Linguistics Flashcards
How is human language different from animal communication systems?
Discrete Infinity (Many individual units to infinitely express oneself) (Many different sounds to make many different words to make infinite sentences)
Displacement (We can talk about the present, past, future, things that are fiction or abstract)
Language is fundamentally cooperative
Important characteristics about language
Native speakers (Learned as infants)
One can use it to speak about everything
Recognized by a group as their language
Are sign languages languages?
Yes.
Types of people without language
Wolf children (Children who grew up without biological parents or language)
Physically and psychologically abused people
Aphasia
Continuity based theories
Theories about origin of human language that attribute it to evolving based on animal communication systems.
Discontinuity based theories
Disagree with continuity based theories about human language evolving based on animal communication systems. Something unique happened in the development of human beings to allow for it.
Why are languages different?
They are primarily a marker of identity, rather than communication systems.
Subpopulations of native speakers of a language may over time speak the language differently from others, leading to the creation of new languages.
Is it plausible that all languages in human history have derived from one common ancestor language?
Yes.
Language family
a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestral language or parental language, called the proto-language of that family
Language branch
Group of languages within language family that are even more closely related and quite similar. Ex: Germanic and Romance Language Branches in Indo-European Language Family
Isolated language
Language not similar or related to other languages like Basque.
Reasons why languages are similar?
Historical roots of languages (like Romance Languages and their similarities)
Physical reasons (Humans have similar bodies and brains regardless of culture)
Building blocks of sign languages
Parameters
And these parameters are the handshape. That is used to articulate the sign. The movement that the hand makes in the articulation of the sign. The location, where is the hand located. Is it located in space, on the body, on the head.
Also the orientation of the hand, so do the fingers point upwards or to the front. What about the orientation of the palm, that can also be distinctive.
Is linguistic diversity increasing or decreasing? Are language deaths usually reversible?
Decreasing. Languages, especially indigenous ones, are dying off as the last speakers die.
Unfortunately, when languages die off, they usually cannot be revived.
What influences whether a language is considered its own language or a dialect?
Political and social factors.
Ex: Serbo-Croatian (Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian are essentially the same language, but due to animosity among the groups, they are considered separate languages.)
mutual intelligibility
a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort
Why does mutual intelligibility fail as a criterion to distinguish languages?
It can be tough to determine whether a variety is either a dialect or a language.
Speakers of language A may understand speakers of language B, but not vice versa.
Dialect continuum
Also languages themselves change over time (Geoffrey Chaucer and George Bush probably would not understand each other although they both speak English)
Dialect continuum
a series of language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulate over distance so that widely separated varieties may not be. This is a typical occurrence with widely spread languages and language families around the world, when these languages did not spread recently. Some prominent examples include the Indo-Aryan languages across large parts of India, varieties of Arabic across north Africa and southwest Asia, the Chinese languages or dialects, and subgroups of the Romance, Germanic and Slavic families in Europe. Leonard Bloomfield used the name dialect area. Charles F. Hockett used the term L-complex.
EGIDS
Ranking system to determine how endangered and widely used a language is.
International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)
an alphabet developed in the 19th century to accurately represent the pronunciation of sounds in languages
Vowels v consonants
Vowels are pronounced with no impediment in airstream.
Vowels are in every syllable while consonants are not.
Classifications of sounds by place of articulation
Labial sounds (Produced with participation of lips)
Alveolar sounds (Produced with tip of tongue at roof near front teeth)
Velar sounds (Flat surface of tongue touching roof towards back of mouth)
Besides English, other languages have other places of articulation for sounds
Classifications of sounds by manner of articulation
Plosives (Sound like explosions like “/p/”)
Fricative (Produced by closing mouth, but not completely, so some air can still slip through a narrow channel) (Ex: /f/ sound)
Nasal (involves usage of nose to make sounds as well) (If you make a sound on mirror and see condensation, it’s a sign you used the nose)
Sonorant (Sounds in which airflow is completely unimpeded like /a/)
Classifications of sounds by voicing
Sounds either use vocal cords or not.
According to some linguists, what are consonants that seem to occur in (almost) all languages? Vowels?
M and T because of such easy pronounciation.
A, I, U (very easy to pronounce and distinguish from each other)
How many consonants are out there?
It’s hard to say because it’s a very large size.
Are there typically fewer vowels than consonants in a language? Why?
Yes. Function of consonants is to produce meaning and comprehension while vowels are grammatical. There’s many different words with different meanings, but that’s not the case with grammatical constructions. Also, consonants involve making obstructions in mouth, which there are many ways to do so.
Atoms of language. What are the implications of this assumption?
Features that constitute sounds.
Place of articulation
Manner of articulation
Voicing (Are vocal cords vibrating or not)
Implications: Phonological activity (One sound->another sound, one feature->another feature), Speech Errors (See other card), Path of acquisition of languages children may take. (See other card)
Symmetry of IPA table for consonants of languages.
Do languages change?
Yes, sounds come and go from a language, and the way they are pronounced can change over time.
How to study changes in languages over time?
Compare languages with similar roots like (English with German and Dutch) and analyze spelling in the languages.
Types of changes in languages
Internal (Children don’t speak a perfect copy of the language when learning it from parents. Each generation changes the language when they inherit it.)
External (Contact with other cultures, leading to borrowing aspects from other languages like words.)
What happens when people try to pronounce a word in another language, but don’t have all the sounds in their own language to pronounce it?
They find the closest sounds in their own language to make the pronounciation.
Ex: Bach (Ba -chuh) (German)
An English speaker will say Bach (Ba-k) instead of -chuh.
Phonological activity
In languages, sometimes one sound changes into another sound. As a result, features of the sounds change such as voicing, place or manner of articulation.
Look at the following example which I took from Turkish. What you see here is various words in two different cases, a nominative, that’s the NOM, and a dative, that’s the DAT case. For instance, in Kalip or Kalib-a, in Kanat or Kanad-a. There’s a t versus a d, or a p versus a b. In these cases, t becomes a “voiced” d and “p” becomes a voiced “b”
How do phonological features help us understand the ability of a child to acquire language?
Children acquire certain features for the purposing of making sounds first (such as labial and plosive) and acquire others over time.
Example is English:
So, children first learn plosives, voiceless, labial and coronal features.
They later acquire the nasal feature. Then, fricatives.
consonant inventory
set of consonants used in a language
What is are some challenges in determining the consonant inventory of a language
Determining whether certain syllable beginnings or endings are combinations of distinct sounds or one distinct sound. (Ex: Is the “ch” in the syllable “chip” as a distinct consonant or a combination of two or more distinct sounds?)
Including consonants from words borrowed from other languages
Where can languages with small consonant inventories be found?
Those with smaller than average consonant inventories predominate in the Pacific region (including New Guinea), in South America and in the eastern part of North America, with particular concentrations of “small” inventories in New Guinea and the Amazon basin.
Where can languages with large consonant inventories be found?
Those with larger than average consonant inventories are particularly strongly represented in Africa, especially south of the equator, as well as in an area in the heart of the Eurasian landmass, but are most spectacularly concentrated in the northwest of North America.
Size principle
According to the “size principle” (Lindblom and Maddieson 1988) smaller consonant inventories will tend to contain only those consonants which are in various ways inherently simpler (perhaps because they involve smaller movements to pronounce them, or are easier for a listener to distinguish from other sounds). Consonants which are inherently more complex will be found in larger inventories.
Morpheme
individual units used to make words
affix
type of morpheme; Prefixes and suffixes
Base word
Main morpheme besides prefixes and suffixes in words.
Lovely
Love (base) + ly (suffix)
Isolating languages
Words tend to have just one morpheme in such languages. Language has very few affixes.
Agglutinative languages
Words have more than one morpheme in such languages. (Affixes are assigned to bases etc.)
Fusional languages
Similar to agglutinative languages. Bases of words can change as well.
In Arabic, kitab is book. Kutub is books. No affixes are added. The base (the only morpheme) is just changed. Kitabat is to write. -at is suffix.
Polysynthetic languages
Languages that express what would be sentences in other languages in just one word.
Ex:
English: I can’t hear very well
Iñupiak-inuktitut: Tusaatsiarunnanngittualuujunga
tsiag– (“well”), –junnag– (“to be able to”), –nngit– (negative form), –tualuu– (“a lot”), –junga (marker of the first person and present tense).
Word order (Subject, object, verb)
How the subject, object and verb of a sentence are ordered in a language.
There are six combos: SVO, SOV, VSO, VOS, OSV, OVS.
Word order (Adjective, noun)
How adjective and noun are ordered in a sentenced.
Noun-adjective or adjective-noun
In some languages, it is noun-adjective. Like in French, hommes homme bleus (Blue men).
Word order (Prepositions)
How prepositions are ordered in a sentence. In some languages, preposition is after the noun. In this case, they are called postpositions.
Ex: Liisan Kanssa (With Lisa)
Word order tendencies among languages
In languages where verb is before object, adjective is usually after the noun. Language also has prepositions.
In languages, where verb is after object, adjective is usually before noun. Language has postpositions.
Question words (word order)
Some languages have question words at beginning of sentences.
Others have question words in place where it is supposed to be.
Japanese (SOV): John what eats? (Since we are asking about the object John is eating, we put it in the object place of a sentence in the Japanese language. In this case, the second place of a sentence since sentence order is subject, object, and then, verb.
How do children learn word boundaries in first language?
Repetition of individual words from parents
Over time, realize certain sounds go together more often than others.
Most frequent subject, object, and verb word orders in languages of world?
Why?
SOV and SVO (Both are 90% of languages), VSO (8 or 9% of languages)
Naturally, humans seem to like to express the subject before an object in any sentence.
Hypotheses for why humans naturally prefer to express the subject before the object?
Innate grammer (which prefers to express subject before object)
The way we perceive the world and processes in our brain causes us to think about the subject first doing the verb and then, the object being acted upon when expressing or thinking about some occurrence.
Why do some languages have the less frequent word orders?
The development of the history of those languages is such that it would have led to those word orders being more convenient for usage.
Sociolinguistic classifications of languages
Genetically: Classifying languages into families and groups etc.
Geographically: Classifying dialects (even of different mother languages) by the area they are spoken in
Classifying speakers of a specific language by social variables like age, gender, social class (as such factors determine how people will speak the language)
Idiolect
a person’s individual version of a language.
Ex: My own version and way of speaking English
Sociolect
Dialect of language based on social variables like social class or gender
Ex: Dialect of Spanish spoken by Upper-class Mexicans
Labow study gender differences and explanation
Women: negatively sloping line; Because girls learn the language of their mom and change the language through interactions with other girls in their peer groups.
Men: Staircase graph; Boys learn the language of their mother, and that’s it. After that, they don’t really change the way they speak.
From ages 20 to 50, men largely talk the same because being in careers requires conformity and behaving similarly unlike women. At the time of this study, men mainly had careers compared to women.
Face
the positive public image you seek to establish in social interactions
Politeness Theory
Created by Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson
There’s two types of face: negative and positive.
Negative: Want of a person for his or her actions to not be hindered by others.
Positive: Want of a person to be appreciated by others.
Face-threatening acts
Acts that threaten a person’s negative or positive face. (Possible to be mitigated.)
Waggle Dance
Used by bees to communicate with one another where food sources are. Bees dance at angle relative to the sun, to locate the food source to fellow bees.
How did language come about?
So the question of the origin of language rests on the
differences between human and chimpanzee brains,
when these differences came into being, and under
what evolutionary pressures.
Difficulties in studying how humans began to speak language.
Languages don’t leave fossils to examine. Fossil skulls only show the anatomy of the brain but not what it could do.
To what degree are precursors of human language ability are
found in animals.
There is indeed some consensus that apes’
spatial abilities and their ability to negotiate their
social world provide foundations on which human language and communication could be built.
To what extent does human language derive from other human abilities not shared by primates?
Some researchers claim that everything in language is built out of other
human abilities: the ability for vocal imitation, the ability
to memorize vast amounts of information (both needed
for learning words), the desire to communicate, the
understanding of others’ intentions and beliefs, and the
ability to cooperate. Current research seems to show
that these human abilities are absent or less highly
developed in apes. Other researchers acknowledge the
importance of these factors but argue that hominid
brains required additional changes that adapted them
specifically for language.
phonemes
Distinct sounds in a language.
Phonology
System of distinct sounds used in a language.
Cognate
The term “cognate” is used for words in related languages that have the same origin.
Here’s an example: the English word water corresponds to the German word Wasser. These both come from the Proto-Germanic word *watar. Water and Wasser are therefore cognates.
Allophone
Allophones are a kind of phoneme that changes its sound based on how a word is spelled. Think of the letter t and what kind of sound it makes in the word “tar” compared with “stuff.” It’s pronounced with a more forceful, clipped sound in the first example than it is in the second. Linguists use special punctuation to designate phonemes. The sound of an l, for instance, is written as “/l/.”
Ex: Aspirated team vs unaspirated steam in English. Differences in aspiration of t.
Did human language come about in stages or all at once?
Some researchers said it came all at once through a big change in how humans communicate.
Others suggest it came in stages with development occurring from one hominid to the next.
Theory: In early stages, sounds were used to indicate objects and actions. In order to increase vocabulary, distinct sounds are combined into sequences (words) to express a variety of different ideas. This would require changes in the way the brain controls the vocal tract and possibly in the way the brain interprets auditory signals.
The next plausible step along the line would be to take these words and form sentences, although the sentences would be rather basic and rudimentary. Not complex yet. Ex: ‘me Tarzan, you Jane’
Later on, in these sentences, various grammatical devices would be used like tense markers and relative clauses.
How do features of sounds play a role in understanding speech errors?
Sounds of languages get interchanged. (Saying blake fruid instead of brake fluid)
Features of sounds get interchanged (Saying Cedars of Lemadon instead of Cedars of Lebanon) (A nasal m is switched for non-nasal b)
Feature
manner of articulation, voicing, and place of articulation of sounds. They are atoms of language.
Atoms of language. What are the implications of this assumption?
Features that constitute sounds
Place of articulation
Manner of articulation
Voicing (Are vocal cords vibrating or not)
Implications: Phonological activity (One sound->another sound, one feature->another feature), Speech Errors (See other card), Path of acquisition of languages children may take. (See other card.)
Symmetry of IPA table for consonants of languages.
If a person wants to say a word in another language, what will happen if their language does not have one or more sounds to pronounce that word?
They will use the closest sounds.
For example, English person saying bach.
We don’t have the “ch” sound in German, so we’ll use “k” as it is the closest. So, we’ll say “Ba-k” instead of “ba-ch”.
Why are Australian languages and New Guinean languages so similar in consonant inventory size?
Theory is New Guinea and Australia were once connected by Sahul Shelf (a land bridge). Today’s speakers of Australian languages’ ancestors migrated from New Guinea to Australia.
Why do the languages of Northwest North America have such large consonant inventories?
There is no evidence that these languages have similar genealogical roots and there is no evidence that large consonant inventories can be explained by word borrowing between languages despite deep cultural contacts and ties.
Why do so many Bantu languages have large consonant inventories?
Several Bantu languages (part of the larger Niger-Congo family) in the southern part of the continent, such as Zulu and Yeyi, are known to have enlarged their consonant inventory by borrowing clicks and other sounds which they did not previously use from languages of the Khoisan group, which already had many consonants
Where are languages with average size consonant inventories found?
Languages with average size consonant inventories are found in most areas of the world, suggesting that this size truly is a representative of something typical for spoken human languages.
Challenges in determining vowel inventory of languages? How do linguists resolve these issues?
Whether a diphthong is two vowels combined, or one distinct vowel on its own
Whether a nasalized vowel is a separate, distinct vowel from the non-nasalized version.
The length of vowels. For example, in Tlingit (Na-Dene; Alaska), the word written t’a /t’a/ means ‘king salmon’, whereas t’aa /t’aː/ means ‘board, plank’. Such a long vowel might be considered to be two copies of the same vowel in succession, as the spelling suggests, or be thought of as a single unit.
Long and short variants of the same vowel are always counted once, nasalized vowels do not add to the inventory as long as a non-nasalized counterpart occurs
nasalized vowel
Vowels that require using the nose to pronounce.
bon (b-oh nasal) cafe vs bon (b-uh-n) ami
Diphthong
A complex vowel sound that begins with the sound of one vowel and ends with the sound of another vowel, in the same syllable.
Ex: ou in clout
How phoneticians differentiate vowels?
Phoneticians recognize three properties which contribute to the most basic quality or “timbre” of a vowel sound. These are its height (roughly, how open the jaw needs to be to make the vowel), its position in a front-to-back dimension (roughly, whether the tongue needs to be pushed forward, remain more or less in the position in which it rests during normal breathing, or be pulled toward the back of the mouth for that vowel), and the lip position (whether the lips are pushed forward and narrowed or not).
Of surveyed languages, what’s the average vowel inventory? Lowest? Highest?
Average: Just below 6. Lowest: 2. Highest: 14.
Geographical distribution of languages with average vowel inventory
languages with average inventory sizes are the most widely scattered. In just a few areas, southern Africa being one, they occur almost to the exclusion of the other two types.
Geographical distribution of languages with low vowel inventory
Languages with small inventories are frequent in the Americas. Australia.
Geographical distribution of languages with high vowel inventory
Africa is strikingly marked by a zone right across the “middle belt”, roughly between the Equator and the Sahara, in which large vowel inventories predominate. This belt encompasses languages belonging to three major families, Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan and Afro-Asiatic.
interior Southeast Asia and southern China, New Guinea, Europe
In languages, do consonant inventory and vowel inventory quantities seem to be inversely related?
No.
Vowel harmony
In some languages, words cannot contain front vowels and back vowels together.
Vowel harmony and large vowel inventory relationship.
Africa is strikingly marked by a zone right across the “middle belt”, roughly between the Equator and the Sahara, in which large vowel inventories predominate. This belt encompasses languages belonging to three major families, Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan and Afro-Asiatic. The relatively large number of vowels in these languages seems to be associated with the prevalence of patterns of vowel harmony in the same area.
The European area also includes a number of languages with vowel harmony restrictions on the distribution of their vowels, such as Finnish and Hungarian, as well as Turkish and its relatives (which extend well into Central Asia and to western China).
How do babies pronounce words differently from adults? Why?
They make “mistakes”. So for example they, they would say guck for duck or tike for strike or, oo for shoe, something like that.
It’s the big question. It’s possible they don’t have the grammar necessary yet to not make those “mistakes”.
According to linguists, what is a word?
It’s hard to define. They are arguing over this to this day.
Is spacing good criteria for determining words?
No, because this criteria works for written language, but what about spoken languages? When languages are spoken, especially those without writing systems, how do you define word boundaries when people speak their sentences?
In sentence, “Sun is yellow.” Why is yellow one word and not “is yellow”? How would those word boundaries be defined?
One word represents one concept. Why is this criteria flawed for determining a word?
How do we determine what is considered a single concept for the purpose of distinguishing words from one another?
Why is pronunciation a flawed criteria for determining words?
Because it’s arbitrary.
Take the word “passionfruit”. Normally pronounced, there is no interruption.
However, if a weird person decides to impose an interruption on the word like saying “pass” and then “sionfruit”. Does that mean passionfruit is now two different words?
It is a very indefinite criteria for determining what is a word.
When classifying languages by morphology? Is it a neat classification?
No, oftentimes, languages are a mixture of the classifications.
Morphological classifications
Isolating
Agglutinative
Fusional
Polysynthetic
Why may languages share similar properties in terms of word order, morphology etc.?
- Ancestrally related
- Languages borrowing from each other due to contact between their speakers.
- Language universals (Ex: Languages that have verb-subject-object order also have prepositions before the noun regardless of where the languages are located. Welsh shares this characteristic with Tongan.)
Linguistic typology, genetic and areal classifications.
Have these classifications been confused with another before by Linguists?
Linguistic typology: Classifying languages based on shared language universals
Genetic classification: Classifying languages into families based on ancestry
Areal classification: Classifying languages based on similarities with other languages due to interactions between speakers of languages, leading to borrowing of features and other elements between languages.
They have. For example, Armenian was classified as an Iranian language due to Armenian borrowing from Iranian languages. Areally, they should have been classified together, but not in the same family, as they are genetically different and derive from different ancestor languages.
Sprachbund
a group of languages that share similarities resulting from language contact and borrowing among themselves.
What is the subject in the sentence ‘Rice is being cooked by Mary’?
‘Rice’ is the subject of this sentence. When you change the word ‘rice’ into ‘potatoes’ the verb changes, but if you change ‘Mary’ into ‘Mary and John’ the verb does not change:
(a) Potatoes are being cooked by Mary.
(b) Rice is being cooked by Mary and John.
Verb and subject relationship in sentence.
Verb changes when subject changes.
Ex: John eats.
I eat, (‘eat’ instead of ‘eats’)
Venneman’s classification of languages. Criticisms?
Dependent-head languages (word orders: object-verb, possessor-noun, adjective-noun, noun-postposition)
Ex: Possessor-noun (Adam’s house) Adam is possessor of noun, house.
Head-dependent languages (verb-object, noun-possessor, noun-adjective, preposition-noun)
This classification is too extreme as there are too many languages that do not neatly fit in this classification and have a mixture of characteristics between the two categories.
No inclusion of subject in word order classifications, only object and verb,
What is meaning in linguistics?
It’s hard to know. Philosophers have argued about this for ages.
Semantic meaning
Literal meaning of a sentence.
“I have no money.” means the person is making a claim about his or her financial situation that they have no money.
The semantic meaning of a sentence is testable, meaning you can determine if the person who says the sentence is telling the truth or not. Maybe checking the person’s pockets for money etc..
Pragmatic meaning
What the speaker wants to achieve by speaking a sentence.
Pragmatic meaning depends on the context of the social situation where the sentence is being said.
The speaker has a specific thing he or she wants to convey to a receiver of that sentence. Maybe, a request. Maybe, the speaker intends to inform.
Ex: “I have no money.” Speaker may say this because he or she wants to indicate he or she cannot pay for dinner. Maybe, he or she is promising that he or she will not given allowance to someone.
Clause
a group of words that contains a subject and a verb that have a relationship. Can be a sentence.
Ex: “If I go to town” “I love ice cream”
subordinate clause
A clause that cannot stand alone as a sentence
It cannot save the few WHO ARE RICH.
WHO ARE RICH is subordinate clause.
matrix clause
Clause that contains subordinate clause
It cannot save the few WHO ARE RICH.
WHO ARE RICH is subordinate clause. Matrix clause is It cannot save the few WHO ARE RICH.
Color names and language relationship
Languages differ in color names. Some languages have three colors. Some languages use one word for two colors such as “green” and “blue”. There are colors in some languages that may not exist in other languages such as “orange”.
Languages use different ______ to make sense of the world.
Categories
Ex: Different colors, Some languages have multiple words for different types of snow while in English, we have just one word for snow.
If languages do “have” colors, in what order do the color names exist? Why?
All languages have words for black and white. They distinguish between dark and light colors.
Afterwards, if a language has further color names, it will have a name for red.
If there is a fourth term, it will be for green or yellow.
If there is a fifth term, it will be for green or yellow, depending on whether the fourth term is green or yellow.
Then, if there is another term, it will be for blue.
This order reflects the structure of the human eye which allows us to see these colors more easily in order from red to green or yellow to blue.
