Linguistics 110 Class 1 (9/18/02)
Zhang/Öztürk/Quinn
(1) Linguistics: the scientific study of human language. • Scientific • Scientific study • Language (2) A linguist is someone who: a. speaks many languages (‘polyglot’, ‘multilingual’). b. speaks fluently the languages he or she studies. c. studies the languages he or she speaks fluently. d. study languages in order to teach people how to speak correctly. e. studies natural languages for the purpose of understanding their structure. (3) What does it mean to “know a language”? (a) Sound system •
Sound inventory: German: Bach, Süd ‘south’, rot ‘red’. Mandarin Chinese:
[email protected] ma! ma# ma~
‘mother’ ‘hemp’ ‘horse’ ‘to curse’
Navajo: ch’ah ‘hat’, k’ai’ ‘willow’. Sindhi: ∫´ni ‘field’, ∂inu ‘festival’.
(Indo-European, Pakistan)
!Xo!o): !oo ‘knife’, ||ahm ‘freckle’.
(Khoisan, southern Africa)
English: this, that—the sound for ‘th’ is not in French. •
Sound combination: zl: ok in Polish—zloty ‘a unit of currency’, not ok in English. pt: ok at the beginning of the word in Polish—ptak ‘bird’, not ok in the same position in English.
st: ok in English—stop, rest, not ok in Mandarin Chinese. (b) Words •
The lexical meanings of words.
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(i) English: German: Hausa: Korean: Mandarin: Taiwanese: Arabic: Russian:
tree baum bishiya namu shu~ tǸ!u a~ shajara derevo
(ii) /dog/
English: Hebrew
‘dog’ ‘fish’
/soos/
Hebrew: Latin:
‘horse’ ‘pig’
/moon/
English: Korean:
‘moon’ ‘door’
Q: What do these tell you about the relationship between form and meaning? •
How to combine morphemes into words. Morpheme: smallest meaningful unit in a language.
•
Interaction between knowledge of how to combine morphemes and knowledge of sounds—how does the shape of a morpheme change in different contexts? Plural book chair ax mouse sheep
book[s] chair[z] ax[Iz] mice sheep
*book[z] *chair[s] *ax[s] *mouse[Iz] *sheep[s]
Past
ask[t] ban[d] pat[Id] did held
*ask[d] *ban[t] *pat[t] *do[d] *hold[Id]
ask ban pat do hold
*bookedistas
*pat[d]
(c) Sentences and non-sentences a. b. c. d. e. f. g. h. i.
I am going to give you a presentation on language. I am going to give you. John is difficult to love. It is difficult to love John. John is anxious to go. It is anxious to go John. I have seen Maria and Juan. Who have you seen? Who have I seen Maria and?
Q1: How many grammatical sentences are there in English? Q2: How do we make these grammatical judgments? (4) How do we acquire the knowledge of our language? (a) By imitation? •
One type of knowledge we discussed in (3) clearly show