INTRODUCTION
Language is one of the most useful and most brilliant of human inventions. By means of language, people who live together are able to interact and express their thoughts and feelings to one another. Language is first perceived as a string of noises organised into a meaningful pattern for the purpose of communication. It can as well be seen as graphic symbols also organised into meaningful patterns. The particular patterns of noises or graphic symbols are meaningful particularly to people of the speech community where the language is used. These patterns can however be learnt by people outside the speech community.
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3.1 The Nature of Language
There have been several explanations of language. One which is given above is that language is the means by which people from the same and related communities interact and express their thoughts and feelings to one another. This is one way of explaining the term language. There are other ways of explaining this phenomenon. A classic explication is that of Sapir (1921, p. 18) which explains language as ‘a purely human and non instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of a system of voluntarily produced symbols’. Another famous
definition of language was given by Hall in his Essay on Language, where language is defined as ‘the institution whereby humans communicate and interact with each other by means of habitually used oral-auditory arbitrary symbols’ (Hall, 1968, pp. 158).
An examination of these definitions reveals that language is primarily spoken (i.e oral - auditory). Writing is a recent development. There are many languages that exist only in the spoken form. Another aspect of language evident in the explications above is that language has structure and is normally organized into patterns – phonic (for spoken language) and graphic (for written language). The specific characteristics of language may be summarized thus:
… it is difficult to give a comprehensive definition of language. Any attempt that captures its essential characteristics: namely that it is a system made up of phonic or graphic symbols which are arbitrarily chosen or agreed upon by convention and are usually learned and used by a speech community for the purpose of communication can serve as a reasonable explication (Eka and Udofot 1996: 5)
A necessary implication of the use of language for the purpose of communication is that information expressed by language has to be meaningful to the hearer otherwise communication or interaction does not take place. This idea is stressed by Gimson’s (1980: 4-5) description of language as a system of conventional signals used for communication by a whole community. This pattern of conventions covers a system of significant sound units, the inflection and arrangement of words and the association of meaning with words.
All the explanations of language given above agree on certain issues. First, that language is arbitrary and conventional in the sense that there is often no link between a word and what it means. There exists some form of unwritten agreement or convention about the way language is used. This is like saying that flat-topped wooden or iron furniture with four supports is called a table not because of any reason other than that the English people by agreement and later by convention call it that. Secondly, that language is non instinctive. This means that it is a learned behaviour. Next, that language is human and is used by a group of people (a speech community) whose ancestors agreed on how certain symbols were to be used. Also, that although there are animal signs and computer language, for example, it is the speech of human beings that is elaborate and systematic enough to be studied. This shows that language is a peculiarly human behaviour. If conventional symbols have to be associated with meaning, it follows that the words we use in language and the sentences we make by putting words together have to mean something. This underscores the need for words and sentences to have structure. Knowledge of the elements or parts and patterns of words and sentences equips you with the means of forming them in the acceptable manner using the acceptable patterns of a given language. This course is designed to arm you with the acceptable means of forming words and sentences in English, using the appropriate structures.
3.2 The Structural Approach
The Structural Approach to the study of language can be traced to Bloomfield of the American school of Linguistics who in his book Language published in 1933 laid the foundation which was continued by Fries in his book The Structure of English published in 1952. Fries analysed living English speech using a sentence grammar approach instead of the word grammar approach of traditional grammar. Later grammars of English followed this approach until a different approach became available with the publication of Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures in 1957 and later Aspects of the Theory of Syntax in 1965.
The structural approach to the study of grammar came as a reaction to traditional grammar which divided all the words in the language into parts of speech according to the functions they perform, and prescribed rather than described their behaviour based on the rules of Latin grammar, paying very little attention to the forms of words and sounds of the language. In other words, traditional grammar looked at the functions of words and not at their structure.
The term structure is generally used to analyse all the units of grammar except the smallest unit - the morpheme. In English we have sentence structure, clause structure, group structure and word structure (Eka, 1994, p.24). The sentence is made up of one or more clauses; the clause is made up of one or more groups; the group is made up of one or more words and every word consists of one or more morphemes.
The sentence:
She was dancing gracefully because the music was melodiou scan be broken down into two clauses:
1a. She was dancing gracefully (main clause)
1b. because the music was melodious (subordinate clause)
Each clause: 1a and 1b is made up of groups such as:
1c she, gracefully
(pronoun/ adverbial group)
1d was dancing
(verbal group)
1e because
(prepositional group)
1f the music
(nominal group)
1g was
(verbal group)
1h melodius
(adjectival group)
Each group consists of words. Some of the words such as dancing and gracefully have more than one morpheme. Dancing is made up of {dance} and the progressive marker {ing} while gracefully also contains two morphemes: {grace} and the derivational morphemes {- ful} and {-ly}.
The structural approach to the study of Language also spread to Europe. It was the French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure who started people thinking along the lines of modern linguistics in Europe when he drew the distinction between diachronic and synchronic study of language. A diachronic study studies the historical development of language while a synchronic describes language as it is used at a particular point in time. His lectures, published posthumously by his students in A course in general linguistics (Cours de linguistique généralé) inspired other linguists in Europe namely: Henry Sweet whose ideas were elaborated upon by J. R. Firth of the London School of Linguistics.
From the London School of Linguistics also came Halliday who suggested a model of grammar often referred to as Neo-Firthian or Systemic Grammar. His model has structure as the surface grammar and meaning as the deep grammar. Within the model, morphology studies the structure of words while syntax studies the structure of sentences which are built up of words, yet they are ‘not separated as levels but accounted for within the units of the grammatical rank scale ’ (Eka, 1994, p.24). The model discusses four fundamental categories of grammar one of which is structure and the others are unit, class and system.
The Unit category identifies levels: the morpheme, the word, the group, the clause and the sentence which are hierarchically related in the sense that the upper unit is made up of one or more items of the lower unit next to it (as for instance the word which is made up of one or more morphemes etc.) The morpheme occupies the lowest rank while the sentence occupies the highest rank. Structure is used to analyse all the units except the morpheme. The elements of the clause in English are: Subject(S), Predicator (P), Complement (C), Adjunct (A). All clause structures combine some or all of the elements. The nominal group structure is Modifier (m), Head (h), and Qualifier (q). A modifier is any structure before the head while a qualifier refers to any structure after the head as in the following example:
M M H Q
The/ new/ students/ of the National Open University of
Nigeria
Class refers to a set of items with similar characteristics. Items of the same class belong to the same unit since they usually have the same structural possibilities. One can therefore refer to classes of verbs, nouns, adjectives etc and also to their behaviour as a group. For example verbs act as predicators while the nouns often operate as head of the nominal group in the structure of a clause. Every class also has sub- classes as for instance in the cases of nouns being countable and uncountable (count and non-count nouns), proper and abstract while verbs can be transitive, intransitive or linking.
System refers to a set of features from which only one has to be selected as for instance the system of number which allows for choice between singular and plural; the system of voice of verbs where a choice is made between active and passive and the system of polarity where the choice is between positive and negative.
An attempt is made in this course to describe the structure of the English Language in terms of the sound structure, the sentence structure, the group structure as well as the word and meaning structure. The emphasis is to show the constituents; that is what each of these is made up of: the sound system, the sentence, clause, group and the word.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE (SAE) 1
1. From the definitions of language given above, make a list of the characteristics of language.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE (SAE) 2
1. Distinguish between diachronic and synchronic study of language.
2. Which are the units of grammar discussed in this section?
3. Explain the term structure and its use.
4.0 CONCLUSION
This unit introduced you to the nature of language and the levels of language study. You also learned that language can be studied from the phonological, syntactic, semantic and lexical or what is more technically referred to as the morphological levels and each level has a structure
5.0 SUMMARY
In this unit you have learnt the following:
Language is a purely human behaviour and that is made up of sounds and symbols.
Language is a learned behaviour; it is conventional and arbitrary Language is mainly for communication among a speech community.
Language is a system and has four main levels of structure: phonological, syntactic, lexical and semantic
The structural approach to the analysis of language is traceable to Bloomfield of the American School of Linguistics.
The approach spread to Europe and was developed into the Systemic Model By the linguists of the London School of Linguistics mainly J.R Firth and M.A.K. Halliday.
The Structural Approach analyses language at four categories: unit, class, structure and system.
Structure is used to analyse all the units of grammar except the morpheme.
6.0 TUTOR MARKED ASSIGNMENT (TMA)
1. Discuss the origin and methods of the Structural Approach to the study of English grammar.
ENG 121 THE STRUCTURE OF MODERN ENGLISH
7.0 REFERENCES/FURTHER READINGS
Bloomfield, L. 1933. Language. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Eka, D. (1996) Elements of Grammar and Mechanics of English.
Uyo: Samuf Educational.
Eka, D. and Udofot, I. (1996) Aspects of Spoken Language. Calabar: Bon Universal.
Fromkin, V. and Rodman, R. (1983) Introduction to Language. New York: Holt, Rineheart and Winston.
Tomori, S,H.O.(1977). The Morphology And Syntax Of Present-Day
English: An Introduction. London: Heinemann
Quirk, R. and Greenbaum, S. (1980). A University Grammar of English, London: Longman.
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