REVISION
Week 14
Chapter One
What is Language?
Linguistic Knowledge
When you know a language…
Language is much more than speech. How?
Deaf people use sing language, and express meaning only the manner
and modality is different from spoken language.
So…what is the relation between speech sounds and
the meaning they represent ?
The relationship between form (sound) and meaning
(concept) of a word is arbitrary.
When someone mentions the word house you will imagine it,
and not something else.
This is also true in sign language.
The creativity of Linguistic knowledge
• Knowledge of language enables you to combine sounds
to form words, words to form phrase, phrases to form
sentences.
• Knowledge of language makes it possible to understand
and produce new sentences.
Linguistic Competence Versus
Performance (Chomsky)
• Grammatical competence (Unconscious knowledge of
possible grammatical structures in an idealized
speaker)
• *What eats John?
• What does John eat?
• Performance (Actual production and comprehension
of language in specific instances of language use)
• Whe..When are you coming?
• I don’t… well uhm, maybe tomorrow.
5. Linguistic knowledge and Performance
Our linguistic knowledge allows us to form longer and longer
sentences by joining sentences and phrases together or
adding modifiers to a noun. It is impossible to limit the number
we could add if desired. Very long sentences are theoretically
possible. But they are highly improbable.
Linguistic Competence
It is what we know about language, the knowledge that is in
you!
Linguistic Performance
Is how we use this knowledge in actual speech production and
comprehension
Speakers of all languages have the knowledge to
understand or produce sentences of any length.
What is Grammar?
1. Descriptive Grammars
Every human being who speaks a language knows its grammar.
It does not tell how you should speak; it describes your basic linguistic
knowledge. It explains how it is possible for you to speak and understand,
and tells you what you know about the sounds, words, phrases, and
sentences of your language.
2. Prescriptive Grammars
In this grammar, grammarians wish to prescribe, rather
than describe the rules of grammar.
Their goal is to not describe the rules people know, but to
tell them what rules they should follow.
3. Teaching Grammars
Is used to learn another language or dialect. It is used in
schools to fulfill language requirements. They can be
helpful to people who do not speak the same standard or
prestige dialects.
CHAPTER 2
Brain and language
When you say a word that you read, the information about the
word travels from your primary visual cortex to Wernicke’s area,
which recognizes the word’s meaning, to Broca’s area, which is
involved in formulating spoken language, to the primary motor
cortex, which enables the movement of muscles to let you say the
word aloud.
CHAPTER 3
Morphology: the words of language
1. What is Morphology?
• Part of a speaker’s linguistic knowledge is his mental
lexicon. Knowing a word means knowing that a particular
sequence of sounds is associated with a particular
meaning.
Lexicography: the editing or making of a dictionary.
Information Provided in a Dictionary:
1. Spelling
2. Pronunciation.
3. Definitions to represent the word’s one or more
meanings.
4. Parts of Speech.
1. What is a Morpheme?
• A morpheme is the most elemental unit of grammatical form.
• It is the minimal linguistic unit.
• An arbitrary union of sound and meaning that cannot be
further analyzed.
2. What is Morphology?
It is the study of the internal structure of words, and of the
rules by which words are formed. The study of forms.
1. Content Words
• Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are Content words,
these words denote concepts such as objects, actions,
attributes, and ideas.
• They are sometimes called open class.
Why are they called “open class?”
Because we can and regularly add new words to these
classes.
2. Function Words:
• They do not have a clear lexical meaning or
obvious concepts associated with them, like
conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns.
• Function words are called Closed Class.
The difference between Content and Function
Words
Check the example page 75
Lexical such
as car, book,
girl
Free
Functional
such as the,
an, on
Morphemes
Derivational
such as –less,
-er, -ful
Bound
Inflectional
such as –s, ed, -ing
What is a monomorphic word?
When a syllable is a part of a word and it is not a separate morpheme. For
example “father”, -er is not a separate morpheme, because a father is not
“one who faths.” similarly in weather the –er is not a distinct morpheme
ending. Thus, father and weather are single morphemes or
monomorphemic words.
This follows the concept of the morpheme as a sound-meaning unit.
Rules of Word Formation
By using the morphological rules of English we are able to
create new words.
For example:
• Adjective + ify
Beauty + ify
•
Verb + (c) action
Inform + action
Verb
Beautify (to make beautiful)
Noun
Information
Derivational Morphemes
This type of morpheme changes the meaning of the word or
the part of speech or both. Derivational morphemes often
create new words.
For example, bound morphemes like –ify are added to a
base, a new word with a new meaning is derived.
Pure + ify
Pure + -cation
Purify (to make pure)
Purification (the process of making pure)
The form that results from the addition of a
derivational morpheme is called a derived word.
More about Derivational Morphemes:
• Derivational morphemes have clear semantic content.
• Derivational morphemes may or may not change the part of
speech of a word.
• Derivational Morphemes add meanings to the words.
Inflectional Morphemes
They mark properties such as tense, number, gender,
case, and so forth. i.e. they are used to show if a word
is plural or singular, if it is past tense or not, and if it is
comparative or possessive form.
1. They never change the syntactic category.
2. They come after the derivational morphemes in a
word.
For Example Pure + -ify + -ed
Purified
Page 99
Word Coinage
New words enter a language in a variety of other ways. Some
are created to fit some purpose example advertisement such
as Kleenex from the word clean.
Coinage is the invention of new words.
1. Words from names.
2. Back Formation.
3. Compounds.
4. Blends.
5. Reduced Words.
Page 92-93
SYNTAX
The Sentence Patterns of Language
The part of grammar that represents a
speaker’s knowledge of sentences and
their structure is called
Syntax
What is a syntactic category?
A family of expressions that can substitute for one another
without loss of grammaticality, is called a syntactic category.
For Example:
John found a puppy.
In the previous sentence we can replace the noun “John”
with phrases such as “the boy” or “the child,” John, the boy,
and the child all belong to the same syntactic category.
What the Syntax Rules Do
1. Combine words into phrases, phrases into sentences.
2. Specify the correct word order for a language. SVO
3. Describe the relationship between the meaning of a
particular group of words and their arrangement.
4. Specify the grammatical relations of a sentence; such
as subject and direct object.
Page 116-117
How to judge grammatical and non-grammatical
sentences?
1. The words obey the word order.
2. Grammatical doesn’t depend on the truth of the
sentence. Untrue sentences can be grammatical.
The syntactic rules are unconscious
rules, the grammar is a mental
grammar, different from the prescriptive
rules.
Page 120-121
Template vs. Tree Diagram
TEMPLATE:
The boy raced the girl.
Det-N-V-Det-N
This TEMPLATE says
that a determiner is
followed by a noun,
which is followed be
a verb, etc
• This TEMPLATE, however,
suggests that words have no
internal organization.
• Thus, we can use a TREE
DIAGRAM to make it easier
to see the parts and subparts
of a sentence.
• As a result, the structure of
the sentence can be
recognized in the tree’s
hierarchical organization.
Phrase Structure Tree (PS Trees) or
Constituent Structure Tree:
a tree diagram with syntactic category information
The boy raced the girl.
SEMANTICS
The meaning of language
What do you know about meaning, when
you know a language ?
1. Meaningful and meaningless words and
sentences.
2. When a word is ambiguous.
3. When 2 words have the same meaning or the
opposite.
4. When sentences are true or false.
Page 173
What is semantics?
The study of the linguistic meaning of morphemes,
words, phrases, and sentences.
Lexical Semantics which is concerned with the
meanings of words, and the meaning relationships
among words.
Sentence Semantics is concerned with the
meanings of syntactic units larger than the word.
Page 174
What Speakers Know About Sentence
Meaning?
1. Truth
2. Entailment and Related Notions.
3. Ambiguity.
Page 174-177
When Compositionality Goes Awry
a. Anomaly.
b. Metaphor
c. Idioms
Page 181-186
Lexical Relations
“Characterizing the meaning of words in terms of their
relationship” –Yule1.Synonyms
2. Antonyms (a. gradable b. relational opposites c. by
adding prefixes)
3. Homonyms; same spelling ,homophones; same sound
4. Polysemy
5. Hyponym
6. Metonym
Page 189-192
Semantic Features
Semantic features such as “human”, “female","
young”, “cause”, or “go” can be treated as the basic
elements involved in differentiating the meaning of each
word in a language from every other word.
We can characterize the feature that is crucially required in
a noun in order for it to appear as the subject for a
particular verb.
The____N +human_____ is reading the newspaper.
Semantic Roles
1. Agent: who preforms the action of the verb, “doer”
2. Theme: involved or effected by the action, “undergoes”
3. Goal: Endpoint of a change in location, where it moves
to.
4. Source: where the entry move from.
5. Instrument: if an agent uses another entry to preform an
action.
6. Experiencer: who has feelings, perceptions, receiving
sensory input.
1. Synonyms
Words or expressions that have the
same meaning in some or all contexts.
For Example:
He is sitting on a couch.
He is sitting on a sofa.
Page 189
2. Antonyms
Words that are opposite in meaning.
a. Complementary pairs (awake/asleep)
b. Gradable pairs (short/tall)
c. Relational opposites (buy/sell)
Page 190
3. Homonyms
Words that have different meanings but are
pronounced the same, and may or may not be
spelled the same.
Bear / bare are homonyms.
Words like bat, pupil are homophones.
4. Polysemy
One form having multiple meanings that
are related by expansion and based on
similarities.
Diamond
Page 192
5. Hyponym
The relationship of hyponymy is between
the more general term and the more
specific.
Such as animal and horse, plant and flower.
6. Metonym
Is a word that substitutes for an object the
name of an attribute or concept associated
with the that object.
1. Container/content (bottle/water)
2. A whole/part (house/roof)
3. Representative/symbol (king/crown)
Page 192
The hamburger ate the boy
• This sentence is syntactically good, but
semantically odd. Explain
The Cooperative Principles:
Maxims of Conversations (Grice, 1989)
Name of Maxim
Description of Maxim
1. Quantity
Say neither more nor less
than the discourse requires
Be relevant
2. Relevance
3. Manner
4. Quality
Be brief and orderly; avoid
ambiguity and obscurity
Do not lie; do not make
unsupported claims
Examples
1. I’m a multimillionaire (Actually, I’m penniless.)
Violated maxim: Quality
Explanation: The speaker has failed to tell the truth.
2. A: When am I going to get back the money I lent you?
B: Boy, it’s hot in here!
Violated maxim: Relevance
Explanation: B’s answer is not related to A’s question.
3. A: What should I do to get rid of this headache, Doctor?
B: Take some medicine.
Violated maxim: Quantity
Explanation: B has not provided enough information.
PHONETICS AND
PHONOLOGY
Chapters 6-7
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
Chapter 8
Mechanisms of Language Acquisition.
a. Do children learn through Imitation? 314-315
b. Do children learn through Reinforcement? 315-316
c. Do children learn through Analogy? 316-317
d. Do children learn through Structural input? 318
What is Motherese or CDS?
When adults tend to speak to children in a special
simplified language.
Major characteristics of CDS:
• It is not Syntactically simpler.
• It is not restricted.
• Simpler sentences and a lot of repetition.
KNOWING MORE THAN
ONE LANGUAGE
Bilingualism and 2nd language acquisition
2. Childhood bilingualism
3. Theories of bilingual development.
4. Cognitive Effects of Bilingualism.
1.
SECOND LANGUAGE
ACQUISITION