Talking about Language

[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.]

Hello, everybody, and welcome to this third lecture in the language section of Cognitive Psychology.

This week, I'll be talking about, um, kind of core issues in language and language processing that.

Uh, psychologists are interested in. Um.

Before I start on that, I did say another tip on short answer questions.

Just let me say that obviously the one I gave you last time, which is right, something rather than nothing applies to MC as well.

Don't leave MC with no answer. You cannot be penalised in our system for a wrong answer.

You don't put anything. You definitely get nothing.

If you put something, you might have got the right answer. Even if you've got no idea, you might have guessed it.

So always select an answer for Mcqs.

Always write something for short answers. There's a second tip for these questions.

Again it applies to both is know your facts.

Hey. Both MCU's and and perhaps even more particularly,

the short answer questions are usually factually things that are factual things that you need to remember.

Now, there is a notion around these days. Uh.

Hear it from my wife, for example. Some of you may have encountered in foundation here that we don't need to

memorise things these days because you can look at your phone and look them up.

So I've got two things to say about that. One is you might not need to be able to memorise things.

But being able to memorise is a good skill.

Most of the things that we come across in education are things we don't need that are useful skills.

The other thing is, if you look something up. You got to be able to assess the reliability of your sources.

And we know, unfortunately, that people are extremely bad at doing that.

Uh, sometimes they're just bad and sometimes they're just deliberately, uh, not trying to assess the truth.

So we know that people who follow Elon Musk, for example.

I don't care whether what he says is true. I just want to hear what they want to hear.

So that's the tip. Know your facts to answer mcqs and short answer questions.

Okay, so. Today I'm going to be talking about language and languages.

Am I doing that? Well, because they're important in the psychology of language that we we speak, use language all the time.

We learn to speak as young children.

We don't realise we're learning a language. We don't realise we're learning something very complicated.

But we are. And for most kids, that happens without any real problems.

Doesn't happen immediately. Happens over time, but it goes smoothly.

And of course, in literate societies like our own, um,

most people also learn to read fluently at a somewhat later age, and they find it more difficult.

It's, you know, it's for most people, it's a it is a learning process.

You it feels quite hard. Some kids that just seem to pick up reading at most are taught to read in schools.

As I've already said, and as I said last week, as adults we use language all the time without thinking there's any problem with that.

It's not difficult, um, certainly spoken language, but most of it's written language,

whether that's printed in books and magazines, whether it's on screen language.

Uh, and some people, of course, use other forms of language like sign language, which I'll say a little bit about in, in the lecture today.

Now, these languages, whether they're spoken written side languages or whatever, they're very complicated systems.

And as users of learning, when we're using language in our everyday life, talking to our friends,

looking at stuff on our screens, and so we don't think that there's this something complicated about language.

It's just something we do quite naturally, just as we see things quite naturally.

If we've got good vision, we pay attention to things.

We remember two things, all the things we've been talking about in the cognitive class.

As uses of those systems. Uses of memory.

Uses of language. Uses of attentional systems. We don't have an intuitive grasp of the complications that underlie our use of those systems.

In the case of languages. Languages are studied in a separate discipline.

Linguistics is taught at Sussex. Whole degree, our undergraduate degree in linguistics.

And what you've done that lots and lots of stuff about languages you still don't know.

So what are we going to be talking about today? We're going to talk about the fact that languages have structure, complicated structures.

And they have two levels the structure of forms, the bits and pieces that get put together and how they get put together.

But we put them together so that we convey meanings to other people.

And those meanings themselves are also complicated and structured.

And it's the structures of form that allow us to express the complicatedly structured meanings,

to get information across to other people, to interact with them in various ways.

And as I've already been emphasising, the structures are complicated, they're multi-layered.

And that's reflected in the fact that if you if you're a student of linguistics, you'll be studying linguistics.

You will study languages at many different levels, which I'll say a little bit about in the lecture today.

Um. These issues of of, uh.

Of form apply.

Very clearly when you're talking about words, when you talk about phrases, when you're talking about individual sentences or utterances.

Where do you go beyond that to talk about conversations, texts, discourses, and so on.

The questions become a little more difficult to to, to answer.

And finally, uh, as you may well know, uh, linguists and psychologists are interested in the question do all languages have things in common?

Well, in a sense, yes they do. But what is it they have in common?

Is it something very deep and complicated, or is it just they're all based on sounds that come out of our mouths or whatever?

Um. So this isn't an advert.

This is a very old book that I wrote, first published in 1985.

I put it on, uh, really for the cover. The on the cover, I put a cartoon from Glen Baxter, from his book The Impending Glen.

And, uh, just, um. Blow up that bit so you can see what the caption says is Jed is saying,

surely language is not defined for us as an arrangement fulfilling your definite purpose.

Well, from what I've been saying. Yes it is.

In fact, there's arrangements in language at two levels.

There's arrangements of forms, bits and pieces of language, and there's an arrangement of meanings that those arrangements of form allow us to convey.

And there's a purpose to language, to convey information to interact with, to, to form social bonds.

Not maybe not a single purpose, but there are a set of purposes for which we use language.

Though perhaps Jed isn't right after all. Okay.

So let's say a little bit more about to this business of arrangements and purpose.

As I've already kind of been saying, there's arrangements in language on two fronts.

There are patterns of full. So in spoken languages, that's patterns of sounds.

In visual language. Written language. Printed language.

Computer screen language. There are patterns of visual marks.

Um. In sign languages, there are patterns of hand positions.

So. So there's arrangements of, of form, patterns of form in language.

And there are patterns of meaning because we we express complicated thoughts, convey complicated bits of information to one another.

Uh, and this notion, uh, of uh, patterning at two different levels was called by this guy Charles Hockett.

Duality of parsimony. So parsimony form factor means meaning.

So that's the arrangement. And I've said the purpose of language is communication in some very broad sense.

There's been a bit of a tendency in sort of highfalutin academic circles to to focus on communicating information, stating facts, right?

You know, writing psychology texts like psycholinguistics, central topics, for example.

But another purposes a very important purpose in languages is social interaction, where often the actual content is not so important.

Um. It's perhaps less studied within psychology, and perhaps it should be studied more, but it's there.

It's one of the purposes of of language. So as I've already said, we've got this separate discipline of linguistics in which we study.

Language in general and to. To some extent we study individual languages, whether they're in languages, whether they're,

um, Native American languages, Asian languages, Australasia languages, whatever they might be.

There are lots and lots of there are there are thousands, small number of thousands of languages still spoken in the world.

Um. And they cluster into various families.

Within the families of languages. There are more similarities, obviously, than across languages.

And so. And as I've already said, the arrangements or structures on both sides of the structures of the form,

the structures of the bits and pieces you put together and the structures of the meanings that you're trying to convey.

These are complicated.

It's the relations between those two structures, the structures of forming structures of meaning that allow you to convey information to other people.

For the most part. The relations are arbitrary.

To give a very simple example at the level of words.

The fact that the English word cat refers to a certain type of animal.

There's nothing systematic that's in different languages. We refer to the same types of animals, but with completely different words.

So that's the sense in which the relation is arbitrary.

Now, of course, we're psychologists of a study in psychology. So we're really interested in the use of language.

So. The complicated systems which we're using all the time.

How do we do that? Well, there must be a store of information in the brain that somehow reflects,

maybe quite indirectly, the kinds of structures that linguists identify when they study languages.

So the information stored and then the mechanisms that put that information to use to use it,

and mechanisms that allow us to understand what's said to us or what we read, mechanisms that allow us to say things or write things.

So that's comprehension and production and also mechanisms that allow us to do more complicated things, like engage in conversations.

Uh, and so I'll say a bit more about the, uh, details of the psychology of language.

Uh, in the last lecture. Um.

I've said for the most part the relations between the forms and the meanings arbitrary.

We concentrate on spoken language. Not all connections are arbitrary.

And there's a phenomenon of fairly widespread phenomenon called sound symbolism, which is an example of non arbitrariness.

So. An example in English.

Uh, is. Words beginning with.

This is words beginning with glove.

Before I reveal some of these, you might say, think to yourself, what are these words and what do they have in common?

What do the ones beginning with [INAUDIBLE] have in common? What are the ones that beginning with glove have in common?

I have a little bit of a think about that. So the slow ones, that little bit yucky.

Slime, slither, sludge and so on.

And the gleam of the glove are a bit sort of shiny glitter glow.

And so. So that's a non arbitrary connection between sounds and the meanings that in

this case words beginning with those particular combinations of sounds have.

And that's from English. The not arbitrary connection between words and their meanings.

If you look across a variety of languages, you will see some kinds of sound symbolism that are common across all languages.

So some examples from this study mentioned here is that, uh, words with this sound is a source of sound.

A in them tend to refer to small things, uh, whereas words that um.

Begin with cut above ten to suggest fullness.

Now, that's not obviously not every word that begins with in every language, but it's a tendency.

It's a non arbitrary connection between sounds and meanings.

Um. This is.

These bits are coming up the wrong way around. Um. You can see some symbolism in brand names.

So for example. If you had two types of ketchup.

One was called nadex and one was called nadex.

Which one would you think was thicker? Most people will give the same answer, and I'm sure most of you will say the second of those.

Um, so I'm not sure what is coming out in that order. We also know from various studies that children, uh, learn sound symbolic.

The way they looked at verbs. They looked at verbs. But, uh.

Words that contain these sound symbolic connections, like the ones I've given above for English.

Those tend to be learned earlier. Other things being equal by kids.

So. That's the sort of psychological reflex of this sound symbolism where you get these not arbitrary connections.

Things might be easy. So why isn't everything? Why is everything symbolic?

Well, we need to be able to express loads and loads and loads of different meanings and it just wouldn't work.

So. It's good to mention.

I've already said linguistics is a complicated discipline.

Let's just, uh, see some of the kinds of things that it tries to look at when that linguist try to look at when they look at languages.

So. We look at the sound, the sounds of language, you know, or if we're looking at written languages,

we look at the letters that make up, uh, scripts in alphabetic languages or other symbols.

Beyond the individual sounds. We look at patterns of sounds.

So some some set. For example, some sequences of sounds are allowed in English words and others aren't.

Similarly, for patterns of letters, I'll say a little bit more about these. They look at structures in phrase.

When you put several words together to make a phrase or a sentence, how are they structured together?

Is there structure beyond that? I've already mentioned at the beginning that that's a kind of open question.

And then we have other, uh, parts of linguistics that look at meaning of direct, direct or literal meaning that words, phrases, sentences have.

There are indirect types of meaning, how the utterances come to have indirect meanings, how do they relate to direct meanings, and so on.

And then there are things like issues about style. Do you write in the formal style when you're writing academic material,

do you talk in a casual way when you're chatting with your friends in some slightly different way,

perhaps when you're chatting with tutors or parents and so on.

So. Perhaps I should say explicitly.

Just just. I'll just remind you. Spoken languages prior to written language.

So there's a bit of a tendency. There's been a bit of a tendency in the psychology of language to look at written language,

because it's easier to design studies with written language.

Variety of reasons. But if we're really thinking about language.

Spoken language is the basic form. You look at language development, obviously, you look at very young kids.

You could only look at spoken.

A crucial observation is that the sounds we use in language are different from the other kinds of sounds we make with our mouths.

Those are sounds of things like coughs, whistles.

So on. They're quite different types of sets. The sounds in language are quite different, and they're very specific to human vocal anatomy.

So the early studies, uh, back in the 1930s, trying to teach, um, chimpanzees to speak English.

Failed because chimpanzees cannot make the same range of language sounds that, uh, people did.

And that's why they work on chimp language.

Moved to sign languages because chimps can do the signs, but they can't make the vocal.

So the very basic sounds of speech are called sounds.

And there's a yeah, there are tens up to that 100 of them that are used in the world's languages.

Um. Not every language uses every sound.

And in some, like in every language, some actually different sounds, uh, are treated equivalently.

So, uh, those groups of phonemes that are treated the same way in a language, uh, are called phonemes.

So the crucial thing in a language like English is how many different phonemes are there that you can make words out of?

And the answer is somewhere around 35 to 40. It depends a bit on the dialect, um, or the country in which you're speaking.

Um, and here's a, uh, simple thing you can do to.

Show yourself that what seems to be the same set seems to be a pass, and must be different because.

What's happening when you make the sound is different.

So you can you can, um, demonstrate this to yourself by putting your finger in front of your mouth and saying pin and saying spin.

When you say pin. The part in the pin involves a puff of air coming out of your mouth, and the putting spin doesn't.

Uh, so there must be different sounds while you're doing that. I'm going to generate today's, um, attendance code.

Okay, so today's attendance code is 0550.

Okay. But he got that 0550.

And that's today's attendance code. So, um, although they the puff when you say the word pin in, say the word spin.

The sounds are slightly different. They're treated as equivalent sounds by English speakers.

By equivalent, we mean that. If by any chance you could, you could force yourself to make the so-called, um, aspirated sound when you said pin.

It wouldn't be a different word. To change the word, you've got to shift to a different phoneme.

So if you change from the huff phoneme to the above phoneme, then the word changes from pin to then.

So the phonemes are the crucial things that determine what the words and when you put the string of phonemes together.

A string of phonemes makes a word, and it doesn't matter if they're pronounced slightly differently from case to case,

as long as you stick with the same phoneme, it's the same word.

As soon as you switch to a different phoneme, it's a different or it might not be a word at all.

There isn't a word, so there isn't a word.

Written in English, for example. So obviously RA is a different phonemes from pattern, but.

Um, so those are the there's the whole set of individual sounds, and then there's the, the groupings of those into phonemes, those.

That's kind of a bit like lessons. Lessons are a bit more sort of mentally prominent for most literate English speakers.

And. I stressed at the beginning that linguists talk about patterns.

Patterns of form. So patterns of form here are. How are you allowed to put these phonemes together to make words in English, for example?

You might think that's a simple shoot. There's a massive book that fat called the Sam Pattern of English by two very prominent ones.

Chomsky, better known for his work on syntax and universal grammar, and Morris.

Hello. Um, it's a massive book about the sound pattern of English, uh, very influential, the sorts of things it talks about.

Uh, I've shown that in, in a written form, but, uh, we're talking about sound patterns.

So the sequence of, uh, characters you scratch is an English word.

But if you want to do separate tissue, perhaps that's not an English word.

It's not. Not just not an English word. You're not allowed to have English words that begin with SB loanwords from Italian.

I think that, but, um, that's not in allowable sequence in English.

There's no reason why it's perfectly pronounceable, but in English it's not allowed.

So that's sequences of sounds with in words is one thing that these, uh, issues about form deal with.

And the other thing is, um, what's called super segmental for a segment is a phoneme.

So it's talking about things that are not associated with individual phonemes, but with, um, sequences.

And these are things like rhythm, intonation, stress, timing and so on, which are all, you know, that they're important, they can influence meaning.

So if I say, um. There's an apple on the table.

That's a statement of fact. And I say it's an apple on the table.

Uh, that's the question.

And it's to do with different intonation, different passing of intonation across that the same sequence of words, hence the same sequence of phonemes.

So um. That intonation does have an effect on me.

So this is a connection between the patterning on the sand side and patterns of meaning.

What about written language will have already said um, written language is the derivative form.

The crucial form of language is spoken language. But talking about written printed marks on paper and computer screens and so on.

Um. We tend to say things mainly.

Not all of you are native speakers of English. But most of you will be native speakers and all of you.

Most of you will be native speakers of languages that have alphabetic writing systems and in alphabetic writing systems.

The letters in the alphabet correspond. Roughly speaking, to the phonemes now in English.

English is a pretty irregular language, as you undoubtedly know.

Why is why ach t spelt so pronounced what you're after?

Uh, and there are all sorts of other irregularities in English spelling.

Uh, but very roughly speaking. Letters are approximately equal to phonemes.

So b is, uh, p is puff. And so other languages, uh, even some of the other European languages.

I mean, the typical examples is a Spanish Finnish, which is actually from a different language family, um, the Latin family that Spanish is part of.

Uh, they are much more regular in their correspondence between the sounds and the letters.

There are two other types of writing system.

One is called a syllabary. So a syllabary is syllables are things like, uh, or.

After. Um, the best known language that uses a syllable or actually uses two syllables is Japanese.

Japanese also uses, uh, Chinese characters as well, but there are two syllables.

That's a common hiragana in Japanese. Um, the Cherokee language from North America.

Uses a syllabary linear B, so I've spelt my saying that a in my singing shouldn't be there.

Um. The language linear B, which was discovered at Knossos.

Um uses a syllabary. And the third type of writing system is a low grade graphic writing system where a symbol sort of corresponds to a word.

It's not quite as simple as that. And the best known example of that, uh, today's modern Chinese.

Uh, other languages, uh, the main language of, um, Mexico and other parts of Central America, uh,

which died out with the Mayan civilisation and cuneiform, which you may have heard of, which was, uh, used for a variety of Near Eastern languages.

Many hundreds and thousands of years ago. So not hundreds.

Hundreds of thousands. A few thousand years ago. Um.

So you've got these different types of writing system, that alphabetic system,

it has a lot of advantages and has come to dominate the writing systems of the world's languages.

So. Corresponding to identifying phonemes.

You've got letters in those languages, and then you've got rules for what strings of letters are allowed in making up words in particular languages.

And you've got things like punctuation that vaguely correspond to things like intonation and so on.

So. We've got the same kinds of patterns in written language that you have in.

Um. As I mentioned at the beginning, in addition to to uh, written and uh, spoken of in.

Generally, written languages are forms of spoken language. Sign language is something different again.

They have signs made with your hands that can vary in their exact form from occasion to occasion.

Rather like a phoneme might be pronounced slightly differently on one occasion to another.

Uh, but the you know, there are clear boundaries between what counts as one sign and what counts as another sign.

And generally the signs correspond roughly to words in in spoken languages.

As you may know, in order to allow.

Deaf people to communicate with hearing people. You sometimes also get so-called systems of fingerspelling.

You spell out with your fingers. Words in a in a language like English or whatever it might be.

But that's not that's not sign language. That's.

Something is an auxiliary thing that people who need to communicate between deaf and speaking people sometimes use the sign.

Languages themselves are completely separate languages.

They've been shown in the last 56 years to be fully fledged languages that have all the properties that other languages have.

They have patterns of form. They have patterns of meaning.

And. The fact that you have a name like British Sign Language or American Sign Language doesn't mean that these are anything to do with specifically,

anything to do with the languages spoken around. So, so far I've really been talking primarily about about words,

whether they're words in the spoken language, words in the written language, or words in a sign language.

But of course. When we're using language, we've got to go beyond individual words.

If we could only using individual words, we'd only be able to label types of things.

We want to express much more complicated meanings, and we want to do that by creating formal structures so the way words are put together.

Um. So I've just indicated here how you can, uh, build up, uh, a complicated structure.

Uh, and uh, at each stage you've got a sequence of words that make sense.

AI corresponds to a particular meaning, so you've got table to.

All things of a certain kind. Brown table. That's a subset of tables.

Big brown table. That's an even more specific subset.

When I add that in, I've seen that if you're talking about a specific if, say,

the big brown table and they're talking about a specific table, which one it is depends on the context in which you say the big brown table.

And then we could go on to the big round table. Stanley polished the big round table.

Now deliberately chosen the way I built that up. There are some sequences of words in that final sentence.

Stanley polished the big round table that are not sensible units polished the big.

That's not a sensibility that doesn't convey a particular bit of meaning, or neither does the big brand by itself.

So. There is structure within that sentence.

But it's not just any old structure. It's a very specific structure that allows us to express particular types of of meaning.

There's a wave, so there's a wave. Uh, there are several ways of drawing out their structure.

They've got one of them in one of the supplementary slides, I think. What about some?

Going beyond individual. Individual sentences is not not much good for the kinds of things we want to do with language in everyday life.

We want longer texts that describe complicated events, sequences, events, and so on.

We want to and fro in conversations where you say one thing, I say another thing, then I come back to them, blah blah blah blah blah.

Um. And clearly there are some kinds of relations between the you know what I say here and what I say next and what I say and what you say.

So here's a very simple example here, Sandra through the brick at the window.

The glass smashed into a thousand pieces. The relation.

The meaning relation between those two sentences is that the first one is the cause and the second one is the effect.

Sound was throwing the brick at the window that makes it or causes it to smash.

So that's. And that that's an arrangments on the side of meaning.

That's the meaning relation. Is there a structural relation that just seems to be two sentences in the sequence?

Is there something we can describe on the formal side beyond that? Well, that's an open questions, as I've said, but you can do other things.

You can actually structure the sentences by by putting in words that join the

sentences together and signal the kind of meaning relation that's intended.

So instead of just having the two sentences I can throw in there because which explicitly on the one hand signals the meaning,

but also gives the sentence structure, because we've now got it's not two separate sentences.

We've got two clauses that are part of the same sentence. So it's explicitly saying but that's just relationships.

It's just the relationship between. Two things that are very close together.

Obviously, in a larger text you've got lots and lots of different things going on.

Um, and there is a question about whether there is a structure of meaning.

Now, some people have claimed that there are formal structures in texts which lead to the.

Complicated meanings that those texts convey.

And here are two, uh, well known examples that not from the psychology literature.

The first one is, um, a book originally published in Russian by Vladimir Prop in the 1920s about morphology because morphology means structure.

The morphology of the folktale. So he looks at various different types of folktale and said, well, these all have a particular structure.

And that structure on the formal side tells you about the mean that obviously folktales tend to be much more tightly structured than,

say, a conversation that you have with your friend on the way back from the pub.

Well, what had. Another.

So that's the book at the bottom of another well known, um, set of ideas about structure in stories of a particular kind.

Is is Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces?

Um. He refers to the kind of stories that he's talking about here as monomyth or hero's journeys.

Um, and again, these are highly structured kinds of stories, um,

where you might think there is some formal structure that underlines the structure, meaning that the story's tending to give back.

Another example would be in. Literature.

Literary criticism. There's a three act analysis of I mean, some plays are specifically structured into three acts of this type.

Films typically wouldn't be, but it's in certain types of plays and films.

You can see, first of all, a set up, then some sort of confrontation, and then the resolution of that comes a consultation.

So that's sometimes been satirised. And so these kind of plays of a.

And, um. But again, it's an idea that there is, at least for certain kinds of dramas.

There is a formal structure that underlies the kind of meaning, in a very broad sense, that the authors are trying to convey.

And another I. I've this final example because these people are all psychologists.

They've largely manned the lines of study. These are people who said.

Okay, I've seen these ideas about how sentences are structured from Chomsky.

And I, uh. Use the same idea of structuring of parts and stories of certain kinds.

Um, to, um, explain how stories are processed.

These are psychological. That's been very controversial.

And, you know, the problem is you write out some rules for how stories are structured, and then someone comes along, oh, what about this story?

Or what about that story or what about that one? So just as props were applied to very specific sets of folktales,

these ideas about stories being structured by grammars that are similar to the grammars that structure sentences.

They seem to be very restricted in the kinds of stories they can deal with.

And of course, you look at the psychological experiments and you know you've got these.

610 sentence stories that are very, very formulaic.

So as I've said, the.

There is this kind of unresolved issue about whether you can really make a general distinction between form and meaning at this level,

for certain restricted classes of text. You seem to be able to, but can you apply that idea generally?

Well, my view is probably not. But other people might say yes.

Um. When I was talking about words before.

I was talking about structure of the form.

You know, we've got these bits that we can put together phonemes or letters and we can put them together in certain ways.

We can't put them together in other ways. And they make things that might be words in the language, whether, you know,

whether a string of letters that's allowable in the language is actually a word in that language is just a matter of chance, usually.

But what about what about the meanings of words? Because we talked in the first lecture last week about about concepts.

And that's all to do with word meaning. Phonemes or less.

Lexis, which is sometimes called grapheme, is the source of phonemes graphene's, graphene, the letters,

all other things that perhaps something like C-H would be regarded as a single grapheme because it has a single sound associated with it.

They don't have meanings in themselves, but they make words that do have meanings, and words can have internal meaning structures.

And that study in the branch of linguistics called morphology.

Slightly, you know, morphology. If you step outside of morphology as a more general bend, it's something to do with form in general.

So if you look in biology, for example. But in linguistics it means structure of meaning within words.

So I've just shown a, you know, a well known example of a highly structured word in English showing the different bits being put together.

Uh, so a morpheme is the smallest unit that can carry meaning in a particular.

And in many cases, a morpheme is just a word that is a tool.

Free morphemes cat table, justice, red cross, etc., etc. single words that there is meaning and for most some.

For the most part, the relation between the form and the meaning is arbitrary,

and we have onomatopoeic words where the sound of the words like or vaguely suggests the sound it refers to.

But most, uh, in most cases the connection is arbitrary.

In addition to the free morphemes, we have two types of bound more things which can't stand by themselves as words.

But when you add them onto words, they change the meaning in various ways.

So we've got the so-called inflections, uh, which are used for things like, uh, turning a noun into its plural cat cats table tables.

And then we have, uh, things like, um. More things that change the tense of verbs.

So, um. We can have things like speed, speed or.

So the Eddie Murphy which changes to the past tense and so and then the other class of them and more things of the derivational morphemes that change,

uh, the meaning of a word sometimes change its category.

So it's, um, fit, uh.

Playing. So that's that's a good idea.

And. Things like love.

Lovely. Uh, so so these, uh, uh, again, the, uh, those, uh, prefixes and suffixes can't stand by themselves as words.

They do have, have particular meanings. So things like, um, changes the meaning from positive to negative or vice versa.

Ness changes something from a property into a.

Some sort of substantive and so on. Uh.

So. That's just a very brief overview of the kinds of structure in many structure you find in individual words.

What about even when you go beyond individual words?

Well, we've seen that words are. Uh, structured in various ways into phrases like, uh, the big brown table.

Um, and obviously the meaning of that phrase depends on the meanings of the words in it and the way that they're put together.

And that's known as the principle of compositionality. So if you want the literal, if you want to talk about the literal meaning of a complex phrase,

then it derives from from the meanings of the words and the way they put together.

And you can see that the structure, the way that the words structured, uh, together does influence the way that, um.

The meaning derives. So here are two two examples of sequences of words that can be grouped together in different ways.

So presumably they intended. Many of the first one is that the squad helps dog bite victim by the victim of a dog bite.

And it doesn't mean that the squad helps the dog by victim.

I. The dog to bite the victim.

The first thing to do are in the second one.

Here we we've got, as I mentioned here, we've got uh uh uh uh.

Difference of meaning in the word waffles as well. So this is a.

A headline from the Falklands War that my colleague Gerry Altman brought to my attention is supposed to say British left waffles on Falklands I.

Left leaning politicians were blathering on about what was going on in the Falklands, but it could also be grouped in a different way.

So the British left waffles on the Falklands, presumably because they thought some did like to.

So depending on the way you see the words is being structured, you get different structures on the meaning side coming out.

So it's reasonably clear at the level of phrases and sentences.

The literal meaning at least derives from the words and the way they're structured together.

Um, beyond sentences, we've already mentioned that, um.

The the things, events or whatever that are described in different sentences.

Particular sentences next to each other can be related to each other by relation meaning relationships such as cause and effect,

or statements in the supporting arguments or whatever. Um, and uh, sometimes those relations are signals by um.

Coordinators and subordinates is like, because um.

And the structural relationships introduced by.

Making sentences with those called the nations or subordinates in them reflects

the uh meaning relationship like effect calls that realise that lies beneath.

Now. It's all very well talking about the literal meaning of phrases and sentences,

but most of the time there's much more to engaging in conversations than writing texts and so on, than just conveying bits of literal meaning.

There are other types of meaning which are sometimes grouped together under the head of pragmatic meaning.

Things that you would do when you're saying things. And.

Some of the phenomena.

I've just very, very briefly mentioning some of the phenomena of this study, partly because psychologists have been interested in these phenomena.

Also, there's the phenomena phenomenon of presupposition.

So few is to say, I've stopped eating fast food.

You're not saying explicitly I used to eat it, but you're presupposing it doesn't make sense to say you stopped eating it unless you used to eat it.

There are things that might be implicated by what you say, but again, are not explicitly stated.

So if you if you say some of the fans went to the match, you wouldn't say that if you do that, all of them went to the match.

So it indicates that not all of them went. There are.

Issues about politeness that can be expressed by the way that you phrase what you're saying and then that.

That links with this idea of one of the purposes of language being social interaction, cementing or otherwise your social relations.

Um, you've got figurative language, metaphors, idioms and so on.

And you've also got the fact that when you say something, you might actually be performing some non-linguistic action.

Um, that idea was introduced by the philosopher J.L. Austin in his book How to Do Things with Words,

and taken up by Johnson and his work on speech charts.

And a typical example is that, you know, by uttering those words or similar words in the context of a marriage ceremony,

you actually, you know, you're not just saying something, you're actually performing the action of, uh, marrying that person.

Um, again, as I mentioned at the beginning, another thing that started in, uh, certain parts of, um.

Linguistics and is, you know, is is important in, uh, psychological work is stylistics.

Well, are you speaking the formal? Why are you speaking in an informal way?

Are you speaking a version of the language that's specific to your local community,

a dialect, or are you speaking in the the formal, uh, language of, uh.

Uh, the country that you live in. Are you speaking formally or informally?

Um. And these issues actually cross the boundaries between linguistics and literary criticism.

Finally, as I said at the beginning, linguists are interested not only in particular languages but what's what,

if anything, all languages have in common. And we've seen that superficially, languages can be very different.

And that was one of the things that led Wolfram, who we're talking about last time, to his linguistic relativity hypothesis.

But perhaps, you know, we've already seen one thing. This language is all use a set of sounds which are specific to language,

and they're very different from the other kinds of sounds we can make with our mouths.

And, um. Many linguists believe that all languages, despite looking superficially different, have something fairly profound in common underneath them.

And that's something that Chomsky calls universal grammar.

And that's to do primarily with the idea that there are general principles involving structures of phrases and sentences.

So just to summarise what I've been saying today. Languages are complex systems, and those users of them were not aware of the complexity.

They have structure and form and structure of meaning, what Hockett called duality of patterning.

The relationship between the two sets of patterns are largely not entirely arbitrary.

Sense symbolism. Structures found is found within words and between words and clauses.

Beyond those. Beyond sentences, there still are patterns.

But whether there is as that the larger stretches of language you consider,

the more disputed it is whether you can identify truly structural patterns.

Linguists are also interested in what all languages have in common.

Finally, don't forget languages are very complicated systems.

Okay, that's it for today. There are some supplementary sides.

Again, more about arbitrariness. More of that language and more that you can look at those on online.

Okay, so the final lecture is on Friday morning.

I'll be talking about psychology of language.