Language and Language Processing I

Question 1

Talking about Language - Context

Answer 1

• 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

Question 2

Arrangement:
- how many fronts
- what are they

Answer 2

• 2 fronts
• patterns of form and patterns of meaning

Question 3

What are the patterns of form?

Answer 3

–Patterns of sound (spoken language)

–Patterns of visual marks (written language)

–Patterns of hand positions etc. (sign language)

Question 3

What did Charles Hockett (1960) come up with?

Answer 3

Duality of patterning

Question 4

Charles Hockett (1960)
What is the purpose?

Answer 4

communication, in a very broad sense
– Communicating information
– Social interaction- including “doing things with words” (e.g. “I promise….”)

Question 5

Linguistics
1- the study of?
2- what are complex?
3- What do the relations between them allow?
4- What are these relations?

Answer 5

1- The study of language and languages- (searches for things that are common for languages)

2- The ”arrangements” or structures in both parts are complex
–The sounds, visual patterns, hand positions
–And the Meanings

3- The relations between them (forms and patterns) allow languages to express meaning

4- These relations are (for the most part) arbitrary

Question 6

Linguistics and Psychology:
1- languages are?
2- use of languages?
3- what does the the ability to use language depend on?
4- and?

Answer 6

1- Languages are complex systems
2- We know languages and use them all the time in our everyday lives
3- This ability to use language must depend on information stored in the mind/brain and used when were talking/ listening to other people
4- And mechanisms to put that information to use, rapidly on-the-fly

Question 7

Arbitrariness: Emphasised by ……

Answer 7

Ferdinand de Saussure
Founder of semiotics (study of signs and meaning)

Question 8

Arbitrariness: de Saussure
Explain his theory

Answer 8

By a sign he meant the arbitrary relationship between signifier (bit or language- a word like dog) and signified (the thing out there in the world it stands for).

For dog- there is a relationship in english between spoken sound dog and things out there in the world that are dogs.

Main theory: Connection between signifier and signified is fundamentally arbitrary, and different in different languages
Hund, inu, koira, chien… (German, Japanese, Finnish, French)

Question 9

What is an example of non-arbitrariness?

Answer 9

Sound symbolism

Question 10

Explain sound symbolism in English, other languages and other evidence

Answer 10

Sound symbolism in English:
Slime, slip, slide, slick, sleek, slither…
Gleam, glitter, glamour, glance, glow…

(words beginning with sl have one type of meaning and words beginning with gl have another type of meaning)

Non-arbitrary connection between types of concept and types of word

• Blasi et al. (2016): Patterns in certain sound-meaning connections across thousands of languages
  –e.g. “small” andi, “full” andporb

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”)*

Question 11

Linguistics describes language at several levels:
List these

Answer 11

• 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

Question 12

Speech sounds:
1- different from?
2- phones vs phonemes

Answer 12

1- Different from other types of sounds that humans make (coughs, whistles, etc.)
2-
phones= the sounds of speech
phonemes= sounds that make up speech
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”)
–If you change one phoneme, you change the meaning – “pin” vs “bin”

Question 13

Speech Sounds – Further Aspects

Answer 13

• 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)

Question 14

“Written” Language
1- what is it?
2- how is it displayed?
3- what do letters correspond to? (what do other systems use)
4- what is included?

Answer 14

1- Derived from and dependent upon spoken language

2- Written or printed marks on paper, computer screens

3- 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) or logographs (Chinese, Mayan, Cuneiform)

4- Rules for what strings of letters (or other symbols) are allowed and include punctuation

Question 15

Sign Languages
- what do they have?
- as well as?
- BUT

Answer 15

• 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

Question 16

Arrangements (structures) above words

Answer 16

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

as you move down descriptions become more specific

But, for example, “polished the big” is not a group, nor is “the big brown”

Question 17

HIERARCHICAL STRUCTURE AS AN (UPSIDE-DOWN) TREE

What does the structure look like?

Answer 17

Sentence
| |
Verb phrase Noun phrase- name - Stanley
| |
Noun phrase Verb - polished
| | | |
Article-the Adjective-big Adjective-brown Noun- table

Question 18

HIERARCHICAL STRUCTURE AS AN (UPSIDE-DOWN) TREE
Explain

Answer 18

Although ‘the big brown table’ occurs in the final one, theres nothing that just groups those together.
Theres nothing that groups ‘polished the big’ together. The ‘the’ phrases form groups that have meanings of certain kinds. The reason we group them together in the form side is to associate certain types of meaning so we can convey complicated messages to other people.

Question 19

Above the Sentence:
Cause-effect relationship

Answer 19

• 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

Putting because at the front indicates a causal relationship

Question 20

Above the Sentence:
Are there structures for different types of text?

Answer 20

• 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.)

Question 21

Arrangement – on the meaning side
- what have meanings?
- what don’t have meanings?
- what can words have?

Answer 21

• 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)

Question 22

Morphemes
- what are they?
- what are the types of morphemes?

Answer 22

• Smallest meaningful unit

1) Free morphemes – can be words by themselves
Cat, table, justice, red, fast etc. etc. etc.

2) Bound morphemes
–Inflectional – add grammatical information, produce a word of the same category (e.g. plural –s for nouns, third person singular present tense –s for verbs, -ed for past tense)
–Derivational – change the meaning and/or the word category (e.g. “un-”, “-ness”, “-ly”, and many more)

Question 23

Meaning beyond the word:
- what does the meaning of a complex phase depend on?
- when does structure matter?
- what is this idea known as?

Answer 23

• The meaning of a complex phrase depends on the meanings of the words in it and the way they are put together (structurally).
• Alleged headlines, where structure (and word meaning is the second case) matters
  [Squad] [helps [dog bite] victim]]
  OR? [Squad] [helps [dog [bite victim]]

This idea is known as:
The Principle of Compositionality

Question 24

Meaning beyond the word:
combinations?

Answer 24

• The combination of meanings parallels the combination of parts into a structure (for example, in a very simple piece of structure, definite determiner + noun = noun phrase: “the” + “cat” = “the cat”)
• But the combination of meanings is a different type of combination

–so there have to be rules for saying what combination of meanings goes with each type of (structural) combination of parts.

Question 24

Meaning beyond the word:
Structure vs meaning

Answer 24

In the structure a definite determiner (“the”) can be added to a singular noun (“cat”) to make a noun phrase (“the cat”)

On the meaning side, “cat” denotes a type of animal, and the meaning of the definite article (“the”) is that it changes the meaning from type of animal to a reference to one particular animal

In any particular case, which cat is being referred to is determined by context – linguistic and non-linguistic (e.g. what cat is close by when the phrase is used)

Question 25

Meaning beyond the sentence:
- what do sentences typically depict
- clauses related to sentences?
- what are structural relations paralleled by?
- beyond complex sentences, what are there issues with?

Answer 25

• Sentences typically depict events, actions, state and processes (eventualities). These eventualities are related to each other, for example as cause and effect (as previously illustrated) or statement and supporting argument.

– In complex sentences, there may be more than one eventuality – one per clause
–The clauses may (or may not) be related structurally via co-ordination (e.g.”and”) or subordination (e.g. “because”) – see previous example.
–These structural relations are paralleled by meaning relations, following the principle of compositionality

• Beyond complex sentences there are issues about the meaning of larger stretches of text that have not really been resolved.

Question 26

Meaning beyond the sentence
Issues

Answer 26

One set of issues revolves around the previously mentioned debate about whether there is formal structure above the sentence (e.g. as suggested by story grammars) and hence whether the principle of compositionality can be applied at that level to show how the meaning of extended text follows from its structure and the meaning of its parts.

However, there are other issues that are primarily about meaning itself.

Question 27

Pragmatic Meaning
Examples

Answer 27

• What is taken for granted – presupposition
  “I’ve stopped eating fast food” presupposes “I used to eat fast food”
• What follows but isn’t stated – implicature
  “some of fans went to the match” implicates “not all of the fans went to the match”
• What is socially conveyed – e.g. politeness
  “pass the salt” vs “please could you pass the salt”
• What is conveyed figuratively
  “all the world’s a stage”
• What we do (other than describing things) by speaking
  “with this ring, I thee wed”

Question 28

Stylistics

Answer 28

• Use of different forms of language
  –Dialect
  –Register (e.g. formal vs informal ways of speaking)
• Ways of using language in different types of literary text
  So, creating a link between linguistics and literary criticism
• Some overlap with pragmatics
  For example, an interest in implicature

Question 29

1- How do languages have structure?
2- What are the relations between the two sets of patterns are largely?
3- Where is structure found?
4- beyond complex sentences, are patterns still found?
5- As well as being interested in individual languages, what do linguist ask about?
6- languages are/

Answer 29

1- In both form and meaning (duality of patterning)
2- arbitrary
3- within words and between words in clauses
4- yes, but whether there are purely structural patterns is disputed
5- what all languages have in common
6- complex systems