Linguistics & Semantics

Lesson 1: Linguistics and Language

Conclusions

The study of Linguistics concerns language in general. People speak between 3000 and 6000 different languages around the world. We always think to ourselves what is that these languages have in common, and what is it that differentiates them? Each language is a very complicated system which includes thousands and thousands of different words where many difficult rules are necessary to combine these words into sentences. Children for instance learn their language relatively fast and they do not need any kind of language lessons. How it is possible that children have no trouble learning such a complicated system while, at the same time, there are still many problems in teaching a computer to understand language responding in a natural way?

Being languages are so complicated, the study of Linguistics shall be divided into several subfields. Each subfield deals with a different aspect of language.

Morphology, for example, is the study of word form. How do speakers of a language combine words to make new ones (compounds) ‘mooreland, moonlight, honeymoon, senzatetto, pellerossa, etc.’. How do we know what the tense aspect is of a verb we have never heard before?

Syntax, on the contrary, refers to the study of a sentence formation. Which step do speakers have to take to transform an indirect question into a direct question (reported speech into direct speech). What is the best way to represent the structure of a coordinate sentence?

The study of word meaning is called Semantics. There are many words which have more than one meaning called polysemic words but this does not seem to bother the listeners in understanding what the speakers say.

Pragmatics concerns the way people behave in daily life. It studies the factors that govern our choice of language in social interaction and the effects of our choice on others (David Christal).

Textual analysis (textual linguistics) deals with the communicative functions, cohesion, co-reference, etc. In writing texts we consider the structure in paragraphs, connective elements such as titles, explanations, cross references, etc. Moreover a typology of texts (from a tale to an article, from a law to a piece of crime news, from the words of a song to an advertising spot etc) is developed in order to individualize the structure, functions and the conditions of intelligibility.

Not only do we have the capacity to manipulate a great number of words and sentences but also we can adapt the usage of our language by considering the context itself. Sometimes it happens that we cannot understand a word that we read or hear. Notwithstanding this we are often able to fill the gaps thanks to the context itself.

In a given situation where it is difficult to understand the other person owing to the high volume of music or to the noise of traffic we can do necessary adaptations in order that the communication may work well. Moreover peoples who speak in the same way do not exist. It is just the existence of this kind of variations that allows us to identify our interlocutor, for instance, when we are at the telephone.

Notwithstanding these interpersonal divergences we can understand a lot of sentences we hear. At the moment there is not a complete grammar for any human language. We know how to speak but as a whole we have much difficulty in explaining what we know. Consequently it is the duty of Linguistics to ‘render’ explicit what we know about language.

Semantics studies the meaning of words and it surely deals with the creativity of language thanks to the presence of several rhetorical figures or tropes (imagery, metaphor, connotations etc). Imagery, icon, metaphor and symbol are figures of speech or artistic conventions, in which one thing stands for another in a kind of semantic relation. Image is the representation of an object or scene which conveys only itself. In common usage, the word ‘image’ refers to a physical depiction of something, as in a photographic image, or in common speech: “he is the image of his father”. The words are used with the intention of describing something. By extension, however, the image also exits in a mental representation, as in the memory or the imagination.

There is a good physical example of this in the common experience of looking at a bright light source, then closing one’s eyes and still seeing the ‘afterimage’, apparently on the backs of the eyelids. Metaphor compares two things that are alike in some way so as to clarify our understanding of one of them. The metaphor is used above all by poets because they want to make their readers seeing an aspect of something they have not noticed before. Writers of prose take use of metaphors to make a difficult idea easier to understand, by comparing something which is unfamiliar to something which is familiar; in ordinary speech people use metaphors for emphasis.

All metaphors, however, have one fact in common, that is, they do not announce they are comparing one thing to the other. They say for instance that ‘Mark is John’, and leave to the reader or the hearer to figure out in what way Mark is like John. The difference between metaphor and simile is that in metaphor the comparison is implied, while in simile it is explicit. So metaphors have a way of activating previous experiences and associations. At first glance they can seem ambiguous and paradoxical, but in practice they can explain complex concepts both quicker and more accurate than a more literal explanation. In many areas, especially where instant communication of complex messages must be achieved, metaphor have become more and more important.

Linguistics and its subfields (see for example Semantics) have a prominent place being the basis of each deepened study of words and sentences. The search of the origin of words have involved since ancient times (antiquity) many scholars who sought for not only the history but also the destiny itself of terms (nomen est omen). We need to know the forms and meanings of words but chiefly we need to “travelling in time” learning the mystery of words, the iron phonetic rules, the charm of analogies, the curiosity of apparent equalities of sounds or meaning among languages. And all this is given by Linguistics which is science, art and intuition.

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