GL 3102
Introduction to Linguistics
Linguistics is…
Linguist is …
 the scientific study of language
 a person who studies linguistics
 the systematic study of language
 a person who is skilled in several languages
Linguistic Knowledge
1. Language Form
 Knowledge of the sound system (Phonetics & Phonology)
 Knowledge of words (Morphology)
 Knowledge of sentences (Syntax)
2. Sound system
 Knowing what sound are in that language and what sounds are not
 Knowing what sequences of sounds are possible in different positions
3. Words
 Knowing that certain sound sequences mean certain concepts or meanings
 The sounds of words are given meaning only by the language in which they occur.
 Knowing all the words in the dictionary doesn’t mean that person know the language.
4. Sentences
 Phrases, Clauses, Sentences
 Knowing which strings of words are sentences and which are not sentences
o Phrase
- A group of words that belong together by meaning and does not contain a
Subject + Verb combination
- A phrase is a part of a sentences
o Clause
- A group of words that contains a subject and a verb
- Independent clauses can be a sentence by itself
- Dependent clauses cannot be a sentence by itself because the meaning is
incomplete
o Sentence
- A group of words that has a subject and expresses a complete thought
- Simple sentence
- Compound sentence
- Complex sentence
- Fragment = incomplete sentence
- No limit to the length of any sentences
- No limit to the number of sentences
5. Language meaning
 Ability to determine the meaning of sentences
 When a sentence has more than one meaning
- Mary threw up her lunch.
- I saw her duck
 When different sentences mean the same thing
- John is an unmarried male.
- John is a bachelor.
6. Language in a context
CONTEXT = Circumstances in which a communication occurs
 Verbal context = surrounding text or talk of an expression
- Can you ride a bicycle?
- Can you pass the salt?
 Social context
- Age, class, gender, race, etc.
7. Other Branches of linguistics
 Sociolinguistics
- The relation between linguistic variation and social structures
 Psycholinguistics
- The representation and function of language in the mind and the brain
 Historical Linguistics
- Language change
Linguistics
= The scientific study of a language
= The systematic study of language
Linguist
= A person who studies Linguistics
= A specialist in linguistics
What is the language ?
How did humans communicate with one another for survival before human language was developed ?
 Bady languge.
 Primitive sounds.
 Painting / Drawing.
 Smoke Signals.
Modes of Communication = the means by which the messages are transmitted
1. Vocal – Auditory System (Sound signals)
 The sender of the signal employs a vocal tract to produce the message, and the
receiver employs an auditory mechanism to receive the signal.
 Specifically used by human.
2. Visual System (Gestures) symbol by body (boby languges)
3. Tactile, System (Touching) Touch each other to communicate
4. Olfactory / chemical system (Smelling)
 Both human and animal can communicate.
 Only humans use language to communicate, while other animals communicate with
each other in systems called signal code.
 Every human society develops speech and the understanding of speech.
1. What is a language ?
Language is …
 The specialized sound signaling system (which seems to be genetically programmed
to develop in humans)
 The system of symbols with the most general meaning of any used by humans
 A system of signs that express ideas,…(Ferdinand de Saussure 1915)
 A system for the communication meaning thro ugh sounds. (Winfred Lehmann
1976)
 A system, consists of three subsystems or components : one semantic, one syntactic,
and one phonological. (lbid)
 The system of human communication which consists of the structural arrangement of
sounds into larger units, e.g. morphemes, words, sentences, discourse/text
 Language is a multilayered system.
 Spoken language is common to all human societies.
 Humans can transfer language to various other media such as written symbols,
Braille, sign language and so on.
2. How human language differs from animal communication
‘How can language be distinguished
From other systems of animal communication ?’
Charles Hockett ( an American linguist and anthropologist ) proposed set of “Design
Features” to consider whether or not human language features are shares by other
animals.
Design Features
1) Use of sound signals
5) Displacement
2) Arbitrariness
6) Creativity (Productivity)
3) The need for learning
7) Patterning
4) Duality
8) Structure dependence
2.1) Use of sound signals use sound to communicate.
Human speech produced by
 Lung.
 Vocal cord / folds.
 Teeth, Lips & Tongue.
Advantages
 Can be used in the dark.
 Can be used at some distance.
 Allow a lot of messages to be sent.
 Leave the body free for other activities.
“ Vocal cords / folds ”
Open during inhalation, closed when holding one’s breath.
Teeth-Chewing, tearing
Lips-Food intake
Tongue-chewing, swallowing
2.2) Arbitrariness
 No link between the signal and the message.
 No intrinsic connection.
 The symbols used in human communication are ARBITRARY
not seeming to be based on a reason.
 Animal->a strong link between the signal and the message (non-arbitrary).
 Human->no link between the signal and the message (Arbitrary).
 EXCEPT onomatopoeia is an exception of ar bitrariness in human language. (words that
imitate or echo natural sounds), e.g. moo, bow-wow, bang, cuckoo.
2.3) The need for learning
Most animals
 Automatically know how to communicate without learning.
 Genetically Inbuilt.
Human
 Not innate (not genetically inbuilt).
 Mostly conditioned by the environment.
 Long learning process.
 Culturally transmitted (language is passed from one generation to next).
2.4) Duality
 Animals have a stock of basic sounds.
 Most animals can use each basic sound only once.
 Messages animal can send is restricted to the number of basic sounds.
 Human language contains 2 subsystems, one of sounds and the other of meaning.
 Each human language has a stock of phonemes (sound units).
 Each phoneme is meaningless in isolation.
 A phoneme is meaningful only when it is combined with other phonemes.
/f/ /p/ /n/ /i/
Fin pin nip
Duality / Double Articulation
 The organization of language which a layer of sounds combine
into a second layer of larger units.
Advantage
 A greater number of messages can be sent.
 Now some people claim that duality exists also in Birdsong, where each
individual note is a phoneme.
2.5) Displacement
 The referent of the signal does not have to be immediately present in time or space
 Communicate about things that are present and absent
 Communicate about things in any time and any space / place
 The bees communicate about the
 Distance +direction > 3pattern-round, sickle, waggle.
 Quantity > The number of repetition.
 However, bee communication has the property of displacement in an extremely limited
form.
2.6) Creativity (Productivity)
 Most animals -> very limited number of messages they can send or receive
o Male grasshoppers attract mates or protect their territories.
o Dolphins (clicks, whistles, sguawks)
o Vervet Monkeys (36 sounds)
o Honeybees (only about the nectar / pollen)
Creativity (productivity)
 Produce utterances which have hever been said before.
 Understand utterances which have hever been heard before.
There is purple platypus crawling across the ceiling.
A spider is driving a car.
A pig is swimming in a pool.
2.7) Patterning
 Human language is most definitely not disorganized collection of individual items.
 Human do not juxtapose sounds and words in a random way. lnstead they ring the
changes on a few well defined patterns.
 Therefore language can be regarded as an intricate network of interlinked elements in
which every item is held in its place and given its identity by all the other items
2.8) Structure dependence
 “ Language operations depend on an understanding of the internal structure of a sentence.”
 Elements of structure can be added, change place, or be omitted.
This table is very importance for the exam
Design Features
1) Use of sound signals use sound to communicate.
2) Arbitrariness
3) The need for learning
4) Duality
5) Displacement
6) Creativity (Productivity)
7) Patterning
8) Structure dependence
Human
Animal
Theoretical Linguistics
The branch of linguistics that is most concerned with developing models of linguistics knowledge.
 Four Major Components of Linguistics
1. Sound
2. Word
3. Sentence
4. Meaning
Four Major Components of Analysis
1. Phonetics & phonology
 Phonetics is the study of speech sounds: how they are produced, transmitted, and
received.
1. Articulatory phonetics: how to speech sound are produced.
2. Auditory phonetics: how the sound are perceived.
3. Acoustic phonetics: physical properties of sound such as frequency, duration,
amplitude.
 Phonology is the study of speech sounds of a particular language.
2. Morphology
 The study of how words are formed, structured, or classified.
 Focuses on the internal structure of words.
3. Syntax
 The study of the arrangement of words in a sentence.
 It is the study of word order: how words are combined together to form sentences.
4. Semantics
 The study of meaning.
1. Word meaning
2. Sentence meaning
Phonetics & Phonology
 Phonetics
 Spoken word
 Describe the sounds of a language
 International phonetic
2 Types of sounds
1) Consonantal-type sounds
= speech sounds produced by stopping the air from flowing freely through the
mouth, especially by closing the lips or touching the teeth with the tongue.
2) Vowel-type sounds
= speech sounds produced by human beings when the breath flows out through the
mouth without being blocked by the teeth, tongue or lips.
Consonantal sounds
Consonantal sounds are described in terms of three variables:
1) Voicing
2) Place of articulation
3) Manner of articulation
1) Voicing: 2 types of voicing
1.1 Voiced-the vocal cords vibrate
1.2 Voiceless-the vocal cords do not vibrate
2) Place of articulation: the point at which the articulators actually touch, or are at their
closest: where the sound is produced.
3) Manner of articulation: the type of the obstruction caused by narrowing or closure of
the articulators
 Phonology
 The study of sound system in a particular language
1. Phoneme
 The small segment of sound
 Has no in itself
 Can distinguish two words
2 types of phonemes
1. Segmental phonemes
 Phonemes consisting of sound segments
 Consonant & vowel
2. Non-segmental/Suprasegmental phonemes
 Phonemes or feature of speech that my extend over and modify series of
segmental phonemes
 Tone, stress
 Finding ‘PHONEME’
Finding sound systems in a particular language is finding sounds which
Candistinguish the meanings of words – phonemes
1. Find minimal pairs = “pairs of word which have different meanings and different by
only one phoneme occurring in the same position”
2. Transcribe minimal pairs by using IPA symbols
3. Contrast those pairs of words
Why are minimal pairs important in the study of speech sound?
 To fond phoneme in a language
 To distinguish two words in a language
 To learn how to pronounce words in a language
 To determine if two sounds are different phonemes
2. Allophones
 Variant forms of a phoneme in a particular language
 Different pronunciations of the same sound/ phoneme
 Predictable allophones
 Free variation
 Not all phonemes have significantly different allophones
Free variation
 Sound differ phonetically but are non-phonemic( not change the word’s
meaning)
 In some words, two phonemes may occur interchangeably without
changing the meaning of words
 It is important to be aware of what allophones and phonemes exist in other
languages, as these can cause problems when learning the sounds of
English
3. Sound combination
 Not all possible combinations of phonemes occur.
 There are restrictions in the combinatorial possibilities of the consonants and
in the maximal lengths of possible consonant sequences.
 The maximum initial consonant cluster in English is three consonants.
Morphology
 The study of how words are formed, structured, or classified.
 Focuses on the internal structure of words.
Morpheme
 The minimal unit of meaning
 The smallest linguistic unit which has
1.) meaning 2.) syntactic significance
1.1) Identifying Morphemes
A linguist identifies morphemes by comparing a wide variety of utterances which are
partially the same.
Example
ugly
uglier
ugliest
pretty
prettier
prettiest
1.2) Two types of morphemes
1.2.1 Free morphemes
- can stand alone
- Free morphemes are ‘words’
 Content words
 Function words
1.2.2 Bound morphemes
- a grammatical unit that never occurs by itself, but is always attached to host
morpheme.
Example Affixes
 suffixes -ish, -ness, -ly, -ing, -er
 prefixes dis-, trans-, un-, pre-, bi1.2.2.1 Derivational Morphemes
- have clear semantic content
- add meaning when combined with other morphemes in a word
- change word form
Example prefixes or suffixes
1.2.2.2 Inflectional Morpheme
- have a grammatical function
Content Words & Function Words
Content Words
 a word to which an independence meaning can be assigned.
Function Words (structure words)
 words that do not have clear lexical meaning or obvious concepts
associated with them
2.2.1 Conjunction : connect words e.g. and, but, while
2.2.2 Preposition : connect nouns e.g. in, down, to,….
2.2.3 Articles : indicate whether a noun is definite or indefinite e.g. a, an, the
2.2.4 Pronouns : used instead of nouns or noun phrases
Word Formation : How new words are formed
1. Affixation : combining bound morpheme and free morphemes in English
Example free + bound
talk + ative = talkative
2. Compounding : A process that forms new words from two or more independent words
 Word + Word e.g. girl + friend = girlfriend
3. Acronyms : words derived from the initials of several words
 Compact disc : CD
 Television : TV
4. Abbreviations/ Clipping –words formed by abbreviating
 omnibus : bus
 doctor
: doc
5. Eponyms – words derived from name of an object or activity which is also the name of the person
who first produced.
 Teddy bear – Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th president of the United States.
6. Blends – words derived from two words but parts of the words that are combined are deleted
 breakfast + lunch = brunch
 motor
+ hotel = motel
7. Coinage – words created out of nothing
 Qizmo , Exxon, Kodak
Syntax
1. Syntax is …
 The study of the arrangement of words in sentences.
 The study of word order (the way in which words combine to form sentences)
 Time part of grammar that represents a speaker’s knowledge of sentences and
their structures.
The majority of the languages in the world belong to one of these typologies:
1. Subject-verb-object [ SVO]
2. Subject-object-verb [SOV]
3. Verb-subject-object [VSO]
The most frequent word orders are SVO and SOV because they allow for placement
of the subject in the first position.
4. Verb-object-subject[ VOS]
5. Object-subject-verb[OSV]
6. Object-verb-subject[OVS]
2. Sentence is…
 Traditional grammar: the expression of a complete thought with at least one
subject
 Modern Linguistics:
1. The largest unit on which linguist analysis can be carried out.
2. The largest grammatical from.
3. A Grammatical from which can be analyzed into constituents.
3. Sentence Patterns
 Different languages use different devices for showing the relationship of one word to
another.
 Most language have one or two devices.
1. Word order 2. Inflections 3. Function words
3.1 Word Order
 Used most frequently in English
 Word order indicates who frightened whom
3.2 Inflections
 The extra letter or letters added to nouns, verbs, and adjectives in their different
grammatical forms
 Such as tense, person, number and gender.
 Inflection or word endings indicate the relationship between words in Latin.
 Word order doesn’t matter in this language.
3.3 Function Words
 Used in both English and Latin
 Function words such as of, by, that, indicate relationship between parts of the sentence.
4. Syntactic Analysis
 Every language has a limited number of recurring sentence patterns.
 The techniques used to represent the parts of the sentence and the syntactic relationship are
1. Tree Diagram
2. Tree Diagram with Phrase Market
3. Rewrite Rule
4.1 Tree Diagram
The child found the puppy.
Subject: The child.
Predicate: found the puppy.
The child found the puppy.
The child
The
child
found the puppy
found
the puppy
The
puppy
4.2 Tree Diagrams With P-market
 A tree diagram which provides labels ( phrase market : P-market) for each of the
constituents of the sentence is called:
- A phrase structure tree
- A constituent structure tree
Syntactic Categories
0. Sentient (S)
1. Noun (N)
2. Preposition (P)
3. Adjective (Adj)
4. Verb (V)
5. Adverb (Adv)
6. Determiner (Det)
7. Phrase (P)
Phrase
A small group of related words within a sentence or clause.
A grammatical unit at a level between a word and a clause
A phrase function as a part of speech and includes a head(or headword), which determines
the nature of the unit.
Principal types of Phrases:
1. Noun Phrase [ NP]
2. Verb Phrase [VP]
3. Prepositional Phrase [PP]
4. Adjective Phrase [AgjP]
5. Adverb Phrase [AdvpP]
Tree Diagram with P-marker
The child found the puppy
S
NP
Det
VP
N
The
child
V
found
NP
Det
N
the
puppy
Tree Diagram: Conclusion
A tree diagram with phrase-marker represent three aspects of a speaker’s syntactic knowledge:
1. The linear order of the words in the sentence
2. The groupings of words into syntactic categories
3. The hierarchical structureof the syntactic categories
4.2 Rewrite Rule
 A replacement rule
 A phrase structure rule
 The symbol to the left of an arrow is replaced by an expanded from written to the right
of the arrow.
 S = NP VP [ S consists of NP VP ]
 VP = V NP [VP consists of V NP ]
 NP = Det N [ NP consists of Det N ]
 NP = N [ NP consists of N ]
5.Compound& Complex Sentences
 Compound and complex sentences are sentences which have one or more sentence-like
structure attached to them or inserted inside them
 2 methods of forming compound & complex sentences:
1. Conjoining = Compound sentence
2. Embedding = Complex sentence
1. Conjoining
- The process which two or more sentences of equal importance attached together to
from a single sentence
- Ex
 John played tennis, and Paul went fishing, and Peter played badminton, and
Mary washed her cloths,...
2. Embedding
- The process which sentence-like structures are embedded into other sentences
- Subsidiary sentences are inserted into one main sentence.
Complex sentence = independent cl.(main cl.) + dependent cl. (subordinate cl.)
 Main clause – complete sentence, can stand alone
 Subordinate clause – fragment (incomplete sentence), cannot stand alone
Recursion
 The possibility of repeatedly re-using the same construction
 No fixed limit to the length of sentences
SEMANTLCS = Meaning.
1. Semantics is …
o The study of the linguistic meaning of morphemes , words phrases , and sentences
2. Meanings of sentences : Relationship between sentences
2.1 Entailment
o The relationship between two sentences where the truth of one infers the truth of the other.
o One sentence entalls another if the truth of the first sentence necessrlies implies the truth of
the second.
Sentence 1 is True . → Sentence 2 is T
EX : The president was assassinated. → The presdent is dead.
2.2 Contradiction
o Negative entailment:
The truth of one sentence necessarily implies
of another sentence
o Sentence 1 is True.→ Sentence 2is Faise.
EX : He opened the door.→ The door is closed
Ambiguity = uncertainty or inexactness of meaning in language
2.3 Ambiguous Sentences = sentences which have multiple meaning
Example : The lady hit the man with an umbrella.
Meaning 1) The lady hit the man who had an umbrella.
2) The lady used an umbrella to hit the man.
There are 2 types of homonym
a) Same sound but different meaning and spelling
Example : Flower – flour
main – mane
knot – nit
b) Same sound and spelling but different meaning
Example : Fair – fair
bear – bear
rose – rose
Semantic Ambiguity
1.
Lexical Ambiguity : a word has multiple meanings.
e.g.
I will meet you by the bank.
Turn right here.
2.
Phonetic Ambiguity : words have the same sound.
e.g.
This is the fare/fair.
Ice cream / I scream.
3.
Syntactic Ambiguity : sequence of words in a sentence.
e.g.
I saw the man with the binoculars.
They are hunting dogs.
3. Meanings of words : Reiatonship between words (lexical items)
3.1 Homonym = Different words that are pronounces the same, but may or may not be Spelled the same
so –sow
EXEX
: : sewsew
– so– –sow
(v.)(v.)
– two
– too
to –totwo
– too
Meat- meet
- meet
Meat
taletale– –tailtail
3.2 Synonym = Words that sound different but have the same or nearly the same meaning.
EX :
describe – explain - express
3.3 Antonym = Words that are opposite in meaning
EX :
absent – present
dead - alive
3.4 Hyponym = a set of related words whose meaning are specific instances of a more general word
EX :
poodle – dog
cat – animal
4. Grammaticality is a conformation to the rules of syntax in a language.
grammatical = well formed sequence of words
ungrammatical = ill formed sequence of words
EX :
The boy found the ball
grammatical
The boy found the ball
ungrammatical