So, jumping right in:
FAQ's
Q. So.. what exactly is Linguistics? And what can you do with it?A. Well, its the study of language. It includes the study of language acquisition, morphology, syntax, phonology, semantics, historical linguistics, etc. There are research linguists who work in different ways. Some study historical linguistics, tracing back modern languages to their common ancestors, and trying to recreate lost languages. Others travel to remote parts of the globe and document previously undocumented languages. Other linguists work as speech therapists, language teachers, translators, or even forensic linguists. (I just heard about the latest one. Apparently there are linguists working for some police departments who analyze language in connection with possible crimes. This could apply to suicide notes, ransom letters, recorded speech, etc. Cool, huh?)
Q. Linguistics, huh? Are you a cunning linguist?
A. Ha.Ha. No.
Q. Oh? A linguist? How many languages do you speak?
A. This is a common misconception about linguists. Many linguists only speak their mother tongue. You don't have to be fluent in a foreign language to be able to describe its syntax and morphology (Don't worry. I'll explain these terms later). Also, if your focus was on first language acquisition, or how children learn language, you wouldn't need to know a foreign language at all.
Q. What attracted you to linguistics?
A. Well, I took my first linguistics class while I was an English Education major, and it just clicked with me. One of the first things we discussed was how children learn language. Now, if you ask the average person on the street how it is that young children learn language, they would tell you that kids hear things and repeat them. When they make correct utterances, they are rewarded by being understood, and when they make incorrect utterances, they are corrected, kind of like training a dog. However, if that were the case, children would not every be able to create original sentences. It would be based completely on repetition. Also, if that were the case, why do children almost universally make errors like "feets" and "teached". They certainly don't hear these words used. So where do they come from? The child is applying a fairly complex system of rules to the language that he or she knows. Which, for a 2-3 year old, is highly impressive. It is argued in linguistics that children are born with an innate ability to learn language. Their brain is hard-wired to make sense of an extremely confusing system. The specific language they learn obviously depends on the input they are exposed to, which is why children born in Boston speak English, while children in Tokyo speak Japanese.
The point is, there is something about humans that makes us hard-wired to communicate, and that is just amazing to me.
Also, linguistics radically changed the way I looked at grammar. I had always found grammar to be confusing in school, but as soon as it was explained by a linguist, it was like, suddenly everything was clear. Thats part of the reason that I want to teach English. Students deserve to know that grammar doesn't have to be this big scary intimidating thing. (Also, linguists are "descriptive grammarians", meaning that they don't abide by all those stupid rules you learned growing up. You wanna end a sentence with a preposition? You wanna use a double negative? Go for it. The only ungrammatical sentence is one that a native speaker wouldn't understand the intent of. So, a sentence like "I ain't got none" might hurt your ears, but from a linguist's standpoint, its completely grammatical.)
Q. What are you gonna do with that?
A. Well, I'm getting my certificate in TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) and then I'm going to go into the Peace Corps to teach English abroad with them. Afterwards, I will probably come back and get my Masters in Teaching and teach high school English (and probably French too) here in the states.
Okay.. and now for the things that I actually study:
Phonology- the study of the sounds of a language. Studies the way we make sounds, why sounds change over time a certain way, etc. For example, if you are a native speaker of English, you know that to form the plural of a word, you add an -s or -es. However, you probably didn't notice that you pronounce that plural in three different ways. Don't believe me? Say "pigs", "picks" and "pieces". Catch the difference? The first was a -z sound, then an -s, and then a -iz or -uz. Why is it that all native speakers will do that without ever having to be instructed in it? Any its not just repetition either, because we apply the same rules to made-up words!
Here, I also get to learn the International Phonetic Alphabet, which makes so much more sense than English spelling. There is a letter for each sound made in a work. So, in the word phone, the "ph" would be represented by [f], because that is that sound it makes. Also, the "sh" sound is represented by [ʃ] and the "th" in "thin" would look different than the "th" in "this", because they are different sounds. The problem with writing everything in IPA, because trust me, I would love to, is that IPA transcribes accents and pronunciation differences. For example, my friend Rachel and I would have different spelling of the word "button" because we say it differently. And who is to say that one accent is superior to another?
Morphology- is actually cooler than it sounds. It has to do with morphemes, which are the smallest meaningful parts of words. So, the word speakers has three. speak-er-s. The first is this root verb. The second part turns that verb into a noun. and the last morpheme marks it as a plural noun. Its because of morphology like this that we can play with language like we do. Its why I can say a made up word like "verbify" and you know that it means to turn something into a verb. And we all do this without even thinking about it!
There's a lot more to it, but I'll leave you with that for now. I could talk forever about language, but I don't want to bore you all to tears!
-D
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