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240 Cards in this Set

  • Front
  • Back

What is Language?

- it is a system of signs


- it is a tool to do something

What are Semiotics?

The process whereby signs communicate meaning to individuals and allow them to understand the world around them and how it works

What are Gestures?

It is nonverbal communication made with part of the body; used instead of verbal communication (or in combination)

Language in relation to other aspects of semiotics?

1) Auditory vocal: speech, physiological reflexes, voice quality


2) visual: sign languages, writing


3) Tactile: braille, secret codes, proxemics (distance related to closeness of the people around you)


4) olfactory: perfumes, pheromones


5) Gustatory: tastes


- we make conclusions about the world from these signs


- contexts is very much apart of commination and signs (also cultural depended)

What are semiotics?

- signs

are gestures ambiguous?

- some ambiguous gestures: ok, sign for victory, thumbs up


yes

Are there gesture universal?

- the concept is universal but the movement themselves is not


- smiling? the ack is but the interpretation is not


- only physiological responses are universal, gestures are culture - dependent

What is Language?

- ability to communicate (innate) - tool to communicate


- attribute that distinguishes human from the other animals: we are conscious of our language, we have a writing systems, our language goes beyond instinct, our language in more creative, we are more reflective with our language, we can take about the past and the future (displacement), we can take about the language itself, more conscious way of speaking, according to chomsky we have some sort of capacity to learn a language (critical period)


- it a system of sounds, meaning and rules unconsciously learned by speakers

What are the linguistics approach?

- identification of linguistic feature


- hypothesis


- corpus collected from the community (interview people)


- analysis


- conclusion


- further study

What is phonology?

(the rules of sounds ones they interact with one another; explain the process)


* all about pronunciation



What is phonetics?

the study and classification of sounds and the interaction between the two

What are morphology?

- grammar


- the study of words formation, how words are put together

What are syntax?

word order

What is a language?

- it is a system of relationship


languages differentiates animals from humans


- languages is mainly oral: all people speak but not all can write


- not all languages are written

Do we know instinctively when languages rules are violated?

yes

What is lEXISON?

metaphors


- it is very contactual and cultural - take something from the culture that is know

What happened when you lose languages?

- you lose some of the culture that is implied within the language


- when a language dies then the cultural aspect of language dies



How do we know there is cultural in languages?

- look at metaphors (they are culturally dependent)

Why do languages disappear?

- destruction of speaker habit


- language and power


- Genocide, war, and natural disasters


Forced or soft (education) assimilation to dominate languages (like in Canada with the natives)


- demographical changes: people move and migrate and then need to learn new languages to live


- language attrition: the youth do not learn there parents language because of various factors


Is it possible to revive or preserve a language?

- yes


- ex. Hebrew


- the trick is to have native speakers

What is Pigan Language?

When there are a bunch of people who do not speak the same language but then create there own language

What are Creole languages?

when those people have kids and use that new language and make written language



We cannot preserve every language... should we?

- if they die than there is a loss of culture


- language can tells something different about the brain worlds

What is the archive of indigenous languages of latin america?

- it is an organization who's mission is the preservation, access and community support

What are language universals?

- main aim of linguistics, theory is to understand language and human development capacity (e.g. universal grammar)


- where humans exists, language exists


- languages change, don't "corrupt" and there is no perfect/worst language


- but language is always chafing, so it is not corruption


- Word formation rules are similar


- similar grammatical categories (nouns, verbs, direct objects, and adjective) and features (negatives, interrogatives, imperative ect.)


- semanticity: words have meaning. Semantic universal: male/female, animate/inanimate


- Word order: subject comes before the object in 99% of the languages


- similar phonetics categories - have constant and vowels


- nasal consonants in 97% of languages





What was Chomsky idea?

- that we all have the mechanism to learn a language

What is arbitrariness?

no connection between form and meaning (except onomatopoeia, but not always)


ex. they way that we express animal noise in different country


- that we preserve sounds differently

all Languages are....

Conventionality: all speakers implicitly agree on forms to use


Productivity: Constant creation of new sentences


Linearity: one sign after the other


Discreteness: not a continuum, we understand (p) or (b), nothing in between


- also found in animals: vocal/auditory channel, reciprocity, specialization, non directionality


* language in human have a wider function that it does in animals

What is the function of language?

- the main function of language is to communicate


- the parts that make of communication: sender, code, receiver


- we need language in order to interact with people


- social interaction: to maintain comfort, avoid silence


- petic/play: rhymes, litanies, chants, glossolalia (speaking in toungues) - people though that language has magical function

What is the Functions of Language?

- control of reality: cognitive


- Doing by saying "I baptize you"


- language has a way of making you become something


- political religious persuasion


- referential: recording of fact


- Language is organized, impersonal (politeness and impersonal go hand in hand), explicit


- Language is a tool in order to get what they want


- language is an expression of identity: voluntary and involuntary (regional, social, education, sex, age, personality, ect.)


- expression of emotions: swearing, interjections


- language is the medium of thought

What is the origins of language?

- earliest writing: 3500 BC (sumerians)


- we do not truly know


- some say: divine origin, natural sounds source, information exchange in reference to the environment, gossip theory


- no one knows

History of Writing

- Cave drawing during from 29,000 to 10,000 years ago


- pictograms = it is exactly what is supposed to be


- what was the purpose of cave drawing? leisure, religious, fertility magic


- many different people thought that writing was a gift of the gods


- there is no common origin: systems developed independently. Some are still undeciphered: etruscan


- In china: earlies know system (jiaju)


- the pictograms become an ideograms (not as arbitrary/ clear cut) than a ideogram because a logogram then they can become syllabic (adding sun to sunday/ it is like japanese) or phonemic


- mesopotamia (modern iraq) from 3500 BC used wedge shaped (cuneiform) reed stylus to engrave characters in clay tables


- first top to bottom, then left to right. Contact: business trisection, prayers, poems, proverbs


- Logographic system (picture give as a word) + phonological system


- Assyrians > persians (600-400 BC) > syllabic writing > akkadians and hittite (old indo european language)


- in egypt: hieroglyphs: about 500 sacred carving found in tombs and temples form 3000 BC


- Right to left is how the write


- magic value: writing the name of the dead ensure eternity


- Pictograms + ideograms + some phonograms (consonantal)


- North semitic > phoenician (modern lebanon) syllabic characters of pictorial origin (22 c's in 1000 BC)


- Greek alphabetic characters (800 BC) added vowels: 1 character: 1 sound


- Etruscan (central Italy) > roman alphabet


- Greek was precursor of cy



What are logogrphics?

- each logogram has meaning


- single written character which represents a word or a morpheme (the smallest unit with meaning)


What are pictograms?

- part of logograms; pictures of concrete items; non arbitrary relationship between form and meaning


- sometimes, ambiguous because context not know, open interpretation



What are ideograms?

- picture of abstract items i.e.. the circle for sun

What are phonographic?

- characters have no meaning, but have a sound and the sound is what it directs us

What is syllabic writing system?

1 symbol is equal to q syllable, derive from logograms

What are the alphabetic writing system?

based on phonemic principles


- the phonemic writing is the most efficient

What is Linguistics?

- see speech as a sign system


- scientific, objective



According to chomsky we all have some sort of capacity to learn a language (critical period) is this true?

- yes this is true

What is the linguistic approach?

1) Identification of linguistics feature


2) hypothesis


3) Corpus collected from the community (interview people)


4) Analysis


5) Conclusion


6) Further study

What is linguistics Knowledge?

- we kind of know language unconsciously (like we can use relative clause without understudying what a relative clause is)

What does knowing a language mean?

- knowing a language means knowing what sounds are in that language and what sounds are not


- this unconscious knowledge is revealed by the way speakers of one language pronounce words from another language (why people who first language is not english can not pronounce certain kinds of letter combination because it does not exist in there language structure


- knowing the sound system of a language includes more than knowing the inventory of sounds: sounds may start a words, end a word, or follow each other


- knowing a language is therefore knowing how to relate sounds and meanings


- show that the sounds of words are given meaning only by the language in which they occur


sound symbolism is found in words whose pronunciation suggest the meaning, as in the word hiss


- sound symbolism is found in words whose pronunciation suggest the meaning, as in the word hiss


- A few words in most languages are onomatopoeic - the sounds of the words supposedly imitate the sounds of nature


- though we do not speak in isolated words alone

Discus the idea of creativity of linguistic knowledge?

- knowledge of a language enables you to combine words to form phrases and phrases to form sentences


- knowing a language means being able to produce new sentences never spoken before and to understand sentences never heard before


- chomsky called it the creative aspect of language


- this creative ability is due to the fact that language use is not limited to stimulus response behaviour

Discus forming sentences?

- therefore, in addition to knowledge of the words of the language, linguistics includes rules for forming sentences and making judgments


- these rules must be finite in length and finite in number so that they can be stored in our finite brains; yet they must permit us to form and understand an infinite set of new sentences

what is the difference between you linguistic competence and you linguistic performance?

there is a difference between what you know, which is your linguistic competence, and how you use this knowledge in actual speech production and comprehension, which is you linguistic performance

What is the linguistics system?

- the sounds, structures, meaning, words and rules for putting them all together


- is leaned subconsciously with no awareness that the rules are being learned

What is grammar?

- the sounds and sound patters, the basic units of meaning, such as words, and the rules combine them to form new sentences constituted the grammar of a language


- the grammar, then, is what we know; it represents our linguistics competence


- to understand the nature of language, we must understand the nature of this internalized, unconscious set of rules, which is part of every grammar of every language

What is descriptive grammar?

- it does not tell you how you should speak; it describes your basic linguistic knowledge. It explains how it is possible for you to speak and understand, and it tells what you know about the sounds, words, phrases, and sentences of your language


- we have used the word grammar in two ways: the first in reference to the mental grammar speakers have in their brain; the second as the model or description of this internalized grammar

Is every grammar equal?

- no language or variety a language (called a dialect) is superior to any other in a linguistic sense. Every grammar is equally complex and logical and capable of producing an infinite set of sentences to express any thought



what does a dialect assume?

- A dialect may assume a privileged position in a country, but its status is the consequence of the political, social or economic powers of its speakers, not the linguistic merit of the dialect

What is prescriptive grammar?

- from ancient times until the present, "purists" have believed that language change is corruption and that there are certain "correct" forms that all educated people should use in speaking and writing


- they wished to prescribe rather than describe the rules of grammar, which gave rise to the writing of prescriptive grammars

What is teaching grammar?

which is used to learn another language or dialect


- are those we use in school to fulfil language requiremtsn

what is reference grammar?

which tries to be as comprehensive as possible so that it mights serve as a reference for those interested in establishing grammatical facts

what is a Gloss?

the parallel word in the student native language (mason and house)

what is phonology?

it is the sound system of language

what is semantics?

the system of meaning

what is morphology?

rules of word formation

what is syntax?

the rules of sentence formation

what is lexicon?

vocabulary of words

what is universal grammar?

is the laws that pertain to all human languages, representing the universal properties of language

What is the evidence for language universals?

- sign languages


- deaf children of deaf parents who are exposed to sign language learn it in stages parallel to language acquisition by hearing children learning oral languages


- if however, human language is universal, then it is not surpassing that non spoken languages have developed as a substitute for spoken language among non hearing individuals

When did people stat to use language?

- despite the difficulty of finding scientific evidence, speculations on language origin have provided valuable insight into the nature and development of language


- there is no concrete time when we know when people started to use language


- mongentic theory of language origin: this is the belief that all languages originate from a single source

What are some language universals?

1) Conventionality: all speakers implicitly agree on forms to use


2) Productivity: Constant creation of new sentences


3) Linearity: one sign after the other


4) Discreteness: not a continuum, we understand (p) or(b), nothing in between


*also found in animals: Vocal/auditory channel, reciprocity, specialization, non directionality

What is the functions of language?

- the main function of language is to communicate


- the parts that make of communication: sender, code, receiver


- we need language in order to interact with people


- social interaction: to maintain comfort, avoid silence


- petic/play: rhymes, litanies, chants, glossolalia (speaking in tongues) - people though that language had magical functions


- control of reality


ex. "I baptize you"


- language has a way of making you become something


- political religious persuasion


- referntial: recording of fact


- language is organized, impersonal (politeness and impersonal go hand in hand), explicitly


- language is a tool in order to get what they what


- language is an expression of identity: voluntary and involuntary (regional, social, education, sex, age, personality ext)


- expression of emotions: swearing, interjects


- language is the medium of thought

what is the origins of language?

- despite the difficulty of finding scientific evidence, speculations on language origin have provided valuable insight into the nature and development of language


- there is not concrete time when we know when people started to use language



what is the Monogenetic theory of language origin?

- this it the belief that all languages originate from a single source

what is the history of writing?

- cave drawing dating from 29,000 to 10,000 years ago


- pictogram = it is exactly what is supposed to be


- what was the purpose of cave drawing? leisure, religious, fertility, magic


- many different people thought that writing was a gist from the gods


- there is no common origin: systems developed independently. Some are still undeciphered: etruscan


- in china: ear lies know system (jiaju)


- pictogram in 6600 BC: symbols written on tortoise shells


- then pictograms become an ideogram ( not as arbitrary/clear cut) than a ideogram because a logogram (it remiss me an actual sound that is makes) then they can become syllabic (adding sun to sunday/ it is like japanese) or phonemic


- mesopotamia (modern iraq) from 3500 BC used wedge shaped (cuneiform) reed stylus to engrave characters in clay tablets


- first top to bottom, then left to right. Contact: business transaction, prayers, poems, proverbs


- Logographic system (picture gives as word) + phonological system


- Assyrians > persians (600-400 BC) > syllabic writing > akkadians and hittite (old info european language)


- In Egypt: hieroglyphs: about 500 sacred carving found in tombs and temples from 3000 BC


- right to left is how they would write


magic value: writing the name of the dead ensures eternity


- pictograms + ideograms + some phonograms (consonantal)


- North semitic > phoenician (modern lebanon) syllabic characters of pictorial origin (22 c's in 1000 BC)


- greek alphabetic characters (800 BC) added vowels: 1 character: 1 sound


- Etruscan (central italy) > roman alphabet



What are logo graphics?

- each logo ram has meaning


- single written character which represents a word or morpheme (the smallest unit with meaning)

what is a pictogram?

- part of logograms, pictures of concrete items; non arbitrary relationship between forma and meaning


- sometimes, ambiguous became context not know, open interpretation

what are ideogram?

- pictures of abstract items


- i.e. the circle for sun


* foot to represent: foot, walt, go, stand, stay, bring

what are phonographic?

- characters have no meaning; but have a sound and the sound is what it direct us

what is the syllabic writing system?

1 symbol / 1 syllable; derive from logograms

what is the alphabetic writing system?

- based on gnomic principles

What about modern writing systems?

- all alphabetic


- except for chinese and japanese (syllables + alphabetic component)


- and semitic system which are syllabic (c's only)


pictorgram, idoegrams: in airports, highways, public places


- logograms exist in all languages (numbers, math symbols)


- understood across dialects, is a unifying factor


- syllabic writing ( 1 symbol = 1 syllable)


- appeared first in the middle east


- chinese: logographic system + some morphemes


- has too many characters (50,000 in K'ang and His dictionary, 17th c)


- 5000 are sufficient to read the newspaper


- basic literacy you know 2000 words


1956: simplification of characters


- adoption of "pinyin", phonetic system with roman alphabet


- for street signs, brand names, computer terminology, but not generalized


- old system (china) is outsized, haphazard, inefficient, partly reliable, but maintained for cultural resins (calligraphy) and a common unifying factor for all of china





describe some characteristics of speech?

- natural, more moder, casual, more requital, non official, transient, time constraints, immediate, rougher, more expressive, dialogue

Describe some characteristics of writing?

learned in school, more archaic, formal, longer words, more structured, subordination


official value: business, law, medial, seldom not standard, permanent: repeated reading, organization, compactness precision, complete sentences, space constraint, static, delayed, no dialogue


* as soon as a word gets accepted into the dictionary then it is old

What is spelling?

- is the written record of a word. Normally based on one sound/ one letter


- however, often one letter may have a combination of sounds


- some letters can have no sound


- A cluster of letters could have many sounds (though, throughout, rough, plough)



Irregularities

- GB Bradshaw: the miraculous birth of language. Philosophical library, NY


- in his preface to pygmalion, shaw complains that english has an "old foreign alphabet"in which only c's have any speech value


- in his will, he encouraged the creation of a new alphabet

Where does todays spelling come from?

- the late middle english pronunciation


- though pronunciations keep evolving over time

Discussies the various types of spelling reforms

- 26 letters not enough to represent 40 sounds


- relationization in the 16th c.


- boring from the latin words indite - idict


- rein - reign


- illand - island


- there was the great vowel sift in the 15 c


change in the vowel system in the 15 century; what happen was that all the e sounds became i sounds


- 16th, 17th c. create rules to stabilize english spelling, such as adding "e" to render the previous vowel sound long: as in sale


- 16 th c. samuel johnson standaridized spellings to reflect morphology


- spelling reforms attempts (we would not have spelling mistakes, it would be easier to teach, thought with different spelling it would be very different and have to learn, then you have to transcribe everything today into a new spelling system, the writing would be phonemic, but people always change how they speak so this is not possible

The history of writing (text book)

- there are many legends and stories about the invention of writing


- in fact, the invention of writing systems comes relatively late in human history, and its development was gradual

Pictorgrams and ideograms

- the seed out of which writing developed were probably the early drawings made by ancient humans


- onces a pictogram was accepted as the representation of an object, its meaning was extended to attributes of that object or concepts associated with it. Thus, a picture of the sun could represent "warmth", "heat", "light", "daytime" and so on. Pictograms thus began to represent ideas rather than objects. Such generalization abstract pictograms are called ideograms


- the simplifying conventions that developed so distorted the literal representations that it was no longer easy to interpret symbols without learning the system


- the ideograms became linguistic symbols as they came to stand for the sounds that represented the idea. -That is,

what are petoglyphs?

- cave drawings, called petroglyphs, such as those found in the altamira cave in northern spain, drawing by humans living more than 200,00 years ago can be read today

what are pictograms?

- later drawings, hoverer, are clearly "picture writing" or pictograms


- unlike modern writing systems, each picture or pictograms is a direct image of the object it represents. There is an nonarbintary relationship between the form and the meaning of the symbol


- this early form of writing did not have any direct relation to the language spoken, because the picture represented objects in the world rather than the linguistic names given to these objects; they did not represent the sound of spoken language


- The advantage of such symbols is that they can be understood by anyone because they do not depend on the words of any language



What is Cuneiform Writing?

- It was the writing of the summerians people in mesopotamia


- they left innumerable clay tables containing, among other things, business documents, epics, prayers, poems and proverbs


- the writing system of the sumerians in the oldest one know


- the characters or symbols were produced by using a wedge-shaped stylus that was pressed into soft clay tables


- This form of writing is called cuneiform


- eventually, cuneiform script came to represent words of the language. Such a system is called logographic or word writing


- in this type of writing, the symbol stands for both the word and the concept, which it may resemble however abstractly


- thus logograms, the symbols of a word writing system, are ideograms that represent, in addition to concept, the word or morpheme in the language for that concept


- the cuneiform writing system was borrowed by the babylonians, assyrians, and persians


- in adopting cuneiform characters in their own languages, the borrowers used them to represent the sounds of syllables in their words. In this way, cuneiform eve loved into syllabic writing system


- In a syllabic writing system, each syllable in the language is represented by its own symbol, and words are written syllable by syllable



What are emoticons?

- emoticons are strings of text characters that when viewed sideways, form a face expressing a particular emotion


- they are a modern, pictographic system similar to cuneiform in that the same symbols are combined in different manners to convey different concepts

What is the Rebus principle?

- when a graphic sign no longer has any visual relationship to the world it represents, it becomes a phonographic symbol, staring for the sounds that represent the word


- A single sign can then be used to represent all worlds with the same sounds - the homophones of the language


- the rebus principle: the rebus is a representation of words or syllables by pictures of object whose name sounds like the intended words or syllable

How did we move from Hieroglyphs to the alphabet?

- at the same time that sumerian pictography was flourishing, a similar system was being used by the egyptians, which the greeks later called hieroglyphics


- like the sumerian pictograms, the hieroglyphs came to represent both the concept and the word for the concept


- thought the rebus principle, hieroglyphics also became a syllabic writing system


- in this syllabic stage, hieroglyphics were borrowed by many people, including the phoneicians


- they developed a writing system of 22 syllabic characters, the west semitic syllabary


- thus, the west semitic syllabary was both syllabary and a consonantal alphabet


- the ancient greeks tried to borrow the phoenician writing system, but it was unsatisfactory as a syllabary because greek has too complex a syllable structure


- in greek, unlike in phoenician, vowels cannot be determined by grammatical context, so a writing system for greek required that vowels have their own independent representations


- Fortuitously, phoenician had more consonants than greek, so when the greeks borrowed the system they used extra symbols to represent vowel sounds. The result was alphabetic writing system is which both consonants and vowels are symbolized


- the result was alphabetic writing, a system in which both consonants and vowels are symbolized


- alphabetic system are those in which each symbol typically represents one sound unit


- A majority of alphabetic system in use today are derived from the greek system

Discuss the writing system used in China and Japan

- it is understandable why, historically, word writing gave way to alphabetic systems in most places in the world


- the major exception are the writing system used in china and japan


- Chinese writing utilizes a system of characters, each of which represent a morpheme or word


- the Chinese government has adopted a spelling system using roman alphabet, called pinyin, which is now used for certain purposes along with the regular system of characters


- to the chinese, writing is an art - calligraphy - and thousands of years of poetry, literature and history are preserved in the old system


- similarly, the spoken word for rice is different in the various chinese languages, but the written character is the same


- if the writing system in china were to become alphabetic, then each language would be as different in writing as in speaking, and written communication would no longer be possible among the various language communities

What is the syllabic writing system?

- they are more efficient that word writing systems


- however, languages with a rich structure of syllables containing manny consonant cluster cannot be efficiently written with a syllabary

What are the two north american syllabics writing systems?

- cherokee has a syllabic writing system


- by 1830, more than 1/2 of the adult male population of cherokees could read and write in sikwayi's script and while use of the script has subsequently declined there have been attempts to renew its use


- some commentators have expressed surprise that american aboriginal scripts did not progress to alphabetic systems, but we should keep in mind that, although a syllabary would not fit a language such as english it functioned well in cherokee and cree

Consonantal alphabetic writing

- semitic languages, such as her brew and arabic, are written with alphabets that consist only of consonants

What is the alphabetic writing system?

- alphabetic writing system are easy to learn, convenient to use, and maximally efficient for transcribing any human language


- the term sound writing is sometimes used in place of alphabetic writing, but it does not truly represent the principle involved in the use of alphabets


- except for the phonetic alphabets, whose function is to record the sounds of all language for descriptive purpose, most, if not all, alphabets have been on the phonemic principle


- the rules governing the sound system of the language play an important role in the relationship between sounds and characters


- some languages use two letter together - called a digraph - to represent a single sound

How does reading, writing and speech all interconnect?

- the written language reflects, to a certain extent, the elements and rules that together constitute the grammar of the language


- the system of phonemes is represented by the letters of the alphabet, though not necessarily in a direct way


- writing then somewhat reflects the spoken language and punctuation many even distinguish between two meanings not revealed in the spoken forms


- in the spoken sentence, if he receives extra stress (called contrastive stress), then it must refer to bill; if he receives normal stress then it refers to john


- A speaker can usually emphasize any word in a sentence by using contrastive stress. Writers, sometimes attempt to show emphasis by using all capital letters, or italics, or by underlining the emphasized word

What is the whole language approach to reading?

- what is sometimes referred to as the whole language approach to reading has suggested that children can generally learn to read just as they lean to talk, though constant interaction with family and friends, teachers and classmates

What is the phonics methods?

- this view contrasts with the view that children be specifically taught to segment speech into individual sounds and relate these sounds to the letter of the alphabet, which is sometimes referred to as teaching phonics


- reading and writing are not innate whereas learning language is

Disuse the difference between graphemes and phonemes

- the irregularities between graphemes (lettres and phonemes have been cited as one reason "why johnny can't read"


- current english spellings are based primarily on earlier pronunciations of words


- for these reasons, modern english orthography does not always represent what we know about the phonology of the language


- the spelling of such pairs thus reflect our knowledge of the sound pattern of the language and semantic - morphological relationship between words. These considerations have led some to suggest that english orthography is morphophonemic in addition to being phonemic


- while dialectal pronunciations differ, the common spelling indicate the intended word. it is necessary for the written language to transcend local dialects

Spelling and pronunciations

- writing has affected speech only marginally, however, most notably in the phenomenon of spelling pronunciation


- since the 16th century, to some extend spelling has influenced standard pronunciation


- the struggle between those who demanded that words be pronounced according to spelling and those who demanded that words be spelled according to pronunciation generated great hear in that century


- although the written language has some influence on the spoken language, it does not change the basic system - the

WHAT ARE THE TWO COMPONENT OF CANADIAN SPELLING?

- we use the british system of spelling - because we were a colonie


- but is more of a hybrid between british and american spelling

What is logographic?

- in which every symbol or character represents a word or morpheme

What is syllabic writing?

- in which each symbol represents a syllable (Japanese)

What are the consonantal alphabetic?

- in which each symbol represents a consonant and vowels may be represented by diacritical marks (hebrew)

what about alphabetic writing?

- in which each symbol represents

What are words? (morphology)

- collection of distinct sounds that convey information / agreed upon meaning (sounds with meaning)


- string of sounds with particular meanings


- if we speak quickly; then we don't know the spaces, if you don't know the language then it is harder for you to see the spaces


- it is very difficult to define


- an indivisible unit. Words added in a sentences are never added within another word


- there is a pontetial pause before and after, not in the middle of a word.


- 1 to 1 relationship with meaning


- smallest unit of meaning that can stand on its own

How many words do we know?

- individual vocabulary: 40,000 words (20,000 passive 20,000 active) according to pinker 1999


- ba graduates know approx 50,000 words

How many words does a speaker need?

- if you know 1,000 words (brown corpus) you can read 72% of the corpus


- vocabulary size and text converge in the brown corpus


- then you need around 15,000 words in order to understand

What are the most common words in english?

- and, is, my, it, the


- 43% of the words occur 1/2 the time


9 of the most common words = and, be, have, it, of, the, to, will, you


- they are verbs in there own right, but they are also an auxiliary, they have two jobs

What is lexicon?

- difficulty defining the size of lexicon


- polysemy: multiple meaning of a word. Is mouse 1 or 2 words? is mice another word


- technical vocabulary: productivity of language


- as we learn more then we come up with new language all the time


- is twenty - one, one or two words

Where does english borrow a lot of words from?

- english borrows a lot from latin

What are content words?

(nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) are open class - new words are constantly being added to content words

What are grammatical words?

(as so know as function words)


(conjuctions, prepositions, pronouns) are closed class - new words unlikely to be added


I/he/she

What do dictionaries provide?

- provide spelling, pronunciation, parts of speech, definition, etymology, register, exp,ads


- they are usually prescriptive: gives "correct" pronunciation and meaning, avoids socially unacceptable language, and tries to be unbiased


- automatically out of data (as soon as it goes in to a dictionary)

What are morphemes?

- minimal units of meaning or grammatical function


- the smallest unit of meaning


- all the things that you add to the original morphemes then it all adds/changes the meaning of the root word


- thought the meaning of individual morpheme not always evident

What are free morphemes?

- they are usually words


- unattached, one complete meaning


- lexical morphemes

What are functional (grammatical) morpheme?

- conjunctions, prepositions, articles, pronouns

What are bound morphemes?

- these are prefixes and suffixes


- attached, dependent on free morphemes or stems or roots

What are inflectional morphemes?

- suffixes that express verb tense, gender, number of case (no change in gram. category)

what does the -s bounded morpheme do to the word?

- 3rd person singular, plural, possessive

What does the -ed bounded morpheme do to the words?

- past tense, past participle < it can form did, it stopped being a free morpheme

What does the -en bounded morpheme do to the words?

- past participle


- plural

What does the -ing bounded morpheme do to the words?

- present participle

What does the -er bounded morpheme do to the words?

- comparative

What does the -est bounded morpheme do to the words?

- superlative

What languages express gender in the whole phrase

- spanish, french, Italian


- gender (it is arbitrary and convention) changes over time

what are inflectional morphemes?

- in grammar, inflection or inflexion - sometimes called accidence is the modification of a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender and mood

what are syntactically morphemes?

- consisting of or noting morphemes that are combined in the same order as they would be if they were separate words in a corresponding construction. The word blackberry, which consists of an adjective followed by a noun is a syntactic compound

What are synthetic languages?

- relations are mostly inflectional (Russian & latin)

What are analytic languages?

- relations are mostly syntactic

What are derivational morphemes?

- affixes are divided into several types, depending on their position with reference to the root


- it derives other words


- derivational morphemes create new words, usually chafing grammatical category (but not always)



What are prefixes?

- attached before another morpheme


ex. bi -


- they do not change the grammatical category

what are suffixes?

attached after another morpheme

What are circumflexes?

- attached before and after another morpheme or set of morphemes

what are infixes?

- inserted within another morpheme

What is lexical creativity?

- we understand language because the rules for word formation are regular

what is coinage?

- invention of totally new terms; enter language through usage


- brand names


- new technology

What are compounding words?

- total meaning is not the same as the meaning of its component parts


- spelling is inconsistent


- compounding is a productive morphological process


- grammatical categories combine with other gram. categories more or less productively


- Frequently, the final word or the "head" determines the class of the compound


- meaning is not alway logical, it stand as a single semantic unit

What are acronyms?

- made up of the initials of several words

What is alphabetizes?

- if each letter is pronounced


ex. VIP

What is addreviations?

- to make brief: shortened words, usually formed by CVC, CV structures

What are blends?

- usually continua the beginning of one word + end of another


ex. brunch

What are back-formations?

- formed by often erroneously subtracting an affix

What are conversion?

- no derivation but there is a category change:


from noun to verb


from adverb to verb


from pronoun to noun


from adjective to noun

What is eponyms?

or words from names of people

What are allomorphs?

- are different pronunciations of the same morpheme

What are morphemes?

- the smallest unit of linguistics meaning; a particular string of sounds must be united with a meaning and a meaning must be united with specific sounds, in order for the sounds or the meaning to be word in our mental dictionaries

What is lexicon?

- your mental lexicon part of your linguistic knowledge

What is the difference between written word and spoken words?

- we separate written words by spaces, but in the spoken language there are no pauses between most words. Without knowledge of the language, one can't tell how many words are in an utterance

What are homophones?

- different words with the same sounds but different meanings

What are synonyms?

- synonyms because they are represented by four different strings of sounds


- since each word is a sound meaning unit, each word stored in our mental dictionaries must be listed with its unique phonological representation which determines its pronunciation and with meaning

What is orthography?

- spelling

What is grammatical category or synaptic category?

- each word listed in your mental dictionary must include other information as well, such as whether it is a noun, a pronoun, a verb, an adjective, and adverb, a preposition or a conduction. That is, its grammatical category or syntactic category is specified

How did dictionaries grow? history of dictionaries

- dictionaries grew out of the earlier practice of writing words as translations or "glosses" above especially difficult word in latin text, and later in french ones


- the earliest proper dictionaries in english were alphabetical lists of " hard words" with glosses of their meanings in ordinary words


- it was not until the next century that anyone thought of including in the dictionary all hrs words


- the "supreme authority" of the english language of the "correct" pronunciation and meaning of a words


- by the end of the eighteenth century, pronouncing dictionaries appeared to show not only how words such as colonel, enough or phthisical were spelled but also how they were pronounced, and pronunciations became a regular part of dictionaries


- provides the following information about each word: 1) spelling 2) the "standard" pronunciation 3) part of speech - for example, noun, verb, preposition

What are content words?

- nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are the content words. These words denote concepts such as objects, actions, attributes and ideas that we can think about like children, anarchism, soar, and purple


- content words are sometimes called the open class words because we can and regularly do add new words to these classes

What are function words?

- there are other classes of words that do not have clear lexical meaning or obvious concepts associated with them, including connections such as and or, and, but; prepositions such as in and of; the articles the, a/an, and pronounces such as it and he. These kinds of words are called function words because they have a grammatical function


- function words are sometimes called close class words


- with the growth of feminist movement, some proposals have been made for adding a neutral singular pronouns - that would be neither masculine nor feminine and that could be used as the general, or generic form

What is morphology?

- the study of the internal structure of words, and the rules by which words are formed


- knowing a language implies knowing its morphology

What is discreteness?

- the decomposition of words into morphemes illustrates one of the fundamental properties of human language


- in all languages, discrete linguistics units combine in rule - governed ways to form lager units


- our knowledge of these discrete units and rules for combining them accounts for the creativity of human language

Free morphemes

- such as boy


- can constitute words by themselves

Bound morphemes

- they are affixes


- they are never words by themselves

What discontinuous morphemes?

- some languages have circumflexes, morphemes that are attached to a root or stem morpheme both initially and finally

What is a root?

- morphologically complex words consist of a root and one or more affixes. A root is a lexical c intent morpheme that cannot be analyed into smaller parts


- when a root morpheme is combined with an affix, it forms a stem, which may or may not be a word (painter is both a word and a stem; - chive + er is only a stem)

What are bound morphemes?

- bound morphemes like -ify and - tion are called derivational morphemes


- when they are added to root morpheme or stem, a new word with a new meaning is derived


- this means that we must have a list of the derivational morphemes in our mental dictionaries as well as the rules that determine how they are added to a root or stem. The form that results from the addition of derivational morpheme is called a derived word

What are derivation morphemes?

- derivational morphemes have clear semantic content


- in this sense, they are like content word, except that they are not words

What are compounds?

- new words may be formed by stringing together other word to create compound words


- there is almost no limit on the kinds of combinations that occur in english

What is conversion?

- often considered a type of derivational process, conversion is another means by which word enter a languages lexicon


- conversion refers to the process in which an existing word becomes assigned to another syntactic category

What are blends?

- blends are similar to compounds, but parts of the words combined are deletes, so they are "less than" compounds


- smog from smoke and fog

What are back formations?

- a new word may enter the language because of an incorrect morphological analysis


- for example, peddle was derived from peddler on the mistaken assumption that -er was the "agetive" suffix

What is an abbreviation? What is the process?

Abbreviations of longer words or phrases may also become “lexicalized”; narc for narcotics agent


More recently, dis and rad from disrespect and radical


This process is sometimes called clipping

What are acronym?

Acronyms are words derived from the initials of several words


Ex NAFTA (north american free trade agreement) When the string of letters is not easily pronounced as a word, the acronym is produced by souring our each letter and consequently may be called an initialism

What is grammatical morphemes?

is a better term for the functions of language are expressed not only by word but by suffixes, prefixes and unaccented particles

Arbitrary

Describes the property of language, including sign language, whereby there is no natural or intrinsic relationship between the way a word is pronounced (or signed) and its meaning.

Auxiliary

A verbal element, traditionally called a "helping verb", that co-occurs with and qualifies, the main verb in a verb phrase with regard to such properties as tense


eg. have, be will

C-selection

The classifying of verbs and other lexical items in terms of the syntactic category of the complements that they accept (C stands categorial), sometimes called subcategrorization:


eg. the verb finds c-selects, or is subcategorized for, a noun phrase complement

Complement

The constituent(s) in a phrase other than the head that complete(s) the meaning of the phrase and which is C-selected by the verb. The right sister to the head in the X-bar schema. In the verb phrase found a puppy, the noun phrase a puppy is a complement of the verb found.

Constituent

A syntactic unit in a phrase structure tree


eg. the girl is a noun phase constituent in the sentence the boy loves the girl

Constituent structure

The hierarchically arranged syntactic units such as noun phrase and verb phrase that underlie every sentence

Constituent structure tree

A tree diagram with syntactic categories at each node that reveals both the linear and hierarchical structure of phrase and sentences

d-strucutre

Any phrase structure tree generated by the phrase structure rules (i.e. by the x-bar schema) of a transformational grammar; the basic syntactic structures of the grammar. Also called deep structure

What is a declarative sentence

A sentence that asserts that a particular situation exists

Deep structure

- any phrase structure tree generated by the phrase structure rules (i.e. by the X-bar schema) of a transformational grammar; the basic syntactic structure of the grammar

Demonstratives

Words such as this, that, those, and these that function syntactically as articles but are semantically deictic because context is needed to determine the referents of the noun phrases in which they occur

Determiner (Det)

The syntactic category, also functional category, of words and expressions, which when combined with a noun form a noun phrase. Includes the articles the and a, demonstratives such as this and that, qualifiers such as each and every

Direct object

The grammatical relation of a noun phrase when it appears immediately below the verb phrase and next to the verb in deep structure; the noun phrase complement of a transitive verb:


Eg, the puppy in the boy found the puppy

Functional category

One of the categories of function words, including determiner, Aux, complementizer, and preposition. These categories are not lexical or phrasal categories

Grammatical relations

Any of several structural positions that a noun phrase may assume in a sentence, such as subject or direct object.

Head (of phrase)

The central word of a phrase whose lexical category defines the type of phrase: e.g., the noun man is the head of the noun phrase the man who came to dinner; the verb wrote is the head of the verb phrase wrote a letter to his mother; the adjective red is the head of the adjective phrase very bright red in the face

Immediately dominate

If a node labeled A is directly above a node labeled B in a phrase structure tree, then A immediately dominates B.

Intransitive verb

A verb that must not have (does not C-select for) a direct object NP complement: e.g., sleep, rise.

Lexical category

A general term for the word-level syntactic categories of noun, verb, adjective, and adverb. These are the categories of content words like man, run, large, and rapidly, as opposed to functional category words such as the and and.

Meaning

The conceptual or semantic aspect of a sign or utterance that permits us to comprehend the message being conveyed. Expressions in language generally have both form—pronunciation or gesture—and meaning

Modal

An auxiliary verb other than be, have, and do, such as can, could, will, would, or must.

node

A labeled branch point in a phrase structure tree; part of the graphical depiction of a transition network represented as a circle, pairs of which are connected by arcs.

noun phrase (NP)

The syntactic category, also phrasal category, of expressions containing some form of a noun or pronoun as its head, and which functions as the subject or as various objects in a sentence.

parameters

The small set of alternatives for a particular phenomenon made available by Universal Grammar. For example, Universal Grammar specifies that a phrase must have a head and possibly complements; a parameter states whether the complement(s) precedes or follows the head.

Phrasal category

The class of syntactic categories that comprise the root of an X-bar structure including NP, VP, AP, PP, and AdvP.

phrase structure (ps) rules

Principles of grammar that specify the constituency of syntactic categories and of phrase structure trees: e.g., NP → Det N - , or VP → V- NP in the X-bar schema.

Phrase structure tree

A tree diagram with syntactic categories at each node that reveals both the linear and hierarchical structure of phrases and sentences.

Prepositional phrase (pp)

The syntactic category, also phrasal category, consisting of a prepositional head and a noun phrase complement: e.g., with a key, into the battle, over the top.

Rules of syntax

Principles of grammar that account for the grammaticality of sentences, their hierarchical structure, their word order, whether there is structural ambiguity, etc.

s-selection

The classifying of verbs and other lexical items in terms of the semantic category of the head and complements that they accept, e.g., the verb assassinate S-selects for a human subject and a prestigious, human NP complement.

s-sctucutre

The structure that results from applying transformational rules to a d-structure. It is syntactically closest to actual utterances. Also called surface structure.

sisters

In a phrase structure tree, two categories that are directly under the same node: e.g., V and the direct object NP are sisters inside the verb phrase.

specifier

The category of the left sister of X̄ in the X-bar schema: e.g., a determiner in an NP. It is a modifier of the head and is often optional.

structural ambiguity

The phenomenon in which the same sequence of words has two or more meanings that accounted for by different phrase structure analyses: e.g., He saw a boy with a telescope.

subcategorization

The classifying of verbs and other lexical items in terms of the syntactic category of the complements that they accept (C stands for categorial), sometimes called subcategorization: e.g., the verb find C-selects, or is subcategorized for, a noun phrase complement.

subject

The grammatical relation of a noun phrase to a S(entence) when it appears immediately below that S in a phrase structure tree: e.g., the zebra in The zebra has stripes.

suppletive form

A term used to refer to inflected morphemes in which the regular rules do not apply: e.g.,went as the past tense of go.

suface structure

The structure that results from applying transformational rules to a deep structure. It is syntactically closest to actual utterances.

syntactic category

Traditionally called "parts of speech"; also called syntactic categories; expressions of the same grammatical category can generally substitute for one another without loss of grammaticality: e.g., noun phrase, verb phrase, adjective, auxiliary verb.

syntax

The rules of sentence formation; the component of the mental grammar that represents speakers' knowledge of the structure of phrases and sentences.

transformational rule

A syntactic rule that applies to an underlying phrase structure tree of a sentence (either d-structure or an intermediate structure already affected by a transformation) and derives a new structure by moving, deleting or inserting elements: e.g., the transformational rules of wh- movement and do insertion relate the deep structure sentence John saw who to the surface structure Who(m) did John see.

transitive

A verb that C-selects an obligatory noun-phrase complement: e.g., find.

tree diagram

A graphical representation of the linear and hierarchical structure of a phrase or sentence. A phrase structure tree.

verb (v)

The syntactic category, also lexical category, of words that can be the head of a verb phrase. Verbs denote actions, sensations, and states: e.g., climb, hear, understand.

verb phrase (VP)

The syntactic category of expressions that contain a verb as its head along with its complements such as noun phrases and prepositional phrases: e.g., gave the book to the child.

what is prescriptivism?

- the view that one language or one form of a language is better than another



Who defines what is right in a language and what the rules are?

- it depend on the language


- there is no english academy


- but this is why english grows so fast because there is no academy

Noun phrase

NP (pronoun, noun, clause or sentence) May function as subject: the boy is here May function as object: I spoke to the boy

verb phrase

VP (Always contains a verb) May also contain a NP, PP (prepositional phrase) Took (the buss) (in(the morning))


- but it can also contain a noun phrase and a preposition parse

Adjective phrase

AP (contains an adjective as its head) Full of toys in , an adjectival phrase may occur as a post modifier to a noun (a bin full of toys), or as a predicate to a verb (the bin is full of toys)


- but it also needs a noun phrase in order to be completed


*this is all from generative grammar: it generates a surface strucure

What is generative grammar?

- a very explicit system of phrase structure rules used to generate sentences and exclude non-grammatical ones


- rules must state explicitly all and only the possible combinations of constituents of the language

What are transformational rules?

phrase structure rules generate sentences with a fixed order. But transformational rules are need to: move, delete, add certain elements

in most languages are the subjects found before the verb?

yes

What are sentences composed of?

sentences are composed of discrete units that are combined by rules. this system of rules explains how speakers can store infinite knowledge in finite space - our brain. The part of the grammar that represents a speaker's knowledge of sentences and their structures is called syntax

Why is word order important?

- part of what we mean by strucure is word order. The meaning of sentences depends largely on the order in which words occur in a sentence

What is syntactic knowledge?

syntactic knowledge goes beyond being able to decide which strings are grammatical and which are not. It accounts for the multiple meanings, or ambiguity, of expressions like synthetic buffalo hinds in the tumbleweed carton, which can mean buffalo hinds that are synthetic or hines of synthetic buffalo


- syntactic knowledge also enables us to determine the grammatical relations in a sentence such as subject and direct object and how they are to be understood

what is structural ambiguity?

these ambiguities are a result of different structure (different ways that a sentence could be written)

What do syntaic rules help people to produce?

the syntactic rules permit speakers to produce and understand a limitless number of sentences never produces or heard before - the creative aspect of language

What does the syntactic rules in grammar account for?

1) the grammaticality of sentences


2) word order


3) hierarchical organization of sentences


4) grammatical relations such as subject and object


5) whether different structure have differing meanings or the same meaning


6) the creative aspect of language

What are constiuents?

- syntactic rules determine the order of words in a sentence, and how the words are grouped


- the natural grouping of a sentence are called constituents


- our knowledge of the constituent structure may be graphically represented as a tree structure


- every sentence in a language is associated with one or more constituent structures. If a sentence has more than one constiteneuet structure, it is ambigious, and each tree will correspond to one of the possible meanings

What is a syntactic category?

- a family of expressions that can substitute for one another without loss of grammaticality is called a synaptic category


- some of these syntactic categories have traditionally been called parts of speech


- syntactic categories are better defined in terms of the syntactic rules of the grammar


- the larger syntactic categories, such as verb phrase, are identified as consisting of all the syntactic categories and words below that point, or node, it the tree

What are auxiliary verbs?

- words like will, have, is and may are in a class of auxiliary verb, which included might, would, could, can and several others. The auxiliaries other than be and have are also refereed to as modals


- Auxiliary verbs specify a time frame for the sentence, whether the situation described by the sentence will take place, already took place, or is taking place now

What are phrase structure rules?

A phrase structure tree is a formal device for representing the knowledge that a speaker has of the structure of sentences in his language Rather, a speaker's knowledge of the permissible and impermissible structure must exist as a finite set of rules that “generate”, or provide a tree for, any sentences in the language.


THese are phrase structure rules


Phrase structure rules specify the structures of a language precisely and concisely

The relationship between phrase structure rules and phrase structure trees

There are several possible ways to view phrase structure rules. We can regard them as test that trees must pass to be grammatical. Each syntactic category mentioned in the tree is examined to see if they syntactic categories immediately beneath it agree with the phrase structure rules




Categories such as NP,VP,AP, IP (=S) are phrasal categories. The categories N, V, P, Adj and Adv are lexical categories. The categories such as Det and Aux that house function words are functional categories


Phrase structure tree always have lexical and functional categories at the bottom since the rules must apply until no phrasal categories remain


Since there is an infinite number of possible sentences in every language, there are limitless number of trees, but only a finite set of phrase structure rules that specify the tree allowed by grammar of the language

what is a coordinate structure?

A coordinate structure results when two constituents of the same category are joined with a conjunction such as and or or.

What is a complementizer?

A complementizer is an element that turns a sentence into a complement

Sentence relatedness

Sentences may be related in various ways. For example, they may have the same phrase structure, but differ in meaning because they contain different words


Auxiliaries are very important in forming certain types of sentences in English, including questions


In questions, the auxiliary appears at the beginning of the sentences This difference in position is not accounted for by the phrase structure rules we have presented, which specify that in a sentence the NP comes first, followed by Aux, followed by VP


Phrase structures rules account for much syntactic knowledge, but they do not account for the fact that certain sentences types in the language relate systematically to other sentences types

Transformational Rules

A way to capture the relationship between a declarative and a question is to allow the phrase structure rules to generate the structure corresponding to the declarative sentence, and have another formal device, called a transformational rules, move the auxiliary in front of the subject




The basic structure of sentences, also called deep structures, are specified by the phrase structure rules




The structures that result from the application of transformational rules are called surface structures



Much syntactic knowledge that is not expressed by phrase structure rules is accounted for by transformations, which can alter phrase structure trees by moving, adding or deleting elements

What are syntactic dependencies?

Sentences are organized according to two basic principles: constituent structure and syntactic dependencies


As we discussed earlier, constituent structure refers to the hierarchical organization of the subparts of a sentence


The second important property is that there are dependencies among elements in the sentences




In other words, the presence of a particular word or morpheme can depend on the presence of some other word or morpheme in a sentence




Unlike the other rules we have seen, which operate inside a phrase or clause, wh movement can move the wh phrase outside its own clause. In fact there is no limit to the distance that a wh phrase can move, as illustrated by the following sentences



“Long distance” dependencies by wh movement are fundamental part of human language. They provide further evidence that sentences are not simply strings of words but are supported by a rich scaffolding of phrase structure trees




These trees express the underlying structure of the sentences as well as their relations to other sentences in the language

What is X-bar theory?

- In more recent approaches to syntax, phrase structure rules have been replaced by more general constraints due in part to preference for more economical descriptions


- In the approach originally referred to as X-bar theory, a binary branching pattern is adopted to account for the fact that phrases systematically contain heads (X) and may also contain complements and specifiers in the configuration for all categories, lexical and functional


- The bar notion allows one to demonstrate three hierarchical levels needed to account for syntactic structures