01_General Concepts

the scientific study of language

“is a purely human and non-instinctive

method of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of voluntarily produced symbols [i.e. linguistic signs]” (Sapir 1921: 7)

–

language as system of signs.

the more fundamental ability to use our existing repertoire of words and grammatical constructions to produce a theoretically infinite number of utterances, many of which have never been said in the same way before.

examples:

(1)Oh, my God. I’m gagging and vomiting at the same time. I’m...I’m gavomiting. [TV, Scrubs, 2004]

(2) [W]e couldn’t stay, so I brought us here, but Ron got splinched. [Movies, Harry Potter..., 2010)

is the capacity of human beings to use words and grammatical constructions to talk about events that go beyond the immediate situation, that is, events that are displaced in time and space.

->utterances can pertain to actions, persons, or ideas that are removed from the current speech situation, either spatially and / or temporally; e.g.

(1)She’s at Nora’s right now. [COCA, TV, 2011] ->spatial

(2) Martine was their fiddler and Kid their drummer back in the day, when they’d been a band.[COCA, FIC, 2019] ->temporal

refers to the dual organization of language: (i) at the physical level, languages have distinct sounds

that are meaningless if considered individually, yet (ii) their combination may create meaningful units

that can be used as communicative symbols.

a triangular constellation of sender, receiver and things in the external world to be referred to

language as represented in the minds of individual speakers

language as a communally shared, social construct

language as the actual linguistic activities witnessed in concrete speech situations

The relationship between words in a sentence

example: That + ´s belong together

Some words are interchangable in a sentence

example: "That´s awesome."

->awesome could be exchanged with cool, lit, dope...

modern approach, objectively analyzing language (how people actually write/talk)

traditional approach, providing norms on how language

should be used (how people should(n’t) talk/write)

analyzing language with focus on a specific point in time

(e.g. only PDE, only ME, one temporal data point)

observing language change over a period of time (e.g. from

OE to PDE, 2+ temporal data points)

anguage is analyzed purely in terms of the language system(langue)

focus rests on actual language use (parole)

attested language data (e.g. from corpora) as the fundamental basis of evidence

research is based on the linguist’s intuition

focus rests on one particular language

two or more languages are compared according to their

differences and/or similarities

differences between languages

similarities across many languages

research results have a practical purpose, that is, they are

relevant in, for example, foreign language teaching, forensics or lexicography

research results are supposed to be of purely academic

relevance