LING 15 MIDTERM UCSB

Symbol

Physical object that represents a concept other than itself

Phonemes

Sounds used to assemble words, building blocks of words.

(Duck is made of three phonemes: D sound, U sound, K sound)

Words

Linguistic forms that have contentful/semantic meanings

Free standing

words can be rearranged in a sentence because they have meaning (phonemes are not free standing)

Minimal in structure

cannot identify a smaller part of a word as having a meaningful contribution

Meaning is...

the interface between symbols and a complete set of info and conceptual space

Semantics

the basic meaning retrievable from expressions (words, phrases, sentences)

semantics are also...

any distinctions between words that result in a change in meaning (stallion versus mare this is a change in meaning that is easy to understand.)

You must be aware of the arbitrariness of a word to be aware of its...

semantics

lexical semantics

meaning of words

propositional semantics

meanings of complex elements (combinations of meaningful symbols) The duck gave the goose a puppy. The puppy gave the duck a goose.

Pragmatic

additional meaning that can be reconstructed from an expression, relies on knowledge of how people use language ("wow, that's really loud" pragmatically means "be quiet")

Social/Indexical meaning

the social meaning of expressions. Indicates where a person is from. (Pronunciation, word choice)

Metaphorical

expressing some concepts in terms of other concepts. Expressing something in a separate set of terms (high spirits, feeling low)

cultural meaning

languages differ from culture to culture. Difference in set of symbolic forms and ways of combining them. pragmatic and indexical meanings differ, gendering nouns

Convention

A cultural practice that people adhere to. symbolism and ordering is conventionalized, people who speak one language follow the same norms (subjects precede verbs in English)

levels of symbolic organization

phonemes, lexicon, grammar

inventory

the set of phonemes that a language uses. The sounds that have become relevant as building blocks. They do not contain semantic meaning, but are symbols

Lexicon

all languages have a set of vocabulary items. Form-meaning relationship differ across languages and cultures

Morpheme

an indivisible form-meaning pair (cannot be divided into smaller elements where each smaller element also means something)

Stall-ion. One part does not mean male and one part does not mean horse.

Grammar

A way of organizing words (symbols) systematically to represent complex events

Participants

tell the relative time and duration of a verb. Identified through combination of word form and extra phrases/expressions. (The goose chased the duck. Subject precedes verb, Object follows verb.)

Verbs

Allow us to talk about things that are not in the immediate present. Show agreement by number, person, and word category

semantic categorization

Any distinction between words that results in a change in meaning

How do you know something does not exhibit semantic meaning?

show someone plural markers and show that nouns take separate plural markers.(Showing that it is grammatical because they all show plurality

Grammatical categorization

two or more words are treated differently in the grammar (Pot: singular is zaari, plural is zaarite)

noun categories

differentiated grammatically, marked with different forms

grammatical gender

words of one class grammatically act different from another (Feminine versus masculine nouns)

Arbitrariness

the info encoded by a symbol is not reflected in its form. Nothing about the sounds in the word "Paris" indicate its form

Iconic

symbol shares some resemblance to the meaning and what it represents. Form is analogous to meaning, opposite of arbitrary (Visual aspect directly tells you the form)

Discreetness

different symbols belong to different categories. Combination of symbols into larger forms. There is a finite number of phonemes in a language.

Displacement/remoteness

talking about things in the present time and space. Animal signs are incapable of demonstrating remoteness, only humans can use tenses

Patterning

symbols combine in a meaningful way. Refers to the ways in which elements are combined, the ability of human language to form discrete, meaningful units

Productivity

Ability to combine in a way to produce new utterances. Grammatical rules regardless of the semantics of meaning. Humans can still understand meaning from messed up sentences

Form/display or signal

Some behavior performed by an animal with communicative intent

context

the environment and situation

Response

the effect the message has on others

mating display

presenting a display with the intent of attracting a mate to continue their species

territorial display

keep animals of other species out of a specific territory

threat alert

produced as a display to frighten a predator or alert members of the same species of potential threat

food source info

coordinating for getting food

bird calls/song

all birds use calls, not all use songs

Calls

Brief and simple, form of call is directly related to context. Alarm: let others be aware.

Mobbing: let others know to come together.

Songs

Elaborate tunes used for territory and mating.

Hierarchical estruture and organization of form.

Theme --> phrase -->

subphrase --> unit

Honeybees

Can transmit location of nectar sources. Round dance + secretion for nearby sources. Tailwagging for remote sources.

Direction and distance

one bee goes out and finds food sources --> comes back and dances to alert --> secretes around the source --> all the bees then find it because of the chemical secretion

visual symbols

signs or tokens

Ape vocal tracks have

little phonetic range

Natural calls resemble

other animal systems, different calls warn different predators

Ape training

use visual symbols, cannot demonstrate phonology. Do demonstrate arbitrariness and prediction of symbols

Apes cannot demonstrate

remoteness, abstraction, relevance of ordering/patterning

Animal communication

Signals are iconic, not arbitrary

Animal communication is missing

remoteness in time/space/reality, participant/verb, discreteness

holistic/situational calls are

not abstract

situational

not remote

holistic

has meaning without decoding the sentence

chimp "words" for different foods

relates the call to the concept rather than to an immediate referent

Decimal (base 10) system

one lexical item for each number between one and ten, ten is an organizing principle for large amounts

gender systems are

sex based (male/female) and non sex based (animacy/inanimacy)

Grammaticization

the development of functional/grammatical units out of what used to be full words. Formerly independent words reduce to prefixes or suffixes (-ir verbs versus -ar verbs in Spanish) indicate assignment to different categories

Degrees of synthesis

isolating, agglutinative, fusional

isolating

words have one form and one function

agglutinative

words have affixes (prefixes and suffixes) each with one function

Fusional

Some affixes indicate multiple functions, functions are fused together in one element, one element carries more than one function

constituent order

order of subject verb and object

semantic shift

inherited form but innovated meaning, clearly observable but not clearly patterned, obscured by phonological shifts

Polysemy

form with multiple related meanings

synecdoche

using a part to refer to a whole (Ex: capital = head, capital = entire animal)

metaphorical shift

expansion of meaning (capital = owned animals, capital = measurement of wealth)

inherited

properties of a language that transmit from previous generations

non-inherited

innovations or origins lie in language contact (slang differs from generation to generation)

comparative method

analysis of multiple languages that looks for evidence in sound shifts (regular differences in traits)

cognates

words in different languages that are inherited from the same ancestor form (a cognate is an easy word to remember because it looks and means the same thing as a word you already know)

sound correspondence

some decedents inherit conserved phoneme, others inherit an innovated phoneme

inheritance

certain languages came from one single ancestor language (English German, Swedish, Norwegian, Russian, Romance languages)

influence

Languages influence each other independent of inheritance (European languages influence each other due to close proximity)