Formal Properties of Language: Form of
the Message
The components of language:
1. the sounds of language
2. the structure of language
3. and the meanings of language
Talk is achieved through the
interdependent components
of sounds, words, sentences,
and meanings.
Phonology
The Sounds of Language
Phonetics
Description of the raw
sounds of language
Phonemics
The comparative analysis of
sounds to differentiate meaning.
"perro" (dog)
Phone= raw sound
"pero" (but)
Phonetics
 the study of the articulation of
sounds that occur in a
language
 describes how sounds are
produced or articulated by
manipulation of vocal
apparatus.
 Sounds vary according to:
•
•
•
•
the positions of speech organs
the points of articulation
the control of the air flow
the manner of articulation.
The Vocal Apparatus
Voiced and voiceless
 If the vocal chords are close together when air passes through they
vibrate to produce voiced sounds
 all vowels in English and some consonants (b, d, and g, for
example) are voiced.
 Voiceless sounds (also called unvoiced sounds) are made when the
vocal cords are not vibrating (consonants p, t, and k, for example, are
voiceless).
Voiceless consonant
Voiced equivalent
[p] (pin)
[b] (bin)
[t] (ten)
[d] (den)
[k] (con)
[g] (gone)
[tʃ] (chin)
[dʒ] (gin)
[f] (fan)
[v](van)
[θ] (thin, thigh)
[ð] (then, thy)
[s] (sip)
[z] (zip)
[ʃ] (pressure)
[ʒ] (pleasure)
Minimal pairs:
 pairs of words whose pronunciation differs at only one segment,
such as sheep and ship or lice and rice.
 it is the existence of minimal pairs which enables linguists to build
up the phoneme inventory for a language or dialect
 cheer versus jeer which differ only in voicing.
“You should have heard them ?eering at the end of the game.”
 you would have to perceive the voicing in order to know exactly
what was meant.
Oral or Nasal
 In oral sounds most air is expelled via the oral cavity (mouth).
 Typically the velum (soft palate) is raised at the back of the mouth
to block the passage of air into the nasal cavity.
 In nasal sounds the velum is lowered, to allow airflow through the
nasal cavity.
 M and N and Ng (eng (ŋ)) are nasal consonants
 All languages have some nasal consonants (except around Puget
sound and on Bougainville Island)
Place of articulation
Where the sound is formed (articulated) in the mouth
Manner of Articulation
The degree of interference or modification of the airstream as it
passes through the oral cavity
Consonants
Stops
 consonants produced by complete blocking of the airflow through the oral
cavity.
Fricatives
 consonants formed by impeding the flow of air somewhere in the vocal
apparatus so that a friction-sound is produced.
 Because the flow of breath is heard in producing fricatives, fricatives are
also called spirants.
 Fricatives may be voiced or voiceless
Liquids
 little obstruction of airstream results in modification but no turbulence
(e.g. l and r)
Affricatives
 complete closure followed by narrow opening for air to go through e.g.
chin gin
Vowels
Glides (semivowels)
 little obstruction,
 intermediate between consonants and vowels
Dipthongs (or glide vowels)
 involve movement of the sound from one position to another.
(Bi-)Labial consonants are produced by
creating a closure with both lips. English
lacks bilabial fricatives, but these are
found in Japanese ('Fuji'), and in Spanish
('deber').
Labiodental consonants are
produced by raising the lower lip to
the upper teeth. English has only
fricative labiodentals, and no stops.
In English, the interdental consonants
are also all fricatives. th
English alveolar consonants are formed
by raising the tip of the tongue to the
alveolar ridge, lies right behind the teeth.
There are both fricatives and stops.
Very few palatals in English, just two
affricates and the glide [j].
Spanish has a palatal nasal, as found in the
word for 'year', 'ano'..
English has few velar consonants. No
fricatives, for example. But these are
sometimes pronounced in words
borrowed into English from languages
which do have velar fricatives, e.g. from
German, 'Bach'.
No uvular consonants in English but they
are found in many languages. E.g. both
French and some varieties of German have
a uvular 'r' sound. Uvular stops are also
common in many languages.
phonetic notation
International Phonetic Alphabet
(IPA)
 a system of phonetic notation
based on the Latin alphabet
 devised by the International
Phonetic Association as a
standardized representation of the
sounds of spoken language
 The general principle of the IPA
is to provide one symbol for each
distinctive sound
Applicable to all languages
 No language uses all the possible
sounds
Vowel sounds
 Vowels are produced by relative openness of the vocal tract
 Differences in vowel quality are produced by movement of the
tongue and rounding or unrounding of the lips
 This changes the resonance in the oral cavity
Vowel sounds
There are three key questions to consider when describing vowel
articulation.
1. How close is the tongue to the roof of the mouth?
2. Where is the narrowest constriction in the oral cavity?
3. What is the position of the lips?
Phonetic vowel sounds
Phonemics
 a phoneme is the smallest structural unit that
distinguishes meaning
 contrasts signal differences in meanings of words
 Phonemics is the analysis of how sounds
(phonemes) differentiate meanings of words
 An example of a phoneme is the /t/ sound in the
words tip, stand, water, and cat. (In transcription,
phonemes are placed between slashes, as here.)
 For example, in English /b/: pit versus bit
 French also has a "t" sound that is similar to the English phone,
but is actually produced by placing the tongue on the teeth rather
than the hard palate.
 It is represented by a different character in the International
Phonetic Alphabet.
 The difference between the "t's" in the two languages can be heard
in the production of the words: bait and bete
"bait" (English)
"bête" (French: stupid)
 The French dental "t" derives from a wider practice preferring the
teeth to the alveolar ridge as a point of articulation.
 Thus the "l" sound, which is articulated on the hard palate in
English, is produced in French by placing the tongue on the upper
teeth, is audible in the difference between bell and belle
bell" (English)
"belle" (French: beautiful)
 In English the difference between "d" and "th" is phonemic as evident in
the minimal pairs "den" vs. "then."
 In Spanish these two sounds are allophones of one phoneme usually
represented as d in the written language
 They appear in complementary rather than contrastive positions.
 The true "d" always occurs at the beginning of a word as in the word:
"donut" (doughnut)
 The "th" fricative form occurs between two vowels as in: bebida (drink)
 Observe the two different pronunciations of the d sound in the following
sentence:
 "De me una bebida helada y un donut". (Give me a cold drink and a
doughnut)
 In Canadian English, the phoneme /t/ has five different
pronunciations.
This means that /t/ has 5 allophones.
 Each pronunciation depends on the phonetic context in
which /t/ occurs.
 the allophones and their contexts appear in the words
top, stop, little, kitten, and hunter.
 The differences in the pronunciation of each of these /t/'s
are subtle to native ears; you may not discern them right
away.
 But they may be substantial for speakers of other
languages.
 In English and many other languages, the liquids /l/ and /r/
are two separate phonemes (minimal pair 'life', 'rife')
 In Korean these two liquids are allophones of the same
phoneme,
 the general rule is that [ɾ] comes before a vowel, and [l] does
not (e.g. Seoul, Korea).
 A native speaker will tell you that the [l] in Seoul and the [ɾ]
in Korean are in fact the same sound.
 The particular sounds which are phonemic in a language can
change over time.
 At one time, [f] and [v] were allophones in English, but these
later changed into separate phonemes.
 This is one of the main factors of historical change of
languages
Prosodic features
 those aspects of speech which go beyond phonemes and deal with
the auditory qualities of sound.
The collective term used to describe variations in pitch, intonation,
(define) stress, loudness, tempo, rhythm and length
 In spoken communication, we use and interpret these features
without really thinking about them.
There are various conventional ways of representing them in
writing, although the nuances are often hard to convey on paper.
Stress
"Do the dance organizers need people such that those people
decorate the dance location?" - Do they need people to DECORATE?
OR
"Do the dance organizers need people such that the organizers
decorate those people?". - Do they need PEOPLE to decorate?
 stress or accent refers to the degree of emphasis placed on the
syllables of words in multisyllabic words; stress is not evenly
distributed on all the syllables
 can serve to alter the meaning or function
 In English the difference in stress signals the difference between a
noun and a verb
 Nouns are stressed on the first syllable and verbs on the second
present
object
construct
implant
"record" (stressed-unstressed) and "record" (unstressed-stressed).
Tempo
 The pace of speech is called.
 Fast speech can convey urgency, whereas slower speech can be
used for emphasis.
 Varying the tempo is ofetn used for effect in public speaking, often
accompanying changes in loudness.
 When reading stories to children, we can vary the tempo and
loudness to reinforce the meaning of the words.
Then carefully,
Tenderly,
Gently he crept
Up the trunk to the nest where the little egg slept. Dr Seuss:
Horton Hatches the Egg
 Juncture refers to the length of pauses between two syllables and
distinguishes the term "greenhouse," with a short pause, from
"green house," with a long one.
Pitch
 Pitch = frequency of sound
 The perceived pitch of a sound is just the ear's response to
frequency
 sounds can be ordered on a scale from low to high.
 changes in the relative tension of the vocal chords in the
production of syllables results in variation in pitch
 Pitch generally occurs with vowels
 Pitch is a feature of all languages on units of clauses and or
sentences
Statement: “This is living!"
Question: "This is living?"
 The second sentence is distinguished from the first by the
placement of a rising tone on the last syllable.
 In English declarative sentences and questions are characterized
by contrastive pitch elements – and are this phonemic
Tone
 Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish words or
grammatical meaning —to inflect words.
 To inflect a word (inflection) is to modify or mark it to reflect
grammatical information, such as gender, tense, number, case, or
person.
 All languages use pitch to express emotional and other
paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and
intonation
 Over ½ the world’s languages use pitch as phonemes, analogously
to consonants and vowels, to distinguish the meaning of words .
 Most Asian languages such as Chinese and Thai, African languages
such as Yoruba, Zulu, and Luganda and Native language such as
Sarcee and Navaho use pitch in this way
 Called tonal languages
 Most Indo-European languages are not tonal.
 In the most familiar tonal language, Chinese, most syllables carry
their own tone
 words tend to be short, and many are differentiated solely by tone.
Mandarin Chinese
Meaning primarily determined by tone
Ma
High= Mother
Rising=horse
Falling=scolding
Thai tones
Chinese tones
Tone
 The tonal patterns of African languages form the basis for an interesting
non-verbal form of communication known as drum language.
This communication medium is based on
two drums one of which has a low and the
other a high tone.
Messages are produced by drumming a
sequence of lows and highs that matches the
spoken syllable patterns.
The following drum message in Twi is
transmitted by Radio Ghana to introduce its
evening news broadcast:
Ghana mo tie (Ghana listen: high-low-highhigh-high)
Drum signals were used to communicate
with people beyond the range of the human
voice in Africa before the electronic age.
Grammar
the rules governing the use of a language
Morphology
Syntax
Rules about how
words are to be
constructed to
create meaning
Rules about how
words are to be
arranged to make a
meaningful sentence
Morphology: The Structure of Words
 how phonemes are combined by language into larger units
 Words are composed of units of sound and meaning called
morphemes
 A morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has meaning.
 In spoken language, morphemes are composed of phonemes
 A morpheme is free if it can stand alone e.g. Cat, sing, good, happy.
(also called roots or stems)
 Free morphemes refer to or name objects, events, ideas, etc.
 Bound morphemes are attached to a free morpheme and cannot
stand alone.
 A word may thus contain more than one morpheme
 Bound morphemes attached to stems are called affixes
 Three basic kinds
• Prefixes at the beginning - un-happy
• Suffixes at the end of a stem - happy-ness
• Infixes in the middle - fikas: fumikas (Strong ---He is becoming
strong)
Qasirrsarrvigssarsingitluinarpug
“someone did not find a completely suitable resting place”
 They express grammatical or relational meanings, such as number,
tense, person, gender, or case
Cat-s the animal and the plural
Dis-like
Sing-ing
 Morphemes can be added to words in cycles producing longer and more
complex sequences
•Act
•Act-ive
•In-act-ive
•In-act-iv-ity
•Incorrectly
 Allomorphs are morphemes that have the same meaning but a different
sound
 e.g. English plural suffix (-s) has three allomorphs
•/iz/ following sibilants (s,z,sh,zh,ch,j) class classes
•/-s/ following voiceless consonants cat, cats
•/-z/ following voiced consonants and vowels tub, tubs, bee, bees
 Irregularities between form and meaning in construction of words do
occur
 E.g. plurals formed by vowel changes in the stem
•Mouse/mice foot/feet, woman/women
 Children’s desire for rule consistency often leads to mistakes – sheeps
Eat, ate, eated
Morphological Typologies
• Classification of languages according to how they structure
words out of morphemes
• Isolating languages: few morphemes, simple method:
prefix and suffix (English, Chinese)
• Agglutinating languages: words containing many
morphemes, highly regular rules (Turkish, Blackfoot)
• Synthetic or polysynthetic: Words containing many
morphemes, very complex rules (Mohawk, Greek, Russian,
Inuktitut)
Grammatical Concepts
 Morphemes express lexical (word) or grammatical meaning
 Grammatical meaning includes concepts applying to nouns, verbs,
modifiers and so on.
 Some common concepts of nouns are case, number and gender
 Case refers to grammatical relationships between nouns e.g.
subject or object
 Some languages, called inflecting mark cases with affixes
Latin Cases
Nominative: used when the noun is the subject of the sentence or
phrase
Vocative: used when the noun is used in a direct address
Accusative: used when the noun is the direct object of the
sentence/phrase,
Genitive: used when the noun is the possessor of an object
Dative: used when the noun is the indirect object of the sentence
Ablative: used when the noun demonstrates separation or movement
from a source, cause, agent, or instrument
SINGULAR
PLURAL
NOM.
familia
familiae
GEN.
familiae
familiarum
DAT.
familiae
familiis
ACC.
familiam
familias
ABL.
familia
familiis
English :
household
Grammatical meanings
Different languages may express different grammatical concepts in
different ways
 number
• some languages do not indicate singular/non-singular differences but
rely on context or separate enumerators.
• some languages have one two and plural
• Inuktitut igloo (a house), igluk (two houses), iglut (three or more
houses)
 definite and indefinite a/the - some languages do not mark
 Gender (a separate marked class) (Romance Languages)
 shape and texture e.g. Navajo
 Tense - time of an event’s occurrence – I visited the zoo
 aspect – manner in which an event occurs – I am visiting the zoo
 mode – likelihood of an events occurrence or speakers attitude toward an
occurrence – I could visit the zoo
Syntax: The Structure of
Sentences
 rules that determine how words should be
combined in sentences and phrases to make sense
to speakers of a language
 In English (and Chinese) word order is critical
for meaning (you, are, and there)
– There you are,
– You are there,
– Are you there?
 Every language has rules of syntax that describe order of words
 Most languages organize the three basic units of subject, object
and verb in one of three patterns.
• Verb –Subject-Object
• Subject-Verb-Object
• Subject-Object-Verb
 Syntactic patterns are often used to express case relations between
words.
 English signals case by word order
• The dog chased the cat
• The cat chased the dog.
 Russian, an inflecting language, uses affixes to mark case so words
can come in any order
Deep Structure and Surface Structure
 Because subjects precede objects in most languages this pattern probably
reflects human cognition
 Chomsky introduced the distinction
between surface structures – the surface
appearance of sentences as they appear in
actual speech and deep structure, the
underlying order of words as they are
generated by basic phrase structure rules
 Deep structure is transformed into surface
structure by transformations of the deep
structure to result in actual speech
 Transformation grammar provides insights
that enable linguists to decipher he origin of
ambiguity in sentences
Noam Chomsky
“Flying planes can be dangerous.”
Semantics: The Analysis of Meaning
 The role of language is to express the speaker’s meaning.
 Meaning is encoded in morphemes that have meaning (semantic
content)
 The morphemes are then combined with others to produce further
meaning (words)
 Words are combined with other words to create even more
meaning (syntax)
 But understanding syntax is not enough
 ‘colorless green ideas sleep furiously” – although grammatically
correct is meaningless
 Words have referential meaning – i.e. They label things- persons,
objects, events
 But they also have cultural meanings, reflecting
attitudes, values, or shared symbols (e.g. apple pie)
 Semantic Analysis is thus complex because
meaning includes many kinds of input
please pass the salt/gimme the salt.
 The words used and their order can vary depending on the context
e.g. Formal or informal.
 Or the relationship between the people interacting (e.g. Dr
Jones/sweetheart)
 Or on cultural meanings
 Can also indicate attitudes of
the speakers (affective
meaning) e.g. John told me
about his accomplishments/
John boasted about his
accomplishments)
Nouns may contain several semantic features
• Count/mass
• Specific/generic
• Potent/impotent
• Animate/inanimate
• Masculine/feminine
• Human/nonhuman
What is a cow?
COW: count, potent, animate, feminine, nonhuman
 semantic features may be expressed by various linguistic means
 some languages mark features of animate/inanimate mass/count/
definite/indefinite etc.
 In English animate and inanimate nouns are distinguished by their
ability to occur as subjects of certain verbs
• e.g. only animate nouns can be subjects of breathe, eat or sleep
• count nouns can be counted things like water cannot
• definite and indefinite are signalled by the or a
Verbs can be actions, processes, or states
Only certain nouns can accompany certain verbs
• action: Jane ran not the wood ran
• process: the wood dried
• action/process: Jane dried the wood
• state: the wood is dry
Non-Verbal Communication
 Kinesics: gesture, facial expressions, eye contact and body posture
 Proxemics: includes uses of touch and definitions of personal
space
 Proxemics and kinesics are important components of participant’s
messages.
 There are universal and culturally specific behaviour patterns
 Non-verbal actions that look
the same in different systems
may have different meanings
because the meanings are
culturally constructed and
assigned
some gestures, body postures and facial
movements may have universal significance,
and some may be of primate origin
human and other primates appear to
employ similar signals for enjoyment,
distress, threat, and submissiveness
 according to culturally prescribed codes we use
eye movement and contact to manage conversations
and to regulate interactions
 we follow rigid rules governing personal touch
 We use our bodies and gestures, in relation to
others to fine tune our speech.
 We must internalize all this in order to became
and remain fully functioning and socially
appropriate members of any culture.
 Some gestures can express a specific
meaning, often substituting for spoken
words.
 e.g. head nods to signal assent, or
shrugging the shoulders to convey
uncertainty.
 Some are culturally specific and can
lead to cultural misunderstandings –
nodding in Bulgaria and Sri Lanka
means disagreement
 Gestures and words can give opposite
meanings and create confusion
What is he saying?
 Patterns of non-verbal behaviour often signal differences in status
 Gestures, eye movements, smiles and other facial expressions,
touching and defining personal space are used in displays of status
 In many cultures, a constellation of non-verbal behaviours appears
to be consistent with high status or power.
• Dominant people tend to use broad
gestures, look or even stare at others,
maintain serious unsmiling faces, and
inhabit wide areas of personal space
• Subordinates tend to use restricted small
gestures avert their eyes when looked at,
smile frequently and allow their space to be
encroached on even to the point of being
touched
Gestures can be used as general markers of politeness
 In Japan, people greet each other by
bowing.
 When bowing to someone of higher
social status, a deeper, longer bow
indicates respect.
 A small head nod is casual and
informal.
 It is also common to bow to express
thanks, to apologize, to make a
request or to ask someone a favour.
 Shaking hands is uncommon among
the Japanese
gender differences
 men tend to use dominant acts while women use
acts marking subordination
 Men touch women more than women touch men
 Men initiate eye contact more than women
 Women return smiles of
men more than men
return smiles of women
The Meaning of Silence
Silence transmits many kinds of culturally dependent meaning
Conveys meaning partly from the situational and interactional;
contexts of its use.
silence does not simply exist bit is actively created by participants
 ceremonial silence – e.g. Where
participants have established roles and
behave in predictable ways – church,
classroom, theatre, courtroom
 Participants restricted to brief formulaic
responses
 Difference in status reflected in use of silence
 People of higher status tend to talk more whereas those of lower
status are expected to be silent or less talkative
 “Children should be seen and not heard”
Functions of Silence
 one function of speech is to avoid silence – e.g. small talk
• In N. Am. Silence is embarrassing.
• In Arabic countries, word games are played and thoughts
repeated to avoid silence.
 silence often given negative interpretation – feelings of hostility,
disdain, disinterest or anger – the silent treatment
 other times seen as mark of contemplative thought respect for
others or desire to avoid conflict
• A Japanese proverb says "Those who know do not speak - those
who speak do not know";
context also determines when silence used – when with unknown
people
silent treatment
silence can mark the solemnity of funerals
a means of social control -ostracism
because greetings are signals of sociability, silence is a show of
hostility– not on speaking terms
Terms
Phonetics
Phone
Phonemics
phoneme
Minimal pairs:
Voiced
Voiceless
Oral sounds
Nasal sounds
Place of articulation
Manner of Articulation
Allophones
Prosodic features
(prosody)
Stress
Tempo
Juncture
Pitch
Tone
Inflection
tonal language
Grammar
Morphology
Syntax
Morpheme
Free morpheme
Bound morpheme
Allomorph
Affix
Prefix
Suffix
Infix
Morphological Typologies
Isolating languages
Agglutinating languages
Synthetic or polysynthetic
languages
Case
Deep Structure and Surface
Structure
Semantics
Kinesics
Proxemics