1 .An Introduction to Linguistics and language
1. What is Linguistics?
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It endeavors to answer the question--what is language and how is represented in the mind? Linguists focus on describing and explaining language and are not concerned with the prescriptive rules of the language. 2. Basic criteria for doing Linguistics
?1. Objectivity ?2. Explicitness ?3. Rigorousness ?4. Adequacy 3. The Scope of Linguistics(1)
? General Linguistics: the study of language as a whole ? Phonetics: the study of sounds in linguistic communication
? Phonology: the study of the sound patterns of language. It is concerned with how sounds are put together and used to convey meaning in communication.
? Morphology : the study of the way in which the symbols are arranged and combined to form words.
4. The Scope of Linguistics (2)
? : Syntax the study of sentence structure. It attempts to describe what is grammatical in a particular language in term of rules ? Semantics: the study of meaning.
? Pragmatics: the study of meaning in context
? Sociolinguistics: the study of social aspects of language and its relation with society. ? Psycholingustics:the study of language with relation to psychology ? Applied linguistics: the study of applications of linguistics. 5. Some distinctions in linguistics ? Prescriptive vs.descriptive ? Synchronic vs. diachronic ? Speech and writing ? Langue and parole
? Competence and performance
? Traditional grammar and modern linguistics(linguistics is descriptive while traditional grammar is prescriptive; modern linguistics regards spoken language as primary, not the written; modern linguistics differs from traditional grammar in that it does not force language into a Latin-based framework.)
6. What is language?
? Language is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of dictionary-makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground. ? Walt Whitman 7. The definition of language
?Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication 8. Design features (Properties)
? Arbitrariness: vast majority of linguistic expressions are arbitrary ? Productivity: creativity or open-endedness ? Duality: double articulation(sounds and meanings) ? Displacement: eg. Santa Claus, Superman, dragon ? Cultural transmission: meme, memics
? (Discreteness:the sounds used in language are meaningfully distinct. Eg. pack, back) 9. Assignments
? Comment on the definition of language. ?Summarize the design features of language.
?What is your understanding of synchronic study of language
2.Chapter 2 Phonetics and phonology
1. Phonetics: the sounds of language
", Three branches of phonetics
", Articulatory Phonetics发音语音学: the production of speech sounds. ", Auditory Phonetics听觉语音学: the study of the perception of speech sounds
", Acoustic Phonetics声学语音学: the study of the physical production and transmission of speech sounds.
2. Organs of speech: 1.The pharyngeal cavity喉腔 2.The oral cavity口腔 3.The nasal cavity鼻腔 3. Two kinds of transcription
", Broad transcription宽式标音: transcription with letter-symbols
", Narrow transcription窄式标音: transcription with letter-symbols and the diacritics 4. Classification of English consonants 5. Classification of English vowels
6. Phonology : the sound patterns of language
", Difference ", Phone, phoneme, allophone
", Phonemic contrast, complementary distribution, minimal pair
7. Phones, phonemes, and allophones
", Phonology is the study of sound patterns of language( i.e. how sounds are arranged to form meaningful units) and the function of each sound. It reveals what are the possible combinations of sounds in a language and explains why certain words take the form they do. 8. Phone 音素
", phone: the smallest perceptible discrete segment of sound in a stream of speech
i) phonetic unit ii) not distinctive of meaning iii) physical as heard or produced iv) marked with [ ] 9. Phoneme 音位
", the minimal unit in the sound system of a language. With phonemes, we establish the patterns of organization within the infinitely large number of sounds. Each language can be shown to operate with a relatively small number of phonemes (15-80). No two languages have the same phonemic system. 10. Phoneme 音位
i) phonological unit ii) distinctive of meaning iii) abstract, not physical iv) marked with / /. 11.Three requirements for identifying minimal pairs:
1) different in meaning; 2) only one phoneme different; 3) the different phonemes occur in the same phonetic environment.
", Minimal set: pat, mat, bat, fat, cat, hat, etc.
11. Allophone 音位变体: phonic variants/realizations of a phoneme 12. Phonological rules:
", Phonological patterning is rule-governed. [blik] and [kilb], though not found in English, can be possible combinations, while [kbil] or [lkib] cannot. Sequential rules are those that account for the combination of sounds in a particular language. They are language-specific, as in the
following cases:
", * [tlait] [iltrit] 13.Sequential rule
", If three consonants should cluster together at the beginning of a word, the combination should follow the order/sequence below: ", a. The first phoneme must be /s/
", b. The second phoneme must be /p/, /t/ or /k/
", c. The third phoneme must be /l/, /r/, or /w/. spring, string, squirrel, split, screen 14. Assimilation rule
", A sound may change by assimilating/copying a feature of a sequential/neighboring sound, e.g. impossible, irresistible, illegal [in-] ", Question: What other examples?
", sink /since ", pan cake ", sun glasses ", five past seven ", has to 15. Deletion rule
", A sound may be deleted even though it may be orthographically represented. 16.Stress, tone, and intonation
", Suprasegmental （超切分）phonology ", Suprasegmental phonemes: ", stress, tone and intonation 17.Stress重音
", Word stress/sentence stress ", Primary stress/secondary stress
", Stress of compounds: ‵blackbird / black ‵bird; ‵greenhouse / green ‵ house ", Sentence stress: Depending on the relative importance of the words; contrastive stress 18. Tone (声调）
", Different rates of vibration produce different frequencies, which are termed as different pitches. Pitch variations are distinctive of meaning.
", In some languages like Chinese, pitch variations are called tones. Languages using tones are tone languages.
19. Intonation（语调）
", When pitch, stress and length variations are tied to the sentence, they combine to become known as intonation.
Three major types of English intonation: a. falling tone/tune b. rising tone/tune c. fall-rise tone/tune
20. Assignments:
", Difference between phonetics and phonology
", Phone, phoneme, allophone
", Phonemic contrast, complementary distribution, minimal pair
3. Morphology（词法）
1. Morphology is the study of word formation and structure. It studies how words are put together from their smaller parts and the rules governing this process. 2. Two kinds of words
", 1. Open class words: content words .e.g. nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs
", 2. Closed class words: grammatical words or functional words. E.g. conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns
3. Word Relations
", Words can be related to other words, e.g. \— \
", The rules that relate such sets of words are called Word Formation Rules. Thus, the morphology contains
? fundamental elements – morphemes ? rules of combination -- Word Formation Rules 4. Morphemes
", The elements that are combining to form words are called morphemes. A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning you can have in a language. ", we know three things about every morpheme: 1. its meaning 2. its form (the sounds that make it up) 3. a rule of combination (put it before/after/inside the stem) 5. A case: ", Unhappy ", Happier ", unhappier
6. Bound and Free Morphemes
", \
", The morpheme \
", But the morpheme \? \than one.\
", Therefore, \7. Affixes
", Morphemes added to free forms to make other free forms are called affixes. There are four principle kinds of affixes:
1. prefixes (at beginning) — \2. suffixes (at end) — \
3. circumfixes (at both ends) — \otherwise attested independent prefixes and suffixes.) 4. infixes (in the middle) -- \8.Derivational morphemes
", Derivational morphemes may or may not change the category, or grammatical class of words. ", E.g. Noun--- Adjective ", affection + ate ", alcohol+ ic 9. Inflectional Morphology
", Morphology that interacts with syntax (sentence structure) is called INFLECTIONAL
MORPHOLOGY Some examples are: ? person? number? gender ? noun class ? case ? tense ", Inflectional morphemes never change the category. Inflectional morphemes do not change the \ones. 10. A Rule for Forming some English Words 11. Compounds 12. Other ways of Forming Words 13. Word-formation:
the creation of new words on the basis of existing structural devices in the language
derivation compounding
derivational affixation clipping, abbreviation, acronyms conversion
14. Word formation
", * affixation ", * coinage: Ford, Kodak ", * compounding/composition: hot-line, keep-fit
", * conversion /functional shift : knee, cool, trigger, brake ", * derivation: alcoholic, affectionate
", * back-formation:edit, babysit, massproduce, laze ", * blending: smog, motel, globesity
", * shortening (clipped words, acronym) ", * borrowing: tea, algebra
15. Compare the following derived words: in how far do they differ? Lab OED 16. Compare the following derived words: in how far do they differ? ", lab babysit (from: babysitter)
17. Compare the following derived words: in how far do they differ? ", institution-al ",skin-deep 18. Compare the following derived words: in how far do they differ? ", to strength-en ", to house (e.g. this building houses 500 families)
19. Assignments
", Distinguish the following terms: ", Open class words and closed class words
", Bound morpheme and free morpheme
", Inflectional morpheme and derivational morpheme ", List some rules of word formation
4. syntax
1. Syntax is a branch of linguistics that studies how words are combined to form sentences and the rules that govern the formation of sentences.
2. Syntactic rules
", How do we COMBINE WORDS to make SENTENCES? Syntax uses trees (just as in morphology) but the trees are built on WORDS instead of morphemes. Words are the fundamental units of sentences. The laws of combination for words are the syntactic rules.
3. Sentence Structure
", We know that there is structure in sentences separate from the meaning of the sentence because of the difference between \", (1) Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. ", (2) Green sleep furiously ideas colorless. ", Which sounds better ? 4. Word-level categories ", Major lexical categories
", N( Noun) book, boy ", V(Verb) run, buy ", A(Adjective) happy, heavy ", P (Preposition) about, in ", Minor lexical categories ", Det (determiner) the, a this ", Deg (Degree word) quite, very ", Qual (Qualifier) often, always ", Aux(Auxiliary) must, should ", Con (Conjunction) and, but 5. Three criteria for judging the word’s categories
", 1.meaning Noun—entity ", 2.inflection -ed, -s ", 3.distribution the girl Det+ N 6. Phrase categories
", Phrases are constructed out of a \
? Noun Phrase (NP) ? Verb Phrase (VP) ? Adjective Phrase (AP) ? Prepositional Phrase (PP) 7. Head, specifier, complement
", Head: the word around which a phrase is formed ", Specifier: the words on the left side of the heads