which can be substitute for each other. Each element of a structure is defined by the whole, i.e. by all its connections by the other elements. Taken in isolation any element loses its essential characteristics. Change in any part of a structure triggers off a seres of changes in other parts and changes the whole.

Stepanov: system is a whole that consists of elements and relations among these elements. The whole determines each element.

Alefirenko: L is an aggregate of units that has a certain order. Units, unlike elements are relatively independent and each of them displays the main features of the whole system. Structure is an aggregate of links and relations between language units.

L is a strictly coherent system of systems (the system of pronouns, of inflections, etc.). They tend to be integrated within a larger whole.

Aristotle: Linguistic signs as means of manifesting the impressions a human being gets when perceiving objects of the outside world.

Potebnya: a sign substitutes for the corresponding images or concepts; it represents them in flow of thoughts and can be called a representation

Charles Peirce: we think only in signs, nothing is a sign unless it’s interpreted as a sign

Sign consists of signified and signifier. The signified is a mental concept.

The sign is the whole that results from the association of the signifier with the signified (Saussure)

The relationship between the signifier and the signified – signification.

Signs only make sense as part of a formal, generalized and abstract system (Saussure)

Saussure’s conception of meaning was purely structural and relational rather than referential: “Within the language system everything depends on relations”.

Tha value of a sign is determined by the relationships between the sign and other signs within the system as a whole.

Signs are arbitrary: there is no necessary relationship between the signifier and the signified.

Signs are conventional

Signs are inventional: they’re sent by a sender who wishes to communicate and understandable only by those who understand what is coded in the sign.

By Pierce:

Icon – a sign that has a direct link with the object it stands for.

The signifier is perceived as resembling or imitationg the signified (onomatopoeic words, a portrait, sound effects in radio drama, imitative gestures)

Index a sign whichwould lose the character which makes it a sign if its object were removed.

The signifier is not arbitrary but is directly connected in some way to the signified, e.g. “natural signs” (smoke, thunder, footprint, echoes)

Symbols – a sign which would lose the character which renders it a sign if there were no interpretant (words)

The signifier does not resemble the signified but which is fundamentally arbitrary or purely conventional – so that the relationship must be learnt.

In most semiotic systems signs are not emotionally colored, they are neutral in terms of emotions or evaluation. The word as the central linguistic sign is usually loaded with some connotative meaning.

In most semiotic systems each sign can have only one meaning, the majority of words are polysemantic.

Being arbitrary by nature, the word can still become motivated as a result of some word formation process. Saussure – L system has a certain rationality.

Unlike signs in other semiotic systems, linguistic signs (words and morphemes) are productive elements because they can be used to create new signs (word formation).

Lecture 2 3.11.2011

Language and Thought

All the theories of L and T range between identification of T and L and their absolute segregation. At one extreme is the common sense view that language just provides names for thoughts that exist independently. Language offers ways of expressing pre-existing thoughts. Anв the adherence of this approach see the relationship between L and T as a mechanical external connection between two distinct processes.

Sapir – language is an outward facet of thought on the highest, most generalized level of symbolic expressions.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – the language we speak determines what we can think. “Language acts as a polarizing lens on a camera in filtering reality- we see the world only in the categories of our language”.

The Hopi Indians have the conception of the time which cannot be grasped.

English uses nouns to refer to phases in a cycle of time, such as summer and morning.

Hopi treats phases as continuing events. Worlds like “morning” are translated into Hopi as a kind of adberbs such as “while morning phase is occuring”.

English tenses divide time into three distinct units: present, past, future; whereas Hopi verbs do not indicate the time of an event as such, but rather focus on the matter or duration of an event.

Vygotsky managed to introduce some notions to get the idea of the relationships of l and t.

Where do L and T meet?

Word meaning is an integral part of word as such, and thus it belongs to the realm of L as much as to the realm of thought.

WM is a unit of L as system of signs and it is a unit of speech.

Generalization is a verbal act of thought.

Every word is already a generalization. That means that L is not a nomenclature that provides labels for pre-existing thoughts. L generates its own categories. And the higher forms of human intercourse are possible only because man’s thought reflects the results of categorization.

Why is the focus on categorization?

The ability to categorize, i.e. to judge that a particular thing is or is not an instance of a particular category, is an essential part of cognition.

Categorization is often automatic and unconscious.

WM is a unit of both generalizing thought and social interchange and it is of great value for the study of thought and language.

In wm thought and l unite into verbal thought.

T is not merely expressed by words; it comes into existence through them.

Every thought tends to connect something with something else. That is to establish relationships between things. WE can see that every thought moves, grows and develops, fulfills a function, solves a problem.

This flow of T occurs as an inner movement through a series of planes:

• The plane of external speech

• The word meaning plane

• Plane of inner speech

• Plane of thought itself.

The external and the semantic aspects of speech develop in opposite directions – one from the particular to the whole, from word to sentence, and the other from the whole to the particular, from sentence to word.

Beyond this plane is the plane of inner speech. It is not speech minus sound. It has an entirely separate speech function. IS is a specific formation with its own laws and complex relations to the other forms of speech activity.

Ego-centric speech is a stage of development preceding inner speech.

Ego-centric speech disappears at school age.

Both fulfill intellectual functions; their structures are similar; one changes into the other.

The main distinguishing traits of inner speech:

• Peculiar syntax: compared with external speech, inner speech appears disconnected and incomplete. Meaning is in the fore-front. Inner speech works with semantics, not phonetics.

• Inner speech is to a large extent thinking in pure meanings.

• Specific semantic structure contributes to abbreviation.

Semantic peculiarities of inner speech:

• Superiority of the sense of a word over its meaning: the sense of a word is the sum of all the psychological events aroused in our consciousness by the word. It’s a dynamic, complex whole, which has several zones of unequal stability.

• Meaning is only one of the zones of sense.

• A word acquires its sense from the context in which it appears; in different contexts it changes its sense.

• Meaning remains stable throughout the changes of sense.

• The dictionary meaning of a word is no more than a stone in the edifice of sense, a potentiality that finds diversified realization in speech.

• A word in a context means both, more and less, than the same word in isolation. It means more because it acquires new content. It means less because its meaning is limited and narrowed by the context.

• The sense of a word is a complex, mobile phenomenon; it changes in different minds and situations and is almost unlimited.

• Word and sense are relatively independent of each other.

• The predominance of sense over meaning, of sentence over word, of context over sentence is the rule.

• Word combination is a kind of agglutination (way of combining words).

• As egocentric speech of the child approaches inner speech, the child uses agglutination more as a way of forming compound words to express complex ideas.

• The way in which senses of words combine and unite: the senses of different words flow into one another – literally “influence” one another – so that the earlier ones modify the later ones.

Thought

• Thought creates a connection, fulfills a function, and solves a problem.

• The flow of thought is not accompanied by a simultaneous unfolding of speech. The two processes are not identical, and there is no rigid correspondence between the units of thought and speech.

• Thought has its own structure, and the transition from it to speech is no easy matter.

• In the mind of the speaker the whole thought is present at once, but in speech it has to be developed successively.

• Precisely because thought doesn’t have its automatic counterpart in words its transition from T to word leads through meaning.

• Thought itself is engendered by motivation.

• Behind ever thought there is an affective-volitional tendency. To understand another’s speech it is not sufficient to understand the words. We must understand the thought. We must also know the motivation of thought.

Conclusions:

• Verbal thought is a complex, dynamic entity.

• The realization of thought and word is a movement through a series of planes

• In reality, the development of verbal thought takes the following course: from the motive which engenders a thought to the shaping of the thought, first in inner speech, then in meanings of words, and finally in words.

Language and Thought from the point of view of cognitive Linguistics:

WE all possess general cognitive abilities to cognize the surrounding world

It can take place in both verbal and non-verbal forms, but only language can reveal the mechanisms of cognition. It is a channel to penetrate into our minds.

The world around us is not meaningful but it acquires meaning through human mind.

Meaning-construction is inferential process

Meanings are cognitive structures embedded in our patterns of knowledge. Our complex conceptual structures are manifested in language use and comprehension.

Meaning as a mental representation may be structured and organized in different ways:

• Schemas

• Frames

• Scenarios

Lecture 3 10.11.2011