Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Studying the human language faculty
- 2 Language as a mental organ
- 3 Syntax
- 4 Sound patterns in language
- 5 Describing linguistic knowledge
- 6 Phonetics and the I-linguistics of speech
- 7 Morphology
- 8 Language change
- 9 “Growing” a language
- 10 The organic basis of language
- References
- Index
5 - Describing linguistic knowledge
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Studying the human language faculty
- 2 Language as a mental organ
- 3 Syntax
- 4 Sound patterns in language
- 5 Describing linguistic knowledge
- 6 Phonetics and the I-linguistics of speech
- 7 Morphology
- 8 Language change
- 9 “Growing” a language
- 10 The organic basis of language
- References
- Index
Summary
In the previous chapter, we traced the path of linguists' interests in sound structure as these evolved from an E-language-based focus on representations alone to an I-language approach. Over time, it has come to be appreciated that knowledge of language includes not only (representational) questions of what speakers of a language know about the sound properties of its words, etc., but also the characterization of what they know about overall regularities that transcend particular items (see Anderson 1985). In the domain of sound structure, the description of these regularities originated in important respects from the study of what had been previously thought of as “morphophonemics” (see section 4.2.3 above). It inherited from that work a descriptive framework going back to one of the oldest grammatical traditions about which we have evidence, that of ancient Indian grammarians such as Pāṇini (c. 500 BC). In those terms, regularities are formulated as a system of rules, each of which performs some limited, local modification of a representation. Collectively, and in the context of a theory of the way they interact with one another, these rules describe a mapping between phonological representation and overt phonetic form.
Until relatively recently, linguists assumed that the description of a speaker's knowledge of overall regularities, of the general principles that are not part of any individual word or other linguistic form, was essentially equivalent to such a system of rules.
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- Information
- The Language OrganLinguistics as Cognitive Physiology, pp. 92 - 110Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002