Talk:Linguistics

World map fail

I'm crazy or the map of the language distribution is completely wrong? In Brazil people do not speak the same language that people in Argentina, neither in Spain and France or Sweden and USA !!! Maybe I did not understand the map (upper right) but it is called "major world language groups" — Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.250.5.248 (talk) 07:50, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

Well, I don't suppose you are actually crazy, but the map is not wrong - it seems that you do not know what is meant by a language group. All the countries you mention speak an Indo-European language. --Pfold (talk) 08:09, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

Thank you, now I get it. It may be a good idea to put a symbology to explain the colors, maybe I'll learn why there are two in Australia (aborigines live across the country), and about that small green dot between Argentina and Chile. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.250.5.247 (talk) 02:32, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

The colors attempt to depict the language group with the largest number of speakers in an area. In wide areas of Australia English-speakers are few in number and concentrated in small communities, while aboriginal groups may roam over large areas. The green area between Argentina and Chile that you refer to represents the area in which the majority of inhabitants are Mapuche. -- Donald Albury 23:51, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

I had been puzzled by this map earlier. Thanks for the explanation. I just reviewed the map and checked the Wikimedia Commons description page. I don't see how a naive user has a chance to interpret the map correctly. May I suggest that Donald Albury's explanation be added as a caption or linked file? I have no experience with WMCommons or images in WP, so I'm hoping for help, but I will try to do it myself eventually. Thanks -- Jo3sampl (talk) 00:14, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

That map is not part of this article, it's part of the {{Linguistics}} navigational template which is put at the top of all linguistics-related articles. Furthermore, it's not meant to be content; it's a decoration. Therefore, it would not be appropriate to add a caption, although I can update the tooltip (the text that appears when you hover your mouse over the image for a moment). I already updated the image description page on Wikipedia Commons so it contains a link to the map's legend. rʨanaɢ (talk) 00:22, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

Thanks very much. -- Jo3sampl (talk) 01:11, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

Suggestion: Language Birth and Death

I would like to ask a pertinent question. Why are linguists so hooked up with language death rather than with language birth?

Shouldn't we be concentrating on new languages that are being born rather than old languages that are dying? Won't that help us more positively to maintain multilingualism in the world?

Every language has a deep structure that is multilingual. We don't need to impose multilingualism if our thinking is diverse.

I know of some books on language birth and I'd like to write about them. The authors are from places as diverse as Taiwan, Mauritius, and Schenzen. But my editing on the article is repeatedly being deleted. Is there a technical problem on Wikipedia or was I sleep-editing?

Either way, can we please incorporate these things into the article? Thanks. ElbowingYouOut (talk) 18:49, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

Who says linguists aren't concerned with language birth? There are many linguists interested in creole languages as a way of studying how languages are born, and linguists studying how particular aspects of language come about (e.g. tonogenesis).

The reason your earlier edits to the article were removed are explained at User_talk:Rjanag#Rhetoric. rʨanaɢ (talk) 19:01, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

(I forgot to add the usual: "Hi Supriyya!". rʨanaɢ (talk) 19:03, 11 September 2011 (UTC))

I still don't understand what you're saying completely. I mean what - can we just add a section on creole then? I'm fine with that. ElbowingYouOut (talk) 15:13, 25 September 2011 (UTC)

Your edits about creole and English are incorrect. There is no "the beginning stage of language" - creolization is one way a very particular way through which a language can come into existence, and even in those cases creolization is normally preceded by a pidgin stage. English is not a creole or a pidgin, but there are of course English based creoles and pidgins in the world, although I am uncertain why you would go into detail about those here.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 15:56, 25 September 2011 (UTC)

I haven't read into your discussions further, but I must point out that there are serious discussions regarding the possible status of English as a creole—see the Middle English creolization hypothesis. —Bill Price (nyb) 19:26, 25 September 2011 (UTC)

There is serious discussion about a lot of things. That is not what Elbowingyouout was mentioning - in his edit he stated the hypothesis as if it were fact.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 19:36, 25 September 2011 (UTC)

Hello, hello. What does Taivo mean by English was never a creole? You mean the present state of English as it is today just popped out of nowhere, Maunus? Then in that case we must also prove that no historical linguistics is being done with English as a model, since English obviously has no history. And sure, my statement was unsourced, but it can always be left open to references and sources at some later stage. Why remove the aspect completely? This entire discussion thread is a little cryptic, I must say. (I have no idea what that "Hello Supriyya" message by Rjanag meant, either, and I have no time for that. Please don't try to ward this off as me being some other user you don't like because you are unable to verbalise your article-related arguments properly.)

There is no "the beginning stage of language" - creolization is one way a very particular way through which a language can come into existence, and even in those cases creolization is normally preceded by a pidgin stage. - Maunus

Do you see the obvious contradiction in your own sentence?

I'd really be obliged if you could provide some sources to your claim that "English is not a creole". Of course English is not a creole, by the way. It's not at a creole stage in countries where English is the first language in the 21st Century, OBVIOUSLY. Grade-I information and logic. √ Check. But it was in the 13th century, like because, of history? And it is in third world and post-colonial countries because, like, again, it was introduced there later? Grade-II logic and information. √ Check.

And oh, just to state the even-more-obvious to be on the safe side: creole is not a language (like English or Spanish). Neither is it a CLASSIFICATION or a linguistic typology. Tcha. It is a development stage that every language goes through. Like human beings who go through childhood, then adolescence, then old age, and so on. You may say that human beings are not children, but then, you see... ElbowingYouOut (talk) 11:56, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

• Nonsense. That is not what the word "creole" means in the usage of any mainstream linguist. Present some actual linguistic sources arguing these claims and then we can talk.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 12:19, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

Two thoughts: first, ElbowingYouOut's idea of what a creole is is utterly bizarre. Second, isn't is nice that Supriyya still takes time to visit us? garik (talk) 14:33, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

• Nonsense? Then why don't you elucidate the definition of what creole means to a mainstream linguist? And to a niche linguist too?

Garik, who's Supriyya? I'll be adding changes to the article in a while if I get no response. ElbowingYouOut (talk) 00:59, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

You have had plenty of responses. Anything you add that is not supported by sources determined by consensus to be relevant will of course be promptly removed.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 01:54, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Looks defensive

The very first line of the article has FOUR references. It looks defensive to have to try so hard to prove such a basic claim, like the discipline needs to prove its very fundamental existence. Whoever added it, please remove. ElbowingYouOut (talk) 15:30, 25 September 2011 (UTC)

It seems more silly to remove the references and add an unsourced definition. We have adopted the current definition, ith sources, after long discussions with some people who think that linguistics deals with programming languages or animal communication, because some linguists work with those. That is however incorrect as we have established, since the only reasons that lingusts may be interested in non-human languages is to better understand the nature of human languages. We can of course take the discussion again, but please don't assume that such deliberate decisions are not the result of discussion and deliberation among multiple specialist editors, because they are.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 15:54, 25 September 2011 (UTC)

Percentage

What percentage of people on Earth are fluent at speaking 6 or more languages? Pass a Method talk 15:41, 30 October 2011 (UTC)

This talk page is for discussing improvements to the Linguistics article, not for other discussion (and your question is not really about linguistics). You will have more luck asking this question as the Language reference desk. rʨanaɢ (talk) 15:44, 30 October 2011 (UTC)

A treatise on generative linguistics

(an anon Ip inserted these treatise on Generative linguistics in the intrduction of this article. It seems to hav good material - but it needs to go somewhere else in the article. And it should be cleaned frm editorializing·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 00:34, 10 February 2012 (UTC)) Linguistic Competence defines the system of rules that governs an individual’s tacit understanding of what is acceptable and what is not in the language they speak. The concept, introduced by the linguist Noam Chomsky in 1965, was intended to address certain assumptions about language, especially in structuralist linguistics, where the idea of an unconscious system had been extensively elaborated and schematized. Competence can be regarded as a revision of the idea of the language system. The empirical and formal realization of competence would be performance, which thus corresponds to diverse structuralist notions of parole, utterance, event, process, etc. Chomsky argues that the unconscious system of linguistic relations, which Ferdinand de Saussure named langue, is often mistakenly associated with knowledge or ability (or know-how). Chomsky is concerned to establish a science that would study what he calls “the language faculty”, in analogy with other mental faculties like logic, which as a kind of intuitive reasoning power requires no accumulation of facts or skills in order to develop. Grammatical knowledge too seems to be present and fully functional in speakers fluent in any language. So competence in Chomsky’s sense implies neither an accumulated store of knowledge nor an ability or skill. He rejects Saussure’s langue as “merely a systematic inventory of items”, and instead returns to a rationalist model of underlying competence regarded as “a system of generative processes” (4). This has the advantage of explaining plausibly events of linguistic innovation in unpredictable situations, as well as pertinence of expression and understanding in particular contexts. This faculty seems to be absent in animals and (so far) in machines that can nonetheless be taught or programmed to use signs in imitative or predetermined ways.

A key source for Chomsky’s conception is Rene Descartes, whose concern with the creative powers of the mind leads him to regard human language as an instrument of thought. Chomsky also cites Wilhelm von Humboldt as a source for the conception of the generative nature of competence. Humboldt argues that use of language is based upon the demands that thinking imposes on language, and that this is where the general laws governing language originate. In order to understand the instrument or the faculty itself, however, it would not be necessary or even desirable to consider the creative abilities of great writers or the cultural wealth of nations; the linguist would, rather, attempt to abstract the generative rules, which remain unchanged from individual to individual. Competence, in Chomsky’s sense, is to be regarded as entirely independent of any considerations of performance, which might concern other disciplines, like pragmatics, psychology, medicine, or literary theory.

An individual’s competence is defined by the grammar, or set of rules, that is represented mentally and manifested by their understanding of acceptable usage in a given linguistic idiom. Grammatical competence thus defines an innate knowledge of rules rather than knowledge of items or relations. It is said to be innate because one apparently does not have to be trained to acquire it and it can be applied to an unlimited number of previously unheard examples. The two phrases I speak acceptable Chinese and I speak Chinese acceptably would be regarded as acceptable by any native English speaker, but I speak acceptably Chinese would probably not. Despite this, the more complex form, I speak quite acceptably Cantonese and some other Chinese dialects as well as Japanese, might be regarded as alright. Examples like these are thought to provide evidence of a deep structure of grammar, in other words, a linguistic competence.

A project in generative grammar has two distinct aims. First, it is a matter of analyzing the elements of a sentence or phrase into its distinct parts, thus revealing the so called deep structure of the sentence. Competence thus implies an unconscious knowledge of the rules for converting deep structure into surface structure. The procedures have been adopted by or incorporated into several approaches to text and discourse analysis. The relationship between surface structure and deep structure can be easily demonstrated, for instance, by examples of structural ambiguity, a key source of jokes, like Groucho Marx’s line from Animal Crackers: One morning I shot an elephant in my pyjamas; how he got into my pyjamas I’ll never know. The comic aspect of the punch line lies in its revealing the fact that the surface structure of the main sentence expresses two possible grammatical sentences: in my pyjamas I shot an elephant; and I shot an elephant who was wearing my pyjamas. The discrete unit in my pyjamas each time plays a different grammatical role in the deep structure of the sentence.

The second, more controversial, aim of generative grammar is to establish and produce descriptive models of the rules that compose the complete grammar. The rules must be finite yet must be capable of generating an infinite number of innovative sentences. This aspect of grammar is open to debate and misunderstanding partly because of the intuitive nature of an individual’s sense of what is and is not acceptable. Projects in generative grammar abound with examples of sentences that lie on the boundaries of what speakers might regard as acceptable, revealing fine degrees of unacceptability as well as acceptability. The point is not to establish what is right or wrong in any absolute sense. Rather it is to establish first that a speaker’s competence leads them to intuitive judgments concerning the relative acceptability of sentences; and then it is a matter of producing models of that competence. So the controversial aspect of generative grammar lies in its assertion of an innate cognitive faculty, from which issues the rules of grammatical structure and generation, and which thus describes the entire grammar of the language faculty, its syntax, which is manifested by an individual’s competence in their language. Despite the ideal implied by the notion of a complete grammar, Chomsky insists that any science of the language faculty must, like all science, be subject to interminable revision and refinement.

Diverse approaches in literary criticism and critical theory address both the productive potential and the problematic character of the notion of competence. Michel Riffaterre’s response in 1966 to the exhaustive structuralist reading of Baudelaire’s “Les Chats,” by Claude Levi-Strauss and Roman Jakobson, accuses them of building a “supertext”, based on the collation and classification of regularities, which no ordinary reader could have arrived at independently of structuralist resources. In a gesture that parallels Chomsky’s response to Saussure, Riffaterre constructs instead the theoretical fiction of the “superreader”, a notion designed to establish those moments in a literary text that invariably draw the attention of the reader because of their unpredictability in the face of normative grammatical restrictions. Such moments invariably “hold up” the reading process. The idea of the superreader is to be established independently of any consideration of external conditions on individual readers, the effects on understanding of continual evolution of the language, and changes in poetic or aesthetic conventions. In later work, Riffaterre builds a sophisticated stylistic method that, again, parallels generative, or transformational, grammar. He argues that a literary text can by analyzed for the way it has been generated from what he calls its matrix, a “kernel word” or “minimal sentence”. The matrix allows the generation of forms more complex than itself, creating two levels: the generator (corresponding to the minimal deep structure of the work); and the transform (corresponding to the increasingly complex surface structure).

Fascinating as the results of Riffaterre’s readings are, critics have discovered numerous problems with them. The texts he chooses for analysis, for instance, tend to be unpredictable in consistent ways, like Lauréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror. So while his analyses of texts like this are revealing, critics have been skeptical about his claims for a science of the literary in general, because many texts commonly regarded as literary can be regarded as grammatically normative yet effective in other ways.

Jonathan Culler, in his Structuralist Poetics, moves away from the idea of the underlying competence of literary works, and considers instead the literary competence of readers. Culler argues that this literary competence, regarded as a kind of grammar of literature, is acquired in education institutions. In his later work, On Deconstruction, he develops the idea further, drawing on diverse critical responses to institutions, and questioning the foundations of a literary competence that surreptitiously promotes the doctrines and values of specific traditions.

Literary analysis has also been responsible for effective critical engagements with the implications of Chomsky’s concept of competence. Colin MacCabe’s essay on Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, “Competence and Performance: the Body and Language in Finnegans Wake,” takes issue with the biological grounds of Chomsky’s theoretical formulations, arguing that Finnegans Wake literally “dismembers” any normative conception of the relation between the body and language. MacCabe argues that more weight must be given to the institutional forms of education and entertainment in the formation of tacit competence as a source of political force. He insists that in order to build on Chomsky’s studies of competence a concept of discourse is required.

The concept of discourse would help bring Chomsky’s theoretical formulations closer to those of Michel Foucault, to whom he is often opposed. Foucault, for instance, in The Archeology of Knowledge adapts the notion of archive to account for those rules that govern what we know and what we can say, but which we cannot, for that reason, ever describe. These rules function not as part of an innate system, as Chomsky contends, but as a “system of accumulation, historicity, and disappearance” (Archaeology 130). The archive thus designates what Foucault calls the “historical a priori”, historical conditions independent of experience that nonetheless help to determine it. Several other theorists have comparable formulations, where the always apparently innate laws that conspire to form competences of certain kinds turn out to have been overdetermined by institutions or other systems of organization. In these cases there are not only linguistic and literary competences but also competences of love, of sexuality, of urban dwelling and so on. Jacques Lacan’s concept of the Other, as “the locus of the word”, functions just as Chomsky’s concept of the fluent speaker does, with the essential difference that Lacan’s Other is the locus also of the Symbolic and thus represents institutional normalization. A further celebrated intervention would be Roland Barthes’s formulation, in S/Z, of the codes that he argues govern the realist text. Barthes exposes a tacit understanding that disguises a highly sophisticated and multivalent matrix of assumptions and expectations.

It appears to be from here. garik (talk) 03:11, 10 February 2012 (UTC)

Earliest known linguistics

I tried to find a citation for the previous comment but was not able to confirm it so I changed the tail sentence in the introductory paragraph from the former:

The earliest known linguistic activities date to Iron Age India (around the 8th century BC) with the analysis of Sanskrit.^{[citation needed]}

To the oldest and most correct I could find:

The earliest known descriptive linguistics activities are said to have been Panini's Ashtadhyayi around 500 BCE with the analysis of Sanskrit. Theoretick (talk) 01:53, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

Schools of Study - SFL

Shouldn't there be a separate listing under schools of study for Systemic functional linguistics? It is mentioned and discussed in the section but I would think it would benefit from being listed alongside Generative Grammar and Cognitive Linguistics. Theoretick (talk) 02:16, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

Please go ahead and add it! (I do think though that SFL is just one of many functional schools, just like there are many generative schools not all of which are described in their own sections) ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 02:38, 8 March 2012 (UTC)