BA Lingistics, 1981, UC Santa Cruz

We talk about everything we do, so in some senses linguistics touches all we know. Linguists study:

• The sounds of language (phonetics) - all the sounds of all the languages in the world.
• Regular variation of sound that do or don't change the meaning (phonology). For instance, the sounds at the end of cats, dogs and fishes all mean "plural," but they are really different, an "s", a "z" and an "ez" sound. How the plural sounds is predictable because of the proceeding sound. The "t" in "cat" has no voice, the "g" in "dog" does. A "z" is an "s" with voice. The "e" sound before the "z" in "fishes" allows us to hear that the plural was added. The plural is a phoneme that is realized in different ways, meaning that we consider all three to be the same and can predict how it will occur in different circumstances.
• Words and smaller units that change the meaning of word are called morphemes . The /z/ sound that is added to form a plural is "the plural morpheme." "-ing" is another example of a morpheme. In Spanish "hablo" means "I talk" and "hablas" means "you talk." The endings are morphemes that change the meaning for the word.
• The words of a language are called its lexicon. Sometimes words and morphemes are the same sounds, but we think of them differently. Words are just what you think words are and are defined that way. As what people think words are.
• Historical linguistics studies how the sounds change over time.
• Syntax is the order of the words. Why is "the cat ate the rat" a good sentence but "the the cat rat ates" not? What rules make the two sentences different?
• Semantics is "meaning" and it is trickery. It is possible to have sentences that are grammatically correct, that have correct syntax, but are meaningless, Noam Chomsky's came up with: "colorless green ideas sleep furiously." Ideas can't sleep, ideas do not have color, something can't be both green and colorless and so on. The words have a relationship with each other.

  But there are other ways that language "means," If we say "leave!" it is an action and we expect an action in return. It only make sense in context. We can say the sentence "he's a student" and have it mean many things; "he's a student?" "he's a student" (with disgust), "he's a student" (statement of fact). In answer to the question: "What did she just say?" (quoting someone else). When we say "I understand" often we are not referring to something inside of ourselves, but telling others our interaction can continue. "Meaning" is not always tied to words. In fact some linguists and philosophers of language think words mean different things every time they are used. Meaning is negotiated and renegotiated and it may not even be a useful term. Meaning can't be looked up in a dictionary in real human communicaton.