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In my previous post, What is Language For? I observed that by around 4 years of age, every cognitively normal human child on the planet is a linguistic genius. But the apparent ease with which each acquire, and come to use our mother tongue(s), belies a level of complexity of immense proportions. You might not know a preposition from an adverb, or the difference between the passive voice and the indicative, nor what the double object construction is. You might also be at a loss if I asked you how to conjugate the copula in English, or what perfective aspect is. Yet like around 400 million other native speakers of English around the world, you and I deploy the copula and successfully conjugate it countless times every day. In other words, our knowledge of language is implicit rather than explicit. While you might not be able to explain to a foreigner, should they ask, how to conjugate the copula without the aid of a book of English grammar, you can do it with your hands tied behind your back. Each of us carries around in our heads a ‘mental grammar’ far more impressive than any written grammar. In short, you or I don’t have to know that the verb be is the copula to know how to use it.
Language has a symbolic function: it allows us to convey messages to those around, ranging from observations on the weather, to declaring undying love. Language encompasses a wide range of different types of knowledge which serve to support symbol use. One kind of knowledge involves knowledge of the individual sounds that make up a particular language, and the rules that govern the way these sounds can be combined. While there is an inventory of all the possible sounds a human being can make, different languages draw on different numbers of these in producing the words that make up a language. This is why a French speaker finds it difficult to pronounce the th sound in English, and why a Chinese speaker often cannot pronounce the r sound: fried rice becomes flied lice. These sounds simply don’t exist in French, or Mandarin. Indeed, English speakers often sound equally absurd when speaking other languages, as I can attest from years of mangling the French language. A number of French sounds simply don’t exist in English.
Standard English consists of 12 simple vowel sounds. These include the /I/ in pit and the /e/ in pet. There are, in addition, a further 8 two vowel sound sequences, known as diphthongs, such as the /eI/ in day. English also has 14 consonants like the /z/ in zip and the /ŋ/ in ring. This makes a total of 44 distinct sound segments from which all English words are derived—at least in standard British Received Pronunciation (RP). This total, may, on the face of it be somewhat surprising, given that the alphabet consists of only 26 letters. Yet the English spelling system is, in fact, the Latin spelling system, and as applied to English is notoriously treacherous, as is made abundantly clear by the following poem by T.S.Watt, first published back in 1954:
I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble but not you
On hiccough, thorough, slough and through.
Well done! And now you wish perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.
And dead, it's said like bed, not bead-
for goodness' sake don't call it 'deed'!
Watch out for meat and great and threat
(they rhyme with suite and straight and debt).
A second type of knowledge involves word structure. Each of us intuitively knows how simple words are combined to make complex words—and the meanings associated with the parts of words involved. We know the difference between teaching, teacher and teachable. A teacher is a person who carries out the activity of teaching, while a subject is teachable (or not). We add the suffixes –er, -ing and -able to the verb stem teach at will in order to derive the requisite meaning. We also know that while a teacher is someone who teaches, we can’t necessarily add –er willy nilly to create similar meanings. Much of our knowledge appears to be word-specific. For instance, a villager is not someone who ‘villages’ and a bestseller is not someone who ‘bestsells’. In fact, a bestseller is not a person at all.
Another type of knowledge relates to the range of meanings associated with words and other linguistic expressions. Knowledge of this kind is not the restricted definitional kind that you might find given as concise definitions in a desk dictionary, for instance. The sort of meanings associated with words that you carry around with you in your head is better likened to an encyclopaedia. In fact, it is commonly referred to as encyclopaedic knowledge. For instance, consider everything you must know in order to understand what open means in the following expressions: open a book, open your briefcase, open the curtains, open your mouth, and open her blouse. The kind of knowledge you must have access to, stuffed somewhere in your head, concerns the range of scenarios in which very different sorts of things can be ‘opened’. After all, we apply ‘open’ to very different sorts of ‘containers’ such as a briefcase, a mouth and a blouse, with apertures of different kinds, whose opening is achieved in different ways and for different purposes. It is less clear that a book is a container, and it is not at all clear that there is a container that is opened by virtue of opening curtains. We conventionally use open in relation to these very different scenarios, and many others, including such things as ‘opening’ a bank account. The word meanings that we carry around in our heads appear not to resemble the narrow, precise definitions of a dictionary. Rather, they relate to the sorts of things and situations with respect to which open can apply, the way the opening occurs, and the purposes for the ‘opening’ event. Consider how you would go about opening a blouse versus a briefcase, the different sorts of entities you would be likely to find inside each (!), and the reasons for the ‘opening’ event.
Another kind of knowledge relates our ability to combine words using knowledge of regular patterns in order to make a seemingly infinite number of novel sentences; we possess knowledge of the abstract rules that make up everything you and I know about English sentence structure. Part of this involves knowledge regarding word order. We know intuitively that in the expression: The window cleaner nervously kissed the supermodel, the window cleaner did the kissing. But if we reverse the window cleaner and the supermodel: The supermodel confidently kissed the window cleaner, now we have a different ‘kisser’ and ‘kissee’. Part of what you and I know about a language, then, involves knowing the order in which words are located in a sentence. The order, after all, determines the role we attribute to the window cleaner and the supermodel in the kissing event. Of course, other languages vary in quite remarkable ways. Hungarian, for instance, has no fixed word order. Each language represents a unique system replete with its own conventions.
In addition, we possess a large inventory of idioms which are an essential part of any language, and which often pose problems for the language learner. For instance, try explaining to a foreign student why, in English, we can sleep tight, soundly and deeply, but we don’t sleep wide! To bend over backwards means, somewhat bizarrely, to try very hard, rather than, to bend over backwards, and to jump down someone’s throat means something quite different from what it literally says. And to kick the bucket, which means ‘to die’, changes its meaning entirely even if we replace just one of the words. For instance, to kick the mop relates, presumably, to a frustrated janitor rather than death.
The final kind of knowledge that I touch on relates to what we might think of as contextualisation cues. These include the gestures which accompany our utterances, our facial expression, and cues relating to features of stress, intonation and pitch. For instance, whether the pitch of an utterance rises or falls can determine whether we interpret the utterance to be a question or a statement. Moreover, even a well-judged pause or glance can provide an effective means of signalling meaning; for instance, Marina Hyde, the journalist, and writing in The Guardian newspaper (5th June 2013), once noted that the appeal of Alistair Campbell—Tony Blair’s once fearsome spin doctor—was “based entirely on the look he wore – a look which said: ‘I'd like to shag you, if only I had the time.’"
Excerpted from The Language Myth (2014: Chapter 1; published by Cambridge University Press)
