Science of language final exam

Denotation

The dictionary definition of a word

Bachelor → a young, unmarried man

Connotation

concepts associated with or evoked by a word

The Bachelor, or a handsome man

Semantic features - DOG

break words into semantic features to allow us to talk about natural classes

Dog and cat are [- human], girl and boy are [- adult]

Synonymy

different words that share at least one semantic feature

Remember - recall

Small - little

Antonymy

words that have opposite semantic features

sharp vs dull

Homophony

words with different meaning but same pronunciation

bank (by a river, place to keep money)

club (weapon, social org)

Polysemy

One word with multiple related meanings

Crane

• a bird

• a piece of construction equipment

• to stretch the neck ;

• all similar

Syntactic Ambiguity

Two or more possible meanings within a single sentence or sequence of words, as opposed to lexical ambiguity, which is the presence of two or more possible meanings within a single word

“Mary hit the boy with the bicycle” - syntactic or semantically ambiguous?

syntactic - it is not a question of different word meaning but structure

mary had the bike

or the boy had the bike

Semantically ambiguous

A sentence where words could have different meanings and create ambiguity

“She couldn’t find the smaller mouse”

“I saw her duck”

both semantically and syntactically ambigiuous

Compositionality

Some words have meanings that change depending on their context

• ex. some adjectives have meaning that does not change - RED

• some do, like big - big city vs big mouse

Entailment

If a sentence A entails a sentence B, sentence A cannot be true without B being true as well.

“john is a big man” entails the sentence “john is a man”

verbs and adjectives entail features of their argument

Diachronic language change

Language changing at different points in time

Protolanguage

an ancestral language from which many languages developed

How to analyze if languages are related?

• see if their sound changes are systematic

• and if they target the same sound

Grimm’s Law (first germanic sound shift)

how stop consonants developed in proto-germanic to proto-indo-european

• voiced stops became voiceless stops

• /bh/, /dh,/, /gh/ to /b/ /d/ /g/

Bhratar (Sanskrit) to Brother

The Great Vowel Shift

middle english change

chain shift where long vowels changed

high vowels became diphthongs - OO to OW

other long vowels became raised - A and O become EEs and OOs

[a] becomes fronted to aye

Remnants/ examples of the shift

• Divine - divinity

Divine probably sounded like “deeveen”

many vowels were replaced with SHWA

• cuhmunicashun

OO → OW, pronoonce to pronounce, but we still say pronunciation

Canadian raising

diphthongs raise before voiceless consonants - raising starting point of dipthong

Write vs ride

rice vs rise

Vowel reduction

Unstressed “u” in jugular or insulation

Labov “R-less” study

He went to Saks, Macy’s and S. Klein in NYC - they ranges from bougie to common

The “rlessness” became more evident in salespeople in less bougie stores

shows that there are differences within a region

Hypercorrection

overcorrect speech → him and I, when you actually can say “me”

Aphasia

Commonly caused by stroke,

acquired neurogenic language disorder

Non fluent aphasia

Able to describe nouns, cannot make full sentences, speech takes effort

“Uh .. mother.. dishes.. door”

Fluent aphasia

grammatically ok but not much content, hard to understand. word-finding errors

“mother is away here, working her work out of her”

Semantic paraphasia

substitution of word in place of the intended target - substitution of a word with a different but similar meaning

“table” for chair

phonemic paraphasia

substitution of a word with a similar sound.

car for cat or “wishdasher”

Neologism

nonwords with no clean relationship to target word

• “I can’t mention the tarripoi”

Conduction aphasia

Fluent aphasia with spontaneous speech

damage to articulate fasciculus, white matter that connects Broca’s to Wernicke’s

Localization hypothesis

Specific brain regions are uniquely responsible for specific language functions

“Broca’s is for production” “Wernicke’s is responsible for understanding”

Issues with the localization hypothesis

• oversimplified - only studies simple tasks, ignores real world context, patients don’t fit into even categories when it comes to localization

• lacks anatomical precision

  • lesion location doesn’t always explain symptoms

• there are networks of regions working together

Strong modularity

Subsystems work independently

• incorrect!

McGurk experiments

A sound is repeated frequently, when we have our eyes closed we hear “da” but when they’re open we can see it is clearly “ba” -

shows our visuals and sound work together

Anti modularity

The brain is connected with no discrete subsystems

• incorrect

• but our brains have patterns, people with brain injuries don’t have all sound or speech missing

Weak modularity

• best guess for brain functioning

• some different systems but they interact with eachother

Click experiments

Click in the middle of a word in a sentence, but many interpret the click as after the word - “that the girl was happy (click) was evident from the way she laughed”

shows how syntax interacts with other forms of perception, processing sound and syntax work at the same time