A short story of linguistic Flashcards
Linguistic
the scientific study of languages
the prehistory of linguistics?
Ancien Greece: Philosophers had a strong interest in language, but not in the sense of linguistic today:
- Socrates, Plato and Aristotle examined the relationship between speech and the thoughts that it communicated
- Plato made a distinction between two categories of words (verbs and nouns)
Port Royale perspective on language
A philosophical perspective on language similar to Ancient Greece perspective.
Port Royale
17th century scholars : grammatical categories and structures = relatable to universal logical patterns of thought
What made the ideas of Port Royale widely known?
Chomsky who drew parallells between them and his own conception of the relationship between language and mind
How did European people describe languages they encountered while exploring the world?
Problem: most of these people were hampered by an understandable assumption that “language” was, essentially, the way European languages worked.
They described languages in the manner of classical ones (greek/latin)
The common beliefs of the prescriptive tradition
There is a well-defined correct way of speaking
But people walk around making mistakes when they use language.
Prescriptivism
→ prescribing = monitoring people’s use of language and how they must speak.
Descriptivism
objectively analyzing and describing how language is actually used by a speech community
Who was the first English grammarian? What did he do?
Robert Lowth (self-proclaimed)
A short introduction to English grammar > his book was used for centuries.
> a prescriptive grammarian
> His aim was to prove that English was a “real” language like Latin or ancient Greek, worthy of study and use in serious discourse.
> Many of the rules were just his preferences & based on the latin language.
Philology
the study of the history of language. → how language develop (oral, lexical & grammatical changes)
What was the linguistic situation during the 19th/20th century?
the study of language was mostly philological
What marks the beginning of modern linguistic?
Saussure.
Who is Saussure and why is he important?
He was a specialist in Indo-European languages. In 1916.
Known for his Cours de Linguistique Générale
⇒ foundation of what is now known and practised as modern linguistics.
Explain the signifier & the signified
the signifier : the acoustic image
the signified : the meaning the concept
together = the sign
The link between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary, no intrinsic link
What did Saussure mean by the linguistic “system”?
each sound or word/morpheme has value in the fact that it has a meaning different from other sounds and morphemes;
A cat is not a mouse ; /k/ is not /r/ ; pig is not pork…
The syntagmatic axis of language (by Saussure)
The signifier has to be articulated. It has an order, a beginning, a middle and an end. So the signifier is linear.
The syntagmatic axis of language is the chain on which words follow each other along a temporal line. Things need to be said in a certain order.
Paradigm
a set of linguistic items that form mutually exclusive choices in particular syntactic roles
e.g. “a book” or “his book”.
Syntagmatic relations (by Saussure)
The relationships between constituents in a construction
the → catS → are → eating
The determine cat, cat is plural so we use “are”, are implies ing.
Paradigmatic relationships (by Saussure)
the relations between any given unit of the utterance and the unit(s) that we might have chosen instead.
e.g. cats vs mice / eating vs. playing
Phonemes
distinct units of sound in a specified language that distinguish one word from another.
When can we say that two words are contrastive?
When a different phoneme disctincts those two words.
Allophones
when two different prononciation are not contrastive, not different phonemes. It is “what happens” to a phoneme in certain environments.
e.g. [p] and [ph] in English
Synchrony
the study of a language at a particular time ==> introduced by Saussure. Before Saussure, historical linguistics (diachrony) was considered the main task of linguists, rather than synchrony.
