LIGN 101 Intro Topics + Language Families and Relationships

The 3 major properties of language

Arbitrary, productive and creative, rules of language

Prescriptive grammaticality

rules that prescribe how people should talk or write

Descriptive grammaticality

rules that describe how people actually talk or write

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

The language you speak influences how you think about the world

use of * in front of a sentence or word

used to indicate that the expression is ungrammatical, incorrect, or unacceptable

Dialect

a form of language shared by a certain group of people

Sociolect

a dialect shared by a certain social group

Idiolect

the way an individual uses language

Universal Grammar

an idea proposed by Noam Chomsky, there is some genetic basis to human language

Grammaticality judgements

judgements on how “correct” a language sounds

Iconic signs

the sign represents the signified

Arbitrary signs

the sign doesn’t represent the signified, referential only by agreement and knowledge

Productivity of a language

the capacity to generate new, meaningful expressions

How do we know that two languages are related to one another?

Geography, sound correspondences, cognate words, DNA and genetic testing

Language isolates

languages that don’t have any contemporary relatives or ancestors

Reconstruct earlier versions of a language

the process of looking at daughter languages and guessing what structures, sounds, and words the mother language must have had

4 steps to reconstruct words

find cognates

reverse sound changes

note borrowings

if all else fails - go with the most common form in the daughters

5 steps to reconstruct grammar

look at the grammatical patterns and structures present

find the ones that are shared among the languages

pick a shared pattern or structure

try to explain pattern and structure or lack thereof

assume that the structures present in a majority of daughters were also present in the mother

Mutual intelligibility

when two people can understand each other when talking

Dialect continuum

a geographical continuum of speakers where nearby speakers understand each other, but distant speakers might not

Language family

languages that are related to each other, consists of a mother language and sister languages

Language reconstruction

assumes regularity, the process of looking at daughter languages and guessing what structures, sounds, and words the mother language must have had

Indo-European

a major language family of about 3.2 billion speakers of Europe and the Middle East (includes Germanic, Italic, Celtic, Albanian, Hellenic, Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian)

Cognates

words that sound the same across different languages (father, vater, vader, far)