Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech

by Edward Sapir

Overview

How do culture and language correspond? How does language work, and how do languages vary? An expert linguist and anthropologist addresses these and related issues in a highly readable examination of language within the contexts of thought, historical process, race, culture, and art. A leader in American structural linguistics, Edward Sapir (1884-1939) studied under the direction of Franz Boas, a pioneer in anthropology. With his student Benjamin Whorf, Sapir developed and championed the controversial Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which states that certain thoughts expressed in one language cannot be understood by natives of another language, and that thinking is strongly affected by the nature of the native language. Sapir's gifts of lyric and persuasive writing make this introduction to the fundamentals of language accessible and interesting to readers with no background in the subject. Professional linguists will be similarly engaged by the breadth of the author's canvas, the penetrating quality of his vision, and his treatment of topics-including a discussion of "drift," or the processes of language change, now regarded a classic exposition of linguistic theory.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780486437446
Publisher:	Dover Publications
Publication date:	09/10/2004
Series:	Dover Language Guides
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

Table of Contents

	Preface	iii
I	Introductory: Language Defined	1
	Language a cultural, not a biologically inherited, function
	Futility of interjectional and sound-imitative theories of the origin of speech
	Definition of language
	The psychophysical basis of speech
	Concepts and language
	Is thought possible without language?
	Abbreviations and transfers of the speech process
	The universality of language
II	The Elements of Speech	17
	Sounds not properly elements of speech
	Words and significant parts of words (radical elements, grammatical elements)
	Types of words
	The word a formal, not a functional unit
	The word has a real psychological existence
	The sentence
	The cognitive, volitional, and emotional aspects of speech
	Feeling-tones of words
III	The Sounds of Language	32
	The vast number of possible sounds
	The articulating organs and their share in the production of speechsounds: lungs, glottal cords, nose, mouth and its parts
	Vowel articulations
	How and where consonants are articulated
	The phonetic habits of a language
	The "values" of sounds
	Phonetic patterns
IV	Form in Language: Grammatical Processes	44
	Formal processes as distinct from grammatical functions
	Intercrossing of the two points of view
	Six main types of grammatical process
	Word sequence as a method
	Compounding of radical elements
	Affixing: prefixes and suffixes; infixes
	Internal vocalic change; consonantal change
	Reduplication
	Functional variations of stress; of pitch
V	Form in Language: Grammatical Concepts	64
	Analysis of a typical English sentence
	Types of concepts illustrated by it
	Inconsistent expression of analogous concepts
	How the same sentence may be expressed in other languages with striking differences in the selection and grouping of concepts
	Essential and non-essential concepts
	The mixing of essential relational concepts with secondary ones of more concrete order
	Form for form's sake
	Classification of linguistic concepts: basic or concrete, derivational, concrete relational, pure relational
	Tendency for these types of concepts to flow into each other
	Categories expressed in various grammatical systems
	Order and stress as relating principles in the sentence
	Concord
	Parts of speech: no absolute classification possible; noun and verb
VI	Types of Linguistic Structure	97
	The possibility of classifying languages
	Difficulties
	Classification into form-languages and formless languages not valid
	Classification according to formal processes used not practicable
	Classification according to degree of synthesis
	"Inflective" and "agglutinative"
	Fusion and symbolism as linguistic techniques
	Agglutination
	"Inflective" a confused term
	Threefold classification suggested: what types of concepts are expressed? what is the prevailing technique? what is the degree of synthesis? Four fundamental conceptual types
	Examples tabulated
	Historical test of the validity of the suggested conceptual classification
VII	Language as a Historical Product: Drift	120
	Variability of language
	Individual and dialectic variations
	Time variation or "drift"
	How dialects arise
	Linguistic stocks
	Direction or "slope" of linguistic drift
	Tendencies illustrated in an English sentence
	Hesitations of usage as symptomatic of the direction of drift
	Leveling tendencies in English
	Weakening of case elements
	Tendency to fixed position in the sentence
	Drift toward the invariable word
VIII	Language as a Historical Product: Phonetic Law	141
	Parallels in drift in related languages
	Phonetic law as illustrated in the history of certain English and German vowels and consonants
	Regularity of phonetic law
	Shifting of sounds without destruction of phonetic pattern
	Difficulty of explaining the nature of phonetic drifts
	Vowel mutation in English and German
	Morphological influence on phonetic change
	Analogical levelings to offset irregularities produced by phonetic laws
	New morphological features due to phonetic change
IX	How Languages Influence Each Other	158
	Linguistic influences due to cultural contact
	Borrowing of words
	Resistances to borrowing
	Phonetic modification of borrowed words
	Phonetic interinfluencings of neighboring languages
	Morphological borrowings
	Morphological resemblances as vestiges of genetic relationship
X	Language, Race and Culture	170
	Naive tendency to consider linguistic, racial, and cultural groupings as congruent
	Race and language need not correspond
	Cultural and linguistic boundaries not identical
	Coincidences between linguistic cleavages and those of language and culture due to historical, not intrinsic psychological, causes
	Language does not in any deep sense "reflect" culture
XI	Language and Literature	182
	Language as the material or medium of literature
	Literature may move on the generalized linguistic plane or may be inseparable from specific linguistic conditions
	Language as a collective art
	Necessary esthetic advantages or limitations in any language
	Style as conditioned by inherent features of the language
	Prosody as conditioned by the phonetic dynamics of a language
	Index	191