HESP 120 Final Exam Review

Final Exam Review

Pragmatics definition

\-pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics that studies how context contributes to meaning

\-pragmatics studies the practical aspects of human action and thought

\-it studies the use of linguistic signs, words, and sentences, in actual situation meaning and context

context

can be a

* simple observation
* indirect request
* apology
* expression of sympathy
* language and context are interdependent and symbiotic

diectics

"placeholder" words whose meaning is always determined by the context in which they are uttered

pronouns

he, she, it

spatial diectics

here, there

temporal diectics

now, then, today

true or false. the same sentence can be used to communicate different things in different situations

true

linguistic context

what has already been said

ex: will you marry me?

* is there a santa claus?
* is there an exam on tuesday?

situational context

non linguistic factors that affect meaning

* shared knowledge about the world
* physical environment
* what's happening
* does not need to be previously mentioned in the discourse in order for speakers to understand what others mean
* “duck”

social context

information about the speakers and what each of their roles are

* “can you unload the dishwasher?”
* “hey”

felicity

refers to the conditions that must be in place and the criteria that must be satisfied for a speech act to achieve its purpose

felicitous

utterance is appropriate relative to context in which it occurred

* speaker 1: what do you do for a living?
* speaker 2: I'm a fortune cookie writer

infelicitous

utterance is inappropriate

grice's cooperative priniciple

speakers 'intend' for successful communication to take place and obey cultural norms of talk

* this is why we dont have conversations that sounds like this: \n -kim: how are you today? \n -sandy: oh, harrisburg is the capital of pennsylvania \n -kim: really? I thought the weather would be warmer.

grice's maxims

Rules of thumb that cooperative speakers generally follow

maxim of quality

* Be truthful
* Do not say what you believe to be false
* Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence

maxim of quantity

* Make your contribution as informative as is required
* Do not make your contribution more informative than is required
* A: where were you born?
* B: earth
* A: where were you born?
* B: in room 265, on the third floor of the east wing of st Anne's hospital, which is located at 458 third street three blocks from main street in westerville, ohio

maxim of relevance

be relevant

* sandy: is gail dating someone these days?
* tom: well she goes to clevelnad every weekend
* what do you think sandy will assume from this?

maxim of manner

avoid obscurity and ambiguity

be orderly and clear

be brief

* A birthday cake should have icing; use unbleached flour and sugar in the cake; bake it for one hour; preheat the oven to 350; and beat in fresh eggs.
* They had a baby and got married.
* A: how old is your son?
* B: the square root of 25

form

structure of the utterance

function

purpose of the utterance

declaratives

word order: subject-verb-object

typically spoken with local intonation

* today is wednesday
* this is a declarative sentence
* the aliens are wearing hats

interrogatives

yes-no questions

inverted word order

spoken with final rising intonation

* is today Wednesday?


* is this a question?

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WH questions

WH word fronting

Spoken with falling intonation

* what day is today?
* what's this?

Imperatives

No overt subject

Often use extra high pitch

* Go!
* Clean your room!
* Obey me!

Speech acts

actions that are carried out

assertions

represent a state of affair/convey information

* usually can be characterized as true or false
* the battle of Hastings occurred in 1066

questions

elicit information

* what time is it?

requests

(politely) elicit action or information

* please turn in your homework on time

Orders

demand action

* shut the door!

promises

commit the speaker to a course of action

* tell you what, i'll do it this weekend

threats

commit the speaker to an action that the hearer does not want

* turn in your homework, or i'll give you a zero

direct speech acts

speech acts are explicit

The speaker's intonation is immediately clear, and listeners do not have to make any inferences

* A: please pass me the salt
* B: (passes the salt)

indirect speech acts

speech acts are implicit

the hallmark of an indirect speech act is that its literal meaning is different from its intended meaning

* i could really use some salt
* could you pass me the salt?
* would you mind passing the salt?

examples of indirect speech acts

* gee, it's sure is cold in here
* do you have the time
* can I go to the bathroom?

presupposition

* An underlying assumption that a speaker believes (and behaves as though other participants in the discourse believe) prior to making an utterance.

inference

a conclusion that a person is entitled to draw based on a set of circumstances

implicature

refers to when a speaker **implies** something about an utterance.

* If this process is possible, then we say that an utterance has "implicature"

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The same sentence used in different contexts can have different implicatures.

* A: Am I too late for dinner?
* B: I've just cleared the table

conversational implicature

*  the special meaning created when a maxim is flouted

children's pronounciation

\-some ways in which children's pronunciation may not match adult forms

-late-acquired sounds

\-consonant cluster

\-sequencing errors

stages of language acquisition: birth to 8 weeks

newborn/reflexive stage

stage of language acquisition: 2-4 months

different cries, gurgling, squealing, cooing

4-6 months language acquisition

vocal play (consonant-like sounds, then syllables)

7-9 months language acquisition

repeated/canonical babbling

intonation

10-11 months language acquisition

variegated babbling

12 months language acquisition

one-word stage

12-18 months language acquisition

one word stage

18-24 months language acquisition

two word stage: noun-like word + predicate-like word (V, POSS, etc.)

2 year old language acquisition

phrases, short sentences, and simple questions

3 year old language acquisition

prepositions, pronouns, sequences of 2-3 sentences

4 year old language acquisition

basic grammar rules

tell stories

regular inflection

some irregular forms

“FIS” phenomenon

Children can perceive more sounds (and phonetic differences) than they can produce

high amplitude sucking environment

infants are given a special pacifier that is connected to a sound-generating system. Each suck on the pacifier generates a noise, and infants learn quickly that their sucking produces the noise. At first, babies suck often because they are interested in hearing the noise. They lose interest, however, in hearing the same noise over again, and their sucking rate slows down. When this happens, the experimenter changes the sound that the pacifier generates. If the infant sucks faster after the change, we infer that he has recognized the change in sound and is sucking faster to hear the interesting new sound. If the infant does not suck faster, we infer that he could not discriminate between the two sounds

head turn preference

The infant sits on a parent’s lap, watching a display and listening to sounds. During the conditioning phase, the infant learns to associate a change in sound with the activation of visual reinforcers. At first, the visual reinforcers are presented at the same time as the change in sound. Then the visual reinforcers are presented shortly after the change. The infant will begin to anticipate the appearance of the visual reinforcers and look for them before they are activated. During the testing phase, if the infant looks to the visual reinforcers immediately after a change in sound, we infer that the infant has perceived the change in sound and can thus discriminate between the two sounds involved. If the infant does not look to the visual reinforcers, we infer that he did not perceive the change and thus cannot discriminate between the two sounds

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theories of language acquisition

* Imitation Theory
* Reinforcement Theory
* Active Construction of a Grammar Theory
* Connectionist Theories
* Social Interaction Theory
* Innateness Theory

Imitation theory

children learn language by listen and reproducing language

* does not count when deaf children create homesign with hearing parents

reinforcement theory

children learn to speak because they are reward for correct speech and corrected for incorrect speech

* even when children often do not change their speech

active construction of a grammar theory

children invent the rule of language themselves

* Children overgeneralize rules, they already know the rules

connectionist theories

 children learn by creating neural connections in the brain

* children use incorrect irregular forms

social interaction theory

children acquire language through social interaction

* can understand more complex and novel sentences

innateness hypothesis

The idea that infants are born with a certain degree of knowledge regarding the fact that languages have features and they are supposed to "figure out" what those features are.

* language ability is innate
* babies are born with knowledge that language have patterns and can identify those patterns

critical period hypothesis

An age after which it is impossible to acquire language with native-speaker fluency

A period of brain development after which learning is not so automatic

genie

Genie was found in 1970 when she was nearly fourteen years old. She had been abused and isolated since the age of twenty months. When first discovered, Genie was completely silent. Thereafter, her language acquisition was extremely slow, and although she did learn to speak, her speech was abnormal. She was able to memorize many vocabulary items, but her expressions were formulaic, as in what is X and give me X. She never learned grammar.

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morphological overgeneralization

Child extends a rule beyond the context in which it applies

* language development: young children show an unconscious awareness of morphological rules
* past tense verbs: eaten, marked, finded, hitted, breaked, runned, drownded,
* plurals: peoples, mouses, tooths, foots,

the wug test

more evidence for awareness of morphological rules

semantic overextension

when a child extends the range of a word's meaning beyond that typically used by adults

* Doggie > dogs + cats; any four-legged animal
* Hat > anything you can put on your head
* Dada > any man
* Ball > balls, marbles, eggs, balloons

semantic underextension

the application of a word to a smaller set of objects than is appropriate for mature adult speech

* Baba > my bottle (no other bottles)
* Bear > my teddy bear (not other bears)

Overgeneralization

Evidence of knowledge of rules

can't be imitation of adults or memorization of adult speech

psycholinguistics

the study of acquisition, storage, comprehension, and production

lateralization

The brain is divided into two hemispheres; each hemisphere is responsible for different functions called lateralization

what is the left hemisphere responsible for?

language processing

broca's area

Located at base of motor cortex

Primarily involved in production of language

* Organization of articulatory patterns of language
* Inflectional morphemes
* Function words
* Sentence structure
* Pronouns

 

wernicke's area

located near back section of auditory cortex

primarily involved in language perception and comprehension

* Comprehension of words and sentences
* Selection of words from mental lexicon

aphasia

* An impairment affecting the production or comprehension of speech and the ability to read or write.
* An inability to perceive, process, or produce language because of physical damage to the brain.

broca's aphasia

* Non-fluent
* Causes issues with production and naming
* Impacts reading comprehension
* Most Broca aphasics do not have a problem understanding the speech of others
* Broca's aphasics speak or sign haltingly
* English: typically have problems with function words and inflectional suffixes
* ASL: their language typically contain no inflection or classifiers

wernicke's aphasia

* Fluent
* Responsible for speech comprehension
* Causes issues with lucid speech
* It impacts listening comprehension

conduction aphasia

* Associative
* Little to no language comprehension or production.
* Impacts both reading and listening

sociolinguistics

* The study of the relationships between language varieties and social structure
* Studying the interrelationships among language varieties

language variety

 specific form of a language (Isolects or lect)

* include languages, dialects, idiolect, registers, styles, or other forms of language, including standard varieties and non-standard (vernacular) varieties

dialect

* The language variety characteristic of a particular social group

isogloss

**the geographical boundary marking the limit of the regional distribution of a particular feature**

isogloss bundle

When many different isoglosses fall in approximately the same location (or separate the same group of speakers), they form an isogloss bundle

accent

the pronunciation of a particular social group

american regional dialects

\-the U.S. english splits into four main dialectal zones are geographically: the Northern, the Southern, the Midlands, and the Western dialects \n -the first three are "the strongest regional divisions in american speech." the Northern and the Southern dialects come first from the first settlements established in the eastern U.S. \n -the Midland and Western dialects originate from the southern and western settlements \n -north american english comprise three varieties; the first one is generally known as U.S. english, the second one is called canadian english, and the third is Caribbean english

the south: regional dialect

In the south , people tend to speak slower here than in the north creating the famous southern "drawl"

 

* **I** is pronounced AH, and OO is pronounced YOO, as in
* "Ah'm dyoo home at fahv o'clock."

 

* An OW in words like loud is pronounced with a slided double sound AOO (combining the vowel sounds in "hat" and "boot"

 

* Some local words are: funky (bad smelling)
* Jump the broomstick (get married)

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social dialect

a variety of speech associated with a particular social class or occupational group within a society

social dialect: ethnicity

* All dialects are all rule governed
* Often speakers of the same ethnicity will share a dialect

 

chicano english

* Often spoken by some second or third generation speakers of Mexican descent
* Speakers of Chicano English may or may not be speakers of Spanish
* Not the same thing as Spanglish
* Some Chicano English speakers are monolingual

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Features of chicano english

* Use of monophthong \[o\] rather than diphthong \[oʊ\]
* Use of "barely" for "just recently"
* Use of lexical items found in Mexican Spanish

AAVE

\-you do not have to be black to speak AAE \n -not all african americans do speak it \n -african americans who do speak AAE are often adept at style-shifting \n -it is not a homogenous variety; it is a continuum of varieties (also with regional, age, etc. variation) \n -AAE is rule-ordered and has a very complex grammatical system

Features of AAVE

a phonological rule: word-final consonant cluster reduction \n -past and passed= pass \n -burned my hand \n -also happens in many other american english dialects \n -a grammatical rule: "habitual be" \n -distinguishes whether the statement refers to a specific instance or in general (a habitual state) \n -the coffee (always) be cold \n -\*the coffee be cold right now \n -she be late (everyday)

class

* Socioeconomic status (SES) affects language

 

gender

* Men and women talk differently
* But beware of stereotypes
* And linking of cultural norms of behavior with gender is usually arbitrary (different cultures have different norms)
* Women tend to use more standard variants

age

* Younger speakers often speak differently than older speakers
* Part of natural language change
* Cross-linguistic tendency (not unique to English)
* Variation may be phonetic, phonological, lexical, semantic, etc.

overt prestige

speakers seek prestige by assimilating to the Standard

* Ex: when people try to get rid of their own dialects
* People model their speech after the dialect that is prestigious to them

convert prestige

speaker chooses to differ from the standard and assimilate to a different non-standard language variety

* The standard is not the most prestigious for all people

speech styles

* systematic variations in speech based on factors such as
* Topic/purpose
* Setting
* Addressee

 

register

different levels of formality, and are characterized by an entire set of linguistic features

* Markers of register can be lexical, phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic

style shifting

Automatically adjusting from one speech style to another

slang

* Words or expressions used in informal settings, often to indicate membership in a particular social group

jargon

Technical language, typically associated with a particular specialized domain

* Business speak
* Legalese
* Argot
* Sports terminology
* News and politics
* Medical terminology
* May ultimately be incorporated in general use
* Bottom line, hardware, software
* Cool