Іі. Practical tasks

1. Answer the following question.

What gave rise to the advent of Descriptive linguistics?

Why was the comparative historic method of little use in the study of the lan­guages of Indian tribes?

What was the first step of work in this field?

What type do American Indian languages belong to?

What does the term 'agglomerating language' mean?

What was the convenient method for describing such languages?

What concept contributed to a more refined description of languages?

By whom was the concept of phoneme worked out?

Whom do we usually mention as the predecessor of Descriptive linguistics?

What method did the Descriptive linguistics criticise and what approach to phonemes did it propose?

Which of the two methods—the oppositional or the distributional – gives a more exact description of the linguistic facts?

Who were the founders of Descriptive linguistics?

* * *

What was the role played by E. Sapir in Descriptive linguistics?

How can we characterise L. Bloomfield's works?

By whom were Bloomfield's ideas later developed?

What are Bloomfield's main ideas?

How did Bloomfield understand language?

What is the role of meaning in Bloomfield's theory?

Can you give the definition of meaning in accordance with Bloomfield's the­ory?

What is the grammatical meaning of an utterance?

How does Bloomfield understand grammar?

What is the definition of the sentence given by Bloomfield?

What is the favorite sentence-type in English according to Bloomfield?

* * *

What are the main positions of the ACTOR-ACTION sentence-type? How are the main form-classes defined?

What is the new approach to the breaking up of the word-stock into classes of words proposed by Bloomfield?

How are the form-classes of a language most easily described?

How are the long form-classes further subdivided?

What do the symbols N and V represent?

How do we understand the symbols NP and VP?

What is the furthest division of the N-class and the V-class?

What is the result of the selection of the N and V subclasses?

By whom was the division of the word-stock into form-classes further devel­oped?

By whom was the concept of utterance introduced?

What prompted the introduction of this concept?

What is the theory of the Immediate Constituents?

Who was the first to introduce the 1С?

Who can we suppose might have influenced the idea of the 1С?

Lecture № 5 Part I Сontemporary descriptive linguistics

The main contribution of the American Descriptive School to modern linguistics is the elaboration of the techniques of linguistic analysis. The main methods are the Distributional method and the method of Immediate Con­stituents.

A recent development of Descriptive linguistics gave rise to a new method —the Transformational grammar. The TG was first suggested by Har­ris as a method of analysing the concrete utterances and was later elaborated by Noam Chomsky as a synthetic method of constructing sentences. The Trans­formational grammar refers to syntax only and presupposes the identification of such linguistic units as phonemes, morphemes and form-classes.

Bloomfield wrote but little about specific procedures and techniques of analysis. It was carried out by his followers and pupils.

The most widely known for his syntactic studies is Zellig S. Harris. A se­ries of articles by Harris are to be found in Language—the journal of American Descriptive linguistics. Harris's main works are Method in Structural Linguis­tics and Co-Occurrence and Transformation in Linguistic Structure.

Charles Carpenter Fries is another prominent figure of American linguis­tic theory. His main work The Structure of English is widely known in our country.

* * *

The scientists belonging to this branch of linguistics understand language as one of the semeiotic systems, that is a system of signals by which people communicate.

Animals are supposed to have semeiotic systems of their own. This prob­lem is now under investigation.

The vocal or natural language is the most important of all the semeiotic systems used by people. A natural language is a system of vocal signals. These signals are arbitrary in the sense that they are not inherent or anyhow con­nected with the nature of things they refer to. Every human being learns the system of the language of his community and by and by he begins to under­stand what people around him say and then begins to speak himself. The task of a scientist is to observe and to describe how people actually say things, but he should not prescribe how things should be said.

The research is carried out in the synchronic plane. Languages are stud­ied as spoken languages only, the point of view of their historical development is utterly neglected for the time being.

No comparative studies are carried out, only one language; the given lan­guage is being studied. This principle has been the basic progressive feature of Descriptive linguistics; it enabled the Descriptive linguists to do away with the traditional approach that made the scholars understand any language through the norms of Latin grammar, thus distorting the peculiar structure of the lan­guage studied.

The most important part of the study is 'field-work' that comprises three parts: (1) the work with native informants (people who speak the language studied by the linguist as their mother-tongue); (2) the filing of results (differ­ent systems of indexes and slips are used): (3) systematization.

The writing systems also receive considerable attention. This branch of linguistics is called or 'Graphonomy¹.

When the methods of Descriptive linguistics were extended to the study of such languages as English and other languages well known to the linguists, the analysis was continued in such a way as if the language were unknown and the linguist was to decipher it as if it were the cracking of a code.

Descriptive theory recognises the following fundamental concepts for analysing linguistic material:

Utterance: "An utterance is any stretch of talk, by one person, before and after which there is silence on the part of the person." Sentence: The definition given by Bloomfield is accepted. Structural meaning The structural meaning of a sentence is the meaning signaled by the parts of the sentence irrespective of their lexical meanings.

The ideas of structural meaning of a sentence-structure was introduced not only by L. Bloomfield, but also by Acad. L. V. Shcherba who gave his fa­mous example of the structural meaning in the non-sensical sentence "Глокая куздра штеко будланула бокра и куздрячит бокренка".

Environment or position of an element is understood as a set of the neighboring elements.

Distribution: The distribution of an element is the total of all environments in which it occurs. There is a second definition used by Descriptive linguistics, namely: Distribution is the class of elements that occur in the same position.

Contrastive distribution is understood as a difference of two linguistic units occurring in the same environment and changing one linguistic form into an­other linguistic form.

Non-contrastive distribution is understood as a difference of two linguistic units occurring in the same environment without changing one linguistic form into another linguistic form.

Complementary distribution: Two units are said to be in complementary dis­tribution if only one of them normally occurs in certain environments and only the other normally occurs in other surroundings, e.g. -(e)s [z], [s], [iz] in 'rooms', 'books', 'boxes', etc.

Morpheme: The morpheme is "a linguistic form which bears no partial phonetic-semantic resemblance to any other form."

Allomorph: An allomorph is a variant of a morpheme which occurs in certain environments. Thus a morpheme is a group of one or more allomorphs (or morphs).

The allomorphs of one and the same morpheme

1. must be in complementary distribution;

2. the sum of their environments must be equal to the sum of environments of some single morpheme in the language, e.g. the allomorphs [z], [s],[iz] together have the same set of environments as the single zero suffix: room—rooms, book—books, box—boxes, etc.;

3. they must be similar in meaning.

Prof. A. Smirnitzky, who recognised the above mentioned criteria, pointed out that the basic phonetic variants of the three allomorphs [z]. [s]. [iz] and [d], [t], [id] are respectively [z] and [d ], as they are produced by native speakers in conditions where any variant could appear—after vowels; the voiceless variants [s], [t] are the result of assimilation to the preceding voice­less consonants, and [iz], [id] represent the historically earlier forms with an [i] preserved between two phonemes of a similar character.

We may note that the differences in the environments are the same for such series of pairs as:

boy - boys	pay - paid
book - books	talk - talked
man - men	take - took
sheep - sheep	cut - cut

The first series of minimal pairs fits in the environments:

"The - is here," "The—s are here"; the second—in the environments: "I'll — with you," "I —ed with you yesterday." From these sequences we may extract such series as 'boy, book ...' and 'pay, talk...' and not only [s] or [z] and [t] or [d] but also the changes of [æ] to [e] and of [ei] to [u]. Thus we may say that the replacement of [æ] by [e] in 'man' yields 'men' in exactly the same way as the addition of [z] to 'boy' yields 'boys': and the replacement of [ei] by [u j in 'take' yields 'took' in exactly the same way as does the adding of [d ] to 'pay'.

The same criteria hold for identifying suppletive forms. According to Prof. A. Smirnitzky, the paradigm of the verb 'go' is recognised on the basis of three features (when compared to the paradigm of such a verb as 'look': (1) the lexical meaning of the forms is identical, (2) they are in complementary distri­bution, (3) the set of environments of suppletive forms is the same as that of the suffixed forms, namely:

go	-	look
-	went	looked
gone	-	looked

Instances of complementary distribution are numerous in morphology. Forms with phonemic replacement and suppletive forms can be described in terms, of complementary distribution on the basis of pattern congruity, e.g.

book - books	look - looked
class - classes	start - started
man - men	write - wrote
	go - went

Form-classes or positional classes: In Structural linguistics this classifi­cation is set up on the basis of a particular choice of diagnostic co-oceurrents: 'cloth' and 'paper' both occur, say, in "The — is" where 'diminish' does not ap­pear:

we call this class N. And 'diminish' and 'grow' both occur, say, in "It will —" where 'paper' and 'cloth' do not: we call this class V.

Construction: A construction is any significant group of words or mor­phemes.

Constituent: A constituent is a linguistic form that enters into some larger construction, e.g. the constituents "the old man" and "has gone to his son's house" constitute a sentence.

Immediate constituent: An immediate constituent is one of the two con­stituents of which the given linguistic form is directly built up. The dichoto-mous division of a construction begins with the larger elements and continues as far as possible, e.g. The old man ] went to his son's house.

The old man | went to his son's house.

The ||old man | went || to his son's house.

The || old ||| man | went || to ||| his son's house.

The || old ||| man | went || to ||| his son'| s |||| house.

The || old ||| man | went || to ||| his son’|||| s ||||| house.

Endocentric construction: Endocentric constructions are of two kinds: co­ordinate and subordinate; they have the following distinctive feature in common: the position of the construction in the sentence is the same as the position of one of its constituents, e.g.

"Boys and girls came in" or "boys came in" or "girls came in" are equally analysable into 1С. The same holds for "very fresh milk" or "fresh milk" or "milk" in "Cats like—."

Exocentric constructions differ from endocentric constructions in that they have a position (or function) different; from the position of either of their constituents, e.g. "John worked," "with me," "by running away." As Bloomfield phrases it: "The resultant phrase belongs to the form-class of no immediate constituent".

Linguistic levels: The main elements of language are usually recognised by Descriptive linguistics: the phoneme and the morpheme. A third level is of­ten recognised, the level of constructions or the syntactic level.

Any utterance or part of utterance can be described in terms of mor­phemes and any morpheme can be described in terms of phonemes. Thus any utterance can be presented on the phonemic level (as a sequence of phonemes) and on the morphemic level (as a sequence of morphemes).

The notion of levels is closely connected with that of isomorphism. Iso­morphism means similarity of relations between the units concerned.

The structure of language is understood as consisting of different levels con­nected with each other by the relation of hierarchy. Hierarchy means that the units of a lower level are elements of which elements of a higher level are built up and into which they are analysable.

* * *

Charles Carpenter Fries's book The Structure of English must attract our closest attention because it served as theoretical basis for the compiling of sev­eral Fries's series, that is English text-books for foreign students.

In accord with one of the main assumptions of Descriptive linguistics the material which furnished the linguistic evidence for the analysis and discus­sions in Fries's book were some fifty hours of recorded conversations— conversations in which the participants were entirely unaware that their speech was being recorded.

Sentences and Their Classification'

Fries adopts the definition of the sentence given by Bloomfield and the definition of the utterance by Harris. He develops Bloomfield's idea of the meaning of the linguistic form as the response to it. Instead of classifying sen­tences in accord with "the purpose of communication" Fries classifies them in accord with the responses sentences elicit. The utterances that begin conversa­tion and elicit responses are called "situation utterance units." The responses and the sentences that follow the situation sentences in the same utterance are called "sequence sentences." They are also called non-situation sentences. The situation utterances (or sentences) are further classed into three major groups in accord with the responses they elicit, namely.

1. utterances that are immediately and regularly followed by oral responses only: (a) greetings, (b) calls, (c) questions;

2. utterances regularly eliciting 'action'-responses: requests or commands;

3. utterances regularly eliciting conversational signals of attention to continuous discourse: statements.

This utterance-response theory is a basis for training exercises aiming at the development of correct and natural responses of students of foreign lan­guages.

The idea of situation sentences and sequence sentences is also very use­ful because it involves the study of substitutes and other means of connecting sentences in natural discourse.

The Revision of the Classical Parts of the Sentence and the

Parts of Speech

In Fries's book we can find a critical revision of the classical analysis of the parts of the sentence. Fries writes that this kind of analysis is of no value for an effective practical command of English. This classical analysis consists solely in ascribing the technical terms 'subject', 'predicate' , 'indirect object', 'direct object' to certain parts of the sentence.

The grouping of morphemes into positional classes with the help of'en­vironments' suggested by Harris led to the recognition of a few 'diagnostic frames' in Charles Fries' work.

Fries chose three patterns of English sentences as 'frames' to fill the posi­tions with the words under the test.

If a word could fit into a position without causing a change of the struc­tural meaning of the sentence, the word was considered to belong to a certain form-class.

	1	2	3	4
Frame A	The concert 1	was 2	good 3	(always) 4
Frame B	The clerk 1	remembered 2	the tax 3	(suddenly)
Frame C	The term	Went	-	there