Chapter 1 - A Language Like English PDF

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Chapter 1 - A Language Like English Thursday, September 20, 2018

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The pronunciation of ask and aks is an example of metathesis, a systematic process of sound change. We'll read more about it in Chapter 3. Metathesis involves the reversal, or switching, of two sounds.

All living languages change over time, and all show variation. For example, the Modern English word bird used to be brid. Just because a current form was common in English 1,500 years ago doesn’t mean that we should use it today or think its somehow better. For example, many English speakers do not think of the word ask and aks as equal. But in the structural system of the English language, ask and aks are linguistically equal ways to refer to the act of posing a question, and they are related historically to each other.

Characteristic of Language: humans are held accountable for their communication - For example, if a nearsighted bird mistakenly warns of a predator day after day, the other birds will fly away nonetheless. Animals are not held accountable for their communication, but humans are. Recall the story of the boy who cried wolf. Characteristic of Language: language is a source of power - Names are powerful - Words have the power to offend - Some believe words may have magical powers Characteristic of Language: language defines us as individuals and indicates our societal standing - Often we make judgements about people and discriminate for or against them based on their language. - Humans size each other up whenever they meet, evaluating each other's clothes, haircut, demeanor, language and more. Characteristic of Language: language distinguishes us from all other animals - Human language is one of the defining features of being human

Definition of human language: Human language is a conventional system of signs that allows for the creative communication of meaning. Conventional: There is no direct relationship between words and the meaning they represent. Therefore, the meaning of words rests on conventional understanding. That is, the understanding of words is shared by a shared community of speakers. Ex. English or Lisheng could mean the language you are reading right now

System: The organization of language is rule governed. We cannot combine words any which way we want in a sentence, but must instead follow specific word-order rules. Ex. Any which way in a sentence vs. which a any in sentence way Creative communication of meaning: Language allows speakers to create new utterances to convey new meaning as needed using their linguistic abilities.

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Conventionality / Arbitrariness • Human language depends on convention • There is no direct relationship between form and meaning • A set of sounds or gestures carries a specific meaning because we all agree that is does • Ex. Giving someone the middle finger. We, as a community of speakers, have agreed that raising just your middle finger to someone is offensive. But there there's nothing inherently wrong with this action.

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) - A Swiss linguist whose ideas have shaped modern linguistics Signifier + Signified = Linguistic Sign (form) + (content) = (a word) (string of sounds) + (meaning) = (a word) Signifier: is the linguistic form i.e. the string of words Signified: the concept to which the signifier refers to (object or idea) Sign: the relationship of the signifier and the signified create a meaningful word Note: - The relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. There is no direct relationship between the sound of a word and its meaning. The obvious exception to the arbitrariness principle is onomatopoetic words, such as slush or plop. - The relationship between linguistic signs is systematic. The meaning of a linguistic sign is related to and in some ways determined by the meaning of the other signs in the system. The system of interrelated signs, which makes up language, is what Saussure called langue. It is the underlying abstract system of a language--the signs and their relationship to one another. Parole refers to the actual speech that the speakers produce, based on this system.

Noam Chomsky, an influential linguist of the 20th century, distinguished between: Linguistic competence: refers to a speaker's knowledge of grammatical rules Linguistic performance: is a speaker's realization of these rules in his or her speech Linguistic competence can also include a person's ability to negotiate conversations and other discursive situations and how to select (consciously or unconsciously) among linguistic variants in a specific linguistic context.

Creativity The grammar of human language allows speakers to create and understand an infinite number of utterances from a finite set of linguistic resources (sounds, words, grammatical rules). Infinite?? Yes, consider that you have never before encountered the exact sequence of words that you have read so far and yet you have been understanding this "creative input" with no linguistic difficulty. An example of an infinite number of "new utterances": The experts said that the newscaster said that some random people on the street said

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that we said that they said that her friend Lola said……that the near-sighted oriole went to get her eyes checked. Every time we add a new "X said" clause into this sentence, the meaning changes, and we can add a infinite number of these clauses into such a structure. The capacity of a language to embed an infinite number of elements into its grammatical structures is know as recursion. This is another feature that distinguishes human language from other animal's communication systems. Recursion is the ability to say things infinitely differently and comprehend things in novel ways. Example: It was a good lecture. It was a very good lecture. It was a very very good lecture. It was a very very very good lecture. Sue said, it was a very very very good lecture. Sally said that Sue said it was a very... ... ... ... We can go on like this infinitely.

Grammar and Grammatical Grammar = the structure and rules governing a language that a speaker consciously and subconsciously knows and uses. Includes sound, word formation, syntax and semantics. Grammatical = all language constructs that conform to the systematic rules of a language and are comprehensible to other native speakers

What is Linguistics? Linguistics is the scientific study of language as a system and social phenomenon Phonology - the study of sound systems and sound change Phonetics - the description and classification of sounds and their production and perception Morphology - the study of how words form Syntax - considers the structure of phrases, clauses, and sentences Semantic - the study of meaning, the relationship between linguistic signs and the things or ideas they represent Stylistics - the study of language as it is used in written contexts Sociolinguistics - the study of language variation by region Applied Linguistics - all applications of linguistic theory to real world problems Psycholinguistics - the way in which we acquire and understand language Subfields tend to overlap. For example, phonology and morphology are often interconnected, as are syntax, semantics and discourse.

Human Language vs. Animal Communication How do animals communicate? 1) By means of sound 2) By means of movement - Other species vocalize and communicate with one another, but vocalization and speech are not the same, and neither are communication and language. - Unlike humans, other animals do not have an infinitely creative grammar.

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- Our ability to speak depends partly on the position of the human larynx, which is lower in the throat than on other primates and therefore can express greater variety of sounds. - Speech also depends partly on our muscular tongue and uniquely shaped jaw which work together to produce the distinctive sounds of the human language. - Unlike other animals, we have fine motor control over the tongue and jaw.

Distinctive Characteristics of Human Language The significant ways that the human language differs from other animal communication: 1) Humans acquire language in speech communities. - All neurotypical humans will acquire the language of the community in which they are raised. - A human baby will learn whatever human language that is spoken in its community. - It doesn’t matter what language the baby's biological parents spoke if it is raised in a different community. - For animals, communication systems are inborn. Ex. A kitten will still "speak" like a kitten if it is raised with puppies. - In humans, the capacity for language may be biological, but the specific linguistical signs that we acquire are determined by what we hear after we are born. 2) Human words are unique compared to other animal signs. - Humans exhibit displacement, or the ability to project forward and backwards in time. - Animals can only talk about the here and now - Abstraction: humans can talk about language itself, abstract ideas, humour, emotions 3) Human language can be ambiguous. - Many of our words carry multiple meanings, and sentences can have more than one interpretation. - We can also inject emotional content in our words that is separate from the worlds themselves - Animal messages are holistic and clear 4) Human languages is infinitely creative - Our sentences are made up of combinable parts - Animal communication cannot be parsed (analyze a sentence into its parts and describe their syntactic roles) into elements to be recombined. - Animals can't combine sounds in novel ways, form new words and add information. Ex. A dog will bark to warn about danger but the dog cannot add "one of them has a

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weapon". - Syntactic recursion is fundamental to human language's creativity 5) Human language changes rapidly over time. - Animals systems of communication are inborn and they rarely change over time - Though, in a similar way, human laughter and crying rarely change over time

The Process of Language Change Language Genealogies Proto-Indo-European > Germanic > West Germanic > Low German > English - Indo-European is a proto-language, is a hypothetical language which linguists have reconstructed by comparing related languages. We have no written evidence, but we can infer from comparison of its descendants. - English developed from the Germanic dialects brought to England in the 5th century (449 CE) from Germany. - Many people think English is a Romance language (descended from Latin) because English has so many Latinate words. But these words are borrowings into English, not signs of its genealogy.

Why are some words similar in different languages? Sol - Danish, Icelandic, Spanish soil - Gothic soleil - French sole - Italian sonne - German sun - English sontse - Russian For example, Father, Vader and Vater all have common ancestor words in a shared early Germanic ancestor language. These words are reflexes of that ancestor and cognates to one another, the ancestor is their etymon.

Cognates: words in different languages that are related to one another

Mechanics of Language Change

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All fundamental aspects of languages change over time: sound, word forms, syntax, and vocabulary. The three main factors that motivate this change are: 1) Internal Factors: those inherent to the structure, especially the sound structure of a language. 2) Social Factors: those that depend on the behavior of speech communities 3) Cognitive Factors: those that depend on our comprehension of the language and on our mind's language processes - All languages change - The change is gradual - There is no "fixed" point of a split. There is no decisive moment at which a daughter language splits from a parent language and gets its own name. Historical linguists make language family trees in retrospect. - If enough speakers adopt a new meaning or construction, it becomes a conventional, accepted part of day-to-day language. Ex. Google: It is a noun but some speakers began using it as a verb to describe searching for something on the internet. As more people adopted the word as a verb, it is now a conventional part of our language. Progress or Decay? - Because the human language is infinitely creative, it is constantly changing. But is it progressing or decaying? Neither/a bit of both. - There's an idea of equilibrium in a language. Some linguists argue that languages maintain equilibrium over time in terms of grammatical complexity: a language may lose complexity in one feature but gain it elsewhere. - Even if there was a superior language that was the "best", there is no evidence that languages are progressing towards this ultimate goal. - Languages are ebbing and flowing, but neither progressing or decaying, as far as we can tell.

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