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