Some general linguistic concepts [Archives:2005/814/Education]
By Mohammed Hassan Al-Fattah
Lecturer,
English department
College of Education
Mahweet
Language and its use has been basic to all human societies, at all times. Linguistics is regarded to be a rich field of knowledge because it explains the matters relating to language. It involves a scientific study and a systematic description of language. Using linguistics as a tool, we can describe a particular language. We can describe even different languages and attempt a comparative or contrastive analysis of language.
Recent researches in the area of linguistics have proved that all human languages have certain common characteristics. It is nearly agreed, for example, that all languages have grammatical categories like nouns, personal pronouns, verbs, adjectives and negative expressions. In spite of that, every language has its own rules and its own peculiarities. In English, for example, there are only two numbers: singular and plural. But in Arabic, there are three: singular, dual and plural. In an English clause, the subject generally comes first then the verb and the object. In a Hindi transitive clause, the object occurs before the verb. In an Arabic sentence, the subject comes sometimes before the verb and sometimes after the verb because there are two categories of sentences in classical Arabic. English verbs and adjectives don't distinguish between the masculine and feminine. But Arabic verbs and adjectives do. In Latin prepositions are not used at the end of a sentence. Such examples can be multiplied.
As far as the classification of languages into morphological types are concerned, it is William Ven Humbolt a German linguist of the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, who for the first time suggested the classification of languages into the following three types. The first type, known as agglutinating languages are the ones in which sentences composed of shorter elements are formed by sticking these elements. Examples of this type are Turkish and Finnish. The second type is inflecting languages, in which most words are variable words such as the words sing, sang, sung, sings, singing. The word order is not very important from the point of view of the syntactic relationship between the words in a sentence as found in the Ancient Greek and the classical Arabic. As Dr. Thakur mentions in his book Morphology (1998:85), the third type is isolating languages. Chinese is an example of this type where nearly all the words are monomorphic and all the morphemes are free morphemes. In this connection, English can be described as a fairly mixed type of languages. English belongs to the Indo European family of language and is classified along with old language like Ancient Greek and Latin. English words carry the characteristics of inflecting and agglutinative patterns. It has also the features of the isolating languages because a large number of words in English are monomorphic and monosyllabic.
To establish the similarities and differences between languages, there is an emerging new branch of linguistics called contrastive linguistics. This area of linguistics helps us to make a systematic study of the linguistic system of various languages.
Contrastive linguistics help the experts and researchers to understand and solve the problems in the field of education especially foreign language learning. Contrastive linguistic analysis is very important in the field of teaching and learning languages because fairly systematic attempts have been made to show the relevance of linguistics finding a solution to language teaching problems. So it is useful for the teacher to get a good amount of knowledge in linguistics because this will enable him to understand, analyze and interpret the structure of the language he/she is teaching. The teacher's knowledge of linguistics helps him to solve the problems he faces while teaching a foreign language. Contrastive analysis can also help the syllabus makers in making syllabuses, designing courses and organizing curriculums in comparison with other curriculums. For example, comparing and contrasting the educational systems or the system of teaching foreign languages in different countries will be useful in the process of designing the curriculum for the teaching of foreign languages. Contrastive linguistics gives useful information about languages and their syntactic systems and this helps the teachers to have some useful insight into the ways in which languages operate.
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