Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com An Introduction to Language AUSTRALIAN & NEW ZEALAND 10 T H EDITION Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, Nina Hyams, Mengistu Amberber, Felicity Cox, Rosalind Thornton Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com An Introduction to Language: Australian and New Zealand 10th edition 10th Edition Victoria Fromkin Robert Rodman Nina Hyams Mengistu Amberber Felicity Cox Rosalind Thornton Head of content management: Dorothy Chiu Senior content manager: Fiona Hammond Content developer: Talia Lewis Project editor: Raymond Williams Text designer: James Steer Editor: Jade Jakovcic Proofreader: James Anderson Indexer: Max McMaster Permissions/Photo researcher: Helen Mammides Cover: Shutterstock.com/Skorik Ekaterina Typeset by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd Any URLs contained in this publication were checked for currency during the production process. Note, however, that the publisher cannot vouch for the ongoing currency of URLs. Previous edition published by Cengage in 2018. Authorised adaptation of An Introduction to Language by Fromkin/Rodman/Hyams 11th edition, published Cengage Learning © 2019 ISBN 9781337559577 © 2022 Cengage Learning Australia Pty Limited Copyright Notice This Work is copyright. No part of this Work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission of the Publisher. Except as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, for example any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, subject to certain limitations. 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Cengage Learning Australia Level 7, 80 Dorcas Street South Melbourne, Victoria Australia 3205 Cengage Learning New Zealand Unit 4B Rosedale Office Park 331 Rosedale Road, Albany, North Shore 0632, NZ For learning solutions, visit cengage.com.au Printed in Singapore by 1010 Printing International Limited. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 25 24 23 22 21 Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com 00_Fromkin_10e-50065_pre.indd 4 15/09/21 2:52 PM Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com Brief contents Part 1 The nature of human language 1 1. What is language? 2 Part 2 Grammatical aspects of language 27 2. Phonetics: the sounds of language 28 4. Morphology: the words of language 118 Semantics and pragmatics: the meanings of language 209 3. 5. 6. Phonology: the sound patterns of language Syntax: the sentence patterns of language Part 3 66 156 The psychology of language 255 7. 256 8. Language acquisition Language processing and the human brain Part 4 302 Language and society 347 9. 348 Language in society 10. Language change: the syllables of time 11. Writing: the ABCs of language Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com 397 441 v Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com Contents Guide to the text Guide to the online resources Preface About the authors Acknowledgements xiii xvii xix xxiii xxiv Part 1 The nature of human language 1 1 What is language? 2 Linguistic knowledge Knowledge of the sound system Knowledge of words The creativity of linguistic knowledge Knowledge of sentences and non-sentences 3 3 5 7 Linguistic knowledge and performance What is grammar? 8 8 Prescriptive grammars 10 Universal Grammar 13 Descriptive grammars Teaching grammars The development of grammar Sign languages: evidence for language universals 9 12 14 14 What is not (human) language 15 Can animals learn human language? 17 The birds and the bees Can computers learn human language? Chapter review Part 2 15 19 21 Grammatical aspects of language 27 2 Phonetics: the sounds of language 28 Speech sounds Identity of speech sounds The phonetic alphabet vi 2 Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com 29 30 31 Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com Sound and spelling correspondences CONTENTS 34 Categorising speech sounds 36 Vowels 47 Consonants 38 Prosodic features 53 Tone and intonation 54 Stress The phonetics of signed languages Chapter review 3 Phonology: the sound patterns of language Phonemes: the phonological units of language Identifying phonemes Complementary distribution An illustration of vowel allophones: nasalisation in English An illustration of consonant allophones: variation in English /t/ 54 56 58 66 67 68 69 71 72 Phonological features 73 Natural classes of speech sounds 76 Contrastive and non-contrastive features Feature specifications for Australian English consonant and vowel phonemes 73 79 Phonological rules 80 Segment insertion and deletion 85 Feature change Reordering From one to many and from many to one The function of phonological rules 81 85 86 87 Phonemic analysis: discovering phonemes Phonotactics 87 90 The production of morphemes 92 An illustration of allomorphs: English past tense 94 Lexical gaps An illustration of allomorphs: English plurals An illustration of allomorphs: Akan negation 91 92 96 Prosodic phonology 96 Word stress 97 Syllable structure Sentence and phrase stress Intonation Approaches to phonology Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com 97 98 99 100 vii CONTENTS Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com Optimality Theory 101 Chapter review 103 An exemplar-based approach to phonology 4 Morphology: the words of language Content words and function words Morphemes: the minimal units of meaning The discreteness of morphemes Bound and free morphemes Bound roots 118 119 121 123 123 126 Rules of word formation 127 Inflectional morphology 129 Derivational morphology The hierarchical structure of words Rule productivity Compounds Word formation errors 127 132 134 137 139 Sign language morphology Morphological analysis: identifying morphemes 140 141 5 Syntax: the sentence patterns of language 156 Chapter review What syntax rules do Sentence structure Constituents and constituency tests Syntactic categories Selection 146 157 160 160 163 172 Phrase structure 174 Phrase structure rules 176 Phrase structure trees Structural ambiguities The infinity of language 174 185 187 Movement 189 Aux movement 190 Tense movement 190 Universal Grammar principles and parameters 192 Parameters 197 Chapter review 200 Principles Universal Grammar in action: sign-language syntax viii 101 Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com 192 198 Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com 6 Semantics and pragmatics: the meanings of language What speakers know about sentence meaning Truth CONTENTS 209 210 210 Entailment and related notions 211 Compositional semantics 212 When compositionality goes awry 215 Ambiguity Semantic rules 212 213 Lexical semantics (word meanings) 220 Lexical relations 222 Theories of word meaning Semantic features Argument structure and thematic roles 220 226 230 Pragmatics 232 Language and thought 238 Pronouns and other deictic words Chapter review Part 3 The psychology of language 7 Language acquisition Children’s capacity for language Usage-based language development Corrective feedback The theory of Universal Grammar 232 243 255 256 256 257 259 261 Acquiring linguistic knowledge 264 The acquisition of phonology 269 Infant perception and production of speech sounds The acquisition of the lexicon The acquisition of morphology The acquisition of syntax The acquisition of pragmatics The acquisition of signed languages 265 271 273 277 284 284 Knowing more than one language 286 Second-language acquisition 289 Childhood bilingualism Chapter review Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com 286 295 ix CONTENTS Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com 8 Language processing and the human brain Comprehension of speech The speech signal Speech perception Bottom-up and top-down models Lexical access and word recognition 303 303 305 306 307 Syntactic processing 309 Garden path sentences 310 Syntactic category ambiguity Further factors 310 313 Speech production 315 Application and misapplication of rules 316 Lexical selection Planning units 315 317 The human brain: localisation of language 319 Acquired dyslexia 325 Neural evidence of grammatical phenomena 328 Neurolinguistic studies of sentence and word structure 330 Aphasia Brain imaging in aphasic patients Neurolinguistic studies of speech sounds 321 326 329 Language and brain development: left hemisphere lateralisation 331 Delayed exposure to language 332 Language creation in deaf children 335 Brain plasticity The critical period 332 333 The Modular mind: dissociations of language and cognition 336 Specific language impairment 338 Linguistic savants Genetic basis of language Chapter review x 302 Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com 337 339 340 Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com Part 4 Language and society 9 Language in society Dialects Regional dialects Dialects of English Social dialects CONTENTS 347 348 348 350 351 358 Languages in contact 367 Contact languages: pidgins and creoles 368 Lingua francas Bilingualism 367 374 Language and education 376 Teaching reading 377 Second-language teaching Bilingual education 376 379 Language in use 379 Slang 380 Taboo or not taboo? 381 Styles Jargon and argot Language and sexism Secret languages and language games Chapter review 10 Language change: the syllables of time The regularity of sound change Sound correspondences Ancestral protolanguages 379 381 384 385 387 397 398 398 399 Phonological change 399 The Great Vowel Shift 401 Phonological rules 400 Morphological change Syntactic change Lexical change 402 403 406 Semantic change 412 Addition of new words Broadening Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com 407 413 xi CONTENTS Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com Narrowing 413 413 Meaning shifts Reconstructing dead languages 413 Comparative reconstruction 416 The nineteenth-century comparativists 414 Historical evidence Extinct and endangered languages The genetic classification of languages 421 423 Types of languages Why do languages change? 426 429 11 Writing: the ABCs of language 441 Languages of the world Chapter review 425 432 The history of writing 442 Pictograms and ideograms 443 Cuneiform writing 444 446 The rebus principle From hieroglyphics to the alphabet 447 Modern writing systems 447 Syllabic writing 449 Word writing 448 Consonantal alphabet writing 450 Alphabetic writing 451 Writing and speech 452 Spelling pronunciations 457 Spelling 454 Chapter review Glossary Index xii 419 458 465 488 Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com Guide to the text CHAPTER As you read this text you will find a number of features in every chapter to enhance your study of linguistics and help you twotheory of these words a minimal pair, two separate w understand Any how the is applied in form the real world. The two sounds that differentiate the words belong to differen From the minimal set of [bVt] words above (where V refers to variety of English has at least 14 vowel phonemes. Remember t Use thewe phoneme for Australian Englishcorrespondin vowel sounds. To that total canlist add a phoneme inside the front cover as a quick reference list pair such as book [bʊk] ofand back that [bæk] and we can the symbols are used to represent theadd one for [ sounds of Australian English. such as boy [boɪ] and bee [biː]. We can also add bare [beː] and be Our minimal pair analysis has revealed 12 monophthon of these symbols phonemes, namely, /iː/ /ɪ/Find /e/instances /eː/ /æ/ /ɐː/ /ɐ/ /ɔ/ /oː/ /ʊ/ /ʉː/ throughout the text. /ɪə/. To this set of phonemes we must also add schwa /ə/, the vo unstressed syllables in English and is particularly common in pair patty [pʰætiː] versus patter [pʰætə] illustrates its phonem symbolising these phonemes is given in the MD phonemic sys /ɒ/ /ɔ/ /ʊ/ /u/ /ɜ/ /eɪ/ /aɪ/ /ɔɪ/ /aʊ/ /oʊ/ /ɪə/. See Table 2.1 for d differ slightly in different varieties of English because the sy way of representing the phonemes, which may vary between th in English, each of the vowel phonemes has a number of var allophone is not random or haphazard – it is principled. A PHONEME LIST FOR AUSTRALIAN ENGLISH Vowels Consonants Phoneme Stops /p/ /b/ /t/ /d/ /k/ /ɡ/ Nasals /m/ /n/ /ŋ/ As in pit /bɪt/ tip /mɪt/ sing /sɪŋ/ nit /j/ /l/ Fricatives /f/ /v/ part /ɐː/ /ɡʊd/ mitt pat /æ/ /kʊd/ good pair /eː/ /dɪp/ could pet /e/ /tɪp/ dip peat pit /iː/ /ɪ/ /pɪt/ bit putt /ɐ/ pot /ɔ/ port /oː/ /nɪt/ put /ʊ/ boot /ʉː/ pert /ɜː/ Approximants rip /ɹ/ /w/ Harrington, Cox & Evans Phoneme As in high /ɑe/ /jɪp/ lip hay /æɪ/ /wɪp/ yip apart /ə/ /ɹɪp/ whip hoy /oɪ/ /lɪp/ how /æɔ/ hoe /əʉ/ fan /fæn/ thick /θɪk/ van here /ɪə/ /piːt/ /pɪt/ /pet/ /peː/ /pæt/ /pɐːt/ /pɐt/ /pɔt/ /poːt/ /pʊt/ /bʉːt/ /pɜːt/ /əpɐːt/ /hæɪ/ /hɑe/ /hoɪ/ /hæɔ/ /həʉ/ /hɪə/ Mitchell & Delbridge /væn/ peat /i/ /pit/ pit /ɪ/ /pɪt/ pet /ɛ/ /pɛt/ pair /ɛə/ /pɛə/ fission pat /ʃ/ /fɪʃən/ /æ/ /pæt/ vision part /ʒ/ /vɪʒən/ /a/ /pat/ putt hit /ʌ/ /pʌt/ /h/ /hɪt/ pot /ɒ/ /pɒt/ Affricates port /ɔ/ /pɔt/ put chill /ʊ/ /pʊt/ /ʧ/ /ʧɪl/ boot Jill /u/ /but/ /ʤ/ /ʤɪl/ pert /ɜ/ /pɜt/ Lexical categories with examples apart /ə/ /əpat/ Noun (N) puppy, man, soup, happiness, thought, he, Mary hay /eɪ/ /heɪ/ high Verb (V) find, run, sip, see, know, try, want, believe /aɪ/ /haɪ/ hoy Verb (V) red, big, happy, quick, hopeless, silly, awful /ɔɪ/ /hɔɪ/ how /aʊ/ very /haʊ/ Adverb (Adv) again, always, brightly, often, never, quickly, hoe /oʊ/ /hoʊ/ Preposition (P) up, across, over, into, besides, with, of, to, from, before, after, at, in, on, by here /ɪə/ /hɪə/ tour /ʊə/ /tʊə/ (now rare) Phrasal lexical categories with examples /θ/ /ð/ /s/ /z/ Noun phrase (NP) this /ðɪs/ sip zip /sɪp/ /zɪp/ puppies, the man, some soup, his girlfriend, a good thought, the man with the telescope, a bottle of Coke Verb phrase (VP) Adjective phrase (AdjP) Adverb phrase (AdvP) Prepositional phrase (PP) smiles, always jokes, often goes to the city, rode on a camel into the desert happy, very silly, bright blue, red with anger, worthy of praise brightly, more quickly, very slowly, really often of linguistics, in the laundry, at the party, from the city Find useful summary tables while you learn about syntax including a quick guide to the various lexical categories inside the back cover. Complementary distribution Quick tests for lexical categories Note: These tests are not foolproof so try both the morphological and the distributional tests. Noun Morphological Verb Morphological Adjective Morphological Distributional Distributional Distributional Adverb Morphological Distributional Preposition Morphological Distributional Can the word take a plural suffix? (e.g. X-s) Can the word combine with an article? (e.g. a X, the X) or Can the word appear after an adjective? (e.g. silly X, beautiful X) As we have seen, minimal pairs illustrate that some speech sou (e.g. the vowels in bit and bet) and these contrastive sounds repr language. We have also seen that some sounds are not contrasti and cannot be used to make different words. The rounded and un respectively were cited as examples that do not contrast. The sub not create a minimal pair, so you can say the word sat with eith [sʷ] and the meaning of the word remains the same. The round the /s/ phoneme do not occur in the same phonological context Can the word take a suffix for present or past tense? (e.g. X-s, X-ed) Can the word be used with an adverb? (e.g. X quickly, X often) or Can the word be used with a modal? (e.g. can X, will X) Can the word be used in a comparative form by adding –er or preceding it by more? (e.g. X-er, more X) Can the word be positioned between a determiner and a noun? (e.g. the X book, a X boy) or Can the word be preceded by very? (e.g. very X) Caution!: This test also identifies adverbs Does the word end with –ly? (e.g. X-ly) Caution!: This test only identifes a small subset of adverbs, and there are also adjectives ending with –ly Can the word be preceded by very? (e.g. very X) Caution!: This test also identifies adjectives or Is the word ungrammatical when positioned between a determiner and a noun? (e.g. *the X book, *a X boy) None. Prepositions are a closed class set (e.g. in, under, before, of, with etc.) Can the word be followed by a noun phrase? (e.g. X the box) Functional categories with examples Determiner (Det) the, a, my, his, your, each, some, many, two, several, this, those Complementiser (C) that, if, for, whether Auxiliary (Aux) have, be, do, can, may, might, must, will, shall, should, would, could Conjunction (Conj) Person Singular 1st I 2nd 3rd masculine 3rd feminine 3rd neuter and, or, but you he she it Subject pronoun Plural we yo they they they Pronouns Singular me you him her it Object pronoun Possessive pronoun Plural Singular you you them her us them my him Table 3.1 them its Plural our you their their their Distribution of rounded and unrounde Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com Before a rounded vowel xiii Bef Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com GUIDE TO THE TEXT PART-OPENING FEATURES Refer to the Chapter list for an outline of the chapters in each part. Part 2 Grammatical aspects of language 2 Phonetics: the sounds of language 27 4 Morphology: the words of language 118 3 Phonology: the sound patterns of language 5 Syntax: the sentence patterns of language 6 Semantics and pragmatics: the meanings of language 66 156 209 The theory of grammar is concerned with the question: What is the nature of a person’s knowledge of [their] language, the knowledge that enables [them] to make use of language in the normal, creative fashion? A person who knows a language has mastered a system of rules that assigns sound and meaning in a definite way for an infinite class of possible sentences. Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind, 1968 CHAPTER OPENING FEATURES 2 Phonetics: the sounds of language 7111 languages are spoken today. That number is constantly in flux, because we’re learning more about the world’s languages every day. And beyond that, the languages themselves are in flux. They’re living and dynamic, spoken by communities whose lives are shaped by our rapidly changing world. This is a fragile time: Roughly 40 per cent of languages are now endangered, often with less than 1000 speakers remaining. Meanwhile, just 23 languages BK-CLA-FROMKIN_10E-200595-Chp02.indd 27 account for more than half the world’s population. 27 18/01/21 2:37 PM Authentic real-world and literary quotes provide insights and connect with the theory. Ethnologue, https://www.ethnologue.com/guides/how-many-languages Learning objectives After reading Chapter 2, you should be able to: • show an understanding that speech is produced through carefully coordinated overlapping vocal gestures that lead to disturbances in the air creating dynamic changes in acoustic energy • demonstrate familiarity with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and its ability to represent the speech sounds of the world’s languages, showing a particular understanding of the IPA symbols used to represent Australian English speech sounds • categorise the consonant sounds of English according to the taxonomy determined by the International Phonetic Association and show an understanding of some additional consonantal features used across the world’s languages • describe the major features used to classify the vowels of the world’s languages, with a focus on Australian English • show how the phonetic features of length, pitch and loudness can be used in language to create the prosodic characteristics of rhythm, stress, intonation and tone • compare the difference between spoken and signed languages through your understanding that signed languages use combinations of features such as handshape, orientation, movement and location to distinguish meaning. Identify the key concepts that the chapter will cover with the Learning objectives at the start of each chapter. The speech sounds that humans use in language are restricted to those we can make with our FEATURES vocal WITHIN CHAPTERS organs and that we can easily differentiate when we listen to speech. All spoken languages PART 3 / THE PSYCHOLOGY OF LANGUAGE fundamental frequency In speech, the rate at which the vocal folds vibrate, symbolised as F0, called F-zero, perceived by the listener as pitch. intensity, and the particular combination of ‘greater or lesser’ is heard as a particular sound. (Imagine smooth ocean waves with regular peaks and troughs approaching a rocky coastline. As they crash on the rocks they are ‘modulated’ or broken up into dozens of ‘subwaves’ with varying peaks and troughs. That is similar to what is happening to the glottal pulses as they ‘crash’ through the vocal tract.) Computer programs can be used to decompose the speech signal into its frequency components. BK-CLA-FROMKIN_10E-200595-Chp02.indd 28 18/01/21 2:37 PM spectrogram When speech is fed into a computer (from a microphone or a recording), an image of the speech (voiceprints) signal is displayed. The patterns produced are called spectrograms or sometimes voiceprints. A A visual representation spectrogram of the words heed, head, had and who’d produced by a speaker with a British accent of speech is shown in Figure 8.1. decomposed intensity The28 magnitude of an acoustic signal, which is perceived as loudness. xiv use classes of sounds known as vowels and consonants, make use of air flowing from the lungs, and use pitch in some way to signal meaning. These fundamental similarities exist across languages, but there are also a great many differences between the world’s languages in terms Thetype sounds produce can beused. described in terms of how fast variations of airofpressure of the and we number of sounds Some spoken languages use athe very small number occur, the words. fundamental frequency of–the sounds spoken and is perceived bythe the hearer speechwhich soundsdetermines to differentiate For instance, Rotokas a language by people on as pitch. We can also describe the magnitude, or intensity, of the variations, which determines island of Bougainville – uses as few as 11 speech sounds. Others like !Xóõ (also known as East Taa)loudness – a language of Botswana – is reported the largest inventory of speech the of the sound. The quality to of have the speech sound – whether it issounds an [iː]oforall an [ɐː] or 1 languages,–with up to 161 sounds used to differentiate words. whatever is determined by the shape of the vocal tract when air is flowing through it. This This chapter will discuss speech sounds, how we produce them and how they may be classified. shape modulates the sound from the glottis into a spectrum of frequencies of greater or lesser When you see Key terms marked in bold, study the Definitions nearby to learn important vocabulary. See the Glossary at the back of the book for a full list of key terms and definitions. Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com into component morphemes, words, and phrases that exist in the grammar. They also show that when we speak, SPECTS OF LANGUAGE words are chosen and sequenced ahead of when they are articulated. Get Complete eBook Bylevel. email at student.support@hotmail.com Planning also goes on atDownload the sentence In experimentally controlled settings, speakers GUIDE TO THE TEXT take longer to initiate (begin uttering) passive sentences like The ball was chased by Nellie than active sentences like Nellie chased the ball. They also take longer to begin uttering sentences e coordination test shows that up his breakfast and up his dinner cannot be conjoined, containing relative clauses like The cat that the dog chased climbed the tree than ones like The cat sting that they are not constituents. In fact, up is part of the phrasal verb ‘throw up’. It is FEATURES WITHIN CHAPTERS that scratched the dog climbed the tree due to the word order in the relative clause. These findings le to coordinate his breakfast and his dinner, however, which tells us that these two strings suggest that more planning goes into sentences that have a less common word order than into examples of linguistic rules and theory in practice are captured in Worked examples. ds are the sameKey kind of constituent. sentences with SVO word order, as outlined in the worked examples below. e can summarise this section by evaluating whether or not the string of words in the n from the sentence The puppy played in the garden passes the constituency tests, as shown Worked example Planning in Active versus Passive Sentences e 5.1. ‘Q’ and ‘A’ abbreviatePART ‘Question’ and ‘Answer’. 2 / GRAMMATICAL ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE nstituency tests Nellie chased the ball Active The object of ‘chase’ is ‘the ball.’ Grammaticality does not depend on the truth of sentences. If it did, lying would be impo Passive Nor does it depend on whether realofobjects aresentence being discussed, ble 5.1 The constituency tests The object the active ‘the ball’ nor on whether someth possible. Untrue sentencesbecomes can be grammatical, sentences discussing unicorns can be gramm the subject NP in the passive uestion: Is the string of words in the garden a constituent? sentence. and sentences referring to pregnant rocks can be grammatical. PART 2 / test GRAMMATICAL ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE Standalone Q: Where did the puppy play? Our unconscious knowledge of the syntactic rules of grammar permits us to A: In the garden grammaticality judgements. These rules are not the prescriptive rules that are taught in s Replacement by a pro-form The puppy played the garden likein‘Don’t end a sentence with a preposition’. Children develop unconscious syntactic ru The puppy played there Worked example their Sentences language long before theyRelative attend school, as is discussed in Chapter 7. containing Clauses Move as a unit test Coordination test The ball was chased by Nellie Worked example a It was in the garden that the puppy played. Sentence structure [The cat[that __scratched the dog] climbed the tree. The relative clause modifies ‘the cat’; Semantic rule I is where b In the garden the puppy played The meaning of: played in the garden and on the porchthis is known as the head noun. ‘The cat’ The puppy is the agent of ‘scratch’ and it is moved S that anything by a transformation position S S V I reallyOdo not know has ever beenfrom morethe exciting than diagramming sentence marked with ‘__’. Gertrude Stein, ‘Poetry and Grammar’, 193 the above examples, the group of words in the garden passes all tests. In each case, the test [Thesocat[that thetodog chased__] the tree. The relative clause modifies ‘the cat’, NP Aux a grammatical sentence and it is safe conclude it isclimbed a constituent. The VP standalone test the head noun. ‘The cat’ is the and patient Syntactic rules determine the order of words in a sentence, the organisation of the gro that in the garden can beisused as a fragment answer to a question. It can also be replaced the following truth condition: of the verb ‘chase,’ and it is moved by a O S V words. The O words in the sentence: pro-form there. The move as a unit test shows us that in the garden can be moved from its from the object position transformation If the meaning of NP individual) is apuppy. member of the meaning of VP (a set of ‘__’. The(an child found the inside the relative clause marked al position without any loss of grammaticality. Sometimes, however, you may find that a individuals), then S is TRUE; otherwise it is FALSE. be grouped intoanother [the child] and [found the puppy], corresponding to the subject and pre ular test does not work for a particular stringmay of words. If so, try test. It is always of the sentence. A further division gives [[the child] [[found][the puppy]]], and final idea to try several tests. Interestingly, however, speakers more up likely produce a passive sentence after hearing Rule I states that a sentence thatare is made of atosubject NP and a VP is trueIt if subject [[[the][child]] [[found][[the][puppy]]]]. is the easier totests see OF theLANGUAGE parts and su r knowledge of the constituent structure may individual befor graphically represented as a Phrase tree diagram. CHAPTER 5 structure / SYNTAX: THEand SENTENCE PATTERNS Other key elements are highlighted simplewords navigation, including trees Constituency a passive, despite its non-typical word order. In syntactic priming experiments, speakers are NP refers to an individual whosentence is among the members of the set that constitutes the meaning of tree diagram, which illustrates the hierarchical structure of sentence ee structure for the sentence The puppy playedofinthe the garden is in asafollows: asked describe a scene afterishearing an unrelated passive sentence. Results show that the VP.toNotice that this rule completely general; active it doesornot refer to any particular sentence, Theifchild found the puppy they are more likelyIttoworks describe the scenefor using a passive that is sings what they have just heard. individuals equally such as Ellen Rex barks. Therefore The first testor is verbs. the ‘standalone’ test. Ifwell a group sentences of words can stand alone as aorfragment answer meaning of form Rex barks is the truthConsider condition (i.e. the ‘if-sentence’) that states that the sentence to a the question, they a constituent. the following: the puppy is true if the individual referred to by Rex is among thethe setchild of individualsfound referred to by barks and the puppy played 318 CHAPTER 5 / SYNTAX: THE SENTENCE PATTERNS OF LANGUAGE so on. What did the child find? Constituency tests the puppy child found the in Let us now try a slightly more complex case: the sentence Jack kissed Laura. The main syntactic The puppy. difference and the previous one is that we now have a transitive verb that *Found the. between this example the garden the puppy The first test is the ‘standalone’ test. If a group of words can stand alone as a fragment answer requires -CLA-FROMKIN_10E-200595-Chp08.indd 318 an extra NP in object position; otherwise our semantic rules will derive the meaning 1/16/21 8:58 PM to a question, they form a constituent. Consider the following: addition to the syntactic tests same just described, experimental evidence hasexample. shown that using mechanical procedure aspuppy in the first We again start withto the The testthe shows that the group of ‘tree’ wordsisthe can stand as abeing fragment answer theword The upside down with alone its ‘root’ the entire sentence, The child found the ers do not mentally meanings represent and sentences as strings of words, but rather in terms of structure. question, while thesyntactic group ofand words found the cannot. This test supports ourare judgement that the the ‘branches’ leading to its ‘leaves’, which the individual words, the, child, found, t What did the child find? listen to sentences that have clicking noises Constituency tests tuents. In these experiments, participants puppy is a meaningful linguistic unit while foundcan thebe is just two words listed one afterjust theas other. puppy. The diagram redrawn, showing the words ‘leaves’: WordIn meanings The points. puppy. ed into them at random some cases the click occurs at a constituent boundary. The second test is the ‘replacement a pro-form’ test.the There are several kinds of pro-forms. treeby diagram conveys same information as the nested brackets, but more clearl *Found the. Jack between refers (or The means) Jackthat ample, the click might occur thetosubject andthe theindividual predicate, is, between Pronouns are one kind of pro-form andand cansubgroupings substitute forare natural groups of words. Consider the of the tree. From th groupings reflected in the hierarchical structure ppy and played in the garden. In other sentences, the click is inserted in the middle of refers to (or means) the individual Laura followingLaura question and answer diagram, we know that can the phrase foundasthe puppy divides naturally Thebetween test shows that group of words the puppy stand a fragment answer to the into two branches, o stituent, for example, andthe puppy. Participants are then askedalone to report kissed the refers to (or means) the set of pairs of individuals X and Y such that X kissed Y. the verb found and the other for the direct object the puppy. A different division, say, fou question, the group of words found the first, cannot. This test supports the click occurred. There while have been two important results: participants in these our judgement that the Where did you find the puppy? Constituency tests and puppy, is unnatural. puppy isand a meaningful linguistic words listed one after the other. iments noticed the click recalled its location unit bestwhile whenfound it occurred at atwo constituent Sthe is just I found him in the park. root The second test is the ‘replacement by a pro-form’ test. There are several kinds of pro-forms. NPsubstitute Aux for VPnatural groups of words. Consider the Pronouns are one kind of pro-form and can Here, the pronoun him is replacing the puppy. When the group of words the puppy is replaced following question and answer Jack sentence, V so we NP can conclude that the puppy is a by the pronoun, the result is a grammatical thethe place child of an found constituent. There are eBook also words, such as do, that canat take entire expression, Getdid Complete Where you find the puppy? Download By email xv Constituency tests kissed student.support@hotmail.com Laura the puppy such as in found the puppy. I found him in the park. Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com GUIDE TO THE TEXT END-OF-CHAPTER FEATURES At the end of each chapter you will find several tools to help you to review, practise and extend your knowledge of the key learning objectives. PART 3 / THE PSYCHOLOGY OF LANGUAGE CHAPTER REVIEW Summary Psycholinguistics is concerned with linguistic performance or processing, which is the use of linguistic knowledge (competence) in speech production and comprehension. Comprehension, the process of understanding an utterance, requires the ability to access the mental lexicon to match the words in the utterance to their meanings. Comprehension begins with the perception of the acoustic speech signal. Listeners who know a language have the ability to segment the stream into linguistic units and to recognise acoustically distinct sounds as the same linguistic unit. Psycholinguistic studies are aimed at uncovering the units, stages and processes involved in linguistic performance. Several experimental techniques, including lexical decision tasks, have proved helpful in understanding lexical access. The measurement of response times (RTs), shows that it takes longer to retrieve less common words than more common words, longer to retrieve possible non-words than impossible non-words, longer to retrieve words with larger phonological neighbourhoods than ones with smaller neighbourhoods, and longer to retrieve lexically ambiguous words than unambiguous ones.8A/word may prime another AND wordTHE if the CHAPTER LANGUAGE PROCESSING HUMAN BRAIN words are semantically, morphologically or phonologically related. The priming effect is shown by faster RTs to related words than to unrelated words. To comprehend the meaning of an utterance, the listener must parse the string into syntactic constituents. This is done according to the rules of the grammar of the language and also following structural parsing principles that favour errors simpler structures, although factors, such as frequency of occurrence and subcategorisation 1 Speech (i.e. ‘slips of the tongue’other or ‘bloopers’) illustrate a difference between linguistic competence information, can also since influence the parser in its structural and performance our very recognition of them aschoices. errors shows that we have knowledge of well-formed Language is filled with temporary ambiguities – points at which the sentence can continue in more were than one sentences. Furthermore, errors provide information about the grammar. The following utterances actually wayobserved. because aAword is ambiguous in Dr its syntactic few are attributed to Spooner. category or because there are different structural possibilities. In such the reader ‘gostate down a garden path’ and have to and redo CHAPTER LANGUAGE PROCESSING THE HUMAN BRAIN a cases, For each speechmay error, what kind of linguistic unit or backtrack rule 8is /involved, thatthe is, parse. whether itAND is phonological, Much of the best information aboutor the units and stages of speech production comes from observing and morphological, syntactic, lexical semantic. analysing spontaneous Manyor ofthe themechanisms same factorsthat thatproduced influence it. the listener in b State, to the bestspeech, of your especially ability, thespeech natureerrors. of the error comprehension affect utterance the speaker in the production. Lexical access is influenced in both by semantic and Based on also the information provided in this would thethe location neural activity be the same or (Note: The intended is to left chapter, of the arrow and actual of utterance is cases to the right.) phonological relatedness of words and word frequency. different read in these two systems? Explain. Example: when ad hocChinese oddspeakers hack Neurolinguistics is the study of the brain mechanisms and anatomical structures that underlie linguistic a phonological vowellanguage segmentimpairment have been shown to have particular difficulty with morphemes 19 Children with specific competence and performance. The brain is divided into two cerebral hemispheres, which are connected by the b reversal or exchange of segments related to tense, which tend to be omitted from their productions. Make a list of all of the relevant morphemes corpus callosum, a network that permits the left and right hemispheres to communicate. Language is lateralised PART 3 / THE PSYCHOLOGY LANGUAGE Example: she tense gaveOF itinaway she make gived up it away that express English, and a sentence in which this particular morpheme is omitted. You may to the left hemisphere of the brain. Much of the early evidence for language lateralisation came from the study a inflectional morphology want to check Chapter 4 to get some help on English morphology. of aphasia. Evidence for language lateralisation as well as the contralateral control of function is also provided by b incorrect application of regular past-tense rule to exceptional verbof the following topics: 20 Challenge exercise: Do some independent research on one or more split-brain patients and by studying people with other neurological conditions, such as acquired dyslexia. Example: When willof you you will leave? a Consider some theleave? high-techWhen methodologies used to investigate the brain discussed in this chapter, such Advances in technology have provided a variety of non-invasive methods for studying the living brain as a as syntactic rule PET, MRI and MEG. What are the upsides and downsides of the use of these technologies on healthy Aitchison, J, 2011, The articulate An introduction to Obler, L K and Gjerlow 2002, Language brain, 4th edition, it processes language. Bymammal: measuring electromagnetic activities (ERPs and MEGKstudies), andand through imaging b patients? failure to Consider move thethe auxiliary to form a question cost, the intrusiveness and the ethics of exploring aPress, person’s brain, against psycholinguistics, Oxford, UK.and Cambridge University Cambridge, UK.weighed techniques, suchRoutledge, as CT, MRI, fMRI, fPET scans, both damaged and healthy brains can be observed and Caplan, D 1987, Neurolinguistics and linguistic aphasiology, Cambridge Patterson, K E, Marshall, J C and Coltheart, M (eds) 1986, Surface the knowledge obtained from such studies. i brake fluid viii Are weoftaking a bustoback? Are we taking blake fruid evaluated. These studies confirm earlier results concerning the lateralisation language the left hemisphere. University Press, Cambridge, UK. dyslexia, Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ. b Recent research suggests that specific language impairment maythe have a genetic basis. Conduct some ii Language: drink isStructure, the curse ofto the working of language the left hemisphere begins verybass? early life. While the left _____Lateralisation 1996, processing, and disorders, MIT Press, is a process Pinker,that S 1994, The buck language instinct,inWilliam Morrow, New York. research to find out what and experimental findings have led researchers to the this conclusion. ixE,isKlima, he broke the crystal on my watch classes is theobservations curse of the drinking Cambridge, MA. Poizner, H Sevidence and Bellugi, 1987, What hands revealhe about hemisphere is innatelywork predisposed to specialise for language, there also ofU considerable plasticity in PART 3_____ / THE OF LANGUAGE 2001, ‘Neurolinguistics’, in M Aronof and J Rees-Miller (eds), The the brain, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. ItPSYCHOLOGY may be helpful to investigate the websites of senior researchers in this area, such as Mabel Rice and brokeofthe on my crotch the systemclasses during(Spooner) the early stages of language development. The plasticity thewhistle brain decreases with age and handbook of linguistics, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London. Rice, M and Wexler, K 1996, ‘Toward tense as a clinical marker of Dorothy Bishop. x a phonological rule a phonological fool iii I have to smoke a cigarette with my coffee with the increasing specialisation of the different hemispheres and regions ofimpairment the brain.in English-speaking children’, Journal Curtiss, S 1977, Genie: A linguistic study of a modern-day ‘wild child’, specific language cAcademic Look up some ofcoffee the research on the spontaneous emergence language in individuals withstretch hearing loss xi of pitch and stress piss …Press, smoke my with a cigarette York. Speech and Hearing Research, 39: 1239–1257. The timing ofNew exposure to language is crucial. The critical-ageof hypothesis states that there is and a window of haveJ 2005, not had access to language input, such as in Nicaraguan Sign or inseries: Al-Sayyid Bedouin _____ andwho Schaeffer, ‘Syntactic development in children with Searchinger, GLebanon 1994, TheLanguage human language 1, 2, 3, Equinox Film/ xii lemadon iv untactful distactful opportunity for learning a first language. Within this time frame, children have the capability to acquire language, of Knowing, Inc., York. Sign Language. AtD-,what point does a and gestural home sign Ways system become a New ‘language’? You mayseduction wish to read , hemispherectomy: The I-, and C-systems’, Brain Language xiii speech production preach v an eating marathon a meeting arathon or, in theJ, 2011, case The of deaf children, create language if there is noSedivy, appropriate language model inand the environment. J 2019, Language in mind: An introduction to psycholinguistics. Aitchison, articulate mammal: An introduction to Obler, L K and Gjerlow K 2002, Language brain, 4th edition, 94: 147–166. literature by Susan Goldin-Meadow, Ann Senghas and Marie Coppola. xiv he’s a New Yorker vilanguage executive committee executor committee Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK. ithe’s The faculty isOxford, modular. It is independent systems with which interacts. psycholinguistics, Routledge, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.a New Yorkan Damasio, H 1981, ‘Cerebral localization ofUK. the aphasias’, in M Taylor of other cognitive d DThe late former prime minister Dame Margaret Thatcher was (famously) quoted as saying: ‘If you Senghas, A, S, and Özyürek, A children 2004, ‘Children creating core Caplan, 1987, Neurolinguistics linguistic aphasiology, Cambridge Patterson, KKita, E,I’d Marshall, J C and Coltheart, M (eds) 1986, Surface xv forgotten about that I’d forgot vii lady with theUK dachshund with the Evidence for modularity isand found inPress, the lady selective impairment of language in aphasia, in with specific Sarno (ed.), Acquired aphasia, Academic New York. of language: Evidence an emerging sign language University Press, Cambridge, UK. dyslexia, Hillsdale, NJ. want something said, ask a man …ofifayou want somethingproperties done,Erlbaum, ask a woman’. Thisfrom suggests, perhaps, Fiederici, A Dimpairment 2017, Language in our brain: The origins uniquely abouten that Volkswagen language (SLI), in linguistic savants, and in children who learn language past the critical period. Much in Nicaragua’, Science, 305: 1779–1782. _____human 1996, Language: Structure, processing, and disorders, MIT Press, Pinker, S 1994, The language instinct, William Morrow, New York. capacity. Cambridge, MA. information differently. This exercise asks you to take up the controversial that men MIT andPress, women process neurolinguistic research is centred on experimental and behavioural data from people or atypical Smith, NH V E, and Tsimpli, IM 1995, The mindimpaired of a savant: Language Cambridge, MA. Poizner, Klima, S and Bellugi, Uwith 1987, What the hands reveal about Goldin-Meadow, S 2005, The resilience of language:sentences. What gesture creation 2 Consider the following ambiguous Explain ambiguity, givehow the most likelywomen interpretation question: Are there gender differences in the brainthe having to doand with men and process and and learning modularity, Blackwell, Oxford, UK. _____in2001, ‘Neurolinguistics’, in M Aronof and J Rees-Miller (eds), The the brain, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. language. These findings greatly enhance our understanding of language structure and acquisition. deaf children can tell us about how all children learn language. state what a computer would have to London. have in its knowledge to achieve that interpretation. Springer, SP and Deutsch, G‘Toward 1997, Left brain, brain, 5th edition, use language? You begin your research by seeking answers (try internet) to questions about handbook ofPress, linguistics, & Kegan Paul, Rice,base M and Wexler, K the 1996, tense as right a clinical marker ofthe Psychology New Routledge York. might H Freeman, Sanimpairment Francisco. Curtiss, Sincidence 1977, Genie: A linguistic study ofon a modern-day child’, specific language in English-speaking children’, Journal Example: AS.cheesecake was the table.‘wild It was delicious differences andW was soon eaten. 340 of SLI, dyslexia and language development in boys versus girls. Goldin-Meadlow, and Mylander, C 1998, ‘Spontaneous sign systems G and Crain, S 2008,Research, ‘An MEG39: study of the negative polarity item Academic New York. of Speech and Hearing 1239–1257. created byPress, deaf children two cultures’, 391: 279–281. a Ambiguity: It caninrefer to the Nature, cheesecake or the table.Tesan, any: Lexical and postlexical in R 1, Kakigi, K Yokosawa _____ andJ 2007, Schaeffer, J 2005, ‘Syntactic development children with Searchinger, G 1994, The humanprocessing’, language series: 2, 3, Equinox Film/ Ingram, An introduction to in spoken language b Likely:Neurolinguistics: It refers to the cheesecake. and Kuriki (eds), Inc., Biomagnetism: WaysS of Knowing, New York.Interdisciplinary research and processing and its disorders. University Press, hemispherectomy: The I-, D-, Cambridge and C-systems’, Brain and Language, exploration, pp. 229–231, Hokkaido University Press, Tokyo. cCambridge, Knowledge: Tables are not usually eaten. Sedivy, J 2019, Language in mind: An introduction to psycholinguistics. 94: 147–166.U.K. Review your understanding of the key chapter topics with the Summary. Exercises Further reading Test your knowledge and consolidate your learning through the end-of-chapter exercises. Extend your understanding with challenge exercises. Further reading BK-CLA-FROMKIN_10E-200595-Chp08.indd 340 Lenneberg, H 1967, Biological foundations of aphasias’, language, Wiley, New Damasio, H E1981, ‘Cerebral localization of the in M Taylor i For those of you who have children and don’t York. Sarno (ed.), Acquired aphasia, Academic Press, New York. it, biology we have nursery downstairs. (Sign Lieberman, Pknow 1984, Language The evolution language, Harvard Fiederici, A D 2017, inand our a brain: Theoforigins of a uniquely University Cambridge, MA. human capacity. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. inPress, a church) Goldin-Meadow, S 2005, The resilience of language: What gesture creation ii The police were asked to stop drinking in in deaf children can tell us about how all children learn language. public Psychology Press,places. New York. iii OurS.bikinis are exciting; they are simply the Goldin-Meadlow, and Mylander, C 1998, ‘Spontaneous sign systems created by deaf children in suit two cultures’, Nature, 391: 279–281. tops. (Bathing ad in newspaper) Ingram, J 2007, Neurolinguistics: An introduction to spoken language iv It’sand time we made smoking history. • processing https://www.youtube.com/user/thelingspace its disorders. Cambridge University Press, – Fun (Antismoking campaign slogan) acquisition, short introductory videos on language Cambridge, U.K. Lenneberg, E H 1967, Biological foundations of language, v Do you know time? (Hint: ThisWiley, is a New psycholinguistics andthe neurolinguistics. York. pragmatic ambiguity.) • http://www.linguisticsociety.org/resource/ Lieberman, P 1984, The biology and evolution of language, Harvard vi Concerned withcan spreading violence, University Press, Cambridge, MA. neurolinguistics – You learn about howthe ourprime Weblinks called dyslexia a press conference. brains minister work, aphasia, and stuttering. • Extend your understanding with the suggested Further reading and Weblinks relevant to each chapter. research that support the existence of the CPH and research that failed to support the existence of the CPH. https://aphasia.org.au/about-aphasia – At this site you will find information about aphasia and useful Weblinks links to Australian and overseas aphasia sites. • • 1/16/21 8:58 PM Traxler, M J 2011, Introduction to psycholinguistics: Understanding Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK. viiA, Kita, The of theA church have cast off language science. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, UK. creating Senghas, S,ladies and Özyürek, 2004, ‘Children core Warren, P 2012, psycholinguistics, University properties ofIntroducing language: Evidence from anCambridge emerging sign language clothing of every kind and they may be Press, Cambridge, UK. in Nicaragua’, 1779–1782. seenScience, in the305: church basement on Friday. Yamada, J 1990, Laura: AI M case for the of language, MIT Press, Smith, NV and Tsimpli, 1995, Themodularity mind of a savant: Language (Announcement in aOxford, church bulletin) Cambridge, MA. learning and modularity, Blackwell, UK. Springer, S P and 1997, Left right brain, 5th edition, viii SheDeutsch, earnedG little as abrain, whiskey maker but he W H Freeman, San Francisco. loved her still. Tesan, G and Crain, S 2008, ‘An MEG study of the negative polarity item ix The butcher backed into the meat grinder any: Lexical and postlexical processing’, in R Kakigi, K Yokosawa and gotBiomagnetism: a little behind in his work. S Kuriki (eds), Interdisciplinary research and • and http://psychology.about.com/od/ exploration, pp. 229–231, Hokkaido University Press,the Tokyo. x A dog gave birth to puppies road historyofpsychology/a/genie.htm – near Here you will Traxler, M J 2011, Introduction to psycholinguistics: Understanding and was cited for littering. learn more about Genie’s case. language science. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, UK. xi A hole was found in the nudist camp wall. Warren, P 2012, Introducing psycholinguistics, Cambridge University • http://criticalperiodhypothesis.blogspot.com/p/ Press, Cambridge, UK. are looking into it. The police history-of-cph_21.html – This site introduces the Yamada, J 1990, Laura: A case for the modularity of language, MIT Press, history ofMA. the critical period hypothesis [CPH], Cambridge, https://www.youtube.com/user/thelingspace – Fun http://cnlr.northwestern.edu – At this site you short introductory videos on language acquisition, will learn how researchers at the Center for the Neurobiology of Language Recovery of http://www.linguisticsociety.org/resource/ Northwestern University help people with aphasia neurolinguistics You can learn about how our regain language –functionality. brains work, aphasia, dyslexia and stuttering. http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/lang.html – https://aphasia.org.au/about-aphasia – At this site Interesting information about language and the you will findtoinformation about aphasia and useful brain, easy read! links to Australian and overseas aphasia sites. •• http://psychology.about.com/od/ http://ling.umd.edu/neurolinguistics – Gain a better historyofpsychology/a/genie.htm – HerefMRI, you will understanding of techniques like MEG, EEG or learninmore about Genie’s case. ERP neurolinguistics research. •• http://criticalperiodhypothesis.blogspot.com/p/ http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~lngbrain/main.htm – All history-of-cph_21.html This site introduces you could want to know– about language and the the historyincluding of the critical period [CPH], brain, articles, linkshypothesis and a glossary of research that support the existence of the CPH and important terms. research that failed to support the existence of the CPH. BK-CLA-FROMKIN_10E-200595-Chp08.indd 341and neurolinguistics. psycholinguistics • xvi • • 341 1/16/21 8:58 PM Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com 345 Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com Guide to the online resources FOR THE INSTRUCTOR Cengage is pleased to provide you with a selection of resources that will help you to prepare your lectures and assessments, when you choose this textbook for your course. Log in or request an account to access instructor resources at au.cengage.com/instructor/account for Australia or nz.cengage.com/instructor/account for New Zealand. MINDTAP Premium online teaching and learning tools are available on the MindTap platform - the personalised eLearning solution. MindTap is a flexible and easy-to-use platform that helps build student confidence and gives you a clear picture of their progress. We partner with you to ease the transition to digital – we’re with you every step of the way. The Cengage Mobile App puts your course directly into students’ hands with course materials available on their smartphone or tablet. Students can read on the go, complete practice quizzes or participate in interactive real-time activities. MindTap for Fromkin’s An Introduction to Language is full of innovative resources to support critical thinking, and help your students move from memorisation to mastery! Includes: • Fromkin’s An Introduction to Language eBook • Interactive phoneme list for Australian English • Chapter revision quizzes MindTap is a premium purchasable eLearning tool. Contact your Cengage learning consultant to find out how MindTap can transform your course. ANSWER KEY AND ADDITIONAL EXERCISE SOLUTIONS The answer key provides instructors with suggested solutions to all the end-of-chapter exercises in the text. Solutions to the additional exercises are also provided. COGNERO TEST BANK A bank of questions has been developed in conjunction with the text for creating quizzes, tests and exams for your students. Create multiple test versions in an instant and deliver tests from your LMS, your classroom, or wherever you want using Cognero. Cognero test generator is a flexible online system that allows you to import, edit, and manipulate content from the text’s test bank or elsewhere, including your own favourite test questions. POWERPOINT™ PRESENTATIONS Use the chapter-by-chapter PowerPoint slides to enhance your lecture presentations and handouts by reinforcing the key principles of linguistics. Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com xvii Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com GUIDE TO THE ONLINE RESOURCES ARTWORK FROM THE TEXT Add the digital files of graphs, tables, pictures and flow charts into your course management system, use them in student handouts, or copy them into your lecture presentations. INTERACTIVE PHONEME LIST FOR AUSTRALIAN ENGLISH Listen to the sounds of Australian English with the interactive phoneme list, which includes both Harrington, Cox and Evans (HCE) and Mitchell and Delbridge (MD) vowel transcription systems. Each phoneme is captured in the locally recorded library of words spoken with an Australian English accent. LEXICAL CATEGORY TEST TABLES Download a copy of the summary tables located inside the back cover of the text for quick reference. FOR THE STUDENT MINDTAP MindTap is the next-level online learning tool that helps you get better grades! MindTap gives you the resources you need to study – all in one place and available when you need them. In the MindTap Reader, you can make notes, highlight text and even find a definition directly from the page. If your instructor has chosen MindTap for your subject this semester, log in to MindTap to: • Get better grades • Save time and get organised • Connect with your instructor and peers • Study when and where you want, online and mobile • Complete assessment tasks as set by your instructor When your instructor creates a course using MindTap, they will let you know your course link so you can access the content. Please purchase MindTap only when directed by your instructor. Course length is set by your instructor. STUDENT WEBSITE Student Website for Fromkin’s An Introduction to Language 10th edition Resources on the Student Website are included with this text. This collection of bonus online tools includes: • Interactive phoneme list for Australian English • Lexical category test tables Access the resources at https://fromkin.cengagelearning.com.au/ xviii Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com Preface Well, this bit which I am writing, called Introduction, is really the er-h’r’m of the book, and I have put it in, partly so as not to take you by surprise, and partly because I can’t do without it now. There are some very clever writers who say that it is quite easy not to have an er-h’r’m, but I don’t agree with them. I think it is much easier not to have all the rest of the book. A A Milne, The Christopher Robin Birthday Book The last thing we find in making a book is to know what we must put first. Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) Interest in linguistics – the study of human language – has existed throughout history. Many of the questions discussed in this book have been asked for thousands of years. What is language? What do you know when you know a language? What is the origin of language? Is language unique to the human species? Why are there so many languages? Where do they come from? How are they related? How do children learn language? Are some languages (or dialects) superior to others? Are some languages simpler than others? What do all languages have in common? What is the neurological basis of human language? What parts of the brain are concerned with language? Can computers be taught to speak and understand human language? These are only a few of the questions that have piqued curiosity about language. In addition to a philosophical interest in such questions, there are many other reasons that linguists, psychologists, philosophers, educators, sociologists, legal experts, neurologists, communication engineers and computer scientists need to understand the nature of human language. New developments in linguistics have wide ranging impact in education, health science, sociology, psychology, law, medicine, technology and communication. In light of the importance of linguistics in so many diverse disciplines, the first nine (Australian) editions of this textbook were directed towards students in a wide variety of courses. The book has been used in linguistics and non-linguistics courses, at all levels from undergraduate to postgraduate, for students in fields as diverse as computer science, English, foreign languages, speech pathology, anthropology, communications and philosophy. The tenth Australian edition follows in this tradition, but further extends and updates the content to make it suitable for an even wider audience. Students will gain insight into current linguistic issues and develop a better understanding of debates appearing in the national media. We hope that this book will help to dispel certain common misconceptions that people have about language and language use. We have provided many new exercises and problem sets in this edition so that students can apply their knowledge of linguistic concepts to novel data. This will help to consolidate learning and further test understanding of the material in the text. More research-oriented exercises have also been added for those instructors who wish their students to pursue certain topics more deeply. Some exercises are marked as ‘challenge exercises’ if they go beyond the scope of what is ordinarily expected in a first course in language study. An answer key is available to instructors to assist them in areas outside of their expertise. Chapter 1 continues to be a concise introduction to the general study of language. It includes many ‘hooks’ for engaging students in language study, including discussions of signed languages; a consideration of animal ‘languages’; a treatment of language origins; and the occasional silliness of self-appointed mavens of ‘good’ grammar who beg us not to carelessly split infinitives and who find sentence-ending prepositions an abomination not to be put up with. Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com xix PREFACE Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com Chapter 2, on phonetics, introduces the notion of phoneme and allophone at the beginning of the chapter to set the scene for discussion of different levels of analysis. In this chapter the transcription system for Australian English, based firmly on the principles of the International Phonetic Alphabet is introduced. This system is essential for the study of Australian English speech patterns. The text fully adheres to the International Phonetics Association (IPA) notation conventions. The taxonomic classification system for describing the sounds of the worlds languages is introduced with particular reference to articulatory processes that are necessary to create individual speech sounds. Consonants, vowels, tone and intonation are illustrated through examples from a range of languages. Chapter 3, on phonology, reinforces the concept of phoneme and allophone and highlights some important allophonic processes that occur in English. This chapter retains numerous Australian English and other language problems and examples to illustrate the important theoretical concepts relating to the patterns of sounds in language. Material in this chapter continues to be presented so that the student can appreciate the need for formal theories through real-world examples. Chapter 4 launches the book into the study of grammar with morphology, the study of word formation, as that is the most familiar aspect of grammar to most students. The subject is treated with clarity and an abundance of simple illustrations from non-English languages to emphasise the universality of word structure, including the essentials of derivational versus inflectional morphology, free and bound morphemes, and the hierarchical structure of words. The section on compounds words has been expanded to include a detailed discussion of their internal structure. Many instructors have noted that recent school English curricula include little teaching of grammar, and have requested that the text cover more foundational knowledge. Chapter 5 now has an expanded section on the various syntactic categories, and ways to identify parts of speech. In particular, we have expanded the section on how to identify different syntactic categories using constituency tests. Our feedback has shown that our students would benefit more from studying the basics of sentence structure than learning about current views on X-bar phrase structure. For this reason, we have not followed the US edition in moving to X-bar theory. Instead, we have chosen to introduce students to the more intuitive earlier system of phrase structure rules with ternary branching trees, leaving X-bar theory for more advanced courses on syntax. The text introduces students to phrase structure rules slowly and systematically, incorporating many example tree structures. While our focus is necessarily on the sentence structure of English, we have introduced cross-linguistic examples where possible. The intention in the syntax chapter is to enhance the student’s understanding of the differences among languages as well as the universal aspects of grammar. Nevertheless, the introductory spirit of these chapters is not sacrificed, and students gain a deep understanding of word and phrase structure with a minimum of formalisms and a maximum of insightful examples and explanations, supplemented as always by quotes, poetry and humour. Chapter 6, on semantics, has been more finely structured so that the challenging topics of this complex subject can be digested in smaller pieces. Still based on the theme of ‘What do you know about meaning when you know a language?’ the chapter first introduces students to truth-conditional semantics and the principle of compositionality. Following that are discussions of what happens when compositionality fails, as with idioms, metaphors and anomalous sentences. Lexical semantics takes up various approaches to word meaning, including the concepts of reference and sense, semantic features, argument structure and thematic roles. The most heavily revised parts of this chapter are the sections on argument structure, thematic roles and semantic features, the latter now containing a discussion of how these features affect the syntax. In the section on pragmatics, we discuss and illustrate in depth the influence of situational versus linguistic context on the communicative content of utterances, the significance of implicature in comprehension, Grice’s maxims of conversation, presuppositions and J L Austin’s speech acts. The chapters comprising Part 3, `The psychology of language’, have been revisited. Chapter 7, `Language acquisition’, remains rich in data from English and other languages. The 10th edition incorporates a new xx Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com PREFACE section on the acquisition of Murrinhpatha, an Australian indigenous language spoken in the Northern Territory. Bilingualism and L2 acquisition are taken up in detail, including a section on L2 teaching. This edition includes both usage-based approaches to language acquisition as well as the generative approach. The arguments for innateness and Universal Grammar that language acquisition provides are, nevertheless, exploited to show the student how scientific theories of great import are discovered and supported through observation, experiment and reason. As in most chapters, Australian Sign Language (Auslan) is discussed, and its important role in understanding the biological foundations of language is emphasised. In Chapter 8, ‘Language processing and the human brain’, the section on psycholinguistics has been revised to accommodate recent discoveries. This chapter may be read and appreciated without technical knowledge of linguistics. When the centrality of language to human nature is appreciated, students will be motivated to learn more about human language, and about linguistics, because they will be learning more about themselves. As in the previous edition, highly detailed illustrations of MRI and PET scans of the brain are included, and this chapter highlights some of the new results and tremendous progress in the study of neurolinguistics over the past few years. There is a section on how MEG (magnetoencephalography) can be used to study aspects of our linguistic knowledge. The arguments for the autonomy of language in the human brain are carefully crafted so that the student sees how experimental evidence is applied to support scientific theories. Part 4 is concerned with language and society, including sociolinguistics and historical linguistics. Chapter 9 emphasises the important relationship between language and society and includes a focus on the concept of social dialect and style. Pidgins and creoles are discussed with greater reference to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages. The ‘Language in use’ section takes up slang, profanity, racial epithets, euphemisms and similar topics. Attitudes towards language and how they reflect the views and mores of society are also included in this chapter. We also discuss topics such as English spoken by nonnative speakers and so-called standard languages. A section on language and sexism reflects a growing concern with this topic. An expanded list of references in this chapter is a valuable resource for further study. Chapter 10, on language change, includes the latest research on language families, language relatedness and language typology. There is also a section ‘Extinct and endangered languages’, which reflects the intense interest in this critical subject. In response to reviewers’ requests, a detailed and more complex illustration of the application of the comparative method to two contemporary dialects to reconstruct their ancestor – often called ‘internal reconstruction’ – is included in this chapter. Chapter 11, on writing systems, has been updated with a discussion on emojis, adding a further dimension to what it means to write a language. Key terms, which are bold in the text, are defined in the margin close to where they appear, as well as in the revised glossary at the end of the book. The glossary has been expanded and improved so that this edition provides students with a linguistic lexicon of nearly 550 terms, making the book a worthy reference volume. This new Australian edition continues to reflect the study of linguistics in Australia by taking account of the place of language in Australian society and by basing its detailed description of English on the Australian English dialect. The phonemic symbols, for example, are those that are in standard use in this country, and the discussion of social and regional variation in Chapter 9 continues to focus on Australia and New Zealand. This book assumes no previous knowledge on the part of the reader. An updated list of references and list of weblinks at the end of each chapter are included to accommodate any reader who wishes to pursue a subject in more depth. Each chapter concludes with a summary and exercises to enhance the student’s interest in, learning and comprehension of the textual material. We wish to thank the reviewers of this edition. We have benefited greatly from discussions with and suggestions from friends, Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com xxi PREFACE Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com colleagues, students, lecturers, tutors and reviewers of the last edition. If this text is better than the last, it is because of them. The responsibility for errors in fact or judgement is, of course, ours. We hope that the continual updates we make to the book improve its quality and the user experience. Finally, we wish to say thank you to the lecturers who have used the earlier editions; without them and their students there would be no new edition. xxii Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com About the authors Victoria Fromkin received her bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1944 and her MA and PhD. in linguistics from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1963 and 1965, respectively. She was a member of the faculty of the UCLA Department of Linguistics from 1966 until her death in 2000, and served as its chair from 1972 to 1976. From 1979 to 1989 she served as the UCLA Graduate Dean and Vice Chancellor of Graduate Programs. She was a visiting professor at the Universities of Stockholm, Cambridge, and Oxford. Vicki served as president of the Linguistics Society of America in 1985, president of the Association of Graduate Schools in 1988, and chair of the Board of Governors of the Academy of Aphasia. She received the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award and the Professional Achievement Award, and served as the US Delegate and a member of the Executive Committee of the International Permanent Committee of Linguistics (CIPL). She was an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the New York Academy of Science, the American Psychological Society, and the Acoustical Society of America, and in 1996 was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences. She published more than one hundred books, monographs, and papers on topics concerned with phonetics, phonology, tone languages, African languages, speech errors, processing models, aphasia, and the brain/mind/language interface – all research areas in which she worked. Vicki Fromkin passed away on 19 January, 2000, at the age of 76. Robert Rodman received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1961, a master’s degree in mathematics in 1965, a master’s degree in linguistics in 1971, and his PhD. in linguistics in 1973. He was on the faculties of the University of California at Santa Cruz, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Kyoto Industrial College in Japan, and North Carolina State University. His research areas included forensic linguistics and computer speech processing. In 2009, he was elected into the American Academy of Social Sciences as an Associate Fellow for his achievements in computational forensic linguistics. Robert Rodman passed away on 15 January, 2017, at the age of 76. Nina Hyams received her bachelor’s degree in journalism from Boston University in 1973 and her MA and PhD. in linguistics from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 1981 and 1983, respectively. She joined the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1983, where she is currently a professor of linguistics. Her main areas of research are childhood language development and syntax. She is author of the book Language Acquisition and the Theory of Parameters (D. Reidel Publishers, 1986), a milestone in language acquisition research. She has also published numerous articles on the development of syntax, morphology, and semantics in children. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of Utrecht and the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and has given lectures throughout Europe and Japan. Nina lives in Los Angeles with her pal Spot, a rescued border collie mutt, and his olde English bulldogge companion, the ever soulful Nellie. Mengistu Amberber is a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of New South Wales. His main research interests include the syntax–semantics interface (with particular reference to generative grammar) and linguistic typology. He is the co-editor of Complex Predicates: Cross-linguistic Perspectives on Event Structure (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Felicity Cox is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University. She is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and has published widely on the phonetics and phonology of Australian English. Felicity is an author (along with Prof Janet Fletcher) of Australian English: Pronunciation and Transcription, 2nd edition (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Rosalind Thornton is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University. Rosalind teaches introductory linguistics, and child language acquisition. Her research focuses on the acquisition of syntax and semantics, focusing on typically-developing children. Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com xxiii Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com Acknowledgements Cengage and the authors would like to thank the following reviewers, who provided incisive and helpful feedback: •• Gavin Austin, University of Southern Queensland •• Manuel Delicado Cantero, ANU •• Alison Dench, Sheridan College •• Iain Giblin, Macquarie University •• Weifeng Han, Flinders University •• Alan Libert, University of Newcastle •• Hossein Shokouhi, Deakin University We would also like to thank David Blair, Mark Harvey and Peter Collins for their major contributions to previous editions, and Adam Schembri for his valuable help in reviewing and updating this edition’s sections on sign languages. Every attempt has been made to trace and acknowledge copyright holders. Where the attempt has been unsuccessful, the publisher welcomes information that would redress the situation. xxiv Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com Part 1 The nature of human language 1 What is language? 2 Reflecting on Noam Chomsky’s ideas on the innateness of the fundamentals of grammar in the human mind, I saw that any innate features of the language capacity must be a set of biological structures, selected in the course of the evolution of the human brain. S E Luria, A Slot Machine, a Broken Test Tube, an Autobiography, 1984 The nervous systems of all animals have a number of basic functions in common, most notably the control of movement and the analysis of sensation. What distinguishes the human brain is the variety of more specialized activities it is capable of learning. The pre-eminent example is language. Norman Geschwind, Specializations of the Human Brain, 1979 Linguistics shares with other sciences a concern to be objective, systematic, consistent and explicit in its account of language. Like other sciences, it aims to collect data, test hypotheses, devise models and construct theories. Its subject matter, however, is unique: at one extreme it overlaps with such ‘hard’ sciences as physics and anatomy; at the other, it involves such traditional ‘arts’ subjects as philosophy and literary criticism. The field of linguistics includes both science and the humanities, and offers a breadth of coverage that, for many aspiring students of the subject, is the primary source of its appeal. David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, 2010 Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com 1 1 Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com What is language? When we study human language, we are approaching what some might call the ‘human essence’, the distinctive qualities of mind that are, so far as we know, unique to [humankind]. Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind, 1972 Learning objectives After reading Chapter 1, you should be able to: • understand the arbitrary relation between linguistic form and meaning • distinguish between linguistic knowledge (competence) and linguistic behaviour (performance) • distinguish between descriptive and prescriptive rules of grammar • understand the relationship between grammatical rules of individual languages and principles of language structure that may hold across all languages • explain the difference between human language and the communicative systems of other animals. Whatever else people do when they come together – whether they play, fight, make love or make cars – they talk. We live in a world of language. We talk to our friends, our associates, our wives and husbands, our lovers, our teachers, our parents, our rivals and even our enemies. We talk to bus drivers and total strangers. We talk face-to-face and over the telephone, and everyone responds with more talk. Television and radio further swell this torrent of words. Hardly a moment of our waking lives is free from words and even in our dreams we talk and are talked to. We also talk when there is no-one to answer. Some of us talk aloud in our sleep. We talk to our pets and sometimes to ourselves. The possession of language, perhaps more than any other attribute, distinguishes humans from other animals. To understand our humanity, one must understand the nature of language that makes us human. According to the philosophy expressed in the myths and religions of many peoples, language is the source of human life and power. To some people of Africa, a newborn child is a kintu, a ‘thing’, not yet a muntu, a ‘person’. Only by the act of learning language does the child become a human being. According to this tradition, then, we all become human because we all know at least one language. But what does it mean to know a language? Linguistic knowledge sign language A language used by deaf people in which linguistic units, such as morphemes and words as well as grammatical relations, are formed by manual and other body movements. 2 Do we know only what we see, or do we see what we somehow already know? Cynthia Ozick, ‘What Helen Keller Saw’, New Yorker, 16 and 23 June 2003 When you know a language, you can speak and be understood by others who know that language. This means you are able to produce strings of sounds that signify certain meanings and to understand or interpret the sounds produced by others. But language is more than speech. Deaf people produce and understand sign languages just as hearing people produce and understand spoken languages. The languages of the deaf communities throughout the world are equivalent to spoken languages, differing only in their modality of expression. Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com CHAPTER 1 / WHAT IS LANGUAGE? Almost everyone knows at least one language. Five-year-old children are nearly as proficient at speaking and understanding speech as their parents. Yet the ability to carry out the simplest conversation requires profound knowledge that most speakers are unaware of. This is true for speakers of all languages, from Albanian to Zulu. A speaker of English can produce a sentence that has two relative clauses without knowing what a relative clause is, such as: My goddaughter, who was born in Sweden and who now lives in Australia, is named Disa, after a Viking queen. In a parallel fashion, a child can walk without understanding or being able to explain the principles of balance and support or the neurophysiological control mechanisms that permit one to do so. The fact that we may know something unconsciously is not unique to language. Knowledge of the sound system Part of knowing a language means knowing what sounds (or signs)1 are in that language and what sounds are not. One way this unconscious knowledge is revealed is by the way speakers of one language pronounce words from another language. If you speak only English, for example, you may substitute an English sound for a non-English sound when pronouncing words of another language, such as French ménage à trois. If you pronounce it as the French do, you are using sounds outside the English sound system. French people speaking English often pronounce words such as this and that as if they were spelt zis and zat. The English sound represented by the initial letters th in these words is not part of the French sound system, and the French pronunciation reveals the speaker’s unconscious knowledge of this fact. Knowing the sound system of a language includes more than knowing the inventory of sounds. It means also knowing which sounds may start a word, end a word and follow each other. The name of a former president of Ghana was Nkrumah, pronounced with an initial sound like the sound ending the English word sing. Although this is an English sound, no word in English begins with the ng sound. Speakers of English who have occasion to pronounce this name often mispronounce it (by Ghanaian standards) by inserting a short vowel sound, such as Nekrumah or Enkrumah. Similarly, the first name of the New Zealand mystery writer Ngaio Marsh is often mispronounced with an ‘n’ sound at the beginning instead of the ‘ng’ sound. Children who learn English recognise that ng does not begin a word, just as Ghanaian and Māori children learn that words in their language may begin with the ng sound. We will learn more about sounds and sound systems in Chapters 2 and 3. sign A single gesture (possibly with complex meaning) in the sign languages used by the deaf. Knowledge of words Knowing the sounds and sound patterns in our language constitutes only one part of our linguistic knowledge. Knowing a language means also knowing that certain sequences of sounds signify certain concepts or meanings. Speakers of English know what boy means, and that it means something different from toy or girl or pterodactyl. When you know a language, you know words in that language; that is, which sequences of sounds are related to specific meanings and which are not. Arbitrary relation of form and meaning The minute I set eyes on an animal I know what it is. I don’t have to reflect a moment; the right name comes out instantly. I seem to know just by the shape of the creature and the way it acts what animal it is. When the dodo came along he [Adam] thought it was a wildcat. But I saved him. I just spoke up in a quite natural way and said, ‘Well, I do declare if there isn’t the dodo!’ Mark Twain, Eve’s Diary, 1906 Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com 3 Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com PART 1 / THE NATURE OF HUMAN LANGUAGE arbitrary Describes the property of language, including sign language, whereby there is no natural or intrinsic relationship between the way a word is pronounced (or signed) and its meaning. If you do not know a language, the words (and sentences) of that language will be mainly incomprehensible because the relationship between speech sounds and the meanings they represent in the languages of the world is, for the most part, an arbitrary one. When you are acquiring a language, you have to learn that the sounds represented by the letters house signify the concept ; if you know French, this same meaning is represented by maison; if you know Spanish, by casa, if you know Amharic, by bet. Similarly, is represented by hand in English, main in French, nsa in Twi, and ruka in Russian. The same sequence of sounds can represent different meanings in different languages. The word bolna means ‘speak’ in Hindu-Urdu and ‘aching’ in Russian; bis means ‘devil’ in Ukrainian and ‘twice’ in Latin; a pet means ‘a domestic animal’ in English and ‘a fart’ in Catalan; and the sequence of sounds taka means ‘hawk’ in Japanese, ‘fist’ in Quechua, ‘a small bird’ in Zulu, and ‘money’ in Bengali. These examples show that the words of a particular language have the meanings they do only by convention. This arbitrary relationship between form and meaning is shown in Figure 1.1, whereby a pterodactyl could have been called a ron, blick or kerplunkity and remained the same type of dinosaur. As Juliet says in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet. Figure 1.1 Form and meaning Herman®/LaughingStock Licensing Inc., Ottawa, Canada 4 Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com CHAPTER 1 / WHAT IS LANGUAGE? This conventional and arbitrary relationship between form (sounds) and meaning (concept) of a word in spoken languages is also true of many signs in sign languages. If you see someone using a sign language you do not know, it is doubtful you will understand much of the message from the signs alone. A person who knows Chinese Sign Language (CSL) would find it difficult to understand Australian Sign Language (Auslan) and vice versa. For some signs, the relationship between form and meaning was originally not arbitrary. The Auslan sign meaning ‘tomorrow’, for example, may have originated as a compound of signs meaning ‘one’ and ‘sleep’. Over time this has changed, just as the pronunciation of words may change; now, the sign is formed by a ‘one’ handshape moving away from the cheek. These signs become conventional, so that the forms of the handshape, movement and location do not reveal the meaning any longer. There is some sound symbolism in language; that is, words whose pronunciation suggests their meaning. Most languages contain onomatopoeic words, such as buzz or murmur, that imitate the sounds associated with the objects or actions they refer to. But even here the sounds differ from language to language, reflecting the particular sound system of the language. In English cock-a-doodle-doo is an onomatopoeic word whose meaning is ‘the crow of a rooster’, whereas in Finnish the rooster’s crow is kukkokiekuu. Forget gobble gobble when you are in Istanbul; a turkey in Turkey goes glu-glu. Sometimes particular sound sequences seem to relate to a particular concept. In English many words beginning with gl relate to sight, such as glare, glint, gleam, glitter, glossy, glaze, glance, glimmer, glimpse and glisten. However, such words are a very small part of any language, and gl may have nothing to do with ‘sight’ in another language or even in other words in English, such as gladiator, glucose, glory, glutton, globe and so on. To know a language we must know words of that language. But no speaker knows all the entries in an unabridged dictionary, and even if someone did, he or she would still not know that language. Imagine trying to learn a foreign language by buying a dictionary and memorising words. No matter how many words you learnt, you would not be able to form the simplest phrases or sentences in the language, or understand a native speaker. No one speaks in isolated words. Of course, you could search in your tourist’s dictionary for individual words to find out how to say something like ‘car – petrol – where?’ After many tries, a native speaker might understand this question and then point in the direction of a service station. If the speaker answered you with a sentence, however, you probably would not understand what was said; nor would you be able to look it up, because you would not know where one word ended and another began. Chapter 5 will explore how words are put together to form phrases and sentences, and Chapter 6 will explore word and sentence meanings. The creativity of linguistic knowledge convention/ conventional The agreed-on, though generally arbitrary, relationship between the form and meaning of words. form The phonological or gestural representation of a morpheme or word. meaning The conceptual or semantic aspect of a sign or utterance that permits us to comprehend the message being conveyed. Expressions in language generally have both form – pronunciation or gesture – and meaning. sound symbolism The notion that certain sound combinations occur in semantically similar words, for example, gl in gleam, glisten, glitter, which all relate to vision. onomatopoeia/ onomatopoeic Refers to words whose pronunciations suggest their meaning, e.g. meow, buzz. Albert: So are you saying that you were the best friend of the woman who was married to the man who represented your husband in divorce? André: In the history of speech, that sentence has never been uttered before. Neil Simon, The Dinner Party, 2000 Knowledge of a language enables you to combine sounds to form words, words to form phrases and phrases to form sentences. You cannot buy a dictionary of any language with all its sentences because no dictionary can list all the possible sentences. Knowing a language means being able to produce and understand new sentences never spoken before. This is the creative aspect, or creativity of language. Not every speaker of a language can create great literature, but everybody who knows a language can create and understand new sentences. Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com creative aspect/ creativity of language Speakers’ ability to combine the finite number of linguistic units of their language to produce and understand an infinite range of novel sentences. 5 Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com PART 1 / THE NATURE OF HUMAN LANGUAGE In pointing out the creative aspect of language, Chomsky made a powerful argument against the behaviourist view of language that prevailed in the first half of the twentieth century, which held that language is a set of learnt responses to stimuli. While it is true that if someone steps on our toes we may automatically respond with a scream or a grunt, these sounds are not part of language. They are involuntary reactions to stimuli. After we automatically cry out, we can then go on to say, ‘Thank you very much for stepping on my toe because I was afraid I had elephantiasis, but because I could feel it hurt I know I don’t’, or any one of an infinite number of sentences, because the particular sentence we produce is not controlled by a stimulus. Even some involuntary cries, such as ouch, are constrained by our own language system, as are the filled pauses that are sprinkled through conversational speech, such as er, uh and you know in English. They contain only the sounds found in the language. French speakers, for example, often fill their pauses with the vowel sound that starts their word for ‘egg’ – oeuf – a sound that does not occur in English. Knowing a language includes knowing what sentences are appropriate in various situations. Saying ‘Minced steak costs five dollars a kilo’ after someone has just stepped on your toe would hardly be an appropriate response, although it would be possible. Our creative ability is not only reflected in what we say, but also includes our understanding of new or novel sentences. Consider the following sentence: Ben Hall decided to become a bushranger because he dreamed of pigeon-toed giraffes and cross-eyed elephants dancing in pink skirts and green berets on the wind-swept sands of the Nullarbor. You may not believe the sentence, you may question its logic, but you can understand it, although you have probably never heard or read it before now. Knowledge of a language, then, makes it possible to understand and produce new sentences. If you counted the number of sentences in this book that you have seen or heard before, the number would be small. Next time you write an essay or a letter, see how many of your sentences are new. Few sentences are stored in your brain, to be pulled out to fit some situation or matched with some sentence that you hear. Novel sentences never spoken or heard before cannot be stored in your memory. Simple memorisation of all the possible sentences in a language is impossible in principle. If for every sentence in the language a longer sentence can be formed, then there is no limit to the length of any sentence and therefore no limit to the number of sentences. In English you can say: This is the house. or or or This is the house that Jack built. This is the malt that lay in the house that Jack built. This is the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built. And you need not stop there. How long, then, is the longest sentence? A speaker of English can say: The old man went. or 6 The old, old, old, old, old man went. How many ‘olds’ are too many? Seven? Twenty-three? It is true that the longer these sentences become, the less likely we would be to hear or to say them. A sentence with 276 occurrences of ‘old’ would be highly unlikely in either speech or writing, even to describe Methuselah. But such a sentence is theoretically possible. If you know English, you have the knowledge to add any number of adjectives as modifiers to a noun and to form sentences with indefinite numbers of clauses, as in the house that Jack built. Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com CHAPTER 1 / WHAT IS LANGUAGE? All human languages permit their speakers to form indefinitely long sentences; creativity is a universal property of human language. The fact of human linguistic creativity was well expressed more than 400 years ago by Huarte de San Juan (1530–1592): ‘Normal human minds are such that … without the help of anybody, they will produce 1000 (sentences) they never heard spoke of … inventing and saying such things as they never heard from their masters, nor any mouth’. Knowledge of sentences and non-sentences A person who knows a language has mastered a system of rules that assigns sound and meaning in a definite way for an infinite class of possible sentences. Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind, 1972 Our knowledge of language not only allows us to produce and understand an infinite number of well-formed (even if silly and illogical) sentences. It also permits us to distinguish wellformed (grammatical) from ill-formed (ungrammatical) sentences. This is further evidence of our linguistic creativity because ungrammatical sentences are typically novel, not sentences we have previously heard or produced, precisely because they are ungrammatical! Consider the following sentences: 1 a John kissed the little old lady who owned the shaggy dog. b c d e f g h Who owned the shaggy dog John kissed the little old lady. John is difficult to love. It is difficult to love John. John is anxious to go. It is anxious to go John. John, who was a student, flunked his exams. Exams his flunked student a was who John. If you were asked to put an asterisk before the examples that seemed ill formed or ungrammatical or no good to you, which ones would you choose? (The asterisk * is used before examples that speakers reject for any reason. This notation will be used throughout the book.) Our intuitive knowledge about what is or is not an allowable sentence in English leads us to put an asterisk before b, f and h. Which ones did you choose? Would you agree with the following judgements? 2 a What he did was climb a tree. b c d e f g h *What he thought was want a sports car. Drink your beer and go home! *What are drinking and go home? I expect them to arrive a week from next Thursday. *I expect a week from next Thursday to arrive them. Linus lost his security blanket. *Lost Linus security blanket his. asterisk The symbol * used to indicate ungrammatical or anomalous examples; for example, *cried the baby, *sincerity dances; also used in historical and comparative linguistics to represent a reconstructed form. If you find the sentences with asterisks unacceptable, as we do, you see that not every string of words constitutes a well-formed sentence in a language. Our knowledge of a language determines which strings of words are well-formed sentences, and which are not. Therefore, in addition to knowing the words of the language, linguistic knowledge includes rules for forming sentences and making the kinds of judgements you made about the examples in (1) and (2) above. These rules must be finite in length and finite in number so they can be stored in our finite brains. Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com 7 Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com PART 1 / THE NATURE OF HUMAN LANGUAGE Yet they must permit us to form and understand an infinite set of new sentences. They are not rules determined by a judge or a legislature, or even rules taught in a grammar class. They are unconscious rules that we acquire as young children as we develop language. Returning to the question we posed at the beginning of this chapter – what does it mean to know a language? It means knowing the sounds and meanings of many, if not all, of the words of the language, and the rules for their combination – the grammar, which generates infinitely many possible sentences. We will have more to say about these rules of grammar in later chapters. Linguistic knowledge and performance linguistic competence The knowledge of a language represented by the mental grammar that accounts for speakers’ linguistic ability and creativity. For the most part, linguistic competence is unconscious knowledge. linguistic performance The use of linguistic competence in the production and comprehension of language; behaviour as distinguished from linguistic knowledge. slip of the tongue (speech error) An involuntary deviation from an intended utterance that often results in ungrammaticality, nonsense words, anomaly, etc. ‘What’s one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one?’ ‘I don’t know’, said Alice. ‘I lost count’. ‘She can’t do Addition’, the Red Queen interrupted. Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, 1871 Our linguistic knowledge permits us to form longer and longer sentences by joining sentences and phrases or adding modifiers to a noun. Whether we stop at three, five or eighteen adjectives, it is impossible to limit the number we could add if desired. Very long sentences are theoretically possible, but they are highly improbable. Evidently, there is a difference between having the knowledge necessary to produce sentences of a language and applying this knowledge. It is a difference between what we know – our linguistic competence – and how we use this knowledge in actual speech production and comprehension – our linguistic performance. Speakers of all languages have the knowledge to understand or produce sentences of any length. However, there are physiological and psychological reasons that limit the number of adjectives, adverbs, clauses and so on that we actually produce and understand. Speakers may run out of breath, lose track of what they have said or die of old age before they are finished. Listeners may become confused, tired, bored or disgusted. When we speak we usually wish to convey some message. At some stage during the act of producing speech, we must organise our thoughts into strings of words. Sometimes the message is garbled. We may stammer or pause or produce slips of the tongue (or speech errors), like saying ‘preach seduction’ when ‘speech production’ is meant (discussed in Chapters 3 and 8). We may even sound like the character in the cartoon below, who illustrates the difference between linguistic knowledge and the way we use that knowledge in performance. For the most part, linguistic knowledge is not conscious knowledge. The linguistic system – the sounds, structures, meanings, words and rules for putting them all together – is acquired with no conscious awareness. Our ability to speak and understand, and to make judgements about the grammaticality of sentences, reveals our knowledge of the rules of our language. This knowledge represents a complex cognitive system. The nature of this system is what this book is all about. Figure 1.2 highlights the distinction between linguistic knowledge and linguistic performance. What is grammar? We use the term ‘grammar’ with a systematic ambiguity. On the one hand, the term refers to the explicit theory constructed by the linguist and proposed as a description of the speaker’s competence. On the other hand, it refers to this competence itself. Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle, The Sound Pattern of English, 1968 8 Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com CHAPTER 1 / WHAT IS LANGUAGE? Figure 1.2 Linguistic knowledge versus linguistic performance grammar A linguistic description of a speaker’s mental grammar; the mental representation of a speaker’s linguistic competence; what a speaker knows about a language. CartoonStock/Robert Mankoff Descriptive grammars There are no primitive languages. The great and abstract ideas of Christianity can be discussed even by the wretched Greenlanders. Johann Peter Suessmilch, in a paper delivered before the Prussian Academy, 1756 The way we are using the word grammar differs from most common usages. In our sense, the grammar includes the knowledge speakers have about the units and rules of their language – rules for combining sounds into words (called phonology), rules of word formation (called morphology), rules for combining words into phrases and phrases into sentences (called syntax) and rules for assigning meaning (called semantics). The grammar, together with a mental dictionary that lists the words of the language, represents our linguistic competence. To understand the nature of language, we must understand the nature of grammar and, in particular, the internalised, unconscious set of rules that is part of every grammar of every language. Every human being who speaks a language knows its grammar. When linguists wish to describe a language, they attempt to describe the rules (the grammar) of the language that exist in the minds of its speakers. Some differences will exist among speakers, but there must be shared knowledge too. The shared knowledge – the common parts of the grammar – makes it possible to communicate through language. To the extent that the linguist’s description is a true model of the speakers’ linguistic capacity, it is a successful description of the grammar and of the language itself. Such a model is called a descriptive grammar. It does not tell you how you should speak; it describes your basic linguistic knowledge. It explains how it is possible for you to speak and understand and make judgements about well-formedness, and it tells what you know about the sounds, words, phrases and sentences of your language. Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com phonology The sound system of a language; the component of a grammar that includes the inventory of sounds (phonemic units) and the processes required to ensure their appropriate combination and realisation, including aspects of rhythm, intonation and stress; the study of the sound systems of all languages. morphology The structure of words; the component of the grammar that includes the rules of word formation. syntax The rules of sentence formation; the component of the mental grammar that represents speakers’ knowledge of the structure of phrases and sentences. semantics The study of the linguistic meaning of morphemes, words, phrases and sentences. 9 Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com PART 1 / THE NATURE OF HUMAN LANGUAGE descriptive grammar A linguist’s description or model of the mental grammar, including the units, structures and rules; an explicit statement of what speakers know about their language. mental grammar The internalised grammar that a descriptive grammar attempts to model; see linguistic competence. grammatical Describes a wellformed sequence of words, one conforming to rules of syntax. ungrammatical Describes a structure that fails to conform to the rules of grammar. dialect A variety of a language whose grammar differs in systematic ways from other varieties. Differences may be lexical, phonological, syntactic and/or semantic. prescriptive grammar Rules of grammar brought about by grammarians’ attempts to legislate what grammatical rules for speakers should be, rather than what they are. 10 Linguists use the word grammar in two ways: the first refers to the mental grammar speakers have in their brains; the second to the model or description of this internalised grammar studied by linguists. Almost 2000 years ago the Greek grammarian Dionysius Thrax defined grammar as that which permits us either to speak a language or to speak about a language. From now on we will not differentiate these two meanings because the linguist’s descriptive grammar is an attempt at a formal statement (or theory) of the speaker’s grammar. When we say in later chapters that a sentence is grammatical, we mean that it conforms to the rules of the mental grammar (as described by the linguist); when we say that it is ungrammatical, we mean it deviates from the rules in some way. If, however, we posit a rule for English that does not agree with your intuitions as a speaker, then the grammar we are describing differs in some way from the mental grammar that represents your linguistic competence; that is, your language is not the one described. No language or variety of a language (called a dialect) is superior to any other in a linguistic sense. Every grammar is equally complex, logical and capable of producing an infinite set of sentences to express any thought. If something can be expressed in one language or one dialect, it can be expressed in any other language or dialect. It might involve different meanings and different words, but it can be expressed. We will have more to say about dialects in Chapter 9. This is true as well for languages of technologically underdeveloped cultures. The grammars of these languages are not primitive or ill formed in any way. They have all the richness and complexity of the grammars of languages spoken in technologically advanced cultures. Prescriptive grammars It is certainly the business of a grammarian to find out, and not to make, the laws of a language. John Fell, Essay Towards an English Grammar, 1784 Just read the sentence aloud, Amanda, and listen to how it sounds. If the sentence sounds OK, go with it. If not, rearrange the pieces. Then throw out the rule books and go to bed. James Kilpatrick, ‘Writer’s Art’ (syndicated newspaper column), 1998 Any fool can make a rule And every fool will mind it. Henry David Thoreau, journal entry, 1860 Not all grammarians, past or present, share the view that all grammars are equal. Language ‘purists’ of all ages believe that some versions of a language are better than others, that there are certain ‘correct’ forms that all educated people should use in speaking and writing, and that language change is corruption. The Greek Alexandrians in the first century, the Arabic scholars at Basra in the eighth century and numerous English grammarians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries held this view. They wished to prescribe rather than describe the rules of grammar, which gave rise to the writing of prescriptive grammars. In the Renaissance a new middle class emerged who wanted their children to speak the dialect of the ‘upper’ classes. This desire led to the publication of many prescriptive grammars. In 1762 Bishop Robert Lowth wrote A Short Introduction to English Grammar with Critical Notes, in which he prescribed a number of new rules for English, many of which were influenced by his personal taste. Before the publication of his grammar, practically everyone – upper class, middle class and lower class – said ‘I don’t have none’, ‘You was wrong about that’ and ‘Matilda is fatter than me’. Lowth, however, decided that ‘two negatives make a positive’ and therefore one should say ‘I don’t have any’, that even when you is singular it should be followed by the plural were and that I not me, he not him, they not them and so forth should follow than in comparative constructions. Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com CHAPTER 1 / WHAT IS LANGUAGE? Many of these prescriptive rules were based on Latin grammar, which had already given way to different rules in the languages that developed from Latin, such as Italian and French. Because Lowth was influential and because the rising new class wanted to speak ‘properly’, many of these new rules were legislated into English grammar, at least for the prestige dialect – that variety of the language spoken by people in positions of power. Figure 1.3 highlights the distinction between prescriptive grammar and descriptive grammar, suggesting that double negatives are not ‘correct English’. Figure 1.3 Prescriptive grammar prestige dialect The dialect usually spoken by people in positions of power, and the one deemed correct by prescriptive grammarians; for example, RP (received pronunciation) (British) English, the dialect spoken by the British royal family. Pearls Before Swine © 2015 Stephan Pastis. Reprinted with permission of ANDREWS McMEEL SYNDICATION. All rights reserved. The view that dialects that regularly use double negatives are inferior cannot be justified if one looks at the standard dialects of other languages in the world. Romance languages, for example, use double negatives, as the following examples from French and Italian show: French: Italian: Je ne veux parler avec personne. I not want speak with no-one. Non voglio parlare con nessuno. not I want speak with no-one. standard dialect The dialect (regional or social) considered the norm. English translation: I don’t want to speak with anyone. Prescriptive grammars such as Lowth’s are different from the descriptive grammars we have been discussing. Their goal is not to describe the rules people know, but to tell them what rules they should follow. British prime minister Winston Churchill had this to say about the ‘rule’ against ending a sentence with a preposition: ‘That is a rule up with which I shall not put’. Today our bookstores are filled with books by language purists attempting to ‘save the English language’. Edwin Newman, for example, in his books Strictly Speaking and A Civil Tongue, rails against those who use the word hopefully to mean ‘I hope’, as in ‘Hopefully, it will not rain tomorrow’, instead of using it ‘properly’ to mean ‘with hope’. What Newman fails to recognise is that language changes in the course of time and words change meaning, and the meaning of hopefully has been broadened for most English speakers to include both usages. Other saviours of the English language blame television, the schools and even the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for failing to preserve the standard language, and they mount attacks against those academics who suggest that non-standard varieties are perfectly proper in their context and effective for communication. Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com 11 Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com PART 1 / THE NATURE OF HUMAN LANGUAGE Figure 1.4 offers another example of the disjunction between prescriptive grammar and the actual use of language Figure 1.4 Prescriptive grammar and actual use ‘Piled Higher and Deeper’ by Jorge Cham, http://www.phdcomics.com. All human languages and dialects are fully expressive, complete and logical, as much as they were 200 or 2000 years ago. Hopefully, this book will convince you that all languages and dialects are rule-governed, whether spoken by rich or poor, powerful or weak, learned or illiterate. Grammars and usages of particular groups in society may be dominant for social and political reasons, but from a linguistic (scientific) point of view, they are neither superior nor inferior to the grammars and usages of less prestigious segments of society. Having said all this, it is undeniable that the standard dialect may indeed be a better dialect for someone wishing to obtain a particular job or achieve a position of social prestige. In a society where ‘linguistic profiling’ is used to discriminate against speakers of a minority dialect, it may behove those speakers to learn the prestige dialect rather than wait for social change. But linguistically, prestige and standard dialects do not have superior grammars. Finally, all of the preceding remarks apply to spoken language. Writing is another story (see Chapter 11). Writing is not acquired naturally through simple exposure to others speaking the language (see Chapter 7), it must be taught. And writing follows certain prescriptive rules of grammar, usage and style that the spoken language does not, and is subject to little dialectal variation. Teaching grammars I don’t want to talk grammar. I want to talk like a lady. Eliza Doolittle in George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion, 1912 teaching grammar A set of language rules written to help speakers learn a foreign language or a different dialect of their own language. 12 The descriptive grammar of a language attempts to describe the rules internalised by a speaker of that language. It is different from a teaching grammar, which is used to learn another language or dialect. Teaching grammars are used in schools to fulfil language requirements. They can be helpful to people who do not speak the standard or prestige dialect, but find it would be advantageous socially and economically to do so. Teaching grammars state explicitly the rules of the language, list the words and their pronunciations and aid the learning of a new language or dialect. It is often difficult for adults to learn a second language without formal instruction, even when they have lived for an extended period in a country where the language is spoken. (Second- Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com CHAPTER 1 / WHAT IS LANGUAGE? language acquisition is discussed in more detail in Chapter 7.) Teaching grammars assume the student already knows one language and compares the grammar of the target language with the grammar of their native language. The meaning of a word is given by providing a gloss – the parallel word in the student’s native language. For example, with maison, ‘house’ in French, it is assumed the student knows the meaning of the gloss ‘house’, and so the meaning of the word maison. Sounds of the target language that do not occur in the native language are often described by reference to known sounds. Therefore, the student might be aided in producing the French sound u in the word tu by instructions such as ‘Round your lips while producing the vowel sound in tea’. The rules on how to put words together to form grammatical sentences also refer to the learner’s native-language knowledge. The teaching grammar Learn Zulu by Sibusiso Nyembezi, for example, states, gloss A word in one language given to express the meaning of a word in another language; for example, ‘house’ is the English gloss for the French word maison. ‘The difference between singular and plural is not at the end of the word but at the beginning of it’, and warns that ‘Zulu does not have the indefinite and definite articles “a” and “the”’. Such statements assume that students know the rules of their own grammar, in this case English. Although such grammars might be considered prescriptive in the sense that they attempt to teach the student what is or is not a grammatical construction in the new language, their aim is different from grammars that attempt to change the rules or usage of a language that is already known by the speaker. This book is not primarily concerned with either prescriptive or teaching grammars, but these are considered in Chapter 9 in the discussion of standard and non-standard dialects. Universal Grammar In a grammar there are parts that pertain to all languages; these components form what is called the general grammar. In addition to these general (universal) parts, there are those that belong only to one particular language; and these constitute the particular grammars of each language. César Chesneau Du Marsais, c. 1750 There are rules of particular languages, such as English, Swahili and Zulu, that form part of the individual grammars of these languages, and then there are rules that hold in all languages. Those rules representing the universal properties of all languages constitute a Universal Grammar (UG). The linguist attempts to uncover the laws of particular languages and also the laws that pertain to all languages. The universal laws are of particular interest because they give us a window into the human ‘faculty of language’ which enables us to learn and use any particular language. Interest in language universals has a long history. Early scholars encouraged research into the nature of language in general and promoted the idea of general grammar as distinct from special grammar. General grammar was to reveal those features common to all languages. Students trying to learn Latin, Greek, French or Swahili as a second language are generally so focused on learning aspects of the new language that differ from their native language that they may be sceptical of the universal laws of language. Yet there are many things that all language learners know unconsciously even before they begin to learn a new language. They know that a language has its own set of sounds, perhaps thought of as its alphabet, that combine according to certain patterns to form words, and that the words themselves recombine to form phrases and sentences. The learner will expect to find verbs and nouns, as these are universal grammatical categories; they will know that the language – like all languages – has a way of negating, forming questions, issuing commands, and referring to past or future time; and more generally, they will understand that the language has a system of rules that will allow them to produce and understand an infinite number of sentences. Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com Universal Grammar (UG) The principles and properties that pertain to the grammars of all human languages. 13 Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com PART 1 / THE NATURE OF HUMAN LANGUAGE One way of thinking about UG is as the blueprint that all languages follow that forms part of the child’s innate capacity for language learning. It specifies the different components of the grammar and their relations, how the different rules of these components are constructed, how they interact and so on. The linguist’s goal is to reveal the ‘laws of human language’, just as the physicist’s goal is to reveal the ‘laws of the physical universe’. The complexity of language undoubtedly means this goal will never be fully achieved. All scientific theories are incomplete and new hypotheses must be proposed to account for new data. Theories are continually changing as new discoveries are made. Just as physics was enlarged by Einstein’s theories of relativity, so grows the linguistic theory of UG as new discoveries shed new light on the nature of human language. The comparative study of many different languages is of central importance to this enterprise. 2 The development of grammar How comes it that human beings, whose contacts with the world are brief and personal and limited, are nevertheless able to know as much as they do know? Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, 1948 lexicon The component of the grammar containing a speaker’s knowledge about morphemes and words; a speaker’s mental dictionary. Linguistic theory is concerned not only with describing the knowledge that an adult speaker has of his or her language, but also with explaining how that knowledge is acquired. All typically developing children acquire (at least one) language in a relatively short period with apparent ease. They do this despite the fact that parents and other caregivers do not provide them with any specific language instruction. Indeed, it is often remarked that children seem to ‘pick up’ a language just from hearing it spoken around them. Children are language-learning virtuosos – whether a child is male or female, from a rich family or a disadvantaged one, whether he or she grows up on a farm or in the city, attends day care or is home all day, none of these factors fundamentally affect the way language develops. Children can acquire any language they are exposed to – English, Dutch, French, Swahili, Japanese – with comparable ease and, even though each language has its own peculiar characteristics, children learn them all in very much the same way. For example, all children go through a babbling stage; their babbles gradually give way to words, which then combine to form simple sentences and then sentences of ever-increasing complexity. The same child who may be unable to tie her shoes or even count to five has managed to master the complex grammatical structures of her language and acquire a substantial lexicon. How children accomplish this remarkable cognitive feat is a topic of intense interest to linguists. According to one hypothesis, the child’s inexorable path to adult linguistic knowledge and the uniformity of the acquisition process point to a substantial innate component to language development. Children acquire language as quickly and effortlessly as they do because they do not have to figure out all the grammatical rules of language, but only those that are specific to their particular language. The universal properties – the laws of language – are part of their biological endowment. There are alternative views on language acquisition that assume little or no innate component specific to language. In Chapter 7 we will discuss language acquisition in more detail. Sign languages: evidence for language universals It is not the want of organs that [prevents animals from making] … known their thoughts … for it is evident that magpies and parrots are able to utter words just like ourselves, and yet they cannot speak as we do, that is, so as to give evidence that they think of what they say. On the other hand, men who, being born deaf and mute … are destitute of the organs which serve the others for talking, are in the habit of themselves inventing certain signs by which they make themselves understood. René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditation on First Philosophy, 1637 14 Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com CHAPTER 1 / WHAT IS LANGUAGE? The sign languages of deaf communities provide some of the best evidence to support the view that all languages are governed by the same universal principles. Current research on sign languages has been crucial to understanding the biological underpinnings of human language acquisition and use. The major language of the deaf community in Australia is Australian Sign Language – known as Auslan. It has evolved mostly from British Sign Language (BSL), with some input from Irish Sign Language, both of which were brought to Australia during the nineteenth century. Auslan and other sign languages do not use sounds to express meanings. Instead, they are visual–gestural systems that use hand, body and facial gestures as the forms used to create vocabulary and to express grammatical rules. Sign languages are fully developed languages, and signers create and comprehend unlimited numbers of new sentences, just as speakers of spoken languages do. Signed languages have their own grammatical rules and a mental lexicon of signs, all encoded through a system of gestures, and are otherwise equivalent to spoken languages. Signers are affected by performance factors just as speakers are; slips of the hand occur similar to slips of the tongue. Finger fumblers amuse signers just as tongue twisters amuse speakers. These and other language games play on properties of the phonological (that is, ‘sound’) systems of the spoken and signed languages. Deaf children who are exposed to signed languages acquire them just as hearing children acquire spoken languages, going through the same linguistic stages, including the babbling stage. Deaf children babble with their hands, just as hearing children babble with their vocal tracts. Neurological studies show that signed languages are organised in the brain in a very similar way to spoken languages, despite their visual modality. We discuss the brain basis of language in Chapter 8. In short, signed languages resemble spoken languages in all major aspects. This universality is expected because, regardless of the modality in which it is expressed, language is a biologically based ability. Our knowledge, use and acquisition of language are not dependent on the ability to produce and hear sounds, but on a far more abstract cognitive capacity. Australian Sign Language (Auslan) The sign language used by the deaf community in Australia; see also sign languages. What is not (human) language It is a very remarkable fact that there are none so depraved and stupid, without even excepting idiots, that they cannot arrange different words together, forming of them a statement by which they make known their thoughts; while, on the other hand, there is no other animal, however perfect and fortunately circumstanced it may be, which can do the same. René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditation on First Philosophy, 1637 All languages share certain fundamental properties, and children naturally acquire these languages – whether they are spoken or signed. Both modalities are equally accessible to the child because human beings are designed for human language. But what of the ‘languages’ of other species – are they like human languages? Can other species be taught a human language? The birds and the bees Teach me half the gladness That thy brain must know; Such harmonious madness From my lips would flow, The world should listen then, as I am listening now. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), ‘To a Skylark’ Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com 15 Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com PART 1 / THE NATURE OF HUMAN LANGUAGE discreteness A fundamental property of human language in which larger linguistic units are perceived to be composed of smaller linguistic units, e.g. cat is perceived as the phonemes /k/, /æ/, /t/; the cat is perceived as the and cat. bird call One or more short notes that convey messages about the immediate environment, such as danger, feeding, nesting and flocking. birdsong A complex pattern of notes used by birds to mark their territory and to attract mates. displacement The capacity to talk (or sign) messages that are unrelated to here and now. 16 Most animal species possess some kind of communication system. Humans also communicate through systems other than language, such as head nodding or facial expressions. The question is whether the communication systems used by other species are at all like human language with its very specific properties, most notably its creative aspect. Many species have a non-vocal system of communication. Among certain species of spiders there is a complex system for courtship. Before approaching his ladylove, the male spider goes through an elaborate series of gestures to tell her that he is indeed a spider and a suitable mate, and not a crumb or a fly to be eaten. These gestures are invariant. One never finds a creative spider changing or adding to the courtship ritual of his species. A similar kind of gestural language is found among the fiddler crabs. There are 40 species and each uses its own claw-waving movement to signal to another member of its ‘clan’. The timing, movement and posture of the body never change from one time to another or from one crab to another within the particular variety. Whatever the signal means, it is fixed – only one meaning can be conveyed. An essential property of human language not shared by the communication systems of spiders, crabs and other animals is its discreteness. Human languages are not simply made up of a fixed set of invariant signs. They are composed of discrete units – sounds, words, phrases – that are combined according to the rules of the grammar of the language. The word top in English has a particular meaning, but it also has individual parts that can be rearranged to produce other meaningful sequences – pot or opt. Similarly, the phrase the cat on the mat means something different from the mat on the cat. We can arrange and rearrange the units of our language to form an infinite number of expressions. The creativity of human language depends on discreteness. In contrast to crabs and spiders, birds communicate vocally and birdsongs have always captured the human imagination. Musicians and composers have been moved by these melodies, sometimes imitating them in their compositions, at other times incorporating birdsongs directly into the music. Birdsongs have also inspired poets, as in Shelley’s ‘To a Skylark’, not to mention cartoonists. Birds do not sing for our pleasure, however. Their songs and calls communicate important information to other members of the species and sometimes to other animals. Bird calls (consisting of one or more short notes) convey danger, feeding, nesting, flocking and so on. Birdsongs (more complex patterns of notes) are used to stake out territory and to attract mates. Like the messages of crabs and spiders, however, there is no evidence of any internal structure to these songs; they cannot be segmented into discrete meaningful parts and rearranged to encode different messages as can the words, phrases and sentences of human language. In its territorial song, the European robin alternates between high-pitched and low-pitched notes to indicate how strongly it feels about defending its territory. The different alternations indicate intensity and nothing more. The robin is creative in its ability to sing the same song in different ways, but not creative in its ability to use the same units of the system to express different messages with different meanings. Recently, scientists have observed that finches will react when the units of a familiar song are rearranged. It is unclear, however, whether the birds recognise a violation of the rules of the song or are just responding to a pattern change. Though crucial to the birds’ survival, the messages conveyed by these songs and calls are limited, relating only to a bird’s immediate environment and needs. Human language is different, of course. Our words and sentences are not simply responses to internal and external stimuli. If you are tired you may yawn, but you may also say ‘I’m tired’, or ‘I’m going to bed’, or ‘I’m going to a cafe for a double espresso’. Notably, you also have the right to remain silent, or talk about things completely unrelated to your physical state – the weather, the movie you saw last night, your plans for the weekend, or most interesting of all, your linguistics class. The linguists call this property of human language displacement: the capacity to talk (or sign) messages that are unrelated to here and now. Displacement and discreteness are two Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com CHAPTER 1 / WHAT IS LANGUAGE? fundamental properties that distinguish human language from the communication systems of birds and other animals. One respect in which birdsongs do resemble human languages is in their development. In many bird species the full adult version of the birdsong is acquired in several stages, as it is for children acquiring language. The young bird sings a simplified version of the song shortly after hatching and then learns the more detailed, complex version by hearing adults sing. However, it must hear the adult song during a specific fixed period after birth – the period differs from species to species – otherwise song acquisition does not occur. For example, the chaffinch is unable to learn the more detailed song elements after 10 months of age. A baby nightingale in captivity may be trained to sing melodiously by another nightingale, a ‘teaching bird’, but only before its tail feathers are grown. These birds show a critical period for acquiring their ‘language’ similar to the critical period for human language acquisition, which we will discuss in Chapter 7. As with human language acquisition, the development of the birdsongs of these species involves an interaction of both learnt and innate structure. An interesting consequence of the fact that some birdsongs are partially learnt is that variation can develop. There can be ‘regional dialects’ within the same species and, as with humans, these dialects are transmitted from parents to offspring. Researchers have noted, in fact, that dialect differences may be better preserved in songbirds than in humans because there is no homogenisation of regional accents due to radio or television. We will discuss human language dialects in Chapter 9. Honey bees have a particularly interesting signalling system. When a forager bee returns to the hive, it communicates to other bees where a source of food is located by performing a dance on a wall of the hive to reveal the location and quality of the food source. For one species of Italian honey bee, the dancing may assume one of three possible patterns: round (which indicates locations near the hive, within 6 metres or so); sickle (which indicates locations 6 to 18 metres from the hive); and tail-wagging (for distances that exceed 18 metres). The number of repetitions per minute of the basic pattern in the tail-wagging dance indicates the precise distance – the slower the repetition rate, the longer the distance. The number of repetitions and the intensity with which the bee dances the round dance indicates the richness of the food source – the more repetitions and the livelier the bee dance, the more food to be had. Bee dances are discrete in some sense, consisting of separate parts, and in principle they can communicate infinitely many different messages, like human language; but unlike human language the topic is always the same – namely, food. They lack the displacement property. As experiments have shown, when a bee is forced to walk to a food source rather than fly, it will communicate a distance many times farther away than the food source actually is. The bee has no way of communicating the special circumstances of its trip. This absence of creativity makes the bee’s dance qualitatively different from human language. As we will discuss in Chapter 8, the human language ability is rooted in the human brain. Just like human language, the communication system of each species is determined by its biology. This raises, again, the interesting question of whether it is possible for one species to acquire the language of another. Can animals learn human language? It is a great baboon, but so much like man in most things … I do believe it already understands much English; and I am of the mind it might be taught to speak or make signs. Entry in Samuel Pepys’ diary, 1661 Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com 17 Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com PART 1 / THE NATURE OF HUMAN LANGUAGE The idea of talking animals is as old and as widespread among human societies as language itself. All cultures have legends in which some animal speaks. All over west Africa, children listen to folktales in which a ‘spider-man’ is the hero. ‘Coyote’ is a favourite figure in many Native American tales, and many an animal takes the stage in Aesop’s famous fables. Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck are icons of American popular culture. The fictional Doctor Dolittle communicated with all manner of animals, from giant snails to tiny sparrows, as did Saint Francis of Assisi. In reality, various species show abilities that seem to mimic aspects of human language. Talking birds, such as parrots and mynahs, can be taught to faithfully reproduce words and phrases, but this does not mean they have acquired a human language. As the poet William Cowper put it: ‘Words learned by rote a parrot may rehearse; but talking is not always to converse’.3 Talking birds do not decompose their imitations into discrete units. Polly and Molly do not rhyme for a parrot. They are as different as hello and goodbye. If Polly learns to say Polly wants a cracker and Polly wants a doughnut, and also learns to say whisky and bagel, she will not then spontaneously produce Polly wants whisky or Polly wants a bagel or Polly wants whisky and a bagel. If she learns cat and cats, and dog and dogs, and then learns the word parrot, she will not be able to form the plural parrots as children do. Unlike every developing child, a parrot cannot generalise from particular instances and therefore cannot produce sentences he has not been directly taught. A parrot – even a very verbose one – cannot produce an unlimited set of utterances from a finite set of units. The imitative utterances of talking birds mean nothing to the birds; these utterances have no communicative function. It is clear that simply knowing how to produce a sequence of speech sounds is not the same as knowing a language. But what about animals that appear to learn the meanings of words? Do they have human language? Dogs can easily be taught to respond to commands such as ‘heel’, ‘sit’, ‘fetch’ and so on, and even seem to understand object words like ball, toy and so on. Indeed, in 2004 German psychologists reported on a border collie named Rico (Figure 1.5) that had acquired a 200-word vocabulary (containing both German and English words). When asked to fetch a particular toy from a pile of many toys, Rico was correct over 90 per cent of the time. When told to fetch a toy whose name he had not been previously taught, Rico could match the novel name to a new toy among a pile of familiar toys about 70 per cent of the time – a rate comparable to that of young children performing a similar novel name task. More recently, a border collie named Chaser Figure 1.5 Rico responding to a command by that lives in South Carolina in the US was reported fetching a toy to understand the names of 1022 toys! Chaser was taught these names over a three-year period. Like Rico, he is able to connect a novel name to a new toy placed in a huge pile of toys whose names he already knows. Rico and Chaser are clearly very intelligent dogs and their name recognition skills are amazing. It is unlikely, however, that Rico or Chaser (or Spot or Rover) understand the meanings of words or have acquired a symbolic system in the way that children do. Rather, they learn to associate a particular sequence of sounds with an object or action. For Chaser and Rico, the name ‘Sponge Bob’, for example, might mean something like ‘fetch Sponge Bob’ – what the dog has been taught to do. AAP Photos/Reuters/Manuela Hartling The young child who has learnt the name ‘Sponge Bob’ knows that it refers to a particular toy or 18 Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com CHAPTER 1 / WHAT IS LANGUAGE? television character independent of any a particular game or context. The philosopher Bertrand Russell (‘The Uses of Language’) summed up the dog rather insightfully, noting that ‘however eloquently he may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were honest though poor’. In their natural habitats, chimpanzees, gorillas and other non-human primates communicate with each other through visual, auditory, olfactory and tactile signals. Many of these signals seem to have meanings associated with the animals’ immediate environment or emotional state. They can signal danger and can communicate aggressiveness and subordination. However, the natural sounds and gestures produced by all non-human primates are highly stereotyped and limited in the type and number of messages they convey, consisting mainly of emotional responses to particular situations. They have no way of expressing the anger they felt yesterday or the anticipation of tomorrow. Even though primate communication systems are quite limited, many people have been interested in the question of whether they have the latent capacity to acquire complex linguistic systems similar to human language. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, there were a number of studies designed to test whether non-human primates could learn human language, including both words (or signs) and the grammatical rules for their combination. In early experiments researchers raised chimpanzees in their own homes alongside their children, in order to recreate the natural environment in which human children acquire language. The chimps were unable to vocalise words despite the efforts of their caretakers, although they did achieve the ability to understand a number of individual words. Primates’ vocal tracts do not permit them to pronounce many different sounds but because of their manual dexterity, sign language was an attractive alternative to test their cognitive linguistic ability. Starting with a chimpanzee named Washoe and continuing over the years with a gorilla named Koko and another chimp ironically named Nim Chimpsky (after Noam Chomsky; Nim was the subject of a movie, Project Nim, released in August 2011), intense efforts were made to teach them American Sign Language. Although the primates achieved small successes, such as the ability to string two signs together and to occasionally show flashes of creativity, none achieved the qualitative linguistic ability of a human child. Similar results were obtained in attempting to teach primates artificial languages designed to resemble human languages in some respects. Common chimpanzees Sarah, Lana, Sherman and Austin, and, more recently, a male bonobo (or pygmy chimpanzee) named Kanzi, were taught languages whose ‘words’ were plastic chips, or keys on a keyboard, which could be arranged into ‘sentences’. The researchers were particularly interested in the ability of primates to communicate using such abstract symbols. These experiments also came under scrutiny. Questions arose over what kind of knowledge Sarah and Lana were showing with their symbol manipulations and to what extent their responses were being inadvertently cued by experimenters. Many scientists, including some who were directly involved with these projects, have concluded that the creative ability that is so much a part of human language was not evidenced by the chimps’ use of the artificial languages. As often happens in science, the search for the answers to one kind of question leads to answers to other questions. The linguistic experiments with primates have led to many advances in our understanding of primate cognitive ability. Researchers have gone on to investigate other capacities of the chimp mind, such as causality. These studies also point out how remarkable it is that within just a few short years, without the benefit of explicit guidance and regardless of personal circumstances, all human children are able to create new and complex sentences never spoken and never heard before. Can computers learn human language? Computers are prolific. If you are reading this book, there is a high likelihood that you use a computer, be it as large as a desktop or as small as an Apple Watch. You may also be able to speak Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com 19 Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com PART 1 / THE NATURE OF HUMAN LANGUAGE to your computer and it may speak back. Your computer may take dictation, translate between languages, read an electronic newspaper out loud and give you the definition of eleemosynary. These are the trappings of human language, but does your computer, or any computer, have human language competence? We saw earlier that two key properties of human language are discreteness and displacement. Computer speech has both these properties. Spoken words are assembled from discrete, prestored units of sound; and sentences from a prestored lexicon of words. Moreover, computer speech may refer to the past, present or future and to its current location or another place. Unlike talking birds, computers have no trouble generalising sentences, such as ‘Polly wants a cracker’ to ‘Polly wants some whisky’ or even to ‘Hedwig likes mice’. Forming plurals or past tenses are also easily programmable. A computer could associate one million spoken names of objects to pictures of those objects, putting poor Chaser (and all of us) to shame. As to the lack of creativity among non-human primates, computers suffer from no such drawback. Computers have been programmed to write poetry, learn new words, and even provide psychological counselling. Even the best of language-using computers have distinctly non-human language traits. While humans never pronounce the same word twice identically, computers always do. Humans suffer from slips of the tongue, fumbled pronunciations and convoluted phrasing. Humans often speak in fits and starts, hemming and hawing, and inserting filler sounds such as ‘um’ and ‘you know’. Humans repeat words in a sentence such as ‘I … I … I don’t want to paint uh I mean stain … stain my floor, no, I mean the decking’. Humans bollix their syntax and realise it after they may have said ‘The horses away ran from the barn jumped the fence over’. Computers never do any of this unless they are purposefully programmed to do so, and even when they are, the ‘mistakes’ sound disingenuous. Nonetheless, it may be argued that these are issues of linguistic performance. The toughest test of linguistic competence is a version of one first suggested by Alan M. Turing (1912–1954), the British mathematician who is considered the founder of modern computer science. Behind two screens are placed a computer and a human. An interrogator engages both voices behind the screens in conversation. If based on language usage, the interrogator is unable to determine which is the human and which is the computer, then one might argue that the computer has attained human linguistic competence. No computer has come close to passing this ‘Turing test’, fictional computers and robots to the contrary notwithstanding. Indeed, the test has never been seriously administered. Moreover, if in an unforeseeable future a computer was programmed to pass this test, it would be the ingenuity and linguistic competence of the programmers on display, not the computer nor its software. Despite the intelligence of animals and machines, none has achieved the linguistic competence of any healthy human being. 20 Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com CHAPTER 1 / WHAT IS LANGUAGE? CHAPTER REVIEW Summary We are all intimately familiar with at least one language – our own. Yet few of us ever stop to consider what we know when we know a language. No book contains, or could possibly contain, all the elements of the English or Russian or Zulu language. The words of a language can be listed in a dictionary, but all the sentences cannot be. However, a language consists of these sentences as well as words. Speakers use a finite set of rules to produce and understand an infinite set of possible sentences. These rules are part of the grammar of a language, which develops when you acquire the language and includes the sound system (the phonology), the structure and properties of words (the morphology and lexicon), how words may be combined into phrases and sentences (the syntax), and the ways in which sounds and meanings are related (the semantics). The sounds and meanings of individual words are related in an arbitrary fashion. If you had never heard the word syntax you would not, by its sounds, know what it meant. The gestures used by signers are also arbitrarily related to their meanings. Language, then, is a system that relates sounds (or hand and body gestures) with meanings. When you know a language you know this system. This knowledge (linguistic competence) is different from behaviour (linguistic performance). You have the competence to produce a million-word sentence, but performance limitations, such as memory and endurance, keep this from occurring. There are different kinds of ‘grammars’. The descriptive grammar of a language represents the unconscious linguistic knowledge or capacity of its speakers. Such a grammar is a model of the mental grammar every speaker of the language knows. It does not teach the rules of the language; it describes the rules that are already known. A grammar that attempts to legislate what your grammar should be is called a prescriptive grammar – it prescribes. It does not describe, except incidentally. Teaching grammars are written to help people learn a foreign language or a dialect of their own language. The more that linguists investigate the thousands of languages of the world and describe the ways in which they differ from each other, the more they discover that these differences are limited. Linguistic universals pertain to each of the parts of grammars, the ways in which these parts are related and the forms of rules. According to one influential hypothesis, these principles comprise Universal Grammar (UG), which provides a blueprint for the grammars of all possible human languages and constitutes the innate component of the human language faculty that makes normal language development possible.4 Strong evidence for UG is found in the way children acquire language. Children learn language by exposure. They need not be deliberately taught, although parents may enjoy ‘teaching’ their children to speak or sign. Children will learn any human language to which they are exposed, and they learn it in definable stages, beginning at a very early age. The fact that deaf children learn sign language shows that the ability to hear or produce sounds is not a prerequisite for language learning. All of the sign languages in the world, which differ as spoken languages do, are visual–gestural systems that are as fully developed and as structurally complex as spoken languages. The major sign language used in Australia is called Australian Sign Language, or Auslan. If language is defined merely as a system of communication, or the ability to produce speech sounds, then language is not unique to humans. There are, however, certain characteristics of human language not found in the communication systems of any other species. A basic property of human language is its creativity – a speaker’s ability to combine the basic linguistic units to form an infinite set of well-formed grammatical sentences, most of which are novel, never before produced or heard. For many years, researchers were interested in the question of whether language is a uniquely human ability. There have been many attempts to teach non-human primates communication systems that are supposed to resemble human language in certain respects. Overall, results have been disappointing. Some chimpanzees have been trained to use an impressive number of symbols or signs. But a careful examination of their multi-sign utterances reveals that unlike children, the chimps show little creativity or spontaneity. Their ‘utterances’ are often unwittingly cued by trainers and have little syntactic structure. Some highly intelligent dogs have also learnt a significant number of words, but their learning is restricted to a specific context and it is likely that their Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com 21 Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com PART 1 / THE NATURE OF HUMAN LANGUAGE ‘meanings’ for these words are very different from the symbolic or referential meanings that would be learnt by a human child. Computer scientists have laboured for decades to program computers with the linguistic competence of a human. While the results are impressive, and computers appear to be able to talk, listen, and understand, there is little evidence that human linguistic competence has been achieved. Exercises 1 An English speaker’s knowledge includes the sound sequences of the English language. When new products are put on the market, the manufacturers have to create names for them that conform to the allowable sound patterns of the language. Suppose you were hired by a manufacturer of soap products to name five new products. What names might you come up with? List them. As we are interested in how the names are pronounced, describe in any way you can how to say the words you list. Suppose, for example, you named one detergent Blick. You could describe the sounds in any of the following ways: bl as in blood, i as in pit, ck as in stick bli as in bliss, ck as in tick b as in boy, lick as in lick. 22 2 Consider the following sentences. Put an asterisk (*) before those that do not seem to conform to the rules of your grammar; that is, those that seem ungrammatical to you. State, if you can, why you think the sentence is ungrammatical. a Robin forced the sheriff go. b Napoleon forced Josephine to go. c The devil made Faust go. d He passed by a large pile of money. e He drove by my house. f He drove my house by. g Did in a corner little Jack Horner sit? h Elizabeth is resembled by Charles. i Nancy is eager to please. j It is easy to frighten Emily. k It is eager to love a kitten. l That birds can fly flabbergasts. m The fact that you are late to class is surprising. n Has the nurse slept the baby yet? o I was surprised for you to get married. p I wonder who and Mary went swimming. q Myself bit John. r What did Alice eat the toadstool with? s What did Alice eat the toadstool and? 3 It was pointed out in this chapter that a small set of words in languages may be onomatopoeic; that is, their sounds imitate what they refer to. Ding-dong, tick-tock, bang, zing, swish and plop are such words in English. Construct a list of 10 new onomatopoeic words. Test them on at least five friends to see if they are truly nonarbitrary as to sound and meaning. 4 Although sounds and meanings of most words in all languages are arbitrarily related, there are some communication systems in which the signs unambiguously reveal their meaning. a Describe (or draw) five different signs that directly show what they mean. Example: a road sign indicating an S curve. b Describe any other communication system that, like language, consists of arbitrary symbols. Example: traffic signals, where red means stop and green means go. Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com CHAPTER 1 / WHAT IS LANGUAGE? 5 Consider these two statements: ‘I learnt a new word today’. ‘I learnt a new sentence today’. Do you think the two statements are equally probable? Give reasons for your answer. 6 An African grey parrot named Alex who was the subject of a 30-year experiment was reported to have learnt the meanings of 150 words. There are many reports online about Alex’s impressive abilities. In the light of evidence presented in this chapter, or based on your own online research, discuss whether Alex’s communications were the results of classical operant conditioning, as many scientists believe, or whether he showed true linguistic creativity, as his trainers maintain. 7 A wolf is able to express subtle gradations of emotion by different positions of the ears, the lips and the tail. There are 11 postures of the tail that express such emotions as self-confidence, confident threat, lack of tension, uncertain threat, depression, defensiveness, active submission and complete submission. This system seems to be complex. Suppose there were a thousand different emotions that the wolf could express in this way. Would you then say a wolf had a language similar to a human’s? If not, why not? 8 Suppose you taught a dog to heel, sit up, roll over, play dead, stay, jump and bark on command, using the italicised words as cues. Would you be teaching it language? Why? 9 Challenge exercise: One of the key assumptions of this book and an important discovery of modern linguistics is that sign languages are essentially the same as spoken languages except that they use gestures instead of sound. However, we know people use gestures when they communicate in speech. Write a short essay on the role of gestures in spoken language interaction (see Goldin-Meadow and Alibali, 2013, listed in the ‘Further reading’ section). 10 State some rule of grammar that you have learnt is the correct way to say something but that you do not generally use in speaking. You may, for example, have learnt that ‘It’s me’ is incorrect and that the correct form is ‘It’s I’. Nevertheless, you always use ‘me’ in such a sentence; your friends do also and, in fact, ‘It’s I’ sounds odd to you. Write a short essay presenting arguments against someone who tells you that you are wrong. Discuss how this disagreement demonstrates the difference between descriptive and prescriptive grammars. 11 Noam Chomsky has been quoted as saying: It’s about as likely that an ape will prove to have a language ability as that there is an island somewhere with a species of flightless birds waiting for human beings to teach them to fly.5 In the light of evidence presented in this chapter, or based on your own online research, comment on Chomsky’s remark. Do you agree or disagree, or do you think the evidence is inconclusive? 12 Challenge exercise: In the text, we discussed how birdsongs are fundamentally different from human language. However, some recent studies suggest that the acoustic patterns of some bird songs resemble the acoustic patterns found in speech. Research this topic, starting from the article by James and Sakata (2017) listed in the ‘Further reading’ section, and write a short essay. 13 Think of song titles that are ‘bad’ grammar but which, if corrected, would lack effect. The 1929 Fats Waller classic ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’’, for example, is clearly superior to the bland ‘I am not misbehaving’. Try to come up with five or ten such titles. 14 Linguists who attempt to write a descriptive grammar of linguistic competence are faced with a difficult task. They must understand a deep and complex system based on a set of sparse and often inaccurate data. (Children learning language face the same difficulty.) Albert Einstein and Leopold Infield captured the essence of the difficulty in their book The Evolution of Physics, written in 1938: In our endeavour to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility of the meaning of such a comparison. Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com 23 Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com PART 1 / THE NATURE OF HUMAN LANGUAGE Write a short essay that speculates on how a linguist might go about understanding the reality of a person’s grammar (the closed watch) by observing what that person says and does not say (the face and moving hands). A person might, for example, never say ‘The sixth sheik’s sixth sheep is sick as a dog’, but the grammar should specify that it is a well-formed sentence, just as it should somehow indicate that ‘came the messenger on time’ is ill formed. 15 View the movie My Fair Lady (drawn from the play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw). Note every attempt to teach grammar (pronunciation, word choice and syntax) to the character of Eliza Doolittle. This is an illustration of ‘teaching grammar’. 16 English words containing dge in their spelling (trudge, edge) are said mostly to have an unfavourable or negative connotation. Research this notion by accumulating as many dge words as you can and classifying them as unfavourable (sludge) or neutral (bridge). What do you do about budget? Unfavourable or not? Are there other questionable words? 17 Euphemism treadmill refers to the linguistic phenomenon in which a euphemism evolved to be as offensive as the word it replaced, requiring yet another euphemism. Provide some examples from English. (Hint: Sex, race and bodily functions are good places to start.) 18 Challenge exercise: Read the Cratylus Dialogue by Plato – it is available online at http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/cratylus.html. In it is a discussion (or dialogue) of whether names are conventional (i.e. what we have called ‘arbitrary’) or natural. Do you find Socrates’ point of view sufficiently well-argued to support the thesis in this chapter that the relationship between form and meaning is indeed arbitrary? Argue your case in either direction in a short (or long if you wish) essay. 19 Challenge exercise: It is claimed that Pirahã – an indigenous language of Brazil – violates some of the universal principles hypothesised by linguists. Which principles are in question? Is the evidence persuasive? Conclusive? Speculative? (As a starting point, use the journal Current Anthropology, 46(4), August–October 2005 and the journal Language, 85(2), June 2009.) 20 Challenge exercise: There are approximately 7000 languages spoken today in the world according to the encyclopaedia Ethnologue: Languages of the World (see https://www.ethnologue.com/endangered-languages). Many languages are seriously endangered and some will cease to be spoken in the near future. Write a short essay on the topic of language endangerment and what linguists and language planners can and should do about it. 21 There are, very roughly, about half a million words in use in today’s English language according to current unabridged dictionaries. However, if we reach back to the beginnings of the printing press and examine large amounts of published English we find an additional half a million words now no longer in use, such as slethem, a musical instrument. Write a short essay arguing one way or the other that the lexicon of the English language ought to be counted as containing one million or so words. Feel free, as always, to poke around the internet to inform yourself further. 22 The linguist Geoffrey Pullum has published a number of incisive criticisms of some prescriptive grammarians’ advice on English usage. Research Pullum’s view on this topic (see also his posts on the popular linguistics blog Language Log at http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll) and write a short essay about the issues he raised, focusing on arguments and evidence. 23 Challenge exercise: Constructed languages are languages that are consciously designed and invented for various purposes. It has been claimed that the process of inventing languages can provide us with insight into the structure of natural languages. Research this topic, starting from the video talk by the linguist David Adger on Language Invention and Language Structure (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RA5NXBbXYdQ), and write a short essay. 24 Challenge exercise: In this chapter, we discussed the phenomenon of sound symbolism and noted that even though there are some words whose pronunciation suggests their meaning, there appears to be no consistent pattern across languages. However, there are recent studies that challenge this conclusion. Research this topic, starting from the article by Dingemanse et al. (2016) listed in the ‘Further reading’ section, and write a short essay. 24 Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com CHAPTER 1 / WHAT IS LANGUAGE? 25 In the text, we discussed a number of prescriptive rules in English, such as the prohibition on using two negatives in a sentence. If you speak another language, provide some examples of prescriptive rules in the language. 26 In the text we mentioned speech error, which is an anomalous or ungrammatical utterance due to an involuntary deviation from an intended utterance. Provide five actual examples of speech errors using the Fromkin Speech Error Database (https://www.mpi.nl/dbmpi/sedb/sperco-search.pl). 27 In his recent book Language Unlimited, the linguist David Adger (2019) invites readers to carry out the following simple experiment: Make [a sentence] up that, say, spans at least one line on the page. Now go to your favourite search engine and put in the sentence you’ve made up, in inverted commas, so that the search engine looks for an exact match. Now hit return. Adger then asks the question: ‘does your sentence exist anywhere else on the internet?’ Discuss briefly what you found out from your search. What does this tell us about the nature of human language? Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com 25 Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com PART 1 / THE NATURE OF HUMAN LANGUAGE Further reading Adger, D 2019, Language unlimited: The science behind our most creative power, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK. Anderson, S R 2004, Doctor Dolittle’s delusion: Animals and the uniqueness of human language, Yale University Press, New Haven. Berwick, R C and Chomsky, N 2015, Why only us? Language and evolution, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Bickerton, D 2014, More than nature needs: Language, mind, and evolution, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Chomsky, N 1986, Knowledge of language: Its nature, origin, and use, Praeger, New York. Crystal, D 2010, Cambridge encyclopedia of language, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. Dingemanse, M, Schuerman, W, Reinisch, E, Tufvesson, S and Mitterer, H 2016, ‘What sound symbolism can and cannot do: Testing the iconicity of ideophones from five languages’, Language, 92(2): e117–e113. Enfield, N 2017, How we talk: The inner workings of conversation. Basic Books, New York. Evans, N 2009, Dying words: Endangered languages and what they have to tell us, Wiley-Blackwell, Milton, QLD. _____ and Levinson, S C 2009, ‘The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32: 429–492. Evans, V 2014, The language myth: Why language is not an instinct, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. Everett, D L 2017, How language began: The story of humanity’s greatest invention, Liveright, New York. Goldberg, A 2019, Explain me this: Creativity, competition and the partial productivity of constructions. Princeton University Press, Princeton. Goldin-Meadow, S and Alibali, M W 2013, ‘Gesture’s role in speaking, learning, and creating language’, Annual Review of Psychology, 64: 257–283. Harrison, K D 2010, The last speakers: The quest to save the world’s most endangered languages, National Geographic Books, Washington DC. Hess, E 2008, Nim Chimpsky: The chimp who would be human, Bantam, New York. Hurford, J 2014, The origins of language: A slim guide, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK. James, L S and Sakata, J T 2017, ‘Learning biases underlie ‘universals’ in avian vocal sequencing’, Current Biology, 27: 3676–3682. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2017.10.019 Johnston, T and Schembri, A 2007, Australian Sign Language: An introduction to sign language linguistics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. Malt, B and Wolff, P (eds) 2010, Words and the mind: How words capture human experience, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK. Moro, A 2008, The boundaries of Babel: The brain and the enigma of impossible languages, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Napoli, DJ 2019, Do animals use language? The 5-minute linguist: Bitesized essays on language and languages, 3rd edition. Carolyn Myrick and Walt Wolfram, eds. Equinox Publishing, London. Peterson, David J 2015, The art of language invention: From horse-lords to dark elves, the words behind word-building. Penguin Books, New York. Pfau, R, Steinback, M and Woll, B 2012, Sign language: An international handbook, De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin. Pilley, J W 2013, Chaser: Unlocking the genius of the dog who knows a thousand words, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston. Pinker, S 2007, The stuff of thought: Language as a window into human nature, Viking, New York. Pullum, G K 2018, Linguistics: Why it matters. Polity Press, Cambridge, MA. Schembri, A, Fenlon, J, Cormier, K and Johnston, T 2018, ‘Sociolinguistic typology and sign languages’. Frontiers in Psychology, 9: 200. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00200 Schembri, A C and Lucas, C 2015, Sociolinguistics and deaf communities, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. Tomasello, M 2008, Origins of human communication, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. _____ 2019, Becoming human: A theory of ontogeny, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Weblinks • https://lexicon.hum.uu.nl – The Lexicon of Linguistics offers a dictionary of linguistic terms. If you come across a linguistic term you are not familiar with, it is a great place to start your search. Bookmark this site – it will save you precious time during your preparation for exams! • http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/capsules/outil_ rouge06.html – This site presents Chomsky’s Universal Grammar, observations that support the Chomskyan view of language as well as criticisms of Chomsky’s theories. • http://www.open.edu/openlearn/education – This site provides some interesting activities and questions for discussion so you have a clearer understanding of the similarities and differences between human and animal communicative behaviour. • http://www.auslan.org.au – At this site you will find a dictionary, a brief history and a corpus of Australian Sign Language (Auslan). • https://www.sila.org.au – Another great Australian website for all kinds of language–related information and tools. 3 The poem ‘Conversation’. The Poems of William Cowper, Esq. of the inner temple. Complete in one volume. For a recent perspective on the debate on language universals see Evans, N and Levinson, S (2009), Evans, V (2014) listed in the ‘Further reading’ section. Chomsky, N 1980, ‘Are those apes really talking? Skeptics say it is mostly a lot of monkeyshines’, Time, 3 October, 115. Endnotes 1 2 26 The sign languages of the deaf will be discussed throughout the book. As stated, they are essentially the same as spoken languages except that they use gestures instead of sound. A reference to ‘language’, then, unless speech sounds or spoken languages are specifically mentioned, includes both spoken and signed languages. It is important to note here that the concept of ‘UG’ is controversial and not accepted by all linguists. For alternative ways of explaining the similarity across languages see Goldberg (2019), Tomasello (2008, 2019) listed in the ‘Further reading’ section. 4 5 Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com Part 2 Grammatical aspects of language 2 Phonetics: the sounds of language 28 4 Morphology: the words of language 118 3 Phonology: the sound patterns of language 5 Syntax: the sentence patterns of language 6 Semantics and pragmatics: the meanings of language 66 156 209 The theory of grammar is concerned with the question: What is the nature of a person’s knowledge of [their] language, the knowledge that enables [them] to make use of language in the normal, creative fashion? A person who knows a language has mastered a system of rules that assigns sound and meaning in a definite way for an infinite class of possible sentences. Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind, 1968 Get Complete eBook Download By email at student.support@hotmail.com 27