Today was a much more eventful day for me! This morning, I met Erin Chesson, a linguistics graduate student at UNC, at Starbucks in North Hills to chat about her work. She worked for Americore in Durham assisting Eritrean refugees in adapting to American life. In that line of work, she found herself doing the work of a linguist, so she decided to go back to school to learn the technicalities of the field that she did not get in her undergraduate degree of Global Development Studies from UVA. For her graduate thesis, she is planning to study the development of Tigrinya (the primary Eritrean language) in Heritage speakers (children of local refugees learning and increasingly speaking English).
This summer, Erin is teaching a section of Linguistics 101 online. For our meeting today, she printed out the first lesson from her class to give me a crash course in basic linguistic terms, including Prescriptive and Descriptive Grammar and Language Competence and Performance. Prescriptive Grammar is a set of statements for a given language that assert what a speaker should or should not do (i.e. Don’t use the passive voice, Don’t use double negatives, Don’t split infinitives). Grammar has a different meaning for linguists, referring to rules a speaker uses on all levels: word-level, sound-level, sentence-level. While these rules are obeyed in part by speakers, they are almost never a complete reflection of how language is used. A linguist’s goal is to describe actual language use, which is where Descriptive Grammar comes into play. Linguistic competence is a speaker’s ability to identify whether or not a word or sentence is plausible within their language’s grammar. For example, some clusters of letters look like they could be an invented word, while others look like jumbles of nothing, and how some sentences identifiably make sense, while others are completely unclear. (I’ve included some English examples at the bottom of this post– see if you can test your competence!) While competence refers to a speaker’s knowledge of their language, performance refers to their ability to use it– both in typical and atypical settings, such as stutters or swearing or mid-sentence abandonment.
While I could go on and on about the new things I learned today, I think the aforementioned aspects are the most important to understand for the casual linguistics enthusiast. Next week, I will be getting Ethiopian food with Erin to further discuss her research!
Here are some excerpts from a Linguistics 101 textbook– test your competency in English!
