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