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L I N G U I ST I C S

An Introduction to Language and Communication

S I X T H E D I T I O N

Adrian A K M A J I A N Richard A. D E M E R S Ann K. F A R M E R Robert M. H A R N I S H

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LINGUISTICS

LINGUISTICS

An Introduction to Language and Communication

Sixth Edition

Adrian Akmajian

Richard A. Demers

Ann K. Farmer

Robert M. Harnish

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

( 2010 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or informa- tion storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

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This book was set in Times New Roman on 3B2 by Asco Typesetters, Hong Kong. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Linguistics : an introduction to language and communication / Adrian Akmajian

... [et al.]. — 6th ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-262-01375-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-262-51370- (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Linguistics. I. Akmajian, Adrian. P121.A4384 2010 410—dc22 2009028422

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Acknowledgments

For this sixth edition we would like to thank the many students whom we

have taught and from whom we have learned. We would also like to

express our special thanks to our colleagues Henry Byerly, Massimo

Piattelli-Palmarini, Merrill Garrett, and Nicholas Farmer, and to David

Hill for help with the index. Finally, thanks to Anne Mark, for her editing

skills and excellent feedback during the preparation of the manuscript.

the chapters on phonetics and phonology. Though this is not the ‘‘tradi-

tional’’ order of presentation, we have found it desirable for two reasons.

First, it enables us to introduce students to the various fields of linguistics

by virtue of the information encoded in words. And second, words and

their properties are intuitively accessible to students in a way that sounds

and their properties may not be.

Second, we must emphasize once again our concern with imparting ba-

sic conceptual foundations of linguistics and the method of argumenta-

tion, justification, and hypothesis testing within the field. In no way is

this edition intended to be a complete survey of the facts or putative

results that have occupied linguists in recent years. On the contrary, we

have chosen a small set of linguistic concepts that we understand to be

among the most fundamental within the field at this time; and in present-

ing these concepts, we have attempted to show how to argue for linguistic

hypotheses. By dealing with a relatively small number of topics in detail,

students can get a feeling for how work in di¤erent areas of linguistics is

done. If an introductory course can impart this feeling for the field, it will

have largely succeeded.

Third, we have drawn the linguistic examples in this edition, as in ear-

lier ones, almost exclusively from English. Once again we should note

that we recognize the great importance of studying language universals

and the increasingly significant role that comparative studies play in lin-

guistic research. However, in presenting conceptual foundations of lin-

guistics to students who have never been exposed to the subject before,

we feel it is crucial that they should be able to draw upon their linguistic

intuitions when required to make subtle judgments about language, both

in following the text and in doing exercises. This is not merely for conve-

nience, to set up as few obstacles as possible in an introductory course;

rather, we feel it is essential that students be able to evaluate critically

our factual claims at each step, for this encourages a healthy skepticism

and an active approach toward the subject matter. Given that the major-

ity of our readers are native speakers of English, our focus on English

examples provides benefits that we feel far outweigh the lack of data

from other languages. Obviously, the general principles we discuss must

be applicable to all languages, and some teachers may wish to emphasize

universals and crosslinguistic data in their lectures. Such material can be

found in A Linguistics Workbook: Companion to Linguistics, Sixth Edition,

by Ann K. Farmer and Richard A. Demers, also published by the MIT

Press.

xii Note to the Teacher

LESSON PLANS

We have organized this book to give teachers maximum flexibility in de-

signing a linguistics course for their own (and their students’ own) special

needs. The individual chapters are designed with numerous subsections

and in such a way that core material is often presented first, with addi-

tional material following as special topics. In this way, teachers who can

spend only a week on a certain chapter are able to choose various subsec-

tions, so that students are exposed to the material most relevant for that

particular course—in short, the book can be used in a modular fashion.

We will take up some specific examples.

For teachers working in the quarter system, this book can be used

easily for a one-quarter course. For a course oriented toward more

traditional topics in linguistics, the following is a possible format (with

variations depending on the teacher):

Chapter 2: Morphology

Chapter 3: Phonetics and Phonemic Transcription

Chapter 4: Phonology

Chapter 5: Syntax

Chapter 7: Language Variation

Chapter 8: Language Change

The chapters cited do not depend crucially on the ones that have been

skipped over; thus, we have ensured that a traditional core exists within

the book.

For a one-quarter course with an emphasis on psycholinguistics, cogni-

tive science, or human communication, the following is a possible format:

Chapter 2: Morphology

Chapter 5: Syntax

Chapter 6: Semantics

Chapter 9: Pragmatics

Chapter 11: Language Acquisition in Children

Chapter 12: Language and the Brain

Teachers working within the semester system (or teaching courses that

run two quarters in the quarter system) will find that the book can be

used quite comfortably within a 14- or 15-week term. For example, for a

one-semester linguistics course oriented toward more traditional topics,

the following is a possible format:

xiii Note to the Teacher

PART I

THE STRUCTURE OF HUMAN LANGUAGE

In addition to discussing the core areas of morphology, phonology,

syntax, and semantics (chapter 6), we will discuss two subfields of linguis-

tics that draw heavily on those core areas, namely, language variation

(chapter 7) and language change (chapter 8). In these chapters we will

consider the ways in which language varies across individual speakers

and dialect groups (regionally, socially, and ethnically) and how lan-

guages vary and relate to each other historically. Thus, having isolated

important structural units in chapters 2–5, we will then examine how

such units can vary along a number of dimensions.

The subfields represented in chapters 2–6 form the core of what has

classically been known as structural linguistics (as practiced in the United

States from the 1930s to the 1950s), and they continue to form a central

part of generative linguistics, the theoretical perspective we adopt here.

The latter dates from the publication of Noam Chomsky’s 1957 work

Syntactic Structures and has been the dominant school of linguistics in

the United States since that time. It has also come to be a dominant

school in Western Europe and Japan and has increasing influence in sev-

eral Eastern European countries as well.

Assuming that the majority of our readers are native speakers of

English, we have drawn the language data used in this book almost exclu-

sively from English (see A Linguistics Workbook: Companion to Linguis-

tics, Sixth Edition, also published by the MIT Press, for exercises based

on over 20 languages). We encourage you to use your native linguistic

judgments in evaluating our arguments and hypotheses. It is important

that you test hypotheses, since this is an important aspect of doing scien-

tific investigations. We should also stress that the general aspects of the

linguistic framework we develop here are proposed to hold for all lan-

guages, or at least for a large subset of languages, and we encourage you

to think about other languages you may know as you study the English

examples.

4 Part I

Chapter 1

What Is Linguistics?

The field of linguistics, the scientific study of human natural language, is

a growing and exciting area of study, with an important impact on fields

as diverse as education, anthropology, sociology, language teaching, cog-

nitive psychology, philosophy, computer science, neuroscience, and artifi-

cial intelligence, among others. Indeed, the last five fields cited, along

with linguistics, are the key components of the field of cognitive science,

the study of the structure and functioning of human cognitive processes.

In spite of the importance of the field of linguistics, many people, even

highly educated people, will tell you that they have only a vague idea of

what the field is about. Some believe that a linguist is a person who

speaks several languages fluently. Others believe that linguists are lan-

guage experts who can help you decide whether it is better to say ‘‘It is

I’’ or ‘‘It’s me.’’ Yet it is quite possible to be a professional linguist (and

an excellent one at that) without having taught a single language class,

without having interpreted at the UN, and without speaking any more

than one language.

What is linguistics, then? Fundamentally, the field is concerned with

the nature of language and (linguistic) communication. It is apparent that

people have been fascinated with language and communication for thou-

sands of years, yet in many ways we are only beginning to understand the

complex nature of this aspect of human life. If we ask, What is the nature

of language? or How does communication work? we quickly realize that

these questions have no simple answers and are much too broad to be

answered in a direct way. Similarly, questions such as What is energy?

or What is matter? cannot be answered in a simple fashion, and indeed

research in physics is carried out in numerous subfields, some of which in-

volve investigating the nature of energy and matter. Linguistics is no dif-

ferent: the field as a whole represents an attempt to break down the broad

questions about the nature of language and communication into smaller,