Linguistics week 2
What do linguists do? What is
language?
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In your free time

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 Animal “Languages” in
Chapter 1 of your book.
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What do linguists do?
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They don’t necessarily “learn languages”
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They are often interested in the structure of
languages. They might
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–
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specialize in one language, or a group of languages
compare different languages
study features shared by all languages
Many linguists study speech sounds, and grammar
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Linguist and 語言學 are confusing terms
What fields, please?
A brief outline of some semester 2 topics:
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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 (any
examples?)
» 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
Ta-hsüeh-shih-ching
The changing role of
English in Taiwan society:
borrowing, or showing off?
case and size: codeswitching, or lexicalized
Chinese words?
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Linguistics in the real world
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Speech disorders (problems)
Forensic (legal) 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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Defining characteristics of:
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Bananas
Dogs
Elephants
Garbage
Language
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Do these count as language? Rank
0 to 10, in your opinion
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A person talking (rank 10)
A dead fish with its mouth open (rank 0)
Now rank these
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A person talking on the radio
A parrot talking
A dog wagging its tail
Bees dancing
A computer voice on the telephone
Sign language used by deaf people
Sign language used by hearing people
Body language (for example, folding your arms)
Sneezing
Wearing odd socks (for example: one black, one green)
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A selection of Hockett’s design features for
language 1966), "The Problem of
Universals in Language" (write them)
1.
Rapid Fading
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2.
Interchangeability
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3.
individuals who use a language can both send and receive any
permissible message within that communication system
Feedback
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4.
message does not linger in time or space after production
users of a language can perceive what they are transmitting and
can make corrections if they make errors
Arbitrariness
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there is no logical connection between the form of the signal and
its meaning
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More design features (he actually described
15 altogether)
5.
Displacement
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6.
Productivity
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7.
users can create and understand completely novel messages
Duality (of Patterning)
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8.
linguistic messages may refer to things remote in time and space,
or both, from the site of the communication
a large number of meaningful elements are made up of a
conveniently small number of meaningless but messagedifferentiating elements.
Prevarication
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linguistic messages can be false, deceptive, or meaningless
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Duality of patterning
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A small number of phones can be
concatenated to form a very large number
of words (the lexicon)
AND, although the lexicon is finite, they
can be combined to form an infinite number
of possible utterances
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The creative aspect of language (Chomsky)
Also known as the infinity of expressions
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Bee dancing
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http://www.skylon.co.uk/hba/beekeeping.html#da
nce
Honey bees perform a sort of dance when they
return to the hive, after finding food, which shows
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the direction relative to the sun
the distance
perhaps, the quality of the food source
Is it a kind of language?
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Does it satisfy any of Hockett’s design features?
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My family and other animals
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Talking to horses and dogs (anyone?)
Training chimpanzees
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Gua: “understood 100 words”
Viki: could say mama, papa, etc
Washoe: used sign language, made sentences
Are these chimps really using language?
Maybe they are just like trained rats, or
Pavlov’s dogs
language game if time
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Homework
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p17 Study questions 1-6
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Read the questions
Read the answers (p228)
Explain the answers to a classmate in Chinese
Read Chapter 6 (Morphology)
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Duality of patterning


A small number of phones can be
concatenated to form a very large number
of words (the lexicon)
AND, although the lexicon is finite, they
can be combined to form an infinite number
of possible utterances
–
–
The creative aspect of language (Chomsky)
Also known as the infinity of expressions
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The infinity of expressions
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There is no upper limit on sentence length
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Some interesting examples on page 10
“One is a number…”
We can be almost as creative as we wish in
forming new sentences
Probably, no-one has ever said before:
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“Ming Chuan linguistics students usually ride
motorbikes through Manchester, wearing moccasins
and carrying a mop-bucket”
The utterance is “pragmatically odd”: it makes sense,
but…
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So, is anything possible? Can we
create any utterance we want?
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Maybe, a good utterance must “make sense”?
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But some utterances are impossible
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WRONG!: Chomsky gave the famous example
“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”
This is syntactically well-formed (although
semantically it is ill-formed)
“Sleep ideas colorless green furiously” is syntactically
ill-formed
page 11 here, practise prag, sem, synt i/f utts in chin
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So, what utterances are OK?
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We have
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a finite lexicon
an infinite number of possible utterances
no room in our brains to store all those
utterances
no requirement to make sense…
So how is it decided?
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Our linguistic knowledge
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(=our knowledge of our own language)
This consists of
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A lexicon (a finite number of words)
A grammar (count noun!): that is, a finite set of rules
stating what is possible
» Note that we are not consciously aware of what these
rules are; like the rules for muscle control!
» Now, we have 3 meanings of the word grammar!
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Back to what linguists do!
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Finite lexicon
+ finite set of rules (grammar)
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 infinity of expressions
Lexicon: easy.
- Buy a dictionary.
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Grammar: difficult.
- This is what linguists do
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