Linguistics Lecture Notes

Linguistics

  • Scientific study of language.
    • Linguistic anthropology.
    • Sociolinguistics.
    • Phocolinguistics.

Philology

  • Humanistic study of language.
    • Study of language and literature.
    • Study of literary texts.
    • History of language.
    • Fictional languages.

Philosophy of Language

  • J.R.R. Tolkien.
  • Charles Sanders Peirce: Pragmatism & Semiotics.
  • Analytic Philosophy: Logical positivism.
    • Bertrand Russell: Principia Mathematica.
    • Ludwig Wittgenstein: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

Trivium

  • The medieval University Curriculum derived from antiquity.
    • Rhetoric:
    • Study of the use of language to instruct & persuade.
    • Modes of expression.
    • Oratory.
    • Grammar:
    • Composition
    • Study of language & meaning.
    • Reading and interpretation.
    • Logic or dialectic:
    • Study of language and knowledge.
    • Syllogism.

Communication

  • Speech and rhetoric.
  • Persuasion.
    • Attitude change.
    • Advertising & marketing.
    • Political communication & propaganda.
  • Communication theory.
    • Relational communication.
  • Applied Communication.
    • Journalism - public relations.
    • Organizational communication.
    • Leadership.
    • Internal & external communication.
    • Strategic Communication.
  • General Semantics: Language is how we make sense of evaluate events.
  • Systems Theory: Language is how we relate to our environment.
  • Media Ecology: Language is a medium of communication & perception.

Studying Language

  • Syntactics: Studying the structure of language.
  • Semantics: Studying meaning.
  • Pragmatics: Studying how language is used in context.

Language

  • Language is a form of symbolic communication.
    • Words are symbols.
    • Symbols represent / stand for / point to something other than themselves.
    • Symbols are arbitrary and conventional.
  • Language is the primary form of symbolic communication.
  • Language is the basis of verbal communication.
    • Verbal refers to the use of words in general.
  • Language can be distinguished from paralanguage.
    • Accents, lisps, volume, speed, pitch.
    • Handwriting, font.
  • Langue vs Parole.
    • Ferdinand de Saussure.
    • Walter Ong
    • The Presence of the World (1967).
    • Orality and Literacy (1982).

What is Language

  • Phonemes: Units of sound - sounds that make a difference in meaning.
  • Morphemes: Units that have meaning vocabulary, prefixes, suffixes.
  • Syntax: Rules for combining units - grammar.
  • All language is dialect - dialects within dialects.
  • Idiolect: Individual's own personal dialect.

George Orwell "Politics and the English Language"

  • Text should be simple & direct.
  • Critics, politicians & humanities.
  • Neil Postman "The Semantic Environment".
    • Context - language is a context.
    • Stupid talk: Talk thou doesn't know what environment its in.
    • Crazy talk: Irrational talk.

Language is Human

  • Unique to human species, defining characteristic, key to our survival as a species.
  • Progress over time - info passed down from generations.
  • Thinking (self).
    • Intra personal vs. interpersonal communication.
    • Inner monologue/voice.
    • Learning how to speak later learn to internalize.
    • Learning how to speak = learn to think out loud.
    • While you're thinking - visualize, hear music, playback memory, perception, animal.
  • Cognition & Consciousness.
  • Von Humbolt Linguistic Relativism.
    • Language affects or determines the way we view the world.
    • Edward Sapir: Gives us tools for thought.
    • Benjamin Lee Whorf: Different languages provide different world news.
    • Each language is unique.
    • Dorothy Lee.
    • Every language has words that can't be translated.
    • Lera Boroditsky: Argument when thought can be in language.

Linguistic Relativism

  • Fictional languages.
    • Anthony Burgess.
    • Arrival (Ted Chiang).
    • Esperanto Bahai.

Language & Thought

  • Gender differences.
  • Class differences.
  • Education jargon.
  • Euphemism, ads & marketing.
    • Softens: Passed away (died).
  • Titles.
  • Married names.
  • Sexist language pronouns.

Definition of Man

  • We create symbols, misuse them, use them.
  • We define by saying what something is and what something is not (defined by negative).
  • Language & Symbols instruments.
  • Symbols can abstract ideas like "no" (negative).
  • Second level thinking about thinking, inner dialogue, instructions, recalling.
  • Terministic Screens (Burke).

Metaphor

  • Simile:
    • Similarity.
    • Connection.
    • Comparison.
  • Metonym:
    • Contiguity.
    • Association.
    • Connection.
    • Substitutes one term for another.
  • Synecdoche: The part stands for whole.
  • Toponym: Place stands for institution.
  • Other forms of:
    • Containment.
    • Other forms of connection.

Metaphor (Traditional)

  • Comparison between unlike things.
  • Use concrete terms to represent abstract ones.
  • Poetry, rhetoric, ornamental language.
  • Figure of speech, figurative vs. literal language.
  • "Mere metaphor"?

Metaphor (George Lakoff & Mark Johnson)

  • Metaphor theory - everything is a metaphor.
  • All language is metaphorical, symbols are metaphors.
  • Beyond comparing - understanding and experiencing one thing in terms of another.
  • Most powerful metaphors are deeply embedded in language and used unconsciously.
  • Different metaphors in different languages (linguistic relativity).
    • Dorothy Lee, Vera Boroditsky.

Metaphors for Time

  • Time is a line.
  • Time is money valuable, limited, commodity, measurable.
  • Alternatives - "time heals all wounds".

Metaphors for Conflict

  • Fight, battle, war.
  • Attack & defend.
  • Enemy, ally, sides.
  • Win or lose.
  • Weapons - firearms, knives, swords, bombs.
  • Alternatives - Courtship, prayer, identification.

Meaning

  • Definition not best way to get at the meaning.
  • Definitions are something humans create.
  • Dictionaries are closed systems.
  • Meaning vs Definition.
    • Behavioral view.
    • Response to a stimulus.
    • Action, reaction.
    • Information processing, cognition.
    • Nervous system.
    • Feeling thought, conception.
    • How I respond to others.
    • How I respond to myself.
    • How I imagine others will respond to me.
    • Predict individual response.
    • Predict generalized response.

Signal vs. Symbol

  • Signal:
    • Reaction.
    • Directly connected to what it represents.
    • Casual/natural relationship.
    • Animal communication.
    • Non-verbal communication.
    • Ivan Pavlov Signal reaction immediate, reflex, knee jerk behavior.
  • Symbol:
    • Reaction.
    • No direct connection to what it represents.
    • Arbitrary relationship.
    • Conventional relationship.
    • Pavlov, Signal of a signal.
    • Language, writing, Morse Code, ASCII.
    • Mathematics.
    • Icons.
    • Art, myth, ritual, dreams abstracting.
    • Symbol reaction delayed, reflective, thought.

Susanne Langer: Philosophy in a New Key: Feeling and Form

  • Discursive Symbols:
    • Language, mathematics.
    • Definitions.
    • Propositional statements.
    • True/False.
    • Logic.
  • Presentational Symbols:
    • Images, art, perception.
    • No definitions.
    • Not propositional not statements.
    • Not true/false.
    • Feeling.
    • Language made up of units with meaning.
    • Image works as a whole, no dictionary for images.

Codes

  • Digital:
    • Arbitrary.
    • Mathematics, language.
    • Discrete units.
    • 1-to-1 correspondence.
    • Counting.
    • Yes or no.
    • Left brain.
  • Analogic:
    • Not logical.
    • Resemblance, similarity analogy.
    • Images, non-verbal.
    • Continuous measurement (since not 1 to 1).
    • More or less.
    • Right brain.

Meaning

  • Sign:
    • Signifier external.
    • Signify; represent, stand for, point to something other than itself.
    • Signified response.
  • Signal
  • The Meaning of Meaning.
  • The Semantic Triangle.
    • Symbol:
    • Symbolizes
    • (Casual relation).
    • Thought of Reference.
    • Stands for.
    • Referent.
    • Refers to.
    • (Other casual net Can imputed relation).

Semiotics/Semiology

  • Science of signs.
  • Charles Sanders Peirce:
    • Index, icon, symbol.
  • Ferdinand de Saussure:
    • Signifier & Signified.
    • Motivated vs. unmotivated
  • Paradigmatic analysis.
    • Binary oppositions.
  • Syntagmatic Analysis.
    • Word order.
    • Narrative structure.
  • Context.
    • Ogden & Richards - The meaning of meaning.
    • Bronislaw Malinowski - Situational context.
    • Erving Goffman - Situations.
    • Richards - feedforward (provide context for understanding).
    • Paul Watzlawick - punctuation, Change: Principles of Problem Formation & Problem Resolution.
  • Framing & Reframing.

General Semantics

  • Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity (1933).
  • Time-binding: Progress, Science ability to pass down knowings through generations.
  • D: Perception, description, evaluation pragmatic approach.
  • Accumulation of knowledge.
  • Evaluation of knowledge.

The Map is Not the Territory (Korzybski)

  • The word is not the thing it represents
  • The symbol is not the referent
  • Language is not reality.
  • "Whatever you say it is, it isn't".
  • But all maps are not equal.
  • Structural similarity.
    • Structure, relationship.
    • Systems theory.
    • Structure practical utility.
  • The Territory (according to modern science).
    • Objective reality "out there".
    • Laws of thermodynamics energy, differences, change.
    • Theory of relativity.
    • Uncertainty principle.
    • Chaos and order.

Mapping The Territory

  • Human limitations subjectivity.
  • Confirmation bias.
    • Selective process.
    • Selective exposure.
    • Selective attention.
    • Selective perception.
    • Selective retention.
  • Men Seek for vocabularies that are reflections of reality.

Mapping the Territory

  • Sense perception as mapping.
  • Optical illusions.
  • What is the Ames illusion room, window.
  • Stroop test Words of colors.
  • What our sensory organs take in is not what is actually.
  • What we take in from external world is sensory data.
  • Sensory data is ambiguous which we actively organize.
  • We are not born perceiving, learn how to perceive.
  • Learning to perceive takes place through experience.
  • What we perceive is a function of our past experiences.
  • "We see things not as they are, but as we are".
  • Perception is a kind of instructive theory-making.
  • We typically don't change our theories about the world unless we encounter problems.
  • All perception is an attempt to establish a predictable continuity and impose order and structure onto chaos.

Generalizations about Perception

  • Perception is subjective.
  • Perception is a function of the biological structure of our nervous systems, and sensory organs.
  • Perception is also a function of the ways in which we extend our senses through technologies.
  • Perception is a function of culture (intersubjective).
  • Perception a function of language and other coding systems and symbols that we employ.
  • What we perceive is also a function of context.
  • What we perceive is also a function of our needs, purposes, and values.
  • Perception is transaction.
  • Human beings are meaning makers.

Semantic Reactions

  • Podcast.
  • Science: Scientific method.
    • Empiricism empirical method.
    • Sense perception.
    • Our knowledge of the world is what we take in from our senses.
    • Instruments - to extend our senses data.
    • Generalizations (Through perceptions).
    • Induction- Specifics to generalizations.
    • Deduction- thinking things through.
    • If you can't test it, it's not scientific.
  • Science is seeking most accurate map of territory.
  • East used to be on top (north) Sunrise. Orient maps from all angles & directions.
  • Every map distorts, maps are static reality is dynamic.
  • Vortex & Spirals.

Abstracting

  • Structural Differential.
  • Abstraction vs. abstracting.
  • Abstract vs. Concrete.
    • Abstract art.
    • Scientific term.
    • To abstract: to take one thing out of another (Salt out of Saltwater).
  • Process of abstracting.
  • Consciousness of abstraction.
    • Event level reality.
  • Sensory information.
  • Object (Perception).
    • Reality is broken by whatever we know is just a piece of what we know.
    • Animas dont know whats beyond its own perception (also babies).

Structural Differential

  • Event level reality, out there, process.
  • Object level- perception, experience.
  • Language levels.
    • Naming- individual.
    • Describing - Particular.
    • Inferring similarities (relation).
  • Abstraction Ladder (S. I. Hayakawa).
  • Load reduction of complexity.

Process of Abstracting (Wendell Johnson, "People in Quandaries")

  • To abstract.
    1. Leaving out details.
    2. Categorization.
    3. Subjective evaluation.

Consciousness of Abstracting

  • Stereotyping.
  • Prejudice.
  • Scapegoating.
  • Projection.
  • Intersectionality.

Reification

  • Concept of race changing over time.
    • Changes based on context.
    • Anthropologists base race on statistical averages.
    • Family ext. family & class & tribe & nation & natury.
  • Identification.
  • Frustration.
  • Abstract concepts like love, success, demoralization.
  • Operationalism: Operational definitions.
    • Concrete money (exact goal).
    • Specify procedures.

Consciousness of Abstracting

  • Values.
  • Issues.
  • Models & maps.
  • Art.
  • Metaphors & definitions questions.
  • Multiordinality - same word can stand for different level of abstracting.
  • Bypassing two parties speaking at different levels of abstracting.
  • Visual images.
  • Mathematics (precise & abstract).
  • Lower leus of abstracting.
  • Avoiding dead level abstracting.
  • Reality testing.
  • Isms, shifters: pronouns, fillers.
  • Bar doesn't polysemic.

20th Century Science

  • Scientific revolution paradigm shift.
    • Albert Einstein.
    • 19th Century Darwinian evolution.
    • Non-Newtonian physics (Einsteinian physics).
    • Non-Euclidean geometry.
  • Requires a parallel revolution in thinking.
  • Axiom: Given truth / starting point (Aristotelian logic out from assumptions).
  • Non-aristotelian: A.

Aristotelian Logic

  • Law of Identity:
    • A=AA = A
    • A thing is what it is.
      -A=BA = B
      -1+1=21 + 1 = 2
  • Law of Excluded Middle:
    • Either A=BA = B or A≠BA \neq B
    • Either True or False (either/or)?
  • Law of Non-Contradiction:
    • Not A=BA = B and A≠BA \neq B
    • Not True and False.

Non-Aristotelian Principles

  • Non-Identity:
    • A is not A.
    • No identity relationships in nature non-additive, non linear (I cloud + I cloud = ?).
    • A map is not the territory it represents.
    • A symbol is not its referent.
    • A word is not the thing it stands for.
    • Whatever you say, it is not.
    • All members of a category are not the same.
    • Things change overtime.
  • Non-Allness:
    • A is not all A.
    • We can never know all there is to know.
    • A map does not represent all of the territory.
    • Words can't say everything about the things they represent.
    • A person can't say all that can be said.
    • The word "is" doesn't mean "equals".
  • Self-Reflexiveness:
    • An ideal map would contain a map of the map.
    • Language about language self reference.
    • George Herbert Mead - consciousness & self-consciousness.
  • Paradox.
    • Alfred North Whitehead & Bertrand Russell theory of logical types puts things at different logical levels.
    • Kurt Gödel incompleteness theorem.
    • Douglas Hofstadter recursion, self-consciousness & AI.
    • Gregory Bateson metacommunication, relationship.

Non-Aristotelian

  • Elementalism: breaking things down they can't be breaking down in reality… (in nature you can't take things out of context / environment).
    • Elementalism vs. non-elementalism.
  • Two-valued vs. multi-valued orientation.
    • Statement of US Conservative vs Canadian Conservative difference good vs bad representation.
  • "To be" or not "to be".
    • Is of identification.
    • Is of projection.
    • Shows equality.
  • E Prime English w/o "is", "being", "be", etc.
  • Intensional vs. extensional orientation.

Overview Semantic Reactions

  • Abstracting, allness, & absolutes immediate vs. delayed. -- Signal & Symbol reactions.
    • Extensional devices:
    • Indexing: John 2010 not John 2020.
    • Dating.
    • Hyphens Chang not chair.
    • Quotation marks.
    • Plurals stab.
    • Verbs.
    • Quantifying terms.
    • Qualifying terms.

Facts

  • What is a fact?
    • Statements statements of fact statements of descriptions.
    • True facts false facts.
    • Statements that can be determined true or false based on the available evidence.
    • Context, reports, operationalism.
  • Proposition propositional logic.
    • Bertrand Russell.
    • Alfred North Whitehead.
    • Ludwig Wittgenstein.
    • Well-formed statements true or false.
  • Logical positivism.
  • Philosophy of Science.
    • Condon, sense data vs. system.
    • Deductive vs. inductive logic.
    • Empiricism.
    • Statements of description statements of fact.
    • Data vs. hypotheses & theories generalizations.
  • Kod Popper.
    • Falsification.
    • Deductive Start w/ generalization.
    • Inductive, start w/ specifics.

Opinion/Judgments

  • Values beliefs attitudes opinions.
  • Definitions delimitations.
    • Statement of meaning a - axioms & postulates.
    • Dictionaries as closed systems.
    • Tautologies.

The Relational View

  • Bateson "a role is half a relationship".
    • Gregory Bateson Steps to an ecology of Mind, Data Mind and Nature- Cybernetics and systems.
    • Difference that makes a difference.
    • Metacommunication.
    • Phatic communication ritual ex; hello, how are you.
    • Relationship as unit of analysis.
    • Paradox & double bind "be spontaneous", "do it be you".
    • The pattern which connects 7 m/it.
  • Paul Watzlawick.
    • Pragmatics of Human Communication content and relationship level.
    • Codependency & enablers goal: family therapy.
  • Deborah Tannen.
    • Relationship (of authority) dominates content-person reflections system

Culture as Symbol System

  • Time-binding meaning making.
  • System of signs.
  • Linguistic relativism.
  • Edward T. Hall -The Silent dimension Culture as language.
    • Extension of Sapir-Whorf -"Culture is communication".
    • Phoneme, morpheme, syntax isolate, sex, pattern.
    • Formal, informal, technical high vs. low context.
    • Intercultural & non-verbal communication.
  • Ray L. Birdwhistell -Kinesics and Context (body language).
  • Media as Language Sergei Eisenstein The Film Sense Film Form theory of montage Edmund Carpenter new languages language = medium extension of Sapir Whorf Hypothesis/linguistic relativism.
  • Marshall McLuhan -Understanding Media: The Extension of Man media as translators grammer.