Lecture 1 - Summary
Introduction: what is grammar?
1. The components of HF ENG 111 (Language)
A simple model of a linguistic communication process, involving one person
(the sender) saying "I'm hungry" to another person (the receiver), might
look like Figure 1 below:
Figure 1. Linguistic communication.
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A sender wishes to communicate a message (thought, idea)
to a receiver.
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A coding system allows the sender to encode (translate) the
message as a linguistic code, involving words, sentences, etc.
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In the encoding process the sender can often choose between alternative
ways of encoding the message. This choice may be influenced by attitudes
(e.g. Is dinner ready soon? may be more polite than Why can you
never have dinner ready on time?; in a different conversation, that
woman and our Great Leader would have reflected different attitudes
towards Mrs. Thatcher) and various aspects of the situation in which
the act of communication takes place (e.g. here or there
will be used to refer to Trondheim, depending on whether the sender is
in Trondheim or not).
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The end product of the encoding process is a sound wave which is
transmitted to the receiver.
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Assuming the receiver has access to the same coding system as the sender,
(s)he decodes the incoming sound waves (i.e. reconstructs the words
and sentences produced by the sender).
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In addition, the receiver interprets the received message, i.e.
tries to figure out the answer to questions like Why did (s)he say that?
Does (s)he really mean that? Is (s)he being ironic? (The decoded and
interpreted received message is written in brackets in the figure just
to remind us that the received message may be more or less, but perhaps
not exactly, what the sender wished to communicate.)
A more complex model of linguistic communication would also take into account
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that the participants take turns at being speaker (sender) and addressee
(receiver) in a conversation;
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that the participants' utterances, as well as their interpretations of
each other's utterances, will be influenced by their general background
knowledge and assumptions about the other participant;
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that a receiver typically not only decodes and interprets an utterance,
but also reacts to, or acts on, the utterance (e.g. by starting to cook
dinner or by apologizing for dinner not being ready yet).
However, the simplified model in Figure 1 is sufficient to show how the
Phonetics/phonology and Grammar components of HF ENG 111 (Language) are related:
the Phonetics/phonology component focuses on the sound wave and its physical
characteristics as well as the properties of the organs for speech production
and reception, whereas the Grammar component focuses on the properties
of the elements we need to describe the encoding/decoding processes. In
the Language and society component, finally, the focus will be on historical
processes bringing about changes in English grammar, vocabulary and phonology
as well as on social phenomena which will lead to variation in the use
of English.
2. The linguistic sign
Central in our representation of the linguistic coding system is the notion
of the linguistic sign. This represents the connection between a
content (meaning) and an expression (form, code), e.g. our
mental representation of what a dog is (content) and the word dog
(or 
;
either italics or phonemic transcription will be used to represent the
expression side of the linguistic sign).
Figure 2. The linguistic sign.
The linguistic sign is conventional in the sense that the speakers
of a language must use the same expression to represent the same content
(otherwise the receiver's decoding would not recover the content encoded
by the sender, and we would not understand each other).
At the same time we can say that the particuar expression we connect with a
particular content is in the vast majority of cases arbirary: as long as
the members of a speech community agree on what expression to use, it makes no
difference exactly what that expression is. Consider, in this connection,
the words meaning 'dog' in a few languages: Norwegian bokmål/nynorsk hund,
trøndersk dialect hoinn, German Hund, French chien, Czech pes,
Russian sobaka, Bulgarian kuche, Swahili mbwa. This principle
of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign is to some extent contradicted
by the fact that all languages have words that imitate non-lingustic sounds: the whisper
of the wind, the babbling of a brook, the growling of a dog, etc. But note that
different languages represent the same non-linguistic sound in different ways, so that
we find a certain arbitrariness at work here as well: the crowing of a cock is
represented as cock-a-doodle-doo in English, as kykkeliky in Norwegian and
as kikeriki in German.
A simple linguistic sign such as
is usually referred to as a morpheme. It is a unit which cannot
be further subdivided (if we consider the sounds /d/, /
/
and /g/ separately, we lose the connection with the content and we are
thus no longer dealing with the morpheme).
A morpheme like
is called a free morpheme: it can be used as a word on its own (She
saw a dog). A morpheme like -s (meaning 'more than one') is
a bound morpheme (more specifically, a suffix), since it must be
combined with a free morpheme to form a word (She saw two dogs).
3. Grammar
Grammar, in a narrow sense, is (the study of) the rules governing the combination
of morphemes to form larger units which can express more complex messages
than the individual morpheme can. Traditionally, a distinction is made
between morphology (the rules for combining morphemes to form words)
and syntax (the rules for combining words to form sentences).
But grammar must also account for many aspects of the connection between
content (meaning) and expression (form), especially the meaning of syntactic
constructions. This part of grammar is known as semantics ('the
study of meaning without reference to situation').
Those cases where the choice of expression is influenced by attitudes
and/or aspects of the speech situation are usually held to be the domain
of a special branch of grammar, pragmatics ('the study of meaning
with reference to situation').
The content of the grammar course will primarily focus on English
syntax, but with a good deal of attention paid to semantics
and, to some extent, to pragmatics. English morphology will be touched
upon occasionally.