Ling 1 Final UCLA

syntax

how phrases and sentences are constructed

constituents

units words are grouped into

words are NOT

beads on a string

word order in English

subject-verb-object SVO

all languages share...

syntactic categories (all have N, V but not necessarily Adj, Adv, Prep, Articles, etc.)

noun

person, place, or thing

verb

action word

preposition

shows the relationship of a noun or a pronoun to some other word in a sentence

adjective

describes a noun

adverb

describes a verb

auxiliary

have, had, be, was, etc.

modal

can, may, will, might, could, etc.

determiner

a, the, those, etc.

subject-auxiliary inversion

movement of an auxiliary verb to sentence-initial position (preceding the subject) to form a question, ex: "has he eaten?"

multiple auxiliary inversion

only the first auxiliary after the subject inverts with the subject, ex: "the little rabbit has eaten" becomes "has the little rabbit eaten?"

true or false: you should try every constituency test on a string to determine if it's a constituent

true, only needs to pass one test to be a constituent

pronoun replacement test

determines NP, when a group of words can be replaced by a pronoun and be grammatical and have the same meaning

"do so/do too" replacement test

determines VP, if a string can be replaced by "do so/do too" (ex: did he go to school? yes, he did so)

stand alone test

if a group of words can stand alone in a response to a question, it is a constituent (ex: the girl ran in the rain. who ran in the rain? the girl)

movement tests

fronting, clefting

fronting

moving a group of words to the front of a sentence (ex: the girl ran in the rain vs. in the rain, the girl ran)

clefting

break up the sentence and feed it into "It is/was ___ that ___" (ex: it was in the rain that the girl ran, it was the girl that ran in the rain)

syntactic tree

a visual representation of constituency and phrase structure rules

minimum PS rule in English?

N+V

sentence PS rule

S -> NP VP

noun phrase

(Det) (Adj) N (PP), interchangeable within a sentence

verb phrase

V (NP) (PP) (Adv), interchangeable

prepositional phrase

Prep (NP)

node

a labeled branch point where the syntactic category is labelled (ex: NP -> Det N has 3 nodes)

domination

every higher node dominates all categories beneath it (ex: PP dominates Prep, NP, det, N)

sisterhood

2 categories directly under the same node (PP -> Prep NP, Prep and NP are sisters)

head of phrase

the word that determines the syntactic or phrasal category of that phrase (ex: an extinct bird species of South America, BIRD)

complement

gives additional information about the head (ex: ate [head] a bagel [complement])

structural ambiguity

a situation in which a single phrase or sentence has 2+ different underlying structures and interpretations (ex: old men and women), can be lexical (fruit truck crash creates jam, traffic or jelly?) or just structural

habitual be

the use of an uninflected form of the verb "to be" to indicate that a state or activity is habitual (ex: he be working, has a stable job), AAVE

multiple modals

"you might oughta go home", Southern US English

negative inversion

couldn't nobody beat them vs. nobody could beat them, AAVE but in SAE too: rarely, have i seen such a mess. never, would i...

wh-movement

a transformation that moves a wh- phrase to the beginning of the sentence (who? what? etc.)

f**k inversion

john is a nice guy vs. is john f**k a nice guy? (he is NOT a nice guy), British English

spoonerism (speech error)

an unintentional exchange of sounds

feature exchange

pig and vat vs. big and fat (voicing)

phoneme exchange

heft lemisphere

word exchange

what child will a grammar learn?

phrasal exchange

i haven't satten down and writ it

malapropism

the unintentional misuse of a word by confusion with one that sounds similar (ex: she is the pineapple [pinnacle] of politeness)

positive evidence

grammatical utterances in the learner's linguistic environment

negative evidence

ungrammatical sentence exposure (basically just speech errors)

what is the logical problem of language acquisition?

1. teaching doesn't play a huge role in FLA, it's quick and spontaneous

2. adults only provide positive evidence (how do kids know what's ungrammatical then?)

3. children are exposed to a finite # of sentences but create infinite amts

4. children make errors that adults don't (ex: overgeneralize -ed)

Poverty of the Stimulus

what a child gets in their environment by itself isn't enough to acquire language, so there must be something innate (Chomsky)

Theory of Imitation

children imitate what adults say (wrong)

1. children make errors that adults do not make

2. child utterances are not like adult speech

Theory of Correction/Reinforcement

language learning is based on correcting bad sentences and reinforcing good ones (wrong)

1. parental reinforcement/correction is inconsistent (sometimes ignore it, sometimes don't)

2. adults express approval at ungrammatical utterances sometimes

3. some cultures don't interact with young children directly, but they still develop linguistically

Innateness Model

our knowledge has 2 components:

1. innate blueprint of language aka UG

2. environment (based on Poverty of the Stimulus)

Critical Period Hypothesis

there is a limited period during which language acquisition can occur to acquire a language natively (0-13 years)

Genie

locked in a small space until 13 w/ no linguistic input, language in RH, no complex syntax or morphology, abusive environment=unreliable data

Chelsea

deaf but misdiagnosed until 31, job, reads and writes, 2k word vocab ASL, can't comprehend complex syntax/word order

Newport study

ASL, kids exposed at 4-6 way better than kids exposed at 12+

Mayberry study

2011, compared native ASL, early learners, and delayed learners that have been signing 20+ years (native>early>late)

2nd language acquisition

children who learn a second language young are nearly indistinguishable from native speakers

childhood aphasia

faster/better recovery, early enough means RH can step in

1. 0-3 months: no effect

2. 26-36 months: language accomplishments disappear but reacquired all stages

3. 3-10 years: aphasic symptoms, recov possible

4. 11 years: symptoms persist

language contact

2 or more language/dialects come into extended contact with each other

true or false: languages can exist in isolation

false

bilingualism/codeswitching

switching from one language to another

lingua franca

a language that is adopted as a common language between speakers whose native languages are different (English is common)

language creation

pidgins and creoles

language shift

stopping use of a native language (leads to endangerment/death)

borrowing

taking words, phonetics, syntax, morphology from other languages (ex: sushi from Japanese, [ʒ] from French, how come from Yiddish, and incredible so -able/-ible from French)

adstrates

languages in contact that have equal prestige

superstrate

language of dominant group

substrate

language of the less dominant group, typically provides the phonological/grammatical features

lexifier language

language that has contributed the majority of the words in a pidgin or a creole (usually the superstrate)

pidgin

a simplified form of speech developed from 2 or more languages (used in specific interactions like business, service, and trade), NO NATIVE SPEAKERS

creoles

when children begin to acquire a pidgin as a native language, it becomes a creole language (more complex grammatically, has native speakers)

pidgin properties

simplified consonant clusters (strong->trong), many common sounds from world languages, NEVER TONAL, lack inflectional morphology, reduplication=plural, flexible word order, no complete sentences, no def/indef articles

creole properties

many common sounds from world languages, rarely tonal, can have inflectional morphology, fixed syntax, basic word order=SVO, complex sentences, fully developed tenses

language endangerment/death statistics

5% of world languages have 1 million+ speakers, and 94% of the world speaks one of these. of the remaining 95%, 497 are nearly extinct. 8 languages w/ 100 million+ speakers

8 languages with 100 m+ speakers

Mandarin, English, Spanish, Bengali, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese

what percent of human languages are in danger over the next generation?

90%

language death

occurs when the last native speakers of a language have died, and no new generations speak the language fluently

6 reasons why we care about language endangerment

1. need diversity

2. analogy to ecosystem diversity (each lang is a unqiue realization of the human experience)

3. language expresses identity

4. languages are repositories of history

5. languages contribute to the sum total of human knowledge

6. interesting!

4 reasons languages die

1. physical danger (ex: destruction of habitat bc of a disaster)

2. culture change (ex: military dominance, media, etc.)

3. pressure to speak dominant language

4. forced assimilation

6 ways to prevent language loss

1. dominant culture accepts language diversity

2. more domains a minority lang is used in=easier to preserve

3. improve roads, communication, etc. to maintain a large enough community of speakers

4. minority speakers need pride and respect for their language

5. minority speakers need a say in education system

6. endangered speakers need technology to communicate w/ other speakers

communication vs. language

something we do vs. a tool

4 types of communication

visual, auditory, tactile, and chemical/olfactory (none of these are languages but still communicate a message)

Clever Hans

a horse that was claimed to have been able to perform math and other intellectual tasks. it was determined that the horse wasn't actually performing these mental tasks but was watching the reaction of the human observers

Alex the parrot

didn't learn a language but learned "meaningful use of English speech"

properties of human language

1. interchangeability

2. cultural transmission

3. arbitrariness

4. duality of patterning

5. displacement

6. prevarication

7. ambiguity

8. productivity

9. grammar

interchangeability

the ability of individuals to both transmit and receive messages

cultural transmission

nature vs. nurture, some aspects are innate but some are environmental

arbitrariness

no natural connection between a linguistic form and its meaning

duality of patterning

system is decomposable into smaller, recombinable parts

displacement

humans can talk about abstract concepts (past, things not there, future, present, unity, love, etc.)

prevarication

describe things not literally there (lie, imaginary, etc.)

ambiguity

words can have several meanings

productivity

unlimited potential to express novel ideas

grammar

a system of rules that enables us to communicate with and understand others (phonology, morphology, syntax, etc.)

vervet monkeys

3 different alarms for 3 different predators (large cats, eagles, snakes), elicit 3 different reactions

teaching primates language

possible to teach primates substantial vocab of arbitrary signs with associated meanings, can use spontaneously BUT none were fluent, language is HUMAN

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

language structures thought and ways of looking at the world are embedded in language

linguistic determinism

the strong form of Whorf's hypothesis, language controls the way we think and interpret the world around us

linguistic relativism

the weak form of Whorf's hypothesis, different languages encode different categories, and speakers think about the world in different ways bc of it