Summary of Language Study PDF

**Chapter one -- The origins of language** In Darwin's vision of the origins of language, early humans had already developed musical ability prior to language and were using it to "charm each other". However, we simply do not know how language originated. Ww do know that the ability to produce sou...

**Chapter one -- The origins of language** In Darwin's vision of the origins of language, early humans had already developed musical ability prior to language and were using it to "charm each other". However, we simply do not know how language originated. Ww do know that the ability to produce sound and simple vocal patterning appears to be an ancient part of the brain that we share with all vertabrates. We suspect that language must have been developed between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago. There are a few theories for how language came to be: - **The divine source:** Language was gods gift to humanity. ¨Whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof¨. Another theory is the tower of Babel. The passage tells of God punishing man for the tower\'s construction by means of the confusion of tongues. - **The natural sound source** The first words were imitations of natural sounds, like animal noises. There are also onomatopoeic words in every language **Onomatopoeic:** *the naming of a thing or action by imitation of natural sounds* We also have **the ¨pooh-pooh¨ hypothesis**. Here it is stated that t*he original sounds of language came from cries of emotion, i.e. pain, anger and joy.* - **The musical source** Melody develops in the human brain before other aspects of language. Early humans may have used melody to express themselves before they started to use words. - **The social interaction source** The ¨yo-he-ho theory¨ places the development of human language in a social context and states that language originated in the need to coordinate physical effort. - **Physical adaptation source** Some of the physical aspects of humans that make the production of speech possible or easier are not shared with other creatures. Your posture, your voicebox (larnyx), teeth and brain are examples of this - **The tool making source** The human brain is lateralized with specialized functions. Tool-making and language-using abilities seem to be originally connected. Using tools requires organization, similar to language structure. This suggests that manual gestures might be the first instance of language communication. - **The genetic source** This is based on **the innateness hypothesis:** *All humans are born with a special capacity for learning language. Given the right circumstances, all people can acquire language.* Development is language independent, even independent physical abilities like sign language are able to be learned. **Chapter 5 -- Word formation** *The study of the origin of a word is known as its* **etymology**. When we look closely at the etymologies of less technical words, we soon discover that there are many different ways in which new words can enter the language. What was once seen as barbaric misuse of language, can now be seen as a completely normal word. Rather than act as if the language is being debased, we might prefer to view the constant evolution of new words and new uses of old words as a good sign of vitality and creativeness. Language is shaped by the needs of its users. One of the least common processes of word formation is **coinage**, that is, *the invention of totally new terms.* The most typical sources are invented trade names for commercial products that become general terms for ant version of that product. *The most salient contemporary example of coinage is the word google. Originally a misspelling of the word googol. The term google has become a widely used expression meaning "to use the internet to find information"* New products and concepts are the usual sources of coinage *New words based on the name of a person or a place are called* **eponyms.** When we talked about a sandwich (from the earl of sandwich, who insisted on having bread and meat together), we were using an eponym. One of the most common sources of new words in English is the process simply labeled **borrowing**, that is, *the taking over of words from other language.* A special type of borrowing is described as **loan-translation or calque.** I*n this process, there is a direct translation of the elements of a word into the borrowed language. An example of this is Wolkenkrabber, which is a calque of the English skyscraper* In some of the examples we have just considered, there is a joining of two separate words to produce a single form. Lehn and wort are combined to produce lehnwort in German. *This combining process is known as* **compounding**. This is more common in Germanic languages such as German and English, barely happens in French and Spanish *The combination of two separate forms to produce a single new term is also present in the process called* **blending.** *However, this is typically accomplished by taking only the beginning of one word and joining it to the end of the other word.* In the US they call a product that is used as gasoline, but is made from alcohol. The blended word for referring to this is gasohol. The element of reduction that is noticeable in blending is even more apparent in the procces described as **clipping.** *This occurs when a word of more than one syllable is reduced to a shorter form*, usually beginning in casual speech. The word gasoline is still used, but most people talk about gas, using the clipped form. A very specialized type of reduction process is known as **backformation**, typically, a word of one type is reduced to form a word of another type (most often a verb). *An example of backformation is the process when the noun television came into use and the verb televise was created from it.* *A change in the function of a word, for example when a noun comes to be used as a verb*, is generally known as **conversion**. For example, the noun bottle, has been used through conversion as verbs" We bottled the home brew last night. This seems almost the same as backformation, doesn\'t it? **Backformation** *changes the form of the word by removing an element, while* **conversion** *keeps the words form intact and changes it grammatical function.* **Acronyms** *are new words formed from the initial letters of a set of other words*. These can be forms such as CD (compact disk) or VCR (Video Casette Recorder) where the pronunciation consists of saying each separate letter. More typicalm acronyms are pronounced as single words, such as NATO and NASA The most common word formation in the production of new English words is called **derivation** and *it is accomplished by means of a large number of small bits of the English language which are not usually given separate listings in dictionaries.* These small bits are generally described as **affixes.** *Some examples are the elements un-, pre-, -ful, and --less which appear in words like unhappy and careless.* Looking more closely at the preceding groups of words, we can see that some **affixes** have to be added to the beginning of the word. These are called **prefixes**. Other affixes have to be added to the end of the word and are called **suffixes**. *All English words formed by this derivational process have either pre- or suffixes.* For example, the word *disres* *pectful, has both, where foolishness has two suffixes*. There is a third type of affix, not normally used in English, but found in some other languages. This is called an **infix**, *an affix incorporated inside another word.* An infix in English is un-fuckin-believable **Chapter 6 -- Morphology** In many languages, what appears to be single forms actually turn out to contain a large number of "word-like" elements. For example, in Swahili, the form nitakupenda conveys what in English would be represented along the lines of I will love you. Is the swahili form a single word then? It seems to consist of multiple elements which English turns into separate words. *From this we can conclude that a Swahili word, is different from an English word.* Yet there is some similarity between the languages, similar elements of the message can be found in both. Perhaps we should look at linguistic forms in other languages as elements instead of simply words? T*his is an example of investigating basic forms in language, generally known as* **morphology** *(which literally means" the study of forms")* We do not have to go through other languages to discover that word forms may consist of a number of elements. We can recognize that words such as talks, talked and talking all consist of one element; talk, and a number of other elements. All theme elements are described as **morphemes**, defined as: *A minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function.* Units or grammatical function include forms used to indicate past tense or plural. From these examples, we can make a broad distinction between two types of morphemes. There are **free morphemes**, that is, *morphemes that can stand by themselves as single words.* You\'ve also got **bound morphemes**, *which are basically affixes, so we can say that all affixes in English are bound morphemes.* *When free morphemes are used with bound morphemes attached, these basic word forms are technically known as* **stems**. For example, in the word undresses. Dress is the stem. Free morphemes fall into two categories. *The first category is the words we think of as the words that carry the content of the messages we convey,* these words are **nouns, adjectives and verbs.** These free morphemes are called **lexical morphemes**. We can add new lexical morphemes to the language rather easily, so they are treated as an **open class of words.** Other types of free morphemes are called **functional morphemes**. *This set consists of the functional words in the language* such as **conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns.** Because new functional morphemes are barely ever added, they are described as a **closed class of words.** Derivational and inflectional morphemes The set of affixes that make up the categories of bound morphemes can also be divided into two types. One of them are **derivational morphemes**. *We use these bound morphemes to make new words or to make words of a different grammatical category from them stem.* *The addition of the derivational morpheme --ness changes the adjective good to the noun goodness.* The second set of bound morphemes contains what are called **inflectional morphemes.** These are not used to produce new words in the language, but rather *to indicate aspects of the grammatical function of a word. Inflectional morphemes are used to show if a word is plural or singular, past tense or not, and if it is a comparative or possessive form.* An inflectional morpheme never changes the grammatical category of a word. For example, both old and older are adjectives. The --er inflection here simply creates a different version of the adjective. However, *a derivational morpheme can change the grammatical category of a word. So the verb teach becomes the noun teacher if you add the derivational morpheme --er* Whenever there is a derivational suffix and an inflectional suffix attached to the same word, they always appear in that order. *Take teachers, first the derivational --er, second the inflectional --s* A useful way to remember all this is the following chart: This neat lil' chart conceals a number of problems in the analysis of English morphology. Simply put, there are some exceptions, this mostly comes from the origin of the language. *A large number of English words owe their morphological patterning to languages like latin and Greek. So a full description of English morphology, would need to take historical influences into account.* For the morphology of other languages, I cant really make this any shorter. If you feel the need to check up on Kanuri, Ganda, Ilocano and Tagalog morphology, **take a look at page 72 & 73.** **Chapter 9 - Semantics** **Semantics** *is the study of the meaning of words, phrases and sentences*. In **semantic analysis,** there is always an attempt to *focus on what the words conventionally mean, rather than on what an individual speaker might want them to mean.* With **meaning** in language, there is a broad distinction to be made between **conceptual meaning** and **associative meaning**. Conceptual meaning *covers those basic essential components of meaning that are conveyed by the literal use of a word. It is the type of meaning dictionaries are designed to describe.* Associative meaning *refers to the ideas or feelings that a word brings to mind beyond its basic or literal definition. It\'s like the extra meanings or associations we have with a word based on our experiences, culture, or context.* One way in which the study of basic conceptual meaning might be helpful would be as a means of accounting for the "oddness" we experience when we read sentences such as the following. Take the sentence "The hamburger ate the boy" for example. *The syntactic structure makes sense. But is semantically odd.* The components of the conceptual meaning of the noun "Hamburger" must be different from those of the noun "boy", thereby semantically preventing one, and not the other from being used as the subject of the verb "ate" *The subject for this verb has to be capable of "eating" which the boy is, but the hamburger is not.* Such an **element** can be as general as being an "animate being". We can use this idea to describe part of the meaning of words as either having (+) or not having (-) that feature *Boy would be "animate +" and hamburger has the feature "animate -"* This is an example of a procedure for analyzing meaning in terms of semantic features. From a **feature analysis** like this, we can say that the meaning of the word "girl" involves the elements (+Human, +Female, +Animate and -Adult) You can also turn this concept around. An example of this would be "The \_\_\_\_\_ is reading" So the noun will have the feature +human (N(+human)) This approach gives us the ability to predict which nouns make this sentence semantically odd. Like "hamburger", which isn't (+human.) For many words in a language, it may not be as easy to come up with neat components of meaning, if you try to differentiate a noun like "threat", you might not be very successful. Part of the problem is that this approach involves a view of words in a language as some sort of **"containers" that carry meaning components**. There is more to the meaning of words than these basic features Instead of thinking of words as **"containers" of meaning**, we can look at the "**roles**" they fulfill within the situation described by a sentence. If the situation is a simple event as in "the boy has kicked the ball", the verb kick described an action. The noun phrase(s) in a sentence describe the roles of entities, such as people and things, involved in the action. For these noun phrases, you can identify several semantic roles In the example sentence, one role is taken by the noun phrase "the boy" as *"the entity that performs the action" technically known as the* **agent**. Another role is taken by "the ball" as *"the entity that is involved in or affected by the action", this is called the* **theme** The theme can also be an entity that is simply being described and is not involved in an action. Agents and themes are the most common semantic roles. *If an agent uses another entity to perform an action, that other entity fills the role of* **instrument**. *When a noun phrase is used to designate an entity as the person who has a feeling, perception or state, it fills the semantic role of* **experiencer**. If we see, know or enjoy something, we're not really performing an action, hence we aren't agent, but an experiencer A number of other semantic roles designate where an entity is in the description of an event. Where an entity is fills the role of **location**. Where the entity moves from is the **source** and where it moves to is the **goal**. When we talk about transferring money "from savings to checkings". *The source is "savings" and the goal is "checkings"* Lexical relations We've discussed words as "containers" of meaning, or as fulfilling "roles" in events. They can also have **"relationships**" with each other. In everyday talk, we often explain the meanings of words in terms of their relationships. When asked the meaning of "conceal", you might say "it's the same as hide". When doing this we are characterizing the meaning of words not in terms of component features but in terms of relationships to other words. *This approach is used in the semantic description of language and treated as the analysis of lexical relations.* There are quite a few of these lexical relations, let\'s list them of. - **Synonyms**: Two or more words with very closely related meanings. Can often, though not always, be substituted for one another in sentences - **Antonyms**: Two forms with opposite meanings. Antonyms can be divided into "gradable" (opposites along a scale) like: "big/small" and "non-gradable" (direct opposites) like: "alive/dead" - **Hyponymy**: When the meaning of one form is included in the meaning of another. For example: Animal/dog, dog/poodle. A dog is an animal, a poodle is a dog. When considering **hyponymous connections,** you are essentially looking a the meaning of words in some type of hierachical relationships. In my example, animal would be at the top. Dog is **the superordinate** when compared to poodle. If we were to add pug to the occasion, this would hierarchically be the same as poodle. In this instance, poodle and pug are **co-hyponyms of the superordinate term dog**. Get it? No? Sucks to be you, check page 119 of the book. - **Prototype**: The idea of the characteristic instance of a category. The concept of a prototype helps explain the meaning of certain words, like bird in terms of resemblance to the clearest example. You might doubt if a penguin is a bird, because it can't fly, but I assume you're pretty sure of a pigeon being one, the pigeon is closer to the prototype in this instance - **Homophones**: Two or more different written forms having the same pronunciaton, like bare/bear - **Homonyms**: A form that has two or more unrelated meanings, like "bank" as in the financial institution and the bank of a river. - **Polysemy**: Two or more words with the same form and related meanings. Can be defined as one form having multiple meanings that are all related by extension. Example would be "head" as the TOP of the body, the froth on TOP of a glass of beer, person at the TOP of a company. - **Metonyms**: a figure of speech where one word or phrase is substituted for another with which it is closely associated. Instead of referring to something by its name, you refer to something related to it. For example: "The white house issued a statement" The white house is a metonym for the president of the United States - **Collocations**: Refers to the habitual pairing or combination of words that are often used together in a language. These word combinations sound natural to native speakers because they frequently occur together in everyday speech or writing. In recent years, the study of which words occur together, and their frequency of **co-occurrence** has received a lot more attention in **corpus linguistics**. A **corpus** *is a large collection of texts, spoken or written, stored as a database in a computer.* **Chapter 10 -- Pragmatics** *The study of what speakers mean is called* **pragmatics**. In many ways, *this is the study of "invisible" meaning, or how we recognize what is meant even when it isn't actually said or written.* When you've got a big sign which says "baby & toddler sale" we understand that it\'s about clothing for babies and toddlers. The influence of context is very important, there are different kinds of context, of course there is, linguistics, eh? One kind is described as **linguistic context/co-text**. The co-text *of a word is the set of other words used in the same phrase or sentence.* The surrounding co-text of a word is the set of other words used in the same phrase or sentence. The surrounding co-text has a strong effect on what we think the word probably means. If the word bank is surrounded by words such as steep or overgrown, we have no problem seeing that its the river type of bank and has nothing to do with money We also know how to interpret words on the basis of **physical context.** If we see the word bank on the wall of a building in a city, the physical location will influence our interpretation. There are some common words in the English language that can't be interpreted at all if we don't know the context. These are words such as "here, there, this, that, now, then", as well as pronouns. Some sentences are virtually impossible to understand if we don't know who is speaking, about whom, where and when. Expressions such as tomorrow and here are obvious examples of bits of language that we can only understand in terms of the speaker's intended meaning. These are known as **deictic**, derived from the Greek **deixis**, *which means "pointing" via language.* We use deixis *to point to things and people, sometimes called* **person deixis**. *Words and phrases used to point to a location are examples of* **spatial deixis**, *and those used to point to a time are* **temporal deixis.** In discussing deixis, we assumed that the use of words to refer to people, places and time was a simple matter. Words don't refer to anything themselves though, people do. We must define **reference** *as an act by which a speaker uses language to enable a listener to identify something.* To perform an act of reference, we can use proper nouns, other nouns in phrases or pronouns. For each word there is a r**ange of reference** *The words Jennifer, friend or she can be used to refer to many entities, it doesn't mean anything by itself.* But through the context of a sentence, we could decipher that the Jennifer you\'d be talking about would be a friend and not the actress who played Rachel in Friends. *A successful act of reference depends more on the listener's ability to recognize what we mean than on the listener's* "dictionary knowledge of a word we use. The key process here is called **inference**. An inference *is additional information used by the listener to create a connection between what is said and what must be meant.* We usually make a distinction between introducing new referents (a kitten) and referring back to them (the kitten, it) We saw a video about a boy trying to wash *a kitten* in a small bath *The kitten* was not happy about getting wet When the boy let go, *it* jumped out of the bath and ran away In this type of **referential relationship**, *the second referring expression is an example of* **anaphora** (referring back). We know because of context the same kitten is being spoken about in the second sentence, as in the first. We can now define it as the kitten, as it has been established. *This fist mention is called the* **antecedent.** **presupposition** refers to *background information or assumptions that are taken for granted in a statement or question*. These are ideas that must be true or accepted by both the speaker and listener for the communication to make sense. Unlike explicit meaning (which is directly stated), presuppositions are usually implicit and assumed to be known or true. For example: \"John stopped smoking.\" Presupposes that John used to smoke. *Presuppositions stay true even if the sentence is negated.* For example: \"John didn\'t stop smoking.\" The presupposition (that John used to smoke) still holds, even though the main point is that he hasn\'t stopped. We can usually recognize the type of "action" performed by a speaker with the utterance. We use the term **speech act** to describe *actions such as "requesting, commanding, questioning, informing, etc."* If you say "I'll be there at six, you are not just speaking, you seem to be performing the speech act of "promising" Speech acts can be separated into direct and indirect. A **direct speech act** is when *the speaker\'s intention matches the literal meaning of the utterance and the grammatical structure*. The meaning is explicit and straightforward. For example: Are you coming to the party?\" (An interrogative sentence directly asking for information.) An **indirect speech act** occurs when t*he literal meaning of the utterance differs from its intended meaning.* The speaker relies on context and shared understanding to convey the intended meaning. These acts often involve implied meanings, politeness, or subtlety. For example: Request as a question: \"Could you pass the salt?\" (Literally a question about ability, but intended as a request.) In the study of **linguistic politeness**, the most relevant concept is **face**. *Your face (in pragmatics terms) is your public self-image*, the emotional and social sense of self that everyone has and expects everyone to recognize. **Politeness** can be defined as *showing awareness and consideration of another person\'s face.* If you say *something that represents a threat to another person's self-image*, that is called a **face-threatening act.** If you say *something that lessens the possible threat to another's face*, it can be described as a **face-saving act.** We have both a **negative face** and a **positive face**. Negative face *is the need to be independent and free form imposition*. Positive face *is the need to be connected, to belong, to be a member of the group*. To combine this, a face-saving act that emphasizes a person's negative face will show concern about imposition (I\'m sorry to bother you). A face-saving act that emphasizes a person's positive face will show solidarity and draw attention to a common goal (let\'s do this together) **Chapter 11 -- Discourse analysis** During the previous chapter, we were, in effect, asking how it is that language users successfully interpret what other users intend to convey. When we carry this investigation further an ask of how we made sense of what we read, how we can recognize well-constructed texts as opposed those that are incoherent, how we understand speakers who communicate more than they say, and how we successfully take part in that complex ability called conversation, we are doing some good ol' **discourse analysis** The word **discourse** is usually defined as *language beyond the sentence* and so the analysis of discourse is typically concerned *with the study of language in texts and conversation.* As language-users, we are capable of creating complex discourse interpretations of fragmentary linguistic messages. An example would be that we can decipher that the phrase "No shoes, no service" means that there is a **conditional relationship** between the two, that you won\'t get service if you aren't wearing shoes. From a sentence written in broken English, we are also capable of interpreting discourse. *Rather than reject this text, we try to make sense of it.* It is this effort to interpret, and how we accomplish it, that are the key elements investigated in the study of discourse. To arrive at an interpretation, and to make our message interpretable. **Cohesion** is a key concept in discourse analysis, r*eferring to the way linguistic elements are used to link parts of a text or discourse together, creating a sense of unity and flow*. It ensures that sentences or utterances in a text are not isolated but interconnected, making the text more comprehensible to the reader or listener. **Cohesive ties** are the specific linguistic devices and elements that *establish connections within a text*. These ties create a network of meaning that binds sentences and parts of discourse together. They can occur within sentences or across sentence boundaries. Analysis of cohesive ties within a text gives us some insight into how writers structure what they want to say. An appropriate number of cohesive ties may be a crucial factor in our judgements on whether something is well written or not. However, by itself cohesion would not be sufficient to enable us to make sense of what we read. You can easily make a highly cohesive text that has a lot of connections between the sentences, but is very difficult to interpret. The connectedness we experience in our interpretation of normal texts is not simply based on connections between the words, there is something more to it. Some other factor that leads us to distinguish texts that make sense from those that don't. This factor is described as **coherence**. Coherence is *a deeper, semantic phenomenon rooted in the logical relationships between ideas and the broader context of communication.* A good example would be a conversation when the phone rings one would say -\>"that's the telephone" but the other just got in the bath -\> "I'm in the bath" the one would reply with a simple -\> "ok" There are no cohesive ties in this fragment of discourse. How do they make sense of what the other says. They use their information contained in the sentences expressed. Exchanges of this type are best understood in terms of the conventional actions performed by the speakes in such interactions. Drawing on the concepts derived from speech acts (chapter 10!) we can characterize the conversation like this: One makes a request of other to perform action -\> Other states reason why unable to comply with request -\> One undertakes to perform action English conversation can be described as an activity in which, for the most part, two or more people take turns at speaking. Typically, only one speaks at a time and there tends to be an avoidance of silence between speaking turns. If more than one speaks at the same time, one of them usually stops. For the most part, participants wait until one speaker indicates that he or she has finished, usually by signaling a completion point. There are different expectations of conversational style and different strategies of participation in conversation. *Some speakers cut in on others,* which could be seen as **rudeness**, *where some speakers keep waiting for their turn without ever pouncing on it,* which could be seen as **shyness**. The rude or shy participants in this way may simply be adhering to different conventions of **turn-taking.** An assumption in conversational exchanges is that participants are **co-operating** with each other, this is the co-operative principle which is stated as: "*Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged"* Supporting this principle are **four maxims** called the **Gricean Maxims**: - **The quantity maxim:** make your contribution as informative as is required, but not more, or less, than is required - **The quality maxim:** Do not say that which you believe to be false or for which you lack adequate evidence - **The relation maxim:** Be relevant - **The manner maxim:** Be clear, brief and orderly **Hedges** are *linguistic devices used to express uncertainty, soften the force of statements, or indicate that the speaker is not fully committed to the truth or precision of their utterance.* They are a significant feature in discourse analysis because they reveal how speakers manage politeness, mitigate face threats, and navigate interpersonal dynamics in communication. So, if I'm not 100% sure about something, I might say "As far as I know" instead of clearly implying that which I'm saying is correct. **Implicatures** are *meanings or inferences that arise from an utterance, not directly stated by the speaker but understood by the listener based on context, shared knowledge, and conversational norms*. If someone were to ask me out to party, I\'d tell them I've got exams next week. In this scenario they would understand that I'm not coming. The last thing I've got for you this chapter is **scripts and schemas**. Scripts *are a type of schema specifically related to sequences of events in familiar situations.* They guide expectations for how events typically unfold, helping individuals interpret discourse in context. For example, a script for \"going to the doctor\" would be: Check-in at reception → Wait in the lobby → Consultation with the doctor → Receive a prescription. Schemas are *mental structures that represent general knowledge about objects, events, or situations.* They help individuals recognize patterns, predict outcomes, and fill in gaps in communication based on prior knowledge. For example, a schema for \"restaurant\": Includes knowledge about ordering food, being served, and paying the bill. **Chapter 17 -- Language history and change** The language of English has gone through substantial changes to become the English we use today. Investigating the features of older languages, and the ways in which they developed into modern languages, involves us in *the study of language history and change,* also known as **philology**. This dominated the study of language, and one result was the creation of family trees to show how languages were related During the 19^th^ century, a term came into use to describe the common ancestor of (some, a lot of) language, it incorporated the notion that this was the original form of a language that was the source of modern languages in the Indian subcontinent and in Europe. With **Proto-Indo-European** established as some type of "great-great-grandmother\" scholars set out to identify the branches of the **family tree**. They made this wee lil' chart. They most certainly made some more, as there are about thirty such language families containing **6912 languages in total**. Many of these languages are in danger of extinction, while few are expanding, the best example of expansion would be English. Looking at the **indo-european family tree,** you might be puzzled that these languages are related. Two modern languages like Hindi and Italian have barely anything in common. However, if you look back to Latin and Sanskrit, from which these languages evolved. You can see that father in Latin is "pater" and in Sanskrit is "pitar", pretty similar, but not the same. It is very unlikely that exactly the same words will be found throughout the languages. *The similarities are still good evidence for proposing a family connection*. The process we just used to establish a possible family connection between different languages involved looking at what are called **cognates**. *Within groups of language, you can often find similarities in sets of words.* A cognate of a word in one language (E.g. English) is a word in another language (e.g. German) that has a similar form and or was used with a similar meaning Using information from sets of cognates, we can embark on a procedure called **comparative reconstruction**. *The aim of this procedure is to reconstruct what must have been the original form in the common ancestral language.* While carrying this out, we operate on some general principles. Two of them being the **majority principle** and the **most natural development principle.** If, in a cognate set three words begin with a \[p\] sound and one word begins with a \[b\] sound, then *our best guess is that the majority would have retained the original sound, being the \[p\].* This is the majority principle. The most natural development is based on the fact that *certain types of sound change are very common whereas others are unlikely*. The direction of change described has been commonly observed, but the reverse has not. There are four cases of this - ***Final vowels often disappear*** - ***Voiceless sounds become voiced, typically between vowels*** - ***Stops become fricatives*** - ***Consonants become voiceless at the end of words*** **Reconstruction** from **sound** and **word** (what it looks like) is also possible. Once again, I can't really make this any shorter than it is written as in the book. I'd advise you to check out page 227 & 228. **The history of English** The reconstruction of proto-forms is an attempt to determine what a language must have been like before any written records. However, even when we have written records from an older period of a language such as English, they may not be like the modern incarnation at all. To see how one language has undergone substantial changes through time, we can look at the history of English, which is traditionally divided into four periods. - **Old English: before 1100** - **Middle English: 1100 -- 1500** - **Early modern English: 1500 -- 1700** - **Modern English: after 1700** The primary source for what made the English language were the Germanic languages spoken by a group of tribes from northern Europe who moved into the British Isles in the fifth century. These tribes of **Angles, Saxons and Jutes** were described as "gods wrath against Brittain." It is from the first two we have the term **Anglo-Saxons** to describe these people and from the name of the first tribe that we get the word for their language "Englisc" and their new home "Engla-land". This early version of the language is what we now know as **Old-English**. *This is where words like mann (man) and cild (child) came from* From the sixth to the eight century, loads of Anglo-Saxons converted to Christianity and several terms from Latin came into English. *This is where the original forms of words such as church, priest and school came from.* From the eight through the ninth and tenth centuries, the vikings came around to clean house in Brittain. From their language of **Old Norse** came *the original forms of words such as give, law and skin came from* The arrival of the **Norman French** announces the beginning of the **Middle English** period. These French speaking invaders became the ruling class after their victory at the battle of Hastings in 1066. *The language of nobility in England was French for the next 200 years. This is the source for words such as army, court, defense and prison came from.* The language of peasants remained English, when working on the ruling class's land, *they spoke of (the old English) sheep and cows, while the upper classes spoke of mutton and beef.* In the two hundred years, from 1400 to 1600, the sounds of English underwent a substantial change known as **the great vowel shift**. The effect of this general raising of long vowel sound (\[o:\] moving up to \[u:\] as in mona to moon) made the pronunciation of **Early modern English** way different from earlier periods. Influences from the outside, such as the Norman French and the Old Norse are examples of **external change** **in the language**. Development of the language that did not seem to be caused by outside factors are described as processes of **internal change.** In a number of changes from middle to modern English, some sounds disappeared from the pronunciation of certain words, in a process described as **sound loss.** - The initial \[h\] of many Old English words were lost - Some words lost sounds, but kept the spelling, resulting in the silent letters of contemporary English - Word-initial velar stops \[k\] & \[g\] are no longer pronounced before nasals, but we still write the words with the remnants of the original pronunciation (knee, gnaw) - The velar fricative \[x\] (think of our dutch ch and g sound) that was used in the older pronunciation of nicht \[nixt\] but is absent in the contemporaty form night \[nait\] The sound change known as **metathesis** involves a reversal in position of two sounds. As in the Old "bridd" to the comtemporary "bird" Another type of sound change is known as **epenthesis**, this is the addition of a sound in the mddle of a word (timr -\> timber) Another one would be **Prothetis.** Though not found in English, it is still noteworthy. It involves the addition of a sound to the beginning of a word. For example the latin "schola" to the Spanish "Escuela" (This is why native Spanish speakers start their words with a sort of \[e\] sound when speaking English, I never knew!) In Old English, the subject could follow the verb and the object could be placed before the verb, or at the beginning of the sentence. The biggest change in the form of English sentences was *the loss of a bunch of inflectional suffixes from many parts of speech*. Suffixes such as --e and --est are no longer used in Modern English The most obvious difference between old and modern English is *the large amount of borrowed words since the Old English perio*d. Less obvious is the loss of many words There are two semantic processes described, broadening and narrowing. An example of **broadening** is the *change from "holy day" as a religious feast to the very general break called a "holiday"* The reverse process, **narrowing**, *has overtaken the word "hund", once used for all types of dogs, but now as "hound", used only for specific breeds.* In this chapter, we have concentrated on variation in language viewed **diachronically**, that is. *From the historical perspective of change through time*. The type of variation that can be viewed **synchronically,** that is, *in terms of differences within one language in different places and among different groups at the same time*, is the subject of the final two chapters, YIPPIE!11!1!!! **Chapter 18 -- Language and regional variation** In this chapter, we'll be investigating aspects of language variation based on where that language is used, as a way of doing linguistic geography. When we speak of the **standard language**, *we speak of an idealized variety, because it has no specific region. It is the variety associated with administrative, commercial and educational centers, regardless of region*. If we think of standard English, it is the version we believe is found in newspapers, is used in media and is taught in most schools. Which also differentiates, as standard British English is different from standard American English Whether we speak with an **accent** or not, *we all speak with an accent. Everyone has one, some being more subtle than others though*. *The term accent is restricted to the description of aspects of pronunciation that identify where an individual speaker is from, regionally or socially.* It is different from the term **dialect**, *which is used to describe features of grammar and vocabulary as well as aspects of pronunciation.* *Despite occasional difficulties, there is a general impression of mutual intelligibility among many speakers of different dialects of English. This is one of the criteria used in the study of dialects, or* **dialectology**, to distinguish between *two dialects of the same language (who can usually understand each other) and two different languages (who can't usually understand each other)*. This is the most reliable way of identifying dialects. All dialects are created equally and are just as important linguistically. However, from a **social point** do view, some varieties do become more prestigious. In fact, the variety that develops as the standard language has usually been one **socially prestigious dialect** associated with a center of economic and political power. Yet there always continue to be other varieties of a language spoken in a different region. An **isogloss** *is a geographical boundary or line on a map that marks the area where a particular linguistic feature is used*. These features can include differences in vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, or other aspects of language. For example: A word isogloss might show where people use \"soda\" versus \"pop\" versus \"coke\" to refer to a soft drink. A **dialect boundary** is *a geographical line or area that separates regions where significantly different dialects of the same language are spoken*. Unlike individual isoglosses, which map single linguistic features, dialect boundaries are broader and reflect accumulated variations across multiple linguistic traits. Dialect boundaries can sometimes align with geographical or cultural features, such as rivers, mountains, or historical divisions, which may have influenced language development and interaction. Another thing to keep note of is that the drawing of isoglosses and dialect boundaries tend to obscure the fact that at most dialect boundary areas, *one dialect or language merges into another, keeping this in mind, we can view regional variations as existing along a* **dialect continuum** rather than as having sharp breaks from one region to the next. Speakers who move back in forth across this border area, using different varieties with some ease, may be described as bidialectal (speaking two dialects). *When we speak about people knowing two distinct languages,* we describe them as **bilingual.** **Billingualism** at the level of the individual tends to be a feature of the minority group. In this form of bilingualism, *a member of a minority group grows up in one linguistic community, mainly speaking one language, but learns another in order to take part in the larger dominant linguistic community.* (e.g. a native Welsh speaker learning English). A rather special situation involving two distinct varieties of a language called **diglossia**, exists in some countries. In diglossia, *there is a* **low variety** *acquired locally and used for everyday things and a* **high variety***, learned in schools and used for important matters.* Egyptian Arabic is the low variation of the high classical Arabic for example. Many countries (uhm, the USA) are often assumed to be **monolingual**. For many of those residents are capable of speaking only one language. However, this doesn't speak for everyone in the country, loads of people in Texas speak Spanish for example. This simple fact has pretty big repercussions for the local government and the educational system. Should school be in Spanish or English? Questions of this type require answers on the basis of some type of **language planning.** *Government, legal and educational organisations have to plan which variety or varieties of the languages spoken in the country are to be used for official business.* A **pidgin** is *a simplified, often makeshift language that develops when speakers of different languages need to communicate but have no common languag*e. It typically has a limited vocabulary and simplified grammar, and it is not spoken as a native language. A **creole** is *a stable, fully developed language that arises from a pidgin when it becomes nativized, meaning it is learned as a first language by a new generation of speakers.* Creoles have a more complex and standardized grammar compared to pidgins and are fully functional languages. Just as there was *development from a pidgin to a creole*, known as **creolization**, there is now often a *retreat from the use of the creole by those who have greater contact with a standard variety of the language*. This process is known as **decreolization** and leads at one extreme to a variety that is closer to the external standard model and leaves, at the other extreme, a basic variety with more local creole features. *Between these two extremes may be a range of slightly different varieties, some with many and some with fewer creole features.* This range of varieties evolving after the creole has come into existence, is called the **post-creole continuum** **Chapter 19 -- Language and social variation** A **speech community** is *a group of people who share a set of norms and expectations regarding the use of language.* The study of l*inguistic features that have social relevance for participants in those speech communities* is called **sociolinguistics**. This term is generally used for the study of the relationship between language and society. This area of investigation developed through the interaction of linguistics with a number of other academic disciplines. *It has strong connections with anthropology, sociology and psychology.* Whereas the traditional study of regional dialects tended to concentrate on the speech of people in rural areas, the study of **social dialects** has been *mainly concerned with speakers in towns and cities*. In the social study of dialect, *it is social class that is mainly used to define groups of speakers as having something in common*. The two main groups are often identified as Middle class and working class. *So, when we refer to working class speech, we are referring to a social dialect*, we call these social dialects **sociolects.** When we look for other examples of language use that might be characteristic of a social dialect, we treat class as the social variable and the pronunciation or word as the linguistic variable. Although the unique circumstances of every life result in each person having an individual way of speaking, a personal dialect or idiolect, we generally tend to sound like others with whom we share similar educational backgrounds and occupations. Those who leave the education system early, will often use different forms than those who go on to complete college An example of this might be the postvocalic \[R\] in English speech. This is a **social marker** for the upper or lower class. Which also differs from region to region. Take a look at this table. **Speech style** is another social feature of language use, the most basic distinction in speech style is between formal and informal uses. *A change from one to the other by an individual* is called **style-shifting.** In style shifting, **prestige** is always taken into account. Prestig*e being a way of explaining the direction in which certain individuals change their speech*. When that *change is in the direction of those perceived to have a higher social status*, we speak of **overt prestige.** There is also the phenomenon of **covert prestige**, which refers to *the social value or status associated with using a non-standard or less prestigious variety of a language, even when it might not be outwardly recognized or rewarded in formal settings.* It helps explain why speakers sometimes prefer non-standard language forms despite societal pressures to conform to standard language norms As we look more closely at variations in speech style, we can see that *it is not only a function of speaker's social class and attention to speech, but it is also influenced by their perception of their listeners,* this type of variation is known as **speech accommodation.** We can *adopt a speech style that attempts to reduce social distance*, known as **convergence**. In contrast *when a speech style is used to emphasize social distance between speakers*, the process is called **divergence**. Another influence on speech style that is tied to social identity derives from **register**, which is *a conventional way of using language that is appropriate in a specific context*, which may be identified as situational, occupational or topical. One of the defining features of a register is the use of **jargon**, *which is a special technical vocabulary (like suffix in linguistics) associated with a specific area of work or interest.* Whereas **jargon** *is specialized vocabulary used by those in established social groups,* **slang** is *more typically used among those who are outside established higher-status groups.* Slang describes words or phrases that are used instead of more everyday terms among (younger) groups with special interests. The use of slang varies within the social group, as illustrated by the use of **taboo terms.** These are *words and phrases that people avoid for reasons related to religion, politeness and prohibited behavior.* **Vernacular language** is *the everyday spoken language used by ordinary people in a specific region or community.* It contrasts with formal, literary, or standardized forms of language and is often associated with informal, local, or non-standard speech patterns. **CHOICE CHAPTERS -- 2 & 12** **Chapter 2 -** There are a lot of stories about creatures that can talk. We usually assume that they are fantasy or fiction or that the involve birds or animals simply imitating something they have heard humans say. Yet we think that creatures are capable of communicating, might it be possible for them to even communicate with humans? Or does human language have certain properties that make it so unique that its unlike any other? To answer these questions, we have to look at some special properties of the human language Communication can be distinguished between specifically communicative signals and those which may be unintentional informative signals. For example: sneezing could be and informative signal for you having a cold, whereas telling would be a specific communicative signal. While we tend to think of communication as the primary function of human language, it is not a distinguishing feature. All creatures communicate in some way. However, we suspect that other creatures are not reflecting on the way they create their communicative messages or reviewing how they work. A barking dog is probably not offering another barking dog advise along the lines humas world. The human capability of reflecting on its language and its uses is called reflexivity, this accounts for the fact we a use language to think and talk about language itself. Making it one of the distinguishing features of human language. When your pet cat comes home and stands at your feet, calling you, you are likely to understand this message as relating to that immediate time and place. If you ask your cat where it\'s been today, it'll probably respond with the same meow. Animal communication seems to be designed to be exclusively for this moment, here and now. It cannot effectively be used to relate events that are far removed in time and place. When a dog grows, it grows for right now. The dog is not capable of growling for last night over at the park. Humans can refer to past and future time. This property of human language is called displacement. It allows language users to talk about things and events not present in the immediate environment. Bees are an exception to this, if you want to know more, check the book It is generally the case that there is no natural connection between a linguistic form and its meaning. The connection is quite arbitrary. We can\'t just look at any Arabic word and determine its (to them) obvious meaning from its shape. This aspect of the relationship between linguistic signs and objects in the world is described as arbitrariness. Of course, you can play a game with words to make them appear to fit the idea or activity they indicate, as shown in these words from a child's game. However, this type of game only emphasizes the arbitrariness of the connection that normally exists between a word and its meaning There are some words in language with sounds that seem to echo the sounds of objects or activities and hence seem to have a less arbitrary connection. English examples are crash Humans are continually creating new expressions and novel utterances by manipulating their linguistic resources to describe new objects and situations. This property is described as productivity and essentially means that the potential number of utterances in any human language is infinite. The communication systems of other creatures are not like that. The limitation features of animal communication is described in terms or fixed reference, Each signal in the system is fixed as relating to a particular object or occasion. While we may inherit physical features from our parents, we do not inherit their language. We do this in a culture with other speakers and not from parental genes. A kitten, given comparable early experiences, will produce meow regardless. This process whereby a language is passed on from one generation to the next is called cultural transmission. It is clear that humans are born with some kind of predisposition to acquire language in a general sense. The general pattern in animal communication is that creatures are born with a set of specific signals that are produced instinctively. Human infants, growing up in isolation, produce no instinctive language. Cultural transmission of a specific language is crucial in the human acquisition process. Human language is organized at two levels or layers at the same time. This property is called duality or double articulation. In speech production, we have a physical at which we can produce individual sounds, like n, b and i. As individual sounds, none of these discrete forms has any intrinsic meaning. In a particular combination such as bin, we have another level producing a meaning that is different from the meaning of the combination in nib. So at one level, we have distinct meanings. This duality of levels is one of the most economical features of human language because, with a limited set of discrete sounds, we are capable of producing a very large number of sound combinations which are distinct in meaning. Among other creatures, each communication signal appears to be a single fixed form that cannot be broken down into separate parts. **Chapter 12 -- Language and the brain** The study of the relationship between language and the brain is called neurolinguistics. Several discoveries have been made about specific parts in the brain that are related to language functions. First we'll be looking at the left hemisphere of the brain, displayed in this picture: The part shown as (1) in the illustration is described as Broca's area. Damage to this specific area of the brain was related to extreme difficulty. The same damage to the corresponding area in the right hemisphere had no such effect. Through this finding, it was argued that language ability must be located in the left hemisphere and since then has been treated as an indication that Broca's area is crucially involved in the production of speech. The part shown as (2) is Wernicke's area, damage to this part of the brain was found among patients who had speech comprehension difficulties. This confirmed the left hemisphere location of language ability and led to the view that Wernicke's area is part of the brain crucially involved in the understanding of speech The part shown as (3) is the illustration is the motor cortex, an area that generally controls movement of the muscles. The part shown as (4) in the illustration us a bundle of nerve fibers called the arcuate fasciculus, which is known to form a crucial connection between Wernicke's and Broca's areas. Having identified these four components, you might be tempted to conclude that specific aspects of language ability can be accorded specific locations in the brain. This is called the localization view. The tip of the tongue phenomenon is when we feel that a word is just eluding us, that we know the word, but just can't find it. When we make mistakes in this retrieval process, there are often strong phonological similarities between the target word we're trying to say and the mike we actually produce. Mistakes of this type are sometimes referred to as malapropisms. Another type of speech error is a slip of the tongue, which produces expressions such as "to make a long shory stort", instead of the correct version, slips of this type are often called spoonerisms. Another type are slips of the ear, this can result in our hearing great ape and wondering why someone\'s looking for one. In actuality, gray tape was said. We simply misheard. We did however, immediately try to make sense of it People who have these slips often,will have an idea of that is like for people who live with this constantly due to brain damage. Those people suffer from different types of language disorders, generally described as aphasia. This is defined as an impairment of language function due to localized brain damage that leads to difficulty in understanding and producing linguistic forms. Broca's aphasia is characterized by a substantially reduced amount of speech, distorted articulation and slow, often effortful speech. What is said often consists almost entirely of lexical morphemes. The lack of functional morphemes has led to the description of this type of aphasic speech as agrammatic. Wernicke's aphasia leads to difficulties in auditory comprehension. Someone suffering from this disorder can produce very fluent speech, it is however, difficult to make sense of. Difficulty of finding the correct word, sometimes referred to as anomia, happens often in Wernicke's aphasia. One other, much less common, type of aphasia has been associated with damage to the arcuate fasciculus and is called conduction aphasia. Individuals suffering from this are fluent,but may have disrupted rythym because of pauses and hesitations. The speaker has great difficulty repeating a word of phrase, what is heard can't be properly transferred successfully to the speech production area Dichotic listening is a psychological experiment technique where two different auditory stimuli are presented simultaneously to each ear. Participants are typically asked to focus on one ear (the \"attended\" ear) and ignore the other (the \"unattended\" ear). This method is often used to study attention, auditory processing, and how the brain filters and processes sounds. Researchers can assess how well individuals can concentrate on and recall information from the attended ear while disregarding distractions in the other ear. The critical period in language development refers to a specific window of time during early childhood when the human brain is particularly receptive to learning language. This period is thought to last from birth to around puberty, after which the ability to acquire language, especially grammar and syntax, becomes significantly more difficult. During the critical period, children are highly sensitive to linguistic input, and if they are exposed to language (spoken or signed) in this time frame, they can learn it effortlessly and naturally. If children are not exposed to any language during this critical period, their ability to fully acquire a language is greatly impaired, as seen in cases of extreme neglect or isolation. The critical period hypothesis suggests that the brain\'s neural plasticity gradually decreases as individuals age, making it harder to learn new languages fluently after this period.