Language & Mind Midterm 1 - Terms

General stuff idk

  • Linguistics = the study of human language

  • Cognitive science = the study of the human mind

  • Why language?

    • Universality across humans

    • Distinguishing feature between humans and other species

    • Highly fruitful research program (past 60 years) - knowledge of language

  • Cognitivist revolution (1950-60)

    • Noam Chomsky’s foundational works:

      • 1947 - Syntactic Structures

      • 1959 - Review of Verbal Behavior

  • Mental grammar: the system of rules and constraints stored in the mind of a speaker that generated the words and sentences of that speaker’s language




Linguistic Competence

  1. Words (meaning and sound) = lexicon

  2. How to pronounce sounds in combination with others = phonology

  3. How to build complex words out of parts = morphology

  4. How to combine words into sentences = syntax

  5. How to understand what sentences mean = semantics




Arguments for Innateness

  • The way that children learn language implies that the human mind/brain contains a genetically determined specialization for language

  • Uniformity throughout the species

  • Species-specificity

  • Poverty of the stimulus: children create grammar beyond what they have evidence for

  • Critical period

  • Universal grammar: no language forms negation by reversing the order of the words (Mary has eaten the cookies -> cookies the eaten has mary)




Morphology General Stuff

  • Morphology = rules of complex word formation

  • Lexicon = mental dictionary of sound-meaning pairs

  • Morpheme = smallest unit of meaning

  • Affix: a bound morpheme that is part of a complex word but does not belong to any lexical category (verb, noun, adjective, etc.)



Inflection vs Derivation

  • Category and meaning change

    • Inflection NEVER changes the part of speech of the root while derivation often does

      • Sweet-er vs sweet-ness

    • Inflection does not change the meaning of the root, while derivation often does

      • King-s vs king-dom

  • Productivity

    • Inflectional affixes usually attach to a whole word class (with very few exceptions)

      • Ex: plural s can apply to almost all nouns

    • Derivational affixes usually only attach to a small subset of word class

      • -ful can only be added to some nouns

  • Order

    • Derivation applies before inflectoin

      • America-American-Americanize-Americanized (only Americanized is inflection, in some cases lolzies)



Inflection & Derivation in other languages

  • Isolating (analytic): avoid affixes, use free forms. One word ~ one morpheme. Use helping verbs and word order (Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Khmer, Yoruba)

  • Synthetic (agglutinating, fusional, polysynthetic): inflection and agglutination are used to express syntactic and semantic relationships

  • Inflection: the addition of morphemes to a root word that assigns a grammatical property

  • Agglutination: combination of two or more morphemes into one word

    • Widely use affixes, affixes typically express a single piece of grammatical information (Turkish, Finnish, Japanese, Korean)

  • Fusional/inflectional: widely use affixes, affixes typically express several pieces of grammatical information (Romance, Slavic, German, Hindi, Greek)

    • Yo comi - Spanish - first person, past tense, singular

  • Polysynthetic: word are composed on many (free or bound) morphemes. Highly inflected. Have long sentence-words (Many indigenous languages of Americas and Asia)



Other morphological processes

  • Alternation: substituting one non-morphemic segment for another non-morphemic segment to mark a grammatical contrast (sing -> sang)

  • Suppletion: replacing one morpheme by a completely different one (go -> went)

  • Reduplication (total or partial): repeating (a part of) the word to mark grammatical contrast): “It’s tuna salad, not SALAD-salad” russian: “quickly -> quickly quickly = very quickly”

  • Cliticization: clitics (enclitics and proclitics) behave like words (meaning and function) but are unable to stand on their own for phonological reasons (contraction part of contractions (they’re)



Creating new words

  • Conversion: assigning an already existing word a new lexical category

    • A ship (n) -> to ship (v) a package

  • Clipping: shortening a polysyllabic word by deleting one or more syllables

    • Influenza - flu

  • Blending: creating words from nonmorphemic parts of two already existing items

    • Hungry + angry -> hangry

  • Backformation: creating a new word by removing a real or supposed affix from another word in a language

    • Enthusiasm -> enthuse