Lecture on Linguistics

1. Lecture on Linguistics For Advanced English

2. Books to recommend • 戴炜栋，何兆熊，(2002)，《新编简明英语语言学教程》，上海外语教育出版社。 • Widdowson, H. Linguistics，上海外语教育出版社，2000

3. I. What is language a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication. • 1. arbitrariness No logical (motivated or intrinsic) connection between sounds and meanings. . E.g.: spitting • --What’s today? --Today is Thursday. • (French) Bonjour. Salut.

4. 2. Productivity/creativity ----Peculiar to human languages，users of language can understand and produce sentences they have never heard before, e.g. we can understand sentence like “ A red-eyed elephant is dancing on the hotel bed”, though it does not describe a common happening in the world. • A gibbon call system is not productive for gibbon draw all their calls from a fixed repertoire which is rapidly exhausted, making any novelty impossible.

5. Duality (double articulation) • Lower level----sounds (meaningless) • Higher level----meaning (larger units of meaning) • A communication system with duality is considered more flexible than one without it, for a far greater number of messages can be sent. A small number of sounds can be grouped and regrouped into a large number of units of meaning (words), and the units of meaning can be arranged and rearranged into an infinite number of sentences. (we make dictionary of a language, but we cannot make a dictionary of sentences of that language.

6. Duality (double articulation) • Lower level----sounds (meaningless) • Higher level----meaning (larger units of meaning) • A communication system with duality is considered more flexible than one without it, for a far greater number of messages can be sent. A small number of sounds can be grouped and regrouped into a large number of units of meaning (words), and the units of meaning can be arranged and rearranged into an infinite number of sentences. (we make dictionary of a language, but we cannot make a dictionary of sentences of that language.

7. Displacement ----Language can be used to refer to things, which are not present: real or imagined matters in the past, present or future, or in far-away places. • A gibbon never utters a call about something he ate last year • There is something special about the bee dance though. Bees communicate with other bees about the food sources they have found when they are no longer in the presence of the food. In this sense, the bee dance has a component of displacement. But this component is very insignificant. For the bees must communicate about the food immediately on returning to the hive. They do not dance about the food they discovered last month nor do they speculate about future discoveries.

8. Cultural transmission ----Language is culturally transmitted (through teaching and learning; rather than by instinct). • Animal call systems are genetically transmitted. All cats, gibbons and bees have systems which are almost identical to those of all other cats, gibbons and bees. • A Chinese speaker and an English speaker are not mutually intelligible. This shows that language is culturally transmitted. That is, it is pass on from one generation to the next by teaching and learning, rather than by instinct. • The story of a wolf child, a pig child shows that a human being brought up in isolation simply does not acquire human language.

9. The scope or major branches of linguistics • Theoretical linguistics • Phonetics • Phonology • Morphology • Syntax • Semantics • Use of linguistics • Applied linguistics • Sociolinguistics • Psycholinguistics ……

10. Descriptive vs prescriptive • Descriptive ---- describe/analyze linguistic facts observed or language people actually use (modern linguistic) • Prescriptive ----lay down rules for “correct” linguistic behavior in using language (traditional grammar)

11. Synchronic vs diachronic • Synchronic study---- description of a language at some point of time (modern linguistics) • Diachronic study---- description of a language through time (historical development of language over a period of time)

12. Speech vs writing • Speech ---- primary medium of language • Writing ---- later developed

13. Langue vs parole (F. de Saussure) • Langue ---- the abstract linguistic system shared by all members of the speech community. • Parole ---- the realization of langue in actual use. • Saussure takes a sociological view of language and his notion of langue is a matter of social conventions.

14. Competence and performance (Chomsky) • Competence ---- the ideal user’s knowledge of the rules of his language • Performance ---- the actual realization of this knowledge in linguistic communication • Chomsky looks at language from a psychological point of view and to him competence is a property of the mind of each individual.

15. Phonetics & phonology • Both are concerned with the same aspect of language----the speech sounds. But they differ in their approach and focus. • Phonetics is of general nature; it is interested in all the speech sounds used in all human languages; it aims to answer questions like: how they are produced, how they differ from each other, what phonetic features they have, how they can be classified, etc. • Phonology aims to discover how speech sounds in a language form patterns and how these sounds are used to convey meaning in linguistic communication.

16. Morphology • Morphology refers to the study of the internal structure of words and the rules by which words are formed.

17. Morpheme--the minimal unit of meaning ---Words are composed of morphemes. Words may consist of one morpheme or more morphemes, e.g. • 1-morpheme boy, desire • 2-morpheme boy+ish, desir(e)+ble • 3-morpheme boy+ish+ness, desir(e)+bl(e)+ity • 4-morpheme gentle+man+li+ness, un+desir(e)+abl(e)+ity • 5-morpheme un+gentle+man+li+ness • 6-morpheme anti+dis+establish+ment+ari+an+ism

18. Affix • Prefix ---- morphemes that occur only before others, e.g. un-, dis, anti-, ir-, etc. • Suffix ---- morphemes that occur only after others, e.g. -ful, -er, -ish, -ness, -able, -tive, tion, etc.

19. Free morpheme & bound morpheme • Free morpheme----is one that may constitute a word (free form) by itself, such as bed, tree, sing, dance, etc. • Bound morpheme----is one that may appear with at least one other morpheme. They can not stand by themselves, such as “-s” in “dogs”, “al” in “national”, “dis-” in “disclose”, “ed” in “recorded”, etc.

20. Allomorph • Some morphemes have a single form in all contexts, such as “dog, bark, cat”,etc. In other instances, there may be some variation, that is, a morpheme may have alternate shapes or phonetic forms. They are said to be the allomorphs of the morpheme, the plural morpheme may be represented by: • map----maps [s] • dog----dogs [z] • watch----watches [iz] • mouse----mice [ai] • ox----oxen [n] • tooth----teeth • sheep----sheep • Each of the underlined part is called an allomorph of plural morpheme.

21. What is syntax? • ----a branch of linguistics that studies how words are combined to form sentences and the rules that govern the formation of sentences.

22. Categories • Category refers to a group of linguistic items which fulfill the same or similar functions in a particular language such as a sentence, a noun phrase or a verb. The most central categories to the syntactic study are the word-level categories (traditionally, parts of speech)

23. Word-level categories • Major lexical categories: N, V, Adj, Prep. • Minor Lexical categories: Det, Deg, Qual, Auxi, Conj.

24. Phrase categories and their structures • Phrase categories----the syntactic units that are built around a certain word category are called phrase categories, such as NP(N), VP(V), AP(A), PP(P). • The structure: specifier + head + complement • Head---- the word around which a phrase is formed • Specifier---- the words on the left side of the heads • Complement---- the words on the right side of the heads

25. Semantics • Semantics----the study of language meaning.

26. Ogden and Richards: semantic triangle concept Symbol Referent/object

27. Major sense relations • Synonymy • Antonymy • Polysemy • Homonymy • Hyponymy

28. Polysemy • Polysemy----the same one word may have more than one meaning, e.g. “table” may mean: • A piece of furniture • All the people seated at a table • The food that is put on a table • A thin flat piece of stone, metal wood, etc. • Orderly arrangement of facts, figures, etc. ……

29. Homonymy • Homonymy---- the phenomenon that words having different meanings have the same form, e.g. different words are identical in sound or spelling, or in both. • Homophone ---- when two words are identical in sound, e.g. rain-reign, night/knight, … • Homogragh ---- when two words are identical in spelling, e.g. tear(n.)-tear(v.), lead(n.)-lead(v.), … • Complete homonym---- when two words are identical in both sound and spelling, e.g. ball, bank, watch, scale, fast, …

30. Hyponymy • Hyponymy----the sense relation between a more general, more inclusive word and a more specific word. • Superordinate: the word which is more general in meaning. • Hyponyms: the word which is more specific in meaning. • Co-hyponyms: hyponyms of the same superordinate.

31. Hyponymy • Superordinate: flower • Hyponyms: rose, tulip, lily, chrysanthemum, peony, narcissus, … • Superordinate: furniture • Hyponyms: bed, table, desk, dresser, wardrobe, sofa, …

32. Componential analysis • Componential analysis---- a way to analyze lexical meaning. The approach is based on the belief that the meaning of a word can be dissected into meaning components, called semantic features. For example, • Man: [+HUMAN, +ADULT, +ANIMATE, +MALE] • Boy: [+HUMAN, -ADULT, +ANIMATE, +MALE] • Woman: [+HUMAN, +ADULT, +ANIMATE, -MALE] • Girl: [+HUMAN, -ADULT, +ANIMATE, -MALE]

33. Pragmatics • ---- the study of language in use or language communication; the study of the use of context to make inference about meaning. • ---- the study of how speakers of a language use sentences to effect successful communication.

34. Context • Context---- a basic concept in the study of pragmatics. It is generally considered as constituted knowledge shared by the speaker and the hearer, such as cultural background, situation (time, place, manner, etc.), the relationship between the speaker and the hearer, etc.….

35. Pragmatics vs. semantics • Semantics---- is the study of the literal meaning of a sentence (without taking context into consideration). • Pragmatics---- the study of the intended meaning of a speaker (taking context into consideration), e.g. • “Today is Sunday”, semantically, it means that today is the first day of the week; pragmatically, you can mean a lot by saying this, all depending on the context and the intention of the speaker, say, making a suggestion or giving an invitation…

36. Speech act theory • Speech acts is a term derived from the work of the philosopher J. L. Austin (1962) and now used to refer to a theory which analyzes the role of utterances in relation to the behavior of the speaker and the hearer in interpersonal communication. It aims to answer the question “What do we do when using language?”

37. Austin’s new model of speech acts ----According to Austin’s new model, a speaker might be performing three acts simultaneously when speaking: locutionary act, illocutionary act and perlocutionary act. • The locutionary act----an act of saying something, i.e. an act of making a meaningful utterance (literal meaning of an utterance); • The illocutionary act----an act performed in saying something: in saying X, I was doing Y (the intention of the speaker while speaking). • The perlocutionary act----an act performed as a result of saying something: by saying X and doing Y, I did Z.

38. For example,“It is cold in here.” • Its locutionary act is the saying of it with its literal meaning the weather is clod in here; • Its illocutionary act can be a request of the hear to shut the window; • Its perlocutionary act can be the hearer’s shutting the window or his refusal to comply with the request. ----Analyze one more example: “You have left the door wide open.” Note: Of the three acts, what speech act theory is most concerned with is the illocutionary act. It attempts to account for the ways by which speakers can mean more than what they say.

39. Searle’s classification of speech acts (1969) • Assertives/representatives(陈述) • Directives(指令) • Commissives(承诺) • Expressives(表达) • Declarations(宣布)

40. Assertives/representatives ---- Stating or describing, saying what the speaker believes to be true, e.g. • I think the film is moving. • I’m certain I have never seen the man before. • I solemnly swear that he had got it. …

41. Directives ---- Trying to get the hearer to do something, e.g. • I order you to leave right now. • Open the window, please. • Your money or your life! …

42. Commissives ---- Committing the speaker himself to some future course of action, e.g. • I promise to come. • I will bring you the book tomorrow without fail. …

43. Expressives ----Expressing the speaker’s psychological state about something, e.g. • I’m sorry for being late. • I apologize for the sufferings that the war has caused to your people. …

44. Declarations ----Bringing about an immediate change in the existing state or affairs, e.g. • I now appoint you chairman of the committee. • You are fired. • I now declare the meeting open. …

45. Principle of conversation (Paul Grice) • Cooperative principle (CP)---- According to Grice, in making conversation, there is a general principle which all participants are expected to observe. It goes as follows: • Make your conversational contribution such as required at the stage at which it occurs by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.

46. Four maxims of CP • The maxim of quality ----Do not say what you believe to be false. ----Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence. • The maxim of quantity ----Make your contribution as informative as required for the current purpose of the exchange. ----Do not make your contribution more informative than is required. • The maxim of relation ----Be relevant ( make your contribution relevant). • The maxim of manner ----Avoid obscurity of expression. ----Avoid ambiguity. ----Be brief. ----Be orderly.

47. Conversational implicature • In real communication, however, speakers do not always observe these maxims strictly. These maxims can be violated for various reasons. When any of the maxims is blantantly violated, i.e. both the speaker and the hearer are aware of the violation, our language becomes indirect, then conversational implicature arises.

48. Violation of maxim of quantity • At a party a young man introduces himself by saying “I’m Robert Sampson from Leeds, 28, unmarried…” • “War is war.” • “Girls are girls.” ----A:When is Susan’s farewell party? ----B:Sometime next month.

49. Violation of maxim of relation ----A: How did the math exam go today, Jonnie? ----B: We had a basketball match with class 2 and we beat them. ----A: The hostess is an awful bore. ----B: The roses in the garden are beautiful, aren’t they? ----A: What time is it? ----B: The postman has just arrived.

50. Violation of maxim of manner ----A: Shall we get something for the kids? ----B: Yes. But I veto I-C-E-C-R-E-A-M.