Week 1 Flashcards
Phonetics
The physical properties of speech sounds.
Phonology
The way speech sounds pattern in languages.
Morphology
The internal structure of words.
Syntax
The internal structure of sentences.
Semantics and pragmatics
The study of meaning and meaning in context.
Linguistics
The scientific study of language
Design properties of human language
- Reflexivity
- Arbitrariness
- Displacement
- Open-endedness
- Cultural transmission
- Duality of patterning
Reflexivity
Humans can use language to talk about language.
Arbitrariness
Linguistic units (“words”) have no natural connection between form and meaning.
Displacement
Language can be used to refer to things that are not ‘in the here and now’.
Open-endedness
The potential number of utterances in human language is infinite.
Cultural transmission
Humans have a predisposition for language; but the language that they acquire depends on their surroundings.
Duality of patterning
Linguistic forms have two levels of structure: meaning and form.
Meaning
Morphemes
Unbelievable
[[un-] [[believe] [-able]]]
Form
Phonemes (IPA)
How many languages are there supposedly?
6,000
What suggests that humans are predisposed to learn language?
Children naturally acquire languages in the first years of their lives without much strain and without any explicit instruction.
Natural languages also include…
Creole languages, which arise naturally from contact between two or more languages.
• Papiamento
Natural languages
- Sign language
- Creoles
How are sign languages produced? And spoken languages?
In the visual-gestural modality.
Spoken languages are produced in the oral-auditory modality.
What is a common misconception about sign languages?
That sign languages are manual representations of spoken language. Instead they are independent languages, with a level of grammatical complexity equal to that of spoken languages.
The innateness hypothesis
Children naturally acquire languages in the first years of their lives without much strain and without any explicit instruction.
This observation has led to the idea that the human capacity for language is innate. This hypothesis is associated first and foremost with the linguist Chomsky.
What evidence of acquisition is there to back up the innateness hypothesis?
- The process of first language acquisition is relatively independent from the environment, the degree of linguistic input and the ambient language.
- Children show similar development patterns, irrespective of the language they’re learning.
- The acquisition process is always successful, unless there’s pathology.
- Correction and instruction by caregivers has little to no effect.
- The linguistic input that the child received is full of mistakes and incomplete utterance, yet this doesn’t affect the acquisition negatively (‘poverty of the stimulus’ argument).
‘Poverty of the stimulus’ argument.
The linguistic input that the child received is full of mistakes and incomplete utterance, yet this doesn’t affect the acquisition negatively.
What evidence of biology is there to back up the innateness hypothesis?
- Some language disorders (SLI) appear to be heredity.
- There is some evidence that certain genes may be involved in building the neural circuitry necessary for language.
- If language is uniquely human property, then it must include an innate aspect.
External language
- Spoken language (oral-auditory modality
- Sign language (visual-gestural modality)
