linguistics fact sheets

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(Source: An Introduction to Language by Victoria Fromkin and Robert Rodman, 6th Ed.) PART ONE: INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS Every human knows at least one language, spoken or signed. Linguistics is the science of language, including the sounds, words, and grammar rules. Words in languages are finite, but sentences are not. It is this creative aspect of human language that sets it apart from animal languages, which are essentially responses to stimuli. The rules of a language, also called grammar, are learned as one acquires a language. These rules include phonology, the sound system, morphology, the structure of words, syntax, the combination of words into sentences, semantics, the ways in which sounds and meanings are related, and the lexicon, or mental dictionary of words. When you know a language, you know words in that language, i.e. sound units that are related to specific meanings. However, the sounds and meanings of words are arbitrary. Knowing a language encompasses this entire system, but this knowledge (called competence) is different from behavior (called performance.) You may know a language, but you may also choose to not speak it. Although you are not speaking the language, you still have the knowledge of it. However, if you don't know a language, you cannot speak it at all. There are two types of grammars: descriptive and prescriptive. Descriptive grammars represent the unconscious knowledge of a language. English speakers, for example, know that "me likes apples" is incorrect and "I like apples" is correct, although the speaker may not be able to explain why. Descriptive grammars do not teach the rules of a 1

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Page 1: Linguistics fact sheets

(Source:  An Introduction to Language by Victoria Fromkin and Robert Rodman, 6th Ed.)

PART ONE: INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS

Every human knows at least one language, spoken or signed. Linguistics is the science of language, including the sounds, words, and grammar rules. Words in languages are finite, but sentences are not. It is this creative aspect of human language that sets it apart from animal languages, which are essentially responses to stimuli.

The rules of a language, also called grammar, are learned as one acquires a language. These rules include phonology, the sound system, morphology, the structure of words, syntax, the combination of words into sentences, semantics, the ways in which sounds and meanings are related, and the lexicon, or mental dictionary of words. When you know a language, you know words in that language, i.e. sound units that are related to specific meanings. However, the sounds and meanings of words are arbitrary.

Knowing a language encompasses this entire system, but this knowledge (called competence) is different from behavior (called performance.) You may know a language, but you may also choose to not speak it. Although you are not speaking the language, you still have the knowledge of it. However, if you don't know a language, you cannot speak it at all.

There are two types of grammars: descriptive and prescriptive. Descriptive grammars represent the unconscious knowledge of a language. English speakers, for example, know that "me likes apples" is incorrect and "I like apples" is correct, although the speaker may not be able to explain why. Descriptive grammars do not teach the rules of a language, but rather describe rules that are already known. In contrast, prescriptive grammars dictate what a speaker's grammar should be and they include teaching grammars, which are written to help teach a foreign language.

There are about 5,000 languages in the world right now (give or take a few thousand), and linguists have discovered that these languages are more alike than different from each other. There are universal concepts and properties that are shared by all languages,

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(Source:  An Introduction to Language by Victoria Fromkin and Robert Rodman, 6th Ed.)

and these principles are contained in the Universal Grammar, which forms the basis of all possible human languages.

PART TWO: MORPHOLOGY AND SYNTAX

Morphemes are the minimal units of words that have a meaning and cannot be subdivided further. There are two main types: free and bound. Free morphemes can occur alone and bound morphemes must occur with another morpheme. An example of a free morpheme is "bad", and an example of a bound morpheme is "ly." It is bound because although it has meaning, it cannot stand alone. It must be attached to another morpheme to produce a word.

Free morpheme: badBound morpheme: lyWord: badly

When we talk about words, there are two groups: lexical (or content) and function (or grammatical) words. Lexical words are called open class words and include nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. New words can regularly be added to this group. Function words, or closed class words, are conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns; and new words cannot be (or are very rarely) added to this class.

Affixes are often the bound morpheme. This group includes prefixes, suffixes, infixes, and circumfixes. Prefixes are added to the beginning of another morpheme, suffixes are added to the end, infixes are inserted into other morphemes, and circumfixes are attached to another morpheme at the beginning and end. Following are examples of each of these:

Prefix: re- added to do produces redoSuffix: -or added to edit produces editorInfix: -um- added to fikas (strong) produces

fumikas (to be strong) in Bontoc

Circumfix: ge- and -t to lieb (love) produces geliebt

(loved) in German

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(Source:  An Introduction to Language by Victoria Fromkin and Robert Rodman, 6th Ed.)

There are two categories of affixes: derivational and inflectional. The main difference between the two is that derivational affixes are added to morphemes to form new words that may or may not be the same part of speech and inflectional affixes are added to the end of an existing word for purely grammatical reasons. In English there are only eight total inflectional affixes:

-s 3rd person singular present she waits-ed past tense she waited-ing progressive she's eating-en past participle she has eaten-s plural three apples-'s possessive Lori's son-er comparative you are taller-est superlative you are the shortest

The other type of bound morphemes are called bound roots. These are morphemes (and not affixes) that must be attached to another morpheme and do not have a meaning of their own. Some examples are -ceive in perceive and mit in submit.

English MorphemesA. Free

1. Open Class 2. Closed Class

B. Bound 1. Affix

a. Derivational b. Inflectional

2. Root 3.

There are six ways to form new words. Compounds are a combination of words, acronyms are derived from the initials of words, back-formations are created from removing what is mistakenly considered to be an affix, abbreviations or clippings are shortening longer words, eponyms are created from proper nouns (names), and blending is combining parts of words into one.

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(Source:  An Introduction to Language by Victoria Fromkin and Robert Rodman, 6th Ed.)

Compound: doghouseAcronym: NBA (National Basketball Association) or

scuba (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus)

Back-formation: edit from editorAbbreviation: phone from telephoneEponym: sandwich from Earl of SandwichBlending: smog from smoke and fog

Grammar is learned unconsciously at a young age. Ask any five year old, and he will tell you that "I eat" and "you eat," but his "dog eats." But a human's syntactical knowledge goes farther than what is grammatical and what is not. It also accounts for ambiguity, in which a sentence could have two meanings, and enables us to determine grammatical relationships such as subject and direct object. Although we may not consciously be able to define the terms, we unconsciously know how to use them in sentences.

Syntax, of course, depends on lexical categories (parts of speech.) You probably learned that there are 8 main parts of speech in grammar school. Linguistics takes a different approach to these categories and separates words into morphological and syntactic groups. Linguistics analyzes words according to their affixes and the words that follow or precede them. Hopefully, the following definitions of the parts of speech will make more sense and be of more use than the old definitions of grammar school books.

Open Class Words

Nouns_____ + plural endings"dogs"

Det. Adj. _____ (this is called a Noun Phrase)"the big dog"

Verbs_______ + tense endings"speaks"

Aux. ____ (this is called a Verb Phrase)"have spoken"

Adjective ______ + er / est Det. ____ Noun

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(Source:  An Introduction to Language by Victoria Fromkin and Robert Rodman, 6th Ed.)

s "small" "the smaller child"

AdverbsAdj. + ly"quickly"

____ Adj. or Verb or Adv."quickly ran"

Closed Class Words

Determiners

a, an, the, this, that, these, those, pronouns, quantities

_____________ Adj. Noun"this blue book"

Auxiliary Verbs

forms of be, have, may, can, shall

NP __________________ VP "the girl is swimming"

Prepositions

at, in, on, under, over, of_____ NP (this is called a Prep. Phase)"in the room"

Conjunctions

and, but, orN or V or Adj. ____________ N or V or Adj. "apples and oranges"

Sub categorization defines the restrictions on which syntactic categories (parts of speech) can or cannot occur within a lexical item. These additional specifications of words are included in our mental lexicon. Verbs are the most common categories that are subcategorized. Verbs can either be transitive or intransitive. Transitive verbs take a direct object, while intransitive verbs take an indirect object (usually they need a preposition before the noun).

Transitive verb: to eat

I ate an apple. (direct object)

Intransitive: to sleep

I was sleeping in the bed. (indirect object)

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(Source:  An Introduction to Language by Victoria Fromkin and Robert Rodman, 6th Ed.)

Individual nouns can also be subcategorized. For example, the noun idea can be followed by a Prepositional Phrase or that and a sentence. But the noun compassion can only be followed by a Prepositional Phrase and not a sentence.  (Ungrammatical sentences are marked with asterisks.)

the idea of stricter laws his compassion for the animals

the idea that stricter lawsare necessary

*his compassion that the animals are hurt

Phrase structure rules describe how phrases are formed and in what order. These rules define the following:

Noun Phrase (NP) (Det.) (Adj.) Noun (PP)

Verb Phrase (VP) Verb (NP) (PP)

Prepositional Phrase (PP) Prep. NP

Sentence (S) NP VP

The parentheses indicate the categories are optional. Verbs don't always have to be followed by prepositional phrases and nouns don't always have to be preceded by adjectives.

Passive SentencesThe difference between the two sentences "Mary hired Bill" and "Bill was hired by Mary" is that the first is active and the second is passive. In order to change an active sentence into a passive one, the object of the active must become the subject of the passive. The verb in the passive sentence becomes a form of "be" plus the participle form of the main verb. And the subject of the active becomes the object of the passive preceded by the word "by."

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(Source:  An Introduction to Language by Victoria Fromkin and Robert Rodman, 6th Ed.)

Active Passive

Mary hired Bill. Bill was hired by Mary.

Subject + Verb + Object

Object + "be" + Verb + by + Subject

PART THREE: PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY

There are three types of the study of the sounds of language. Acoustic Phonetics is the study of the physical properties of sounds. Auditory Phonetics is the study of the way listeners perceive sounds. Articulatory Phonetics (the type this lesson is concerned with) is the study of how the vocal tracts produce the sounds.

The orthography (spelling) of words in misleading, especially in English. One sound can be represented by several different combinations of letters. For example, all of the following words contain the same vowel sound: he, believe, Lee, Caesar, key, amoeba, loudly, machine, people, and sea. The following poem illustrates this fact of English humorously (note the pronunciation of the bold words):

I take it you already know of tough and bough and cough and dough?Some may stumble, but not you, on hiccough, thorough, slough, and through?So now you are ready, perhaps, to learn of less familiar traps?Beware of heard, a dreadful word, that looks like beard, but sounds

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like bird.And dead, it's said like bed, not bead; for goodness' sake, don't call it deed!Watch out for meat and great and threat. (They rhyme with suite and straight and debt.)A moth is not a moth in mother, nor both in bother, broth in brother. And here is not a match for there, nor dear and fear, for bear and pear. And then there's dose and rose and lose - just look them up - and goose and chooseAnd cork and work and card and ward and font and front and word and sword And do and go, then thwart and cart, come, come! I've hardly made a start. A dreadful language? Why man alive! I've learned to talk it when I was five. And yet to write it, the more I tried, I hadn't learned it at fifty-five. - Author Unknown

The discrepancy between spelling and sounds led to the formation of the International Phonetics Alphabet (IPA.) The symbols used in this alphabet can be used to represent all sounds of all human languages. The following is the

English Phonetic alphabet. You might want to memorize all of these symbols, as most foreign language dictionaries use the IPA.

Phonetic Alphabet for English Pronunciation

p pill d dill h heal ʌ but

b bill n neal l leaf aj light

m mill s seal r reef ɔj boy

f feel z zeal j you ɪ bit

v veal č chill wwitch

ɛ bet

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θ thigh ǰ Jill i beet ʊ foot

ð thy ʍwhich

e bait ɔ awe

š shill k kill u boot a bar

žazure

g gill o boat ə sofa

t till ŋ ring æ bat aw cow

Some speakers of English pronounce the words which and witch differently, but if you pronounce both words identically, just use w for both words. And the sounds /ʌ/ and /ə/ are pronounced the same, but the former is used in stressed syllables, while the latter is used in unstressed syllables. This list does not even begin to include all of the phonetic symbols though. One other symbol is the glottal stop, ʔ which is somewhat rare in English. Some linguists in the United States traditionally use different symbols than the IPA symbols. These are listed below.

U.S.

IPA

š ʃ

ž ʒ

č tʃ

ǰ dʒ

U ʊ

The production of any speech sound involves the movement of air. Air is pushed through the lungs, larynx (vocal folds) and vocal tract (the oral and nasal cavities.) Sounds produced by using air from the lungs are called pulmonic sounds. If the air is pushed out, it is called egressive. If the air is sucked in, it is called ingressive. Sounds produced by ingressive airstreams are ejectives, implosives, and clicks. These sounds are common among African and American Indian languages. The majority of languages in the world use pulmonic egressive airstream mechanisms, and I will present only these types of sounds in this lesson.

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(Source:  An Introduction to Language by Victoria Fromkin and Robert Rodman, 6th Ed.)

ConsonantsConsonants are produced as air from the lungs is pushed through the glottis (the opening between the vocal cords) and out the mouth. They are classified according to voicing, aspiration, nasal/oral sounds, places of articulation and manners of articulation. Voicing is whether the vocal folds vibrate or not. The sound /s/ is called voiceless because there is no vibration, and the sound /z/ is called voiced because the vocal folds do vibrate (you can feel on your neck if there is vibration.) Only three sounds in English have aspiration, the sounds /b/, /p/ and /t/. An extra puff of air is pushed out when these sounds begin a word or stressed syllable. Hold a piece of paper close to your mouth when saying the words pin and spin. You should notice extra air when you say pin. Aspiration is indicated in writing with a superscript h, as in /pʰ/. Nasal sounds are produced when the velum (the soft palate located in the back of the roof of the mouth) is lowered and air is passed through the nose and mouth. Oral sounds are produced when the velum is raised and air passes only through the mouth.

Places of ArticulationBilabial: lips togetherLabiodental: lower lip against front teethInterdental: tongue between teethAlveolar: tongue near alveolar ridge on roof of mouth (in between teeth

and hard palate)Palatal: tongue on hard palateVelar: tongue near velumGlottal: space between vocal folds

The following sound is not found in the English language, although it is common in languages such as French and Arabic:

Uvular: raise back of tongue to uvula (the appendage hanging down from

the velum)

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(Source:  An Introduction to Language by Victoria Fromkin and Robert Rodman, 6th Ed.)

Manners of ArticulationStop: obstruct airstream completelyFricative: partial obstruction with frictionAffricate: stop airstream, then releaseLiquids: partial obstruction, no frictionGlides: little or no obstruction, must occur with a vowel

You should practice saying the sounds of the English alphabet to see if you can identify the places of articulation in the mouth. The sounds are described by voicing, place and then manner of articulation, so the sound /j/ would be called a voiced palatal glide and the sound /s/ would be called a voiceless alveolar fricative.

BilabialLabiodent

alInterdent

alAlveola

rPalata

lVelar Glottal

Stop (oral)

pb

td

kg

Nasal (stop)

m n ŋ

Fricativefv

θð

sz

šž

h

Affricatečǰ

Glideʍw j

ʍw

h

Liquid l r

For rows that have two consonants, the top consonant is voiceless and the bottom consonant is voiced. Nasal stops are all voiced, as are liquids. The sound /j/ is also voiced. If sounds are in two places on the chart, that means they can be pronounced either way.

VowelsVowels are produced by a continuous airstream and all are voiced.

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They are classified according to height of the tongue, part of tongue involved, and position of the lips. The tongue can be high, mid, or low; and the part of the tongue used can be front, central or back. Only four vowels are produced with rounded lips and only four vowels are considered tense instead of lax. The sound /a/ would be written as a low back lax unrounded vowel. Many languages also have vowels called diphthongs, a sequence of two sounds, vowel + glide. Examples in English include oy in boy and ow in cow. In addition, vowels can be nasalized when they occur before nasal consonants. A diacritic mark [~] is placed over the vowel to show this. The vowel sounds in bee and bean are considered different because the sound in bean is nasalized.

Part of Tongue

Front Central Back

Tongue

Height

Highiɪ

Mideɛ

əʌ

Low æ a

The bold vowels are tense, and the italic vowels are rounded. English also includes the diphthongs: [aj] as in bite, [aw] as in cow, and [oj] as in boy. For the complete IPA chart with symbols for the sounds of every human language, please visit the International Phonetic Association's website. And you're looking for a way to type English IPA symbols online, please visit ipa.typeit.org

Major Classes of Sounds (Distinctive Features)All of the classes of sounds described above can be put into more general classes that include the patterning of sounds in the world's languages. Continuant sounds indicate a continuous airflow, while non-continuant sounds indicate total obstruction of the airstream. Obstruent sounds do not allow air to escape through the nose, while

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sonorant sounds have a relatively free airflow through the mouth or nose. The following table summarizes this information:

Obstruent Sonorant

Continuant fricatives liquids, glides, vowels

Non-Continuantoral stops, affricates

nasal stops

Major Class Features[+ Consonantal] consonants[- Consonantal] vowels[+Sonorant] nasals, liquids, glides, vowels[- Sonorant] stops, fricatives, affricates (obstruents)[+ Approximant] glides [j, w][- Approximant] everything elseVoice Features[+ Voice] voiced[- Voice] voiceless[+ Spread Glottis] aspirated [pʰ, tʰ, kʰ][- Spread Glottis] unaspirated[+ Constricted Glottis] ejectives, implosives[- Constricted Glottis] everything elseManner Features[+ Continuant] fricatives [f, v, s, z, š, ž, θ, ð][- Continuant] stops [p, b, t, d, k, g, ʔ][+ Nasal] nasal consonants [m, n, ŋ][- Nasal] all oral consonants

[+ Lateral] [l][- Lateral] [r][+ Delayed Release] affricates [č, ǰ][- Delayed Release] stops [p, b, t, d, k, g, ʔ][+ Strident] “noisy” fricatives [f, v, s, z, š, ž][- Strident] [?, ð, h]Place Features[Labial] involves lips [f, v, p, b, w][Coronal] alveolar ridge to palate [θ, ð, s, z, t, d, š, ž, n, r, l][+ Anterior] interdentals and true alveolars[- Anterior] retroflex and palatals [š, ž, č, ǰ, j][Dorsal] from velum back [k, g, ŋ][Glottal] in larynx [h, ʔ]VowelsHeight [± high] [± low]Backness [± back]Lip Rounding [± round]Tenseness [± tense]

Whereas phonetics is the study of sounds and is concerned with the production, audition and perception of speech sounds (called phones),

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phonology describes the way sounds function within a given language and operates at the level of sound systems and abstract sound units. Knowing the sounds of a language is only a small part of phonology. This importance is shown by the fact that you can change one word into another by simply changing one sound. Consider the differences between the words time and dime. The words are identical except for the first sound. [t] and [d] can therefore distinguish words, and are called contrasting sounds. They are distinctive sounds in English, and all distinctive sounds are classified as phonemes.

Minimal PairsMinimal pairs are words with different meanings that have the same sounds except for one. These contrasting sounds can either be consonants or vowels. The words pin and bin are minimal pairs because they are exactly the same except for the first sound. The words read and rude are also exactly the same except for the vowel sound. The examples from above, time and dime, are also minimal pairs. In effect, words with one contrastive sound are minimal pairs. Another feature of minimal pairs is overlapping distribution. Sounds that occur in phonetic environments that are identical are said to be in overlapping distribution. The sounds of [ɪn] from pin and bin are in overlapping distribution because they occur in both words. The same is true for three and through. The sounds of [θr] is in overlapping distribution because they occur in both words as well.

Free VariationSome words in English are pronounced differently by different speakers. This is most noticeable among American English speakers and British English speakers, as well as dialectal differences. This is evidenced in the ways neither, for example, can be pronounced. American English pronunciation is [niðər], while British English pronunciation is [najðər].

Phones and AllophonesPhonemes are not physical sounds. They are abstract mental representations of the phonological units of a language. Phones are considered to be any single speech sound of which phonemes are made. Phonemes are a family of phones regarded as a single sound and represented by the same symbol. The different

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phones that are the realization of a phoneme are called allophones of that phoneme. The use of allophones is not random, but rule-governed. No one is taught these rules as they are learned subconsciously when the native language is acquired. To distinguish between a phoneme and its allophones, I will use slashes // to enclose phonemes and brackets [] to enclose allophones or phones. For example, [i] and [i] are allophones of the phoneme /i/; [ɪ] and [ɪ j] are allophones of the phoneme /ɪ/.

Complementary DistributionIf two sounds are allophones of the same phoneme, they are said to be in complementary distribution. These sounds cannot occur in minimal pairs and they cannot change the meaning of otherwise identical words. If you interchange the sounds, you will only change the pronunciation of the words, not the meaning. Native speakers of the language regard the two allophones as variations of the same sound. To hear this, start to say the word cool (your lips should be pursed in anticipation of /u/ sound), but then say kill instead (with your lips still pursed.) Your pronunciation of kill should sound strange because cool and kill are pronounced with different allophones of the phoneme /k/. Nasalized vowels are allophones of the same phoneme in English. Take, for example, the sounds in bad and ban. The phoneme is /æ/, however the allophones are [æ] and [æj ]. Yet in French, nasalized vowels are not allophones of the same phonemes. They are separate phonemes. The words beau [bo] and bon [bo] are not in complementary distribution because they are minimal pairs and have contrasting sounds. Changing the sounds changes the meaning of the words. This is just one example of differences between languages.

Phonological RulesAssimilation: sounds become more like neighboring sounds, allowing for

ease of articulation or pronunciation; such as vowels are

nasalized before nasal consonants.Harmony: non-adjacent vowels become more similar by sharing

a feature or set of features (common in Finnish)

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Gemination: sound becomes identical to an adjacent soundRegressive Assimilation: sound on left is the target, and sound on right is the trigger. Dissimilation: sounds become less like neighboring

sounds; these rules are quite rare, but

one example in English is [fɪfθ] becoming [fɪft] (/f/

and /θ/ are both fricatives, but /t/ is a stop) Epenthesis: insertion of a sound, e.g. Latin "homre" became

Spanish "hombre"Prothesis: insertion of vowel sound at beginning of wordAnaptyxis: vowel sound with predictable quality is inserted word-internallyParagoge: insertion of vowel sound at end of wordExcrescence: consonant sound inserted between other consonants

(also called stop-intrusion) Deletion: deletion of a sound; e.g. French word-final

consonants are deleted when the next word begins

with a consonant (but are retained when the following word begins with a vowel)

Aphaeresis: vowel sound deleted at beginning of word.Syncope: vowel sound is deleted word-internally.Apocope: vowel sound deleted at end of word.Metathesis: reordering of phonemes; in some dialects of

English, the word asked is pronounced [æks]; children's speech shows many cases of metathesis such as aminal for animal.

Lenition: consonant changes to a weaker manner of articulation; voiced stop becomes a fricative, fricative becomes a glide, etc.

Palatalization: sound becomes palatal when adjacent to a front

vowel

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Compensatory Lengthening: sound becomes long as a result of sound loss, e.g. Latin "octo" became Italian "otto"

Assimilation in English

An interesting observation of assimilation rules is evidenced in the formation of plurals and the past tense in English. When pluralizing nouns, the last letter is pronounced as either [s], [z], or [əz]. When forming past tenses of verbs, the -ed ending is pronounced as either [t], [d], [əd].

If you were to sort words into three columns, you would be able to tell why certain words are followed by certain sounds:

Plural nounsHopefully, you can determine which consonants produce which sounds. In the nouns, /s/ is added after voiceless consonants, and /z/ is added after voiced consonants. /əz/ is added after sibilants. For the verbs, /t/ is added after voiceless consonants, and /d/ is added after voiced consonants. /əd/ is added after alveolar stops. The great thing about this is that no one ever taught you this in school. But thanks to linguistics, you now know why there are different sounds (because of assimilation rules, the consonants become more like their neighboring consonants.)

/s/ /z/ /əz/

cats dadschurche

s

tips bibs kisses

laughs dogs judges

Past Tense

/t/ /d/ /əd/

kissed loved patted

washedjogge

dwaded

coughed

teased

seeded

Writing Rules

A general phonological rule is A → B / D __ E (said: A becomes B when it occurs between D and E) Other symbols in rule writing include: C = any obstruent, V = any vowel, Ø = nothing, # = word boundary, ( ) =

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optional, and { } = either/or. A deletion rule is A → Ø / E __ (A is deleted when it occurs after E) and an insertion rule is Ø → A / E __ (A is inserted when it occurs after E). Alpha notation is used to collapse similar assimilation rules into one. C → [Α voice] / __ [Α voice] (An obstruent becomes voiced when it occurs before a voiced obstruent AND an obstruent becomes voiceless when it occurs before a voiceless obstruent.) Similarly, it can be used for dissimilation rules too. C → [-Α voice] / __ [Α voice] (An obstruent becomes voiced when it occurs before a voiceless obstruent AND an obstruent becomes voiceless when it occurs before a voiced obstruent.) Gemination rules are written as C1C2 → C2C2 (for example, pd → dd)

Syllable Structure

There are three peaks to a syllable: nucleus (vowel), onset (consonant before nucleus) and coda (consonant after nucleus.) The onset and coda are both

optional, meaning that a syllable could contain a vowel and nothing else. The nucleus is required in every syllable by definition. The order of the peaks is always onset - nucleus - coda. All languages permit open syllables (Consonant + Vowel), but not all languages allow closed syllables (Consonant + Vowel + Consonant). Languages that only allow open syllables are called CV languages. In addition to not allowing codas, some CV languages also have constraints on the number of consonants allowed in the onset.

The sonority profile dictates that sonority must rise to the nucleus and fall to the coda in every language. The sonority scale (from most to least sonorous) is vowels - glides - liquids - nasals - obstruents. Sonority must rise in the onset, but the sounds cannot be adjacent to or share a place of articulation (except [s] in English) nor can there be more than two consonants in the onset. This explains why English allows some consonant combinations, but not others. For example, price [prajs] is a well-formed syllable and word because the sonority rises in the onset (p, an obstruent, is less sonorous than r, a liquid); however, rpice [rpajs] is not a syllable in English because the sonority does not rise in the onset.

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The Maximality Condition states that onsets are as large as possible up to the well-formedness rules of a language. Onsets are always preferred over codas when syllabifying words. There are also constraints that state the maximum number of consonants between two vowels is four; onsets and codas have two consonants maximally; and onsets and codas can be bigger only at the edges of words.

PART FOUR: SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS

SemanticsLexical semantics is concerned with the meanings of words and the meaning of relationships among words, while phrasal semantics is concerned with the meaning of syntactic units larger than the word. Pragmatics is the study of how context affects meaning, such as how sentences are interpreted in certain situations.

Semantic properties are the components of meanings of words. For example, the semantic property "human" can be found in many words such as parent, doctor,

baby, professor, widow, and aunt. Other semantic properties include animate objects, male, female, countable items and non-countable items.

The –nymsHomonyms: different words that are pronounced the same, but may or may not

be spelled the same (to, two, and too) Polysemous: word that has multiple meanings that are related

conceptually or historically (bear can mean to tolerate or to carry or to support)

Homograph: different words that are spelled identically and possibly pronounced the same; if they are pronounced the same, they are also homonyms (pen can mean writing utensil or cage)

Heteronym: homographs that are pronounced differently (dove the bird and

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dove the past tense of dive) Synonym: words that mean the same but sound different (couch and sofa) Antonym: words that are opposite in meaning.Complementary pairs: alive and deadGradable pairs: big and small (no absolute scale) Hyponym: set of related words (red, white, yellow, blue are all hyponyms of

"color") Metonym: word used in place of another to convey the same meaning (jock

used for athlete, Washington used for American government, crown used for monarchy)

Retronym: expressions that are no longer redundant (silent movie used to be redundant because a long time ago, all movies were silent, but this is no longer true or redundant)

Thematic RolesThematic roles are the semantic relationships between the verbs and noun phrases of sentences. The following chart shows the thematic roles in relationship to verbs of sentences:

Thematic Role

Description Example

Agent the one who performs an action Maria ran

Themethe person or thing that undergoes an action

Mary called John

Locationthe place where an action takes place

It rains in Spain

Goalthe place to which an action is directed

Put the cat on the porch

Sourcethe place from which an action originates

He flew from Chicago to LA

Instrumentthe means by which an action is performed

He cuts his hair with scissors

Experience one who perceives something She heard Bob

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r play the piano

Causativea natural force that causes a change

The wind destroyed the house

Possessor one who has somethingThe tail of the cat got caught

Recipient one who receives somethingI gave it to the girl

Sentential MeaningThe meaning of sentences is built from the meaning of noun phrases and verbs. Sentences contain truth conditions if the circumstances in the sentence are true. Paraphrases are two sentences with the same truth conditions, despite subtle differences in structure and emphasis. The ball was kicked by the boy is a paraphrase of the sentence the boy kicked the ball, but they have the same truth conditions - that a boy kicked a ball. Sometimes the truth of one sentence entails or implies the truth of another sentence. This is called entailment and the opposite of this is called contradiction, where one sentence implies the falseness of another. He was assassinated entails that he is dead. He was assassinated contradicts with the statement he is alive.

PragmaticsPragmatics is the interpretation of linguistic meaning in context. Linguistic context is discourse that precedes a sentence to be interpreted and situational context is knowledge about the world. In the following sentences, the kids have eaten already and surprisingly, they are hungry, the linguistic context helps to interpret the second sentence depending on what the first sentence says.

Maxims of ConversationGrice's maxims for conversation are conventions of speech such as the maxim of quantity that states a speaker should be as informative as is required and neither more nor less. The maxim of relevance essentially states a speaker should stay on the topic, and the maxim of manner states the speaker should be brief and orderly, and avoid

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ambiguity. The fourth maxim, the maxim of quality, states that a speaker should not lie or make any unsupported claims.

Performative SentencesIn these types of sentences, the speaker is the subject who, by uttering the sentence, is accomplishing some additional action, such as daring, resigning, or nominating. These sentences are all affirmative, declarative and in the present tense. An informal test to see whether a sentence is performative or not is to insert the words I hereby before the verb. I hereby challenge you to a match or I hereby fine you $500 are both performative, but I hereby know that girl is not. Other performative verbs are bet, promise, pronounce, bequeath, swear, testify, and dismiss.

PresuppositionsThese are implicit assumptions required to make a sentence meaningful. Sentences that contain presuppositions are not allowed in court because accepting the validity of the statement mean accepting the presuppositions as well. Have you stopped stealing cars? is not admissible in court because no matter how the defendant answers, the presupposition that he steals cars already will be acknowledged. Have you stopped smoking? Implies that you smoke already.

DeixisDeixis is reference to a person, object, or event which relies on the situational context. First and second person pronouns such as my, mine, you, your, yours, we, ours and us are always deictic because their reference is entirely dependent on context. Demonstrative articles like this, that, these and those and expressions of time and place are always deictic as well. In order to understand what specific times or places such expressions refer to, we also need to know when or where the utterance was said. If someone says "I'm over here!" you would need to know who "I" referred to, as well as where "here" is. Deixis marks one of the boundaries of semantics and pragmatics.

PART FIVE: NEUROLINGUISTICS

The human brain consists of 10 billion nerve cells (neurons) and billions of fibers that connect them. These neurons or gray matter form

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the cortex, the surface of the brain, and the connecting fibers or white matter form the interior of the brain. The brain is divided into two hemispheres, the left and right cerebral hemispheres. These hemispheres are connected by the corpus callosum. In general, the left hemisphere of the brain controls the right side of the body and vice versa.

The auditory cortex receives and interprets auditory stimuli, while the visual cortex receives and interprets visual stimuli. The angular gyrus converts the auditory stimuli to visual stimuli and vice versa. The motor cortex signals the muscles to move when we want to talk and is directed by Broca's area. The nerve fiber connecting Wernicke's and Broca's area is called the arcuate fasciculus.

Lateralization refers to any cognitive functions that are localized to one side of the brain or the other. Language is said to be lateralized and processed in the left hemisphere of the brain. Paul Broca first related language to the left side of the brain when he noted that damage to the front part of the left hemisphere (now called Broca's area) resulted in a loss of speech, while damage to the right side did not. He determined this through autopsies of patients who had acquired language deficits following brain injuries. A language disorder that follows a brain lesion is called aphasia, and patients with damage to Broca's area have slow and labored speech, loss of function words, and poor word order, yet good comprehension.

Carl Wernicke also used studies of autopsies to describe another type of aphasia that resulted from lesions in the back portion of the left hemisphere (now called Wernicke's area.) Unlike Broca's patients, Wernicke's spoke fluently and with good pronunciation, but with many lexical errors and a difficulty in comprehension. Broca's and Wernicke's area are the two main regions of the cortex of the brain related to language processing.

Aphasics can suffer from anomia, jargon aphasia, and acquired dyslexia. Anomia is commonly referred to as "tip of the tongue" phenomenon and many

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aphasics experience word finding difficulty on a regular basis. Jargon aphasia results in the substitution of one word or sound for another. Some aphasics may substitute similar words for each other, such as table for chair, or they may substitute completely unrelated words, such as chair for engine. Others may pronounce table as sable, substituting an s sound for a t sound. Aphasics who became dyslexic after brain damage are called acquired dyslexics. When reading aloud words printed on cards, the patients produced the following substitutions: Stimul

iResponse

OneResponse

Two

Act Play Play

South East West

Heal PainMedicine

The substitution of phonologically similar words, such as pool and tool, also provides evidence that a human's mental lexicon is organized by both phonology and semantics.

Broca's aphasics and some acquired dyslexics are unable to read function words, and when presented with them on the cards, the patients say no, as shown in the following example:

Stimuli One

Response

Stimuli Two

Response

Witch Witch Which no!

Hour Time Our no!

Wood Wood Would no!

The patient's errors suggest our mental dictionary is further organized into parts consisting of major content words (first stimuli) and grammatical words (second stimuli.)

In addition, split-brain patients (those who have had their corpus callosum severed) provide evidence for language lateralization. If an object is placed in the left hand of split-brain patient whose vision is

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cut off, the person cannot name the object, but will know how to use it. The information is sent to the right side of the brain, but cannot be relayed to the left side for linguistic naming.

However, if the object is placed in the person's right hand, the person can immediately name it because the information is sent directly to the left hemisphere.

Dichotic listening is another experimental technique, using auditory signals. Subjects hear a different sound in each ear, such as boy in the left ear and girl in the right ear or water rushing in the left ear and a horn honking in the right ear. When asked to state what they heard in each ear, subjects are more frequently correct in reporting linguistic stimuli in the right ear (girl) and nonverbal stimuli in the left ear (water rushing.) This is because the left side of the brain is specialized for language and a word heard in the right ear will transfer directly to the left side of the body because of the contralateralization of the brain. Furthermore, the right side of the brain is specialized for nonverbal stimuli, such as music and environmental sounds, and a noise heard in the left ear will transfer directly to the right side of the brain.

PART SIX: CHILD LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND SECOND LANGUAGE

ACQUISITION

Linguistic competence develops in stages, from babbling to one word to two word, then telegraphic speech. Babbling is now considered the earliest form of language acquisition because infants will produce sounds based on what language input they receive. One word sentences (holophrastic speech) are generally monosyllabic in consonant-vowel clusters. During two word stage, there are no syntactic or morphological markers, no inflections for plural or past tense, and pronouns are rare, but the intonation contour extends over the whole utterance. Telegraphic speech lacks function words and only carries the open class content words, so that the sentences sound like a telegram.

Three theories

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The three theories of language acquisition: imitation, reinforcement and analogy, do not explain very well how children acquire language. Imitation does not work because children produce sentences never heard before, such as "cat stand up table." Even when they try to imitate adult speech, children cannot generate the same sentences because of their limited grammar. And children who are unable to speak still learn and understand the language, so that when they overcome their speech impairment they immediately begin speaking the

language. Reinforcement also does not work because it actually seldomly occurs and when it does, the reinforcement is correcting pronunciation or truthfulness, and not grammar. A sentence such as "apples are purple" would be corrected more often because it is not true, as compared to a sentence such as "apples is red" regardless of the grammar. Analogy also cannot explain language acquisition. Analogy involves the formation of sentences or phrases by using other sentences as samples. If a child hears the sentence, "I painted a red barn," he can say, by analogy, "I painted a blue barn." Yet if he hears the sentence, "I painted a barn red," he cannot say "I saw a barn red." The analogy did not work this time, and this is not a sentence of English.

AcquisitionsPhonology: A child's error in pronunciation is not random, but rule-governed. Typical phonological rules include: consonant cluster simplification (spoon becomes poon), devoicing of final consonants (dog becomes dok), voicing of initial consonants (truck becomes druck), and consonant harmony (doggy becomes goggy, or big becomes gig.)

Morphology: An overgeneralization of constructed rules is shown when children treat irregular verbs and nouns as regular. Instead of went as the past tense of go, children use goed because the regular verbs add an -ed ending to form the past tense. Similarly, children use gooses as the plural of goose instead of geese, because regular nouns add an -s in the plural.

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The "Innateness Hypothesis" of child language acquisition, proposed by Noam Chomsky, states that the human species is prewired to acquire language, and that the kind of language is also determined. Many factors have led to this hypothesis such as the ease and rapidity of language acquisition despite impoverished input as well as the uniformity of languages. All children will learn a language, and children will also learn more than one language if they are exposed to it. Children follow the same general stages when learning a language, although the linguistic input is widely varied.

The poverty of the stimulus states that children seem to learn or know the aspects of grammar for which they receive no information. In addition, children do not produce sentences that could not be sentences in some human language. The principles of Universal Grammar underlie the specific grammars of all

languages and determine the class of languages that can be acquired unconsciously without instruction. It is the genetically determined faculty of the left hemisphere, and there is little doubt that the brain is specially equipped for acquisition of human language.

The "Critical Age Hypothesis" suggests that there is a critical age for language acquisition without the need for special teaching or learning. During this critical period, language learning proceeds quickly and easily. After this period, the acquisition of grammar is difficult, and for some people, never fully achieved. Cases of children reared in social isolation have been used for testing the critical age hypothesis. None of the children who had little human contact were able to speak any language once reintroduced into society. Even the children who received linguistic input after being reintroduced to society were unable to fully develop language skills. These cases of isolated children, and of deaf children, show that humans cannot fully acquire any language to which they are exposed unless they are within the critical age. Beyond this age, humans are unable to acquire much of syntax and inflectional morphology.

Second Language Acquisition Teaching MethodsGrammar-translation: The student memorizes words, inflected words, and

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syntactic rules and uses them to translate from native to target language and vice versa; most commonly used method in schools because it does not require teacher to be fluent; however, least effective method of teaching.

Direct method: The native language is not used at all in the classroom, and the student must learn the new language without formal instruction; based on theories of first language acquisition.

Audio-lingual: Heavy use of dialogs and audio, based on the assumption that language learning is acquired mainly through imitation, repetition, and reinforcement; influenced by psychology.

Natural Approach: Emphasis on vocabulary and not grammar; focus on meaning, not form; use of authentic materials instead of textbook

Silent Way: Teachers remain passive observers while students

learn, which is a process of personal growth; no grammatical explanation or modeling by the teacher.

Total Physical Response: Students play active role as listener and performer,

must respond to imperative drills with physical action.

Suggestopedia: Students always remain comfortable and relaxed and

learn through memorization of meaningful texts, although the goal is understanding

Community Language Learning: Materials are developed as course progresses

and teacher understands what students need

and want to learn; learning involves the whole

person and language is seen as more than just

communication.

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Community Language Teaching: Incorporates all components of language and

helps students with various learning styles; use

of communication-based activities with authentic materials, needs of learner are

taken into consideration when planning topics

and objectives.

Four skill areasThe four skill areas of learning a foreign language need to be addressed consistently and continually. Good lesson plans incorporate all four: Listening, Speaking, Reading (and Vocabulary), and Writing (and Grammar). Native speakers do not learn the skill areas separately, nor do they use them separately, so they shouldn’t be taught separately. However, it is easy to fall into the trap of teaching about the language, instead of actually teaching the language. Most textbooks resort to teaching grammar and vocabulary lists and nothing more.

PART SEVEN: SOCIOLINGUISTICS

A dialect is a variety of language that is systematically different from other varieties of the same language. The dialects of a single language are mutually intelligible, but when the speakers can no longer understand each other, the dialects become languages. Geographical regions are also considered when dialects become languages. Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish are all considered separate languages because of regular differences in grammar and the countries in which they are

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spoken, yet Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes can all understand one another. Hindi and Urdu are considered mutually intelligible languages when spoken, yet the writing systems are different. On the other hand, Mandarin and Cantonese are mutually unintelligible languages when spoken, yet the writing systems are the same.

A dialect is considered standard if it is used by the upper class, political leaders, in literature and is taught in schools as the correct form of the language. Overt prestige refers to this dominant dialect. A non-standard dialect is associated with covert prestige and is an ethnic or regional dialect of a language. These non-standard dialects are just as linguistically sophisticated as the standard dialect, and judgments to the inferiority of them are based on social or racist judgments. African-American English contains many regular differences of the standard dialect. These differences are the same as the differences among many of the world's dialects. Phonological differences include r and l deletion of words like poor (pa) and all (awe.) Consonant cluster simplification also occurs (passed pronounced like pass), as well as a loss of interdental fricatives. Syntactic differences include the double negative and the loss of and habitual use of the verb "be." He late means he is late now, but he be late means he is always late.

A lingua franca is a major language used in an area where speakers of more than one language live that permits communication and commerce among them. English is called the lingua franca of the whole world, while French used to be the lingua franca of diplomacy.

A pidgin is a rudimentary language of few lexical items and less complex grammatical rules based on another language. No one learns a pidgin as a native language, but children do learn creoles as a first language. Creoles are defined as pidgins that are adopted by a community as its native tongue.

Besides dialects, speakers may use different styles or registers (such as contractions) depending on the context. Slang may also be used in speech, but is not often used in formal situations or writing. Jargon refers to the unique vocabulary pertaining to a certain area, such as computers or medicine. Words or expressions referring to certain acts that are forbidden or frowned upon are considered taboo. These taboo

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words produce euphemisms, words or phrases that replace the expressions that are being avoided.

The use of words may indicate a society's attitude toward sex, bodily functions or religious beliefs, and they may also reflect racism or sexism in a society. Language itself is not racist or sexist, but the society may be. Such insulting words may reinforce biased views, and changes in society may be reflected in the changes in language.

PART EIGHT: HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS

Languages that evolve from a common source are genetically related. These languages were once dialects of the same language. Earlier forms of Germanic languages, such as German, English, and Swedish were dialects of Proto-Germanic, while earlier forms of Romance

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languages, such as Spanish, French, and Italian were dialects of Latin. Furthermore, earlier forms of Proto-Germanic and Latin were once dialects of Indo-European.

Linguistic changes like sound shift are found in the history of all languages, as evidenced by the regular sound correspondences that exist between different stages of the same language, different dialects, and different languages. Words, morphemes, and phonemes may be altered, added or lost. The meaning of words may broaden, narrow or shift. New words may be introduced into a language by borrowing, or by coinage, blends and acronyms. The lexicon may also shrink as older words become obsolete.

Change comes about as a result of the restructuring of grammar by children learning the language. Grammars seem to become simple and regular, but these simplifications may be compensated for by more complexities. Sound changes can occur because of assimilation, a process of ease of articulation. Some grammatical changes are analogic changes, generalizations that lead to more regularity, such as sweeped instead of swept.

The study of linguistic change is called historical and comparative linguistics. Linguists identify regular sound correspondences using the comparative method among the cognates (words that developed from the same ancestral language) of related languages. They can restructure an earlier protolanguage and this allows linguists to determine the history of a language family.

Old English, Middle English, Modern English

Old English499-1066 CE

Beowulf

Middle English

1066-1500 CE

Canterbury Tales

Modern English

1500-present

Shakespeare

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Phonological change: Between 1400 and 1600 CE, the Great Vowel Shift

took place. The seven long vowels of Middle English

underwent changes. The high vowels [i] and [u] became the diphthongs [aj] and [aw]. The long vowels increased tongue height and shifted

upward, and [a] was fronted. Many of the spelling inconsistencies of English are because of the

Great Vowel Shift. Our spelling system still reflects

the way words were pronounced before the shift took

place. Morphological change: Many Indo-European languages had extensive case

endings that governed word order, but these are no

longer found in Romance languages or English. Although pronouns still show a trace of the case system (he vs. him), English uses prepositions to show the case. Instead of the dative case (indirect objects), English usually the words to or for. Instead of the genitive case, English uses the word of or 's after a noun to show possession. Other cases include the nominative (subject pronouns), accusative (direct objects), and vocative.

Syntactic change: Because of the lack of the case system, word order

has become more rigid and strict in Modern English. Now it is strictly Subject - Verb - Object order.

Orthographic change: Consonant clusters have become simplified, such as

hlaf becoming loaf and hnecca becoming neck. However, some of these clusters are still

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written, but are no longer pronounced, such as gnaw, write, and dumb.

Lexical change: Old English borrowed place names from Celtic, army,

religious and educational words from Latin, and everyday words from Scandinavian. Angle and Saxon (German dialects) form the basis of Old English phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon.

PART NINE: CLASSIFICATION OF LANGUAGES

Indo-European family of languages Italic (Latin)

o Romance Catalan French Italian Occitan (Provençal) Portuguese Rhaeto-Romansch Romanian Spanish

Germanic o North Germanic

Danish Faroese Icelandic Norwegian Swedish

o East Germanic Gothic (extinct)

o West Germanic Afrikaans Dutch

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English Flemish Frisian German Yiddish

Slavic o Western

Czech Polish Slovak Sorbian

o Eastern Belarusian Russian Ukrainian

o Southern Bulgarian Croatian Macedonian Old Church Slavonic Serbian Slovene

Baltic o Latvian o Lithuanian o Old Prussian (extinct)

Celtic o Brythonic

Breton Cornish (extinct) Gaulish (extinct) Welsh

o Goidelic Irish Manx Gaelic (extinct) Scots Gaelic

Hellenic (Greek) Albanian Armenian

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Anatolian (extinct) Tocharian (extinct) Indo-Iranian

o Indo-Aryan (Indic) Assamese Bengali Bihari Gujarati Hindi-Urdu Marathi Punjabi Romani Sanskrit Sindhi Singhalese

o Iranian Avestan Balochi Farsi (Persian) Kurdish Pashtu (Afghan) Sogdian

Uralic (or Finno-Ugric) is the other major family of languages spoken on the European continent. Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian are examples.

Afro-Asiatic languages are spoken in Northern Africa and the Middle East. They include Berber, Egyptian, Omotic and Cushitic languages (Somali, Iraqw) as well as the modern Semitic languages of Hebrew, Arabic and Amharic, in addition to languages spoken in biblical times, such as Aramaic, Akkadian, Babylonian, Canaanite, and Phoenician.

The Altaic languages are classified as Japanese and Korean, though some linguists separate these languages into their own groups.

Sino-Tibetan languages include Mandarin, Hakka, Wu, Burmese, Tibetan, and all of the Chinese "dialects."

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Austro-tai languages include Indonesian, Javanese and Thai; while the Asiatic group includes Vietnamese.

The Dravidian languages of Tamil and Telugu are spoken in southeastern India and Sri Lanka.

The Caucasian language family consists of 40 different languages, and is divided into Cartvelian (south Caucasian), North-West Caucasian and North-East Caucasian language groups. Some languages are Georgian, Megrelian, Chechen, Ingush Avarian, Lezgian and Dargin. These languages are mostly spoken in Georgia, Turkey, Syria, Iran, Jordan and parts of the Russian federation.

The Niger-Congo family includes most of the African languages. About 1,500 languages belong to this group, including the Bantu languages of Swahili, Tswana, Xhosa, Zulu, Kikuyu, and Shona. Other languages are Ewe, Mina, Yoruba, Igbo, Wolof, Kordofanian and Fulfulde.

Other African language groups are Nilo-Saharan, which includes 200 languages spoken in Central and Eastern Africa; and Khoisan, the click languages of southern Africa. The Khoisan group only contains about 30 languages, most of which are spoken in Namibia and Botswana.

The Austronesian family also contains about 900 languages, spoken all over the globe. Hawaiian, Maori, Tagalog, and Malay are all representatives of this language family.

Many languages are, or were, spoken in North and South America by the native peoples before the European conquests. Knowledge of these languages is limited, and because many of the languages are approaching extinction, linguists have little hope of achieving a complete understanding of the Amerindian language families.

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Linguistics 101: Introduction to Linguistics I - Fall 1996Anthony Kroch614 Williams [email protected]

Linguistics 101 is an introduction to linguistics from the point of view of its logical and mathematical foundations. Its goal is to teach the basic structural properties of natural language sentences in their syntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspects, as well as the elements of automata theory and logic needed to describe natural language precisely. The course begins with a discussion of the philosophical and psychological foundations of modern linguistics and moves from there to more technical matters.

Linguistics 101 has no prerequisites and fulfills the formal reasoning requirement in SAS. It is also a basic part of the Linguistics major and of the interdisciplinary Cognitive Science minor. Related courses are Linguistics 150: Introduction to Syntax and Linguistics 105: Introduction to Cognitive Science.

Fall 1996 Course SyllabusInstructor: Teaching Assistants:

Anthony KrochAlan Lee & Rashmi Prasad

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614 Williams Hall 429 Williams Hall898-3212 898-6050

Email addresses:

[email protected]

[email protected]

[email protected]

Texts:

1. Steven Pinker. The Language Instinct. New York: William Morrow.2. Course Bulkpack.

This course will introduce you to linguistics, one of the core disciplines of the modern science of mind, from a mathematical point of view. Linguistics is a new science, less than a century old; but we have learned much in this brief period of

scientific study about the uniquely human capacity to code abstract thought in communicable form. In the course of this semester, we will explore some of the results obtained in the scientific investigation of language, especially what has been discovered regarding the formal structure of our linguistic capacities and how our biologically endowed language faculty allows us to represent meanings as structured sequences of words. The course will show you that it is possible to study human language rigorously and scientifically and that such study leads to a conception of language quite different from our everyday common-sense notions of the subject.

Requirements for the course consist of a midterm and a final exam, as well as a series of homework assignments, roughly one per week through the semester. The course is organized around an interesting recent book by Steven Pinker entitled "The Language Instinct." This book is not a textbook but it covers in a readable way the basic aspects of the study of language. There will also be readings to supplement the Pinker book, which are available in the course bulkpack.

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Topic 1: Introduction. How can there be a scientific study of language? How are language and thought related? What grammar is and how we learn it. What we can learn about language from the study of people who lose it or are kept by circumstances from acquiring language in the normal way. Reading:

Steven Pinker. The Language Instinct. Chapters 1-3.Perlmutter. "The Language of the Deaf."Pullum. "The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax."

Topic 2: Formal grammar - the mathematical structure of language. This section of the course introduces the idea that languages can be analyzed mathematically. We discuss the relationship between computer languages and natural human languages and the notion of language complexity. We also introduce the concept of a phrase structure grammar, which underlies both computer and natural languages and the notion of a machine that automatically recognizes and parses sentences.

Reading:

Michael Sipser. Introduction to the Theory of Computation. Chapters 0-2.

Topic 3: Syntax - the structure of sentences in natural language. This section will be a focus of the course. Here we will learn how sentences are built up out of words and why speakers are able to construct sentences of any degree of complexity with a fixed vocabulary. We will also learn why linguists say that language is a rule-governed system and what some of the linguistic rules are that are used in the syntactic description of language. We will see how these rules determine both the structure of sentences and the conditions under which strings of words are interpretable as sentences of a language instead of being meaningless word salad.

Reading:

Pinker, chapter 4.

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Topic 4: Semantics. What is 'meaning'? Lexical semantics. Truth conditional semantics. The distinction between sense and reference. Semantic compositionality. The relationship between syntax and semantics.

Reading:

O'Grady, Dobrovolsky and Aronoff. Contemporary Linguistics: an Introduction. Chapter 6.Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet. Meaning and Grammar: An Introduction to Semantics. chapters 1-2.

Topic 5: Pragmatics. How do speakers take account of listeners' knowledge and beliefs in formulating utterances? What inferences beyond literal meaning listeners draw from what is said to them. What acts can be performed merely by speaking. How context determines reference. The communicative effects of using particular syntactic constructions.

Reading:

Finegan and Besnier. Language, Its Structure and Use. chaps. 7, 10.

Topic 6: Language in real time. How do listeners understand what speakers say? How do speakers convert thought into speech? How psycholinguists study what goes on inside our heads without looking inside them.

Reading:

Pinker, Chapters 7-8.Akmajian et al. Linguistics: an Introduction to Language and Communication. Chapter 10.

Assignment 1: GrammaticalityThis assignment is due at the beginning of the Monday lecture class on September 16. Be sure to write your TA's name and your recitation day on the top of your assignment. All future assignments should also be handed in at the beginning of the Monday lecture class in the week that they are due. Assignments will be returned in recitation sections, beginning on the Friday after they are handed in.1. Prescriptive & Descriptive GrammarIn order to answer this question, you will have to be familiar with some notation used in linguistics. An asterisk (*) is used to mark sentences which are ungrammatical. Grammatical sentences are unmarked.

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Recall that "ungrammatical" is used in the descriptive sense of interest to linguists, not in the prescriptive sense. Pinker, whose use of the term we will follow, defines "grammatical" as "well formed according to consistent rules in the dialect of [a] speaker..." (p. 31). The dialect we have in mind here is the spoken language of the general college-educated American population.

(A) Look at the sentences in (1a) and (1b). Why is (1b) ungrammatical?

(1)a.

Two paintings are on the wall.

b.*Two paintings is on the wall

(B) Now consider the sentences in (2). Do the grammaticality judgments indicated correspond to your own? Assuming the correctness of these judgments, what rule or rules could a speaker use to generate the grammatical sentences (2a) and (2c) but not generate the ungrammatical sentence in (2b). Keep in mind that your rule(s) should also be able to account for the sentences in

(1). How does your description of the sentences in (1) and (2) differ from prescriptions that govern standard usage?

(2) a.There are two paintings on the wall.

b.*There is two paintings on the wall

c.There's two paintings on the wall.

(C) The sentences in (3) show a similar pattern to the pattern seen in (1). However, the pattern in (4) is different from the one in (2). Write a description of the rules needed to generate the grammatical sentences in (3) and (4). Your rules should not generate the ungrammatical sentences.

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(3) a.A painting by Picasso and a painting by Klee are hanging on the wall.

b.*A painting by Picasso and a painting by Klee is hanging on the wall

(4) a. *There are a painting by Picasso and a painting by Klee hanging on the wall

b.There is a painting by Picasso and a painting by Klee hanging on the wall.

c.There's a painting by Picasso and a painting by Klee hanging on the wall.

2. Grammaticality Judgments(A) Decide whether the phrases in (1) - (15) are grammatical in your spoken dialect. (If you are not a native speaker of English, consult a native speaker for judgments). Mark ungrammatical sentences with an asterisk ( * ) and say briefly what's wrong with them.(1) To the bank.(2) The rat the cat the dog bit chased ran.(3) The cat the dog bit ran.(4) Being so flat, the Dutch bicycle everywhere.(5) Who do you wonder whether they will come.(6) Ivan a tin of caviar ate quickly.(7) Its mayor praised her village.(8) If you go to school, there's an elephant on the corner.(9) Susan told John that washing herself in public is a bad idea.(10)

The candy ate the boy.

(11)

Immediately he opened the door he saw the murderer standing there.

(12)

The police officer arrested Sam and I.

(13)

Earlobe seven by hexed fruitless.

(14)

Go take dog for a walk!

(15 Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

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)

(B) Often it is possible to make sense of an ungrammatical sentence. Likewise a grammatical sentence can be incomprehensible. Mark the incomprehensible but grammatical sentences in (A) with a number sign (#).

3. American Sign LanguageRead the discussion of deaf sign language in Pinker and the Perlmutter article in the bulk pack before answering this question.

Sign language users all over the world have been struggling for years to eradicate the notion that because they do not use speech, their communications systems are not "real" languages. One characteristic of languages in general is that there is an arbitrary relation between words and what they represent. You can't hear the French word 'chien,' for example, and know by its sound that it refers to what the English word 'dog' refers to. Critics of sign languages have often described them as "iconic," as a series of pictures and gestures for acting out the real world -- and thus dismissed them as nothing more than complex mime. Consider the issue of iconicity in American Sign Language (ASL) in light of the following evidence.

(A) The signs for male and female:

original:female: running thumb along jaw toward chin, mimicking bonnet stringsmale: grasping an invisible cap near the forehead

current:female: thumb on chin, with a hand shape as if thumbing your nose at someonemale: thumb on forehead, same handshape.-- How have these signs changed over time? How does this development affect the debate over whether signs are iconic or not?

(B) First person pronouns:

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When hearing children are first learning to speak, they often display a charming tendency to confuse the pronouns 'you' and 'me.' When asked, "Do you want milk," they reply, "Yes, you want milk," believing that they are describing themselves. In a curious parallel, deaf children who are learning to sign will display, at the same age, the tendency to confuse the signs for 'you' and 'me.'

The adult will point to the child and ask a question, and the child will point at the adult in reply, even though, once again, these children are describing themselves.

-- Why do you think children make these mistakes? Based on the assumption that ASL is a true language, would you expect hearing children (who are not exposed to ASL) to make the same mistake as deaf children when responding to pointing? Why or why not?

(C) Character placing:When telling a story, an ASL signer is likely to name the characters at the beginning (or whenever they appear) and in doing so, to "place" them at some location in space (one to the left, and one to the right, for example). From that point on, the signer will refer to those locations by pointing instead of repeating the names.

-- Does these rules for pointing remind you of anything in spoken language?

(D) Handshapes:While fingerspelling is not a grammatical part of ASL, many signs in ASL are signed with the handshape of the first letter in the English word -- 'language' is signed with the "l" shape, 'class' with the "c" shape, and 'water' with a "w". The colors blue, purple, green, orange and yellow are all signed with the same motion, shaking the initial letter (b, p, g, o, or y) back and forth. 'Apple' is an "a" shape rotated at cheek level. At the same time, 'onion' is an "x" shape moved the same way, so this pattern does not always not hold.

-- How do these facts impact upon the iconicity debate?

(E) Iconicity in spoken language:

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There are iconic elements in ordinary spoken English. Give some examples. In what ways are similar to and/or different from iconic features of ASL?

Assignment 2: Language, Grammar, and Thought

1. Tongan SyntaxThe following (simplified) sentences are from Tongan, a Polynesian language spoken on the island of Tonga in the Pacific. Each sentence is glossed (directly translated) and an English translation is also provided. The following abbreviations are used: Pr=present tense, Pst =past tense, Nom=nominative case, Acc=accusative case, 1ps=First person singular, 2ps=Second person singular.Answer the following questions based on your observations of sentences (1)-(4): (a) what would you say is the main structural difference between Tongan and English? (b) how is tense realized in Tongan? (c) are the nouns marked in any particular way?

 (1) oku ui ehe-tamasi

ae-tangata

Pr call Nom child Acc man          'The child calls the man.'  (2) oku kai ehe- fefine ae- ufi

Pr eat Nom-woman

Acc- yam

          'The woman eats the yam.'

 (3)  nae  ako  ehe- tamasi

 ae- lesoni

 Pst study

 Nom-

 child  Acc- lesson

          'The child studied the lesson.'

 (4)  nae haka

 ehe-  fefine  ae-  ika

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 Pst  boil Nom-

 woman

 Acc-  fish

          'The woman boiled the fish.'

How are the following sentences structurally different from the ones above? Also, why is the 1ps pronoun in (5) different from the one in (8)? Similarly, why is the 2ps in (6) different from the one in (7)?

 (5)  nae  ku  ui  ae- tangata

 Pst  1ps  call  Acc-  man          'I called the man.' (6)  oku  ke  kai  ae-  laise

 Pr  2ps  eat  Acc-  rice          'You eat rice.'

 (7)  oku manako

 koe  ehe- tangata

 Pr  like  2ps  Nom-  man          'The man likes you.'

 (8)  nae tokonia

 au  ehe-  kakai

 Pst  help  1ps  Nom-  man          'People helped me.'

If you have adequately analyzed the above sentences, you should now be able to do some simple translations from English into Tongan! Try translating the following:

The man scares the child. ('scare' = 'fakailifiai')The woman saw me. ('see' = 'vakai')You ate the fish.You like me.

2. The Relationship between Language and Thought.It is by now a well known fact (and those of you who have tried to learn a foreign language will undoubtedly admit this) that certain things can be expressed more conveniently in some languages than in others. While one language may have a special word to refer exclusively to a

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particular object or notion, in another language this object or notion can be described only by using a whole phrase or sentence. For example, in Tuvaluan, a language spoken by the Polynesian inhabitants of a group of islands in the Central Pacific, there are different words to refer to many different types of coconut, which need to be described at great length in English. Here are a few examples:pii : drinking coconut, with little flesh and much water, at a stage when the

water is maximally sweetmukomuko:young coconut with some flesh in it, before it has become too soliduto : coconut at the stage when its husk can be chewed on and its water

is still sweetmotomoto : same as mukomuko, but with firmer fleshniu : coconut ripe enough for its flesh to be grateduttanu : mature coconut whose sprout has already pierced through

the husk and whose water has turned into an edible spongious solid kernel

How much can we conclude from examples like this one about the relationship between the language that people speak and the way that they think? Do examples like this one support the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?.

3. Grammar of Non-Standard EnglishStudy the following three groups of sentences of Appalachian English. The sentences of each group share a grammatical feature not found in Standard English. Describe these features.(1)  Boy, I started to runnin'.

 A vein in his nose bursted and he went to hemorragin'. She practically raised 'im 'til he got up to walkin'. Just recently, I had an aunt to come from Texas. Usually, I hafta have somebody else to do it. (note: 'went' and 'got' is roughly the equivalent of Standard English's 'started')

(2)  I'd go out and cut me a limb off a tree, get me a good straight one. We had us a cabin, built us a log cabin back over there.

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 And then you'd get you a bowl of ice water. He wanted some straw to build him a house out of. I'm gonna write me a letter to the President.

(3)  I got some kin people lived up there. He's the funny lookin' character plays baseball.'Cause there was this vampire that killed people come in the house. My grandma's got this thing tells me about when to plant.

4. Two puzzles(a). Included in your bulkpack there is an excerpt from an interview with Miss Manners. What point relevant to a linguistics course does she make in her discussion of ettiquette books?(b). Right after the Miss Manners interview there is a page with a

Domino's Pizza advertisement. Why do you think this page was included in the course bulkpack?

Assignment 3: Sentences as Structured Objects

1. Expressivity of LanguageConsider the following sentences :

a) I hate war.b) You know that I hate war.c) He says that you know that I hate war.Construct a sentence that includes sentence (c) and then construct another sentence that includes your new sentence. Can you repeat the process again to create an even longer sentence? How long do you think you can go on? Why?

2. Structural Ambiguity Our syntactic knowledge goes beyond our ability to decide which strings are grammatical and which are not. It accounts for the structural ambiguity of expressions like synthetic buffalo hides. The ambiguity results from the fact that synthetic can modify buffalo hides or simply hides to result in two different interpretations. It is therefore due to the syntactic structure that the expression has two meanings and not due to any ambiguous words. Paraphrase each of the following sentences in two different ways to show that you understand the ambiguity involved :

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a) Smoking grass can be nauseating.b) Rob finally decided on the boat.c) Old men and women are hard to live with.d) That sheepdog is too hairy to eat.e) Terry loves his wife and so do I.f) They said she would go yesterday.

Is the type of ambiguity in the above sentences different from the ambiguity in the following sentences :

g) I walked by the bank yesterday.h) Thomas Jefferson ate his cottage cheese with relish.

3. Mathematical exercises Do exercises 3, 4, and 8 on page 24 at the end of chapter 0 of Sipser.

Assignment 4: Mathematical preliminaries

A. Alphabets, Strings and LanguagesLet be the alphabet containing the symbols a and b. In other words: = {a, b}. A language L contains all strings over which either begin with a and end with b,

or begin with b and end with a. State which of the following strings belong to L, and which do not:

i) abii) baaiii) abbaiv) babav) bubbavi) b

Concatenation is an operation on strings where one string is appended to the end of another string. For example, if we have two strings xy and yx, we can do the operation xy o yx (where 'o' is the symbol denoting concatenation) to yield a new string xyyx. Now, when we concatenate certain strings from the language L, we get a new string which still belongs to L. For example, the strings aab and abb are valid strings in L. The operation aab o abb gives us the new string aababb

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which still belongs to L (since it starts with an a and ends with ab). However, the concatenation of two valid strings of L does not always yield a new string which also belongs to L. Provide some counterexamples of when the concatenation of two strings of L results in a new string which does NOT belong to L.

B. Relations and FunctionsThe above diagram shows the maternal family tree of a certain family. F is the set containing all the members of this family. Let M be the set containing all mothers in F. Hence, M = {Eve, Jennifer, Mary, Kate}. Let the relation R = "is the mother of". The statement mRf, where m is an element of set M and f is an element of set F, simply says that m is the mother of f. We can show this relationship diagramatically:

The above diagram shows a normal relation, where an element in the first group can map onto more than one element in the second group.

a) Now, let S be the set containing all sons in F. List the set S.b) where R = "is the son of", s S, and f F.c) c) Briefly explain why this relation is a function.d) d) Let G be the set of siblings in F. List G. Is gRf a function, where

R = "is the sibling of",e) G, and f F.

C. Finite State AutomataDo Exercises 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4a (on page 75) from Chapter 1 of Sipser.

Assignment 5: Finite State Automata and Regular Grammars

1. Spot the ProblemA language L is described as follows:L = all strings that begin with a 0, end with a 2, and contain at most three 1sThe alphabet of this language is {0, 1, 2}a) Give an example of a string in this language which does not contain a 1.b) Give an example of a string in this language of length 10.

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c) Does the following finite state accept the language L? If not, how would you change it so that it does accept exactly the language L? (Hint: You need to add an extra state.)

2. Introduction to the trees program.Download the Trees 2 program by following the instructions on the Trees web page and the grammars G1, and G2, and G3 . For each of the grammars answer the following questions.a) Describe the language generated by the grammar.b) Draw a finite state automaton that accepts the same language.

Assignment 6: More Machines and Grammars

1. More Finite AutomataConsider a finite automata whose input alphabet is S = {the, old, man, men, is, are, here, and}.a) Construct a state diagram for an automaton which accepts the following language: {the man is here, the men are here}.b) Do the same for the following language : {the man is here, the men are here, the old man is here, the old men are here, the old old man is here, the old old men are here......}c) Construct a state diagram for an automaton which accepts all the sentences in (b) plus all those formed by conjoining sentences with and , e.g., the old man is here and the old old men are here and the men are here.

2. Portuguese verb morphologyDownload the grammar Port-verb from the assignments page on the web and answer the questions below. The grammar generates the regular forms of the three conjugations of Portuguese verbs for the following tenses: the imperfect, the pluperfect, and the past subjunctive. Here are the meanings of the symbols used in the grammar:Agr = agreement node (1, 2, 3 = persons; s/p = singular/plural)Tns = tense nodeImp = imperfectPlu = pluperfect

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Psub = past subjunctiveTheme = thematic vowel nodeT1 = first conjugation themeT2 = second conjugation themeT3 = third conjugation themeSt1 = first conjugation stem (example in grammar: "fal" - 'speak')St2 = second conjugation stem (example in grammar: "beb" - 'drink')St3 = third conjugation stem (example in grammar: "un" - 'unite')

Consider the following paradigm:falava bebia unia

--- bebias uniasImperfect falava --- unia

falávamos bebíamos ---faláveis Bebíeis uníeisfalavam Bebiam ---falara --- unirafalaras beberas ---

Pluperfect falara Bebera unira--- bebéramos uníramosfaláreis bebéreis uníreisfalaram beberam uniramfalasse bebesse unissefalasses bebesses unisses

Past falasse bebesse unisseSubjunctive falássemos bebéssemos uníssemos

--- --- ---falassem bebessem unissem

a) Ten of the forms in the above paradigm are empty. Fill them in by downloading and using the grammar Port-verb to generate them. Ignore the accent marks, which are not incorporated into the Port-verb grammar.b) For each of the following forms, give the tree structure that the grammar assigns to it:

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falavam         bebéramos         unisses.c) Why is the category " Th' " needed in this grammar?d) The grammar Port-verb generates the wrong forms in one kind of case. Where does it make a mistake? How would you recommend fixing the problem?

Assignment 7: Regular Grammars and Context Free Grammars

1. Regular grammars and regular languages.Download grammars G7.1a, G7.1b, and G7.1c. These grammars all include tree fragments that don't follow the schema for regular grammars. To remind you, here is the schema for the tree fragments (or rules) for regular grammars:

Where 'u' is a terminal symbol and X, Z are non-terminals. [We are looking here at the schema for a right-regular grammar. Nothing would change if we switched to the left-regular grammar schema.]

However, the fact that a given grammar for a language is not regular doesn't mean that the language itself is not regular. There could be another grammar that generates/accepts the same language and this second grammar is regular. A language fails to be regular only if it has no grammar that is regular.

For each of the grammars you have downloaded, do the following:

a. Describe the language generated by the grammar.b. Is the language regular? If so, give a regular grammar for it. If not, show thatit is not, using the pumping lemma for regular languages.

2. Compound NounsDownload grammars G7.2a and G7.2b. These grammars generate compoundnouns, using this list of nouns:

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coverMonsantopaintplasticseat

The grammars will generate compound nouns like the following, as well as many others:

           Monsanto plastic seat cover paint

How are the grammars formally different? How are they different linguistically? Do you see any way in which one is superior to the other for purposes of linguistic description?

3. Constructing Grammars and FSA's

Construct a Grammar ( for this you need to construct rules like the one you saw for the grammars you downloaded) and a finite state automaton for the following language :

L = {w | w contains exactly two occurrences of 'a', not necessarily contiguous, and any number of 'b's.}.

Assignment 8: Context Free Grammars and Constituent Structure

1. Context Free Grammars and Pushdown AutomataFor the following language L = {w | w starts and ends with the same symbol}where S = {0,1}:a) Give the Context Free Grammar generating L.b) Construct the State Diagram for the Pushdown Automaton for L.

2. Structural AmbiguityThe following sentences are all structurally ambiguous. Download the grammar tool 8.2 and use it in the Trees program to construct two different structures for each of the sentences. Provide these structures

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by copying them into your answer or printing them out and attaching them. For each pair of structures describe briefly how the difference between them corresponds to a difference in interpretation.

(1) John wrote the book on that table.

(2)Short-haired cats and dogs filled the streets.

(3) Roman history teachers lectured well.

(4)The quarterback stared down the defensive line.

(5)Mary said John sneezed yesterday.

3. ConstituencyFor each of the following sentences show its constituent structure using unlabeled brackets or trees. For example The sentence "John loves Mary passionately" would be bracketed as follows:

[John [ [loves Mary] passionately] ]This bracketing corresponds to the following tree:

Justify the bracketing you give with the constituency tests discussed in class. Are the tests always consistent with one another? Concentrate on the way the two sentences in each pair below differ in constituency.

(1)

a. John ran up a big bill.

b. John ran up a big hill.(2)

a. I drink my coffee black.

b.I know the people present.

Assignment 9: X-bar Structure

1. X -Bar Theory Consider the following X - bar structure and answer the following questions:

a) State (with reasons) whether the following are true or false: (i) P and N are heads.(ii) P' and N'' are heads.

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(iii) P'' dominates P.(iv) N dominates "bridge".(v) DP dominates N'.(vi) N dominates DP.(vii) P and N'' are sisters.

(viii) AdvP and DP are sisters.(ix) P'' is the specifier of AdvP.

b) Using the X' - model as done above for the phrase "right across the bridge", draw a tree diagram for the following phrases :

(i) meet the new governess in the foyer of the opera. (ii) quite fond of his assistant.(iii) buy a car immediately after the holidays.

2. Plug and PlayConsider the following sentence in French:

Les étudiants vont à Paris. The students go to Paris "The students are going to Paris."

The following are the X-bar projections for the words in the sentence:

And the following is part of the tree diagram for this sentence:

Given the two principles of phrase structure below, complete the above tree structure.

XP projections in French branch to the left.X' projections branch to the right.

b. Now, consider the following sentence in Japanese ("tm" = topic marker):

sono gakusei-wa Tokyo ni iku

these students-tm Tokyo to go

"These students are going to Tokyo."

Japanese word order is quite different from French word order but it can just as easily be captured by the X-bar schema, following the principles below:

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XP projections in Japanese branch to the left.X' projections branch to the left

Using the tree diagram you have built for the French sentence as your guide, but changing the structure just enough to comply with the two rules for Japanese given above, construct the tree diagram for the Japanese sentence (Consider the topic marker as part of the noun).3. Structural AmbiguityThe following sentences are all structurally ambiguous. For each pair of structures describe briefly how the difference between them corresponds to a difference in interpretation. To what extent do the tests for constituency discussed in class give evidence to support the differences in the paired structures you have found.

(1) John wrote the book on that table.(2) Short-haired cats and dogs filled the streets.(3) Roman history teachers lectured well.(4) The quarterback stared down the line.(5) Mary said John sneezed yesterday.

Assignment 10: Transformational Movement

1. Tree structures (1) Mary will see John.(2) Mary did not see John.(3) Mary saw John.(4) Will Mary see John?(5) Did Sally know that Mary saw John?(6) Who will Mary see?(7) Who saw John?

2. Layered VP'sIn using the Constituency tests, we saw that substitution was structure based. In other words, only constituents can be substituted for by a pro form. Keeping this in mind, determine the structure of the VP in (1) on the basis of (2) - (5), among other examples you may think of. (1) Mary will organize a meeting at home in the afternoon.(2) Mary will organize a meeting at home in the afternoon, and John will probably do so too.

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(3) Mary will organize a meeting at home in the afternoon, and John will probably do so in the evening.(4) Mary will organize a meeting at home in the afternoon, and John will probably do so in the cafe in the evening.

3. BE and LIKEConsider the following simple sentences:a. Hobbes is a real tiger.b. Hobbes likes the outdoors.Now look at the respective negations of the sentences:c. Hobbes is not a real tiger.d. Hobbes does not like the outdoors.What do you notice about the different behavior of BE and LIKE in these sentences. Next consider the verb HAVE. Does it behave like BE or like LIKE?Now, assume that not is a modifying adverb which adjoins to VP. Draw tree diagrams for (c) and (d). Where did you locate BE in the diagram, and where did you locate LIKE?Next, examine the following sentences:e. Hobbes will be a real tiger.f. Hobbes will like the outdoors.g. Hobbes will not be a real tiger.h. Hobbes will not like the outdoors.

Are sentences (e)-(h) problematic for the tree diagrams you just constructed? Using the notion of verb movement, propose a solution that will provide a unified account of sentences (a)-(f)! What would you say about the behavior of HAVE now, in light of these added facts.

Assignment 11: Semantics I

These exercises come from the indicated readings in the bulkpack.

1. [O'Grady and Dobrovolski, p.247, #3] Three semantic relations among sentences were covered in chapter 6: paraphrase, entailment, and contradiction. Which of these relations is exemplified in each of the following pairs of sentences?

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a) I saw Terry at the anniversary party.    It was Terry that I saw at the anniversary party.

b) Jules is Mary's husband.   Mary is married.

c) My pet cobra likes the taste of chocolate fudge.    My pet cobra finds chocolate fudge tasty.

d) Vera is an only child.    Olga is Vera's sister.

e) It is fifty miles to the nearest service station. The nearest service station is fifty miles away.

f) My cousin Bryan teaches at the community college for a living.    My cousin Bryan is a teacher.

2. [O'Grady and Dobrovolski, p.247, #4] In discussing the nature of meaning, we noted that it is necessary to distinguish between intension and extension. Describe the intensions and extensions of each of these phrases:

a) the President of the United States b) the Queen of England c) the capital of Canada d) women who have walked on the moon e) the Prince of Wales f) Princess Diana's first husband

3. [O'Grady and Dobrovolski, p.248, #6] Each of the following words is associated with a concept:

a) island e) whisperb) soft f) husband

c) white g)baseball bat

d) wristwatch h) mountain

i) Determine which of these examples are fuzzy concepts. ii) Choose one of the fuzzy concepts above. Name one prototypical member of that concept and one member that is closer to the concept boundary.

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iii) Draw a diagram for the concept 'dwelling' similar to that of Figure 6.2 in this chapter. Do the same for the concept 'vehicle'.

4 . [Finegan and Besnier, p. 40-42, #6] As in Russian, word order in Spanish is used to encode information structure. The constituents of a sentence may be ordered in a variety of ways, as shown by the following examples from Castilian

Spanish, all of which can describe the same event. (S = subject; V = verb; O = direct object)Consuelo envió el paquete. Consuelo sent the packageEnvió Consuelo el paquete. sent Consuelo the package       "CONSUELO SENT THE PACKAGE." Envió el paquete Consuelo. sent the package ConsueloEl paquete lo envió Consuelo. the package it sent Consuelo

Consider the following conversational exchanges, focusing on the order of constituents in the answers.a. Q: ¿Qué hizo Consuelo?        what did Consuelo

"What did Consuelo do?"  A:   Consuelo preparó la sangría.

Consuelo prepared the sangria       "Consuelo made the sangria."b. Q:  ¿Quién comió mi bocadillo?

who ate my sandwich "Who ate my sandwich?"

  A:   Tu bocadillo lo comió Consuelo your sandwich it ate Consuelo "Consuelo ate your sandwich."

c. Q:  ¿A quién dió Consuelo este regalo? to whom gave Consuelo this present "Who did Consuelo give this present to?"

  A:  Este regalo lo dió Consuelo a su madre. this present it gave Consuelo to her mother."Consuelo gave this present to her mother."

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d. Q:  ¿Qué pasó? what occurred "What happened?"

  A:  Se murió Consuelo died Consuelo

      "Consuelo died."e. Q:  ¿Recibó Consuelo el premio?  received Consuelo the prize

"Did Consuelo get the prize?"  A:   No, el premio lo recibió Paquita.

no the prize it received Paquita"No, Paquita got the prize."

f. Q:   ¿Recibó Consuelo esta carta? received Consuelo this letter "Did Consuelo get this letter?"

  A: No, Consuelo recibió este paquete. no Consuelo received this package "No, Consuelo got this package."

g. Q:  ¿Recibó Consuelo el premio? received Consuelo the prize "Did Consuelo get the prize?"

  A:  Si, el premio lo recibió Consuelo. yes the prize it received Consuelo "Yes, Consuelo got the prize."

(A) On the basis of this data, describe how word order is used to mark information structure in statements (but not in questions). In particular, state which categories of information structure are marked through which word order possibility. Make the statement of your rules as general as possible.

(B) Notice that in certain sentences, the pronoun lo 'it' appears before the verb. What is the syntactic rule that dictates when it should and should not appear? Which rule of English does the presence of the pronoun in these sentences remind you of?

Assignment 12: Semantics II

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1. Translate the sentences below into truth-conditional logic. You should first break each sentence down into its various atomic statements (using upper-case letters to represent each statement), and then use connectives to relate the statements. Note that the sentences contain various sorts of deletion, so you need to reformulate them first.

Example: "Jack and Jill went up the hill."P = Jack went up the hill Q = Jill went up the hill

(a) A bear or a wolf frightened the boys. (b) Susan doesn't like squash or turnips. (c) John and Bill are going to the movies, but not Tom. (d) Either John and Mary are going to the museum, or I am going to bed. (e) Peter likes the Village People and Mary K.C. and the Sunshine Band.

2. Draw truth tables for the following expressions:

3. Let P, Q and R be true and let S be false. Find the truth values for the following statements:

4. Let's define a new connective in addition to AND ( ), OR (v) and NOT(¬), calling it IF-THEN (->). We need this connective to capture the meaning of conditional sentences like:a) If it rains, we will stay indoors.Here are two possible truth tables, defining the meaning of IF-THEN. Which one seems closer to the meaning of conditional sentences in English? Why?

IF-THEN1 P Q P->QT T TT F FF T T

F F T

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IF-THEN2 P Q P->QT T TT F FF T FF F T

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