Introduction to Linguistics 2
1
Introduction to Linguistics


Teacher: Simon Smith (史尚明)
This semester’s course: the next steps of
linguistic analysis
–
–
–
–
–
the study of meaning
language change
language in society
language acquisition and learning
computers and linguistics
2
About me…






I first came to Taiwan in 1991
BA in Linguistics and Chinese, Leeds
MSc in Machine Translation, Manchester
PhD in Statistical Language Modeling,
Birmingham
Post-doctoral year at Academia Sinica
This is my fourth year at Ming Chuan
3
Why study Linguistics?


Linguistics: related to your English studies
But also a science
–



The scientific study of language
You will get a good grasp of linguistic principles
You will understand more about how languages (including
English and Chinese) work.
Linguistics asks such questions as
–
–
Why do languages change over time?
Why is it easy for kids to learn their first language, but difficult for
adults?
4
Why take this course?

It’s taught (mostly) in English
–

It’s taught in a Western way: you will
–
–
–

Your English reading, writing, listening and speaking will all
improve
think critically
discuss issues with classmates and teacher
question what classmates, teacher and even famous linguists say
You will learn to
–
–
describe your own ideas, and others’ ideas, in a logical way, by
giving presentations to the class
write a medium-length essay, in the Western tradition
5
Course grades: written work

essay 20%
mid-term
exam, 20%

quizzes 10%
final exam, 20%

written exercises
10%
discussion, 20%
In-class or homework
exercises every two
weeks or so
There will be one or
two short quizzes
You will write one
medium length essay
(about 2000 words)
–
details later
6
Course grades: discussion &
presentation

essay 20%
quizzes 10%
–
mid-term
exam, 20%
final exam, 20%

written exercises
10%
Discussion
discussion, 20%
You will discuss
Linguistics and
Language in small
groups
Presentation
–
You will get extra
credit for presenting
your discussion for the
whole class
7
Class rules

Attendance is mandatory
–
–





Assistant class leader please take attendance at break time
More than 4 missed classes (whether for sickness, sports, laziness,
病假, 公假, or any reason) – 0%!
If you arrive late, you must apologize and explain the
reason
Please don’t eat hot food
Please switch off your phone
Please don’t chatter while I’m speaking
Work only on class material during class time
8
Class website


http://mcu.edu.tw/~ssmith
Here you will find
–
–
–
These PowerPoint slides
Syllabus, recommended reading and websites
Your grades
» Check grades on-line after quizzes and
exercises are returned to you
9
Textbook



Yule, The Study of Language (Cambridge,
2006)
You must buy a copy if you haven’t already
You must bring the book every week
10
Last semester’s syllabus
Weeks 1 - 2
Introduction, What is language?
Weeks 3 - 5
The structure of words: Morphology
Weeks 6 - 9
The sounds of language: Phonetics & Phonology
Week 10
Mid-term exam
Weeks 11-13
The structure of sentences: Syntax
Weeks 14-16
The study of meaning: Semantics
Week 17
Beyond the sentence: Pragmatics
Week 18
Final exam
11
This semester:

We finish the study of the different linguistic levels

We will look at some other topics
–
–
–
–
Psycholinguistics
Sociolinguistics
Computational linguistics
Corpus linguistics
12
我覺得這個教室太熱! - syntax

We can also say
–

I don’t think we can really say
–

*我覺得太熱這個教室, although we might understand it if
someone said it
But if someone said
–

?我把這個教室覺得太熱, because it sounds very strange
And we certainly can’t say something like
–

這個教室,我覺得太熱!
*教室這個,太熱覺得我, we would probably have no idea what
they were talking about
This is because of syntactic rules governing Mandarin.
13
我覺得這個教室好冰喔!

You can choose different words, and get more or
less the same meaning
–

Like 好熱, or 非常熱, or 熱得不得了
But some lexical choices (=possible words) are
not available:
–
–
–
–
我覺得這(*位)教室太熱
我覺得這個教室太(*燙)
This is because the classifier 位 selects a human noun
And because 燙 modifies substances like liquids, not spaces like
rooms
14
In pragmatics



我覺得這個教室好冰喔!
Is it only a comment on the temperature?
Or does it really mean something like
–

In English, I’m not sure can mean No
–

Please can you turn the air-conditioning on?
And 我可能不去 generally means “I’m not going”
Pragmatics tells us to look beyond the sentence
to find the real meaning
15
Historical linguistics

How languages are related
–
Language families
» Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan…
–
Areal linguistics
» Greek, Bulgarian
–
Mostly borrowed words; also shared grammatical features
» Chinese, Korean, Japanese

How language changes over time
–
–
–
sounds: poor vs paw, suit.
vocab: 咖啡, 颱風. Calque: 摩天大樓, skyscraper, gratte-ciel
grammar: Did you eat yet? Adversative passive 被
16
Sociolinguistics

Diglossia: “high” and “low” prestige languages
–
–
–
The role of Mandarin and Taiwanese in a bilingual
society
The changing role of English in Taiwan society:
Ta-hsüeh-shih-ching
borrowing, or showing off?
case and size: code-switching, or lexicalized Chinese
words?
17
Applications for linguistics


Speech disorders
Forensic linguistics
–
–


Accent detection
Style verification (eg police style)
Language teaching
Computational applications
–
–
–
Machine translation
Speech recognition and synthesis
Language identification
18
Starting semantics




Read the end of chapter 9, beginning of
chapter 10
Look at these
放東西
放冰箱
跳樓
跳河
Write three more pairs like these
Describe the role of the verb in each case
19