1.1 Language, Grammar and Linguistic Theory
This book attempts to describe some of the basic grammatical characteristics of the English language in a way accessible to most students of English. For this reason we start at the beginning and take as little as possible for granted. Definitions are given for grammatical concepts when they are first used and there is a glossary at the back of the book to remind the reader of these as he or she works through it. At the end of each chapter there are an extensive set of exercises which the student is encouraged to consider and work through either in class or alone. For those students working alone, we have also provided model answers for the exercises. These are for the student to check their understanding of the material supported by the exercises and to offer observations that the student may have missed.
The uninitiated student might be surprised to find that there are many ways to describe language, not all compatible with each other. In this book we make use of a particular system of grammatical description based mainly on Government and Binding theory, though it is not our aim to teach this theory and we will very rarely refer to it directly. We use the theory to offer a description of English, rather than using English to demonstrate the theory. We will spend a short amount of time at the beginning of the book to state our reasons for choosing this theory, as opposed to any other, to base our descriptions.
Whatever else language might be (e.g. a method of communicating, something to aid thought, a form of entertainment or of aesthetic appreciation) it is first and foremost a system that enables people who speak it to produce and understand linguistic expressions. The nature of this system is what linguistics aims to discover. But where do we look for this system? It is a common sense point of view that language exists in people’s heads. After all, we talk of knowing and learning languages. This also happens to be the belief of the kind of linguistics that this book aims to introduce: in a nutshell, the linguistic system that enables us to ‘speak’ and ‘understand’ a language is a body of knowledge which all speakers of a particular language have come to acquire.
If this is true, then our means for investigating language are fairly limited – we cannot, for instance, subject it to direct investigation, as delving around in someone’s brain is not only an ethical minefield, but unlikely to tell us very much given our current level of understanding of how the mind is instantiated in the brain. We are left, therefore, with only indirect ways of investigating language. Usually this works in the following way: we study what the linguistic system produces (grammatical sentences which have certain meanings) and we try to guess what it is that must be going on in the speaker’s head to enable them to do this. As you can imagine, this is not always easy and there is a lot of room for differences of opinion. Some of us might tell you that that is exactly what makes linguistics interesting.
There are however some things we can assume from the outset about the linguistic system without even looking too closely at the details of language. First, it seems that speakers of a language are able to produce and understand a limitless number of expressions. Language simply is not a confined set of squeaks and grunts that have fixed meanings. It is an everyday occurrence that we produce and understand utterances that probably have never been produced before (when was the last time you heard someone say the bishop was wearing a flowing red dress with matching high heeled shoes and singing the Columbian national anthem? – yet you understood it!). But if language exists in our heads, how is this possible? The human head is not big enough to contain this amount of knowledge. Even if we look at things like brain cells and synapse connections, etc., of which there is a very large number possible inside the head, there still is not the room for an infinite amount of linguistic knowledge. The answer must be that this is not how to characterise linguistic knowledge: we do not store all the possible linguistic expressions in our heads, but something else which enables us to produce and understand these expressions. As a brief example to show how this is possible, consider the set of numbers. This set is infinite, and yet I could write down any one of them and you would be able to tell that what I had written was a number. This is possible, not because you or I have all of the set of numbers in our heads, but because we know a small number of simple rules that tell us how to write numbers down. We know that numbers are formed by putting together instances of the ten digits 0,1,2,3, etc. These digits can be put together in almost any order (as long as numbers bigger than or equal to 1 do not begin with a 0) and in any quantities. Therefore, 4 is a number and so is 1234355, etc. But 0234 is not a number and neither is qewd. What these examples show is that it is possible to have knowledge of an infinite set of things without actually storing them in our heads. It seems likely that this is how language works.
So, presumably, what we have in our heads is a (finite) set of rules which tell us how to recognise the infinite number of expressions that constitute the language that we speak. We might refer to this set of rules as a grammar, though there are some linguists who would like to separate the actual set of rules existing inside a speaker’s head from the linguist’s guess of what these rules are. To these linguists a grammar is a linguistic hypothesis (to use a more impressive term than ‘guess’) and what is inside the speaker’s head IS language, i.e. the object of study for linguistics. We can distinguish two notions of language from this perspective: the language which is internal to the mind, call it I-language, which consists of a finite system and is what linguists try to model with grammars; and the language which is external to the speaker, E-language, which is the infinite set of expressions defined by the I-language that linguists take data from when formulating their grammars. We can envisage this as the following:
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So, a linguist goes out amongst language speakers and listens to what they produce and perhaps tests what they can understand and formulates a grammar based on these observations.
It is the way of the universe that no truths are given before we start our investigations of it. But until we have some way of separating what is relevant to our investigations from what is irrelevant there is no way to proceed: do we need to test the acidity of soil before investigating language? It seems highly unlikely that we should, but if we know nothing from the outset, how can we decide? It is necessary therefore, before we even begin our investigations, to make some assumptions about what we are going to study. Usually, these assumptions are based on common sense, like those I have been making so far. But it is important to realise that they are untested assumptions which may prove to be wrong once our investigations get under way. These assumptions, plus anything we add to them as we start finding out about the world, we call a theory.
Linguistic theories are no different from any other theory in this respect. All linguists base themselves on one theory or another. One group of linguists, known as generativists, claim that in order to do things properly we need to make our theories explicit. This can be seen as a reaction to a more traditional approach to linguistics which typically claims to operate atheoretically, but, in fact, makes many implicit assumptions about language which are themselves never open to investigation or challenge. Generative linguists point out that progress is unlikely to be made like this, as if these assumptions turn out to be wrong we will never find out, as they are never questioned. In order to find out if our assumptions are correct, they need to be constantly questioned and the only way to do this is to make them explicit.
Because of this, it is my opinion that the generative perspective is the one that is most likely to provide the best framework for a description of language. We will therefore adopt this perspective and so certain aspects of the theory will form part of the content of the book, but only in so far as they help to achieve the main goal of explaining why English is as it is. In true generative style, I will take the rest of this chapter to try to make explicit some of the basic assumptions that we will be making in the rest of the book.