The notes below are based on an introductory course I took on Linguistics during my first year in college. I appreciate Prof. Maya Abtahian for having taught a great course.

Linguistics

Linguistics is the study of human language.

Prescriptive Grammar (split of infinitives (e.g. to boldly go), preposition stranding (e.g. who did you go with / with whom did you go?) , difference in dialects/individuals, using “I shall” and “you will”; what a language should be)

Descriptive Grammar (Grammatical / Ungrammatical (wouldn’t make any sense / be understood), what a language is about)

Noam Chomsky: universal grammar - proposes the innateness of language (almost every sentence is new and never seen before; children can acquire language easily)

General nature of language

  1. Arbitrariness (symbolic nature of morphemes)

  2. Displacement (meanings are displaced from the presence) past/future tense, etc.

  3. Creativity (Openess & Recursion (in word “nationalization”; in phrases - X→XP - small phrases can be embedded within big ones, infinetly))

  4. Duality (meaningless parts create meaningful whole)

  5. Grammaticality / rule-governed (governed by strict rules)

  6. Cultural Transmission (different languages in different region, and need to be learned)

  7. Uniquely human (only human)

  8. Universal (all human)

  9. Every language (dialect) is complex, systematic and has variation

Phonology

  • Phoneme inventory

  • Phonological rules (underlying/basic form (the basic allophone, e.g. [i]) → derived/restricted form (e.g. [íː] in “bead”)) x → y / _z (x - class of sound; y - feature that changes; z - environment)

  • Phonotactics: Syllable [onset, rhyme[nucleus, coda]] e.g. lin, n is a coda

Most languages are based on pulmonic egressive airstream, created by compression of lung. (Other two: glottalic/velaric ejective/implosive)

4 Articulators: laryngeal, dorsal, coronal, labial

8 Places of Articulation: glottal, pharyngeal, uvular(French “r”), velar, palatal, alveolar, dental, labial

Manners of Articulation: stop, fricative, affricative, nasal, approximant (glide, i.e. semi-vowels)

Obstruents (stops, affricates, fricatives) vs. Sonorants (nasal stops, approximants, vowels)

Suprasegmental qualities / prosodies: length, stress and pitch

Consonant inventories - English is in “average”; Vowel quality inventories - English belongs to “large (7–14)” 

The number of consonants in the world’s languages ranges from roughly 6 to 122.

The number of vowels in the world’s languages ranges from roughly 2 to 14. 

Phonological processes: (Natural sound change - looks like some of the phonological rules)

  1. Assimilation (octo → otto)

  2. Dissimilation - either synchronic or diachronic

  3. Lenition/fortition (amica → amiga/amie)

  4. Deletion (word final [ə] in nose becomes dropped)

  5. Insertion (athlete insertion of a [ə] after [θ])

  6. Metathesis (reversal of segments) (periculum → peligro)

  7. Diphthongization/monophthongization ([iː]→[ɑɪ] in “ice”; [ɪʊ]→[u] in “rude”)

  8. Raising, lowering, fronting and backing of vowels

Alternation: morphophonemic rules concern two (or more) forms of the same morpheme, which are referred to as alternants

Morphology

Morphology: study of the structure of words

Morpheme: a minimal unit of sound and meaning

Morphological Processes:

  1. Affixation (suffixes, prefixes, circumfixes, infixes)

  2. Alternations (break/broke, Semitic Languages)

  3. Reduplication (total reduplication (Japanese ware / wareware) vs. partial reduplication)

  4. Compounding (making complex words out of a combination of stems, as opposed to stem and affix, e.g. German)

Hierarchical structure of words: words that has an internal structure, e.g., “unlockable”

Languages differ in terms of their:

  1. phonological inventories: phoneme inventory + tones

  2. morphology: inventories of elements (e.g. some have dual form, some only plural and singular, some only singular); what is expressed in a word

broad phonetic writing (stress+!!) vs. narrow phonetic writing (allophones e.g. aspiration)

contrastive/phonemic distribution: makes minimal pairs

noncontrastive/nonphonemic distribution:

  1. complementary distribution → allophones

  2. free variation

Another way of seeing this: Do they occur in the same environment?

  1. Yes - overlapping distribution → do they have different meanings?

    1. Yes - free variation (e.g. economics)

    2. No - contrastive distribution → minimal pairs (e.g. Hindi [p] and [ph])

  2. No - complementary distribution → allophones, and there is a phonological rule

mental dictionary →(allophonic rules)→ phonetic speech

phone allophone phoneme, as
morph allomorph morpheme

(phone is independent of language, and corresponds to IPA as it is only identified as its sound; phoneme is dependent on the language, as the smallest distinguishable sound that can create minimal pairs; allophone stresses the relationship between several phones, that they are in complementary distribution)

Free/Bound morph: can be a word on its own / prefix/infix/suffix/stem of a word

Lexical (content) Morphemes: presence is directly determined by what we are talking about; express somewhat concrete meanings; relatively infrequent; open-set membership; always has a stressed syllable (in languages like English).

Grammatical (function) Morphemes: presence obligated by the grammar of the language; express rather abstract meanings; very frequent; closed-set membership; typically lack stressed syllables.  

  1. Free Lexical: content nouns - person, book

  2. Bound Lexical (derivational): -ing (v. → n.) -ment, -ize [(1) change part of speech or the meaning; (2) nonproductivity; (3) suffixability]

  3. Free Grammatical: personal pronouns (I, she), conjunction(and, so), preposition(to, of)

  4. Bound Grammatical (inflectional): s(plural suffix & third person singular) -ing, -ed, -er(comparative), -est(superlative), -n(some past participle suffix) [(1) no function change (2) productivity (3)nonsuffixability], including case morphology as well (e.g. Latin declensions)

Morphological Fusion

Multiple meanings that cannot be separated (e.g. men: man+plural)

Translational Equivalents usually exists in lexical, not grammatical,  morphemes.

Langage varies from analytic (few if any bound morphemes, mostly free morphemes) to synthetic (bound morphemes attached to bound morphemes); word order becomes less important in synthetic languages.

Agglutenation languages glue morphemes together (without inflections) e.g. Swahili

Fusional languages: bound morphemes contain more than one meaning e.g. Spanish & Latin verb conjugations

Polysynthetic languages: words contain several stems and affixes e.g. Siberian Yupik

Among the allomorphs, one is regular (productive, predictable based on phonological context), while the irregular (unproductive, not predictable) allomorphs have to be memorized by speakers

Syntax

Constituents: a (group of) word(s) that function as a single unit within a hierarchical structure - Wikipedia

Function: relationship of the noun phrases to the verb and to other words and word groups in the sentences. 

Word Order: temporal or linear sequence of words of the sentence.

Coordination conjunction: and & or

Coordination: a sort of recursion: groups like sentence, NP, VP, PP may be expanded as a pair of such phrases.

Test for Constituents:

  1. Replacement test: sentence → n. (/pronoun); NP → pronoun; VP → do; PP → adverb

  2. Movement test: my appear in different places in different versions of a sentence. e.g. It is the koalas that live in trees. OR, change active/passive

  3. Answer to a question

  4. Grouping Ambiguity: attests to our awareness of the different possibilities for grouping in syntactic structure

Ambiguity

  1. Lexical ambiguity

  2. Structural ambiguity (e.g. unlockable): when a phrase or sentence has two or more meanings because of structure

    1. Grouping ambiguity: The boy ate the cake in the closet

    2. Function ambiguity: Visiting professors can be boring. (visiting as an infinitive verb / adj.; professor as object/subject) ??? which change is decisive?

Phrase Structure Rules:

  1. S → NP VP

  2. X → XP

  3. XP → (Spec) X Mn

  4. NP → (Det) (AjP) N (PP)

  5. VP → V ({NP, S, AjP}) (PP)

  6. PP → P NP

  7. AjP → (Deg) Aj

  8. X → X C X // C - conjunction

  9. (from Ch.18) VP → Aux V // Aux - auxiliary verb

  10. (from Ch.18) S → Comp S // Complementizer - “[that/if/because/so] it rained” (pp.297–298)

Overall: [[(Det) (AjP) N (PP)]NP [V ({NP, S, AjP})(PP)]VP]S

Grammatical/Ungrammatical: whether sentence is generated by rules or not.

4 types of verb complement

  • Take nouns as complements: see, eat, find, take, send

  • Take adjectives as complements: be, look, seem, feel, become

  • Take sentences as complements (sentential complement verbs): say, imagine, think, believe, promise

  • Take no complements (intransitive verbs): fall, smile, sleep, laugh, walk

  • Ditransitive verbs (give, send) take 3 arguments

Child Language Acquisition

  1. Typical (children usually are able to acquire the language they are supposed to learn (that of their community))

  2. Similar from child to child (stages of acquisition as below)

  3. Spontaneous (instruction in the usual sense is unnecessary)

  4. Creative (ability to create new sentences that they have never heard before e.g. over-regularization, etc.)

Stages of Language Acquisition

  1. cooing: velar consonants ([k], [g]) and back vowels ([u]) [6–8 weeks]

  2. babbling: unrecognizable but word-like vocalization [~6 months]

  3. start to differentiate only the phonemes of their parents’ language: [8 months ~ one year]

  4. holophrastic stage / one-word stage: after producing the first word [~1 year] to gradually(?) two-word stage / telegraphic speech [**18 months]

  5. first grammatical morpheme: **2 years

  6. telegraphic speech: two-word sentences [18 months]

  7. basic mastery: ~4 years

Mistakes / features:

  • phoneme substitution: fronting (consonants with more forward articulation replace those with less forward articulation); stopping (stops replace other manners of articulation); perseverance (preceding phone replaces other manners of articulation, e.g. [gagi] for “glasses”); anticipation: following phone replaces the preceding one.

  • morphological breakdown - Miami → my “ami”

  • Morphological rules: Overgeneralization (generalize productive rules to irregular ones) & Overregularization (result of overgeneralization: using two allomorphs together): twice e.g. come’s past tense said as “camed”, mess’s past tense becomes “mested”

  • Overextension (all things similar to leaf (leaves, vegetables, all green things) as a leaf) & underextension (calls a dog “dog” as if it is the dog’s name)

Explanations of Child language learning:

  1. Conditioned-response learning (i.e. classical conditioning - children are reinforced for their learning behavior) {sounds persuasive, but some phenomenons, e.g. double negatives, overextension, are “unstimulated”. Thus, comprehension must precede naturalistic production.}

  2. Imitation: attest to local vocabulary and accent, encouraged by parents as in “caregiver talk” {although, again, special features like over-generalizations cannot be imitated, and that children cannot give exact copy on esp. grammatical morphemes “nobody [don’t] likes me”}

  3. Hypothesis testing / trial and error learning: (i.e. operant conditioning) {where the hypotheses come from, why do the wrong form persist if “testing” proves them wrong}

  4. Innateness of language: physiological, both phonological and neurobiological; that language is more like walking than writing: although encouraged, it is more spontaneous than requiring necessary teaching (inherited predisposition to learn). {but, the physiological similarity may have arisen because of different functionalities like thinking and tool-using, not (solely) for language}

Language Change

Historical linguistics: an approach to linguistics (not a component)

Why do languages change

  1. Imperfect language learning (e.g. disappearance of voiceless bilabial fricatives into voiced bilabial fricatives; restructuring)

  2. Social motivations for change

  3. Language contact

  4. Natural articulary/perceptual processes

How fast do languages change

Not constant with each other or throughout time; after ~1000 years, not usually mutually intelligible; after ~10000 years, linguists cannot tell relationship. 

Components of Language Change: 

  1. semantic change: word changes meaning (elevation, pejoration, lateral shift, etc.)

  2. syntactic change: negation (ne pas); word order (sov to svo in Yiddish)

  3. morphological change: morphological paradigms

  4. phonetic/phonological change: sound change (both diachronic and synchronic (dialects))

Phonological change happens when one phoneme becomes completely lost, i.e. change in inventory (e.g. American dialects the combination of [a] and [ɔ]); while phonetic change is change in pronunciation of one phoneme. But if one phoneme becomes lost, the change is phonological. 

Dialect areas are separated by a bundle of lines known as isoglosses.

Relic area: area that has preserved older linguistic forms not found in the surrounding area

Diachronic change (along history) vs. Synchronic (present-day)

History of English

  • Old English (–1100)

  • Middle English (1100–1500)

  • Modern English (1500–present)

Relic Forms of a word: a word generally lost from a language but survives in specialized uses (e.g. “let” as hinder, “plumb” as lead, “wer” as man in werewolf)

Grimm’s Law: set of sound changes that affected voiced and voiceless stop consonants between Indo-European and Germanic languages. (Jacob Grimm) (e.g. p→f: pater→father; pes→foot)

Chain Shifts: change in one sound that triggers another sound to change in order to remain distinct (mostly vowels, but consonants are also possible - Grimm’s Law)

I. Great Vowel Shift in English:

  1. [i]→[əɪ]; [u]→[əu]

  2. [e]→[i]; [o]→[u]

  3. [a]→[æ]

  4. [ɔ]→[o]; [ɛ]→[e]

  5. [æ]→[ɛ]

  6. [e]→[i]

  7. [ɛ]→[e]

  8. [əɪ]→[aɪ]; [əu]→[au]

II. Nothern Vowel Shift

Leveling: when one of the two forms of a meaning becomes extinct, it is said to be leveled

Suppletive: fully irregular forms and are especially targets of leveling. 

Comparative Reconstruction: ???????

Lingua Franca - “independently of the linguistic history or structure of the language”, not necessarily but contains Pidgins and Creoles. “any language used by speakers of diverse languages to communicate with each other”

Eight Causes of Language Change: 

  1. Ease of Articulation (deletion - lost of whole phonemes, e.g. limb/limber, strong/stronger; assimilation - neighboring phonemes become alike - progressive(cows→z) vs. regressive(immovable, ingracious, insincere) assimilation; insertion (number, thunder - ease of articulation); dissimilation; metathesis(inverted adjacent phones - ask/aks))

  2. Expression of new meaning (things - chunnel; events - el niño effect; ideas - envelope, soap operas)

  3. Desire for novelty (jargon - specialized vocabulary of professionals: Argot(prevent others from understanding)/Euphemism(pass away/die)/In-group Markers; slang - specialized vocabulary of social groups, especially young social groups)

  4. Regularization (one form/one meaning principle; leveling in lexicon, do-insertion & usage of hopefully)

  5. Redundancy reduction (to eliminate phenomenon of >1 forms for one meaning - bifurcation (fish/fishes, hanged/hung))

  6. Metanalysis/backformation (clever - alc-oholic, shoppe vs. naive napron→apron)

  7. Obsolescence of meaning (disappear: icebox, choke, telegram)

  8. Language contact - external cause (vs. any other possible change - internal; words come from superstratum into substratum)

[Languages in contact refers to the languages that are spoken by bilinguals, and are not necessarily in geographical proximity] [A community made up of bilinguals is not necessarily the same as a bilingual community]

Language Families (p.430)

Current number of world’s languages: 7102; of which ~6000 languages suffer from mortality problems (endangered/moribound)

Typological differences between languages

(within the larger-scale similarity, i.e. universality, of languages)

  • Inventory difference (phonology, morphology)

  • morphology: how much is in a word

  • syntax: basic word order; fixed/flexible word order

  • pro-drop (still syntax): some languages allow drop of pronouns depending on information from the verb and context (e.g. Japanese)

Obstacles towards counting languages accurately:

  1. Chinese-type cases - dialects actually different enough to be considered a new language

  2. Swedish/Norwegian-type cases - different languages due to political/religious reasons that are actually mutually intelligible

  3. Arabic-type cases: Diglossia - extreme difference between casual and formal language

Language families (19 for now)

Indo-European protolanguage (parent language) → sibling languages 

Sir William Jones: credited for the recognition that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin has a common source, Indo-European.

Isolates: languages not yet shown to be part of the larger groups

Methodology:

  1. Language classification: to determine grouping of languages based on shared descent from a parent language

  2. Mass comparison: comparing the basic vocabulary (less likely to be borrowed/onomatopoeic words (doki-doki; kirakira; loooooong; huuuuuuge - iconic; indexical - hey → HEY), then exclude chance → common descent)

  3. Language reconstruction (comparative method / internal reconstruction [e.g. English irregular verbs]): (pp. 440–442)

Outcomes of human contact

  1. Pidgin language: (1) words of the foreign language (2) pronounced according to the phonology of the local languages (3) combined in simple sentences according to the syntax of the local languages. not native to anyone; morphology - no affixation, inflection, minimal function of morphemes, restricted question words / pronouns, universal negative marker; syntax - word order primarily used for grammatical function, less sentence pattern; lexicon - restricted inventory, primary for one source language (but not entirely); phonology - reduced inventory; may display variation

  2. Creole language: more thorough case of mixed languages, learned by children in that community as first language; phonology - preserve sounds in both input languages, sound from both substrates and superstrates; lexicon - words frequently from superstrates, those from substrates gradually become lost, internal innovations; morphosyntax: simplification (lack of inflectional morphology), no corpula in ascriptive-type predication (adjective phrases), TMA systems (pre-verbal markers and often in T-M-A order), similar inventory (past tense from “been”), serial verb construction in syntax; ### fully developed vocabulary and system of grammar -Wikipedia

  3. Code-switching (speakers need to know both source languages to correctly use/comprehend grammar and lexicon in code-switching)

  4. Mixed languages: a combination of two languages, with fixed grammar and vocabulary. Usually outcome of Pidgins and Creoles. [Michif: a language that is not traceable back to a single language family, thought of as a mixed language]

  5. OR, some more gentle changes: language shift (possibly leads to language loss); language maintenance (stable bilingualism)

Head Initial vs. Head Final pattern of languages

The order of head and complements (OR, free word order (e.g. Mapudungun) )

  1. head of a predicate (VP) is at the beginning of this phrase (HI) or at the end (HF);

  2. auxiliary verb precedes verb (HI, e.g. You may [aux] do [v.] this) or follows verb (e.g. studere debeo, I should study);

  3. pre-position (e.g. in the city) (HI) or post-position (the city PREP, e.g. Japanese)

  4. in relative clauses, whether the clause follows (HI) the phrase it is modifying or precedes (HF);

  5. in noun phrase“A’s B”, whether B comes first (HI, e.g. pater nobis) or B follows A’s (HF, e.g. English);

  6. whether an adjective follows (HI) noun or precedes noun.

Head final languages: Hindi, Japanese

Linguistic Variation: different ways of saying the same thing. 

Factors of change:

  1. More populous speech communities (more people contributing to change)

  2. Tight social networks (value of in-group markers ↑)

  3. Groups removed from linguistic standards (less likely to be retained by correction)

  4. Subordinate bilingualism (in contrast to coordinate bilingualism, two languages are not used equally. Thus borrowing from the more dominant language would occur, e.g. Japanese → Chinese writing system; English → French)

Societal interpretation

  1. Geography (dialects → lose mutual intelligibility → formation of new languages (e.g. Spanish and French as dialects of Latin))

  2. Socioeconomic status (SES) (registers (continuum of recognizably different linguistic levels or styles) → sociolects (e.g. William Labov 1966: post-vocalic r in stores Saks’, Macy’s and Klein’s (pp.459–460)))

  3. Ethnicity/race (African American English - Ebonics/BEV - be-deletion; habitual be; consonant deletion (I foun’ something))

  4. Age (slang)

  5. Occupation (jargon)

  6. Religion (Urdu & Hindi; Serbian & Croatian; Amharic & Argobba)

  7. Gender (gender preferential differences - (1) lexical differences (2) pitch (3) non-standard usage (4) conversation (back-channeling); gender exclusive, as in Japanese)

Three sorts of competence needed for complete language use: grammatical, conversational, and sociolinguistic competence

To show/not show familiarity:

  • forms of address (how to address a person - Mr.xxx vs. first name vs. nickname, etc.)

  • polite pronouns (applicable in Spanish, French, Japanese - sometimes as third person singular)

  • ellipsis: omission of major constituents (person with familiarity share a lot of informations - allows for omission)

  • contraction: omission of phonemes in fast speech (→ grammaticization → “proper” spelling of them)

  • code-switching (may be necessitated by speakers’ less degree of grammatical competence in one of the languages) (outcomes of individual and community bilingualism, as well as borrowing)

Covert prestige (deliberate use of taboo words, switching language - to gain acknowledge of one social group) vs. overt prestige (hypercorrections: “they asked he and I” rather than “they asked him and me”; malapropism: replacing unfamiliar word with familiar ones, e.g. sympathy for symphony)

Ch. 10 - Language & the Brain (p.151)

Word frequency effect: common words are processed faster than uncommon words.

Recency effect: words that we see more recently are processed better.

Most knowledge comes from brains that have been injured (stroke, head trauma, degenerative disease - cause lesion; aphasia) (whereas nowadays the function shifts to wards computer techniques - do not need to wait for the patient to die)

Independence of language and cognition(intelligence): Savant’s syndrome (normal language ability but problematic cognition); Williams syndrome (genetic linguistic impairment); - both are cognition impairments without linguistic fluency. But, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: language determines/influence thoughts and cognition. 

Human brain is around 3 pounds, has ~100 billions of nerve cells

The brain is divided into two (roughly symmetrical) hemispheres, divided by a deep groove and connected by corpus callosum, a band of nerve fibres.

Contralateralization: left hemisphere controlling the right part of the body. 

Lateralization: certain tasks are performed/processed primarily by/in one hemisphere as opposed to the other (takes place early in life but not from birth)

Left hemisphere is associated with speech -

  • motor activity is related to speech

  • language is originally gestural/manual rather than oral

Aphasia: (affected speech caused by brain injury)(language impairment without other cognitive impairment - see also Specific Language Impairment, SLI)

  • Broca’s aphasia (dominant (usually left) hemisphere, lower rear portion of frontal lobe) [comprehension(+), grammatical morpheme(-), agrammatism, interpretable speech but not fluent] (non-fluent aphasia) (telegraphic speech - absence of function words/morphemes)

  • Wernicke’s aphasia (dominant hemisphere, temporal&parietal lobes) [comprehension(-), lexical morphemes / content words (-) esp. nouns, fluent speech but no coherence, senseless and unaware of it] (fluent aphasia) (neologisms - meaninglessly created new words) (severe Wernicke’s aphasia may be called jargon aphasia)

  • Transcortical sensory aphasia: well-preserved repetition, but no comprehension or propositional speech

  • Anomic aphasia: (damage in temporal, parietal area) inability to name things; word-finding problems

  • Agrammatic aphasia: recognizes lexical stimulus, but no grammatical stimulus (see Fromkin, p.50)

  • Does Hamlet have Wernicke’s aphasia? Yes - odd expressions; makes little sense; No - no neologism; grammatical speech Conclusion: Wernicke’s area is crucial for lexical matters, while Broca’s area for syntactic matters (and this also holds for deaf signers!)

Alexia / acquired dylexia (behind Wernicke & occipital lobe) p.159

Brain injury after 11 years old has permanents effects on language (attest to critical period theory)

Methodology of brain (pp.154–156)

  1. Sodium amytal injection - relationship between handedness and language dominant hemisphere

  2. Dichotic listening - establishment of right ear advantage in children at a young age (~5 years lod) (shows contralateralization of the brain)

  3. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) [shows that left hemisphere is more sensitive to ungrammatical/nonsensical sentences]

  4. MRI combined with CT scan (reveals lesions in the brain)

  5. PET (positron emission tomography (injection of isotope to trace blood flow)) combined with fMRI (functional MRI) - detects change in brain activity - measure metabolic activity to particular areas of the brain (trace change in local oxygenated blood flow → reflects neuronal activity)

Language is an analytic activity. (p.160)

  • Left hemisphere - analytic & temporal - language, music in musician

  • Right hemisphere - intuitive, holistic - face recognition, music in non-musicians

Crain and Nakayama “The girl is tall?”→ “Is the girl is tall?” (gap) → “Is the girl _ tall?” copying of the auxiliary verb (structure-dependent rules vs. structure independent rules (type III error, i.e. ungrammatical, but I and II are more reasonable - suggesting that they never consider structure-independent rules, and that the children identifies the whole string of words as one constituent)) → structure depend

Invert of Subject - Auxiliary verb: last thing children do when forming a wh- question

Open lexical categories: n., v., adj., adv.; Closed lexical categories: DET PREP AUX PRON CONJ

Phrasehood test: passed by (1) movie/book titles and (2) children’s speech

Ch.11 - Adult Language Learning (p.167)

Foreign language vs. second language (learned inside the community in which it is spoken)

L2 acquisition is problematic, qualitatively different form L1 acquisition, and is characterized by interference.

Adult language learning vs. Child language acquisition: 

  1. Cognitive: similar but different elements → re-interpretation (positive transfer (helps) / negative transfer (interference with old knowledge → e.g. foreign accents))

  2. Metalinguistic knowledge: learning rather than acquisition (is a conscious process)

  3. Affective Differences: attitudes (motivation - integrative (desire to integrate into the society) & instrumental (get something practical/concrete from language learning)), emotions and personality

  4. Critical period (critical age) - (1) maturation version - loss of biological basis  (2) exercise version - experience of learning first language (i.e. superior capacity for learning language - if not exercised, becomes lost) [evidence: (1) variable success in adults (2) significance of motivation (in children no one seems particularly motivated to acquire language) (3) fossilization - long-lasting mistakes resulting from the other language (4) Feral children (p.175)] (Johnson & Newport on 46 native Chinese/Korean speakers leaning English) e.g. Genie

Similarities: (p.178)

  1. Creative construction: creativity in forming new sentences

  2. Natural orders: same pattern of some grammar development

Two ways of L2 acquisition:

  • Sequential bilingualism - acquiring the second language after the first language is acquired

    • Interlanguage grammars

    • heritage language - more native accent, but not for other parts of grammar

  • Simultaneous bilingualism - acquisition of two languages simultaneously (may lead to language mixing - one syntax shows in the other language)

    • Unitary system hypothesis (complementary lexicon - one vocabulary and one lexicon ??? )

    • Separate system of hypothesis (child builds two systems separately, two monolinguals in one head)

Ch.15 - Six ways to get new words (p.239)

Principle of limited Novelty - new meanings in old forms and old meanings in new forms (p.241)

  1. Clipping(NOT acronyming!): shortening of words (e.g. pub for “public house”, pet form “petite”, fan; DOES NOT INCLUDE Mr./Mrs. because reading has not changed)

  2. Acronyming - first letters of words - word acronyming (scuba “self-contained under water breathing apparatus”, laser “Light Amplification Stimulated Emission Radiation”, NASA, radar - lower case possibly intending to replace longer form) vs. spelling acronyms / initialism: TLC, PR, PCR, DNA…

  3. Blending: more than one words taken one part of each (motel, chunnel, brunch, glassphalt)

  4. Metanalysis/Reanalysis - wrong-cutting (napron→apron; ekename→nickname)

  5. Invention: from scratch/people/companies’ names (Kodak, snob, geek, barf, Kleenex)

  6. Borrowing/loanwords (pp.247–248) (mutton, pork, beef, karaoke, etc.) Nativilization: in spelling, pronunciation and others

cf. Etymology (p.249)

Ch.16 - Seven more ways to get new words

  1. Derivation: use of derivation/inflectional affixes (e.g. energy → energizer); usually after narrowing/extension (e.g. readable, unbalanced)

  2. Zero-derivation / functional shift / conversion (swim: v.→n.; fun: n.→v.; metaphors) p.257

  3. Compounding: combining words into one word (greenhouse, dryclean: stress change ??? pp.258–259)

  4. Extension/widening/broadening: widening of word meaning (red, holiday, silverware, understand; idioms: extension of entire phrase)

  5. Narrowing: narrowing of meaning of word (band, building, doctor); includes elevation/amelioration (brave, prize, great, terrific, bad), pejoration/derogation (mean, idiot, criticize, villain) and lateral shifts (harvest, bead, trade); euphemism: extension of ordinary words to express unpleasant/embarrassing ideas

  6. Bifurcation: two form, one meaning → one form (p.262); usually similar to / includes narrowing (hanged/hung, metal/mettle, have [hæf] (two) vs. [hæv] (to), shoppe vs. shop) {either one of the two become no longer used, or each develops its own meaning} {startes from either homonyms (one form, two meanings) or synonyms (two form, ~one meaning - not interchangeable)}

  7. Backformation (belongs to metanalysis) (burger, mar-athon, alc-oholic, -gate)

Ch.17 - Sentence Meaning

Relationship of form and meaning:

  1. Compositional (1) linear (small phrases form larger phrases than sentence) (2) nonlinear (extraposition - “a man is at the door who wants to speak with you”; wh-fronting - “who is this?”) (pp.173–174) - discontinuous constituents

  2. Non-compositional: sum ≠ Σ parts (idioms: derived by metaphors / semantic extension)

Principle of Compositionality

The meaning of a sentence is determined by the meaning of its word in conjunction with the way they are put together syntactically. 

Two elements of meaning: Sense (separate from a word’s reference, more enduring) vs. Reference (the particular entities to which some expression refers): morning star and evening star have the same reference in reality, but their sense (one in the morning and the other in the evening) are different from each other. Both are meanings, as opposed to forms. 

Thematic Roles: (vs. grammatical relations, as subject, direct/indirect object, etc.) roles that noun phrases play with respect to the action/state described by the verb in sentence

  1. Agent: “doer” of the action

  2. Patient/theme: undergoes a change of state

  3. Location: location of deed/event

  4. Instrument: entity employed by an agent in a deed

  5. Time: time of deed/event

  6. Recipient: receiver of result of deed of agent

  7. Experiencer: perceiver of a stimulus

  8. Stimulus: entity perceived/experienced by an experiencer

  9. Cause: cause not an agent

  10. Goal: endpoint of a change in location or possession

  11. Source: where the action originates

Categories of verbs:

  • Agent & Patient - open, eat, fill

  • Agent, no Patient - resign, smile, wake up

  • Agent, patient and recipient - give, award, send

  • Agent, goal - walk, go, travel

  • Recipient, patient: win, get, receive

Some predicates allow their arguments to be implicitly stated (silent), e.g. “I sent (you) the money.”; but not “I put the groceries (on the floor).”

Paraphrases - synonymous sentences: grammar relations change, but semantic roles remain constant

ergative language p.283

Truth value: sentence can be assigned either true or false, (i.e. we know right away whether they are true or false; we can imagine what the world must be like when they are true or false) i.e. we can identify truth conditions ??? for sentences (conditions necessary for the sentence to be true or false) [e.g. the individual designated by the sentence must be in the designated condition for the sentence to be true. if true, the sentence is synthetically true; else, synthetically false]

Ch.18 - Sentence Form p.290

Paraphrasing dependent on meaning (lexical):

  • Open-type verbs: open, eat, frighten, see (i.e. transitive verb)

    • [Vpass, Agent, Patient] → [Patient[beAux[Vppart([by Agent])]VP]VP]S

  • Spray-type verbs: spray, stuff, spread, smear, paint

  • Give-type verbs: agents, patients, recipients (suitable for dative movement ??? p.292)

    • [V, Pa, Re] → [V Pa [to Re]] or [V Re Pa]

Paraphrasing dependent on form (grammatical): Yes/no questions (fronting of be, have and auxiliary verbs); information questions (wh-fronting, p.292)

Deep structures (underlying form) →(auxiliary inversion, wh-fronting)→ surface structures, ready for phonetic form

Why paraphrase? (p.301)

  1. Forgrounding & backgrouding (e.g. prepositional adverb inversion (pp.302–303))

  2. Distinguishing Sentence Type (questions, etc.)

Ch.19 - Pragmatics (p.312)

Pragmatics: relation between language and its context of use (p.312)

  1. Ambiguity (≠ vagueness (e.g. I bought a dog), because it’s limited to ~2 interpretations)

    1. Lexical ambiguity (resulted from homonyms (homophones - same sound / homographs - same spelling); homonyms are similar but not equal to polysemy (semantic extension into several meanings, a single pronunciation is associated with more than two meanings that are distinct but related) also, there is antonymy, where two words are opposite in meaning [e.g. alive/dead (complementary pairs, a = not b); big/small (gradable pairs: one is marked [e.g. how big is this → “big” is marked] and one is not marked); give/receive(relational opposites: display symmetry in meaning)])

    2. Grouping Ambiguity (i.e. structural ambiguity, structural ambiguity can include functional ambiguity if part of speech/relationship in sentence also change.)

    3. Functional Ambiguity

  2. Deictics: morpheme with variable referential meaning:

    1. Personal deictics = personal pronouns

    2. Spatial temporal deictics (demonstrative pronouns like “this” as pronoun, n.; here, there, these, those, now, yesterday, tomorrow)

    3. Definiteness (demonstratives, the; e.g. [this] book)

  3. Figures of speech - metonymy (natural association in time/space, e.g. synecdoche - part to refer to the whole) & metaphor (like icon, while the former is like index); personification (part of metaphor, attributing human characters); hyperbole (extravagant), irony (unreasonably extreme case) —— all above can be idioms (stand up for - metonymy; xxx is the mother of xxx - metaphor)

  4. Indirect illocution (illocution - to speak with an intent) (p.319)

    1. direct illocution: use of performative vert (warn, promise, request)

    2. indirect illocution: leave the intent unexpressed/unovert

Declarative speech acts: bring about new situation (I sentence you five years in jail / “You are out” during a baseball game)

Felicity conditions: conditions that validate an illocution

Presupposition: something assumed to be true in a sentence (presupposing sentence) which asserts other information. i.e. if presupposition is false, the presupposing sentence is also false

Cooperative Principle: contribute meaningfully to the accepted purpose and direction of conversation.

  • Maxim of - (1) relevance (2)quality (be truthful) (3)quantity (4)manner (be clean)

Ch.20 - The Unity of Language (p.331)

  1. Absolute non-implicational universals -

    1. Markedness - less common and less basic features (whereas unmarked categories has greater frequency, variants, and simpler form) (p.333); Zipf’s Law: correlation of (increasing) frequency and (lesser) form {marked: [aspirated+] stops, [voiced+] obstruents, [-voiced] sonorants, bilabial (opposed to labiodental) fricatives, [nasal+] vowels, [-round] back vowels} {more marked: objective > subjective; negative > affirmative; feminine > masculine; second person > first person > third person; past tense > present tense}

    2. all languages have nouns and verbs; at least one negative morpheme; at least one voiceless stop; syllables are formed by consonant and vowel (CV syllables); relative(adjective) clauses

  2. Non-implicational universal tendencies

    1. Languages tend to have fricatives & adjectives

    2. tend to have SOV/SVO (pp.335–336) order (77%), or VSO order (18%)

  3. Absolute implicational universals

    1. if there is mid vowel, then there is high vowel

    2. if there is dual (and singular) form in number, then there is plural form

    3. if there is relative clause, there must be clauses whose “head of clause is coreferential with the subject of the clause” (noun phrase accessibility: subject > object > indirect object > other prepositional object)

  4. Implicational Universal Tendencies:

    1. if nasal consonant is present, then there tends to be /n/

    2. if singular and plural are distinguished by suffix, the suffix tends to be on plural

    3. if the language is VO order, modifiers tend to follow head (p.337–338)

Poverty of stimulus - suggests innateness of language (e.g. c-command: a pronoun cannot c-command and precede its antecedent) (pp.339–341)

Explanations for language universals:

  1. Phylogenetic unity of languages

  2. Functional unity (Zipf’s Law → more efficiency) of language

  3. Physiological unity of humans

  4. Innateness of language

Practice problems

  • The precocious child ate the cake in the closet

  • Thematic roles:

    • “The boy [agent] took the book [patient/theme] from the cupboard [source] with a handcart [instrument].”

    • “The hay [patient] was loaded on the trunk [goal] by the farmer [agent].”

    • “The ice [theme/experiencer] melted.”

    • “The midday sun [cause] feels hot to me [experiencer].”

  • Type of ambiguity:

    • “Are the chicken ready to eat?” Function Ambiguity, because eat could be vt., with chicken as object, or eat could be vi. with chicken as subject.

    • “They read books.” Lexical, NOT functional, because past tense is part of lexicon. Neither part of speech, nor subject/object relationship, changes.

    • “I know clever people like you.” Functional & lexical

    • “Mom’s home cooking.” Functional & grouping

    • “What gets wetter the more it dries? A towel” Functional: dry as vi. “to become dry” or as vt. “to make dry”

  • Test of constituents:

    • “xxx wants to go to Rome to study Italian.” Use replacement test to show “to Rome to study Italian” is a constituent: “xxx wants to go there to study Italian”

Others

Lexical morpheme is content words, as opposed to grammatical morpheme (function words).

Content words can be concrete (book, table, computer) or abstract (exam, linguistics, concept, happiness).

Content vs. abstract, just as lexical vs. grammatical, is not necessarily free morphemes. They could be bound morphemes as well.

dieresis: as ï in naïve, separation of two vowels

Notes

  1. Page number comes from LIN 110 textbook: G. Hudson, Essential Introductory Linguistics, 2000

  2. Blue texts come from lecture slides (ppt) and notes from lectures (notebook)