Linguistics week 2

1. Linguistics week 2 What do linguists do? What is language?

2. In your free time • Look at the diagram again, and try to understand it. Linguistics Sounds of language Grammar Meaning Phonetics Phonology Morphology Syntax Semantics Pragmatics

3. And take a look at 分支學科 • On this website • http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:%E8%AF%AD%E8%A8%80%E5%AD%A6%E9%A6%96%E9%A1%B5 • And read about Animal “Languages” in Chapter 1 of your book.

4. Introducing Linguistics • What do linguists do? • Grammar, and other aspects of language • Relationships between languages • How is linguistics used in the real world?

5. What do linguists do? • They don’t necessarily “learn languages” • Linguist and 語言學 are confusing terms • They are often interested in the structure of languages. They might • specialize in one language, or a group of languages • compare different languages • study features shared by all languages • Many linguists study speech sounds, and grammar • What fields, please? • A brief outline of some semester 2 topics:

6. Historical linguistics • How languages are related • Language families • Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan… • Areal linguistics • Greek, Bulgarian • Mostly borrowed words; also shared grammatical features (any examples?) • Chinese, Korean, Japanese • How language changes over time • sounds: poor vs paw, suit. • vocab: 咖啡, 颱風. Calque: 摩天大樓, skyscraper, gratte-ciel • grammar: Did you eat yet? Adversative passive 被

7. Sociolinguistics • Diglossia: “high” and “low” prestige languages • The role of Mandarin and Taiwanese in a bilingual society • The changing role of English in Taiwan society: borrowing, or showing off? • case and size: code-switching, or lexicalized Chinese words? Ta-hsüeh-shih-ching Ta-hsüeh-shih-ching Ta-hsüeh-shih-ching

8. Applications for linguistics • Speech disorders • Forensic linguistics • Accent detection • Style verification (eg police style) • Language teaching • Computational applications • Machine translation • Speech recognition and synthesis • Language identification

9. So, what is language? • It’s a non-count noun, here – the phenomenon of language • Do you think the utterances of parrots and mynah birds count as language? • What about the “animal languages” you read about? • What about deaf signing? • What about the “sign language” you use? • What about “body language”?

10. A selection of Hockett’s design features for language 1966), "The Problem of Universals in Language" (write them) • Rapid Fading • message does not linger in time or space after production • Interchangeability • individuals who use a language can both send and receive any permissible message within that communication system • Feedback • users of a language can perceive what they are transmitting and can make corrections if they make errors • Arbitrariness • there is no logical connection between the form of the signal and its meaning

11. More design features (he actually described 15 altogether) • Displacement • linguistic messages may refer to things remote in time and space, or both, from the site of the communication • Productivity • users can create and understand completely novel messages • Duality (of Patterning) • a large number of meaningful elements are made up of a conveniently small number of meaningless but message-differentiating elements. • Prevarication • linguistic messages can be false, deceptive, or meaningless

12. Bee dancing • http://www.skylon.co.uk/hba/beekeeping.html#dance • Honey bees perform a sort of dance when they return to the hive, after finding food, which shows • the direction relative to the sun • the distance • perhaps, the quality of the food source • Is it a kind of language? • Does it satisfy any of Hockett’s design features?

13. Duality of patterning • A small number of phones can be concatenated to form a very large number of words (the lexicon) • AND, although the lexicon is finite, they can be combined to form an infinite number of possible utterances • The creative aspect of language (Chomsky) • Also known as the infinity of expressions

14. The infinity of expressions • There is no upper limit on sentence length • Some interesting examples on page 10 • “One is a number…” • We can be almost as creative as we wish in forming new sentences • Probably, no-one has ever said before: • “Ming Chuan linguistics students usually ride motorbikes through Manchester, wearing moccasins and carrying a mop-bucket” • The utterance is “pragmatically odd”: it makes sense, but…

15. So, is anything possible? Can we create any utterance we want? • Maybe, a good utterance must “make sense”? • WRONG!: Chomsky gave the famous example “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” • This is syntactically well-formed (although semantically it is ill-formed) • But some utterances are impossible • “Sleep ideas colorless green furiously” is syntactically ill-formed • page 11 here, practise prag, sem, synt i/f utts in chin

16. So, what utterances are OK? • We have • a finite lexicon • an infinite number of possible utterances • no room in our brains to store all those utterances • no requirement to make sense… • So how is it decided?

17. Our linguistic knowledge • (=our knowledge of our own language) • This consists of • A lexicon (a finite number of words) • A grammar (count noun!): that is, a finite set of rules stating what is possible • Note that we are not consciously aware of what these rules are; like the rules for muscle control! • Now, we have 3 meanings of the word grammar!

18. Back to what linguists do! • Finite lexicon + finite set of rules (grammar)  infinity of expressions • Lexicon: easy. - Buy a dictionary. • Grammar: difficult. - This is what linguists do