Landmarks of Ling Thought I / II & The Ling Sign (Joseph) / Ungerer pragmatic sign

Question 1

Saussure’s metaphor for language?

Answer 1

Thought itself is a cloud (shapeless, swirls around) but LANGUAGE gives it structure;
Sounds equally are shapeless parts of the cloud -> have no intrinsic form, are arbitrary

Question 2

Saussure’s metaphor for sign

Answer 2

two sides of a paper: inseparable, existing at the same time

Question 3

Saussure’s departure from 18th century linguistics

Answer 3

• regarded language as a closed system -> gives structure to shapeless thought clouds
• before: language and parole were not strictly separated
• before: interested in recreating historic word developments: e.g. Latin “causa” may have become French “chose”
• he argued primarily for language to not be viewed as a mere index of words, not a nomenclature

Question 4

language as a structure metaphor:

Answer 4

X not a structure like a house (with individual building blocks, woods, other material)
Instead: like a chess game:
- all pieces make it complete
- other pieces make the game unplayable
- outside of a game, a pawn chess piece is nothing but a carved statue → thus linguistic signs also cannot exist outside of langue, has only value inside it
- every single chess piece has its own value

Question 5

Saussure’s fixation with synchrony?

Answer 5

• language is a closed, fixed system with a complete structure
• elements cannot change > previous state (e.g. of a word) was part of a completely different system
• E.g the sound “m” (e.g. in Latin mare, and French mer) has not simply remained unchanged, but instead what we today call as “m” the consonant has been constantly reintegrated from all systems from Latin to today’s French → it survived because each system had an open slot for a sound with these properties

Question 6

What Saussure meant by structure?

Answer 6

language as a structure: it exists as a whole, the structure creates itself by its internal relations

Question 7

Arbitrariness and syntagmatic relations and associations

Answer 7

Any two words in the Eng language could swap places and for Saussure - this would not matter: they are arbitrary. It does have consequences for syntagmatic and associative relations:
if cow and horse switch, then the associations we have for cow (produces milk, munches grass…) are now those of the sound sequence for “horse” ;
syntagmatic: now cow has to combine with words that previously were combined with horse: e.g. racecow
but what is lost are e.g. semantically logical rhymes: “horses for race courses” makes no sense anymore because cows don’t race

Question 7

Arbitrariness and syntagmatic relations and associations

Answer 7

Any two words in the Eng language could swap places and for Saussure - this would not matter: they are arbitrary. It does have consequences for syntagmatic and associative relations:
if cow and horse switch, then the associations we have for cow (produces milk, munches grass…) are now those of the sound sequence for “horse” ;
syntagmatic: now cow has to combine with words that previously were combined with horse: e.g. racecow
but what is lost are e.g. semantically logical rhymes: “horses for race courses” makes no sense anymore because cows don’t race

Question 8

Jakobson’s linguistic position?

Answer 8

Prague School of linguistics

Question 9

Saussure influenced Jakobson how?

Answer 9

Jakobson influenced by notion of language as a self-contained, closed system; a system which has elements of different values
But he came to disagree on the notion of complete arbitrariness

Question 10

Differences Saussure and Jakobson:

Answer 10

Jakobson, worked on historical developments of sound system -> did work diachronically, Saussure strictly wanted synchrony

Saussure: phonetic sound of a sign is arbitrary, could be any other sound
Jakobson: sounds t and d are clearly more related than t and f -> d is merely more voiced than t; And: in GER: d slot at the end of words is getting devoiced into a t ; however (while it is still d in other forms of the word, thus it is the same phoneme)
-> Jakobson does not agree that phonetic value does not matter; d cannot be devoiced into f

Continued:
Saussure: since language is a complete system, any two values could switch position and it would make no difference, e.g. all dental and velar sounds can switch
Jakobson: studied child acquisition and langue loss and observed a natural sequence of sound acquisition and parallel loss -> there must be a natural hierarchy of sounds; therefore: 2 sounds also cannot just switch within the same language, it would create unnatural speech

Question 11

idea of markedness

Answer 11

two linguistic phenomena that differ in 1 feature: e.g. voicedness: t - unmarked / d (t+voice) = marked
Rat and Rad are both pronounced /t/ → unmarked version in nominative, but in genitives “des Rates” und “des Rads”
→ d is exposed as marked, more complex sound (vibration of vocal cords)

Question 12

Jakobson and iconicity

Answer 12

connects it with his principles of markedness:
singular is unmarked, while plural forms or possessives are marked by s or ‘s (plurality or possession are more complex things than sth. singular)
-> iconicity is the added morpheme as iconic for more complexity

Thus: word forms are not arbitrary, they can be iconic!

And: Jakobson thought this iconic motivation within words must be a universal logic across all languages

Question 13

Jakobson and Formalism

Answer 13

• Jakobson did flee Europe to the US from the Nazis
• met chomsky
• Jakobson did believe in a natural hierarchical order of sounds -> does fit with core believe of Universal grammar
• also Jakobson believed in iconic motivation of forms (e.g. complex concepts will have more complex forms: plural -s addition is more complex than its singular form)

Question 14

Saussure’s gripe with how general public viewed language?

Answer 14

He viewed language as a system of signs (mental concept + sound), but felt as if people instead focused on language as a collection of written words + meanings -> Saussure called this Nomenclaturism = viewing language (wrongly) as an inventory of names

Question 15

Why nomenclaturism is wrong:

Answer 15

in nomenclaturism: meaning exists first / independently and is then simply given a name;
For Saussure however the sign with its two parts (concept and sound) are created together.

E.g. “cattle” has changed its meaning over time, today: live animal stock; before: entire set of belongings; wealth…; “When what is included in the category ‘cattle’ changes, the entire sign changes. It becomes a new sign, even if the sound pattern (the signifier) remains the same.”

Question 16

Saussure’s view on abstractness and concreteness in relation to the sign?

Answer 16

signifier and signified are abstract; whereas the sign is concrete:
the sign as a whole is something to which speakers of a language have mental access. Abstractions, on the other hand, are linguists’ analytical inventions – and that includes the signifier and signified.”
Analogy of the sign as a paper → the paper is a real, concrete thing, it has a front (signifier) and back (signified) that cannot be separated. Thinking of one side as separate would be an “abstraction”
Concrete thus means psychologically accessible

Question 17

Pragmatics def?

Answer 17

Study of meaning in context

Question 18

Bühler’s Organon model - Saussurian?

Answer 18

Organon model includes functions of language:
referential, expressive, appellative -> clearly goes into the direction of pragmatics/functionalism

Question 19

Ungerer’s sign model?

Answer 19

Ungerer -> linguistic sign should not remain in a merely “Saussurian state” of form and meaning being arbitrary

instead of signifier and signified being arbitrary, his model suggest that communicative context determines which signifier is chosen -> this can be successful or appropriate, or it can turn out to be inappropriate sign (for the context)

3 factors come into play in deciding which signifier is appropriate / will be successful for a context: Socio-linguistic interpretation, cognitive interpretation, and referential interpretation

Question 20

What is Ungerer’s sociolinguistic interpretation?

Answer 20

Comes close to what Saussure himself talked about under conventionality

Def: if speakers come from similar backgrounds, their chosen signs will be more likely to be appropriate aka their conventions match;
but if they are different, they are likely to make “odd” word choices

E.g. Speakers of different backgrounds, dialects will clash more: e.g. “bagarap” in Papua New Guinea Pidgin means road “accident”, but in British standard English its highly negative, even taboo expression
Therefore the sign-internal relation of bagarap and its meaning is not the same in speakers of different backgrounds → sign use would be infelicitous, unsuccessful

Question 21

What is Ungerer’s cognitive interpretation?

Answer 21

Basically his version of arguing against arbitrariness by using iconicity/motivation in language:
- morphological motivation in word formation processes: morphemes are transparently showing the meaning
- semantic motivation e.g. metaphors / metonymy
- phonetic motivation = his main point
e.g. onomatopeia, phonesthemes

Argues that brand name coinage exposes a lot of word coining conventions with are motivated by the language conventions: spelling conventions (e.g. how “sh” sound is spelled in english), typical syllable structures,

Also: frequency in langue use strengthens association of a sign with its phonological form; so even if there is no inherent motivation, the frequency of use creates this link. There’s a continuum from highly motivated to less:
onomatopeia > father (“ther” of kinship group + frequently used) > money (no apparent motivation BUT is frequent)

Question 22

Ungerer’s referential interpretation

Answer 22

is the sound sequence dependent on the extralinguistic referent?
e.g. onomatopeia: high dependency: sound comes from real-life sound.
e.g. type of real-life object will determine which word type the sound will match: things will be noun-y: Nouns can have compounds, can have plurals, especially if they are prototypical nouns; less prototypical nouns (e.g. police) will have less of these typical features (e.g. no plural)

Question 23

Ungerer’s model demonstrated: Buzz

Answer 23

sociological: widely spread amongst educated and lesser educated people
Cognitive: phonetically motivated, also matches phonotactics in language
referential: duplicates real-life sound: onomatopeia

Overall very success-promising sign for use in various contexts

Question 24

Ungerer’s model demonstrated: father

Answer 24

sociological: highly widely spread
cognitive: “ther” links it to kindship terms; also high degree of frequency of use
referential: no obvious link to referent (aka basically arbitrary)

Overall: despite referential deficit: promising sign

Question 25

Ungerer’s model demonstrated: controversy

Answer 25

sociological: low spread
cognitive: low frequency, even differences in stress patterns across speakers, no cognitive support by similar words
referential: no obvious link

Overall: low success for sign predicted, successful only in specific contexts.