Welcome to Ming Chuan
University!
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Introduction to Linguistics
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Teacher: Simon Smith (史尚明)
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“Dr Smith”, “Simon” or “老師”: OK
“Smith” or “Teacher”: not OK
This semester’s course:
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the basics of linguistic analysis
» the sounds of languages
» the structure of sentences and individual words
» the study of meaning.
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About me…
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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 third year at Ming Chuan
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Why study Linguistics?
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Linguistics: related to your English studies
But also a science
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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
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How did language begin?
Why is it easy for kids to learn their first language, but difficult for
adults?
What exactly is language?
» That one, we begin to answer next week!
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Why take this course?
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It’s taught (mostly) in English
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It’s taught in a Western way: you will
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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
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describe your own ideas, and others’ ideas, in a logical way, by
giving a presentation to the class
write a medium-length essay, in the Western tradition (probably
not until next semester)
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Course grades
exercises and
homework 15%
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mid-term exam,
15%
final exam, 15% 
presentation,
25%
quizzes, 10%
class
performance,
20%
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In-class or homework
exercises every two weeks
or so
Quizzes will be
announced in advance:
probably there will be two
Midterms and finals will
take place in class time (if
the university gives me
permission!)
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Course grades
exercises and
homework 15%
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Presentations
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mid-term exam,
15%
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final exam, 15%
presentation,
25%
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quizzes, 10%
class
performance,
20%
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you will research one language
on the web or in the library,
and give a short talk
You cannot choose English,
Mandarin or Taiwanese
If you want to choose a
language, tell me soon
I will give more information
later
Class performance
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Attitude
Attendance
Contribution to discussion
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Class rules
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Attendance is mandatory
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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
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Class website
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http://mcu.edu.tw/~ssmith
Here you will find
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These PowerPoint slides
Syllabus, recommended reading and websites
Your grades
» Check grades on-line after quizzes and
exercises are returned to you
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Textbook
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Yule, The Study of Language (Cambridge,
2003)
There should be enough copies in the store
You must buy a copy
You must bring it next week and every
week
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Course syllabus
Weeks 1 - 2
Introduction, What is language?
Weeks 3 - 5
The sounds of language: Phonetics & Phonology
Weeks 6-8
The structure of words: Morphology
Week 9
Midterm exam in class
Week 10
University mid-terms: no class this week
Weeks 11-13
The structure of sentences: Syntax
Weeks 14-16
The study of meaning: Semantics
Week 17
Final exam in class
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Next semester:
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We will look at some other topics
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Psycholinguistics
Sociolinguistics
Computational linguistics
Corpus linguistics
There are a lot of flavors of linguistics!
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But this semester…
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We’ll look at the different linguistic strata
(layers)
Linguistics
Sounds of
language
Phonetics
Grammar
Phonology Morphology Syntax
Meaning
Semantics
Pragmatics
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我覺得這個教室太熱!
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A standard way to express this phonetically
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Another way, using Hanyu Pinyin
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wo3 jue2 de5 zhe4 ge5 jiao4 shi4 tai4 re4
In phonetics terms, this utterance (=sentence) contains
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ㄨㄛˇ ㄐㄩㄝˊ ㄉㄜ˙ ㄓㄜˋ ㄍㄜ˙ㄐㄧㄠˋ ㄕˋ ㄊㄞˋ ㄖ
ㄜˋ
vowels (like ㄜ)
and consonants (like ㄉ)
There are also semivowels (like ㄨ)
And there are diphthongs (ㄧㄠ,ㄞ)
And there is information about the tone (=pitch)
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我覺得這個教室太熱! - morphology
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A morpheme is the smallest unit of
meaning
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教 and 室 have meanings (although 室 is not normally
used independently as a word)
so, 教 and 室 are morphemes
and they can be put together to form a word: 教室
If the utterance had been 我們覺得…
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we would say that 我們 has two morphemes, 我 and 們
們 is called a plural morpheme
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我覺得這個教室太熱! - syntax
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We can also say
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I don’t think we can really say
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*我覺得太熱這個教室, although we might understand it if
someone said it
But if someone said
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?我把這個教室覺得太熱, because it sounds very strange
And we certainly can’t say something like
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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.
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And now, a semantic example
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You can choose different words, and get more or
less the same meaning
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Like 好熱, or 非常熱, or 熱得不得了
But some lexical choices (=possible words) are
not available:
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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
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In pragmatics
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我覺得這個教室太熱!
Is it only a comment on the temperature?
Or does it really mean something like
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In English, I’m not sure can mean No
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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
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In your free time
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Look at the diagram again, and try to
understand it.Linguistics
Sounds of
language
Phonetics
Grammar
Phonology Morphology Syntax
Meaning
Semantics
Pragmatics
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And take a look at 分支學科
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On this website
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http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:%E8%
AF%AD%E8%A8%80%E5%AD%A6%E9%
A6%96%E9%A1%B5
And read about Animals and Human
Languages” in Chapter 4 of your book.
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Introducing Linguistics
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What do linguists do?
Grammar, and other aspects of language
Relationships between languages
How is linguistics used in the real world?
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What do linguists do?
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They don’t necessarily “learn languages”
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Linguist and 語言學 are confusing terms
They are often interested in the structure of
languages. They might
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specialize in one language, or a group of
languages
compare different languages
study features shared by all languages
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Many linguists study grammar
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Syntax
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Morphology
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the way words are arranged to make sentences
John had lunch / *John lunch had
the way words are modified to fit the circumstances
John had lunch / *John have lunch
Linguists study
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what people actually say
not what they “should” say!
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The sort of things linguists look at
in syntax
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Syntax (the way words are arranged to
make sentences)
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John saw the girl with the telescope
爸爸給小明買鹹蛋超人
Me and Dad went to the toyshop
Dad bought an Ultraman for John and I
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And in morphology…
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Affixation: hardly used in Chinese
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My son has 73 Ultramen
我(?的)兒子有73只鹹蛋超人(*們)
Compounding
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rare in English: greenhouse, blackbird
productive in Chinese
» Verb-object compounds: 開車, 幫忙
» Resultative compounds: 來得及, 跑不掉
» Stump compounds: 交大
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Phonology: the sounds of a
language
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How good is ㄅㄆㄇㄈ at representing the
sounds of Chinese?
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雄 is xiong in 韓愈拼音, vsㄒㄩㄥ.
嗯 and 恩 are the same inㄅㄆㄇㄈ, n vs en in
Pinyin
Has 台灣國語 lost the sounds ㄓㄔㄕ?
Why do we sometimes hear 禮拜ㄕ?
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Historical linguistics
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How languages are related
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Language families
» Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan…
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Areal linguistics
» Greek, Bulgarian
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Mostly borrowed words; also shared grammatical features
» Chinese, Korean, Japanese
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How language changes over time
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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
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Sociolinguistics
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Diglossia: “high” and “low” prestige languages
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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?
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Applications for linguistics
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Speech disorders
Forensic linguistics
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Accent detection
Style verification (eg police style)
Language teaching
Computational applications
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Machine translation
Speech recognition and synthesis
Language identification
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