Linguistics Intro

1. What is Language?
   • external: social concept
   • internal: cognitive concept
2. 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
3. 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
4. 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

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