Linguistics Notes Flashcards
Disciplines of linguistics:
- Core disciplines
◦ phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, stylistics, pragmatics, lexicography, historical linguistics, philosophy of language- Applied linguistics
◦ language pedagogy, second language acquisition, forensic linguistics, discourse analysis - Inter-disciplinary disciplines
◦ sociolinguistics, neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics, …
- Applied linguistics
phonetics =
study sound without reference to their function in the given sound system
phonology =
study sound in the coontext of the specific sound system
types of phonetics
◦ articulatory (how the sound is made)
◦ acoustic (how the sound travels)
◦ auditory (how we receive sound)
phoneme =, what it consists of
abstract unit made by Trubetzkoy, consists of allophones = actual sounds interpreted as one phoneme despite phonetic differences e.g. T is one phoneme, but has many allophones (T in water, still, time) = can be many different sounds
vowel=
sound defined by the position of the tongue
about vowels
monophthongs (a, e, i, o, u), diphthongs (ae, io, eu,…), triphthongs
long and short
usually voiced
conosants=
defined by the contacts and movements of various articulatory means (= lips, teeth, tongue)
3 crucial aspect of conosants
▪ place (bilabial)
▪ manner (plosive = you stop at their end, you produce a short sound, e.g. b, p, t)
▪ energy (voiced/voiceless)
markedness=
created by PLC,
◦ characterises a contrast between two members of a pair
◦ *pairs of one “usually” used (unmarked) and one “unusual” word (marked) in certain terms, e.g. lion is unmarked, while lioness is marked
◦ = “I saw a bunch of lions” doesn’t necessarily specify gender
rhoticity=
presence or absence of the R sound
link between a thing a a sound pattern
linguistic sign
2 aspects of linguistic sign
1) material - the sounds
2) conceptual - meaning
Saussure 3 interpretations of language
1) LANGUE - system of sounds used by member of language community
2) PAROLE - utilisation of the system to create concrete utterances
3) LANGAGE - langue + parole
phonological system
consists of all the levels of langugage:
- morposyntactic level
- lexico-semantic level
- discourse level
+ the phonic material they need to function
2 aspects analysed by phonetics:
1) speaker (producer)
2) listener (reciever)
basic element of phonetics
sound segment
2 methods of phonetic ivestigation:
1) subjective - absorbation through senses
2) experimental - technical measurements (Piere Rouselot, 1899)
physiological aspects of speech
1) Respiration
2) Phonation
3) Modification
3 classes of allophones
1) combinatory
2) individual
3) expressive
features of phonology (by Trubetzkoy)
- permanents f.
a) vocalic character
b) consonatal character
c) heigh
d) localization
e) manner
f) timbre
g) nasality
h) quantity - f. capable of neutralization
a) tension
b) aspiration
c) recursion
3 types of phonological apposition:
1) privative - two different phonemes, one has some feature and one doesn’t
2) gradual - a feature present in both, but different grade
3) equipollent - pair different ins several features
.+ bonus
4)prepositional - can be more than 1 pair
5) isolated - in 1 pair only
Jakobson-Halle’s Binaristic Phonological Theory
- phonemes have binary apposition
- appositions are only about + presennce/-absence of a feture
- 2 categories of features:
1) prosodic - within a syllable (tone, force, grantity)
2) inherent - without regard to the role they play within a syllable
study of words and their meaning
lexicology
lexicology - what it studies
total word stock, individual words
the world around us, ideas, actions and imaginary reality
extra-linguistic reality
one word or an association of several words
lexeme/lexical unit
sequence of sounds (or its representation in writing) that communicates meaning (expresses an idea)
Word (not compound)
stable/institutionalised collocations whose meaning (sememe) cannot be derived from its parts
phrase (linguistic, not grammatical)
word consisting of one morpheme and a meaningless stem
Moneme
linguistic sign (sign = something that stands for something and has a meaning and a form)
Lexeme
studies structure of words=
morphology
minimal unit of meaning/grammatical function
morpheme
2 functions of free morphemes
a) lexical - carry lexical meaning by themselves
b) functional - conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns
2 functions of bound morpheme (-s, ‘s, ing, ed, er, est)
a) inflectional - grammatical relationship
b) derivational - can create new words (re-, -ness, -ish, -ment, -ful)
compound relationships
a) visually (modifier + head)
b) copulative (head + head), eg. washer-dyer
c) exo-centric - doesn’t refer to the referent directly, eg. pick-pocket (not a type of pocket)
d) neo-classical - astro-, neo- geo-
Affixes
1) prefix - exgusband
2) sufix - friendly
3) infix - abso-bloody-lately
4) conversion - dance -> to dance
5) borrowing - other languages
minor ford formation process
a) blending - smoke + fog = smog
b) clipping - ad/vertisment, ham/burgers
c) acronyming - CD, NATO, UNESCO
d) back-formation - edition -> edit, donation -> donate
e) reduplication - tap-tap, tip-top, bye-bye
Jaakobson’s functions
1) REFERANTIAL - context, describing situation…
2) POETIC - message, poetry, slogans
3) EMOTIVE - relates to sender
4) CONATIVE - relates to receiver
5) PHATIC - channel, hello?/ok?/bye, to mantain/close/verify communication channel
6) METALNGUAL - code, language describing itself
Bühler’s functions
1) representational - context
2) expressive/emotive - sender, feelings
3) directive - reciever
Halliday’s function’s (SFL)
1) ideational - field, external word, fictional realities, ideas
2) interpersonal - tenor, depends on register, interactions
3) textual - mode (channel), to produce coherent text
text interpretations, features and their significance
stylistics
analysing functions and meaning in different sound contests
discourse analysis
Pragmatics
- study of language in use, speaker’s intentions
- focus on utterance - expressing something aloud
- interdisciplinary research (philosophy of language, cognitive science, psychology, sociology)
study of textual structures and the relation of texts to their context
text linguistics
- the meaning of a word is described by its uses
- views communication as a “Language Game”
Ludwig Wittgenstein
“what is standard is correct”
normative grammar
what the language should be
prescriptive grammar
variation
inter-language - using variety with multiple languages
intra-language - using varieties within one language
synchronic - nowday language
diachronic - taking time into account, change
dialects X accents
dialect - all linguistics levels, geogrephical and social
accents - pronounciation only
differential features between varieties
geographical, sociolect, functional
Halliday’s functional model
1) user related - geography, temporal, social, social, idiolectal, age-related, sex-related
2) use related - situational context, participants,
parameters specifying the situation:
a) FIELD/DOMAIN
b) TENOR -
c) MODE - function of text in the event
4 major registers (Biber)
conversation, fiction, news, academic prose
disciplines that deal with variations
dialectology, sociolinguistics, diachronic linguistics, register/genre analysis, pragmatics
Dialectology people
Georg Wenker, Jules Gilliéron, Hans Kurath, William Labov
dialect continuum
dialects overlap, the further you go the more it changes
wave theory
language change doesn’t happen at the same time everywhere
imaginary line on a map dividing it
isogloss
diglossia
two languages (or two varieties of the same language) are used under different conditions within a community, often by the same speakers (Arabic)
English writing stopped
1066 Norman Conquest
standartization of British English
19th and 20th cent
situation variations
formal, informal
maps that show results of dialect research
dialect atlases
a simplification of isoglosses, solid line in place of multiple paralle isoglosses
dialect boundary
non-standard London dialect
Cockney
non-standard Liverpool dialect
Scouse
people move closer to the standard with increased formality
linguistic prestige
speakers of standard variety are perceived as well educated
open prestige
related to non-standard, vernacular varieties, people use them in order to fit in within community
covert prestige
diagram can be used as a record of change in problems
diachronic view
beggining of written english
5500 - 5000 years ago, 3500 BC - Kish tablet found in Mesopotamia
sources of old language
1) DIVINE SOURCE - Biblical - Adam, Hindu - Saraswati
2) NATURAL SOUND SOURCE - words created as imitations of sounds (bow-wow, Yo-he-ho)
3) PHYSICAL ADAPTATION SOURCE
4) GENETIC SOURCE - language is iherited, “language gene”
Properties of Language
1) DISPLACEMENT - humans can talk about things not present
2) ARBITRARINESS - arbitrary connection between words and meaning
3) PRODUCTIVITY/creativity/open-endedness - humans are able to form new expressions
4) CULTURAL TRANSMISSION - humans are not born knowing language (as opposed to animals
5) DUALITY - two levels of organization a) individual sounds, b) meaning conveyed by combination of sounds
analysing sentence - dividing into smaller parts
parsing
hiearchy of grammatical units
sentence, clause, phrase (1 or more words), words
indicatin seperate phrasis
bracketing
bracketing - hiearchy
a) expansion - adding words
b) substitution - replacing (by pronouns)
c) subtraction - omitting words
d) movement - moving phrases
Noam Chomsky
tranformational generative grammar
competence/performace
competence - linguistic knowledge of what is correct
performace - how the system is used
Old English
- 500 - 1100
- influence by Latin, Old Norse
- synthetic grammar
- West Saxon dialect developed
- Beowulf
- 1066 - Norman Invasion - written English ended
Middle English
- 1100 - 1500
- Norman Conquest - ruling class spoke french
- english borrowed from french vocab, becoming synonyms
- new written standard based on London speech
- Geoffrey Chaucer - Canterbury Tales
- start of the Great Vowel Shift (1400)
Early Modern English
- 1500 - 1750
- rennsaisance, reforms
- interest in classic languages - auxilary word “do” in questions and negatiions
- end of the Great Vowel Shift (1700)
- printing press - standartization of english spelling)
- Dr. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary
Modern English
- 1750 - now
- variability in grammar
- analytical structures
founding fathers of comparative (histology) philology
Rasmus Rask, Franz Bopp, Jacob Grimm
Jacob Grimm
Grim’s law - 1st germanic vowel shift
Wilhelm Von Humboldt
- psychology + linguistics
- inner sprachfrom - better language better person, you mannifest you inner self through what you say
August Schleiches
- darwinism + ling.
- staumbautheorie = languages = tree
Karl Verner
- neogrammarian hypothesis - language are laws that omit no exception
- disregarded the social aspect of language
AESTHETIC IDEALISM
Benedetto Croce
language mirrors the individuals mind and their aesthetic ideas
KAZACH SCHOOL OF LINGUISTIC
- Jan Baudouin de Courtenay - kinda defined phoneme and phonetics before Trubetzkoy
- division of physiophonetics/psychophonetics
STRUCTURALISM
synchronic - 1 language at 1 point of the time
diachronic - language within history
langue - language system that allows us to use language
parole - manifestation of the system, what you actually say
Generativism
- Noam Chomsky
- grammatical structure have nothing to do with function
BRITISH CONTEXTUALISM
Halliday, J.R. Firth
SOCIOLINGUISTICS
Labov
PHYLOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE
Bernard Russel, Ludwig Wittgenstein
PRAGUE LINGUISTICS CIRCLE (members)
Vilém Mathesius
- synchronic approach to ling
Bohuslav Havránek
- standard language, functional styles
Roman Jakobson
- binary nature of oppositions of ling categories, functions of language, markedness
Bohumil Trnka
- historical phonologist
- functional structural description of Modern Language and GVS
Nikolai Trubetzkoy
- founder of phonology, phoneme
PRAGUE LING CIRCLE
- connection between language and the intention od the speaker
- distinctive role of the standard language
- need to study poetic language
SYNCHRONIC STUDY OF LANGUAGE (PLC)
syntagmatic/pragmatic relationship
DYNAMIC NATURE OF LANGUAGE
=elastic stability
- laguage is an open system - change = change at all levels
CENTRE
words used frequently
