language and language processing 1 Flashcards
Talking about language - context:
- We learn to speak as young children, without knowing we are learning
- In literate societies most people learn to read at a later age
- It’s a bit more difficult than learning to talk
- As adults, we use language all the time usually without thinking about it
- spoken, and for most of us, written and on-screen as well
- and for some of us other forms, such as sign language
- Languages are complex systems, and as language users we are only aware of limited aspects of their complexity
- Professional linguists know rather more
arrangement and purpose
- There is an arrangement on two fronts
- Patterns of sound (spoken language)
- Patterns of visual marks (written language)
- Patterns of hand positions etc. (sign language)
- Patterns of meaning
- Charles Hockett (1960) – called it duality of patterning
- The purpose is communication, in a very broad sense
- Communicating information
- Social interaction
- Including “doing things with words” (e.g. “I promise….”)
linguistics
- The study of language and languages
- The ”arrangements” or structures in both parts are complex
- The sounds, visual patterns, hand positions
- And the Meanings
- The relations between them allow languages to express meaning
- These relations are (for the most part) arbitrary
lingusitics and psychology
- Languages are complex systems
- We know languages and use them all the time in our everyday lives
- This ability to use language must depend on information stored in the mind/brain
- And mechanisms to put that information to use, rapidly on-the-fly
arbitrariness - emphasised by de Saussure
- Ferdinand de Saussure – Founder of semiotics (study of signs and meaning)
- Connection between signifier and signified is fundamentally arbitrary, and different in different languages – Hund, inu, koira, chien… (German, Japanese, Finnish, French)
Not everything is arbitrary - Sound symbolism An example of non- arbitrariness:
- Sound symbolism in English:
- Slime, slip, slide, slick, sleek, slither, slink, sludge, slum, slump, slough…
- Gleam, glitter, glamour, glance, glow…
- Non-arbitrary connection between concept and word
- Blasi et al. (2016): Patterns in certain sound-meaning connections across thousands of languages
- e.g. “small” and i, “full” and p or b
- Other evidence:
- Imai et al. (2008): children learn sound-symbolic verbs more easily
- Klink (2000): sound symbolism in brand names (“Which brand of ketchup seems thicker? Nidax or Nodax”)
Linguistics - sub-branches:
· Linguistics describes language at several levels
· Sounds Letters (or other symbols in a writing system)
· Sound patterns Patterns of Letters
· Structure of phrases and sentences
· Structure of discourse/conversation/text at a higher level (???)
· Direct meaning
· Indirect Meaning
· Style
speech sounds
· Different from other types of sounds that humans make (coughs, whistles, etc.)
· Phones – the sounds of speech
· Phonemes – a phoneme is a group of phones that are essentially equivalent in a given language, even though they are not exactly the same sound (e.g. the aspirated /p/ in ”pin” and the unaspirated /p/ in ”spin”)
- Put a finger in front of your mouth as you say the two words, and feel the puff of air (aspiration) in “pin” but not in “spin”
- If you change one phoneme, you change the meaning – “pin” vs “bin”
speech sounds - further aspects
· Phonology – sound patterns (see Chomsky and Halle’s classic 1968 book “The Sound Pattern of English”)
· Sequences of sounds within words (“scratch” but not “sbratch” in English)
· Suprasegmental phonology (rhythm, intonation and stress timing)
“written” language
· Derived from and dependent upon spoken language
· Written or printed marks on paper, computer screens etc.
· Letters (in alphabetic languages) corresponding to phonemes (though not always one-to-one, especially in English – other languages have much more regular correspondence, e.g. Spanish, Finnish)
- Other systems use syllabaries (Japanese, Cherokee, Linear B [for Mycenaean Greek – used at Knossos in Crete]) or logographs (Chinese, Mayan, Cuneiform [for a variety of Near Eastern languages])
· Rules for what strings of letters (or other symbols) are allowed.
· Punctuation
sign languages
· Sign languages also have signs that can vary in their exact form from occasion to occasion, but where there are clear contrasts between one sign and another.
- by “one sign” we mean something with a fixed meaning
· As well as the basic “word”-type signs, languages such as British Sign Language and American Sign Language have systems of finger spelling as an interface between the Sign Language and written language.
· BUT sign languages are fully fledged languages in their own right, different from the languages spoken around them
arrangements (structures) above words
· Word group hierarchically into phrases and larger units:
· table
· brown table
· big brown table
· the big brown table
· polished the big brown table
· Stanley polished the big brown table
· But, for example, “polished the big” is not a group, nor is “the big brown”
above the sentence
· Sandra threw the brick at the window. The glass smashed into a thousand pieces
· CAUSE => EFFECT
· Is this structure (arrangement) or is this meaning?
· What about: Because Sandra threw the brick at the window, the glass smashed into a thousand pieces
- Where the cause-effect relation is explicitly signalled by the word “because” and the two-clause structure
above the sentence 2
· Are there structures for different types of text?
· Many people have suggested that there are:
- Propp (Morphology of the Folktale, 1928/1968)
- the Monomyth or Hero’s Journey: Campbell (1949, The Hero with a Thousand Faces)
- three-act analysis of plays and films (setup, confrontation, resolution, sometimes satirized as beginning, middle and end)
- Story grammars? (Rumelhart, Mandler, Stein, etc.)
· Is there a distinction between form and meaning at this level?
arrangement - on the meaning side
· Words have meaning – we talked last time about concepts
· Phonemes (or graphemes – letters) don’t have meanings in themselves, but allow us, via the rules of phonology and morphology, to make words that do have meanings.
· Words can have internal structure
- And this is what morphology deals with (i.e. it is the study of the internal structure of words, with reference to meaning