Definition of Linguistics

Linguistics is the quasi-scientific study of language, including its observation, analysis, and explanation. For a linguist, language is like any other observable phenomena in the world: stars, trees, the behavior of animals, and so on. Language is linguistic data for which linguistic theory is constructed just as the movement of the stars has supplied data for astronomical theory.

Linguistic theory is a systematic set of concepts that is supposed to express significant insights about language. Linguists often express what they think they know about language in systems of "rules." The recording of the major rules of a language is called writing the "grammar" of a language. But this word grammar (as well as the word rules) is tricky; it is used to mean different things by different people at different times. In linguistics, the words grammar and rules are used in particular ways; students of linguistics must learn how these words are used by linguists or experience confusion about, frustration with, and pointless resistance to the study of linguistics.

Many people (by no means all people) begin their study of linguistics as students of English, as English majors, as people who love the best writers and speakers and want to emulate them in their own writing and speaking. The way that linguistics looks at language--as data just like other natural data lying around the world--sometimes strikes the student of English as strange. If language is just data, then any language can be the object of linguistic inquiry, and no presuppositions, prejudices, or prejudgments are to be brought to the language under examination. Astronomers do not (I would guess) look up into the heavens and think to themselves, "Oh, Mercury is an ugly and bad planet; let us turn our attention to the beautiful Saturn!" In the same way, linguists do not dismiss as uninteresting or unworthy of their attention language that is (according to someone's standards) "bad," "uneducated," "wrong," "illiterate," "lazy," "slovenly," "unsophisticated"; they do not care if language is "ungrammatical" or if language breaks the rules for "good" English.

Linguistics is a descriptive as opposed to a prescriptive study; it intends to investigate what language is rather than how it should be. Other studies (such as English, rhetoric, and communications) take up the latter goal. The student of linguistics must leave that goal behind and look at language afresh. When linguists talk of the "grammar" of a language, they do not mean the rules that speakers of a language should obey in order to speak correctly. That kind of prescriptivism, again, does not have a place in linguistics. Linguists mean something else by grammar and rules. This handout will sketch six meanings of the word grammar, with which the word rules is also connected. Linguistic and non-linguistic meanings are discussed.

The first meaning of grammar is the one linguists are usually concerned with. People who can speak a language know the language in the sense that they have in their heads the system of constitutive rules that enables them to speak language X versus language Y. People who speak English know lots of rules about English, whereas people who speak Russian know lots of rules about Russian. The knowledge of a language's rules (versus some other language's rules) in one's head is called "competence."

Competence, however, is implicit, or tacit; people often do not know that they know what they do about the languages they speak. Because it is tacit knowledge, competence is responsible for fluent, unreflective production and understanding of language without any explicit reference to how English or Spanish or Japanese is spoken. For example, speakers of English can quickly unscramble the following words to form an English sentence:

wolf the threaten these sheep

The English speaker quickly and unreflectively forms the sentence, "These sheep threaten the wolf." English speakers know, among other things, that word order in English usually runs from subject to verb to object (S-V-O); that plural nouns call for verbs without the inflection -s; and that sheep is an exception to the usual pattern that plural nouns take -s. Unscrambling words like these is a matter of linguistic competence, not experience and habit; the sentence above is formed without difficulty even though a person's experience might never have included such a sentence or suggested that sheep could threaten wolves. Sentences like this are uttered and understood by native speakers of English with the aid of competence, not with reference to anything speakers have been explicitly taught about grammar in school. School grammar does not teach children how to put together the basic elements of English sentences.

Children acquire tacitly most of their competence in a language by the time they are five or six years of age. That is, most of the rules that a person needs to know in order to speak a language are tacitly acquired (or "internalized") before first grade. Parents do not explicitly teach their children the rules that constitute a language ("Emma, put the determiner before the noun"; "Emma, you say the th sound by putting your tongue between your teeth," etc.).

Again, students new to linguistics are often greatly concerned with "correct," "proper," or "standard" English, looking at speakers of non-standard English as somehow inferior. In terms of competence, however, all native speakers of English, no matter of what variety, are completely competent speakers--completely competent speakers of a variety of English that may not be prestigious.

Competence (Grammar 1) enables people to actually produce and comprehend sounds or marks that are examples of certain languages. The actual linguistic or grammatical product of competence is called "performance." If someone looks at a written sentence or listens to a tape and says something like, "This is German," the person is looking at or listening to a certain grammar, but what is being talked about is the actual production of a language. Performance includes all the physiological--neural, articulatory, manipulative--processes involved in producing language.

Sometimes there are great differences between what people know (competence) or are able to do versus what they actually produce or comprehend (performance) at any given time. In other words, people can be perfectly competent in a language but not perform to reflect that competence. Such is often the case with people who write a language. All speakers of English know what a sentence is, know how to form and understand sentences. But many people produce incomplete sentences (fragments) in writing. How can this be? The only explanation is that writing introduces elements (punctuation, for example) not found in oral language and demands more sentences than people normally produce in speech. Performance, then, does not necessarily reflect competence.

Linguists listen to or look at examples of performance in order to construct theories of competence. These theories are explicit, systematic descriptions and explanations of what people know about their language and of what they do. A linguist who writes a system of rules concerning the English noun phrase, for example, is said to write a descriptive grammar of the noun phrase. The linguist is interested in writing down all the rules of the noun phrase that speakers of English know while excluding options that speakers know are impossible (or "ungrammatical"). In a descriptive, theoretical grammar, a linguist writes something like, "Determiners, such as the, precede cardinal numerals, such as four, in English noun phrases: the four girls is grammatical; four the girls is ungrammatical."

In this sense, a grammar is the quasi-scientific expression of linguistic theory about competence and/or performance. Sometimes linguists talk of writing "generative" grammars. The word generative simply means that the description is intended to be explicit, or complete. In other words, if the grammar were programmed into a computer, the computer would be able to produce, or generate, English noun phrases or whatever. Linguistics courses are about this kind of grammar.

A grammar that is written not for scientific purposes and not by scientific means is referred to as a school or traditional grammar. School grammars are used for educational purposes and usually present concepts about a language that have been handed down through the ages by tradition rather than by observation. For example, some school grammars say that English has three tenses --past, present, and future--and perhaps even more (such as "future progressive"). But this "theory" of English tenses was handed down by scholars trained in Latin. In fact, English has only two tenses, past and non-past, or present. (English, of course, can be used to speak/write about past, present, and future times, but time and tense are two different things.) Examine the forms of any verb, such as walk; there are forms of the word walk that signify present and past but no form of the single word walk that signifies the future.

What most lay people mean when they use the word grammar is the codification of what speakers/writers of a language should or should not say. This meaning of grammar contrasts sharply with Grammars 1, 2, and 3, what people know about their language, how they actually perform, and the description of what people know and do. In terms of Grammars 1-3, if something is "ungrammatical," then it is not an example of a certain language. In terms of Grammar 5, if something is "ungrammatical," it is not a "good" example of a certain language.

A prescriptive grammar is a set of "rules," but the word rules here refers to standards to which people ought to abide. This handout, for example, breaks a few prescriptive rules about English, so it is not the best example of English grammar in the sense of Grammar 5. But it is definitely English in the sense of Grammar 2, and it would be described by Grammar 3. Its writer is competent in Grammar 1; he speaks English. Can you find some of the broken prescriptive rules in this handout? Linguists tend to regard Grammar 5 as a system of linguistic myths and fetishes that have nothing to do with what a language really is and what people know about it. The person who says, for example, "I ain't got none," knows English and makes his or her meaning clear even if he or she does not live up to Grammar 5. To avoid confusion, Grammar 5 can be referred to as "usage." In comparison to the rules of Grammar 1, Grammar 5 is like the exposed tip of a huge iceberg, most of which remains submerged (i.e., unconscious).

Grammar 5 is called "standard" English, but "standard" English is not "standard" in the sense that it is spoken by the majority of the population. Instead, standard English is a form of English spoken (and especially written) by a segment of the population, a certain group of individuals. Linguists call the various forms of language spoken by different segments of a population "dialects" (or better yet, just "varieties").  Standard English is a social dialect or variety of English. Speakers of a language choose to use or to avoid dialects for sociological and/or economic reasons.  "Standard" English is associated with people the rest of us are supposed to be trying to emulate: highly literate white northern professionals like me, right?

Related to Grammars 4 and 5 is a set of guidelines for the effective, appropriate, and elegant use of the language in certain situations for certain purposes. A rhetorical or stylistic grammar guides speakers/writers to use the language well--not just correctly or incorrectly. For example, rhetorical grammars often advise writers to combine short sentences by using a relative clause, which is economical and which subordinates one idea to another, making a writer's meaning more clear. Instead of writing, "I met a South American. She danced a wicked tango," a rhetorician might advise a person to write (although it depends on the entire context), "I met a woman from South America who danced a wicked tango." Both versions are correct; one might be better in a certain situation. Grammar 6 has as ancient a history as Grammar 4 and is sometimes intermixed with it and with Grammar 5.

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