SKILLS at SMHS Period 1
Monday, February 2nd
Linguistic Landscapes and Levels of Linguistic Structure
Materials needed:
 Student examples of linguistic landscapes (photos on smartphones, notes)
 PowerPoint with our linguistic landscapes examples / levels of linguistic structure terms
 Journals
 Mid-Atlantic accent link
Introduction & Brief Review (10 minutes)
 As students come in: hand out journals and collect remaining UCSB Day permission
slips
 Distribute video-recording consent forms.
 Today we will be discussing your examples of linguistic landscapes before transitioning
to learn about all the different levels of linguistic structure.
 Review question: what is the difference between dialect, accent, and language? Re-write
definitions on the board.
o Accent: The way words sound--pronunciation, emphasis, rhythm. Everyone has
an accent!
o Review the “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy” quote to review
definitions and highlight the notion of status before transitioning into their
examples
 Dialect: A particular form of language that is spoken by a specific region
or social group.
 Language: Not mutually comprehensible. Recognized politically and
institutionally supported.
o Remind the students that the linguistic/scientific cover term for all three is
“variety.”
 And who speaks varieties? Speech communities.
Discussion: Linguistics Landscapes Results (30 minutes)
 Divide class into 5 groups/clusters of 4-5, each small group led by a Fellow or mentor. Sit
in clusters with your group.
 Begin by free-writing in journal on the most striking example they found, responding to
questions (written on the board) adapted from Scott Thornbury’s blog (5 minutes)
o Where was this photo taken?
o What is the photo of? What kind of public language is it? (Street sign,
advertisement, billboard, etc.)
o How many languages can you see?
o What is the relative status of the languages? How can you tell?
o Who wrote the text? Who is the intended audience?
o Is (at least some of) it in another language besides English? If so, why do you
think this language is included?
o Is there a translation? Why/why not? Is it translated well or awkwardly? Is it
even correct?
o Is there anything you don’t understand?
o Is there anything else that stands out to you about the use of language?
 Small-group discussion mediated by fellows/mentors (10-15 minutes)
o Have each student share their example and reflections
 Come back together as a large group (5 minutes)
o Have each group recap their discussions and pose questions to the class
Make-up Discussion - Linguistic Landscapes Continued (10 minutes)
 Play PowerPoint with the images we “found over the weekend”
o What do you notice about the words being used here? What social messages are
they sending? What are these images framing as ‘normal’?
o Slide 2 represents communities (at the large scale of cities) as being very
homogenous, and the shade that represents each community is assumed to
somehow be the norm
o Side with circles: Introduce concepts of “marked” and “unmarked”
 Unmarked categories, language, and identities = thought of by a
community as ‘natural,’ ‘normal,’ ‘ordinary’; are therefore less visible
 the Panthers, “a man”
 Marked categories = thought to somehow be different from the norm
 the Lady Panthers, “a gay man”
 How is language used in these slides to make some categories seem marked, and some
seem unmarked?
Levels of Linguistic Structure (30 minutes)
*Make sure to define each level/unit and write it on the board--have students note down
definitions/examples in their journals, as these will be concepts we continue to refer to
throughout the semester*
From smallest to largest:
Phonology
 The differences in what we call “accent” (sounds), the differences in vowels and
consonants.
 Phonology = all the patterns in a language that directly involve sounds. Rules for “sound
systems” of languages.
 Phoneme = a single sound of a language.
o These are contrastive (change the meaning of the words they belong in) - kiss vs.
kill vs. kick; cat vs. rat vs. bat
 Puerto Rican Spanish turns /s/ into [h]; Spain Spanish uses [θ] in “Barcelona”
 In Wisconsin/upper Midwest /a/ sounds like [e]
 Mary/merry/marry pronounced the same in California, but differently in other parts of
the US
Morphology
 Rules for how “chunks” of meaning get combined into words
 Morpheme: a meaningful unit of language than cannot be further divided into smaller
parts.
o If you’ve studied Greek or Latin roots, these are all morphemes. For example:
what does “pyro-” mean? What about “pro-”, “phon-”, “-graph”?
 Ask students to define prefix, suffix, and root.
o In English, suffixes change the part of speech. Adore+ation (verb to noun.)
 The Spanish present tense verbal paradigm: (cantar - cant-o, cant-as, cant-a, etc.)
o cant- = root ‘sing’
o -o, -as, -a… = suffixes
 Some morphemes can stand on their own (“free morphemes”) and some have to be
attached to other morphemes (“bound morphemes”)
 Have students segment words into morphemes: dog.s, the, walk.ed, river.bed, yes,
un.break.able, muchach.o.s, bail.ando
Syntax
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The rules for combining words into sentences. Also known as “grammar.”
These are so natural we don’t even need to learn them - babies learn to speak their native
language perfectly without ever taking an English class.
o When kids are learning language, we never have to scold them. “Bad boy! Don’t
put the adjective after the noun! Don’t say ‘castle sand the’!” or “What did I tell
you about saying ‘Katie apple ate an’?”
English is SVO (Subject-Verb-Object)
o He needs a hug.
Japanese is SOV (Subject-Object-Verb)
Spanish can be both.
o SVO when there’s a full noun phrase (Él necesita un abrazo) ...
o But SOV when it’s a pronoun (Él lo necesita)
Discussion: Can you think of other syntactic differences between English and Spanish, or
between other languages?
Lexicon:
 Differences in vocabulary.
 Ask them to name examples:
o Bubbler vs. water fountain vs. drinking fountain
o Soda vs pop vs coke
o Sneakers vs tennis shoes vs gym shoes
o Libra vs kilo, etc.
o Freeway names - THE 101 vs. 101
Intonation/prosody
 Patterns of stress and rhythm; the rise and fall of a voice
 Uptalk
 Mid-Atlantic accent (beginning-1:14)
 Ask students to say the sentence “I didn’t say we should kill him,” each time stressing a
different word
o “I didn’t say we should kill him”
o “I didn’t say we should kill him” and so on
o How you say something is as important for the meaning as what you’re saying!
Preview for next class: which levels of linguistic structure do you think change the quickest?
[lexicon, phonology]