Week 1

Linguists are constantly asked the question “How many languages do you speak?” This question is a little irritating, because it is largely irrelevant to what linguists are trying to do. The goals of linguistics are to describe and understand the structure of human languages; to discover the ways in which all languages are alike and the ways in which they may differ. The point is that even if one could speak all 8000 or so of the world’s languages, one would not have solved all the problems of linguistics. The reason is this: speaking a language and knowing its structure are two very different things. In speaking a language, one uses thousands of grammatical rules without being aware of them; they are “unconscious knowledge.” Linguists attempt to make explicit this unconscious knowledge by looking closely at the data of language. That is, they attempt to make the “implicit knowledge” of native speakers into explicit knowledge. This goal implies one of the central methods of doing linguistic research, the consultant session. Quite often, a linguist will study the structure of language she does not speak; this is done by finding a native-speaker consultant to provide the data. The linguist normally asks the.