The premise of this book is that we begin learning a language because it is a matter of success or failure in life. Indeed, it is a matter of life or death.

·       From the moment your wet, squirmy little body is dragged into the world; from the moment you are dried off, receive the first welcoming spank on your bottom and are cut away from your mother’s body, you become a part of the air-breathing world.

•        Simultaneously your primal scream announces that you are here, that you need help, and human contact, you need to be dried off, you need food, you need shelter, you need the care and attention that includes love and caring.

·       From this moment forward, your voice becomes your first communicative tool though, by no means your only one and through these you can express your needs, wants and fears. Through your ability to communicate you can find whatever is necessary to win acceptance into human society.

·       How you gain this is through language which though primitive at the beginning, it will become more sophisticated and more intellectual each year you live. If you learn well, you will achieve your goals and find your dream.

·       This process is compelling and urgent from that first moment. The difference between a ditch digger and an astronaut is a difference of knowledge gained and used in their lives as well as their opportunity and birth location. But obstacles can be overcome as you become more educated. You have a mandate to communicate which exceeds all others. Whatever you want and need, your ability to express your ideas to others and understand their responses is the measure of how successful you will be in the adventure that we call life. If there is a purpose to life it is not focused on hopes and dreams; it is fulfilling the need that lays within us all to communicate and that will fulfill our hopes and dreams. This book is about finding your way and achieving your dreams. It is about the process itself of learning to communicate in English. It is about YOUR success in the future.

Don Liston

1.              The first foundation idea is expressed in the introduction: We are born with a mandate or command to learn language as a matter of survival. Language is critical to all human beings and a condition of our existence. The need to have a language is the most compelling command that all humans obey. Your ability to use language for communication with others determines much of your success or failure in life. Our advantage as humans is based on our intellect and almost nothing else. Language is the physical expression of our intellect.

Therefore: Language is Logical.

Language, in and of itself is logical and cannot be otherwise. The same rules that govern sciences and the pursuit of knowledge and understanding in any field are based on one of our concepts of logic. The changes brought forth in the twentieth century were not a refinement of the study of grammar. English grammar we crafted out of the Latin grammar which was the lingua franca of intellectual thought for many centuries. The respect for the intelligence and foresight of our Roman ancestors also foretold a pattern that would guide our thinking about grammar for centuries.

Languages are learnable by most people. We have the ability to learn our own mother tongue very well. More than that, we can become competent in other languages.  That is a goal within our reach if we understand the task.

2.              Grammar is a description of a language. It discovers and provides the rules that govern how we speak, read and write. The purpose of studying and learning grammar is to give the learner the ability to create sentences that can be understood by another speaker of the language when they hear them or read them. Knowing the grammar and understanding its rules make a language teachable to others.  Language is the vehicle through which we send all of the thoughts and learning of one generation on to the progeny of that generation.

3.              In the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, on page four, states:

A grammar itself is divisible into two components, syntax and morphology. Syntax is concerned with the way words combine to form phrases, clauses, and sentences, while morphology deals with the formation of words. (P.4)

Morphology [D4]   is the study of morphemes. A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning in a language which is a definition created by linguists to broaden understanding o f words. In fact, a morpheme is a word, but the term also includes all combinations of letters that have meaning. We have many letter combinations that, in and of themselves are not words. As a part of another word they have significant meaning. These include the prefixes, suffixes and affixes that inflect words from an original source. These words are morphemes and their inflective elements are also morphemes. To account for this in morphology, some letter combinations are called free morphemes and some are called bound morphemes.  We will discuss this aspect of morphology later as we look at how words are changed in meaning and function as they work inside of sentences. Some letter combinations called “syllables” which are elements of words may also be words on their own and some single letters have word functions such as the letter “a” as it becomes the indefinite article  for words beginning with a consonant. (a job, a cabin, a car, etc). Similarly, the letter combination “an” which is also a definite article if the next word starts with a vowel such as “an alphabet, an element, an item or an optical illusion.  The letter “I” which becomes a personal pronoun in first person, present tense verbs, “I came, I saw, I conquered.” The inflected form, “morphology” is made up of the root word, “morph” and the root form from Latin, “ology,” which means the study of. In this case it is the study of words. That is a foundation idea in grammar.  

4.              Syntax is a logical or grammatical arrangement of words in a sentence. This rule of language is not created by linguists, grammarians or even cognitive scientists. Today when we look at the way our minds process information, we see a kind of binary logic that has been our way of understanding information for as long as we have existed. We think with logic, putting our input information into the brain in a form not unlike the way binary coded programs everything we perceive into our mind.  Roger Penrose describes this process in “The Emperor’s New Mind,” chapter nine, “Real Brains and Model Brains [D5]  .”

The rules that are accepted by linguists and others that are derived from the Chomskian formula: NP > VP > NP in which NP is an article and a noun or pronoun, a VP is a Verb Phrase including all auxiliary verbs, both regular and modal that form the sentence predicate, and the object Noun Phrase which may or may not occur depending on whether or not the verb is transitive.

This formula is embedded in our brains as the “deep structure” envisioned by Noam Chomsky and used as the basis for the theories of Generative Grammar and Transformational Grammar [D6]  . All of this is very interesting and enlightening for the scholars and grammarians but outside of the scope of this work except in an instructional view to tie deep structure to how we form sentences.

          As an example, the reason that a verb in the form of a participial noun such as the gerund or infinitive can become the subject of a sentence lies in the fact that the NP position MUST be a noun or pronoun. More will be discussed as we look at sentence analysis.

5.              Language is time sensitive. What we learn about the evolution of language pertains to how we have evolved as a society. History of our language evolution is relevant in that it gives us intellectual markers that define what we have learned so far.

6.              Language evolves and changes but the patterns that identify sentence formation and our psychological learning process remains stable because of the order of DNA [D7]  . This relationship and the results of the relationship are discussed in detail by Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn.

7.              In writing about grammar, one of the things we notice most is the number of people who write books and instructional texts designed to help the new learners to understand how the language works. To do this, they must write a mountain of description about English and English grammar, so much so that most text books soon become lost in details of verb tenses, capitalization, punctuation and spelling. For second language learners, much time is often devoted to phrasal verbs and idioms which are specialized uses of words and phrases that are not defined or described in standard reference works like dictionaries. While understanding phrasal verbs, idioms and grammatical anomalies is very important for new learners from another language, it cannot take over the main ideas of how sentences are formed and how the morphology allows us to form sentences.

Which English shall we learn? For many people, the idea that there are several different languages with the title of English is their first test of personal resolve. Do the British own the English language and simple rent or lease it out to the rest of us? They certainly contribute huge amounts of knowledge and treasure to making the language as standard as possible with the Oxford English Dictionary, the greatest dictionary developed so far,. They have, over many centuries defined and refined the grammar of English with recent huge contributions of comprehensive grammars of the language. Today the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language takes on the task of examining grammar from a descriptive, rather and prescriptive viewpoint. As English spreads around the world as our international language of business and commerce, any dictionary, any grammar tutorial, any English teaching plan is certain to grow and become profitable.

The bulk of writing in English, however belongs to the Americans. Just the volume of writing on the Internet that comes out of the United States tends to flood out the amounts contributed by others. The American market for literature, business correspondence, scientific publications, fiction and other printed matter is dominated by the three hundred million plus population in the country that has become the center of the political, business and scientific world. If you look closely you see that Americans are not dedicated to English as their “official language,” and the United States has had large communities around the country in which foreign languages are spoken by the local population. Americans tend to see English as their communicative device and have less interest in the ideological approaches that tend to freeze the language into fixed patterns.

If you look closely at English as it is used throughout the world, you see that there is either NO nationality to the language or there are hundreds of nationalities to be found there. The famous lines from My Fair Lady [D10]  , the Broadway play written by Alan J. Lerner and Frederick Loewe, “Why Can’t the English Teach Their Children How to Speak” was a comment on the many regional dialects that are used throughout the British Isles . The Americans are no better with huge variations in English between different regions. The important point to remember as a second language speaker is that it is easier to learn one language than two, three or four. The other point is that both the vocabulary and the grammar are standard throughout the world as English comes to be the universal language often dreamed of before World War II.

          These issues are relevant to how we learn a second language. English, however is not an ordinary “second language.” It is the language needed to travel and conduct business. It is the language needed to identify many advanced terms and concepts in scientific efforts related to space technology, medicine, computers and the intellectual property of the global society.

The process of learning a language that is different from your native language will be challenging as you start out. You already have everything you need to communicate with the world around you. You have plenty of words for whatever you need to say. You also have the ability to make sentences and, although you may have never given it much thought, the forming of sentences in any language is the key to being understood. Now you are asked to learn new words for everything and some of them are difficult to say. Some sounds of words are not made in your native language. Some words seem to be the same but turn out to be very different from your native language. Some words used in other languages for grammatical usage have no equivalent in your native language. The sentences are often so different that you cannot understand them when you read or hear them even after you have learned the words used in them. You need some motivation such as wanting to get a better job, wanting to travel or wanting to read things that were not available in your own native language.

As a child you learned your own language very well. You may not remember precisely how well or how fast but for most people, by age six you are competent in your native language and can begin formal education. The process was not so easy and was not as comfortable as you might think. Keep in mind that you did not have the keen memory that would come with a few years of intellectual development.

This is the first text in “,” my book on learning English. This book is about language and linguistics for people who are learning English. You may be a second language speaker or a native speaker, it doesn’t matter. The core knowledge needed to understand language learning determines how well you form sentences and make yourself understood.

More than that, your language identifies you in many ways. In most modern societies there are only two classes, those who have wealth and those who have education. No matter how well educated you may be, if you cannot pass your knowledge to others through speaking or writing you are at least somewhat ineffective and constrained by your own weak language skills.

What is the language mandate? It is that compelling need within all humans to get what they want and need through communication. It starts early, very early.

Language is absolutely critical to humans. We have plenty of anecdotal evidence that shows that people who fail to learn a language never really overcome that failure. In Before the Dawn [D11]  , a book that discusses our anthropological and linguistic history by Nicholas Wade, he discusses a “feral child” who was kept in a room until she was thirteen years old. She was not allowed to speak to anyone and was found, in 1970 with her mother, wandering the streets of a California town. (p.41)

The two had escaped from a house where Genie had been penned in a bedroom from the age of 18 months and denied conversation. After her rescue, intense efforts were made to teach her to talk, but she never acquired fully grammatical language. Her utterances were stuck at the level of sentences like “Want milk,” or “Applesauce buy store.”

This is a single anecdotal instance but consistent with current linguistic theory that posits the idea that we cannot think without a language.

Fortunately for us, our evolvement to what has become the highest primate has lead to the introduction of a “grammar  gene” that allows us to build a language in the Broca’s and Wernicke’s area of our brain. The intricate patterns of our DNA has shown that our evolution includes many things and they show that our evolutionary progress is governed by a grammar built on logic that matches the ability we have to think and communicate. Each of us carries around our DNA in every cell in our body. The information in that DNA package has given us more knowledge in the last century than all other records, literature, history or other resources combined. 

Nicholas Wade identifies the fact that we began to use language somewhere around 50,000 years ago. We know this because of recent studies and discoveries in the study of DNA and more specifically the genome [D12]  . At a certain point in our evolution, we developed a gene called the fork head box P2 or FOXP2. This gene appears in ape and human DNA about 50,000 years ago and has a variation that sets it apart from the chimpanzees and other high primates. This gene swept through the homo sapiens population of the period and the single variation is still found in humans but not in other high primates.

Linguists, anthropologists and scientists in several fields have identified a number of links that show the evolutionary pattern of language development in humans. Families and individuals such as the feral child, Genie and other cases presented in Before the Dawn bear out the idea that we gained language and that the language has a universal quality that lasts until the present time. Throughout our evolutionary history of the last fifty millennia, we see the marked change and gain of survival advantage that accompanies acquiring a language. (p. 49 -50)

Logic and Language.

As we look at languages we see that there is a logic that applies to how language is formed. The ancient scholars at Bibliotheca Alexandria in the centuries around the time of the advent of Christ describe the grammar of Greek and other languages spoken at that time. Greek was the language of scholars and the teaching and understanding of Greek helped identify how grammar works for all languages.

Dionysius Thrax [D13]  , who lived somewhere between 190 B.C. and 80 B.C., gave us the first functional uses of words as they are used in a sentence. He also gave us the declaration that “a sentence is an expression of a complete thought.” This identification states that, in any language there is a grammatical unit called the sentence which carries the information that the speaker wishes to impart to his listener and reader. This idea is important to new learners of any language because it underlies the observation of linguists and scholars that fluent speakers of a language understand what they hear or read in full sentences, not by individual and discrete words. (p. 30)

Linguists look at language as a series of logical statements with syllogistic [D14]   characteristics. We see that linguistics express semantic relationships in sentences as logical formulas and computer programmers learn that the algorithms [D15]   that are used to program computers must have complete and total logical relationships or the programmer will get the cryptic error message: syntax error. Indeed, the elements that are used to create a sentence are related in the same way that logician and scholar Gottlöb Frege expresses logic in his predicative calculus: A = B, B = C therefore A = C. This deductive expression of logic governs the formation of sentences and gives the new learner a way to use and understand a language.

Where do we start to learn a new language?

When we were infants and needing to tell whoever is around us what we want, we begin with simple things. We have not learned to form words yet and our communicative skills are at ground zero. We don’t have a word for “hungry” yet, but we know what it is like to be hungry. We tell our mother or others of this need and hope that it will be fulfilled quickly. In the first year of our life, we learn to recognize some basic words. We can’t form words but we try within our own limited vocabulary to tell those who are around us what we need.

If we had a word for food or milk, we would certainly use it, but our mothers and others know what babies want and need and they soon make the connection that will help them understand that when we cry in a certain way, it means that we are hungry. Our first word may be unintelligible, but it is understood. More than that, the first words are not words in any formal sense but they do the job of words and allow us to survive and prosper. We have started to build our vocabulary.

Steven Pinker describes all of this in Words and Rules, his first book on grammar itself.

The theory that words work by conventional pairing of sound and meaning is not banal or uncontroversial. In the earliest surviving  debate on linguistics, Plato has Hermogenes say, “Nothing has its name by nature, but only by usage and custom.” Cratylus disagrees: “There is correctness of name existing by nature for everything: a name is not simply that which a number of people jointly agree to call a thing.” Cratylus is a creationist, and suggests that “a power greater than man assigned the first names to things.” (p. 2)

Pinker then explains the   as given to us by Ferdinand Saussure, one of the first modern linguists. Like most scholars and teachers, he explains linguistics in terms of words or morphology [D16]  . Babies learn words first and then move on to full sentences which are the effective use of words to convey our ideas. New speakers of any language begin with words and go on to learn the grammar of the language.

There is an approach to learning words that works better than simply figuring out the meaning of words as they are used in sentences which is called contextual learning. For native speakers this is a very high percentage of their vocabulary. In contextual learning, we hear a word used in a sentence and, because we understand the sentence itself, we can figure out the meaning of the word. This is cursory and incomplete for a word that is needed in our personal inner lexicon or active vocabulary, but it brings the word to our attention and, if we encounter the word again in another sentence that will reinforce our understanding of its meaning.

An example of contextual meaning can be found in sentences like these:

Our oldest son has decided to specialize in logistics in the Army because it will open job possibilities for him in the civilian world.

What is the meaning of logistics? We know that it is a part of the Army’s disciplines that help them do their job of defending the country. If we looked it up in the dictionary we would know immediately that logistics is:

“Main Entry: logistics

Function: noun plural but singular or plural in construction

Etymology: French logistique art of calculating, logistics, from Greek logistik* art of calculating, from feminine of logistikos of calculation, from logizein to calculate, from logos reason

Date: circa 1861

1 : the aspect of military science dealing with the procurement, maintenance, and transportation of military mat*riel, facilities, and personnel

2 : the handling of the details of an operation

In simpler terms, “logistics” is another term for “supply.”

Can you build an adequate vocabulary on contextual understanding alone? You can if you are a native speaker living in an English speaking country. Most of your newly acquired words will come from newspapers, the Internet, the television and other sources. You may hear a new word fifteen or twenty times.

In the recent political campaign that saw candidates selecting their running mates and staff for their planned personnel, you heard the word, “vetting” used to describe the examination process that showed that a person had the proper qualifications and education or training for the job that they were under consideration for. Vetting is not self-explanatory and we heard it several times each day regarding potential running mates, staff members, etc. So what does it mean?

“Vetting” comes from the word, “veterinarian” or a doctor for animals. In horse racing (and probably other kinds of animal racing) the morning that a horse was entered to race on a given day, a veterinarian went to the paddock to check the horse’s fitness to race. That literal meaning was easy to change to a figurative and metaphorical term that would describe examination of candidates for political jobs.

Several things emerge when we look at contextual understanding as a way of acquiring words. First, it does not provide a complete understanding of a word nor does it give other usages. For some words that you almost never use, this works fine. Second, it depends on the understanding of the sentence itself well enough to deduct the meaning of a new word. Native speakers will often know every word in a sentence but one and that is a huge advantage. Third, and perhaps the most important idea for second language learners is the fact that contextual learning does not supply a functional definition of the word. We cannot tell, by how a word is used, whether or not it is a noun, verb, adjective, adverb or more than one functional use.

This leaves the new learner coming from another language a difficult process. They must learn the words as they go. Until their vocabulary and other grammar knowledge reaches a certain point, they must literally look every word up in a dictionary before they can add it to their own inner lexicon. To make this process effective, you need to look at all new words from the dictionary for several things.

First you want to know the grammatical use or function of a word. What part of speech is it? A noun? A verb? An adjective? An adverb? Why do you need to know this about the word? Each word you learn must be used in a sentence and the logical or grammatical governing of syntax requires that the word must perform a task in a sentence. It is not just happenstance; it is an orderly, predetermined process. As I discuss the grammatical processes of forming sentences, I will explain why the function of a word is the most important idea associated with the word.

The etymology of a word is important to understanding how it came to mean what it does today. Etymology is the history of the use of the word and offers us insights into what it meant in the past, what shared roots it may have in other languages and historical usages of the word.

The most critical idea in learning a word for most people is; what does the word mean? In the word’s definitions we often discover other usages that we didn’t know. Most words have several meanings. They may be split between the literal meaning of the word and the figurative meaning or meanings. We need to know all of these.

The last test to see if we understand the word well enough to use it is the proof that comes with using the word in a sentence. If we can use a word in a sentence that we compose ourselves, we own the word forever.

So we enter the language first with a few words, hopefully words that are used by most speakers and used often. We gain vocabulary and fluency by learning the word as well as possible and using it in sentences as often as possible. As we build our vocabulary we should become aware of what teachers and scholars of second language call, the core vocabulary. The core vocabulary is a collection of words that form the most used words in a language. If we know these, some teachers claim, we can speak to anyone, anytime in that language.

I will explain how to find these words and how to learn them in this series of lectures. I will teach you how to look at new languages in a way that will help you make that language a part of your basic knowledge. That is the first goal of learning new languages.

To review and discuss if necessary:

1.    There are two ways to gain command of a language: acquisition and learning.

2.    We acquire our native language and learn all other languages after that initial step.

3.    Acquired languages are gained from everyone around as when we are infants and in early childhood.

4.    Grammar is the description of a language and the establishment of rules of the language. It is what makes a language teachable to others and it is the vehicle we use to pass our knowledge, through written and spoken words on the future generations.

5.    We divide grammar into two parts: syntax and morphology [D17]  .