LINGUISTICS IN UNITED STATES

Linguistics in United States

Linguistics in United States

Introduction

One of the central academic disciplines underlying the collective knowledge base of bilingual education is that of linguistics. Linguistics can be defined, in the broadest terms, as the scientific description of human language. Tony Hewitt explains in the introduction to the Linguistics Encyclopedia (2nd ed.) that serious study of the human capacity for language is presumed to have begun in the first literate human societies (e.g., Mesopotamia, Northern India, China, and Egypt). However, the roots of Western linguistics as a specific area of scientific study date back to the 19th century. Two central questions have shaped the field since that time: First, what is the nature of human language; and second, what is involved in the study of human language? This entry addresses those two questions by way of providing an overview of the science of linguistics.

Nature of Language

It is difficult to capture, succinctly, the myriad ways in which different traditions of linguistic study conceive of the nature of human language. As discussed later in this entry, there are substantive debates about language that prevent such a brief summary. Ralph Faso and Jeff Connor-Linton have attempted to provide an overview of certain features that they maintain most linguists would accept as universal to humans' capacity for language.

The first of these features is the modularity of language. Language is composed of distinct and discrete units, or modules. Each module has a particular role to play, but they function together in a coordinated way to allow humans to produce and understand language. Related to modularity is the principle of constituency Languages are organized in constituent parts such that more complex constituents may be used to take the place of simpler forms. An example of the principle of constituency might be, “They argued heatedly about the new work assignment.” The simple constituent They can be replaced by a more complicated one, for example, “The manager and her employee argued heatedly about the new work assignment,” or even “The new manager and her employee who had worked there for many years argued heatedly about the new work assignment.” The principle of constituency describes how like constituents of varying degrees of complexity may be exchanged for one another. However, this principle does not signify that dialect is random. On the contrary, “heatedly and her new employee argued about the new work assignment” is not a possible construction, because “heatedly” and “they” or “the manager and her employee” are not like constituents.

The standard of constituency is particularly significant in that it permits for an infinite number of utterances, even though languages are created of a finite number of units. This occurrence of dialect is renowned as recursion. The ability to assemble an infinite number of utterances from a finite number of constituent components has an enormous impact on our comprehending of language. Above all, it means that humans do not come by language by memorizing each phrase in a ...