LIGN8 Midterm - UCSD

True or False: English is the official language of the US.

False

Language Properties:

Displacement, Arbitrariness, Productivity, Duality of patterning(morphemes and phonemes), Discreteness (sounds are meaningfully distinct)

Language is:

-A communication tool

-A system of signs

-A cognitive product

-An element of culture/society

True or False: Language is used as a placeholder for a person's character, ethnicity, or its membership in a social group

True.

True or False: Knowing a language is just knowing words and rules of grammar

False

True or False: Every single person speaks in a language variety/dialect, consciously or not.

True

Why are some dialects considered more correct or standard?

SOCIAL conventions, not on any linguistic standard

Factors that affect language use:

-Age

-Gender/Sexuality

-Geography (where people live)

-Social Class and Life Experience

-Ethnicity/Immigration History

-Political/Social Ideology

Double Negation Rule (Bishop Robert Lowth, 1762)

Two negatives makes a positive ("I don't want nothing" means "I want something"). This goes against Prescriptivism in English, but not in other languages like French.

Prescriptivism

An approach to language that defines a "correct" form of language by outlining a set of rules that should be followed

Descriptivism

A linguistic approach which focuses on how language is ACTUALLY used, rather than how it should be.

True or False: Prescriptivism is a social construct.

True. What gets prescribed in language use depends on factors that havenothing to do with linguistics or logic.

True or False: As a discipline, linguistics seeks to tell people how they are SUPPOSED to use language, not DESCRIBE how people actually use language.

False. Wrong way around.

True or False: Language is a monolithic entity that remains uniform and static in space and time

False. This prescriptive assumption goes against the linguistic facts of languages changing over time and variation being the natural state of affairs.

True or False: Language varieties that have overt prestige will be taught in schools and used in media

True. Prescriptive rules are by and large social constructs that serve to separate the educated/powerful from others.

Systematic Pattern

Governing rules on how words are formed, example of DESCRIPTION because of the actual usage

Expletive infixation

f***ing is inserted before a stressed syllable

Grammaticality

Speech that follows the patterns of naturally occurring speech

True or False: Grammaticality is not always what is prescribed in grammar books

True

True or False: Grammaticality is never dialect-specific.

False

Social Acceptability

Judgments of how appropriate a linguistic form is in a given social situation

Principle of linguistic subordination

The speech of a socially subordinate group will be interpreted as linguistically inadequate by comparison with that of the socially dominant group ("You were a successful engineer in the Ukraine, sure, but why can't you speak real English?")

True or False: Real language conventions and rules (grammatical competence) are, for the most part, unconsciously acquired by native speakers

True

Gramatically correct, but not socially acceptable

Using "youse" in a work meeting

Socially acceptable, but not gramatically correct

Saying "actually insane" as a sentence, or purple prose

Dialects may be defined by:

Vocabulary, Grammar, Pronunciation

Dialect refers to...

a speech variety shared by some group of people (a speech community defined regionally, ethnically, or socially otherwise)

Vocabulary Differences

Dinner vs Supper, Lightning Bug vs Firefly

Grammar Differences

Are double modals/negations allowed, is it 15 minutes 'of' or 'till' 11:00

Pronounciation Differences

How many syllables in caramel? Do you pronounce Mary and Merry the same?

Mutual Intelligibility Hypothesis

A) If 2 speakers, A and B, can understand each other (mutually intelligible), they're speaking DIALECTS of the same language C.

B) If 2 speakers, A and B, cannot understand each other (mutually unintelligible), then they are not under the same language C and therefore are considered independent LANGUAGES.

Flaws with the MIH

Mutual intelligibility may be a matter of degree in experience/motivation, and there are counterexamples with Dutch/German, Danish/Norwegian, Mandarin/Taiwanese, or the DIALECT CONTINUUM in general

Dialect continuum

Situation in which a large number of contiguous dialects exist, each mutually intelligible with the next, but with the dialects at either end of the continuum not being mutually intelligible

Macro-Language

A set of related languages that share a common "identity" even though speakers can't normally understand each other (Chinese, Arabic)

Idiolect

A speech variety whose linguistic properties (i.e., phonological, syntactic, intonational etc.) can be exhaustively specified in terms of the intrinsic properties of some single individual. In other words, we speak English UNIQUELY.

True or False: When two communities of speakers become separated over time by migration and communication among them reduces, their linguistic systems diverge, potentially causing mutual unintelligibility.

True

True or False: All individuals have an idiolect, and groups of people form dialects.

True

Popular, INCORRECT definitions of a dialect

-Non-prestige varieties of a language are labeled dialects, while supposedly "correct" varieties of prestige are labeled languages

-Political Definitions, such as the Chinese "dialects" and the Serbo-Croatian schism

The standard dialect is usually the one:

- codified in dictionaries and language textbooks

- used in most forms of public writing

- used in most public/formal speaking situations

-in some ways, an IDEALIZED norm

Standard English

A variety (dialect) of English

Vernaculars

Non-standard Dialects, like home usage

Phoneme

smallest meaningless unit of sound

How to determine whether a speech sound is a phoneme:

Test minimal pairs, where if changing a sound changes the meaning

True or False: Most languages have between 20 and 37 phonemes

True

True or False: No language uses up all possible speech sounds

True

True or False: The number of consonants in the languages of the world ranges from 6 to 50.

False, the upper bound is 97.

Speech sounds are:

- clusters of sound information

- built out of smaller elements of sound

- correspond to different combinations/gestures of vocal muscles/organs

Active Articulators

Parts within the vocal tract that actually move to achieve the articulatory result. Examples: Tongue, Lips, Epiglottis, Larynx

Passive Articulators

Are relatively fixed, but assist in articulation. Examples: teeth, hard/soft palates

Pulmonic (egressive) sounds

Air pressure comes from lungs compression & expansion. Used in ALL languages, most of which exclusively

Glottalic sounds

Air pressure comes from larynx movement. Less common than pulmonic sounds (but not rare).

Velaric sounds (clicks)

Air pressure comes from tongue constriction. Extremely rare as a distinctive speech sound, found only in the Khoisan languages of Southern Africa and many Southern Bantu languages

True or False: Individual speech sounds are devoid of meaning.

True. This is what makes them effective phonemes.

True or False: Speech sounds nevertheless play crucial roles in our perception of, attitude toward, and use of language

True. This includes how what you see is what you hear, What you hear is what you think, and What you say is who you are

McGurk Effect

What we see overrides what we hear.

True or False: If a sound contrast does not exist in your native language, it is likelythat you cannot distinguish it.

True

True or False: Your perception of speech sounds can't be distorted by the acoustic cues you pay attention to

False (yanny vs laurel)

Prof. John Baugh (Stanford University) has conducted research that shows the following:

- Listeners can identify a speaker's ethnic background based solely on speech at better than chance levels.

- There is discrimination based entirely on speech (byway of presumed ethnicity).

The inference in linguistic profiling generally takes this form:

Speech -> ethnicity -> assumptions about individuals. Many, including some lawyers, deny this though.

William Labov (1966)

Study where high, middle, and low-end stores were asked the same question warranting the answer of "fourth floor". /r/ was pronounced with social stratification, with class/prestige/female/younger people stressing the /r/ more. The /r/ production reflects people's awareness of the association between social prestige and linguistic features, including hypercorrection with more emphasis than needed like with Macy's

True or False: Speech perception is multi-modal: the human brain uses different sensorycues in addition to sound in order to process and comprehend speech input

True

Morphemes

the smallest meaningful units of language (building blocks of words, or words themselves)

Two Principal Elements of Grammar

Words and Rules

How many morphemes does "connects" have?

2 ("connect" and "s", since "s" makes it plural)

Roots of a Word

Contains the main lexical meaning of a word (i.e "connect" in "disconnects"). Often free morphemes.

Free morpheme

a morpheme that can stand alone as a word

Affixes

parts added to the beginning (prefix) or end (suffix) of a root word to create new words.

Bound Morphemes

Must be attached to other morphemes to function as words

Synthetic Languages

Bound morphemes are attached to other morphemes, so a word may be made up of several meaningful elements
A single word may contain several morphemes (Y. Eskimo)

Polysynthetic Languages

Highly complex words may be formed by combining a higher number of roots and affixes
A single word may contain several morphemes (Y. Eskimo)

Isolating/Analytic Languages

Each morpheme, or combinations of very few morphemes, are words

Predominantly one word = one morpheme or very few morphemes (Viet & Mandarin)

lexical ambiguity

when a morpheme can have more than one interpretation

Mental Lexicon

the mental dictionary of words/signs and their meanings

True or False: Linguistic signs are stored into our lexicon

True

Rules

Organizing Principles (how elements are organized into higher structures)

Content Words

nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs -> these are an open class, because new content words are added over time.

Function Words

articles, prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns -> these are closed class because they specify grammatical relations and have little or no semantic content

Recursion

A sentence can be inside a verb phrase inside a sentence inside a verb phrase inside ...

- Mary helped George.

- Kathy knew that Mary helped George

- John believed that Cathy knew that Mary helped George...•

capable of producing and understanding an infinite number of sentences

The Wug Test

Created by Jean Gleason to determine whether children can apply rules of grammar to unknown words

- children were told to give the plural of a "Wug" and they said wugs

What we learn from the Wug Test

• Because they're arbitrary, words must be memorized

• Because they're regular, rules can be used to go beyond memory

Dialect (in reading)

neutral label to refer to any variety of language shared by a group of speakers (typifies a group of speakers within a language)

(no particular social or attitudinal evaluation)

official language

The language adopted for use by the government for the conduct of business and publication of documents.

national language

Most common language used in the nation: language with the widest distribution and most speakers (national pride)

True or False: English is the official language of the US at the federal level

False: there is no official language at the federal level int he USA, but English is considered the de facto national language

% of people who only speak English in US

80%

% of people who only speak English in CA

57%

True or False: By the second generation, many immigrants speak only English.

True

Language by Immigration Generation

First Generation: Immigrants to the U.S., dominant in heritage language

1.5st Generation: Children who immigrate, may become English dominant

Second Generation: Bilingual as children, English dominant as they get older

Third Generation: English speakers

How many language varieties are unique to the USA

280 (231 living, 49 extinct)

How many indigenous languages are from California?

Nearly 50

Purposes of National vs Official Languages

National Languages are often for unity

Official Languages are often for official usage

True or False: 50% of the world's population speak two or more languages

False, 75% do.

True or False: By the age of 2.5, a bilingual child begins to make choices in language use - usually towards the majority language

True

True or False: In the U.S., immigrants are strongly urged to assimilate and discouraged from retaining their heritage language

True

Language Contact

1) When two or more languages are spoken in the same or adjoining regions, and

2) when there is a high degree of communication between the people speaking these languages

A language contact situation may result in:

- Language loss

- Bi-/multilingualism

- Language change

Bilinguality vs Bilingualism

bilinguality: The use of two (or more) languages by an INDIVIDUAL

bilingualism: The use of two (or more) languages within a given COMMUNITY (social bilingualism)

Five important variables in relation to bilingualism

1. degree of bilingualism

2. context of bilingual language acquisition

3. age of acquisition

4. domain of use of each language

5. social orientation

Balanced bilinguals

Individuals with well-developed competence in both languages

Dominant bilingual

Individuals who are dominant in one language, with the other being subordinate. Not necessarily in all situations, though.