Linguistics

Linguists use

the scientific method to study language

Prepositions

on, at, since, for, by, of, to, from, with, about, into, over, under, and between

Determiners

An, an, the

Possessives

My, your, his, her

Quantifiers

All, some, most

External language

• External, infinite

• Extension

Internal Language

• Internal

• Finite

• Individual

• Unconscious

• Intension

Mental grammar

the knowledge speakers have about the units and rules of their language.

A native speaker of a language L knows a lot about L

But this knowledge is unconscious

Competence

our subconscious knowledge about a language

Performance

 how we use this knowledge in actual speech production and comprehension

Laws of man

• tell people how they should behave

• and imply negative consequences if they deviate from that behavior.

Laws of nature

describe how nature behaves

Prescriptive Rules

• Rules that tell people how they should speak (or write).

• Usually require some effort to learn.

• Are often broken.

Descriptive rules

• Rules that describe how people use their language.

• These rules are often learned and used tacitly

Examples of Prescriptive Rules

• ‘Don’t end your sentences with a preposition!’

  • Prepositions are words you don’t end a sentence with.

• “Don’t split your infinitives!’

  • We want to successfully complete this course.

• ‘Avoid passives!’

  • He was killed in a car accident.

Creativity

Every language can generate an infinite number of possible new words & sentence. Human language is generative

Displacement

Capability of language to communicate about things that are not immediately present

Semnticity (Idk what word this should be)

• We can use language to communicate about imaginary things and counterfactuals (how things could or could not have been different).

• We can also share factual information about the world on any topic.

• Words can refer to things and events in the world.

All speakers of a given language share a

mental grammar

All languages have

• sounds and rules that govern (im)possible sound combinations,

• words and a system to create (new) words out of smaller units,

• rules about how to form sentences, and a systematic way of assigning meaning to words and sentences.

Negative concord is

obligatory in many languages.

All language change over time

sound change; morphological change; syntactic change

Morphology

is the part of grammar (and subfield of linguistics) that deals with word formation

Complex words

• Can be broken down

• Their structure is complex

• Their meaning is made a function of their parts

Simple words

Cannot be broken down into smaller meaningful units

Morpheme

• The smallest units of sound - meaning correspondence found in human language

  • With a meaning

    • Ex. teach, - er, dog, start, happy, -ness, - un

  • Or a grammatical function (ex, morpheme -s that indicates possession)

Who is best bf

Brick