Linguistics

Part of Speech (5): Adverb

2007-02-23T05:55:00.000+07:00

Before, it has been briefly explained that an adjective is a word that give more information about a noun or pronoun. Now, comes to adverb. An adverb is usually defined as a word that gives more information about a verb, an adjective or another adverb. Adverbs describe verbs, adjectives and adverbs in terms of such qualities as time, frequency and manner. In the sentence Sue runs fast, fast describes how or the manner in which Sue runs. In the sentence Sue runs very fast, very describes the adverb fast and gives information about how fast Sue runs.

Most, but not all adverbs end in -ly as in But not all words that end in -ly are adverbs (ugly is an adjective, supply and reply can both be nouns or verbs). Many times an adjective can be made into an adverb by adding -ly as in nicely, quickly, completely, sincerely.

Adverbs modify or describe verbs (run fast), adjectives (often sad), or other adverbs (too often). Adverbs often, but not always, end in -ly. A test for deciding if a word is an adverb is to think about the word's function. Adverbs tend to tell where, when, or how.

In addition, an adverb can modify a verb, an adjective, another adverb, a phrase, or a clause. An adverb indicates manner, time, place, cause, or degree and answers questions such as "how," "when," "where," "how much".

While some adverbs can be identified by their characteristic "ly" suffix, most of them must be identified by untangling the grammatical relationships within the sentence or clause as a whole. Unlike an adjective, an adverb can be found in various places within the sentence.

In the following examples, each of the highlighted words is an adverb:

The seamstress quickly made the mourning clothes.

In this sentence, the adverb "quickly" modifies the verb "made" and indicates in what manner (or how fast) the clothing was constructed.

The midwives waited patiently through a long labour.

Similarly in this sentence, the adverb "patiently" modifies the verb "waited" and describes the manner in which the midwives waited.

The boldly-spoken words would return to haunt the rebel.

In this sentence the adverb "boldly" modifies the adjective "spoken."

We urged him to dial the number more expeditiously.
Here the adverb "more" modifies the adverb "expeditiously."

Unfortunately, the bank closed at three today.
In this example, the adverb "unfortunately" modifies the entire sentence.

There is one kind of adverb called conjunctive adverb.

You can use a conjunctive adverb to join two clauses together. Some of the most common conjunctive adverbs are "also," "consequently," "finally," "furthermore," "hence," "however," "incidentally," "indeed," "instead," "likewise," "meanwhile," "nevertheless," "next," "nonetheless," "otherwise," "still," "then," "therefore," and "thus." A conjunctive adverb is not strong enough to join two independent clauses without the aid of a semicolon.

The highlighted words in the following sentences are conjunctive adverbs:

-The government has cut university budgets; consequently, class sizes have been increased.
-He did not have all the ingredients the recipe called for; therefore, he decided to make something else.
-The report recommended several changes to the ways the corporation accounted for donations; furthermore, it suggested that a new auditor be appointed immediately.
-The crowd waited patiently for three hours; finally, the doors to the stadium were opened.
-Batman and Robin fruitlessly searched the building; indeed, the Joker had escaped through a secret door in the basement.

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Part of Speech (4): Adjective

2007-01-23T12:19:00.000+07:00

Adjective is part of speech which includes words like big, small, beautiful, smart, etc. English and many other languages have a large number and growing class of adjectives, though in still other languages the class of adjective is tiny and closed or absent altogether. (In these languages, the meanings expressed by adjectives in English are expressed by other parts of speech).

"Fast, fun, new, old, red, ugly" are all adjectives. They describe a noun.

Read these examples:

It's a fast car. It's a fun car. It's a new car.
It's an old car. It's a red car. It's an ugly car.

In English, adjectives may be defined by a umber of criteria. Not every adjective exhibits every single one of the ytpical adjectival properties, but a word that exhibits most of them must still be classed as an adjective. Here are some tests for adjective.

Distribution: An adjective can typically appear in each of the following slots to produce a good sentence: This is a(n) _____ book; This book is _____; _____ though this book is, it's not what we want. (Try this with new, interesting, expensive, beautiful).

Comparison: An adjectivecan be compared in one of the following two ways: big/bigger/biggest, beautiful/more beautiful/ most beautiful. It can akso appear in the as ..... as construction: as pretty as Rita, etc.

Degree: An adjective can be modified by a degree modifier like very, fairly, too, so, or rather. Examples: very big, fairly nice, so good, etc.

Affixation: An adjective may take the prefix un- or in- to form another adjective. Like happy/unhappy, possible/impossible, etc.

Negative properties: An adjective can't be marked for number (singular vs. plural) of for tense (past vs. non-past), nor can it take the suffix -ing which goes onto verb.

Moreover, the meaning of an adjective is typically a temporary or permanent state or condition : big, young, red, asleep, shiny, etc. Many adjetives also express subjective perceptions, rather than objective facts: interesting, beautiful, disgusting, etc. In fact, a few adjectives express very unusual types of meaning: mere, utter, etc.

To conclude, adjectives are words used to describe nouns. Adjectives give more information about a noun. Use adjectives to make your writing more interesting.

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Part of Speech (3): Verb

2007-01-09T17:05:00.000+07:00

A verb is often defined as a word which shows action or state of being. The verb is the heart of a sentence - every sentence must have a verb. Recognizing the verb is often the most important step in understanding the meaning of a sentence. In the sentence The dog bit the man, bit is the verb and the word which shows the action of the sentence. In the sentence The man is sitting on a chair, even though the action doesn't show much activity, sitting is the verb of the sentence. In the sentence She is a smart girl, there is no action but a state of being expressed by the verb is. The word be is different from other verbs in many ways but can still be thought of as a verb.

Unlike most of the other parts of speech, verbs change their form. Sometimes endings are added (learn - learned) and sometimes the word itself becomes different (teach-taught). The different forms of verbs show different meanings related to such things as tense (past, present, future), person (first person, second person, third person), number (singular, plural) and voice (active, passive). Verbs are also often accompanied by verb-like words called modals (may, could, should, etc.) and auxiliaries(do, have, will, etc.) to give them different meanings.

One of the most important things about verbs is their relationship to time. Verbs tell if something has already happened, if it will happen later, or if it is happening now. For things happening now, we use the present tense of a verb; for something that has already happened, we use the past tense; and for something that will happen later, we use the future tense.

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Part of Speech (2): Pronoun

2007-01-08T14:00:00.000+07:00

What is a Pronoun?
A pronoun can replace a noun or another pronoun. You use pronouns like "he," "which," "none," and "you" to make your sentences less cumbersome and less repetitive.

Grammarians classify pronouns into several types, including the personal pronoun, the demonstrative pronoun, the interrogative pronoun, the indefinite pronoun, the relative pronoun, the reflexive pronoun, and the intensive pronoun.

Personal Pronouns
A personal pronoun refers to a specific person or thing and changes its form to indicate person, number, gender, and case.

Subjective Personal Pronouns
A subjective personal pronoun indicates that the pronoun is acting as the subject of the sentence. The subjective personal pronouns are "I," "you," "she," "he," "it," "we," "you," "they."

In the following sentences, each of the highlighted words is a subjective personal pronoun and acts as the subject of the sentence:

I was glad to find the bus pass in the bottom of the green knapsack.
You are surely the strangest child I have ever met.
He stole the selkie's skin and forced her to live with him.
When she was a young woman, she earned her living as a coal miner.
After many years, they returned to their homeland.
We will meet at the library at 3:30 p.m.
It is on the counter.
Are you the delegates from Malagawatch?
Objective Personal Pronouns
An objective personal pronoun indicates that the pronoun is acting as an object of a verb, compound verb, preposition, or infinitive phrase. The objective personal pronouns are: "me," "you," "her," "him," "it," "us," "you," and "them."

In the following sentences, each of the highlighted words is an objective personal pronoun:

Seamus stole the selkie's skin and forced her to live with him.
The objective personal pronoun "her" is the direct object of the verb "forced" and the objective personal pronoun "him" is the object of the preposition "with."

After reading the pamphlet, Judy threw it into the garbage can.
The pronoun "it" is the direct object of the verb "threw".

The agitated assistant stood up and faced the angry delegates and said, "Our leader will address you in five minutes."
In this sentence, the pronoun "you" is the direct object of the verb "address."

Deborah and Roberta will meet us at the newest café in the market.
Here the objective personal pronoun "us" is the direct object of the compound verb "will meet."

Give the list to me.
Here the objective personal pronoun "me" is the object of the preposition "to".

I'm not sure that my contact will talk to you.
Similarly in this example, the objective personal pronoun "you" is the object of the preposition "to".

Christopher was surprised to see her at the drag races.
Here the objective personal pronoun "her" is the object of the infinitive phrase "to see."

Possessive Personal Pronouns
A possessive pronoun indicates that the pronoun is acting as a marker of possession and defines who owns a particular object or person. The possessive personal pronouns are "mine," "yours," "hers," "his," "its," "ours," and "theirs." Note that possessive personal pronouns are very similar to possessive adjectives like "my," "her," and "their."

In each of the following sentences, the highlighted word is a possessive personal pronoun:

The smallest gift is mine.
Here the possessive pronoun "mine" functions as a subject complement.

This is yours.
Here too the possessive pronoun "yours" functions as a subject complement.

His is on the kitchen counter.
In this example, the possessive pronoun "his" acts as the subject of the sentence.

Theirs will be delivered tomorrow.
In this sentence, the possessive pronoun "theirs" is the subject of the sentence.

Ours is the green one on the corner.
Here too the possessive pronoun "ours" function as the subject of the sentence.

Demonstrative Pronouns
A demonstrative pronoun points to and identifies a noun or a pronoun. "This" and "these" refer to things that are nearby either in space or in time, while "that" and "those" refer to things that are farther away in space or time.

The demonstrative pronouns are "this," "that," "these," and "those." "This" and "that" are used to refer to singular nouns or noun phrases and "these" and "those" are used to refer to plural nouns and noun phrases. Note that the demonstrative pronouns are identical to demonstrative adjectives, though, obviously, you use them differently. It is also important to note that "that" can also be used as a relative pronoun.

In the following sentences, each of the highlighted words is a demonstrative pronoun:

This must not continue.
Here "this" is used as the subject of the compound verb "must not continue."

This is puny; that is the tree I want.
In this example "this" is used as subject and refers to something close to the speaker. The demonstrative pronoun "that" is also a subject but refers to something farther away from the speaker.

Three customers wanted these.
Here "these" is the direct object of the verb "wanted".

Interrogative Pronouns
An interrogative pronoun is used to ask questions. The interrogative pronouns are "who," "whom," "which," "what" and the compounds formed with the suffix "ever" ("whoever," "whomever," "whichever," and "whatever"). Note that either "which" or "what" can also be used as an interrogative adjective, and that "who," "whom," or "which" can also be used as a relative pronoun.

You will find "who," "whom," and occasionally "which" used to refer to people, and "which" and "what" used to refer to things and to animals.

"Who" acts as the subject of a verb, while "whom" acts as the object of a verb, preposition, or a verbal.

The highlighted word in each of the following sentences is an interrogative pronoun:

Which wants to see the dentist first?
"Which" is the subject of the sentence.

Who wrote the novel Rockbound?
Similarly "who" is the subject of the sentence.

Whom do you think we should invite?
In this sentence, "whom" is the object of the verb "invite."

To whom do you wish to speak?
Here the interrogative pronoun "whom " is the object of the preposition "to."

Who will meet the delegates at the train station?
In this sentence, the interrogative pronoun "who" is the subject of the compound verb "will meet".

To whom did you give the paper?
In this example the interrogative pronoun "whom" is the object of the preposition "to."

What did she say?
Here the interrogative pronoun "what" is the direct object of the verb "say."

Relative Pronouns
You can use a relative pronoun is used to link one phrase or clause to another phrase or clause. The relative pronouns are "who," "whom," "that," and "which." The compounds "whoever," "whomever," and "whichever" are also relative pronouns.

You can use the relative pronouns "who" and "whoever" to refer to the subject of a clause or sentence, and "whom" and "whomever" to refer to the objects of a verb, a verbal or a preposition.

In each of the following sentences, the highlighted word is a relative pronoun.

You may invite whomever you like to the party.
The relative pronoun "whomever" is the direct object of the compound verb "may invite".

The candidate who wins the greatest popular vote is not always elected.
In this sentence, the relative pronoun is the subject of the verb "wins" and introduces the subordinate clause "who wins the greatest popular vote". This subordinate clause acts as an adjective modifying "candidate."

In a time of crisis, the manager asks the workers whom she believes to be the most efficient to arrive an hour earlier than usual.
In this sentence "whom" is the direct object of the verb "believes" and introduces the subordinate clause "whom she believes to be the most efficient". This subordinate clause modifies the noun "workers."

Whoever broke the window will have to replace it.
Here "whoever" functions as the subject of the verb "broke".

The crate which was left in the corridor has now been moved into the storage closet.
In this example "which" acts as the subject of the compound verb "was left" and introduces the subordinate clause "which was left in the corridor." The subordinate clause acts as an adjective modifying the noun "crate."

I will read whichever manuscript arrives first.
Here "whichever" modifies the noun "manuscript" and introduces the subordinate clause "whichever manuscript arrives first." The subordinate clause functions as the direct object of the compound verb "will read."

Indefinite Pronouns
An indefinite pronoun is a pronoun referring to an identifiable but not specified person or thing. An indefinite pronoun conveys the idea of all, any, none, or some.

The most common indefinite pronouns are "all," "another," "any," "anybody," "anyone," "anything," "each," "everybody," "everyone," "everything," "few," "many," "nobody," "none," "one," "several," "some," "somebody," and "someone." Note that some indefinite pronouns can also be used as indefinite adjectives.

The highlighted words in the following sentences are indefinite pronouns:

Many were invited to the lunch but only twelve showed up.
Here "many" acts as the subject of the compound verb "were invited".

The office had been searched and everything was thrown onto the floor.
In this example ,"everything" acts as a subject of the compound verb "was thrown."

We donated everything we found in the attic to the woman's shelter garage sale.
In this sentence, "everything" is the direct object of theverb "donated."

Although they looked everywhere for extra copies of the magazine, they found none.
Here too the indefinite pronoun functions as a direct object: "none" is the direct object of "found."

Make sure you give everyone a copy of the amended bylaws.
In this example, "everyone" is the indirect object of the verb "give" -- the direct object is the noun phrase "a copy of the amended bylaws."

Give a registration package to each.
Here "each" is the object of the preposition "to."

Reflexive Pronouns
You can use a reflexive pronoun to refer back to the subject of the clause or sentence.

The reflexive pronouns are "myself," "yourself," "herself," "himself," "itself," "ourselves," "yourselves," and "themselves." Note each of these can also act as an intensive pronoun.

Each of the highlighted words in the following sentences is a reflexive pronoun:

Diabetics give themselves insulin shots several times a day.
The Dean often does the photocopying herself so that the secretaries can do more important work.
After the party, I asked myself why I had faxed invitations to everyone in my office building.
Richard usually remembered to send a copy of his e-mail to himself.
Although the landlord promised to paint the apartment, we ended up doing it ourselves.
Intensive Pronouns
An intensive pronoun is a pronoun used to emphasise its antecedent. Intensive pronouns are identical in form to reflexive pronouns.

The highlighted words in the following sentences are intensive pronouns:

I myself believe that aliens should abduct my sister.
The Prime Minister himself said that he would lower taxes.
They themselves promised to come to the party even though they had a final exam at the same time.

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Part of Speech (1)

2006-12-12T13:35:00.000+07:00

Noun

Noun is the part of speech which includes words like girl, tree, and happiness. Traditional grammarian often tries to define a noun as ‘the name of a person, place or things’, but this doesn’t work. Clearly, for example, red is the name of a colour, and so, by this definition , it should be noun – and yet it is most usually an adjective, as in Shinta is wearing a red skirt.

Like any part of speech, nouns can be adequately defined only in terms of their grammatical behaviour. In English, an obvious grammatical characteristic of nouns is that most odf them can appear in two different grammatical forms, called singular and plural. Most english nouns form their plural by adding –s, as in girl/girls, tree/trees, and happiness/hapinesses, but some have irregular form of plural like child/children, goose/geese, etc. However, not all noun do this: some have only a singular form (like wheat, furniture, and spaghetti), while others heve only plural form (like pants, police, and water)

A better way of identifiying nouns is to use a suitable grammatical frame. Consider the two frames. The _______ was nice and The ______ were nice. If you can put single word into one of these blanks to make a good sebtence, then that word mus be a noun, because the grammar of English allows nouns, and only nouns, to appear in these positions. The first frame accepts singular form nouns, like girl, spaghetti, and furniture, while the second frame accepts plural form, like trees, pants and police. Still, of course, there is o guarantee that the result will be sensible: The torture was nice doesn’t sound very normal, but it’s cleary grammatical, and so torture is a noun.

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Psycholinguistics: A Brief Note

2006-08-25T11:12:00.000+07:00

Psycholinguistics is the study of the connection between language and mind. It began to emerge as a distinct discipline in the 1950s. To some extent, its emergence was promoted by the insistence at the time of the linguist Noam Chomsky that linguistics should be regarded as a part of cognitive psychology, but there were other factors as well, notably the growing interest in the question of language acquisition by children.

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There is no doubt that the study of acquisition has so far been the most prominent and successful area of psycholinguistics. But, a number of other topics have also been explored, with varying degrees of success. Many of these are aspects of language processing, the steps involved in producing and comprehending speech. Others include the links between language use and memory, the linguistic examination of reading, and more recently possible links with perception and cognition.

Psycholinguistics would also like to link their findings to those of neurolinguistics, the study of language and brain, but this has not proved at all easy. Some psycholinguists are also contributing to the development of cognitive linguistics and of cognitive science generally.

Language Faculty

2006-08-22T11:34:00.000+07:00

Language faculty is our biological ability to use language. Human beings are the only creatures on earth that use language, and many linguists and others have concluded that we must therefore have some kind of specific biological endowment for language, one which is totally absent, or nearly so, from all other living species: our language faculty.

To be sure, this conclusion has been challenged from two directons. On the one hand, some experiments have attempted to teach other species, usually apes, to use some simplified version of a human language (most often a version of a sign language) and, in spite of serious problem with their methodology and interpretations, a few observers are now prepared to accept that these creatures do indeed exhibit a (severely limited) capacity for using language - though critics of this conclusion are numerous and vigorous. On the other hand, psychologists like Jean Piaget and Jerome Bruner have argued that our language faculty, while admittedly real, is not at all an individual and distinctive part of our biological inheritance, but merely one more manifestation of our general all-purpose cognitive abilities.

Nevertheless, the majority view among linguists at present is that our language faculty is real, that it is at least largely distinct from all of our other cognitive abilities and that it must be the biological result of some kind of dictinctive evolution within the brains of our ancestors. This is the belief that underlines a number of celebrated attempts at giving an account of our language-using abilities, including the generic hypothesis of language, Chomsky's innateness hypothesis, Bickerton's bioprogram hypothesis, and even the search for universal grammar.

A constant theme of these investigations is the issue of modularity. Chomsky and others have long argued that our language faculty must consist of a number of specialized and largely independent subcomponents which interact in specific ways to produce and overall linguistic behaviour. More recently, however, some people have begun to question whether our language faculty as a whole should itself be regarded as a distinctive part of our mental equipment. They suggest instead that various aspects of language use may have entirely separate evolutionary origins, and that what we call our language faculty is probably an epiphenomenon; that is, a purely superficial unity which in fact results from the interaction of diverse structure and processes within our brains, many of which are in no way confined to language behaviour. This debates will doubltless continue for some time.

The study of all the biological aspects of our language faculty is sometimes called biolinguistics.

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Direct and Indirect Speech in English

2006-08-01T12:18:00.000+07:00

There are two ways of reporting what speakers have said, direct and indirect. Direct speech is used when we want to repeat the original speaker's exact words, while indirect speech is used when we want to give the exact meaning of a speech without quoting the speaker's exact words.

A. Indirect speech can be introduced by a verb in a present tense. This usually when we are:
1. reporting a conversation that is still going on
2. reading a letter or something else and reporting what it said
3. reading instructions and reporting them
4. reporting a statement that someone makes very often
e.g. Andrew says that he will never get married.
Andrew says,"I will never get married".

Further, when the introductory verb (reporting verb) is in a present, present perfect, or future tense (less common), the tense of the direct speech does not change. Study the following examples:
1. He says,"I am unwell."
He says (that) he is unwell.
2. He has just said,"My master is writing letters."
He has just said (that) his master is writing letters.
3. He says,"I have passed the examination."
He says (that) he ahs passed the examination.

B. But indirect speech is usually introduced by a verb in the past tense. When the reporting or principle verb is in the past tense, all present tense or verb in the direct speech have to be changed into the corresponding past tense. The changes are shown as follows:
1. Tenses
a.simple present goes to simple past
b.present continuous goes to past continuous
c.present perfect goes to past perfect
d.simple past goes to past perfect
e.present perfect continuous goes to past perfect continuous
f.present future goes to past future (conditional)
g.present future continuous goes to past future continuous (conditional continuous)

2. Adverbs
a.now - then
b.ago - before
c.today - that day
d.tomorrow - the next day/the following day
e.yesterday - the day before/the previous day
f.last night - the night before/the previous night
g.next week/year - the following week/year
h.the day before yesterday - two days before
i.the day after tomorrow - in two days' time
j.a year ago - a year before/the previous year
k.here - there
etc.

3. Others
a.this - that
b.these - those
c.come - go there/here

'that' is usually optional after the verbs "say, tell, think, believe", and is obligatory after the verbs "mention, declare, report, state".

Study the folowing examples:
1. He said,"I am unwell."
He said (that) he was unwell.
2. She said to me,"I don't believe you."
She said (that) she didn't believe you.
3. He said,"I have seen this film."
He said that he had seen that film.
4. She said,"I saw these boys yesterday."
She said that she saw those boys yesterday.
5. John told me,"You can leave us now."
John told me that I might leave them then.
6. "I saw her the day before yesterday", he said.
He said he had seen her two days before.
7. "I'll do it tomorrow", she promised.
She promised that she would do it the next day.
8. Andrew said to Tom,"You are wrong."
Andrew said to Tom that he (Tom) was wrong.
9. Jane said,"I have done my homework."
Jane said that she had done her homework.
10. "I'm starting the day after tomorrow, father", she said.
She said to (told) her father that she was starting in two days' time

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The Distinction Between Phonetics and Phonology (3)

2006-04-21T16:11:00.000+07:00

According to Andrew Spencer in his book "Phonology": "phonology is the study of the sounds used in languages: the way they pattern with respect to each other, the way they are use to make up words and phrases, and the changes they undergo"

Phonetics is essentially the study of the physicaal aspects of speech. This means the physiological bases of speech. Thus, phonetics research might investigate the collection of frequencies of sounds observed in the production of particular types of vowels, or it might examine the precise movements of the tongue in producing the sound 's', for example.

Phonology is not specifically concerned with aspects of speech production or perception which are purely the result of the physical proerties of the system. For instance, it is often said that the articulation of the 'k' sounds in the words 'cara' and a'key' differ from each other slightly. In the 'k' of 'key' the tongue is brought slightly towards the front of the mouth in comparison with the 'k' sound in 'car'. The reason for this is that the 'ey' vowel of 'key' drags the tongue foward slightly, because of that aavowel is produced with the tongue slightly further foward in the mouth than the 'a' vowel of 'car'. In fact, it is more or less impossible to pronounce a clear and pure 'ey' type vowel immediately after the kind of 'k' sound found in 'car'. In other words, ait would appear that some degree of fronting in these circumstances is physiologically inevitable.

Thus, we can distinguish the word 'cane' and 'gain' by choosing as the first consonant either 'k' or 'g'. However, not all languages do this, and in some the speaker may even have a free choice as to which sound to use. To this extent, we can say that this different is purely aphonetics fact of no immediate phonological interest, in the sense that phonological theory doesn't need to have any special account of it.

To conclude, work in phonetics canaa, accordingly, be classified into two board types: (a) general studies of the articulation, acoustic, or perception of speech, and (b) studies of the phonetic properties of specific languages. Later on, in contrast to it, phonology studies the scientific material aspects of speech sound in a particular language.

The Distinction Between Phonetics and Phonology (2)

2006-04-10T16:57:00.000+07:00

As it has been mentioned above, phonetics is the study of of how speech sounds are made , transmitted, and received. It is a subject that requires as its source of data a human being with an intact auditory mechanism and a funcitioning set of vocal organs. The person's particular language background is not stricly relevant: phoneticians would draw the same conclusions about the production and reception of speech whether they are dealing with the speakers of English, Hindi, or Bahasa Indonesia. Although the categories of the sounds of speech can be used fot the analysis of any language, that section provides no information about the way these categories these categories are actually used, in the language of the world.

By contrast, the primary aim of phonology is to discover the principle that govern the way sounds are organized in language, and to expalin the variations that occur. A common methodology to begin by analysing an individual language, to determine which sound units are used and how they pattern - the language's phonological structures'. The properties of different sound systems are the compared and hyphotheses developed about the rules underlying groups of languages, and ultimately in all languages (phonological universal).

The distinction between phonology and phonetics can be seen from a second point of view. The human vocal apparatus can produce a very wide range of sounds; but only a small number of these are used in a language to construct all of its words and sentences. Phonetics is the study of all possible speech sounds; phonology studies the way in which a language's speakers systematically use a selection of these sounds in order to express meaning.

There is a further way of drawing the distinction. No two speakers have anatomically identical vocal tracts , and thus no-one prononces sounds in exactly the same way as anyone else. There is even a considerable amount of variation in the sounds of a single speaker. Yet when using our language we are able to discount much of this variation, and focus on only those sounds, or properties of sounds, that are important to the communication of meaning.

The Distinction Between Phonetics and Phonology (1)

2006-04-04T18:28:00.000+07:00

The study of speech sounds is partitioned betweem two distinct but related sub-disciplines of linguistics, phonetics and phonology. Both termscome from Greek word meaning 'sound'

V. Fromkin and R. Rodman, in their book entitled 'An Introduction to Language' define phonetics as the study of the speech sounds that are utilized by all human languages to represent meaning, and phonology as the study of the sound pattern of human language; it is also the kind of knowledge thar speakers have about the sound pattern of their particular languages.

From the same point of view, phonetics can be difined as a branch of linguistics that studies the characteristics of human sound-making, which regards to three majir processes i.e 1). articulatory production of speech sounds (articolatory phonetics)-the action of speech organs in producing the speech sounds, 2). structure of the acoustic flow (acoustic phonetics)-the acoustic nature of the sound waves which transmit speech between mouth and ears, 3). processes involved in auditory perception (auditory and perceptual phonetics)-the manner in which the ears and the brain interpret speech.

Phonetics was substantially developed by the ancient Indians and by the medieval Arabs, but the modern tradition began in the sixteenth century in England, and it was in nineteeth- and twentieth-century Britain that such figures as Alexander Maville Bell, Henry Sweet, and Daniel Jones chiefly created modern phonetics, though most of the instrumental techniques are far more recent. And the classical Indian scholars described Sanskrit with remarkable accuracy in articulatory phonetics (Allen,1953).

Comes to phonology. It is a branch of linguistics that studies the sound systems of languages. Phonology also concerns with semantically relevant speech sounds and their pertinent characteristics, relations, and systems viewed synchronically and diachronically. The concerned area of phonology is the organization of speech within specific languages, or with the system and pattern of sounds that occur in particular languages.

The history of phonology is largely taken up with the development of ideas concerning the phoneme, as originally propunded in Prague School and Bloomfieldian phonological theory, and the subsequent alternative proposed views.

Listening Comprehension

2006-03-05T23:21:00.000+07:00

The listening skill is the most neglected one, both in first and second language teaching. Teachers tend to focus on the rudimentary elements of listening briefly, and pass over to other aspects of language teaching. Discrimination of sounds and intonations often form the major part of listening practice in the classroom. Listening for content is often assumed. In reality, the listening skill is fundamental to the entire process of mastering and using a language, whether first or second or foreign.

Listening is like painting, like color, in day to day environment. You don’t notice, but it is always there in every linguistic activity. Listening is important for casual chats, face to face encounters, telephone messages, for enjoyment of radio and television programs, formal lectures, and many other activities.

In the past, listening was labeled as a passive skill, along with reading. No doubt, it is a receptive skill like reading. Speaking and writing were considered to be productive skills, but also active skills. While this categorization is somewhat justifiable because the focus of listening is on reception of information, listening itself cannot be fully and correctly characterized only as a passive skill.

There is a need for an active involvement of the self for the efficient performance of listening. The listener is often forced into guessing an approximation to what the speaker is communicating. The listener expects and anticipates what may be the form and content of the immediate message being delivered. He actively avoids the redundancies in the process of listening, focuses himself on the relevant, interesting and/or crucial points, and engages himself in some critical analysis of content. Listening becomes the stepping stone for action. In view of all these and other activities that are involved in listening, we should consider listening as an active skill demanding active participation of the listener.

How do we organize teaching the listening skill for the TESOL audience? Remember that fluent listening results only from wide exposure to the target language. Listening, like other language skills, is acquired only by doing it. Remember also that listening is an integral part of any type of language performance. For this reason it should be taught from the beginning classes of TESOL. It should not be postponed for special treatment at a later date or for special occasions. Fluent listening is important from the beginning, if a student is to succeed in his TESOL class and succeed using English outside his class. Teachers should enable the students to listen to native speakers’ speech from the beginning.

More often than not, English is taught through the eyes rather than through the ears in Third World countries. As a consequence, students would have mastered reading and writing with some relative competence, but their skill in listening to natural and native English will be poorly developed.

Where do we practice Listening Comprehension? In all places and in all classes. We must begin with the identification of natural listening situations both inside the classroom and outside.

The students are always required to listen to the teacher’s instructions and questions, and answer them. They may listen to conversations between a student and the teacher and understand what is going on. They may like to participate in a discussion between students and understand what is being discussed. They may like to listen and enjoy the story told by the teacher, and answer questions raised by the teacher. They may listen to simple questions eliciting information about them and their families and understand what the speaker wants to know from them. They may enjoy the jokes told both in the class and outside.

Outside the classroom, the students have many needs which they can meet only by listening to the speech around them and by expressing what they need. They need to understand the native speakers of English they come across in their day to day life, if they are studying and/or working in an English speaking country. Where there is no opportunity for them to come across native English speakers, they will need to listen and comprehend the native English used in the movies and TV programs.

We practice listening comprehension in all places and in all lessons and in all language skills (although at advanced levels of other language skills the role of listening could be minimal). There may be listening comprehension exercises on the phonological elements when pronunciation is taught. There may be exercises for listening comprehension when exercises on grammar are done, as well as in vocabulary teaching. When varieties of speech in various communicative contexts are introduced, there will be ample scope for listening comprehension exercises.

So, begin with the identification of listening situations appropriate to the need and age of the students and the level of English competence already achieved by them. Start with a focus on an ability to understand the formal code of classroom style English, because this is what is absolutely needed for the learner to benefit from classroom instruction. Focus on the goal of the TESOL learners and progress towards achieving the goal in small graded steps. Proceed to less formal varieties of spoken English to enable students to understand people outside the classroom.
Often a simple progression is suggested: classroom style, outside spoken English, how to listen to lectures and take notes, comprehend native speakers in all situations, including radio and TV, cultural language, etc.

Identify the listening medium: is it face to face interaction, or is it a movie or a TV program? Or is it a lecture situation? Or is it a telephonic conversation? Face to face interaction requires a different listening orientation than watching (and listening) to a movie

Source: The World of Language.

Listening Skill

2006-02-20T20:27:00.000+07:00

Listening in English is attending to and interpreting oral English. Listening is necessary to develop the speaking skill. The student listens to oral speech in English, then separates into segments the stretch of utterances he hears, groups them into words, phrases, and sentences, and, finally, he understands the message these carry. Listening prepares the students to understand the speech of the native speakers of English as they speak naturally in a normal speed and normal manner.

There are three approaches to listening: interactive (listening to a message and doing something as a consequence) and one-way communication or non-interactive (just listening and retaining the message, in activities such as conversations overheard, public address announcements, recorded messages, etc.) and self-talk. Listening to radio and watching TV and films, public performances, lectures, religious services, etc., generally reflect non-interactive listening. Responding to the commands given reflects interactive listening, which, in fact, is equally widespread in communicative situations. Self-talk is also an important process by which internal thinking and reasoning is carried out. All these three modes or approaches to listening may be included in our TESOL listening comprehension training.

In the classroom, students listen in order to repeat and to understand. In listening to repeat, students imitate and memorize linguistic items such as words, idioms, and sentence patterns. This is an important beginning task and focus of listening exercises. However, it is listening to understand that is real listening in its own right.

Students listen to understand as part of using English for communication purposes. In listening to understand, students may be involved in the question-oriented response model of learning or in the task-oriented model of learning. In the question-oriented response model, students may be asked to listen to a sentence, a dialogue, a conversation, a passage, or a lecture and asked to answer questions which may be presented in the form of true/false statements, multiple choice questions, fill in blank, or short answers. In the task-oriented response model, students may be asked to listen to a passage and accomplish the task described in the passage through interaction with others or by themselves.
Remember that research indicates that most students have difficulty with listening skills, even when listening to their native language. Among other factors, because of the phenomenon of stress (some syllables of a word may by stressed while others may not be), most learners of English have difficulty in mastering the correct placement of the primary and other stresses in English. (This could lead to misunderstanding the meaning of a word, phrase or sentence.) As a consequence, listening proficiency in English is to be cultivated with great care.

Source: The Land of Linguistics

Phonetics

2006-01-21T18:30:00.000+07:00

Phonetics is concened with describing speech. Thus, phonetics is a branch of linguistics which deals with the characteristics of speech sounds. In phonetics, we can figure out what people are doing when they are talking and how the sounds of speech can be described.

In nearly all speech sounds, the basic source of power is the respiratory system that pushing the air out of the lungs. We can talk when we are breating in, and it is much harder to talk when we are breating out. The parts of the vocal tracts that can be used to form sounds are called articulators.

A. Vocal Tracts

Vocal tracts are organ of speech involve in speech production. The parts of the vocal tracts that can be used to form sounds are called articulators.

- Alveolar ridge is the small part protuberance behind the upper teeth that can be feeled with the tip of the tongue.

- Hard palate is the hard portion of the roof of the mouth, lying behind the alveolar ridge.

- Soft palate or velum is a muscular flat that can be raised to press againts the back wall of the pharynx and shut off the nasal tract, preventing air from going out throught the nose.

- Tip and blade of the tongue are the most mobile parts in the lower surface of the vocal tract.

- Front of the tongue is actually the foward part of the body of the tongue, and it lies underneath the hard palate when the tongue is at rest.

- Back of the tongue is the main part of the tongue, lying below the hard and soft palate. The body, spesifically the back of the tongue, moves to make vowels and many consonants.

- Epiglottis is the fold of issue below the roof of the tongue. It helps cover the larynx during swallowing, making sure that food goes into the stomach and not the lungs.

- Vocal folds are folds of tissue stretch across the air way to the lungs. They can vibrate againts each other, providing much of the sounds during the speech.

- Glittis is the opening between the vocal folds. During a glottal stop, the vocal folds are held together and there is no opening between them.

- Pharyxn is the cavity between the roof of the the tongue and the walls of the upper throat.

-Lyarynx is the structure that holds and manipulates the vocal folds.

B. Places and Manners of Articulation

The air-stream through the vocal tract must be in some way obstructed to form consonants. base on this obstruction, consonant it self can be classified according to the place and manner of this construction.

1. Places of Articulation

Places of articulation indicate the vocal organ involved in a particular obstruction in producing consonants.

- Bilabial: involves the two lips, upper and lower lips. They are the primary articulators.

- Labio-dental: occurs when the lower lip articulates with the upper teeth.

- Dental/Interdental: produced by articulating tongue tip with the upper teeth.

- Alveolar: produced by articulating tip or blade of the tongue with the alveolar ridge.

- Post-alveolar: occurs when blade of the tongue articulates with the rear part of the alveolar ridge.

- Palato-alveolar: prodeced by articulating the blade, or the tip and blade of the tongue with the alveolar ridge and there is at the same time a raising of the tongue towards the hard palate.

- Retroflex: the tip of the tongue is curled back to articulate with the part of the hard palate immediately behind the alveolar ridge.

- Palatal: the front of the tongue is articulated with the hard palate.

- Velar: the back of the tongue articulates with the uvula.

- Uvular: the back of the tongue articulates with the uvula.

- Glottal: indicating by an obstruction, or a narrowing causing friction but not vibration, between the vocal folds.

- Pharyngeal: the front wall of the pharynx (in the region of the epiglottis) articulates with the back wall.

2. Manner of Articulation

Manners of articulation deal with the way how we produce the consonants. There some kinds of this manner.

- Stop: a complete closure is made at some point in the vocal tract; the soft palate is raised. Air pressure thus builds up behind the closure, which is then released explosively.

- Nasal: a complete closure is made at some point in the mouth, the soft palate is lowered, so that air escape through the nose.

- Affricate: a complete closure is made at some point in the mouth; the soft palate is raised. Air pressure builds up behind the closure, and is then released relatively slow (compare to a stop released). The first element of the sound has a sharp plosive character, but this is followed by an element of audible friction.

- Roll/Trill: one aticulator taps rapidly againts another - typically the tongue tip againts the alveolar ridge or the tomgue back againts the uvula.

- Flap: a single tap is made by one articulators againts another, as in some pronunciation of the r in very and, and d in ladder where the tongue tip taps once againts the alveolar ridge.

- Lateral: a particular closure is made at some point of the mouth in such a way that the air stream is allowed to escape around the side of the closure.

-Fricative: two vocal organs come so close together that the movement of air between them causes audible friction. Some fricative have a sharper sound than others, because of tyhe greater intensity of their high frequencies.

Speech and Writing

2006-01-19T15:22:00.000+07:00

The Distinction between Speech and Writing

Speech and writing are two basic manifestation of language. Each has its own functions. Most obviously, they contrast in physical form: speech uses ‘phonic substabce’, typically in the form of air pressure movements; writing uses ‘graphic substance’, typically in the form of marks on a surface, but of far greater interest are the differences in stucture and function that follow from his basic observation.

These differences are much greater than people usually think. The contrast is greater when written texts are compared with informal conversation; but even in fairly formal and prepared speech settings, such as teacher addressing a class. Event a fluent speaker produces utterances that do not real well when witten down.

The differences of stucture and use between spoken and written language are inevitable because they are the product of radically different kinds of communicative situation. Speech is time-bound, dynamic, transient-part of an interaction in which, typically, both participants are present, and the speaker has specific addressee (or a group of addressee) in mind. Writing is space-bound, static, permanent-the result of a stuation in which , typically, the pruducer is distant from the recipient-and often not even know who the recipient (as with most literature). Writing can only occasionally be tought of as in ‘interaction’, in the same way as speech It is therefore not surprising to find differences emerging very quickly when language first come to be writen down.

The Structural Approach

2006-01-18T22:31:00.000+07:00

The Structural Approach

The arrangement of words in English is very important. The meaning of an utterance changes with a change in the word order. For instance: there is a sentence ‘You are there’. Consider two other sentences made of two words but put in different order ‘Are you there?’ and ‘There you are’. The three sentences, although built of the same vocabulary items give different meaning because of a different way in which the words are arranged.

These different arrangement or patterns of words are called ‘structures’. Structures may consist of full utterances or they may fall on a part of a large pattern. F.D. French has defined a sentence pattern in these words: The word-pattern means a model from which many things of the same kind, and shade can be made like house or shoes which look the same. A sentence pattern is, therefore, a model for sentences, which have the same shade although made up of different words. For instance, there is a sentence in English: ‘I wrote a letter’. The formula of this sentence is SVO (Subject – Verb – Object). We can frame innumerate sentence on this pattern.

Researcher in the field of language teaching in the UK and USA have established that it is more important for the learner of the language to get mastery over the structures more than on vocabulary. So far we have concentrated more on the teaching of vocabulary than that of structures. A lot of work has been done on the selection and gradation of vocabulary but little work has been done on the selection and gradation of structures. It is as important to learn how to put words together as it is to know their meaning. Unless the learners become familiar with the pattern of English, he will not be able to use vocabulary.

Hornby has made a study of Sentence Patterns or Structures in English. He has found that there are approximately 275 structures in English and the learners of the language must master all of them. It should be remembered that the structure approach of language teaching is not a matter of language teaching but only an approach, which tells us what to teach while a method tells us how to teach. The method that is employed is called the Oral Method or the Audio-Lingual Method.

The structure approach is based on the following principles:
1. The important of a speech as the necessary means of fixing firmly all the ground works.
2. The important of forming language habits particularly the habit of arranging words in English sentence patterns to replace the sentence patterns of the learners own language.
3. The pupils’ own activities rather than the activity of the teacher.

The structure approach just lays emphasis on drills. Since language is primarily speak, learning a language means ability to speak the language. The structures, therefore, are drilled orally first before the learner can read or write them. Moreover, since language learning is a matter of habit formation, it requires repetition so that the language habits that are cultivated during the learning process may be retained. A class, which is taught a language through the structural approach, is more lively than other classes in which only teacher speaks and the students remain mere listener.

The selection of structures to be taught depends on the average ability of the students, the allocation of time and the availability of equipments. The following principles should be born in mind while selecting structures:
1. Usefulness: while selecting and grading structures we should adopt frequency and utility. The structures, which are more frequent in use, should be introduced first.
2. Productivity: Some structures are productive; other structures can be built on them. For instance, we have two sentence patterns:
(i) Mr. John is here
(ii) Here is Mr. John.
The former pattern is productive because we can frame many sentence on the same pattern like: ‘He is there’, or ‘She is there’, etc. We can frame many such sentences from the latter pattern.
3. Simplicity: The simplicity of structure depends on the form and meaning. The structure ‘I am playing cricket’ is far simpler in form and meaning than ‘The patient had died before the doctor came’. The simpler structure should be preferred to the complicated one.
4. Teach-ability: Some structures can be taught more easily than others. For example, the structure ‘I am writing’ can be taught easily because the action, which it denotes can be demonstrated in a realistic situation. To teach this structure the teacher will say:
(i) I played at 4 yesterday.
(ii) I played at 4 the day before yesterday.
(iii) I will play at 4 tomorrow.
(iv) I play at 4 everyday.

GRADATION OF STRUCTURE
Structures are to be graded in the order of difficulty. Simple structures should precede the more difficult ones. The following are some of the patterns that should be taught at early stages:
1. Two-part patterns
He / goes.
2. Three-part patterns
He / plays / cricket.
3. Four-part patterns
She / gave / me / a book.
4. Patterns beginning with ‘there’
There are twenty students in this class.
5. Patterns beginning with ‘a question verb’.
Is she coming?
Will he go?
Has he brought the book?
6. Patterns beginning with ‘wh’ type question
How are you?
What does he do?
7. Patterns of Command and Request
Sit down
Please come here, etc.

Of the seven types of patterns mentioned above, the three part patterns and the pattern beginning with ‘there’ occur very frequently. Each pattern embodies an important point of grammar and only one meaning of one word is taught at a time. Moreover, the structures are graded in such a manner that a structure follows the preceding one naturally. During the learning of the structures the child automatically learn grammar also (learns grammar, word order and the use of words or usage). Thus he avoids common error in grammar and composition. This approach lays emphasis on the four skills – listening, speaking, reading and writing. Rapid speech patterns are taught with the help of printed material. Children, therefore, start speaking English before they read or write it. The British Council plays a prominent role in popularizing this approach for the teaching of English in India.

Subsequently the NCERT (National Council of Education Research and Training) introduces the structural syllabuses, and prepares books or teaching materials in elaborating with the Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages (CIEFL), Hydrabad. The books prepared by the NCERT have been adopted by the CBSE (Central Board of Secondary Education) and also by the various boards of education in various states of India. At present English is being taught according to the structural approach in the majority of schools in the country.

Bahasa Indonesia and Globalization

2006-01-09T14:30:00.000+07:00

Has globalization marginalized Bahasa Indonesia?
By Ahmad Qisa'i

Looking back at the history of Bahasa Indonesia as the national language of Indonesia, it was a lingua franca for the diverse communities in the Indonesian archipelago. The original form of this language was a coastal Malay dialect spoken by a small community of people in the coastal area of Sumatra. Its flexibility as a form of communication among people in the archipelago as compared to the Javanese language, the language of the majority of Indonesians, had prompted the decision by the nationalists to declare it as the National Language of Independent Indonesia. The decision was widely known in Indonesian history as Sumpah Pemuda (Youth Pledge) and it was on the basis of this Pledge that the Indonesian Constitution has sanctioned Bahasa Indonesia as the National Language of Indonesia.

The diverse nature of Indonesian society has made a common language of communication a liability for it to succeed and survive as a united community. A simple and flexible mode of communication capable of bridging the gaps between communities will only guarantee the transformation process of Indonesia from a diverse community into a single, strong nation. Selecting a coastal Malay dialect as the national language instead of the much more complicated Javanese language proved to be a correct choice.

The decision to choose a Roman script for the language instead of its Perso-Arabic form has further helped the process of absorbing various elements of other languages to be a part of an enriched language, the Bahasa Indonesia. Foreign languages like the Dutch, Arabic, Sanskrit, French, English as well as other local languages like the Javanese, Sundanese, Madurese and others have given a lot of influence to the development of Bahasa Indonesia into its current position. The efforts by previous regimes to encourage the usage of a proper and correct form of Bahasa Indonesia in any form of communication further elevated the popularity of Bahasa Indonesia. However, the waves of globalization have certainly given a lot of impact on the development of Bahasa Indonesia. The flexible nature of the language has permitted the Indonesianization of borrowed words from foreign languages to be a part of an enriched Bahasa Indonesia. This process, nevertheless, has resulted in the pros and cons among scholars over the status of Bahasa Indonesia in Indonesia amid the continuous waves of globalization.

The most recent cautious remarks came from the Director of Center for Language of National Education Department, Dr. Dendy Sugono (Media Indonesia, 26 December 2005) when he said that the current practice by corporate houses to use foreign names and billboards has threatened the future of Bahasa Indonesia as the national language. This practice, he predicted, would marginalize Bahasa Indonesia and thus would become a national threat to the unity of Indonesia. To avoid the eventuality of his hypothesis, he suggested to the local governments to enact laws preventing the use of foreign terms in public. As an example, he said that his department is looking forward of working on this project with the Jakarta Governor in enacting a law to prohibit the usage of foreign names and billboards by corporate houses and public offices in the Capital.

On the contrary, it is the flexibility of Bahasa Indonesia that has made the language popular. The ability of Bahasa Indonesia to adjust itself to the situation has proved to be effective in its development. Had it been other language, for an example the Javanese language, as the national language, it would have been difficult for it to adjust with the globalize world. The complexity found in the structure and form of the Javanese language in its spoken as well as written form would have deprived the rest of the Indonesian populace of the current situation it enjoys. Indonesia would be limited to the Javanese community while the rest of the archipelago questioned the their status of being a part of Indonesia. India is a perfect example to the situation in Indonesia. The diverse nature of Indian society is a perfect reflection for the Indonesian society. The dilemma of a national language can be taken as an example worth of examination.

The problem of a national language in India arose at the same time it achieved its independence. The majority of Hindi speaking community in India insisted on the declaration of Hindi as the Indian national language. However, other language communities like the Tamils, Bengalis, Punjabis, as well as other language communities of Dravidian languages in the Southern part of India rejected the idea on the basis of possible hegemonic domination by Hindi speaking people over the running of the administration in the country. Thus having undergone various stages of deliberations and arguments as well as threats of secession, it was finally agreed that Hindi would enjoy the status of a national language of an independent India while at the same time 16 other major languages to be accepted as the official language of administration. English, the language that long enjoyed a status of a lingua franca during the British rule in India, would continue to play the role and enjoy the same status as other official languages pending the socialization process of Hindi as the national language of India. However, the situation remains till now and even there was an addition of some three more major languages into the list of official languages in India as sanctioned by the Indian Constitution.

Thus, to be worried over the future status of Bahasa Indonesia due to the wide use of foreign language like English in Indonesia is need not to be exaggerated. On the contrary, the flexibility shown by Bahasa Indonesia will only help it to survive the waves of globalization. It will become the beneficiary of the globalization. Continuous efforts by the government to popularize the use of proper and correct form of Bahasa Indonesia while at the same time encouraging the people to learn and use foreign languages instead of discouraging them will help the process of building Indonesia to be a strong and powerful nation in the future.

Behaviourist Approach

2006-01-07T15:32:00.000+07:00

Behaviourist Approach
By Purwarno Hadinata

In the 19th century in the field of psychology, some behaviorists conduct a research on animals and children how they learn language (Pavlov’s classical conditioning; stimulus – response) trial and error.
(The Behaviourists made research by looking at the behaviour of the objects being researched. E.g. behaviour of dog, cat, child, ect.)

The Behaviourist View of Language learning.

The process of language learning according to the behaviourists can be explained in terms of conditioning. The child begins to hear during the 1st year of his life a large number of speech sound produced by his parents. Gradually his learns to associate these sounds with the situations, which accompany them. For instance, the child learns to recognize the sound of endearment, which his mother produces when she feeds him.

After sometime, these sounds become pleasurable in themselves even when they are not accompanied by food. At this stage, conditioning to language has begun. The more frequently the child is exposed to this process of conditioning, the stronger its effect. However its strength of the associative bound between the sounds and the situations accompanying them depends upon the satisfaction, which the child obtains from the conditioning process.

Before long, the child begins to imitate some of speech sounds that he has heard; the child does so in an attempt to control the environment and to invite the attention of his mother. The mother may fail to response to the majority of these random signals, but if the child, by chance, produces the vocal stimulus, which the mother recognizes as the appropriate, she responses. We say that his behaviour pattern has been rewarded or reinforced while all the inappropriate behaviour patterns have been neglected.

When a behaviour pattern is rewarded, this deals to the formation of the bound of association, say between the utterances (stimulus) and milk (response). Initially learning takes places through a random association but once it has been formed it is rapidly strengthened through repetition. The child is able to confirm that a certain vocal utterance is the correct stimulus for the desired response; he can then repeat the utterance each time it is needed.

On the other hand, a behaviour pattern that is not rewarded gets extinguished (will not be repeated by the child). The child will not continue to produce the utterance for which the mother does not take any notice of it. This is said to be the natural process of language learning, which a language-teaching program should try to stimulate. For the teacher, the following implications of the behaviour model of learning are relevant:

1. Language is learnt only through use or practice. The more the learner is exposed to the use the better the chances of learning it.

2. The production of language depends on the situation, which makes its use necessary. Language cannot be taught in divorce from situation; the teacher has to introduce each new pattern of language in a meaningful situation.

3. Producing the correct linguistic response also requires effort. If the learner is not called upon to make this effort there is no learning.

4. Producing the correct response also requires attention. Attention is bound to slacken after a time to prolong. So prolonged practice is less useful than spaced practice.

5. The spoken language comes earlier than the written, and the receptive (passive) experience of language is necessary before any productive (active) use can begin.

6. Learning takes place faster if the correct response toward stimulus is confirmed. The learner must know at once if his effort is right or wrong (rewarded).

7. Learning is still faster if the learner is placed to the situation where he can produce only the correct response. Each incorrect response builds up a faculty behaviour pattern, which interfere with the process of conditioning.

8. Every new item learnt must be reinforced by further practice before further learning begins.

Most of the methods used during the past 70 years for teaching language made use of these assumptions from Behaviorism. They emphasized, repeated but spaced-practice of language material in meaningful situation, in imitation of a given model, first orally and then writing.

Note: Behaviorism does not distinguish between the language of human being and that of animal.

Linguistic and Communicative Competence

2006-01-02T17:35:00.000+07:00

Linguistic and Communicative Competence

Linguists are aware of the inter-relationship between language and the society, because it is in society that language has its existance. But they have not succeeded in describing such a relationship. Phonology, Lexis and Syntax, which are objects of linguistic description constitute only a part of the elements in the code used for communication. The meaning(s) of an utterance (a sentence, a clause, a phrase, a word, etc) do(es) not depend entirely on its form; a lot depend on who says what, to whom, where, why, in what manner and in what effect. In other words, the context of situation in which an utterance is said, who said it, and to whom are very important. For instance, the occurrence “Can I have the salt please?” is interrogative in form but expresses a polite request in a dinning room.

Grammatical knowledge is not enough to help us participate effectively in communicative situation. In addition to acquainting oneself with the forms of language, one must know the following in order to communicate appropriately:

1. The socio-cultural relation including the attitude, values, conventions, prejudices and preferences of the people who use the language.
2. The nature of the participants which shows the relationship between the speaker and the listener, their occupation, interest, socio-economic status, etc.
3. The rule of the participant, such as the relationship in social network, father – son, teacher – student, boss – subordinate, landlord – tenant, doctor – patient, etc.
4. The nature and function of the speech deals with whether it is a face to face talk persuasion, confrontation, or a casual conversation, or a request informal situation, or a telephonic conversation, etc.
5. The mode (medium) of communication, whether spoken or written form or reading from a written script, or unprepared speech.

Communicative competence, indeed, includes the whole of linguistics competence plus the whole of the amorphous (indefinite shape or form) range of facts included under socio-linguistic pragmatic competence (the rules and conventions for using language items in context and other factors like attitudes, values, and motivation. Dell Hymes says that one who studies language should be able: “to account for this fact that a normal child acquires knowledge of sentence not only as grammatical but also appropriate. He or she acquires competence as to when to speak, when not and as to what to talk about, with whom, when, where, in what manner”. In short, a child becomes able to acquire a repertoire (all the skills, etc that a person has and is able to use) of speech act to take part in a speech act, and to evaluate their accomplishment by others.”

Chomsky believes that linguistic competence can be separated from the rest of communicative competence and studied in isolation but socio-linguist, like Dell Hymes believes that the notion of linguistic competence is unreal and that no significant progress in linguistics is possible without studying forms along with the ways in which they are used. In addition to this, basicall the linguistic competence falls under the domaint of communicative competence because communicative competence is made up of four competence areas including linguistic, sociolinguistic, discourse, and strategic.

For one thing, social interaction is actually skilled work, and it requires effort. It is not in innate (inborn or genetically endowed). It has to be learnt from others. A person who faces to learn and make himself and others uneasy in conversation and perpetually kills, encounters is a faulty person. Dell Hymes maintains that competence is dependent upon the fore features listed below:

1. Whether (and to what degree) something is possible.
2. Whether (and to what degree) something is visible (in relation to the means available)
3. Whether (and to what degree) something is appropriate (adequate, happy, in relation to the context in which it is used).
4. Whether (and to what degree) something is performed (actually done and what the doing entails).

All these show that the linguistic competence is largely a part of Communicative Competence. Dell Hymes’ criticism of the concept of linguistic competence is that it is an abstraction without any relevance to actual use. The same criticism has been directed against the notion of communicative competence. According to Widdowson, if linguistic competence is an abstraction of grammatical knowledge, communicative competence is an abstraction of social behaviour. The notion of communicative competence does not include in its purview (the scope somebody’s activities or influence) the actual procedure, which language users adopt in order to participate in language based on activity. So, along with linguistic competence and communicative competence, pragmatic competence should also be brought into focus.

Pragmatic competence is the one that underlines the ability to use the language along with a conceptual system to achieve certain aims or purpose. And it determines how the tool can be effectively put to use: It is user-oriented.
We can sum up and say that the following are essentially the components of communication that go into the building up of the communicative competence:

A. Linguistic Knowledge and the Para-linguistic Cues:
(i) Verbal elements (sentences, clauses, phrases, etc.)
(ii) Non-verbal elements (aspects of communicative behaviour, such as: facial expression, body movement, eye gaze, gesture, proximity, etc.)
(iii) Elements of discourse and their organization in connective speech and writing.
(iv) Range of possible variants (possible variations and their organizations).
(v) Meaning of variants to a particular situation.

B. Interaction Skills:
(i) Norms of interaction and interpretation.
(ii) Strategies for achieving desire goals.
(iii) Perception or features (verbal as well as non-verbal) in communication situation (situation of communication).
(iv) Understanding appropriateness in any given situation.

C. Cultural Knowledge:
(i) Socials structure.
(ii) Values and attitudes.
(iii) Cognitive scheme (verbal as well as noun verbal) and the cultural transmission processes.

The setting (means: place) of interaction also is an important factor in defining a situation for instance whether you interact someone in the church, a temple, a mosque, a classroom or a market place contributes to the nature of interaction and the variety of language use.

Another concept useful in understanding communicative competence is the concept of phatic-communion. One purpose of phatic communion is to avoid silence because it may imply hostility or embarrassment when it is not required. For instance, pray hall silence may be a sign of respect but when two acquaintances meet and remain silent, their silence may be interpreted as hostility or, at least, indifference. Some expressions like ‘how are you?’ ‘hello’ and ‘good morning’, etc. are highly conventional but their violation affects communication patterns adversely as often leads to discomfiture (lack of comfort) of participants in the interaction.

The concept of communicative competence introduced by Dell Hymes brought about a shift in the approach method and technique in language pedagogy. Linguists argued that ‘There are rules of use without which the rules of grammar will be useless. A distinction was made between the grammatical rules that enable the users to frame correct sentences and the rules of the use of the languages to accomplish some kind of communicative purpose. Some socio-linguists rather some socio-linguistic principles became the key phrase in language teaching.

The European common market gave a fillip (a thing that stimulates or encourages something) to the communicative approach. There was increased need for teaching adults the major languages of the European common market for increased interaction. Wilkins advocated notional-functional syllabus in his book, Notional Syllabus (1976). He gave a course around the uses or functions to which language is put: For example, one lesson can be planned on requesting information, another on apologizing and the third one on expressing gratitude. Linguists made inventories of functions, notions, and structures but they made no the proposal for the gradation of materials to be used. Grading according to functional complexity did not make any sense to them for a simple reason that syntactic complexity and function are to separated or different parameters.

The major distinctive features of Communicative Approach as contrasted to the Audio Lingual Method are the following:
1. Meaning is more important than the structure and form.
2. Dialogues if used around communicative functions, are not to be memorized.
3. Language item should be contexturized. They should not be taught in isolation as in Audio Lingual Method.
4. Language learning does not imply learning structures, sounds and words but learning to communicate.
5. Effective communication is sought and emphasized instead of mastery and over learning.
6. Drilling is not central but peripheral (secondary or minor importance).
7. Pronunciation needs not be native live but comprehensive.
8. Grammatical explanation is not avoided; any device, which the learners have, is accepted varying according to their age and interest.
9. Attempt to communicate needs not to make only after a long process of rigid drills but from the very beginning.
10. Judicious use of native language is accepted when feasible.
11. Translation may be used when student can take benefits.
12. Reading and writing need not weigh for one’s mastery over speech. They may start from the very first day.
13. The target linguistic system will be learnt not through the teaching of the pattern of the system but through the process of learning to communicate.
14. Instead of linguistic competence, communicative competence is the desired goal.
15. Linguistic variation is accepted as a central condition in method and materials.
16. The sequence of units is determined not by the principle of linguistic complexity but by the consideration of content, function, and meaning, which maintain interest.
17. The teacher helps the learners in any way that motivate them to work with the language (regardless of any conflict theory).
18. Language is not a habit; it is created by the individual through trial and error.
19. The primary goal is not accuracy in terms of formal correctness, but fluency and acceptable language; accuracy is judged not in the abstract but in context.
20. Students should not be subjected to making use of language through machines or controlled materials. They should rather be encouraged to interact with people through pair or group work in real life.
21. The teacher should not specify what language students are to use. Indeed he cannot know or anticipate exactly what language the student will use.
22. Intrinsic motivation will spring not from interest in the structure of the language but in what is being communicated in language.

Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics

2006-01-01T16:55:00.000+07:00

Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics

In language acquisition, children acquire languages without formal teaching. Additional languages can also be ‘picked up’, for example Romans acquiring Greek from Greek speaking slaves.

In terms of social requirement, written language was taught for priesthood in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. The classical Greece of Homeric legends was translated from the oral form to the written form in 8th century BC. In the age of Pericles (5th century BC), the language teaching was intended to fulfil the specialist language skills for (a). appreciating great literary texts, (b). acquiring oratorical skills for the service of the state. Plato and Aristotle designed curriculum beginning with ‘good writing (grammar) and moving on to effective discourse (rhetoric) culminating’ in the development of the dialectic to promote a philosophical approach to life.

In Alexandria period (4th century BC), the grammatical analyis in the modern sense began with the ‘Dionysis Thrax’ including the 8 parts of speech: noun, verb, particle, article, pronoun, preposition, adverb, and conjunction. (see Robin, 1951: 39-40). The focus is on phonology and morphology. Meanwhile, the teaching language in Roman period was bilingual in which the Latin standed as the mother tongue and Greek as the language culture. (2nd century BC). Started from Varro (116-27 BC) De Lingua Italiana, Cocero (106-43BC) De Oratore, Quintillian (35-100 AD) De Institutione Orataria, the basic literary was both in Greek and Latin. Letters learnt (phonetic value) was studied from the syllables into words. Then, arranged the words according to the grammar (Latin and Greek) as preparation for the study of poets, and finally reached the rhetoric level as a practical eloquence for public debate and persuasion.

Medieval period (400-1000 AD) was the period in which Latin kept alive by the Church. Teaching process in this period involved: (a) orthography (letters and their pronunciation), (b) prosody (syllable and versification), (c) accidence (words), and (d) syntax (clauses and sentences).

In latter middle ages (1200-1500), Latin and French became dominant languages. Further, the odern period was marked by thr raise of modern European languages indicating by the translation of Bible into vernaculars, the Caxton’s Printing Press in 1480, the publication of polyglot dictionaries, and the dialogue manuals began to be circulated. For learning of a foreign language, some books were published such as The French Schoolmaster (Claudius Holybrand, 1573), and The English Schoolaster (Jacques Bellot, 1580). In that time, there was a growing market of foreign languages.

In modern time, the new approach series of small steps arranged in a logically graded sequence. Following it, the introduction of new vocabulary in restricted amounts and practiced each step throughly in specially written sentences for translation. Pioneering work of J.V. Meidinger’s Praktische Franzasische Grammatik (later is calles the Grammar Translation Method (GTM)) in 1783 was already published in 15 edition by 1799. Franz Ahn A New Practical and Easy Method of Learning (1834) and H.G. Ollendorf A New Method of Learning to Read, then Write and Speak a Language in Six Months in 1835 followed the GTM. Aping the methods of the classicists by elaborate display of rule making, long list of obscure ‘exception’ with a heavy emphasis on literary texts and pseudo-conversational format. This led to the neglect of spoken language. However, it made the study of modern languages also look as intellectually stimulating. Hence, Cambrage University introduced modern language in 1886 and the Oxford Honours school in 1903.

As a reaction to Grammar Translation Method (GTM) and under the influence of Phonetics (Sweet, 1877, 1899 and Jesperson, 1904), the reform movement began. G.B. Shaw dedicated Pygmalion to Henry Sweet In 1886, Paul Passy formed the Phonetics Teachers Association that became the International Phonetic Association (IPA) in 1897. This method of teaching was marked by the primacy of spoken language with the help of phonetically transcribed texts. The use of isolated sentences was replaced by coherent texts and the foreign language came to be used in class. In this time, people began to use phonetics in language teaching.

The above method in a modified form also came to be known as the Direct Method. Here, the teacher’s task was to create the foreign language environment in the classroom. Efford in the classroom was to bring about a direct association between words and meaning (by direct reference to objects). However, there was no connected text was used, only conversation-simple to complex.

The reform of English language teaching in UK was under the influence of Daniel Jones (1917), Palmer (1921), and Michael West (Inspector of school Bengal). The work got interrupted in World War II. A.S. Hornby edited the first volume of the journal called English Language Teaching in 1946. His dictionary The Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English was published in 1948. His pedagogical grammar identifying the basic pattern and structures for a teaching syllabus course were attempted in Oxford Progressive English for Adult Learners (1954). English Language Teaching (ELT) was firmly established as an autonomous branch of language education by the work of Palmer, West, and Hornby.

Work on language teaching also was done in the USA though in the tradition of Sapir and Blommfield. Language teaching in a large-scale way came up with ASTP (Army Specialized Training Program) that used the informant techniques of Bloomfield (1942). The method utilized dialogue memorization , patterned drills and other ‘habit’ formation exercises. This method was called ‘applied linguistics’ by 1948 when Language Learning – A Quarterly Journal of Applied Linguistics was published. Charles C. Fries established 3 months courses at his English Language Institute (ELI). His successor at ELI was Robert Lado.

New technology adopted which name was Language Laboratory., and then relabeled as the Audio-Lingual Approach after Chomsky’s Transformational Grammar paradigm upgraded in the 1960’s as the Audio-Visual Approach.

Interest in language teaching once again reawakened in the 1970’s and 1980’s with the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) based on the concept of ‘comunicative competence’ as forulated by Dell Hymes. This approach further led to the development of Language for Specific Purpose.

By now, many more approaches like natural approach, total physical response, suggestopedia, etc. are on the scene which are influenced both by the communicative approach to language teaching and by the ‘second language acquisition’ paradigm of Krashen (1981).

References:

Bloomfield, L. 1942. An Outline for the Practical Study of Foreign Languages.

Jesperson, O. 1904. How to Teach A Foreign Language.

Jones, D. 1971. The Scientific Study and Teaching of Languages.

Jones, D. 1971. English PronouncingDictionary.

Krashen, S.D. 1981. Second Language Acquisition and Language Learning.

Palmer, H. 1921. The Principles of Language Teaching.

Robins, R.H. 1951. Ancient and Modern Grammatical Theory in Europe. London: Bill

Sweet, H. 1877. Handbook of Phonetics.

Sweet, H. 1899. Practical Study of Languages.

Linguistics and Applied Linguistics

2005-12-22T23:30:00.000+07:00

The Relationship between Linguistics and Applied Linguistics

It has been noticed that language is central to human experience. Using it, human beings can communicate each other within and across society , maintain effective social relations, develop cognitive faculties, and make explicit thoughts. It is the nature of language that make all of these possible. Nature of language is the formal or grammatical structure of language as an autonomous system of signs; moreover, it is the subject of theoretical linguistics.

Applied linguistics (AL) is the utilization of knowledge about the nature of language achieved by linguistic research for the improvement of the efficiency of some practical task in which language is the central component. The goal of applied linguistics is actually to provide a coherent conceptual basis for the analysis and solution of language related problems. However, there is no single unified body of applied linguistics that is relevant to all areas of applied linguistics. It means that actual scope tends to appear lesser than the potential scope.

In order to understand the nature of applied linguistics, it is necessary to know the relationship between applied linguistics and linguistic theory, for example in language teaching in considering to the ‘Structuralist’,‘Ganerative’ and the ‘Communicative’ approaches.

Structuralist approach is a kind of behaviourism. It is the description of conciousness, objective observation, and a conditioned learning in which stimulus-respone- reward is needed. In this approach, learning is as a habit formation (drilling), and it uses the methodology of taxonomic or descriptive. It also emphasis on system of sounds and the grammatical structure, but ignores the meaning because it is not descriptive, so it is out of linguistics. The units are contrastive, like [sheep-ship], as well as hierarchical nature of language, like [constitute and constituents]. Theory of teaching in this approach is like ASTP (Army Specialized Teaching Program) proposed by Bloomfield, Contrastive Analysis i.e. compare and contrast idealized linguistics units of phonetics and phonology, and examine the potential areas of difficulty identified that can be strengthened through drilling, and Error Analysis (Svartik, 1973) i.e. compare learners’ ability in phonetics with his phonology, as well as describe and explain error (omission, insertion, and substitutions). Thus, the structuralist approach focuses on mastery over grammatical structure and 4 language skills, listening, speaking, reading, and writing, and learners in this approach are passive recipient.

In generative approach, language eternally is a phenomena of recurring. It is the human specific internalized mental competence. This approach emphasis on the child's capacity to hypothesize about structure of language as a set of parameters for input-output, or finite rules in infinite generation. Learning process in this approach is cognitive in nature, based on the theory of language acquisition. 'Errors' are hypotheses made by learners and are not mistakes. This is an interlanguage system or transitional system where rules of introduction to linguistics and phonetics neither apply. It is also called as 'Approach Mentalistic' or the method of natural language. Learners in this method are active responser.(Krashen: 1983)

Meanwhile, communicative approach (sociolinguistic approach) assumes language as a means of communication. It deals with the understanding of what language is and what language does in considering language as in speech community or language in use. It also deals with the maximal unit of description or speech event i.e. stating, agreeing, persuading, thanking, apologizing, etc. The centrality of function of this is language as a whole, and rule of orientation is subordinate to role orientation (intrinsic grammar + extrinsic functions, e.gg language and dialect). The primacy of function is asymmetrical relationship (same form-different function, same function-different form). In this appoach, the communicative competence is 'heterogeneous'. In language teaching or learning, aims to cater is to the needs of the learners. In practice, the focus are on materials, activities, and tasks. Dialogue is as the basis of this also.

Some references:

Allen, J.P.B, Corder, P & Davies, A. 1973-77 Edinburgh Course in Applied Linguistics. OUP.

Bloomfield, L. 1942. An Outline Guide for the Practical Study of Foreign Language.

Gargesh, R. 2005 Applied Linguistics in South Asia. Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics. Elvier.

Transformational Generative Grammar

2005-12-20T13:02:00.000+07:00

Noam Chomsky, Writer / Linguist / Political Figure
Born: 7 December 1928
Birthplace: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Best Known As: Creator of the theory of generative grammar

Generative Grammar (Transformational Generative Grammar)

A generative grammar is defined as one that is fully explicit, in the sense that it consists of a set of rules by which it is possible to decide whether any given sentence is grammatical or not. A sentence is seen not as a string of words but rather a "tree" with subordinate and superordinate branches connected at nodes. The sentenc 'The cat killed the bird", in which S is a sentence is ‘the cat killed the bird’, D is a determiner stands for 'the', N is a noun stands for 'cat', V is a verb stands for 'killed', NP is the noun phrase 'the cat, and VP is the verb phrase 'killed the bird'. NP in this sentence is formed by D+N.

Refers to the definition given by dictionary, transformational grammar is a grammar that accounts for the constructions of a language by linguistic transformations and phrase structures, especially generative grammar. Meanwhile, the Encyclopedia states it as linguistic theory associated with Noam Chomsky, particularly with his Syntactic Structures (1957), and with Chomsky's teacher Zellig Harris. Generative grammar attempts to define rules that can generate the infinite number of grammatical (well-formed) sentences possible in a language. It starts not from a behaviorist analysis of minimal sounds but from a rationalist assumption that a deep structure underlies a language, and that a similar deep structure underlies all languages. Transformational grammar seeks to identify rules (transformations) that govern relations between parts of a sentence, on the assumption that beneath such aspects as word order a fundamental structure exists. Transformational and generative grammar together were the starting point for the tremendous growth in linguistics studies since the 1950s.

Transformational generative Grammarians’ aim consists in creating an explicit model of what an ideal speaker of the language intuitively knows. This model assigns a structure to all the sentences of the language concerned. Chomsky makes a clear distinction between ‘competence or knowledge of language’ and ‘performance or the actual use of language in concrete situations’.

The ‘TG model’ also attempts to devise hypothesis on competence by idealising performance, that is to say, by removing performance accidents such as repetition, lack of attention, false starts etc. There is a big difference between Structuralism and TG as the former deals above all with text and language that has actually occurred while the latter doesn’t use the text because it is more interesting in what the text produces.

The main features of a TG model are four:

A) It must capable of generating an infinite set of sentences by operating a finite set of rules on a finite set of items Examples: ‘S? NP+ VP (this sentence can be rewritten as a noun phrase+ verb phrase) ‘the cat killed the bird’; NP? (det)+ N (noun phrase can be rewritten as (determiner)+ noun (the) cat); VP? V+ NP (verb phrase can be rewritten as verb +noun ‘killed the bird’). Following this model we can produce hundreds of sentences: ‘Women love/hate /animals; Men love/hate animals; Some men love/hate animals; Women love/hate some animals; Five men love/hate animals: Here we have three nouns [men women animals], two verbs[ love and hate], two determiners [some and five]. For this reason there is a possibility to build many sentences.

B) A TG model must be explicit and self-sufficient because it tries to describe the ideal speaker-hearer’s linguistic knowledge and intuition.

C) This model must have three components: ‘a phonological component’, ‘a syntactic component’ and ‘ a semantic component’.

D) It must be able to assign a structure to all sentences accepted by a native speaker and rejected all the sentences which wouldn’t be accepted by a native speaker.

Sources:
1.Transformational Generative Grammar
2.Study of Linguistics

Applied Linguistics

2005-12-18T17:34:00.000+07:00

Applied Linguistics (AP) in the Subcontinent
(Continue)

Applied linguistics- a cover term for several sub disciplines that contribute to the increasing understanding of the role of language in human affairs- providing knowledge to those dealing with language related issue- highly diversified. The term ‘applied linguistics’ came into use in the late 1940s and in the 1950s in both Britain and USA, where it initially referred to the teaching and learning of second or foreign languages.

However, it got prominence in India through the Linguistic Society of India, (formed at the Fifth Oriental Conference held at Lahore in 1928 with its first journal ‘ Indian Linguistics (IL)’ commencing publication in 1931). In pre-independence undivided India, the activities of the Society were mainly centered on descriptive and historical linguistics. Major activities in the growth of linguistics as an independent discipline of study began from the meeting of the Society of Deccan College, Pune in 1951.

Since the English language was supposed to cease functioning as official languag in January 1965, the meeting identified tha application of linguistics towards the solution of problem of communication and for the development of regional languages as a fundamental need. Subsequent political developments led to the amendment of the constitution in 1967 whereby English was declared as the ‘associate official language’, which it continues to be till this day. The Summer Institutes in linguistics came into existence in 1954, and Departments of Linguistics began to be set up in Indian Universities, the sole exception being the Department at Calcutta University that had been established in 1920. Linguistics as a major discipline was taught in 14 universities by 1982, the number rose to 20 in 1992, and today it is around 32. Needles to say that applied linguistics is a major component of these programs.

The major trend towards publication in applied linguistics can be said to have begun with Some Aspects of Applied Linguistics by D.P. Pattanayak (1969) and Aspects of Applied Linguistics by A.M. Ghatage (1970). The Dravidian Linguistics was formed in 1971 and the first issue of International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics (IJDL) was bought out in January 1972. Keeping in view the demand for publication in applied linguistics, Mr. Ujjal Singh Bahri founded the Indian Journal of Applied Linguistics (IJOAL) and the Language Forum (LF) in 1975. The biannual South Asian Language Review (SALR) under the editorship of Prof. O.N. Koul commended publication from January 1991.

While IL, IJDL, and SALR publish papers on theoretical as well as applied linguistics, the IJOAL caters only to applied linguistics while LF publishes papers on applied linguistics and on literary studies. At present in addition to this, there are a number of other significant publications such as CIEFL Bulletin, Osmania Papers in Linguistics, The Yearbook of South Asian Languages and Lingustics, Psycholingual and Applied Linguistics. The setting up of the Central Institute of English and Foreign Language- CIEFL (1958), the Central Hindi Directorate- CHD (1960), the Central Hindi Institute- CHI (1961), and the Central Institute of Indian Language- CIIL (1969) have further strengthened the work on applied linguistics through researches and publications. The robustness of the field can also be seen through numerous publications brought out by Sage Publications, Bahri Publications, Creative Publications, Oxford University Press and of course by the CIIL. The range of publications on applied linguistics show that the discipline which was initially equated with language teaching/learning has now grown in scope to include other issues as well as issues related to multilingualism, language planning, language contact studies, second language acquisition, stylistic, translation, studies language disorders and computatioanal linguistics, etc.

Phonology: Distinctive Features

2005-12-17T14:34:00.000+07:00

Distinctive Features

Phonological knowledge goes beyond the ability to produce all the phonetically different sounds of a language. In phonology, every different sounds called phonemes. Thus, phoneme is a distinctive speech sound,and it can change the meaning of a word. In Bahasa Indonesia, for example, the minimal pair ‘aku’ and ‘abu’represent different phonomes.
The sounds [k] and [b] cause the change of the words meaning. Furthermore, in order for two phonetic forms to differ and to contrast meaning, there must be phonetic difference between the substitued sounds. It is a distinctive feature.

Distinctive feature refers to a minimal contrastive unit used as a means of explaining how the sound system of language is organised. The first of these views is found in the approach of the Praque School, whereas the phonome is seen as a bundle of phonetic distinctive feature: the English phoneme /p/, for example, can be seen as the result of the combination of the feature of bilabial, voice, plosive, etc. According to Victoria Fromkin and Robert Rodman in their book ‘An Introduction to Language’ page :73, distinctive feature is a feature that distinguishes one phoneme from another.

Further, for features indicating opposite traits, we can employ a binary system using the symbols [+] and [-] (pluses and minuses) to show whether or not the attribute is present. For example, we need set up only a single feature [voiced] for two separate labels, such as voiced and voiceless. Then, voiced sound can be specified as [+voiced] and voiceless ones as [-voiced]. This binary notation is ideal for all features indicating opposite qualities. This binary system also gives advantage that we can show explicitly how members of pairs such as voiced-voiceless or nasal-oral, are related to each other in a way in which other possible pairing.

A. The Major Class Features

1. Sonorant/Nonsonorant

S. A. Schane in his book ‘Generative Phonology’ states that the feature [sonorant] refers to the resonan quality of sounds. Vowels are always [+sonorant] as are nasals,liquids, and semivowels. The obstruent stops, fricatives, affricates, and glides are, of course [-sonorant].
Sonorants are sounds produced when the vocal tract cavity configurates in which spontaneous voicing is possible, while obstruents are produced with a cavity configuration that makes this kind of voicing is impossible.

2. Vocalic/Nonvocalic

When the most radical constriction does not exceed that found in the high vowels [i] and [u] and the position of the vocal cords allow the spontaneous voicing, the vocalic sounds are produced. Meanwhile, non-vocalic sounds are produced when one or both of these conditions are not satisfied.
Therefore, vocalic sounds are the voiced vowels and liquids, whereas glides, nasals, obstruents as well as voiceless vowels and liquids are not vocalic.

3. Consonantal/Nonconsonantal

Consonantal sounds are produced with a radical obstruction in the midsaggital region of the vocal tract; nonconsonatal sounds are produced without such kind of construction.Further, the term consonantal refers to sounds that produced by a narrowed in the oral cavity-either total occlussion or frication. Stops, fricatives, affricates, nasals, and liquids are [+consonantal], while vowels and semivowels, withou ths degree of narrowing are [-consonantal].

4. Syllabic/Nonsyllabic

In general, vowels are [+syllabic], whereas consonants are [-syllabic]. This features are also necessary for differentating syllabic nasal and liquids ([+syllabic]).
A segment is viewed as syllabic if it constitutes the nucleus or peak of syllable.

A set of features makes explicit claims concerning the relationship of different segment types. The more feature values shared by different classes, more they have in common. Thus, classes which differ in only one feature value are more closely related than those which differ in two or three feature values.

B. Cavity Feature

Cavity feature refers to place of articulation. They specify where in the vocal tract modification of the air stream take place in the production of particular sounds.

1. Primary Structures

1.1 Coronal/Noncoronal

Coronal sounds are produced with the blade of the tongue raised from its neutral position; noncoronal sounds are produced with blade of the tongue is in the neutral position.
Dental, alveolar, and palato-alveolar consonants are coronal, as are the liquids articulated with the blade of the tongue. The uvulars, glides, retroflex vowels are noncoronal.

1.2 Anterior/Nonanterior

The sounds that are produced with an obstruction that is located in front of the palato-alveolar region of the mouth is called anterior sounds. Nonanterior sounds are produced without such kind of construction.
Vowels which are produced without construction in the oral cavity are anterior sounds, as well as consonants and liquids. Palato-alveolar, retroflex, palatal, velar, uvular, or pharyngeal are therefore nonanterior, whereas labials, dentals, and alveolas are anterior.

C. Feature Related to the Body of the Tongue

Another features that related to the position of the body of the tongue are deal with the features high, low, and back. Using the binary feature, we can devide them high-nonhigh, low-nonlow, and back-nonback.
High sounds are produced by raising the body of the tongue above the level that it occupied in the neutral position.; nonhigh sounds are produced without such a raising of the tongue body.

Low-nonlow sounds are produced by lowering the body of the tongue below the level that it occupies in the neutral position, nonllow sound are produced without such kind of lowering of the body of the tongue.
Meanwhile, back sounds are produced by retracting the body of the tongue from the neutral position; nonback sounds are produced without such a restraction from the neutral position.

D. Rounded-Unrounded

Rounded sounds are sounds that are produced with a narrowing of the lip; unrounded sounds are produced without such kind of narrowing.
All classes of sounds may manifest rounding. In glides and nonlow vowels, rounding is commonly correlated with the feature ‘back’: sounds that are also round, those that are nonback are nonround.
The degree of rounding is always determinable from other features. In the vowels and glides it is corelated with the maximum degree of constriction in the oral cavity. Glides and high vowels have most rounding; low vowels, least.

E. Distributed- nondistributed

Distributed sounds are produced with a constriction that extents for a considerable distance along the direction of the air flow; nondistibuted sounds are produced with a constriction that extends only for a short distance in this directon.

Applied Linguistics

2005-12-15T17:27:00.000+07:00

Applied Linguistics
Prof.Ravinder Gargesh

Applied linguistics can be defined as an area of activity consisting of language related concerns that go beyond the study of the forms and functions of language for their own shake.By doing so, the discipline has contributed by developing new perspectives and frames of reference for different areas of language related concerns such as in the domains of language teaching, stylistic, translation, lexicography, language policy, natural language processing by computers, speech, pathology, terminology development, forensic analysis, etc.
In this way, applied linguistics provides help to those who are in need of such knowledge in their language related practices.

Although it is true that applied linguistics presupposed a knowledge of linguistics, it is also true that applied linguistics helps in developing linguistics theory by not only providing insights from other diciplines, but also at times by providing new challenging data.--- Bounger to the Linguistic Society of America on December 28th, 1972 stressed the fact that while subject and verbs agree, linguist should deal with the question whether statements and facts agree. Once we move in this direction, the 'big lie' becomes the proper object of study for linguists, and a necessary one ,especially when lying is cultivated by the government, politicians, journalists, writers, and even by linguists as an art. (Bolinger,1973).

In a similar context, Srivastava (1990:11), in his 'Address to the Indian Linguists' viewed applied linguistics as "a socially meaningful academic activity since here linguists are called to utilize their knowledge and skill to reveal the implicit assumption made by speakers for the benefit of common users." This brings applied linguistics right into the centre of language related social concerns. The scientific perspective of linguistics, it is believed, will help in solving langauge related social concerns.

Semiotics for Beginners

2005-12-13T22:52:00.000+07:00

Semiotics for Beginners
By http://www.blogger.com/'http://www.blogger.com/'>">">Daniel Chandler

Signs
We seem as a species to be driven by a desire to make meanings: above all, we are surely Homo significans - meaning-makers. Distinctively, we make meanings through our creation and interpretation of 'signs'. Indeed, according to Peirce, 'we think only in signs' (Peirce 1931-58, 2.302). Signs take the form of words, images, sounds, odours, flavours, acts or objects, but such things have no intrinsic meaning and become signs only when we invest them with meaning. 'Nothing is a sign unless it is interpreted as a sign', declares Peirce (Peirce 1931-58, 2.172). Anything can be a sign as long as someone interprets it as 'signifying' something - referring to or standing for something other than itself. We interpret things as signs largely unconsciously by relating them to familiar systems of conventions. It is this meaningful use of signs which is at the heart of the concerns of semiotics.

The two dominant models of what constitutes a sign are those of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. Saussure offered a 'dyadic' or two-part model of the sign. He defined a sign as being composed of: a 'signifier' (signifiant) - the form which the sign takes; and
the 'signified' (signifié) - the concept it represents.

The sign is the whole that results from the association of the signifier with the signified (Saussure 1983, 67; Saussure 1974, 67). The relationship between the signifier and the signified is referred to as 'signification', and this is represented in the Saussurean diagram by the arrows. The horizontal line marking the two elements of the sign is referred to as 'the bar'.

If we take a linguistic example, the word 'Open' (when it is invested with meaning by someone who encounters it on a shop doorway) is a sign consisting of:
a signifier: the word open;
a signified concept: that the shop is open for business.
A sign must have both a signifier and a signified. You cannot have a totally meaningless signifier or a completely formless signified (Saussure 1983, 101; Saussure 1974, 102-103). A sign is a recognizable combination of a signifier with a particular signified. The same signifier (the word 'open') could stand for a different signified (and thus be a different sign) if it were on a push-button inside a lift ('push to open door'). Similarly, many signifiers could stand for the concept 'open' (for instance, on top of a packing carton, a small outline of a box with an open flap for 'open this end') - again, with each unique pairing constituting a different sign.

Nowadays, whilst the basic 'Saussurean' model is commonly adopted, it tends to be a more materialistic model than that of Saussure himself. The signifier is now commonly interpreted as the material (or physical) form of the sign - it is something which can be seen, heard, touched, smelt or tasted. For Saussure, both the signifier and the signified were purely 'psychological' (Saussure 1983, 12, 14-15, 66; Saussure 1974, 12, 15, 65-66). Both were form rather than substance:

A linguistic sign is not a link between a thing and a name, but between a concept and a sound pattern. The sound pattern is not actually a sound; for a sound is something physical. A sound pattern is the hearer's psychological impression of a sound, as given to him by the evidence of his senses. This sound pattern may be called a 'material' element only in that it is the representation of our sensory impressions. The sound pattern may thus be distinguished from the other element associated with it in a linguistic sign. This other element is generally of a more abstract kind: the concept. (Saussure 1983, 66; Saussure 1974, 66)
Saussure was focusing on the linguistic sign (such as a word) and he 'phonocentrically' privileged the spoken word, referring specifically to the image acoustique ('sound-image' or 'sound pattern'), seeing writing as a separate, secondary, dependent but comparable sign system (Saussure 1983, 15, 24-25, 117; Saussure 1974, 15, 16, 23-24, 119). Within the ('separate') system of written signs, a signifier such as the written letter 't' signified a sound in the primary sign system of language (and thus a written word would also signify a sound rather than a concept). Thus for Saussure, writing relates to speech as signifier to signified. Most subsequent theorists who have adopted Saussure's model are content to refer to the form of linguistic signs as either spoken or written. We will return later to the issue of the post-Saussurean 'rematerialization' of the sign.

As for the signified, most commentators who adopt Saussure's model still treat this as a mental construct, although they often note that it may nevertheless refer indirectly to things in the world. Saussure's original model of the sign 'brackets the referent': excluding reference to objects existing in the world. His signified is not to be identified directly with a referent but is a concept in the mind - not a thing but the notion of a thing. Some people may wonder why Saussure's model of the sign refers only to a concept and not to a thing. An observation from the philosopher Susanne Langer (who was not referring to Saussure's theories) may be useful here. Note that like most contemporary commentators, Langer uses the term 'symbol' to refer to the linguistic sign (a term which Saussure himself avoided): 'Symbols are not proxy for their objects but are vehicles for the conception of objects... In talking about things we have conceptions of them, not the things themselves; and it is the conceptions, not the things, that symbols directly mean. Behaviour towards conceptions is what words normally evoke; this is the typical process of thinking'. She adds that 'If I say "Napoleon", you do not bow to the conqueror of Europe as though I had introduced him, but merely think of him' (Langer 1951, 61).

Thus, for Saussure the linguistic sign is wholly immaterial - although he disliked referring to it as 'abstract' (Saussure 1983, 15; Saussure 1974, 15). The immateriality of the Saussurean sign is a feature which tends to be neglected in many popular commentaries. If the notion seems strange, we need to remind ourselves that words have no value in themselves - that is their value. Saussure noted that it is not the metal in a coin that fixes its value (Saussure 1983, 117; Saussure 1974, 118). Several reasons could be offered for this. For instance, if linguistic signs drew attention to their materiality this would hinder their communicative transparency (Langer 1951, 73). Furthermore, being immaterial, language is an extraordinarily economical medium and words are always ready-to-hand. Nevertheless, a principled argument can be made for the revaluation of the materiality of the sign, as we shall see in due course.

Saussure noted that his choice of the terms signifier and signified helped to indicate 'the distinction which separates each from the other' (Saussure 1983, 67; Saussure 1974, 67). Despite this, and the horizontal bar in his diagram of the sign, Saussure stressed that sound and thought (or the signifier and the signified) were as inseparable as the two sides of a piece of paper (Saussure 1983, 111; Saussure 1974, 113). They were 'intimately linked' in the mind 'by an associative link' - 'each triggers the other' (Saussure 1983, 66; Saussure 1974, 66). Saussure presented these elements as wholly interdependent, neither pre-existing the other (Silverman 1983, 103). Within the context of spoken language, a sign could not consist of sound without sense or of sense without sound. He used the two arrows in the diagram to suggest their interaction. The bar and the opposition nevertheless suggests that the signifier and the signified can be distinguished for analytical purposes. Poststructuralist theorists criticize the clear distinction which the Saussurean bar seems to suggest between the signifier and the signified; they seek to blur or erase it in order to reconfigure the sign or structural relations. Some theorists have argued that 'the signifier is always separated from the signified... and has a real autonomy' (Lechte 1994, 68), a point to which we will return in discussing the arbitrariness of the sign. Commonsense tends to insist that the signified takes precedence over, and pre-exists, the signifier: 'look after the sense', quipped Lewis Carroll, 'and the sounds will take care of themselves' (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, chapter 9). However, in dramatic contrast, post-Saussurean theorists have seen the model as implicitly granting primacy to the signifier, thus reversing the commonsensical position.

Louis Hjelmslev used the terms 'expression' and 'content' to refer to the signifier and signified respectively (Hjelmslev 1961, 47ff). The distinction between signifier and signified has sometimes been equated to the familiar dualism of 'form and content'. Within such a framework the signifier is seen as the form of the sign and the signified as the content. However, the metaphor of form as a 'container' is problematic, tending to support the equation of content with meaning, implying that meaning can be 'extracted' without an active process of interpretation and that form is not in itself meaningful (Chandler 1995 104-6).

Saussure argued that signs only make sense as part of a formal, generalized and abstract system. His conception of meaning was purely structural and relational rather than referential: primacy is given to relationships rather than to things (the meaning of signs was seen as lying in their systematic relation to each other rather than deriving from any inherent features of signifiers or any reference to material things). Saussure did not define signs in terms of some 'essential' or intrinsic nature. For Saussure, signs refer primarily to each other. Within the language system, 'everything depends on relations' (Saussure 1983, 121; Saussure 1974, 122). No sign makes sense on its own but only in relation to other signs. Both signifier and signified are purely relational entities (Saussure 1983, 118; Saussure 1974, 120). This notion can be hard to understand since we may feel that an individual word such as 'tree' does have some meaning for us, but its meaning depends on its context in relation to the other words with which it is used.

Together with the 'vertical' alignment of signifier and signified within each individual sign (suggesting two structural 'levels'), the emphasis on the relationship between signs defines what are in effect two planes - that of the signifier and the signifier. Later, Louis Hjelmslev referred to the planes of 'expression' and 'content' (Hjelmslev 1961, 60). Saussure himself referred to sound and thought as two distinct but correlated planes. 'We can envisage... the language... as a series of adjoining subdivisions simultaneously imprinted both on the plane of vague, amorphous thought (A), and on the equally featureless plane of sound (B)' (Saussure 1983, 110-111; Saussure 1974, 112). The arbitrary division of the two continua into signs is suggested by the dotted lines whilst the wavy (rather than parallel) edges of the two 'amorphous' masses suggest the lack of any 'natural' fit between them. The gulf and lack of fit between the two planes highlights their relative autonomy. Whilst Saussure is careful not to refer directly to 'reality', Fredric Jameson reads into this feature of Saussure's system that 'it is not so much the individual word or sentence that "stands for" or "reflects" the individual object or event in the real world, but rather that the entire system of signs, the entire field of the langue, lies parallel to reality itself; that it is the totality of systematic language, in other words, which is analogous to whatever organized structures exist in the world of reality, and that our understanding proceeds from one whole or Gestalt to the other, rather than on a one-to-one basis' (Jameson 1972, 32-33).

What Saussure refers to as the 'value' of a sign depends on its relations with other signs within the system - a sign has no 'absolute' value independent of this context (Saussure 1983, 80; Saussure 1974, 80). Saussure uses an analogy with the game of chess, noting that the value of each piece depends on its position on the chessboard (Saussure 1983, 88; Saussure 1974, 88). The sign is more than the sum of its parts. Whilst signification - what is signified - clearly depends on the relationship between the two parts of the sign, the value of a sign is determined by the relationships between the sign and other signs within the system as a whole (Saussure 1983, 112-113; Saussure 1974, 114).

The notion of value... shows us that it is a great mistake to consider a sign as nothing more than the combination of a certain sound and a certain concept. To think of a sign as nothing more would be to isolate it from the system to which it belongs. It would be to suppose that a start could be made with individual signs, and a system constructed by putting them together. On the contrary, the system as a united whole is the starting point, from which it becomes possible, by a process of analysis, to identify its constituent elements. (Saussure 1983, 112; Saussure 1974, 113)

As an example of the distinction between signification and value, Saussure notes that 'The French word mouton may have the same meaning as the English word sheep; but it does not have the same value. There are various reasons for this, but in particular the fact that the English word for the meat of this animal, as prepared and served for a meal, is not sheep but mutton. The difference in value between sheep and mouton hinges on the fact that in English there is also another word mutton for the meat, whereas mouton in French covers both' (Saussure 1983, 114; Saussure 1974, 115-116).

Saussure's relational conception of meaning was specifically differential: he emphasized the differences between signs. Language for him was a system of functional differences and oppositions. 'In a language, as in every other semiological system, what distinguishes a sign is what constitutes it' (Saussure 1983, 119; Saussure 1974, 121). As John Sturrock points out, 'a one-term language is an impossibility because its single term could be applied to everything and differentiate nothing; it requires at least one other term to give it definition' (Sturrock 1979, 10). Advertising furnishes a good example of this notion, since what matters in 'positioning' a product is not the relationship of advertising signifiers to real-world referents, but the differentiation of each sign from the others to which it is related. Saussure's concept of the relational identity of signs is at the heart of structuralist theory. Structuralist analysis focuses on the structural relations which are functional in the signifying system at a particular moment in history. 'Relations are important for what they can explain: meaningful contrasts and permitted or forbidden combinations' (Culler 1975, 14).

Saussure emphasized in particular negative, oppositional differences between signs, and the key relationships in structuralist analysis are binary oppositions (such as nature/culture, life/death). Saussure argued that 'concepts... are defined not positively, in terms of their content, but negatively by contrast with other items in the same system. What characterizes each most exactly is being whatever the others are not' (Saussure 1983, 115; Saussure 1974, 117; my emphasis). This notion may initially seem mystifying if not perverse, but the concept of negative differentiation becomes clearer if we consider how we might teach someone who did not share our language what we mean by the term 'red'. We would be unlikely to make our point by simply showing them a range of different objects which all happened to be red - we would be probably do better to single out a red object from a sets of objects which were identical in all respects except colour. Although Saussure focuses on speech, he also noted that in writing, 'the values of the letter are purely negative and differential' - all we need to be able to do is to distinguish one letter from another (Saussure 1983, 118; Saussure 1974, 119-120). As for his emphasis on negative differences, Saussure remarks that although both the signified and the signifier are purely differential and negative when considered separately, the sign in which they are combined is a positive term. He adds that 'the moment we compare one sign with another as positive combinations, the term difference should be dropped... Two signs... are not different from each other, but only distinct. They are simply in opposition to each other. The entire mechanism of language... is based on oppositions of this kind and upon the phonic and conceptual differences they involve' (Saussure 1983, 119; Saussure 1974, 120-121).

Although the signifier is treated by its users as 'standing for' the signified, Saussurean semioticians emphasize that there is no necessary, intrinsic, direct or inevitable relationship between the signifier and the signified. Saussure stressed the arbitrariness of the sign (Saussure 1983, 67, 78; Saussure 1974, 67, 78) - more specifically the arbitrariness of the link between the signifier and the signified (Saussure 1983, 67; Saussure 1974, 67). He was focusing on linguistic signs, seeing language as the most important sign system; for Saussure, the arbitrary nature of the sign was the first principle of language (Saussure 1983, 67; Saussure 1974, 67) -arbitrariness was identified later by Charles Hockett as a key 'design feature' of language (Hockett 1958; Hockett 1960; Hockett 1965). The feature of arbitrariness may indeed help to account for the extraordinary versatility of language (Lyons 1977, 71). In the context of natural language, Saussure stressed that there is no inherent, essential, 'transparent', self-evident or 'natural' connection between the signifier and the signified - between the sound or shape of a word and the concept to which it refers (Saussure 1983, 67, 68-69, 76, 111, 117; Saussure 1974, 67, 69, 76, 113, 119). Note that Saussure himself avoids directly relating the principle of arbitrariness to the relationship between language and an external world, but that subsequent commentators often do, and indeed, lurking behind the purely conceptual 'signified' one can often detect Saussure's allusion to real-world referents (Coward & Ellis 1977, 22). In language at least, the form of the signifier is not determined by what it signifies: there is nothing 'treeish' about the word 'tree'. Languages differ, of course, in how they refer to the same referent. No specific signifier is 'naturally' more suited to a signified than any other signifier; in principle any signifier could represent any signified. Saussure observed that 'there is nothing at all to prevent the association of any idea whatsoever with any sequence of sounds whatsoever' (Saussure 1983, 76; Saussure 1974, 76); 'the process which selects one particular sound-sequence to correspond to one particular idea is completely arbitrary' (Saussure 1983, 111; Saussure 1974, 113).

This principle of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign was not an original conception: Aristotle had noted that 'there can be no natural connection between the sound of any language and the things signified' (cited in Richards 1932, 32). In Plato's Cratylus Hermogenes urged Socrates to accept that 'whatever name you give to a thing is its right name; and if you give up that name and change it for another, the later name is no less correct than the earlier, just as we change the name of our servants; for I think no name belongs to a particular thing by nature' (cited in Harris 1987, 67). 'That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet', as Shakespeare put it. Whilst the notion of the arbitrariness of language was not new, but the emphasis which Saussure gave it can be seen as an original contribution, particularly in the context of a theory which bracketed the referent. Note that although Saussure prioritized speech, he also stressed that 'the signs used in writing are arbitrary, The letter t, for instance, has no connection with the sound it denotes' (Saussure 1983, 117; Saussure 1974, 119).

The arbitrariness principle can be applied not only to the sign, but to the whole sign-system. The fundamental arbitrariness of language is apparent from the observation that each language involves different distinctions between one signifier and another (e.g. 'tree' and 'free') and between one signified and another (e.g. 'tree' and 'bush'). The signified is clearly arbitrary if reality is perceived as a seamless continuum (which is how Saussure sees the initially undifferentiated realms of both thought and sound): where, for example, does a 'corner' end? Commonsense suggests that the existence of things in the world preceded our apparently simple application of 'labels' to them (a 'nomenclaturist' notion which Saussure rejected and to which we will return in due course). Saussure noted that 'if words had the job of representing concepts fixed in advance, one would be able to find exact equivalents for them as between one language and another. But this is not the case' (Saussure 1983, 114-115; Saussure 1974, 116). Reality is divided up into arbitrary categories by every language and the conceptual world with which each of us is familiar could have been divided up very differently. Indeed, no two languages categorize reality in the same way. As John Passmore puts it, 'Languages differ by differentiating differently' (cited in Sturrock 1986, 17). Linguistic categories are not simply a consequence of some predefined structure in the world. There are no 'natural' concepts or categories which are simply 'reflected' in language. Language plays a crucial role in 'constructing reality'.

If one accepts the arbitrariness of the relationship between signifier and signified then one may argue counter-intuitively that the signified is determined by the signifier rather than vice versa. Indeed, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, in adapting Saussurean theories, sought to highlight the primacy of the signifier in the psyche by rewriting Saussure's model of the sign in the form of a quasi-algebraic sign in which a capital 'S' (representing the signifier) is placed over a lower case and italicized 's' (representing the signified), these two signifiers being separated by a horizontal 'bar' (Lacan 1977, 149). This suited Lacan's purpose of emphasizing how the signified inevitably 'slips beneath' the signifier, resisting our attempts to delimit it. Lacan poetically refers to Saussure's illustration of the planes of sound and thought as 'an image resembling the wavy lines of the upper and lower Waters in miniatures from manuscripts of Genesis; a double flux marked by streaks of rain', suggesting that this can be seen as illustrating the 'incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier' - although he argues that one should regard the dotted vertical lines not as 'segments of correspondence' but as 'anchoring points' (points de capiton - literally, the 'buttons' which anchor upholstery to furniture). However, he notes that this model is too linear, since 'there is in effect no signifying chain that does not have, as if attached to the punctuation of each of its units, a whole articulation of relevant contexts suspended 'vertically', as it were, from that point' (ibid., 154). In the spirit of the Lacanian critique of Saussure's model, subsequent theorists have emphasized the temporary nature of the bond between signifier and signified, stressing that the 'fixing' of 'the chain of signifiers' is socially situated (Coward & Ellis 1977, 6, 13, 17, 67). Note that whilst the intent of Lacan in placing the signifier over the signified is clear enough, his representational strategy seems a little curious, since in the modelling of society orthodox Marxists routinely represent the fundamental driving force of 'the [techno-economic] base' as (logically) below 'the [ideological] superstructure'.

The arbitrariness of the sign is a radical concept because it proposes the autonomy of language in relation to reality. The Saussurean model, with its emphasis on internal structures within a sign system, can be seen as supporting the notion that language does not 'reflect' reality but rather constructs it. We can use language 'to say what isn't in the world, as well as what is. And since we come to know the world through whatever language we have been born into the midst of, it is legitimate to argue that our language determines reality, rather than reality our language' (Sturrock 1986, 79). In their book The Meaning of Meaning, Ogden and Richards criticized Saussure for 'neglecting entirely the things for which signs stand' (Ogden & Richards 1923, 8). Later critics have lamented his model's detachment from social context (Gardiner 1992, 11). Robert Stam argues that by 'bracketting the referent', the Saussurean model 'severs text from history' (Stam 2000, 122). We will return to this theme of the relationship between language and 'reality' in our discussion of 'modality and representation'.

The arbitrary aspect of signs does help to account for the scope for their interpretation (and the importance of context). There is no one-to-one link between signifier and signified; signs have multiple rather than single meanings. Within a single language, one signifier may refer to many signifieds (e.g. puns) and one signified may be referred to by many signifiers (e.g. synonyms). Some commentators are critical of the stance that the relationship of the signifier to the signified, even in language, is always completely arbitrary (e.g. Lewis 1991, 29). Onomatopoeic words are often mentioned in this context, though some semioticians retort that this hardly accounts for the variability between different languages in their words for the same sounds (notably the sounds made by familiar animals) (Saussure 1983, 69; Saussure 1974, 69).

Saussure declares that 'the entire linguistic system is founded upon the irrational principle that the sign is arbitrary'. This provocative declaration is followed immediately by the acknowledgement that 'applied without restriction, this principle would lead to utter chaos' (Saussure 1983, 131; Saussure 1974, 133). If linguistic signs were to be totally arbitrary in every way language would not be a system and its communicative function would be destroyed. He concedes that 'there exists no language in which nothing at all is motivated' (ibid.). Saussure admits that 'a language is not completely arbitrary, for the system has a certain rationality' (Saussure 1983, 73; Saussure 1974, 73). The principle of arbitrariness does not mean that the form of a word is accidental or random, of course. Whilst the sign is not determined extralinguistically it is subject to intralinguistic determination. For instance, signifiers must constitute well-formed combinations of sounds which conform with existing patterns within the language in question. Furthermore, we can recognize that a compound noun such as 'screwdriver' is not wholly arbitrary since it is a meaningful combination of two existing signs. Saussure introduces a distinction between degrees of arbitrariness:

The fundamental principle of the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign does not prevent us from distinguishing in any language between what is intrinsically arbitrary - that is, unmotivated - and what is only relatively arbitrary. Not all signs are absolutely arbitrary. In some cases, there are factors which allow us to recognize different degrees of arbitrariness, although never to discard the notion entirely. The sign may be motivated to a certain extent (Saussure 1983, 130; Saussure 1974, 131; original emphasis, see also following pages)
Here then Saussure modifies his stance somewhat and refers to signs as being 'relatively arbitrary'. Some subsequent theorists (echoing Althusserian Marxist terminology) refer to the relationship between the signifier and the signified in terms of 'relative autonomy' (Tagg 1988, 167; Lechte 1994, 150). The relative conventionality of relationships between signified and signifier is a point to which I return below.

It should be noted that whilst the relationships between signifiers and their signifieds are ontologically arbitrary (philosophically, it would not make any difference to the status of these entities in 'the order of things' if what we call 'black' had always been called 'white' and vice versa), this is not to suggest that signifying systems are socially or historically arbitrary. Natural languages are not, of course, arbitrarily established, unlike historical inventions such as Morse Code. Nor does the arbitrary nature of the sign make it socially 'neutral' or materially 'transparent' - for example, in Western culture 'white' has come to be a privileged signifier (Dyer 1997). Even in the case of the 'arbitrary' colours of traffic lights, the original choice of red for 'stop' was not entirely arbitrary, since it already carried relevant associations with danger. As Lévi-Strauss noted, the sign is arbitrary a priori but ceases to be arbitrary a posteriori - after the sign has come into historical existence it cannot be arbitrarily changed (Lévi-Strauss 1972, 91). As part of its social use within a code (a term which became fundamental amongst post-Saussurean semioticians), every sign acquires a history and connotations of its own which are familiar to members of the sign-users' culture. Saussure remarked that although the signifier 'may seem to be freely chosen', from the point of view of the linguistic community it is 'imposed rather than freely chosen' because 'a language is always an inheritance from the past' which its users have 'no choice but to accept' (Saussure 1983, 71-72; Saussure 1974, 71). Indeed, 'it is because the linguistic sign is arbitrary that it knows no other law than that of tradition, and [it is] because it is founded upon tradition that it can be arbitrary' (Saussure 1983, 74; Saussure 1974, 74). The arbitrariness principle does not, of course mean that an individual can arbitrarily choose any signifier for a given signified. The relation between a signifier and its signified is not a matter of individual choice; if it were then communication would become impossible. 'The individual has no power to alter a sign in any respect once it has become established in the linguistic community' (Saussure 1983, 68; Saussure 1974, 69). From the point-of-view of individual language-users, language is a 'given' - we don't create the system for ourselves. Saussure refers to the language system as a non-negotiable 'contract' into which one is born (Saussure 1983, 14; Saussure 1974, 14) - although he later problematizes the term (ibid., 71). The ontological arbitrariness which it involves becomes invisible to us as we learn to accept it as 'natural'.

The Saussurean legacy of the arbitrariness of signs leads semioticians to stress that the relationship between the signifier and the signified is conventional - dependent on social and cultural conventions. This is particularly clear in the case of the linguistic signs with which Saussure was concerned: a word means what it does to us only because we collectively agree to let it do so. Saussure felt that the main concern of semiotics should be 'the whole group of systems grounded in the arbitrariness of the sign'. He argued that: 'signs which are entirely arbitrary convey better than others the ideal semiological process. That is why the most complex and the most widespread of all systems of expression, which is the one we find in human languages, is also the most characteristic of all. In this sense, linguistics serves as a model for the whole of semiology, even though languages represent only one type of semiological system' (Saussure 1983, 68; Saussure 1974, 68). He did not in fact offer many examples of sign systems other than spoken language and writing, mentioning only: the deaf-and-dumb alphabet; social customs; etiquette; religious and other symbolic rites; legal procedures; military signals and nautical flags (Saussure 1983, 15, 17, 68, 74; Saussure 1974, 16, 17, 68, 73). Saussure added that 'any means of expression accepted in a society rests in principle upon a collective habit, or on convention - which comes to the same thing' (Saussure 1983, 68; Saussure 1974, 68). However, whilst purely conventional signs such as words are quite independent of their referents, other less conventional forms of signs are often somewhat less independent of them. Nevertheless, since the arbitary nature of linguistic signs is clear, those who have adopted the Saussurean model have tended to avoid 'the familiar mistake of assuming that signs which appear natural to those who use them have an intrinsic meaning and require no explanation' (Culler 1975, 5).

At around the same time as Saussure was formulating his model of the sign, of 'semiology' and of a structuralist methodology, across the Atlantic independent work was also in progress as the pragmatist philosopher and logician Charles Sanders Peirce formulated his own model of the sign, of 'semiotic' and of the taxonomies of signs. In contrast to Saussure's model of the sign in the form of a 'self-contained dyad', Peirce offered a triadic model:

The Representamen: the form which the sign takes (not necessarily material);
An Interpretant: not an interpreter but rather the sense made of the sign;
An Object: to which the sign refers.

'A sign... [in the form of a representamen] is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object. It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea, which I have sometimes called the ground of the representamen' (Peirce 1931-58, 2.228). The interaction between the representamen, the object and the interpretant is referred to by Peirce as 'semiosis' (ibid., 5.484). Within Peirce's model of the sign, the traffic light sign for 'stop' would consist of: a red light facing traffic at an intersection (the representamen); vehicles halting (the object) and the idea that a red light indicates that vehicles must stop (the interpretant).

Peirce's model of the sign includes an object or referent - which does not, of course, feature directly in Saussure's model. The representamen is similar in meaning to Saussure's signifier whilst the interpretant is similar in meaning to the signified (Silverman 1983, 15). However, the interpretant has a quality unlike that of the signified: it is itself a sign in the mind of the interpreter. Peirce noted that 'a sign... addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. The sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign' (Peirce 1931-58, 2.228). Umberto Eco uses the phrase 'unlimited semiosis' to refer to the way in which this could lead (as Peirce was well aware) to a series of successive interpretants (potentially) ad infinitum (ibid., 1.339, 2.303). Elsewhere Peirce added that 'the meaning of a representation can be nothing but a representation' (ibid., 1.339). Any initial interpretation can be re-interpreted. That a signified can itself play the role of a signifier is familiar to anyone who uses a dictionary and finds themselves going beyond the original definition to look up yet another word which it employs. This concept can be seen as going beyond Saussure's emphasis on the value of a sign lying in its relation to other signs and it was later to be developed more radically by poststructuralist theorists. Another concept which is alluded to within Peirce's model which has been taken up by later theorists but which was explicitly excluded from Saussure's model is the notion of dialogical thought. It stems in part from Peirce's emphasis on 'semiosis' as a process which is in distinct contrast to Saussure's synchronic emphasis on structure (Peirce 1931-58, 5.484, 5.488). Peirce argued that 'all thinking is dialogic in form. Your self of one instant appeals to your deeper self for his assent' (Peirce 1931-58, 6.338). This notion resurfaced in a more developed form in the 1920s in the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin (Bakhtin 1981). One important aspect of this is its characterization even of internal reflection as fundamentally social.

Peirce, clearly fascinated by tripartite structures, made a phenomenological distinction between the sign itself [or the representamen] as an instance of 'Firstness', its object as an instance of 'Secondness' and the interpretant as an instance of 'Thirdness'. Such unfamiliar terms are relatively modest examples of Peircean coinages, and the complexity of his terminology and style has been a factor in limiting the influence of a distinctively Peircean semiotics.

Variants of Peirce's triad are often presented as 'the semiotic triangle' (as if there were only one version). Here is a version which is quite often encountered and which changes only the unfamiliar Peircean terms (Nöth 1990, 89):

Sign vehicle: the form of the sign;
Sense: the sense made of the sign;
Referent: what the sign 'stands for'.

One fairly well-known semiotic triangle is that of Ogden and Richards, in which the terms used are (a) 'symbol', (b) 'thought or reference' and (c) 'referent' (Ogden & Richards 1923, 14). The broken line at the base of the triangle is intended to indicate that there is not necessarily any observable or direct relationship between the sign vehicle and the referent. Unlike Saussure's abstract signified (which is analogous to term B rather than to C) the referent is an 'object'. This need not exclude the reference of signs to abstract concepts and fictional entities as well as to physical things, but Peirce's model allocates a place for an objective reality which Saussure's model did not directly feature (though Peirce was not a naive realist, and argued that all experience is mediated by signs). Note, however, that Peirce emphasized that 'the dependence of the mode of existence of the thing represented upon the mode of this or that representation of it... is contrary to the nature of reality' (Peirce 1931-58, 5.323). The inclusion of a referent in Peirce's model does not automatically make it a better model of the sign than that of Saussure. Indeed, as John Lyons notes:

There is considerable disagreement about the details of the triadic analysis even among those who accept that all three components, A, B and C, must be taken into account. Should A be defined as a physical or a mental entity? What is the psychological or ontological status of B? Is C something that is referred to on a particular occasion? Or is it the totality of things that might be referred to by uttering the sign...? Or, yet a third possibility, is it some typical or ideal representative of this class? (Lyons 1977, 99)
The notion of the importance of sense-making (which requires an interpreter - though Peirce doesn't feature that term in his triad) has had a particular appeal for communication and media theorists who stress the importance of the active process of interpretation, and thus reject the equation of 'content' and meaning. Many of these theorists allude to semiotic triangles in which the interpreter (or 'user') of the sign features explicitly (in place of 'sense' or 'interpretant'). This highlights the process of semiosis (which is very much a Peircean concept). The meaning of a sign is not contained within it, but arises in its interpretation. Whether a dyadic or triadic model is adopted, the role of the interpreter must be accounted for - either within the formal model of the sign, or as an essential part of the process of semiosis. David Sless declares that 'statements about users, signs or referents can never be made in isolation from each other. A statement about one always contains implications about the other two' (Sless 1986, 6). Paul Thibault argues that the interpreter features implicitly even within Saussure's apparently dyadic model (Thibault 1997, 184).

Note that semioticians make a distinction between a sign and a 'sign vehicle' (the latter being a 'signifier' to Saussureans and a 'representamen' to Peirceans). The sign is more than just a sign vehicle. The term 'sign' is often used loosely, so that this distinction is not always preserved. In the Saussurean framework, some references to 'the sign' should be to the signifier, and similarly, Peirce himself frequently mentions 'the sign' when, strictly speaking, he is referring to the representamen. It is easy to be found guilty of such a slippage, perhaps because we are so used to 'looking beyond' the form which the sign happens to take. However, to reiterate: the signifier or representamen is the form in which the sign appears (such as the spoken or written form of a word) whereas the sign is the whole meaningful ensemble.

Whereas Saussure emphasized the arbitrary nature of the (linguistic) sign, most semioticians stress that signs differ in how arbitrary/conventional (or by contrast 'transparent') they are. Symbolism reflects only one form of relationship between signifiers and their signifieds. Whilst Saussure did not offer a typology of signs, Charles Peirce was a compulsive taxonomist and he offered several logical typologies (Peirce 1931-58, 1.291, 2.243). However, his divisions and subdivisions of signs are extraordinarily elaborate: indeed, he offered the theoretical projection that there could be 59,049 types of signs! Peirce himself noted wryly that this calculation 'threatens a multitude of classes too great to be conveniently carried in one's head', adding that 'we shall, I think, do well to postpone preparation for further divisions until there be a prospect of such a thing being wanted' (Peirce 1931-58, 1.291). However, even his more modest proposals are daunting: Susanne Langer commented that 'there is but cold comfort in his assurance that his original 59,049 types can really be boiled down to a mere sixty-six' (Langer 1951, 56). Unfortunately, the complexity of such typologies rendered them 'nearly useless' as working models for others in the field (Sturrock 1986, 17). However, one of Peirce's basic classifications (first outlined in 1867) has been very widely referred to in subsequent semiotic studies (Peirce 1931-58, 1.564). He regarded it as 'the most fundamental' division of signs (ibid., 2.275). It is less useful as a classification of distinct 'types of signs' than of differing 'modes of relationship' between sign vehicles and their referents (Hawkes 1977, 129). Note that in the subsequent account, I have continued to employ the Saussurean terms signifier and signified, even though Peirce referred to the relation between the 'sign' (sic) and the object, since the Peircean distinctions are most commonly employed within a broadly Saussurean framework. Such incorporation tends to emphasize (albeit indirectly) the referential potential of the signified within the Saussurean model. Here then are the three modes together with some brief definitions of my own and some illustrative examples:

Symbol/symbolic: a mode in which the signifier does not resemble the signified but which is fundamentally arbitrary or purely conventional - so that the relationship must be learnt: e.g. language in general (plus specific languages, alphabetical letters, punctuation marks, words, phrases and sentences), numbers, morse code, traffic lights, national flags;
Icon/iconic: a mode in which the signifier is perceived as resembling or imitating the signified (recognizably looking, sounding, feeling, tasting or smelling like it) - being similar in possessing some of its qualities: e.g. a portrait, a cartoon, a scale-model, onomatopoeia, metaphors, 'realistic' sounds in 'programme music', sound effects in radio drama, a dubbed film soundtrack, imitative gestures;
Index/indexical: a mode in which the signifier is not arbitrary but is directly connected in some way (physically or causally) to the signified - this link can be observed or inferred: e.g. 'natural signs' (smoke, thunder, footprints, echoes, non-synthetic odours and flavours), medical symptoms (pain, a rash, pulse-rate), measuring instruments (weathercock, thermometer, clock, spirit-level), 'signals' (a knock on a door, a phone ringing), pointers (a pointing 'index' finger, a directional signpost), recordings (a photograph, a film, video or television shot, an audio-recorded voice), personal 'trademarks' (handwriting, catchphrase) and indexical words ('that', 'this', 'here', 'there').

The three forms are listed here in decreasing order of conventionality. Symbolic signs such as language are (at least) highly conventional; iconic signs always involve some degree of conventionality; indexical signs 'direct the attention to their objects by blind compulsion' (Peirce 1931-58, 2.306). Indexical and iconic signifiers can be seen as more constrained by referential signifieds whereas in the more conventional symbolic signs the signified can be seen as being defined to a greater extent by the signifier. Within each form signs also vary in their degree of conventionality. Other criteria might be applied to rank the three forms differently. For instance, Hodge and Kress suggest that indexicality is based on an act of judgement or inference whereas iconicity is closer to 'direct perception' making the highest 'modality' that of iconic signs. Note that the terms 'motivation' (from Saussure) and 'constraint' are sometimes used to describe the extent to which the signified determines the signifier. The more a signifier is constrained by the signified, the more 'motivated' the sign is: iconic signs are highly motivated; symbolic signs are unmotivated. The less motivated the sign, the more learning of an agreed convention is required. Nevertheless, most semioticians emphasize the role of convention in relation to signs. As we shall see, even photographs and films are built on conventions which we must learn to 'read'. Such conventions are an important social dimension of semiotics.

Peirce and Saussure used the term 'symbol' differently from each other. Whilst nowadays most theorists would refer to language as a symbolic sign system, Saussure avoided referring to linguistic signs as 'symbols', since the ordinary everyday use of this term refers to examples such as a pair of scales (signifying justice), and he insisted that such signs are 'never wholly arbitrary. They are not empty configurations'. They 'show at least a vestige of natural connection' between the signifier and the signified - a link which he later refers to as 'rational' (Saussure 1983, 68, 73; Saussure 1974, 68, 73). Whilst Saussure focused on the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign, a more obvious example of arbitrary symbolism is mathematics. Mathematics does not need to refer to an external world at all: its signifieds are indisputably concepts and mathematics is a system of relations (Langer 1951, 28).

For Peirce, a symbol is 'a sign which refers to the object that it denotes by virtue of a law, usually an association of general ideas, which operates to cause the symbol to be interpreted as referring to that object' (Peirce 1931-58, 2.249). We interpret symbols according to 'a rule' or 'a habitual connection' (ibid., 2.292, 2.297, 1.369). 'The symbol is connected with its object by virtue of the idea of the symbol-using animal, without which no such connection would exist' (ibid., 2.299). It 'is constituted a sign merely or mainly by the fact that it is used and understood as such' (ibid., 2.307). It 'would lose the character which renders it a sign if there were no interpretant' (ibid., 2.304). A symbol is 'a conventional sign, or one depending upon habit (acquired or inborn)' (ibid., 2.297). 'All words, sentences, books and other conventional signs are symbols' (ibid., 2.292). Peirce thus characterizes linguistic signs in terms of their conventionality in a similar way to Saussure. In a rare direct reference to the arbitrariness of symbols (which he then called 'tokens'), he noted that they 'are, for the most part, conventional or arbitrary' (ibid., 3.360). A symbol is a sign 'whose special significance or fitness to represent just what it does represent lies in nothing but the very fact of there being a habit, disposition, or other effective general rule that it will be so interpreted. Take, for example, the word "man". These three letters are not in the least like a man; nor is the sound with which they are associated' (ibid., 4.447). He adds elsewhere that 'a symbol... fulfills its function regardless of any similarity or analogy with its object and equally regardless of any factual connection therewith' but solely because it will be interpreted as a sign (ibid., 5.73; original emphasis).

Turning to icons, Peirce declared that an iconic sign represents its object 'mainly by its similarity' (Peirce 1931-58, 2.276). A sign is an icon 'insofar as it is like that thing and used as a sign of it' (ibid., 2.247). Indeed, he originally termed such modes, 'likenesses' (e.g. ibid., 1.558). He added that 'every picture (however conventional its method)' is an icon (ibid., 2.279). Icons have qualities which 'resemble' those of the objects they represent, and they 'excite analogous sensations in the mind' (ibid., 2.299; see also 3.362). Unlike the index, 'the icon has no dynamical connection with the object it represents' (ibid.). Just because a signifier resembles that which it depicts does not necessarily make it purely iconic. The philosopher Susanne Langer argues that 'the picture is essentially a symbol, not a duplicate, of what it represents' (Langer 1951, 67). Pictures resemble what they represent only in some respects. What we tend to recognize in an image are analogous relations of parts to a whole (ibid., 67-70). For Peirce, icons included 'every diagram, even although there be no sensuous resemblance between it and its object, but only an analogy between the relations of the parts of each' (Peirce 1931-58, 2.279). 'Many diagrams resemble their objects not at all in looks; it is only in respect to the relations of their parts that their likeness consists' (ibid., 2.282). Even the most 'realistic' image is not a replica or even a copy of what is depicted. We rarely mistake a representation for what it represents.

Semioticians generally maintain that there are no 'pure' icons - there is always an element of cultural convention involved. Peirce stated that although 'any material image' (such as a painting) may be perceived as looking like what it represents, it is 'largely conventional in its mode of representation' (Peirce 1931-58, 2.276). 'We say that the portrait of a person we have not seen is convincing. So far as, on the ground merely of what I see in it, I am led to form an idea of the person it represents, it is an icon. But, in fact, it is not a pure icon, because I am greatly influenced by knowing that it is an effect, through the artist, caused by the original's appearance... Besides, I know that portraits have but the slightest resemblance to their originals, except in certain conventional respects, and after a conventional scale of values, etc.' (ibid., 2.92).

Guy Cook asks whether the iconic sign on the door of a public lavatory for men actually looks more like a man than like a woman. 'For a sign to be truly iconic, it would have to be transparent to someone who had never seen it before - and it seems unlikely that this is as much the case as is sometimes supposed. We see the resemblance when we already know the meaning' (Cook 1992, 70). Thus, even a 'realistic' picture is symbolic as well as iconic.

Iconic and indexical signs are more likely to be read as 'natural' than symbolic signs when making the connection between signifier and signified has become habitual. Iconic signifiers can be highly evocative. Kent Grayson observes: 'Because we can see the object in the sign, we are often left with a sense that the icon has brought us closer to the truth than if we had instead seen an index or a symbol' (Grayson 1998, 36). He adds that 'instead of drawing our attention to the gaps that always exist in representation, iconic experiences encourage us subconsciously to fill in these gaps and then to believe that there were no gaps in the first place... This is the paradox of representation: it may deceive most when we think it works best' (ibid., 41).

The linguist John Lyons notes that iconicity is 'always dependent upon properties of the medium in which the form is manifest' (Lyons 1977, 105). He offers the example of the onomatopoeic English word cuckoo, noting that it is only iconic in the phonic medium (speech) and not in the graphic medium (writing). Whilst the phonic medium can represent characteristic sounds (albeit in a relatively conventionalized way), the graphic medium can represent characteristic shapes (as in the case of Egyptian hieroglyphs) (Lyons 1977, 103). We will return shortly to the importance of the materiality of the sign.

Indexicality is perhaps the most unfamiliar concept. Peirce offers various criteria for what constitutes an index. An index 'indicates' something: for example, 'a sundial or clock indicates the time of day' (Peirce 1931-58, 2.285). He refers to a 'genuine relation' between the 'sign' and the object which does not depend purely on 'the interpreting mind' (ibid., 2.92, 298). The object is 'necessarily existent' (ibid., 2.310). The index is connected to its object 'as a matter of fact' (ibid., 4.447). There is 'a real connection' (ibid., 5.75). There may be a 'direct physical connection' (ibid., 1.372, 2.281, 2.299). An indexical sign is like 'a fragment torn away from the object' (ibid., 2.231). Unlike an icon (the object of which may be fictional) an index stands 'unequivocally for this or that existing thing' (ibid., 4.531). Whilst 'it necessarily has some quality in common' with it, the signifier is 'really affected' by the signified; there is an 'actual modification' involved (ibid., 2.248). The relationship is not based on 'mere resemblance' (ibid.): 'indices... have no significant resemblance to their objects' (ibid., 2.306). 'Similarity or analogy' are not what define the index (ibid., 2.305). 'Anything which focusses the attention is an index. Anything which startles us is an index' (ibid., 2.285; see also 3.434). Indexical signs 'direct the attention to their objects by blind compulsion' (ibid., 2.306; see also 2.191, 2.428). 'Psychologically, the action of indices depends upon association by contiguity, and not upon association by resemblance or upon intellectual operations' (ibid.)

Whilst a photograph is also perceived as resembling that which it depicts, Peirce noted that a photograph is not only iconic but also indexical: 'photographs, especially instantaneous photographs, are very instructive, because we know that in certain respects they are exactly like the objects they represent. But this resemblance is due to the photographs having been produced under such circumstances that they were physically forced to correspond point by point to nature. In that aspect, then, they belong to the... class of signs... by physical connection [the indexical class]' (Peirce 1931-58, 2.281; see also 5.554). So in this sense, since the photographic image is an index of the effect of light on photographic emulsion, all unedited photographic and filmic images are indexical (although we should remember that conventional practices are always involved in composition, focusing, developing and so on). Such images do of course 'resemble' what they depict, and it has been suggested the 'real force' of the photographic and filmic image 'lies in its iconic signification' (Deacon et al. 1999, 188). However, whilst digital imaging techniques are increasingly eroding the indexicality of photographic images, it is arguable that it is the indexicality still routinely attributed to the medium which is primarily responsible for interpreters treating them as 'objective' records of 'reality'. Peirce observed that 'a photograph... owing to its optical connection with its object, is evidence that that appearance corresponds to a reality' (Peirce 1931-58, 4.447). In many contexts photographs are indeed regarded as 'evidence', not least in legal contexts. As for the moving image, video-cameras are of course widely used 'in evidence'. Documentary film and location footage in television news programmes depend upon the indexical nature of the sign. In such genres indexicality seems to warrant the status of the material as evidence. Photographic and filmic images may also be symbolic: in an empirical study of television news, Davis and Walton found that A relatively small proportion of the total number of shots is iconic or directly representative of the people, places and events which are subjects of the news text. A far greater proportion of shots has an oblique relationship to the text; they 'stand for' the subject matter indexically or symbolically (Davis & Walton 1983b, 45).

It is easy to slip into referring to Peirce's three forms as 'types of signs', but they are not necessarily mutually exclusive: a sign can be an icon, a symbol and an index, or any combination. Peirce was fully aware of this: for instance, he insisted that 'it would be difficult if not impossible to instance an absolutely pure index, or to find any sign absolutely devoid of the indexical quality' (Peirce 1931-58, 2.306). A map is indexical in pointing to the locations of things, iconic in its representation of the directional relations and distances between landmarks and symbolic in using conventional symbols the significance of which must be learnt. The film theorist Peter Wollen argues that 'the great merit of Peirce's analysis of signs is that he did not see the different aspects as mutually exclusive. Unlike Saussure he did not show any particular prejudice in favour of one or the other. Indeed, he wanted a logic and a rhetoric which would be based on all three aspects' (Wollen 1969, 141). Film and television use all three forms: icon (sound and image), symbol (speech and writing), and index (as the effect of what is filmed); at first sight iconic signs seem the dominant form, but some filmic signs are fairly arbitrary, such as 'dissolves' which signify that a scene from someone's memory is to follow.

Hawkes notes, following Jakobson, that the three modes 'co-exist in the form of a hierarchy in which one of them will inevitably have dominance over the other two', with dominance determined by context (Hawkes 1977, 129). Whether a sign is symbolic, iconic or indexical depends primarily on the way in which the sign is used, so textbook examples chosen to illustrate the various modes can be misleading. The same signifier may be used iconically in one context and symbolically in another: a photograph of a woman may stand for some broad category such as 'women' or may more specifically represent only the particular woman who is depicted. Signs cannot be classified in terms of the three modes without reference to the purposes of their users within particular contexts. A sign may consequently be treated as symbolic by one person, as iconic by another and as indexical by a third. As Kent Grayson puts it, 'When we speak of an icon, an index or a symbol, we are not referring to objective qualities of the sign itself, but to a viewer's experience of the sign' (Grayson 1998, 35). Signs may also shift in mode over time. As Jonathan Culler notes, 'In one sense a Rolls-Royce is an index of wealth in that one must be wealthy in order to purchase one, but it has been made a conventional sign of wealth by social usage' (Culler 1975, 17).

Despite his emphasis on studying 'the language-state' 'synchronically' (as if it were frozen at one moment in time) rather than 'diachronically' (studying its evolution), Saussure was well aware that the relationship between the signified and the signifier in language was subject to change over time (Saussure 1983, 74ff; Saussure 1974, 74ff). However, this was not the focus of his concern. Critics of structuralist approaches emphasize that the relation between signifier and signified is subject to dynamic change: Rosalind Coward and John Ellis argue that any 'fixing' of 'the chain of signifiers' - is both temporary and socially determined (Coward & Ellis 1977, 6, 8, 13).

In terms of Peirce's three modes, a historical shift from one mode to another tends to occur. Although Peirce made far more allowance for non-linguistic signs than did Saussure, like Saussure, he too granted greater status to symbolic signs: 'they are the only general signs; and generality is essential to reasoning' (Peirce 1931-58, 3.363; see also 4.448 & 4.531). Saussure's emphasis on the importance of the principle of arbitrariness reflects his prioritizing of symbolic signs whilst Peirce referred to Homo sapiens as 'the symbol-using animal' (Peirce 1931-58, 2.299). The idea of the evolution of sign-systems towards the symbolic mode is consistent with such a perspective. Peirce speculates 'whether there be a life in signs, so that - the requisite vehicle being present - they will go through a certain order of development'. Interestingly, he does not present this as necessarily a matter of progress towards the 'ideal' of symbolic form since he allows for the theoretical possibility that 'the same round of changes of form is described over and over again' (ibid., 2.111). Whilst granting such a possibility, he nevertheless notes that 'a regular progression... may be remarked in the three orders of signs, Icon, Index, Symbol' (ibid., 2.299). Peirce posits iconicity as the original default mode of signification, declaring the icon to be 'an originalian sign' (ibid., 2.92), defining this as 'the most primitive, simple and original of the categories' (ibid., 2.90). Compared to the 'genuine sign... or symbol', an index is 'degenerate in the lesser degree' whilst an icon is 'degenerate in the greater degree'. Peirce noted that signs were 'originally in part iconic, in part indexical' (ibid., 2.92). He adds that 'in all primitive writing, such as the Egyptian hieroglyphics, there are icons of a non-logical kind, the ideographs' and he speculates that 'in the earliest form of speech there probably was a large element of mimicry' (ibid., 2.280). However, over time, linguistic signs developed a more symbolic and conventional character (ibid., 2.92, 2.280). 'Symbols come into being by development out of other signs, particularly from icons' (ibid., 2.302).

The historical evidence does indicate a tendency of linguistic signs to evolve from indexical and iconic forms towards symbolic forms. Alphabets were not initially based on the substitution of conventional symbols for sounds. Marcel Danesi notes that 'archaeological research suggests... that the origins of alphabetical writing lie in symbols previously made out of elemental shapes that were used as image-making objects - much like the moulds that figurine and coin-makers use today. Only later did they take on more abstract qualities' (Danesi 1999, 35; see Schmandt-Besserat 1978). Some of the letters in the Greek and Latin alphabets, of course, derive from iconic signs in Egyptian hieroglyphs. The early scripts of the Mediterranean civilizations used pictographs, ideographs and hieroglyphs. Many of these were iconic signs resembling the objects and actions to which they referred either directly or metaphorically. Over time, picture writing became more symbolic and less iconic (Gelb 1963). This shift from the iconic to the symbolic may have been 'dictated by the economy of using a chisel or a reed brush' (Cherry 1966, 33); in general, symbols are semiotically more flexible and efficient (Lyons 1977, 103). The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss identified a similar general movement from motivation to arbitrariness within the conceptual schemes employed by particular cultures (Lévi-Strauss 1974, 156).

Taking a historical perspective is one reason for the insistence of some theorists that 'signs are never arbitrary' (Kress & van Leeuwen 1996, 7). Gunther Kress, for instance, emphasizes the motivation of the sign users rather than of the sign (see also Hodge & Kress 1988, 21-2). Rosalind Coward and John Ellis insist that 'every identity between signifier and signified is the result of productivity and a work of limiting that productivity' (Coward & Ellis 1977, 7).

A distinction is sometimes made between digital and analogical signs. Indeed, Anthony Wilden declares that 'no two categories, and no two kinds of experience are more fundamental in human life and thought than continuity and discontinuity' (Wilden 1987, 222). Whilst we experience time as a continuum, we may represent it in either analogue or digital form. A watch with an analogue display (with hour, minute and second hands) has the advantage of dividing an hour up like a cake (so that, in a lecture, for instance, we can 'see' how much time is left). A watch with a digital display (displaying the current time as a changing number) has the advantage of precision, so that we can easily see exactly what time it is 'now'. Even an analogue display is now simulated on some digital watches.

We have a deep attachment to analogical modes and we tend to regard digital representations as 'less real' or 'less authentic' - at least initially (as in the case of the audio CD compared to the vinyl LP). The analogue/digital distinction is frequently represented as 'natural' versus 'artificial'. Perhaps this is connected in part with the notion that the unconscious - that which we regard as 'deepest' within us - appears to operate analogically (Wilden 1987, 224). The privileging of the analogical may be linked with the status of the unconscious and the defiance of rationality in romantic ideology (which still dominates our conception of ourselves as 'individuals'). The deliberate intention to communicate tends to be dominant in digital codes, whilst in analogue codes 'it is almost impossible... not to communicate' (ibid., 225). Beyond any conscious intention, we communicate through gesture, posture, facial expression, intonation and so on. Analogical codes unavoidably 'give us away', revealing such things as our moods, attitudes, intentions and truthfulness (or otherwise). However, although the appearance of the 'digital watch' in 1971 and the subsequent 'digital revolution' in audio- and video-recording have led us to associate the digital mode with electronic technologies, digital codes have existed since the earliest forms of language - and writing is a 'digital technology'. Signifying systems impose digital order on what we often experience as a dynamic and seamless flux. The very definition of something as a sign involves reducing the continuous to the discrete. As we shall see later, binary (either/or) distinctions are a fundamental process in the creation of signifying structures. Digital signs involve discrete units such as words and 'whole numbers' and depend on the categorization of what is signified.

Analogical signs (such as visual images, gestures, textures, tastes and smells) involve graded relationships on a continuum. They can signify infinite subtleties which seem 'beyond words'. Emotions and feelings are analogical signifieds. Unlike symbolic signifiers, motivated signifiers (and their signifieds) blend into one another. There can be no comprehensive catalogue of such dynamic analogue signs as smiles or laughs. Analogue signs can of course be digitally reproduced (as is demonstrated by the digital recording of sounds and of both still and moving images) but they cannot be directly related to a standard 'dictionary' and syntax in the way that linguistic signs can. Bill Nichols notes that 'the graded quality of analogue codes may make them rich in meaning but it also renders them somewhat impoverished in syntactical complexity or semantic precision. By contrast the discrete units of digital codes may be somewhat impoverished in meaning but capable of much greater complexity or semantic signification' (Nichols 1981, 47; see also Wilden 1987, 138, 224). The art historian Ernst Gombrich insists that 'statements cannot be translated into images' and that 'pictures cannot assert' - a contention also found in Peirce (Gombrich 1982, 138, 175; Peirce 1931-58, 2.291). Nevertheless, whilst images serving such communicative purposes may be more 'open to interpretation', contemporary visual advertisements are a powerful example of how images may be used to make implicit claims which advertisers often prefer not to make more openly in words.

The Italian semiotician Umberto Eco has criticized the apparent equation of the terms 'arbitrary', 'conventional' and 'digital' by some commentators. He notes the way in which the following widespread pairings misleadingly suggest that the terms vertically aligned here are synonymous (Eco 1976, 190). He observes, for instance, that a photograph may be both 'motivated' and 'digital'. Nor is 'conventionality' (dependence on social and cultural conventions) equivalent to 'arbitrariness' (the lack of any intrinsic connection between the signifier and the signified). Yet it is easy to slip into treating such terms as equivalent - the current text far from immune to this. We may, as we shall see later, be so fond of analogy that we are often (perhaps unavoidably) its unwitting victims.

digital vs. analogical
arbitary vs. motivated
conventional vs. natural

Another distinction between sign vehicles relates to the linguistic concept of tokens and types which derives from Peirce (Peirce 1931-58, 4.537). In relation to words in a spoken utterance or written text, a count of the tokens would be a count of the total number of words used (regardless of type), whilst a count of the types would be a count of the different words used, ignoring repetitions. In the language of semantics, tokens instantiate (are instances of) their type. 'Word' and 'word' are instances of the same type. Language depends on the distinction between tokens and types, between the particular instance and the general category. This is the basis of categorization. John Lyons notes that whether something is counted as a token of a type is relative to one's purposes - for instance:

Are tokens to include words with different meanings which happen to be spelt or pronounced in the same way?
Does a capital letter instantiate the same type as the corresponding lower-case letter?
Does a word printed in italics instantiate the same type as a word printed in Roman?
Is a word handwritten by X ever the same as a word handwritten by Y?
(Lyons 1977, 13-15)
From a semiotic point-of-view, such questions could only be answered by considering in each case whether the different forms signified something of any consequence to the relevant sign-users in the context of the specific signifying practice being studied.

Eco lists three kinds of sign vehicles, and it is notable that the distinction relates in part at least to material form: signs in which there may be any number of tokens (replicas) of the same type (e.g. a printed word, or exactly the same model of car in the same colour);
'signs whose tokens, even though produced according to a type, possess a certain quality of material uniqueness' (e.g. a word which someone speaks or which is handwritten);
'signs whose token is their type, or signs in which type and token are identical' (e.g. a unique original oil-painting or Princess Diana's wedding dress).
(Eco 1976, 178ff)
The type-token distinction may influence the way in which a text is interpreted. In his influential essay on 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', the literary-philosophical theorist Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) noted that technological society is dominated by reproductions of original works - tokens of the original type (Benjamin 1992, 211-244). Indeed, even if we do see, for instance, 'the original' of a famous oil-painting, we are highly likely to have seen it first in the form of innumerable reproductions (books, postcards, posters - sometimes even in the form of pastiches or variations on the theme) and we may only be able to 'see' the original in the light of the judgements shaped by the copies or versions which we have encountered (see Intertextuality). In the postmodern era, the bulk of our texts are indeed 'copies without originals'.

The type-token distinction in relation to signs is important in social semiotic terms not as an absolute property of the sign vehicle but only insofar as it matters on any given occasion (for particular purposes) to those involved in using the sign. Minute differences in a pattern could be a matter of life and death for gamblers in relation to variations in the pattern on the backs of playing-cards within the same pack, but stylistic differences in the design of each type of card (such as the Ace of Spades), are much appreciated by collectors as a distinctive feature of different packs of playing-cards.

As already indicated, Saussure saw both the signifier and the signified as non-material 'psychological' forms; the language itself is 'a form, not a substance' (Saussure 1983, 111, 120; Saussure 1974, 113, 122). He uses several examples to reinforce his point. For instance, in one of several chess analogies, he notes that 'if pieces made of ivory are substituted for pieces made of wood, the change makes no difference to the system' (Saussure 1983, 23; Saussure 1974, 22). Pursuing this functional approach, he notes elsewhere that the 8.25pm Geneva-to-Paris train is referred to as 'the same train' even though the combinations of locomotive, carriages and personnel may change. Similarly, he asks why a street which is completely rebuilt can still be 'the same street'. He suggests that this is 'because it is not a purely material structure' (Saussure 1983, 107; Saussure 1974, 108). Saussure insists that this is not to say that such entities are 'abstract' since we cannot conceive of a street or train outside of its material realization - 'their physical existence is essential to our understanding of what they are' (Saussure 1983, 107; Saussure 1974, 109; see also ibid, 15). This can be related to the type-token distinction. Since Saussure sees language in terms of formal function rather than material substance, then whatever performs the same function within the system can be regarded as just another token of the same type. With regard to language, Saussure observes that 'sound, as a material element... is merely ancillary, a material the language uses' (Saussure 1983, 116; Saussure 1974, 118). Linguistic signifiers are 'not physical in any way. They are constituted solely by differences which distinguish one such sound pattern from another' (Saussure 1983, 117; Saussure 1974, 118-119). He admits at one point, with some apparent reluctance, that 'linguistic signs are, so to speak, tangible: writing can fix them in conventional images' (Saussure 1983, 15; Saussure 1974, 15). However, referring to written signs, he comments that 'the actual mode of inscription is irrelevant, because it does not affect the system... Whether I write in black or white, in incised characters or in relief, with a pen or a chisel - none of that is of any importance for the meaning' (Saussure 1983, 118; Saussure 1974, 120). One can understand how a linguist would tend to focus on form and function within language and to regard the material manifestations of language as of peripheral interest. 'The linguist... is interested in types, not tokens' (Lyons 1977, 28).

This was not only the attitude of the linguist Saussure, but also of the philosopher Peirce: 'The word "man"... does not consist of three films of ink. If the word "man" occurs hundreds of times in a book of which myriads of copies are printed, all those millions of triplets of patches of ink are embodiments of one and the same word... each of those embodiments a replica of the symbol. This shows that the word is not a thing' (Peirce 1931-58, 4.447). Peirce did refer to the materiality of the sign: 'since a sign is not identical with the thing signified, but differs from the latter in some respects, it must plainly have some characters which belong to it in itself... These I call the material qualities of the sign'. He granted that materiality is a property of the sign which is 'of great importance in the theory of cognition'. Materiality had 'nothing to do with its representative function' and it did not feature in his classificatory schemes. However, he alludes briefly to the signifying potential of materiality: 'if I take all the things which have certain qualities and physically connect them with another series of things, each to each, they become fit to be signs'. For instance, if the colour of a red flower matters to someone then redness is a sign (ibid., 5.287).

Whilst Saussure chose to ignore the materiality of the linguistic sign, most subsequent theorists who have adopted his model have chosen to reclaim the materiality of the sign (or more strictly of the signifier). Semioticians must take seriously any factors to which sign-users ascribe significance, and the material form of a sign does sometimes make a difference. Contemporary theorists tend to acknowledge that the material form of the sign may generate connotations of its own. As early as 1929 Valentin Voloshinov published Marxism and the Philosophy of Language which included a materialist critique of Saussure's psychological and implicitly idealist model of the sign. Voloshinov described Saussure's ideas as 'the most striking expression' of 'abstract objectivism' (Voloshinov 1973, 58). He insisted that 'a sign is a phenomenon of the external world' and that 'signs... are particular, material things'. Every sign 'has some kind of material embodiment, whether in sound, physical mass, colour, movements of the body, or the like' (ibid., 10-11; cf. 28). For Voloshinov, all signs, including language, have 'concrete material reality' (ibid., 65) and the physical properties of the sign matter.

Psychoanalytic theory also contributed to the revaluation of the signifier - in Freudian dream theory the sound of the signifier could be regarded as a better guide to its possible signified than any conventional 'decoding' might have suggested (Freud 1938, 319). For instance, Freud reported that the dream of a young woman engaged to be married featured flowers - including lilies-of-the-valley and violets. Popular symbolism suggested that the lilies were a symbol of chastity and the woman agreed that she associated them with purity. However, Freud was surprised to discover that she associated the word 'violet' phonetically with the English word 'violate', suggesting her fear of the violence of 'defloration' (another word alluding to flowers) (Freud 1938, 382-3). If this sounds familiar, this particular dream motif featured in the film Final Analysis (1992). As the psychoanalytical theorist Jacques Lacan emphasized (originally in 1957), the Freudian concepts of condensation and displacement illustrate the determination of the signified by the signifier in dreams (Lacan 1977, 159ff). In condensation, several thoughts are condensed into one symbol, whilst in displacement unconscious desire is displaced into an apparently trivial symbol (to avoid dream censorship).

Poststructuralist theorists have sought to revalorize the signifier. The phonocentrism which was allied with Saussure's suppression of the materiality of the linguistic sign was challenged in 1967, when the French poststructuralist Jacques Derrida, in his book Of Grammatology, attacked the privileging of speech over writing which is found in Saussure (as well as in the work of many other previous and subsequent linguists) (Derrida 1976). From Plato to Lévi-Strauss, the spoken word had held a privileged position in the Western worldview, being regarded as intimately involved in our sense of self and constituting a sign of truth and authenticity. Speech had become so thoroughly naturalized that 'not only do the signifier and the signified seem to unite, but also, in this confusion, the signifier seems to erase itself or to become transparent' (Derrida 1981, 22). Writing had traditionally been relegated to a secondary position. The deconstructive enterprise marked 'the return of the repressed' (Derrida 1978, 197). In seeking to establish 'Grammatology' or the study of textuality, Derrida championed the primacy of the material word. He noted that the specificity of words is itself a material dimension. 'The materiality of a word cannot be translated or carried over into another language. Materiality is precisely that which translation relinquishes' - this English translation presumably illustrating some such loss (ibid., 210). Roland Barthes also sought to revalorize the role of the signifier in the act of writing. He argued that in 'classic' literary writing, the writer 'is always supposed to go from signified to signifier, from content to form, from idea to text, from passion to expression' (Barthes 1974, 174). However, this was directly opposite to the way in which Barthes characterized the act of writing. For him, writing was a matter of working with the signifiers and letting the signifieds take care of themselves - a paradoxical phenomenon which other writers have often reported (Chandler 1995, 60ff). Subsequent theorists have also sought to 'rematerialize' the linguistic sign, stressing that words are things and that texts are part of the material world (e.g. Coward & Ellis 1977; Silverman & Torode 1980).

Jay David Bolter argues that 'signs are always anchored in a medium. Signs may be more or less dependent upon the characteristics of one medium - they may transfer more or less well to other media - but there is no such thing as a sign without a medium' (Bolter 1991, 195-6). This is a little misleading, because, as Justin Lewis notes, 'the sign has no material existence, since meaning is brought to words or objects, not inscribed within them. Only the signifier - the unit prior to meaning - exists as a material entity' (Wren-Lewis 1983, 181). Nevertheless, Bolter's point does apply to the sign vehicle, and as Hodge and Tripp note, 'fundamental to all semiotic analysis is the fact that any system of signs (semiotic code) is carried by a material medium which has its own principles of structure' (Hodge & Tripp 1986, 17). Furthermore, some media draw on several interacting sign systems: television and film, for example, utilize verbal, visual, auditory and locomotive signs. The medium is not 'neutral'; each medium has its own constraints and, as Umberto Eco notes, each is already 'charged with cultural signification' (Eco 1976, 267). For instance, photographic and audio-visual media are almost invariably regarded as more 'real' than other forms of representation. Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen argue that 'the material expression of the text is always significant; it is a separately variable semiotic feature' (Kress & van Leeuwen 1996, 231). Changing the signifier at the level of the form or medium may thus influence the signified - the sense which readers make of what is ostensibly the same 'content'. Breaking up a relationship by fax is likely to be regarded in a different light from breaking up in a face-to-face situation.

I have alluded to the problematic distinction between form and content. The linguist Louis Hjelmslev acknowledged that 'there can be no content without an expression, or expressionless content; neither can there be an expression without a content, or content-less expression' (Hjelmslev 1961, 49). However, he offered a framework which facilitated analytical distinctions (ibid., 47ff). Whilst he referred to 'planes' of expression and content (Saussure's signifier and signified), he enriched this model (ibid., 60). His contribution was to suggest that both expression and content have substance and form. Thus there are four categories: substance of expression, form of expression, substance of content, form of content. Various theorists such as Christian Metz have built upon this theoretical distinction and they differ somewhat in what they assign to the four categories (see Tudor 1974, 110; Baggaley & Duck 1976, 149; Metz 1981).

Substance Form
Signifiers:
plane of expression Substance of expression:
physical materials of the medium (e.g. photographs, recorded voices, printed words on paper) Form of expression:
language, formal syntactic structure, technique and style
Signifieds:
plane of content Substance of content:
'human content' (Metz), textual world, subject matter, genre Form of content:
'semantic structure' (Baggaley & Duck), 'thematic structure' (including narrative) (Metz)

Whereas Saussure had insisted that language is 'a form, not a substance', Hjelmslev's framework allows us to analyse texts according to their various dimensions and to grant to each of these the potential for signification. Such a matrix provides a useful framework for the systematic analysis of texts, broadens the notion of what constitutes a sign, and reminds us that the materiality of the sign may in itself signify.

From an explicitly social semiotic perspective, Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen adapt a linguistic model from Michael Halliday and insist that any semiotic system has three essential metafunctions:

the ideational metafunction - 'to represent, in a referential or pseudo-referential sense, aspects of the experiential world outside its particular system of signs';
the interpersonal metafunction - 'to project the relations between the producer of a sign... and the receiver/reproducer of that sign'; and
the textual metafunction - 'to form texts, complexes of signs which cohere both internally and within the context in and for which they were produced'. (Kress & van Leeuwen 1996, 40-41)