Language Evolution: A Changing Perspective - ScienceDirect.com
Language has been commonly viewed as representing a profound change in thought, appearing suddenly and uniquely in humans, with communicative language as a ...
linguists
From ancient times, religion and philosophy have regarded language as a faculty bestowed uniquely and suddenly on our own species, primarily as a mode of thought with communication as a byproduct. This view persists among some scientists and <anchor>linguists</anchor> and is counter to the theory of evolution, which implies that the evolution of complex structures is incremental. I argue here that language derives from mental processes with gradual evolutionary trajectories, including the generative capacities to travel mentally in time and space and into the minds of others. What may be distinctive in humans is the means to communicate these mental experiences along with knowledge gained from them.
Linguists - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics
# Linguists

Linguists are scientists who engage in the scientific study of language, aiming to understand the linguistic knowledge and behavior of humans. Their work can involve theoretical inquiry, descriptive description of linguistic facts, or be based on an inductivist model of science.

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## Linguistics as a Science

A common description of linguistics is that it is the ‘scientific study of language.’ Like other scientists, linguists are engaged in a process of inquiry, attempting to understand phenomena in the world. Linguistics faces specific issues associated with the fact that its subject matter is the linguistic knowledge and behavior of humans. The work of many theoretical linguists can be understood in broadly Popperian, or post-Popperian, falsificationist terms. But not all work in linguistics can be understood in this way. Descriptive linguistics, for example, is less concerned with theory than with the pure description of linguistic facts. Some approaches are based on an inductivist model of science.

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## Building Better Mousetraps

The FBI recruiter's uncertainty about how and where to apply different branches of linguistics is based on misconceptions that are still a problem today. Even the term “linguist” engenders confusion. “To most government and military agencies, ‘linguist’ means ‘translator’”. To others, it means “English teacher”. The closest encounter with linguistics for most students in the United States is the surprisingly controversial inclusion of sentence diagramming in the standardised tests widely used for entry into higher education (SATs).1 Grammar teachers in school, Phipps says, are generally “prescriptivists; people who tell us we don't speak proper English”. The subject is not widely liked.

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## Conclusion

Linguists, especially those interested in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and English for Academic Purposes (EAP), as well as English as a Second Language (ESL) or English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and technical writing, may be interested to find out more about this genre and the related processes and skills. The book serves them, among others, by helping to identify interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary issues and approaches, many of which may go beyond their interest. Nonetheless, investigating these will prove useful.

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## Linguistics: Overview

### Linguistics as a Science

Linguistics achieved its academic identity during the twentieth century, shaped in the first few decades by a series of pioneering and influential personal statements (notably de Saussure, 1916; Sapir, 1921; Bloomfield, 1933), consolidated in the middle decades as a university subject at both undergraduate and graduate levels, and reinterpreted in the later decades by a new generation of scholars concerned to give the subject a sound theoretical foundation (notably Chomsky, 1957, 1965). In Europe, its origins lay chiefly in a reaction to the philological curiosity about the history and origins of language, which had preoccupied the nineteenth century; in the USA, the primary impetus came from a concern to provide a linguistic dimension to the anthropological investigations of American Indian cultures. But the subject also benefited from an increased general interest in the study of language in relation to human beliefs and behavior (e.g., in philosophy, theology, information theory, literary criticism, communication studies), which manifested itself at both popular and specialized levels. The development of the media, especially broadcasting, further helped to bring language issues to the forefront of national consciousnesses, as did the demands made by foreign-language teachers and other ‘language professionals’ for more sophisticated information about their subject.

The multiplicity of interests in the subject, each with its own intellectual agenda and methodologies of inquiry, brought a profound appreciation of the range and complexity of linguistic phenomena, and thus of the need to develop a research discipline with its own principles and procedures. Early on, linguistics came to be viewed as a ‘science’, and attempts were made to define its axioms and make its investigative procedures explicit (e.g., Bloomfield, 1926; Hjelmslev, 1943). Linguists emphasized their concern to make their studies systematic and objective, by contrast with the selective impressionism which had characterized much previous literary and pedagogical work on language. A great deal of attention was devoted to making investigative procedures clear and well defined. There was a significant growth, fostered by progress in acoustic technology, of experimental techniques, especially in phonetics. And there was an unprecedented concern for precise definition, clear and comprehensive description, and more powerful explanation. An emphasis in the first half of the century on the procedures for describing individual languages, or the features of language families, changed during the second half into an emphasis on the universal, defining properties of language, and on the nature of language viewed as part of human biology and psychology. Yet there were significant continuities too. Chomsky's focus on the distinction between linguistic competence and performance, and on the status of language as an ‘organ of the mind’, echoed Saussure's notions of the collective language system ( langue) and its concrete manifestation in utterance ( parole), and of the human language faculty ( faculté de langage).

Because of its claims to scientific stature, the subject has often been referred to as ‘linguistic science’, but sometimes a designation of ‘linguistic sciences’ will be encountered. The choice hinges on the perceived standing of phonetics. In the ‘plural’ interpretation, phonetics is seen as a separate discipline, which along with linguistics makes up the linguistic sciences. The reasoning is that the subject-matter of phonetics – which includes acoustics, anatomy, physiology, neurology, and auditory perception – is so different from the ‘rest’ of linguistics that it cannot sensibly be subsumed under the same heading. Moreover, its methodology is very different, both in its experimental approach and in its reliance on technology. It is, some argue accordingly, a prelanguage study, and its findings need to be brought into relationship with those of linguistics. Others, however, point to the fact that the bulk of the subject deals only with those aspects of sound production and processing that are relevant to the production of spoken language.

Phonetics focuses on such entities as vowels, consonants, and pitch movements, and not on such noises as whistles, hiccups, and burps, even though these are also made by the vocal apparatus. Its aim is to explicate speech sound, and as it is speech which is the ground of being for all languages (writing being present only in a proportion of instances), this alternative argument sees phonetics as the ‘indispensable foundation’ (Henderson, 1971) for linguistics – one branch of a single linguistic science. (The term ‘linguistics’, of course, avoids the need to make a decision.) A similar issue appears when the focus is on speech alone. Speech science (or speech and hearing science) is the study of all the factors involved in the production, transmission, and reception of speech; but speech sciences will also be found, when there is a need to emphasize the constituent disciplines involved.

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## Evolution of Syntax

### Conclusion

Some linguists are reluctant to discuss a topic where the data is so remote. But the data of ‘everyday’ linguistics is also remote in that it is buried in the minds of language users at a level not accessible to consciousness. Recent work means that we now have a fuller understanding of evolution in general and linguists have been working on formulating and testing clearly stated hypotheses on the evolution of language, including the evolution of syntax. Continuing developments in the study of language and syntax have also helped linguists make significant progress in our attempt to understand the nature of syntax and language and how they evolved. While there is as yet no general consensus, there is a clear sense of an emerging interdisciplinary research program concerned with the evolution of language in general and with the evolution of syntax in particular.

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## History of Linguistics: Discipline of Linguistics

### The Meaning of ‘Language’

That linguistics is ‘the scientific study of language’ has become a cliché, but what it means to be ‘scientific’ may not always be obvious, and what people mean when they use the word ‘language’ varies from occasion to occasion. Consideration of what is involved in being scientific is deferred until later in the essay, for now it suffices to observe that only a few aspects of language have been illuminated by theoretical (scientific) linguistics, so there are many areas where it has little, if anything, helpful to say. The situation is akin to that in biology, viewed as the science of living things. Despite their importance to us, biology has nothing to say about the definition of pets; similarly, despite their relevance to us, linguistics has nothing to say about the definition of dialects.

In everyday usage, ‘language’ is used differently, depending on whether it is construed as a property of the individual, of society, of the species, or as an autonomous entity in the world. Linguists working in the tradition of ‘generative’ grammar, the framework that has dominated linguistics for the last 50 years, argue that an ‘individual’ approach to language is logically prior to any other, but in principle we have the possible domains shown in (1), each suggesting different kinds of questions:

(1)Language and the IndividualLanguage and the BrainLanguage and SocietyLanguage and the SpeciesLanguage and LiteratureLanguage and the World

Looking at ‘Language and the Individual’, the central question raised is ‘what constitutes our “knowledge of language”?’ What properties or attributes does one have to have to be correctly described as a speaker of English, or Burmese, or any other ‘natural language’ – the term linguists use to refer to languages naturally acquired and spoken by humans, as opposed to the ‘artificial’ languages of logic or computing? An extension of this question is how and where knowledge of language is represented in the brain, and what mechanisms need to be postulated to enable us to account for our use of this knowledge. Neurolinguistics is an area of remarkable growth, supported by technological advances in imaging.

Under ‘Language and Society’, sociolinguists raise questions such as ‘What are the social variants (class, age, gender, power) that determine, or correlate with, the use of particular forms of the language?’ A woman might use some pronunciations or grammatical constructions with statistically significantly greater frequency than a man of the same age, or a female of a different generation. For the world's multilingual majority, social considerations may even determine which language is used in specific situations. A Swiss from Graubünden might use Romansh at home, Swiss German at work, and High German at a conference.

Looking at ‘Language and the Species’, we might be preoccupied with the puzzle that all human children learn their first language with seeming effortlessness, while the young of other species, however intelligent, show minimal such ability. Linguists, and researchers in related fields, investigate not only whether this claim to uniqueness is indeed true but, if it is, how the faculty evolved.

When we turn to the relation between Language and Literature, we confront several issues: ‘What is literary form?’; that is, what are the linguistic properties that make something a novel or a novella, a sonnet or an epic? How are literary effects achieved? What are the linguistic characteristics of a particular style?

Looking at ‘Language and the World’ raises issues of three different kinds. First, how does language relates to things outside the head? That the word ‘London’ refers to the capital of the United Kingdom is innocuous enough as an informal claim, but it raises interesting, and vexed, philosophical questions. The debate revolves around the status of language as a property of an individual, rather than as an entity with independent existence. This ‘external’ notion of language is presupposed by those who write irate letters to the press, inveighing against split infinitives, and lamenting the fact that our language is becoming degenerate, either because of the sloppiness of modern youth, the pernicious influence of text messaging, or the role of multiculturalism. The third issue is in many ways the most obvious and the most puzzling: Why are there so many languages? Why does ‘human’ have so many dialects?

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## Cognitive Science: History

### 1.4Linguistics

Linguistics began to move towards a central role in the emerging interdisciplinary discussion of mind and brain around the time of the 1956 MIT conference. In the early decades of the twentieth century, linguistics had changed its emphasis from reconstructing the history of languages to studying the structure of languages. Structuralist linguists such as Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and the positivist Leonard Bloomfield focused on lower-level structural units (phonemes and morphemes). In the 1950s, post-Bloomfieldian Zellig Harris turned his attention to syntax and introduced the idea of transformations that normalized complex sentences by relating them to simpler kernel sentences. This idea launched a revolution in linguistics when it was further developed by Harris's student Noam Chomsky at the University of Pennsylvania and then MIT. In his 1957 Syntactic Structures, Chomsky proposed the idea of a grammar as a generative system—a set of rules that would generate all and only members of the infinite set of grammatically well-formed sentences of a human language—and argued that finite state and phrase structure grammars, though generative, were inadequate. A series of transformations was needed to obtain an appropriate surface structure from an initial deep structure created by means of phrase structure rules.

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## Area and International Studies: Linguistics

Linguistics is relevant to area and international studies in the following areas: (a) understanding the geographical distribution of peoples (typology, dialect geography, historical linguistics, fieldwork, and language planning and intervention); (b) understanding different worldviews (linguistic anthropology, discourse analysis, literary analysis, and poetics); and (c) language learning (through the development of pedagogical and reference materials). Since 1950, linguistics has experienced a fascination with mathematical models, in an attempt to provide a formal analysis of the universal features of language. This theoretical perspective of ‘formal linguistics’ marginalizes or excludes issues relevant to area and international studies. Since the 1980s there has been a renewed interest in the relationship between language function and language form, known as ‘functional linguistics.’ Because the context of language and its role in meaning are central to the functionalist view of linguistics, the potential contribution of functional linguistics to area and international studies is great. Professional incentives for creating pedagogical and language reference materials are lacking. However, vast resources of language data available on the Internet and strategic funding initiatives offer opportunities for linguists to generate useful materials and undertake research relevant to area and international studies.

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## Area and International Studies: Linguistics

### 3Linguistic Contributions to Area and International Studies

Many time-honored endeavors of linguists (investigation of unknown languages, research on the relations among languages, preparation of descriptive and pedagogical materials) yield valuable results for area and international studies. Relevant methods and results are discussed under three broad headings below.

#### 3.1Contributions to Understanding the Geographic Distribution of Peoples

Linguists use the empirical methods of fieldwork to discover the facts of existing languages, recording features of phonology (language sounds), morphology (shapes of words), syntax (grammatical constructions), and lexicon (meanings of words). Investigation of how these features vary through space is known as dialectology, and each line on a map corresponding to one of these features is known as an isogloss. Isoglosses usually correspond to geographic (mountains and rivers), ethnic (often religious), or political (more often historical than current) boundaries. Despite the use of scientific discovery procedures, linguists do not have an operational definition for language as opposed to dialect.

Language is often closely tied to national identity, and the cohesiveness of a given speech community is often more dependent upon the sociopolitical imagination of speakers than on the number of features they share or the number of isoglosses that divide them. Chinese, for example, is a remarkably diverse linguistic entity that elsewhere in the world would probably be considered a family of related languages. There is only a gradual cline rather than a bundle of isoglosses between Macedonian and Bulgarian, and the speakers do not agree on the status of their distinction: Bulgarians believe Macedonians are speaking a ‘Western Bulgarian dialect,’ whereas Macedonians assert they are speaking a distinct language. Minor dialectal differences are sometimes amplified for political gain. The various ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia that speak the language historically known as Serbo-Croatian have used relatively minor distinctions as flags of national identity, claiming distinct languages in order to fracture the country and justify seizure of territory.

The aim of historical linguistics is to discover relationships among languages. Historical linguistics uses two methods to arrive at a description of historical changes and their relative chronology. The first method is internal reconstruction, which compares linguistic forms within a single language in an attempt to reconstruct their historical relationships. The second is the comparative method, which compares cognate forms across related languages in an attempt to arrive at how modern forms developed from a shared proto-language. Any given language change usually spreads gradually across the territory of a language. Over time this yields isoglosses, the primary material of dialect geography, and these isoglosses reflect the relative chronology of historical changes. Thanks to historical linguistics, we know a lot about how languages are related to one another, information valuable for understanding the history, migrations, and ethnic backgrounds of peoples.

Despite considerable removal in both time and space, linguistic relationships continue to inspire political and other behavior. During the Cold War Ceaucescu's communist regime raised money by selling babies for adoption to infertile French couples; this plan played upon a desire to procure genetically related offspring, since both Romanian and French are Romance languages. The notion of Slavic unity was used to justify much of the Warsaw Pact, and after the break-up of the Soviet Union Solzhenitsyn suggested that the Belarussians and Ukrainians join Russia to form a country based upon the relation of their languages (since Belarussian, Ukrainian, and Russian constitute the East Slavic language subfamily).

Languages in contact can influence one another regardless of any genetic relation. As a result, groups of contiguous languages tend to develop shared features, known as areal phenomena. The languages of the Balkans include a variety of South Slavic and other very distantly related Indo-European languages, among them Serbo-Croatian, Albanian, Macedonian, Romani, Greek, and Bulgarian. Together they share certain features, pointing to a greater unity of the Balkans that transcends their diverse heritage. Sustained or intensive language contact can result in the creation of new types of languages.

This takes two forms: one is ‘creolization,’ two or more languages melded into a new language; and the other is ‘pidginization,’ a simplified version of a language (often borrowing words from another language). An example of a creole is Papiamentu, a mixture of Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and indigenous languages, spoken in the Dutch Antilles; pidgin English is a language of trade created in Asia and the South Pacific for communication between indigenous peoples and outsiders. A further type of linguistic coexistence is ‘diglossia,’ the use of one language for spontaneous oral communication, but another language for formal and literary expression. For example, after two centuries of German domination removed Czech from the public arena, the Czech National Revival resurrected a literary language from an archaic Bible translation. As a result, there is a significant gap between spoken Czech and the Czech literary language.

Typology compares the structure of both related and unrelated languages. Typology suggests a positive correlation between the severity of geographic terrain and the density of linguistic diversity (Nichols 1990). Perhaps the best example is the Caucasus mountain region, arguably a part of the world with more languages per unit of inhabitable surface area than any other, predictably matched by a high level of ethnic and political tension. Global linguistic diversity is threatened by the phenomenon of language death, and it is predicted that 90 percent of the world's languages will disappear by the end of the twenty-first century (Krauss 1992, p. 7). Endangered languages are those of minorities who must acquire another language (of a politically dominant group) in order to survive. Protection of minority rights requires protection of minority languages, and can entail fieldwork and the preparation of pedagogical materials. Another significant language-planning issue involves the status of languages in the Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union. After decades of Russian domination, the majority languages of these new countries are being elevated to the status of official literary languages.

#### 3.2Contributions to Understanding Behaviors and Worldviews

People use language to describe their experiences of reality and to make hypothetical projections from those experiences. Human experience is mediated by both perceptual mechanisms and conceptual systems. Though much of human perceptual ability is universal, input can be both ambiguous and overly detailed. Perception provides much more opportunity for distinction than any one language can codify in its grammar or any human being can meaningfully attend to. The highly textured world of perception does not suggest any unique strategy for carving nature at its joints. Thus, perception is inseparably joined with conceptual decisions concerning what to ignore and what goes with what (Talmy 1996 has coined the term ‘ception’ to describe the concurrent operation of perception and conception). If, as functional linguists believe, linguistic categories are conceptual categories, and can be specific to a given language, then linguistic categories should reveal important facts about how people understand and interact with their world. Time, for example, is a phenomenon that human beings do not have direct experience of, because humans perceive only time's effects on objects and events. It is therefore possible to conceive of time in different ways, and a plethora of tense and aspect systems present artifacts of varying conceptions of time. The relationships that exist between beings, objects, and events can likewise be understood in many different ways; a testament to this is the variety of case systems and other means that languages use to express relationships.

Language is the essential vehicle of a number of cultural phenomena, ranging from the daily rituals of oral communication, the subject of discourse analysis, through the artistic use of language that is the subject of literary analysis and poetics. Linguistic analysis of use of metaphor and poetic structure can be valuable in interpreting literary culture.

#### 3.3Contributions to Language Pedagogy and Reference

Linguistic expertise is essential for the production of effective language textbooks, reference grammars, and dictionaries, tools that enable area and international studies scholars to gain language proficiency. Academic promotion procedures fail to recognize the exacting scholarship and creative thinking that pedagogical authorship and lexicography require. In the US, there is not enough of a market for publications in languages other than French, Spanish, and German to provide financial incentive to take on these tasks. As a result, linguists are reluctant to author textbooks and reference works, and materials for lesser-taught languages are usually inadequate or absent. Faced with financial crises in the 1990s, some colleges and universities acted on the popular myth that native ability is the only qualification needed to teach language, and replaced language professionals with part-time and/or adjunct native speakers. Although it now has competition from functional linguistics, formal linguistics continues to dominate the field, and its findings are not generally relevant or transferable to pedagogy and lexicography (since this is not the aim of formal linguistics). Collectively, academic bias, small market share, de-professionalization of language teaching, and theoretical focus greatly reduce linguists' impact on language pedagogy and reference materials.

For detailed treatment of the above topics and for further references, see Linguistic Fieldwork; Dialectology; Historical Linguistics; Internal Reconstruction; Comparative Method; Areal Linguistics; Pidgin and Creole Languages; Diglossia; Linguistic Typology; Language Endangerment; Language Policy; Language and Literature; Language and Poetic Structure.

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## Renaissance Linguistics: Spanish Tradition

A history of linguistics must include the contributions of Spanish authors. In antiquity, Quintilian (Marcus Fabius Quintilianus), and in the Middle Ages, Isidore of Seville – both born in what today is Spain – made major contributions to the science. During the Renaissance, Antonio de Nebrija wrote the first grammar of a modern European language, in which he anticipated the idea of language universals. During the latter part of the Renaissance, Francisco Sanchez de las Brozas (Sanctius) also used the concept of language universals and even anticipated the idea of deep or underlying structure. Obviously, Nebrija and Sanctius did not work in a vacuum; there were many other linguists in Spain and even in Spanish America who are discussed in this article.

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