Comprehensive Notes on Linguistics

Languages and Linguistics

  • What is Language?

    • No human language is inherently wrong, defective, or inferior. All native speaker varieties are systematic, logical, and complex.

    • Languages have similar levels of complexity, though manifested in different areas.

  • What do you know when you know a language?

    • Linguistic competence: Unconscious knowledge of the language.

    • Linguistic performance: Actual language use, including potential errors.

  • Levels of Linguistic Structure:

    • Phonetics & Phonology: Sounds of language.

      • Phonetics: the study of the sounds of human speech

      • Phonology: the system of relationships among the speech sounds that constitute the fundamental components of a language.

    • Morphology: Word formation.

    • Syntax: Sentence structure.

    • Semantics: Meaning.

    • Pragmatics: Contextual interpretation.

  • Language is arbitrary but structured.

  • Prescriptive vs. Descriptive Grammar

    • Prescriptive: Rules about how language should be used.

    • Descriptive: Description of how language is actually used.

    • Linguists focus on descriptive grammar.

  • Language as a system of communication with unique design features:

    • Mode of communication, semanticity, interchangeability, arbitrariness, discreteness, displacement, productivity

  • Language exists in multiple modalities (spoken, signed, written).

    • Signed languages adhere to linguistic principles.

Phonetics

  • Three Aspects of Phonetics:

    • Articulatory, acoustic, auditory

  • Vocal Tract Anatomy:

    • Air flow, vocal folds, and oral & nasal cavities.

  • Segments vs. Suprasegmentals

    • Segments: Individual speech sounds.

    • Suprasegmentals: Features like stress, intonation, and tone that occur above the level of individual segments.

  • Consonants vs. Vowels:

    • Consonants: produced with a significant constriction or closure in the vocal tract.

    • Vowels: produced with relatively little obstruction in the vocal tract.

  • Consonants:

    • Features: voicing, place of articulation, manner of articulation.

    • Classes: Stops/obstruents, fricatives, affricates, liquids/glides.

  • Vowels:

    • Features: height, backness, roundness.

Phonology

  • Phonotactic Constraints:

    • Rules governing permissible sound sequences in a language.

    • Languages vary in their phonotactic constraints.

  • Phonetic Inventory:

    • The set of speech sounds a language uses

  • Phonemes vs. Allophones:

    • Phoneme: A basic unit of sound in a language that can distinguish between words.

    • Allophone: A variation of a phoneme that doesn't change the meaning of a word.

  • Distribution of Speech Sounds:

    • How and where a sound occurs in a language.

    • Types: complementary distribution, contrastive distribution, free variation.

      • Complementary distribution: Allophones occur in mutually exclusive environments.

      • Contrastive distribution: Sounds can occur in the same environment and distinguish meaning.

      • Free variation: Sounds can occur in the same environment without changing meaning or creating a new word.

  • Phonological Rules:

    • Rules describing how sounds change in certain environments.

    • Natural Classes: the groups of sounds with similar articulatory or acoustic properties that undergo the same phonological changes

Morphology

  • Morphology: The study of word formation.

  • Words and Word Formation:

    • The Nature of the Lexicon: A mental dictionary of words and their properties.

  • Morphological Processes:

    • Affixation, compounding, reduplication, alternation, suppletion.

  • Morphological Types of Languages:

    • Isolating, agglutinative, fusional, polysynthetic.

  • Hierarchical Structure of Derived Words:

    • Morphemes combine in specific orders to create complex words.

  • Morphological Analysis:

    • Identifying and describing the morphemes in a word.

Syntax

  • Syntax: The study of sentence structure.

  • Basic Ideas of Syntax:

    • Rules and principles governing how words combine to form phrases and sentences.

  • Syntactic Properties:

    • Word order, constituency, agreement.

  • Syntactic Constituency:

    • Groups of words that function as a unit within a sentence.

  • Syntactic Categories:

    • Noun, verb, adjective, preposition, etc.

  • Constructing a Grammar:

    • Developing rules to generate grammatical sentences in a language.

Semantics

  • Semantics: The study of meaning.

  • Subfields of Semantics:

    • Lexical semantics, compositional semantics.

  • Sets and Reference:

    • How words and phrases refer to objects and concepts in the world.

  • Lexical Relations:

    • Synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy.

  • Sentence Relations:

    • Entailment, paraphrase, contradiction.

  • Lexical Semantics:

    • Meaning of words.

  • Compositional Semantics:

    • How the meaning of a sentence is built up from the meaning of its parts.

  • Metaphor:

    • Understanding one concept in terms of another.

Pragmatics

  • Pragmatics: The study of how context affects meaning.

  • Sentence Meaning vs. Utterance Meaning:

    • Sentence meaning: The literal meaning of a sentence.

    • Utterance meaning: The meaning of a sentence in a specific context.

  • Deixis:

    • Words that rely on context for their meaning (e.g., pronouns, demonstratives).

  • Types of Context:

    • Linguistic, situational, social.

  • Felicity:

    • Appropriateness of an utterance in a given context.

  • Grice's Four Maxims:

    • Quantity, quality, relevance, manner.

  • Flouting Maxims:

    • Violating maxims intentionally to convey a different meaning.

  • Implicature:

    • An implied meaning beyond the literal meaning.

  • Speech Acts:

    • Actions performed by utterances.

  • Performatives:

    • Utterances that perform an action (e.g., "I pronounce you married").

  • Direct and Indirect Speech Acts:

    • Direct: The utterance performs its function explicitly.

    • Indirect: The utterance performs its function indirectly.

  • Speech Acts and Sentence Types:

    • Declaratives, interrogatives, imperatives, exclamatives.

  • Presupposition:

    • An assumption implied by an utterance.

Language Acquisition

  • Theories of Language Acquisition

    • The Innateness Hypothesis

      • Innate behaviors

      • Critical period hypothesis

      • Evidence

    • Imitation Theory

      • Evidence?

    • Reinforcement Theory

      • Evidence?

    • Active Construction of a Grammar Theory

      • Example(s)

    • Connectionist Theories

      • Example(s)

    • Social Interaction Theory

  • Acquisition of Speech Sounds & Phonology

    • First Language acquisition - Sound

    • Identifying speech sounds - HAS, HT, results

    • Producing speech sounds

    • Stages of speech production

      • 2-3mos

      • 4-5mos.

      • 6mos.

      • 7-9mos

      • 10-11mos

      • 12mos

    • Babbling

    • Acquiring native language phonology

  • Acquisition of Morphology, Syntax, and Word Meaning

    • First Language Acquisition - morphology, syntax, word meaning

    • Stages of language acquisition (named) - one-word, two-word, later stages

    • Characteristics of child language

      • Overgeneralization

      • Misplacement

      • Intonation

    • Strategies for acquisition of word meaning

      • Complexive concepts

      • Overextension

      • Underextension

    • Language development

      • 12-18mos

      • 18-24mos

      • 2 years

      • 3 years

      • 4 years

  • Child-Directed Speech

    • Attention-getting (and keeping) strategies

    • What adults say to children - content of the conversation, organization of the conversation, corrections

    • How adults talk to children

    • How necessary is child-directed speech?

  • Bilingual Language Acquisition

    • Most people in the world are _lingual

    • Acquiring 2+ languages simultaneously vs sequentially

    • Bilingual language acquisition vs second language acquisition

    • L1, L2

    • Transfer

  • Bilingualism and code-switching/language mixing

Language and Society

  • Language Variation:

    • Sociolinguistics: study of language in society.

    • Language, dialect, accent, idiolect.

    • Distinguishing languages vs. dialects.

    • Difference between dialect and accent.

    • 5 types of variation between language varieties: Phonological, Morphological, Syntactic, Lexical, Semantic

  • Style, Register, Slang:

    • Style: formality of speech.

    • Register: language associated with a particular situation or group.

    • Slang: informal vocabulary.

  • Style Shifting:

    • Adapting language style to different contexts.

    • Jargon: specialized vocabulary of a profession or group.

    • Slang: informal vocabulary.

  • Language Varieties and Prestige:

    • All dialects are linguistically equivalent.

    • Standard dialect: variety used in formal contexts.

    • Nonstandard dialect: any variety that deviates from the standard.

    • Standard and nonstandard are controversial terms.

    • Prestige variety spoken by dominant social groups.

    • Language attitudes can be powerful and damaging.

  • Code-Switching and African-American English:

    • Code-switching: alternating between languages or dialects.

    • Bidialectal: Being fluent in two dialects of the same language.

    • Overt prestige: associated with standard language.

    • Covert prestige: associated with nonstandard language.

  • Regional Variation & Geographic Factors:

    • Regional variation: Differences in language based on geographic location.

    • Geography influences dialect.

    • Dialectologists: People who study regional dialects.

    • Isoglosses: lines on a map marking the boundary between linguistic features.

  • Dialect Regions of the United States:

    • The North, New England, The South, Appalachia, The Midland, The West.

    • Salient phonetic features.

    • Prominent patterns.

    • Morphosyntactic features.

    • Lexical Variation.

    • Impact of geographic factors.

  • Social Factors in Language Variation:

    • Language is determined by exposure, not predestination.

    • No variety is linguistically superior or inferior.

    • Socioeconomic variation.

    • Labov's 1972 study on r-pronunciation in NYC department stores.

    • Age variation.

    • Gender variation.

    • The role of ethnicity.

    • Varieties of US English: AAVE, Chicano English, Lumbee English.

    • Emblematic language

    • Topicalization

  • Language and Identity:

    • Language signals identity.

    • Identity is typically quantified, which is problematic.