LING 1 Midterm UCLA

How many languages are spoken in the world today?

7000

What continent has the greatest number of languages?

Asia

unconscious/implicit knowledge

we have a finite set of building blocks and rules by which we construct words, phrases, and sentences

Phonetics

the inventory of sounds in our language

Phonology

the sound patterns in language (what makes possible sequences)

Lexicon

mental dictionary of words

Word

arbitrary pair of sound and meaning

Morphology

the study of the internal structure of words and the rules for combining parts of words to make more complex words

Morphemes

The smallest units of meaning in a language (ie writes -> writer or writers)

Syntax

rules that help put words together to form phrases and sentences

synonym

A word that means the same as another word

antonym

a word that means the opposite of another word

lexical ambiguity

when a word has multiple meanings

syntactic ambiguity

when a sentence or sequence of words has multiple meanings

What does it mean to say human linguistic knowledge is creative?

we are able to produce and understand an infinite set of novel utterances

devices used to elongate sentences

prepositions, adjectives, conjunctions

grammar

a system of rules that enables us to communicate with and understand others

competence

a speaker's knowledge of the rules of his/her language

performance

how the knowledge of the language is utilized in real-time

what affects our linguistic performance?

memory limitations, shifts in attention and interest, psychological and physical states, linguistic and non-linguistic context

spoonerism

a kind of speech or performance error when sounds or other units are transported (ex: You have hissed my mystery lecture and tasted the whole term)

prescriptive grammar rules

how people SHOULD speak

descriptive grammar rules

how people ACTUALLY speak

Universal grammar

set of universal properties, possessed by all languages

recursive rules

rules that add to or embed one sentence inside another to produce an infinite number of sentences

coordination

recursive rule used to add to a sentence -> between two independent clauses and has a symmetrical relation (compound sentence)

Subordination

recursive rule that used to add to a sentence -> between one independent and one dependent (complex sentence)

Compounding

type of morphological rule combining two or more independent words to make one

Affixation

type of morphological rule where one adds prefixes and suffixes to build on word (beautiful, peacefully)

Right hand head rule

rule in the forming of compound words where the right-most word is the head (ie smart-watch = watch)

compositional

predictable from the meanings of words and their syntactic combination

structurally ambiguous

A property of phrases or sentences whose component words can be combined in more than one way.
E.g., a California history teacher

productivity

degree in which we use a morphological process to create new words (ie compounding is very productive)

Prefixes

attached to the beginning of the root

Suffixes

attached to the end of a root

free morpheme

a morpheme that can stand alone as a word (dog, happy, love)

bound morpheme

A morpheme that must be "bound" with another morpheme to form a word. Ex: un, ish, es, ed, pre

derivational affixes

modify the meaning and often the syntactic category of the root (happy -> unhappy)

inflectional affixes

affect the grammatical function of the root, NOT the meaning (walk -> walked, dance -> dances)

the able rule

V + able -> Adj

un + V

makes a V

principle of compositionality

the meaning of a sentence is determined by the meaning of its word and its syntactic structure

derivational morphemes

change the grammatical category of the word; even if they don't, fundamentally alter the meaning of the word (ex: un- means 'not adj' -> unhappy)

inflectional morphemes

affixes that can be added to a morpheme the do not change the word's meaning or grammatical category

complex

word composed of many morphemes

Wug Test

Created by Jean Gleason to determine whether children can apply rules of grammar to unknown words

circumfixes

affix around the root verb (commonly seen in languages other than english)

expletive infixation

process by which a morpheme is inserted inside another morpheme (attach after first consonant/before first vowel): abso-bloomin'-lutely

reduplicaiton

takes part of a word and repeats in for some grammatical/semantic purpose (English -> ill make the tune salad, and you make the SALAD-salad.

English reduplication term

Contrastive Focus Reduplicaiton

Shm reduplication

used for a dissmissive or pejorative connotation (books, schmooks)

Flat Structure Hypothesis

a sentence is just a string or juxtaposition of words with no special structure

Tree Structure Hypothesis

Sentences have a hierarchical internal structure

constituent

part of a word/phrase that can stand alone, can be displaced from one position to another in a sentence, can be substituted by a single word, pronoun sub trees within the TSH

stand alone test

if a group of words can stand alone in a response to a question, it is a constituent

move as a unit test

if the word/phrase can be moved around in a sentence making grammatical sense, then it is a constituent

pronoun replacement

if the constituent can be replaced by a pronoun -> then it is a consituent

lexical ambiguity (sentence)

sentence is ambiguous because of the ambiguous words within the sentence

structural ambiguity

a situation in which a sentence has two (or more) different underlying structures and interpretations

determiners

specification words -> a, the, that, miss, your, my

Auxillaries

indicates the tense of a sentence or describes the likelihood of an event (will, might, can, must)

complementizers

used to embed one sentence inside another (that, for, if, wether)

S

NP VP

NP

Det N

VP

V NP

Transitive verbs

require a direct object (the man caught a ball)

Intransitive verbs

do not take an object (the dog slept the cat) but they can take a PP

CP

C S

S/TP

NP T

T'

T VP

CP (Tense)

C S/TP

NP (Tense)

Det N'

N'

N PP

PP

P NP

X-bar schema

universal schema that specifies howe languages organize phrases into sentence -> specifies a 3 level of structure of PS trees for all languages (universal)

N' (adj)

adj N

Function of the PS rules

define the set of well-formed grammatical structures in a particular language (infinite set because of recursive rules)

Structure Dependent Agreement

The verb agrees with the subject

PS rules

generate the basic structures (eg John can dance)

Transformational (movement) rules

rules that describe the relationship between different sentence types. They take the output of the PS rules and generate S-structures

Aux movement rule example

the man has eaten a fish. Has the man eaten a fish?

passive rule example

the cat chased the mouse. The mouse was chased by the cat.

There insertion rule

There was a man on the roof. The man was on the roof.

To dative rule

I have a book to john. I gave john a book.

PP fronting

Nellie rolled down the hill. Down the hill rolled nellie.

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

the idea that different languages create different ways of thinking

semantic meaning

literal compositional meaning of a sentence (John has three kids).

pragmatic meaning

the message the speaker intends to convey with his utterance, which may be different from the linguistic meaning. The reason John is so tired is because he has three kids).

lexical semantics

meaning of words

How to tell the difference between possessional and instrumental in ambiguity?

In instrumental the item is a sister to the verb. In possessional the item is lower than the verb in the word tree.

Idioms

expressions with a fixed meaning, in which the semantic rules of compositonality do not apply

tautology

some sentences are always true

contradiction

some sentences are always false.

entailment

Sentence 1 entails sentence 2; whenever sentence 1 is true -> so is sentence 2 (Every student came to class and had a good time -> every student came to class)

synonymy (sentence structure)

two sentences are synonymous if they are always true in the same set of circumstances (Congress passed the bill. -> The bill was passed by congress.)

Contradictory sentences

two sentences are contradictory if S1 and S2 can never be true in the same situation (John came to class -> John didn't come to class).

Presupposition sentences

S1 presupposed S2 if and only if S1 entails S2 and 'not S1' also entails S2 (John stopped smoking presupposed John used to smoke).

Context sensitive (deictic) words

words that derive their meaning from the sentence (here, now, pronouns)

Implicatures

inferences that may be drawn from an utterance in context which are neither expressed directly nor strictly implied

Conversational maxims

specific rules that cooperating partners count on others to follow (quantity, quality, relevance, manner)