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Linguistics week 2

What do linguists do? What is language?

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In your free time

Look at the diagram again, and try to understand it.

Phonetics Phonology

Sounds of language

Linguistics

Grammar

Morphology Syntax

Meaning

Semantics Pragmatics

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And take a look at 分支學科 On this website

– http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:%E8%AF%AD%E8%A8%80%E5%AD%A6%E9%A6%96%E9%A1%B5

And read about Animal “Languages” in Chapter 1 of your book.

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What do linguists do? They don’t necessarily “learn languages”

– Linguist and 語言學 are confusing terms They are often interested in the structure of langua

ges. They might– specialize in one language, or a group of languages– compare different languages– study features shared by all languages

Many linguists study speech sounds, and grammar– What fields, please?

A brief outline of some semester 2 topics:

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Historical linguistics How languages are related

– Language families» Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan…

– Areal linguistics» Greek, Bulgarian

– Mostly borrowed words; also shared grammatical features (any examples?)

» Chinese, Korean, Japanese How language changes over time

– sounds: poor vs paw, suit. – vocab: 咖啡 , 颱風 . Calque: 摩天大樓 , skyscraper, gratte-ciel– grammar: Did you eat yet? Adversative passive 被

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Sociolinguistics Diglossia: “high” and “lo

w” prestige languages– The role of Mandarin and T

aiwanese in a bilingual society

– The changing role of English in Taiwan society: borrowing, or showing off?

– case and size: code-switching, or lexicalized Chinese words?

Ta-hsüeh-shih-ching Ta-hsüeh-shih-ching Ta-hsüeh-shih-ching

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Linguistics in the real world Speech disorders (problems) Forensic (legal) linguistics

– Accent detection– Style verification (eg police style)

Language teaching Computational applications

– Machine translation– Speech recognition and synthesis– Language identification

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Defining characteristics of:

Bananas Dogs Elephants Garbage Language

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Do these count as language? Rank 0 to 10, in your opinion

A person talking (rank 10) A dead fish with its mouth open (rank 0) Now rank these

– A person talking on the radio– A parrot talking– A dog wagging its tail– Bees dancing– A computer voice on the telephone– Sign language used by deaf people– Sign language used by hearing people– Body language (for example, folding your arms)– Sneezing– Wearing odd socks (for example: one black, one green)

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A selection of Hockett’s design features for language 1966), "The Problem of Universals in Language" (write them)

1. Rapid Fading– message does not linger in time or space after production

2. Interchangeability– individuals who use a language can both send and receive any

permissible message within that communication system

3. Feedback – users of a language can perceive what they are transmitting and

can make corrections if they make errors

4. Arbitrariness – there is no logical connection between the form of the signal and

its meaning

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More design features (he actually described 15 altogether)

5. Displacement – linguistic messages may refer to things remote in time and space,

or both, from the site of the communication

6. Productivity– users can create and understand completely novel messages

7. Duality (of Patterning) – a large number of meaningful elements are made up of a

conveniently small number of meaningless but message-differentiating elements.

8. Prevarication – linguistic messages can be false, deceptive, or meaningless

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Duality of patterning A small number of phones can be

concatenated to form a very large number of words (the lexicon)

AND, although the lexicon is finite, they can be combined to form an infinite number of possible utterances– The creative aspect of language (Chomsky)– Also known as the infinity of expressions

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Bee dancing http://

www.skylon.co.uk/hba/beekeeping.html#dance Honey bees perform a sort of dance when they ret

urn to the hive, after finding food, which shows– the direction relative to the sun– the distance– perhaps, the quality of the food source

Is it a kind of language?– Does it satisfy any of Hockett’s design features?

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My family and other animals Talking to horses and dogs (anyone?) Training chimpanzees

– Gua: “understood 100 words”– Viki: could say mama, papa, etc– Washoe: used sign language, made sentences

Are these chimps really using language? Maybe they are just like trained rats, or Pav

lov’s dogs language game if time

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Homework

p17 Study questions 1-6– Read the questions– Read the answers (p228)– Explain the answers to a classmate in Chinese

Read Chapter 6 (Morphology)

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Duality of patterning A small number of phones can be

concatenated to form a very large number of words (the lexicon)

AND, although the lexicon is finite, they can be combined to form an infinite number of possible utterances– The creative aspect of language (Chomsky)– Also known as the infinity of expressions

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The infinity of expressions There is no upper limit on sentence length

– Some interesting examples on page 10– “One is a number…”

We can be almost as creative as we wish in forming new sentences

Probably, no-one has ever said before:– “Ming Chuan linguistics students usually ride

motorbikes through Manchester, wearing moccasins and carrying a mop-bucket”

– The utterance is “pragmatically odd”: it makes sense, but…

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So, is anything possible? Can we create any utterance we want?

Maybe, a good utterance must “make sense”?– WRONG!: Chomsky gave the famous example “Colorl

ess green ideas sleep furiously”– This is syntactically well-formed (although semanticall

y it is ill-formed) But some utterances are impossible

– “Sleep ideas colorless green furiously” is syntactically ill-formed

page 11 here, practise prag, sem, synt i/f utts in chin

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So, what utterances are OK?

We have– a finite lexicon– an infinite number of possible utterances– no room in our brains to store all those

utterances– no requirement to make sense…

So how is it decided?

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Our linguistic knowledge (=our knowledge of our own language) This consists of

– A lexicon (a finite number of words)– A grammar (count noun!): that is, a finite set of rules

stating what is possible» Note that we are not consciously aware of what these

rules are; like the rules for muscle control!» Now, we have 3 meanings of the word grammar!

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Back to what linguists do!

Finite lexicon+ finite set of rules (grammar)

infinity of expressions Lexicon: easy.

- Buy a dictionary. Grammar: difficult.

- This is what linguists do