unit 1

Question 1

what is language

Answer 1

linguistics is the study of language and many aspects connected (interdisciplinary field)

Question 2

what is phonology

Answer 2

the study of sounds of language (What are the types of sounds/sound combinations that are allowed in a language and which are not)

Question 3

what are phonetics

Answer 3

the actual set of sounds (acoustics) when we are speakingw

Question 4

what are semantics

Answer 4

the meaning behind speaking

Question 5

what is morphology

Answer 5

meaning conveyed through meaningful components and how they combine together (cat vs. cats)

Question 6

what is syntax

Answer 6

the order in which words and morphemes go together to produce a meaningful sentence

Question 7

what are pragmatics

Answer 7

how we use it in a social context (nonverbal cues - e.g., tones)

Question 8

history of babylonia

Answer 8

when they came in power in the middle east, they had inherited the culture of a previous civilization

Question 9

history of india

Answer 9

oral preservation of Hindu scriptures became an important part of religious obligation of Hindu’s

Question 10

history of greece

Answer 10

inherited by the romans (nouns, verbs, etc. in english are coming from latin language)

Question 11

history of china

Answer 11

concepts are used to study linguistics (culturally influence languages like Japanese)

Question 12

history of middle east

Answer 12

arabic speakers evolved overtime - had to study classical arabic as it is different when spoken compared to the quaran

Question 13

Language families

Answer 13

• emerged in the 18th century
• Sir William Jones noticed sanskrit was similar to the language of eurpose, greek, and latin (grammatical structures were similar)

Question 14

psycholinguistics

Answer 14

• Galton studied word association in 1879
• Meringer and Mayer (1895) studied slips of the tongue which Freud tried to analyze with his theory of psychodynamics
• Chomsky and the cognitive revolution (criticized skinner)

Question 15

verbal behavior

Answer 15

• only considered observable phenomena such as input (stimuli) and output (response)
• behaviorism says we need to explain language as input and output
• as language was a type of behavior, its acquisition and use were explained with reinforcement (children said something correctly) and conditioning (if you said something incorrectly, others would correct it) - similar to operant conditioning

Question 16

cognitive revolution

Answer 16

• Chomsky’s (1959) review of Skinner’s book
• a new theory called transformational grammar to account for how underlying cognitive structure can account for people’s intuitive grasp of language production and comprehension

Question 17

language families - some loan words in English

Answer 17

words can be borrowed (e.g., curry, mango from Tamil, jungle from Hindi, adobe and alcohol from Arabic, atlas and demon from Greek)

Question 18

the evolution of english

Answer 18

• old english from Beowulf
• chaucer gets closer to english
• languages change overtime
• 5000-6000 languages in the world

Question 19

proto-indo european (PIE)

Answer 19

• most language in europe, west and south asia derive from a common ancestor known as PIE