Linguistics Intro

What is Language? * external: social concept * internal: cognitive concept
Languages in the World * language is used by communities * counting languages * language or dialect? * political factors - government, national borders * mutual intelligibility - same language ➝ understanding * speaker’s own determination * mutually intelligible, but speakers say they are two different languages * documentation of languages in the area * linguists count languages by their grammar * sounds, pronunciation rules, syntax, vocab, etc. * counting helps determine ecology / vitality * macrolanguage: covers many dialects and languages (ex: chinese) * endangerment * about 2/5 of languages are endangered bc of globalization * UNESCO * three generation shift * oldest generation (monolingual) speakers die * middle generation becomes multilingual * youngest generation doesn’t learn first language * summary: linguists study languages for description, documentation, teaching, and preservation efforts
Language in the Mind * Ferdinand de Saussure * Langue: language competence, abstract knowledge. like rules of a game * Parole: language performance, use of language. playing the game. creates variation and fluency * Child Language Acquisition * children are biologically and neurologically predisposed to acquire the language they hear * 0-5 yrs: figuring out system of grammar * Noam Chomsky: LAD
The Communication Chain * Phonetics: study of speech sounds in articulation, acoustics, and audition * Phonology: study of speech patterns * Morphology: study of internal structure of words and word-formation processes * Syntax: deals with word order * Semantics: individual word meanings and sentence-level meanings * Pragmatics: how language is used on a practical level and how semantic meanings change in context * Sociolinguistics: regional and social dialects