Phonetics and Phonology PDF

1. Phonetics and Phonology ========================== - **Phonetics** -- study of the articulation of speech sounds and their acoustic properties - **Phonology** -- study of organization and functions of speech as part of language and grammar (system of sounds) Aspects of Phonetics --...

1. Phonetics and Phonology ========================== - **Phonetics** -- study of the articulation of speech sounds and their acoustic properties - **Phonology** -- study of organization and functions of speech as part of language and grammar (system of sounds) Aspects of Phonetics -------------------- - **Articulatory Phonetics** -- study of the production of speech sounds - Focus on what parts of the mouth are used in what configurations - Use of **X-Ray Photography** (x-ray micro beam) and cinematography - Use of **Palatography** (contact between the tongue and the roof of the mouth) - Use of **Ultrasound** - **Acoustic phonetics** -- study of the transmission and the physical properties of speech sounds - Use of the **Sound Spectrograph** (Praat) - **Auditory Phonetics** -- study of the perception of speech sounds - Use of **Magnetic Resonance Imaging** (**MRI**) and **Computerised Tomography** (**CT**) to show human response to stimuli Main Categories of Speech Stream -------------------------------- - **Suprasegmentals:** features which concern more than just a word/unit of speech; stress etc. - **Segments:** - **Phones** -- distinct speech sounds - **Phonemes** -- idealised speech sounds perceived as variants of the same sound. - **Allophones** -- actual realisations of phonemes - **Consonants** -- produced with a constriction (friction/obstruction) in the vocal tract. - **Vowels** -- at most only a slight narrowing - Borderline cases: consonants similar close to vowels: **glides** (j, l, w, r) - **Co-articulation** -- the influence of one sound on a neighbouring sound Phonetic Transcription ---------------------- - **Phonetic** **transcription** -- a way to describe the sounds used in language as units. - English is very bad with spelling words, Examples: - **Homographs pronounced differently**: *wound (waʊnd/wuːnd)* - **Homophones spelt differently**: *seen, scene (siːn)* - **Similar structures spelt differently**: *through (θruː)/though (ðəʊ)* - **Silent letters**: *gnat (næt), knife (naɪf), write (raɪt)* - **Spelling detached from pronunciation**: *one (wʌn), shoe (ʃuː), borough (bʌrə)* Phonetic Transcription (cont.) ------------------------------ - **Broad Transcription** -- uses Phonemes. - **Narrow Transcription** -- uses Allophones and marks Stress. - **Basic Transcription** -- normal phonetic transcription of the word - **Reverse Transcription** -- spelling the word using phonetic transcription. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) ----------------------------------------- - IPA puts phonemes into a table; divides them between **place and manner of articulation.** - IPA table ignores vowels: impossible to decide on an international standard. Consonants (see my description) ------------------------------- - Consonants are described by **Place of Articulation**, **Manner of Articulation** and **Voicing**. Place of Articulation --------------------- - **I.e. where in the vocal tract the constriction is made:** - Bilabial (p, b, m) - Labio-dental (f, v) - Dental (θ, ð) - Alveolar (t, d, s, z, n, l) - Palatal (j) - Velar (k, g, ŋ) - Palato-alveolar (ʃ, ʒ, tʃ, dʒ) - Glottal (h) - Post-alveolar (r) - Labio-velar (w) Manner of Articulation ---------------------- - I.e. how the airstream is constricted or modified to produce the sound; depends on the degree of closure. - **Obstruents** vs. **Sonorants** (obstruction of airflow vs. relatively open passage) - **Obstruents**: - **Plosives** -- made by obstructing the airstream completely (p, b, t, d, k, g) - **Fricatives** -- made by forming a nearly complete obstruction, which causes friction\ (f, v, θ, ð, s, z, ʃ, ʒ, h) - **Affricates** -- briefly stopping the airstream, and then releasing it lightly so that friction is produced (tʃ, dʒ) - **Sonorants** - - - **Liquids** -- formed with slightly more constriction; "liquid" quality depending on position (r, l) - **Glides --** fairly close to vowel sounds, only require slight movement of the articulators (j, w) - - Ex.: teɪbl̩, prɪzm̩, prɪzn̩ Voicing ------- - Consonants can be **voiced** (pronounced with their vocal folds closed), which produces vibration, or **voiceless** (pronounced with their vocal folds opens) - Voiced consonants: b, d, g, v, ð, z, ʒ, dʒ, m, n, ŋ, r, l, j, w - Voiceless consonants: p, t, k, f, θ, s, ʃ, h, tʃ - When you whisper, you keep your vocal partially open so that they do not vibrate, and that the sound you make is **voiceless**. Vowels (see my quadrilaterals and tables) ----------------------------------------- - Vowels are described by: - The **"height" of the tongue** (high; mid; low) - The **advancement of the tongue** (front; central; back) - **Lip roundness** (rounded; neutral; spread) - **Tenseness or laxness** (tense; lax; also called length -- long, short) Vowels (cont.) -------------- - Two categories of vowels -- **monophthongs** and **diphthongs** - **Monophthongs** -- simple vowels; composed of a single configuration of the vocal tract. - **Diphthongs** -- complex vowels; composed of a sequence of two different configurations. - This sequence still acts as a "single" vowel, however -- it acts as the nucleus to a syllable (knives -- naïve) Syllable Structure ------------------ - **Syllables** -- units of speech; may contain a single sound (makes for **monosyllabic words**) or several sounds. - Syllables can be broken down into an **onset** and a **rhyme**. All syllables have a rhyme, but onsets are optional. - **Rhyme** -- consists of the **vowel and any consonants that come after it.** - **Onset** -- any consonants that occur before the rhyme. - **The rhyme** can be further broken down into **the nucleus** and **the coda.** - **Nucleus** -- the vocalic part of the rhyme (contains vowels) - Carries suprasegmental information such as **stress**, **volume** and **pitch**, the heart of the syllable. - **Coda** -- consists of any final consonants of the syllable. - Ridiculous example of an onset: "klw" in "Klwów" Running/Connected Speech ------------------------ - In everyday language, individual words actually "run" together (or connect to each other) creating **running speech**. Even though, when studied, words and phrases need to be broken down, in real life they often act as one. - E.g. -- intrusive "r" (the idea-r-of...) Suprasegmental Features ----------------------- - **Suprasegmental features** -- "riding on top of" other segmental features; impossible to identify when hearing only a single segment. - May extend across numerous segments in an utterance. - **Length** -- some speech sounds are longer or shorter than other and may vary in certain situations. - High vowels (i, ɪ, u) are shorter than low vowels (æ, ɑ, ɔ) - A vowel is longer when it is preceding a voiced consonant -- **pre-fortis clipping.** Suprasegmental Features (cont.) ------------------------------- - **Intonation** -- the pattern of pitch movement - Depends on the rate of vibration of the vocal folds. - Pitch -- important for gender distinctions - **Pitch accents**: used to highlight important information (\*Mary\* kissed Peter!). - **Phrase tone** -- a change in fundamental frequency at the end of an utterance - Used for distinction between a statement, question etc. (You got an A on the [test?)] - **Stress** -- property of entire syllables, not segments - Nucleus (vowels) of the syllable carries most information about the stress. - A stressed syllable is more prominent than an unstressed one (longer and usually contain full vowels, as opposed to reduced vowels) - Unpredictable in English - Ex.: **'fəʊ**təɡ, rɑːf vs. fə**'tɒ**ɡrəfi - **Primary stress** -- denotes the strongest syllable of a word. - **Secondary stress** -- denotes strong syllables with less emphasis than the primary. Phonotactic constraints ----------------------- - **Phonotactic constraints**: possible combinations of sounds in a language (Phonotactics) - **Consonantal clusters in initial position** - In natively English words, all consonants are permitted at the beginning of a word, **except for ʒ (postalveolar fricative) and ŋ (velar nasal stop)**. - A large number of two-consonant combinations occur word-initially, **with a stop or fricative being followed by a liquid or a glide.** - Ex.: Bring, glean, music, quick, three, fly, humour, sweet - English allows **up to three consonants to start a word** (strength) - **/s/ can be followed by:** - Voiceless and nasal stops (stay, small) - /f/ and /v/ in a small number of borrowed words (sphere, svelte) - By a nasal stop or a liquid (smirk, slow) - Miscellaneous: - Gnome, knife -- **no stop + nasal sound possible** - Ptolemy -- **no stops next to each other** - Gdansk -- a schwa is inserted between the consonants to make it pronounceable. - Psychology - Bomb/tomb -- **no voiced stop after a bilabial stop** - Café -- /eɪ/ instead of /e/; /e/ cannot appear as a syllabic rhyme with no coda. Foreign accents --------------- - In Spanish, the consonant clusters /st/, /sk/ and /sp/ are not permitted to occur at the beginning of a word without a preceding vowel. - Thus, a Spanish speaker may pronounce "Spain" as "Espain." - **Sound substitution** -- speakers use sounds from their native language to replace non-native sounds. - "Th" substitution: /z/ and /s/ for /ð/ or /θ/ in French - This -- /zis/; thin -- /sin/ - Thus, a voiced fricative is used to replace another voiced fricative and vice versa. Phonemes and Allophones ----------------------- - Means of distinguishing between phonemes: change of meaning in **minimal pairs** (crab/grab) - Other languages may work differently (Hindi uses **aspiration**, English does not) - **Sound distribution** -- set of phonetic environments in which a sound occurs. - **Nasalised vowels** -- occur only in proximity with nasals. - **Contrastive distribution** -- minimal pairs - Hindi: p^h^əl -- fruit, pəl -- moment. - **Complementary distribution** -- one sound never occurs in the environment of the other sound and vice versa; allophones of the same phoneme. - \[ɪ\] and \[ɪ͂\] are allophones of the same phoneme /ɪ/ (ex. pin) - **Free variation** -- choice of allophone does not change the meaning of the word. - \[p\] and \[p̚\] in leap, soap, and troop - \[p̚\] -- unreleased voiceless bilabial stop Phonological Rules ------------------ - **Phonological rules** -- allows us to transfer phonemes into actual sounds. - **American flap** -- emerges only between two vowels, first of which is a stressed syllable (**descriptive rule**) - The sound affected by a rule, when the rule works, and the results of the rule are all part of the rule. - **Natural class of sounds**: a group of sounds that share one or more articulatory/auditory property to the exclusion of all other sounds. - Ex. Sibilants (Fricatives and Affricates), Obstruents, Labials, Sonorants Examples of Phonological Rules ------------------------------ - **Assimilation** -- a sound becomes more like the following sound (**um**believable) - **Dissimilation** -- two sounds next to each other become less similar (colonel as /ˈkɜːnəl/) - **Insertion** -- adding a segment into a word (stren**k**th) - **Deletion** -- deleting a segment of the word (governor as /ˈɡʌvnə/) - **Metathesis** -- changing the order of sounds; not present in English usually (ask **-\>** aks) - **Strengthening** -- emphasising certain sounds; ex. emphasis on aspiration - **Weakening** -- and vice versa Implicational laws ------------------ - **Implicational laws** -- explain why certain sounds are more common than others. - Ex.: any language that used /d/ will use /t/ as well; the presence of the less common sound implies the existence of the more common one (cannot be reversed) - **Implications for frequency of sounds** -- even if a language uses the less common sound, it will be used in fewer words than its common counterpart. - **In acquisition** -- we learn the more common sound before the less common one. - The less common sounds get dropped more often than the more common ones; they are less stable. - Vowels shift but change in one vowel implies change in other vowels as well. 2. Morphology ============= Definitions and Overview of Morphology -------------------------------------- - **Morphology:** component of **mental grammar** that deals with types of words and how words are formed out of smaller meaningful pieces (and other words) - Subfield of linguistics; studies the **internal structure of words** - Ex.: the prefix "re" usually modifies words in the same way (replay, reunite) - **Mental grammar**: we do not really know how it works. - **Spoonerisms**: swapping the order of morphemes/syllables - Proves that morphemes must have a certain mental status. - **Lexicon**: internalised mental dictionary of users of language. - Words differ in **form** (what a word sounds like when spoken) and **meaning** (what they denote). - **Lexical categories** (**parts of speech**): classes of words that differ in how other words can be constructed out of them; distinguished based on their morphological properties. - wind (v.) + -ing = winding (adj.) - wind (v.) + -able = windable (adj.) - quick (adj.) + -ness = quickness (n.) - quick (adj.) + -est = quickest (adj.) - apple (n.) + -s = apples (pl. n.) - apple (n.) + -like = apple-like (adj.) Word Formation -------------- - **Derivation:** the process of creating words out of other words - **Open vs Closed lexical categories.** - **Nouns**, **Verbs**, **Adjectives** and **Adverbs**: **Open Lexical Categories** - New words added to the language usually belong to these categories. - **Pronouns** (we, she, they), **Determiners** (a, the, this, your), **Prepositions** (on, of, under, for) and **Conjunctions** (and, or, but): **Closed Lexical Categories** - They rarely acquire new members. - How stable are they? Every noun verb. - **Neologisms** -- new words. - **Neosemanticism** -- word that already exists but has a different meaning. Word Formation (cont.) ---------------------- - **The** **process of Derivation**: - **Affixes** -- the pieces that attach to the **Stem.** - Affixes following the stem: **Suffixes.** - Affixes preceding the stem: **Prefixes.** - **Roots** -- core of the word used to make more words (cat vs. catty) - **Morpheme** (Roots and Affixes): the smallest linguistic unit with a meaning (cat) or grammatical function (-ed for past tense) - **Inflection**: the creation of different grammatical forms of words (rather than new words) - **Inflectional suffixes of English**: - Inflectional affixes usually do not change the grammatical category of a word. - All inflectional affixes of English are attached after the stem, which is not the case in every language. - Derivational affixes can be attached either before or after the stem. - **Polish**: - **Declension**: Nouns, Adjectives, Pronouns and Numerals are declined by Case (7) and Number (2) - **Conjugation**: Verbs are conjugated by Tense, Person, Number, Aspect and Mood - Inflectional affixes occur both before and after the stem. - **Morphosyntactic Tagsets**: labels used to indicate part of speech and other grammatical categories of each token in a corpus. Morphological Terminology ------------------------- - **Morphemes**. **Free vs. Bound**, **Bound Roots** - **Free Morphemes**: can be used as words all by themselves (cat) - **Bound Morphemes**: cannot stand alone (affixes) - **Bound Roots**: cannot stand alone (rasp- +berry) - **Productive vs. Unproductive Roots** - **Productive Root**: currently used to make new words (e.g. trans-) - **Unproductive Roots**: cannot be used to make new words (e.g. -fer, -sist, -ceive) Morphological Terminology (cont.) --------------------------------- - **Roots vs. Stems** - **Roots vs. Stems**: **Root** -- one morpheme; **Stem** -- 1+ morphemes - Use (root) -\> Reuse (stem) -\> Reusable - **Homophonous Affixes** -- sound alike but have different meanings/functions. - -s (3rd person singular or plural) - -er (inflectional-\> comparative degree; derivational -\> agent noun \[speak-speaker\]) - **Content vs. Function Words** - **Content Morphemes**: more concrete meaning - Include all Derivational Affixes, Bound Roots, Free Roots from the categories of **Noun**, **Verb**, **Adjective** and **Adverb** - Free Content Morphemes (Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives, Adverbs) = **Content Words** - **Function Morphemes**: primarily grammatically relevant information - Include all Inflectional Affixes and Free Roots from the categories of **Preposition**, **Determiner**, **Pronoun**, **Conjunction** - Free Function Morphemes (Prepositions, Determiners, Pronouns, Conjunctions)\ = **Function Words** - **Not always clear cut!** - Preposition "under" is classified as a function morpheme, yet it seems to have a pretty concrete meaning. - Derivational affix "-ness" is classified as a content morpheme, but it is difficult to spell out what its meaning is.   Morphological Processes ----------------------- - **Affixation** -- adding Affixes (Prefixes, Suffixes, Infixes) to words (cat -\> catty) - English has no regular infixes, but they do appear in slang (abso-fucking-lutely!) - **Tagalog** uses infixes frequently, e.g. to form infinitives. - Affixation also exists in **sign language** (e.g. for negation) - **Compounding** -- forming new words from two or more independent words (girlfriend) - Black bird vs. blackbird -\> change of pronunciation; different stress - Sometimes written together, sometimes with a hyphen, sometimes separately. - Compounding forms words and not phrases (regardless of spelling) because it **produces different speech patterns.** - Compounds that have words in the same order as phrases have **primary stress on the first word only**, while individual words in phrases have **independent primary stress.** - **Long Compounds**: income tax preparation fees, mint chocolate chip ice cream waffle cone - **German**: compounding forms new words - **Reduplication** -- forming new words by doubling an entire free morpheme (**Total Reduplication**) or part of it (**Partial Reduplication**) - Not used for grammatical purposes in English - Used to indicate intensity (like-like; date-date) - **Indonesian** uses total reduplication to form plurals (ibuibu -- mothers) - **Tagalog** uses partial reduplication for inflection and derivation (bibili -- will buy) - Bi -- **Reduplicant** - **Alternations** -- morpheme-internal modifications - **Inflectional Examples**: man-men; woman-women; goose-geese; foot-feet - **Irregular Verbs**: ring-rang-rung; drink-drank-drunk; swim-swam-swum; feed-fed-fed, hold-held-held. - **Alternation and Affix**: break-broke-broken, speak-spoke-spoken, bite-bit-bitten, fall-fell-fallen, give-gave-given. - **Derivational Examples**: change in part of speech class; final consonant of a Noun voices in order to become a Verb. - Strife (n.) -\> Strive (v.); Teeth (n.) -\> Teethe (v.); Breath (n.) -\> Breathe (v.); Use (n.) -\> Use (v.) - **Suppletion** -- using an inflected form unrelated to the shape of the root of a word. - **English:** Verbs have suppletive past tenses (go-went, is-was) - Some Adjectives such as "bad" or "good have suppletive comparative and superlative forms (bad-worse-worst, good-better-best) - No rule which would explain these forms; not very common. - Examples of suppletion in Classical Arabic (mar mar? at -\> pl. nisa) - **Backformation** (vaporising -\> vape) Language Typologies ------------------- - **Analytic Languages** -- made up of sequences of Free Morphemes - Each word consists of a single Morpheme, used by itself with meaning and function intact (also called **Isolating Languages**) - Do not use Affixes; ex.: **Mandarin Chinese** - **English:** mostly Analytic - **Synthetic Languages** -- use Bound Morphemes attached to other Morphemes, so a word can be made up of several meaningful elements (**Inflection**) - Bound Morphemes can show the grammatical functions of Nouns. - **Hungarian**: affixes added to Nouns show whether they are Objects or Subject; the meaning does not change if the Affixed Nouns change their position. - Personal Possession and Location indicated by use of Suffixes attached to the Stem (Bound Morphemes) - **English**: position of the Nouns indicates its function in a sentence. - Personal Position and Location expressed by the use of Free Morphemes - Usually, no strict word order - **Agglutinating** -- a kind of Synthetic Language, where Morphemes are joined loosely; it's easy to determine the boundaries between Morphemes and each Morpheme carries only one meaning. - **Swahili** uses Agglutination to indicate the Person of the Subject of the Verb or its Tense (by using Prefixes) - **Fusional** -- a kind of Synthetic language, where Morphemes may not be easily separated from the stem. - **Russian**: Bound Morphemes attached to Verb Stems indicate both the Person and the Number of the Subject of the Verb and the Tense of the Verb at the same time. - **Polysynthetic** -- a kind of Synthetic language, where highly complex words may be formed by combining several stems and affixes, usually when making nouns into parts of the verb forms. - **Sora**: words that have several Nouns and Affixes. Ex.: "I will not receive cooked rice from your hand" can be expressed in only one complex word in Sora. Word Structure -------------- - Hierarchical word structure in words modified by Affixes: Obraz zawierający tekst, zrzut ekranu, Czcionka, diagram Opis wygenerowany automatycznie Morphology vs. Etymology ------------------------ - **Nonce-formation** -- the spurious composition of complex words. They are new in the sense that they are being used independently by independent speakers. - Ex.: *dollarless* - **Institutionalisation** -- occurs when Nonce-formation starts to be accepted by other speakers as a known lexical item. - Serves to reduce a word's possible ambiguity. - **Lexicalisation** -- occurs when a lexeme acquires a form which could not have resulted from the application of productive Morphological rules. - **Ex**.: *dead-broke; blackbird* as a species (a *blackbird* does not have to be black) 3. Syntax ========= - **Syntax**: component of grammar that deals with how words and phrases are combined into larger pieces Grammaticality/Acceptability (Judgments) ---------------------------------------- - **Grammaticality**: the extent to which an utterance adheres to grammatical rules - **Acceptability**: appropriate use of language in a given context - A sentence may be grammatical but won't be acceptable in context. Syntax vs. Semantics, Compositionality -------------------------------------- - **Syntax** -- rules to ensure Grammaticality. - **Semantics** -- rules that govern meaning. - Chomsky: *Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.* - Syntactically correct; Semantically absurd - **Principle of Compositionality**: the overall meaning of phrases/sentences is derived from the meaning of their components (i.e. words) in a certain syntactic configuration. - In actuality, **half of the phrases we use are fixed.** Words vs. Phrases (in Syntax) ----------------------------- - **Words** -- basic building blocks of grammar; combinations of letters and sounds separated by spaces. - Some words contain more than one part (hyphenated words, compound words) - Words may be combined into **Phrases** which become popular over the years and are sometimes applied to situations other than originally intended. - **Idioms**: phrases which take on a figurative meaning - **Colloquialism**: an idiom which is only popular in a certain region/group of people - **Phrase**: group of words that works together in a sentence, but does not contain a subject or a verb - Syntactic Properties -------------------- - **Word order of English and Other Languages** - **English**: SVO, sometimes VSO, OSV in tropicalized sentences - *Sally ate an apple* (SVO): 35% of the world's languages use it. - SOV -- 44% of languages use it instead (e.g. Korean, Turkish) - VSO -- 19% of languages (e.g. Arabic, Irish) - **Co**-**occurrence** - **Arguments**: obligatory; cannot have more than required; cannot be freely ordered - ***Sally** devoured **an apple**.* - If the occurrence of some expression X in a sentence necessitates the occurrence of some expression Y, then we say that Y is an argument of X. So, devoured requires two arguments: an **Object** (an apple) and a **Subject** (Sally). - **Complements:** non-subject Arguments (*apple*) - Expressions can require multiple complements. - ***Sally** told Polly **she's leaving.*** - *Sally put **the book on the desk.*** - **Also:** other expressions than verbs can have their own arguments as well - *Sally came to the party with **Bob*** (*Bob* is an argument of *with*) - For a sentence to be well-formed, all the expressions it contains must have all and only the arguments they need: - *She has **a/this/my** dog.* - **Adjuncts**: optional; can have as many as you like; usually can be freely ordered (except OSSACOMUN.) - Sally likes dogs. - Sally likes small dogs. - Sally likes small fluffy dogs. - **Valency of Verbs** refers to the number and type of dependent arguments that the verb can have.  Syntactic Properties (cont.) ---------------------------- - **Agreement**: involves matching the value of some grammatical category between different constituents of a sentence (sometimes between sentences) - *Sandy **likes** Bob*; but *We **like** bob.* - **Person**, **Number**, **Gender**, **Case** (in some others, ex. German) - **Morpho-syntax**: interplay of **Syntax** and **Morphology** **Constituency Structures** - **Syntactic Constituents**: groups of expressions within a larger phrase that form a unit in the sentence's syntactic structure. - *Sally devoured (an apple)* -- Syntactic Constituent; Complement of "devoured." - **Constituency Tests**: help determine which groups of expressions form a Constituent. - **Tests: Question and Answers** - Where was the cat sleeping -\> [On the desk?] - **Tests: Clefting** - **It was [on the desk]** that the cat was sleeping. - **Pro-form Substitution** - The cat was sleeping **[there.]** **[\ ]** Syntactic Distribution ---------------------- - Expressions that have the same **Syntactic Distribution** are interchangeable in a sentence. - Some expressions may not, however, be interchangeable and thus not belong to the same **Syntactic Category** Syntactic Categories in English ------------------------------- Others ------ - **Count Nouns**: able to be counted and pluralized (cats, desks) - **Mass Nouns**: cannot be counted or, normally, pluralized (advice, gravel) - In contrast with other Nouns, can occur without a Determiner and can be replaced with a Pronoun (Advice/it can be helpful) - They can also co-occur with a Determiner (The advice was helpful) - **Intransitive Verbs**: *Paul is leaving.* - **Tritransitive Verbs:** *I'll trade you^1^ this bike^2^ for 30 dollars^3.^* Phrase Structure Rules ---------------------- - **Lexicon** -- Lexical Expressions assigned to Syntactic Categories - **Lexical Entries**: consist of a Syntactic Category name followed by an arrow and a word. - NP -\> {she, Fluffy, Sally} - **Phrase Structure Rules**: rules for putting together blocks like "VP" and "NP" - Ex.: If you put together NP and VP you get a sentence - **Phrase Structure Trees** - Drawn upside down - Phrase Structure RUles that allow for the construction of complex VPs: - A VP can consist of a Transitive Verb followed by an NP - A VP can consist of a Ditransitive Verb followed by a sequence of two NPs - A VP can consist of a sentential complement verb followed by a sentence - Also: Prepositions can combine with their complement NPs to form PPs - **Lexical Ambiguity/Syntactic Ambiguity** - Prepositional Phrase attachment Ambiguity **\ ** Dependency Syntax ----------------- - **Dependency Grammar**: a broad class of syntactic formalisms distinguished from the more established and known Constituency-based Syntactic representations. - Basic assumption: syntactic structure consists of lexical elements linked by binary asymmetrical relations called **Dependencies.** - Instead of focusing on traditional grammatical roles (Subject, Object etc.) dependency syntax emphasizes the connections between words in a sentence. - Each word in a sentence is linked to another, showing how they are related. - **The Head** \ - **Autosemantic meaning vs. Synsemantic meaning.** - **Blind alley** - The meaning of alley is **Autosemantic**; it means what it means. - The meaning of blind is **Synsemantic**; it means what it means only in compilation with alley. - Same case: black coffee Sentence-Long Phraseological Units ---------------------------------- - **Proverbs**: *Make hay while the sun shines. One swallow does not make a summer* (culture-specific) - **Commonplaces**: *Boys will be boys. Wait and see. It's a small world*. - **Routine Formulae**: *Come again? Mind the step. Looking forward to seeing you. Hold your horses*. - **Slogans**: *Value for money. Safety first*. - **Commandments and Maxims**: *Thou shalt not kill. Do it yourself*. - **Quotations and Winged Words**: *Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise.* Connotative Meaning (Glaser 1998) --------------------------------- - "A cloud of culture condensed in a drop of phraseology" (Wierzbicka 2007) - **Expressive Connotations** - **Derogatory**: *mutton dressed as lamb* (*z tyłu liceum, z przodu muzeum*); *to breed like rabbits* - **Taboo:** *get stuffed; son of a bitch* - **Euphemistic**: *the great divide; to live in sin; of a certain age* - **Jocular/humorous**: *Darby and Joan, to have a bun in the oven.* - **Stylistic Connotation** - **Colloquial/informal**: *green fingers* (*green thumb*) - **Slang**: *reach-me-downs* - **Formal**: *the compliments of the season* - **Literary**: *the alpha and omega* - **Archaic**: *in days of yore* - **Foreign**: *casus beli* - **Register Markers** Beyond Sentences ---------------- - **Jokes, recipes** - **Formulaic language in works of literature.** - Page (1976): 1/5 of Homer's Iliad is "composed of lines wholly repeated from one place to another." - **Stories and fables** - **Poems? Plays? Movie scripts?** **Katy Perry -- Dark Horse Parody (Key of Awesome)** - *Horsepower, Trojan horse, rocking horse, Horse of another colour, One-horse town, hold your horses, change horses midstream, lead a horse to water, Flog sth like a dead horse.* 5. Language Acquisition ======================= Innateness Hypothesis --------------------- - **Linguistic Universals**: basic features shared by all languages (**Nouns**, **Verbs**; **Consonants** and **Vowels** in spoken languages) - **Universal Grammar**: theoretically -- inborn set of structural characteristics shared by all languages (active area of research) - **Eric Lenneberg's criteria** - Lenneberg: study of animal behaviour; list of characteristics which are typical of innately determined behaviours - **Innate behaviours** (ex. walking): present in all normal individuals of a species; natural part of human deveopment - **Learned behaviorus** (ex. playing the piano): must be specifically taught - **Lenneberg's characteristics of biologically controlled behaviours**: 1. The behaviour emerges **before it is necessary.** 2. Its appearance is **not the result of a conscious decision.** 3. Its emergence is **not triggered by external events** (though the surrounding environment must be sufficiently" rich" for it to develop adequately) 4. **Direct teaching and intensive practice have relatively little effect.** 5. There is a regular sequence of" milestones" as the behaviour develops, and these can usually be corelated with age and other aspects of development. 6. There is likely to be a" critical **period**" for the acquisition of the behaviour. - Biology**:** language as a behaviour which **facilitates survival and dominance of the human species** - Language as means of ensuring the fulfilment of basic needs. - Language as part of natural development The Critical Period ------------------- - **The Critical Period**: a period of time in an individual's life during which a behaviour (language) must be acquired; the acquisition will fail if attempted otherwise. - **Language Acquisition**: from birth to (approx..) the onset of puberty - During that time: exposure to language necessary to develop the brain structures required. - Otherwise: the kid will never acquire normal language skills (may never acquire any at all) - If a child acquired a native language and starts learning a second one before 12, it is likely to achieve native competence in the second language as well. Feral Children -------------- - Children that were exposed to little or no language were either neglected (**Neglected Children**) or grew up in the wild (**Feral Children**) - **Genie**: found in 1970 (at 14); abused and isolated for 20 months. Completely silent; later learnt slow, abnormal speech (**never learned grammar**) - **Isabelle**: discovered in 1937 (6,5): her mother was deaf and could not speak; her grandfather kept them isolated (did not mistreat them). She learnt language slowly, but **in two years she was completely normal.** - Possibility: not lack of exposure to language; but **trauma as the preventing cause** Imitation Theory ---------------- - Children learn language by **listening to the speech around them and reproducing it.** - Language acquisition consists of **memorising the words and sentences of a language.** - A Korean child will speak Korean if raised in a Korean-speaking environment. - The theory **fails to acknowledge if a child has any sort of internal mental grammar.** - Internal mental grammar: rules for combining words and elements in systematic ways. - The child should not produce words like *hitted* instead of *hit*; yet they do. - The theory cannot account for how children and adults are able to **produce and understand new sentences.** Reinforcement Theory -------------------- - Children learn to speak like adults **because they are praised, rewarded, or otherwise reinforced.** - The use of correct words is rewarded; the use of incorrect words -- punished. - But: parents' corrections have **more to do with accuracy/truth than grammar** - Even if parents try to correct their kids -- they usually fail. - The theory can explain neither where the child's rule came from nor why the child seems impervious to correction. Active Construction of Grammar (Most Influential) ------------------------------------------------- - Children actually **invent the rules themselves.** - The ability to develop rules is innate but the actual rules are based **on the speech children hear around them.** - Children listen to the language around them and analyse it to determine the patterns that exist. - When they think they discovered a pattern, **they hypothesize a rule to account for it.** - Ex.: a child's early hypothesis about **how to form the past tense** of verbs will be to add -ed - *holded, eated* - When children discover that there are forms in the language that do not match those produced by this rule, they modify the rule or add another one to produce the additional forms. - Eventually **the child has created and edited his or her own grammar** to the point where it matches an adult's grammar. - The child uses this grammar to produce utterances and when those utterances differ from adult speech, they are reflecting the differences in the two grammars. - Children's mistakes are **expected to occur and to follow non-random patterns.** - The child is forming the utterances according to the grammatical rules even though the rules are different from those used by adults. - Active reinforcement by adults about a child's mistakes **is not enough to help the child" discover" what is wrong with the utterances**, the child must make the connection in his or her own time. Connectionist Theories ---------------------- - - - Making associations between words, meanings, sound sequences etc. - Ex: the word "bottle" heard in different contexts - Establishment of neural connections to the word, the initial sound, the word "milk," the appearance of the bottle, the activity of drinking, etc. - These connections become the child's **Mental Representation** of the meaning and form of the word. - - Ex.: "bottle" heard in higher frequency with "milk" than "water" - Connectionist Theories (cont.) ------------------------------ - - ACG: children produce certain forms based on rules they have formed. - CT: children exploit statistical information. - **Past Tense Acquisition**: CT proposes that children say "goed" or "growed" not because they have a rule to add "-ed", but because of exposure to words like "showed", "mowed" or "glowed" (**statistical likelihood**) - **Evidence and Experiments:** children sometimes produce irregular forms which can be explained by their exposure to similar irregular forms in other words. Social Interaction Theory ------------------------- - **Basic assumption**: children acquire language through **social interaction**, particularly with **older children and adults.** - Children and their language environment are seen as a **dynamic system.** - **Children prompt their parents** to provide the necessary language experiences they need. - The interaction between children and their language environment as **reciprocal** - Children need their **Language Environment** to improve their social and linguistic communication skills. The appropriate language environment exists because **it is cued by the child.** - **Similarities with ACG**: children must develop rules and have a predisposition to learn language (actively construct grammatical rules) - **Exposure to language alone is insufficient**: quality social interaction is necessary. - **Child-Directed speech**: slow, high-pitched speech, repetitions, simplified syntax, exaggerated intonation, simple vocabulary - See the birdie? Look at the birdie! What a pretty birdie! (likely to point at the bird/ social aspect- sharing an observation) - Has it come to your attention that one of our better-looking feathered friends is perched upon the windowsill? - **Challenges**: how long must a child be exposed to child-directed speech? - Further: child-directed speech varies across cultures - Specific aspects crucial for language development lack clear identification. - Social interaction as means of complementing other theories; language acquisition as a combination of factors (**social interactions, neural connections, rule hypothesising**) Acquisition of Sounds --------------------- - **Sound Identification** - **High Amplitude Sucking (HAS)** -- used to study the auditory perception abilities of infants (up to 6 moths) - Infants identify sounds earlier than they can produce them (duh?) - Each suck on a pacifier -- production of noise - Infants recognise the noises and are interested in hearing them, though not in repetition. - **Conditioned Head-Turn Procedure (HT)** -- used with infants between 5 and 18 months. - **Conditioning Phase**: the infant learns to associate a change in sound with the activation of visual reinforcers. - **Testing Phase**: seeing whether the infant perceives change in sound and discriminates between them. - **Sound Identification (cont.)** - **DeCasper and Spence (1986):** babies recognise Dr. Seuss if they heard it read in the womb. - By 4 months, infants **distinguish between "a" and "i"** as well as their visual articulation. - Infant's coos differ in context matching the sound heard and the mouth watched (indicating early ability to adapt vocalisations based on auditory and visual stimuli) - **Sound Production** - **Cooing**: vowel-like sounds - **Palatal sounds** (easy contact with the roof of the mouth due to large tongue) - **4 months: Babbling begins** -- repeated syllables (**Canonical Babbling**) - CV or VCV (*mamama, bababa, dadada*) - Detached from immediate biological needs; often used for pleasure. - Motor practice and social reward (parent encouragement) - Universal; occurs at a similar age in all children (Biological Maturation **Hypothesis**) - **6 months:** phonetic distinctions corresponding to phonemes. - **10 months: Variegated Babbling** -- different syllables in sequences (Non-reduplicated Babbling) - **Ex.:** *bugabimo* - **12 months:** distinctions between phonemic (contrastive) sounds in their native language. - Once infants identify the crucial distinctions in their native language, they tend to ignore distinctions that are not linguistically important. - **Challenges in Word Segmentation** - **Use of Intonational and Statistical Cues** (stressed syllables, patterns of co-occurrence between sounds) Acquisition of Phonology ------------------------ - 18 months -- **Distorted sound pronunciation** (*wawa* for water; *dat* for that) - Pronunciation errors: **systematic and rule-governed** - Also: children begin learning and asking for names of objects - Breaking words into smaller, simpler units (phonemes) - At first: children master sounds that differ maximally; consonant clusters learnt later; omission of final consonants. - Also: deletion of unstressed syllables (potato -\ *deido*)  Morphology and Syntax --------------------- - **The Holophrastic Stage** (1 yo) - Children produce single words in isolation; names, objects, familiar parts of the environment; later the vocab expands. - Phrases used by adults are blended into single words (*all-gone; whasat*) - **Holophrases**: one-word sentences - Intonation patterns may resemble questions, statements, or demands. Morphology and Syntax (cont.) ----------------------------- - **Two-word Stage** (18-24 months) - Two-word utterances; later produced without pausing and with a single intonation pattern. - Consistent word orders based on **semantic relationships:** agent/ object/ location/ possession/ attributive relationships. - Ex. *baby sleep, kick ball, sit chair, Mommy book.* - **Telegraphic Speech:** children often omit function morphemes and words (Prepositions, Auxiliary Verbs, Determiners, Inflectional Affixes) - **Plurals:** None -\> Irregular plurals -\> Discovery of -s Morpheme (mans) -\> Overgeneralisation (manes, manses) -\> Correct Plurals - **Negatives:** No-placement (no baby sleep) -\> Inserting negative words (baby no sleep) -\> Use of Unanalysed negatives -\> Adult Forms - **Interrogatives:** Rising Intonation (Mommy cup?) -\> Use of Auxiliary Verbs (Are you sad?) -\> Incorrect Word Order (Why you are sad?) -\> Adult Word Order Word Meaning ------------ - **Trial and Error process** -\> forming initial definitions based on limited experience. - Ex.: "team" -- a group of people on a blanket - Approx. 10 words learnt per day: 14,000 words by six. - Non-random, systematic acquisition patterns - **Complexive Concepts**: associating different characteristics with the meaning of a word on successive uses (ex. "doggie" -\> dogs, furry things and things that move by themselves) - **Overextensions**: extending a word's meaning beyond the typical adult usage ("moon" for cakes and the letter 'o") - **Underextensions**: the opposite; (ex. underextending "fruit" to exclude olives) Relational Terms ---------------- - - - To use such terms, one has to be aware of the size in comparison to other objects. - 5/6 yo children cannot use relative words properly. Deictic Expressions ------------------- - - - Verb Meaning Entailment ----------------------- - Give/take; buy/sell pairs; more complex relations that nouns. - Abstract verbs (think, believe) Child-directed Speech --------------------- - **Attention Getters**: used to tell children what they need to listen to - **Attention Holders**: used when they have more to say (ex. a story) - Ex. for both: names, exclamations (look, hey), high pitch, whispering, gestures. - **The Here and Now**: commentaries about what the child is doing or will do. - "That's right, pick up the blocks..." - "That's a puppy, he's so and so..." - **Baby Talk**: easier pronunciation, simplification, diminutives - **Taking Turns**: encouraging kids to take turns as speaker/listener (even if they cannot speak at all) - Where's the ball? Here it is! Child-directed Speech (cont.) ----------------------------- - **Making Corrections**: more about making sure what the children are saying is true, rather than correcting their grammar. - **Prosody**: slow speech, short, simple sentences, high pitch, frequent repetitions, pauses between words - **Importance of Child-directed Speech** - Frequent use of yes/no questions -- earlier understanding of auxiliaries - Turning on the TV is not enough -- reciprocal relationship necessary. - Foreign language TV does not help them learn a foreign language either; no link to familiar situations (Here and Now is necessary) Bilingual Language Acquisition ------------------------------ - **Simultaneous Bilingualism**: learning more than 1 language from birth. - **Sequential Bilingualism**: learning the 2^nd^ language later on. - Children will only be bilingual if at least ¼ of their input is in a certain language. Second Language Acquisition --------------------------- - **Second Language Acquisition**: people who learn a language at school/in a new country. - Different levels of competence - **Fossilisation**: non-native forms can still be pronounced wrong after years of learning - **L1 Transfer and Interference**: variance in difficulty due to language similarity/difference. - Positive/Negative transfer (ex.: the English apply their \[p\] pronunciation to Thai \[p^h^\] Code Switching -------------- - **Code Switching**: using more than one language when speaking. - Used to be looked down upon as proof of not knowing any language well enough or of ignorance. - Actually: bilingual children are aware they're using 2 different languages at 4 months old - They don't mix languages randomly; ex. English words used when discussing school by a Spanish immigrant. 6. Psycholinguistics ==================== Psycholinguistics vs. Neurolinguistics -------------------------------------- - **Psycholinguistics**: studies how intricate linguistics processes are carried out in our minds when we produce and comprehend language - The study of acquisition, storage, comprehension, production - **Neurolinguistics**: the study of language and the physical brain, how and where the brain processes language, where language is centered in the brain and how it flows between the areas, neural and electrochemical bases of language Neurolinguistics ---------------- - **Left Hemisphere**: language is predominantly processed there for 96% of right-handed people and 73% for left-handed people. - **Broca's Area**: organizing the articulatory patterns of language and directing the motor cortex which controls movement when we want to talk. 1. Movement of the face, jaw, tongue in case of spoken language and the hands arms, face, body in case of signed language. 2. Inflectional morphemes - plural, past tense markers, function words (Determiners, Prepositions) - **Lateralization**: each of the brain's hemispheres is responsible for different cognitive function 3. **Left hemisphere**: dominant (analytic reasoning, temporal ordering, arithmetic, and language processing) 4. **Right hemisphere**: processing music, perceiving nonlinguistic sounds, performing tasks that require visual and spatial skills or pattern recognition. 5. **Neural Plasticity**: Lateralization happens in early childhood and can be reversed in its initial stages if there is damage to a part of the brain that is crucially involved in an important function. - **Contralateralization**: right side of the body is controlled by the left hemisphere and the left part of the body is controlled by the right hemisphere. 6. Sensory info (hearing, seeing, touching, tasting, smelling) from the left part of the body received by right hemisphere etc. 7. Experiment: anesthesia is injected into one hemisphere (for ex left), the patient is asked to stand with both arms stretched, the arms on the opposite side to the anaesthetized hemisphere slowly goes down - **Dichotic Listening Task**: Responses to the right ear stimuli are quicker and more accurate when the stimuli are verbal and responses to the left ear are quicker and more accurate when the stimuli are nonverbal. - **Split-brain patients**: normally 2 hemispheres are connected with each other; some patients with epilepsy used to have them separated in order to limit information overload. Neurolinguistics (cont.) ------------------------ - **Hemispherectomy**: one hemisphere (or part of it) is removed from the brain when patients experience severe seizures, it affects their behavior and ability to think. 8. Left side of the brain - processing language, right side -- still processing but less - **Broca's Aphasia**: problems with forming complete words. 9. **S**peaks or signs haltingly (with pauses or interruptions), 10. Telegraphic words (lack in morphological inflection, tense, number etc. and function words) 11. No inflections or classifiers, it's hard to produce speech. 12. No problems with understanding 13. Difficulties with unusual or complex structures - *The lion was killed by the tiger* could be understood as t*he lion killed the tiger.* - **Wernicke's Aphasia**: difficulty to understand speech of others, misinterpreting. 14. Respond in semantically uncoherent ways. 15. Speak in circumlocutions/round-about descriptions; unable to name the thing they want. - *What you drink -\> water, nose-\> what we smell with* 16. Cannot follow simple instructions (*stand up, turn to your right*) - **Anosognosia**: unawareness of the disturbances of their own language, they think their speech is all fine but it's not. - **Conduction Aphasia**: inability to repeat what someone has just said. 17. They can understand what is said, they make phonological errors while speaking spontaneously, especially while attempting to repeat what they are hearing. 18. They are aware of the errors; they know what words they want to say but they pronounce them incorrectly. - **Alexia**: acquired inability to read and comprehend words 19. **S**ometimes they can't also write words (**Agraphia**) 20. Sometimes called **Acquired Dyslexia** - **Agraphia**: inability to write words 21. Possible to have Alexia without agraphia -\> a person can write perfectly but they can't write what they have just written. - **Developmental Dyslexia**: learning disability, makes it difficult to learn and read fluently, diverse set of reading difficulties, not a sign of decreased intelligence. Speech Production ----------------- - **Speech Production**: the process of sending the message, in which our brain is involved in planning what we want to say. 22. Idea -\> Utterance? We think of the complete idea simultaneously, though we produce an utterance linearly. - Ex.: the notion of being simultaneously tired and hungry vs. separating it into linguistic elements - Linearity is found also in the Phonetic context. - **Fromkin's Serial model**: meaning -\> syntactic frame -\> choice of allophones (ex.: I walked down the stairs) 23. **Meaning is identified** (I performed the activity of walking down the stairs in the past) 24. **Syntactic structure is selected** (Noun, Verb, Preposition, Determiner, and noun) 25. **Intonation contour is generated.** 26. **Content words are inserted** (*I, walk,* and *stair*) 27. **Function words and affixes are inserted** (*-ed; down, -s*) 28. **Phonetic segments are specified** (-s pronounced as \[z\], -ed pronounced as \[t\]) - **Levelt's Parallel Model**: the different stages involved are all processed simultaneously and influence each other. 29. **Conceptualization** (Fromkin's 1^st^ stage) 30. **Formulation** (Grammatical and Phonological encoding) 31. **Articulation** - **Inadvertent Errors as Production Errors** ("slips of the tongue): any inadvertent (unintentional) flaws in a speaker's use of language. - **Anticipation:** a later unit is substituted for an earlier unit; a later unit is added earlier in an utterance (a sound or word is pronounced too early) - **Preservation** (opposite of Anticipation): an earlier unit is substituted for a later unit etc. - **Addition**: addition of extra units to the word - **Deletion**: a unit is omitted in the word or utterance - **Metathesis**: the switching up two units, each taking the place of the other - **Spoonerism**: metathesis in the first sounds of two separated words - **Shift**: a unit is moved from one location to another - **Substitution**: one unit is replaced with another - **Blend**: two words "fuse" into a single item Speech Production (cont.) ------------------------- - **Production Errors as insights into speech production processes**: - *Fleudian Shrip* instead of *Freudian Slip* - We know not to pronounce srip, but rather shrip. - Evidence for **Phonotactic Constraints** - **Semantic Constraints**: words replaced by semantically similar ones. - **Malapropism**: incorrect use of a word in place of one which sounds similar but has a different meaning Speech Perception ----------------- - **Speech Perception:** the process of receiving and interpreting messages. - Could be seen as the reverse of speech production -\> we decode the idea carried by an utterance. - **Dealing with variance**: no sound is ever pronounced the same (t**he lack-of-invariance problem)** - **Speaker Normalization**: categories such as age and gender distort the quality of sounds in such a way, that the vowel used by one person may sound like a different vowel produced by another. - Example: an adult male's **strut vowe**l (*low-mid central lax short neutral vowel*) sounding like a male child's **/o**In Vitro** and **In Silicio** data - **In Vivo** -- naturally occurring data. - **In Vitro** -- data generated in the lab. - **In Silicio** -- generated language (GPT) - Read/spoken language: difficult to separate sentences from strands of spoken language. Corpus Linguistics (cont.) -------------------------- - **Corpus-Driven**, **Corpus-Based**, **Corpus-Informed**, **Corpus-Illustrated** and C**orpus-Ignorant** linguistics - **Corpus-Based studies** -\> using corpora as a method of proving a separate hypothesis. - **Corpus-Driven studies** -\> the corpora themselves should be the focus of our study. - **Corpus-Informed studies** -\> you just look at the corpus. - **Corpus-llustrated studies** -\> your cherry pick instances from the corpus - **Corpus-Ignorant studies** -\> you just ignore corpora... - **Corpus Annotation**: **Linguistic**, **Bibliographic**, **Sociolinguistic**, **Structural** - **Sociolinguistic Annotation**: gender, age, education... - **Phonetic Annotation**: pitch... - **Linguistic Annotation**: parts of speech and sentence; grammatical markers etc. - **Adjectival collocations of nos**: Duży, Zadarty, Długi, Wydatny... - **Recall -- Pokrycie/Kompletność**; po pierwszych 10 ciężko wymyślać kolejne - **Frequency i Recency Priming** - Precision -- czy to na pewno kolokacja? (ex. *kulfoniasty nos*)