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Introducing English Linguistics Charles F. Meyer

Introducing English Linguistics Charles F. Meyer. Chapter 1: the study of language Language Change. Is there a difference between synchronic and diachronic approaches to language study?. Other distinctions. Language/dialect Pidgin/creole.

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Introducing English Linguistics Charles F. Meyer

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  1. Introducing English LinguisticsCharles F. Meyer Chapter 1: the study of languageLanguage Change

  2. Is there a difference between synchronic and diachronic approaches to language study?

  3. Other distinctions Language/dialect Pidgin/creole

  4. How are the number of speakers of a language determined?

  5. Most Widely Spoken Languages

  6. The two ways to classify languages Genetic Typological

  7. The comparative method Genetic relationships between languages

  8. The Indo-European language family

  9. Ways of doing linguistic reconstruction Cognate vocabulary Grammatical similarities E.g. case in Indo-European languages Historical/archeological information E.g. interesting new work on DNA analyses to track migrations of people around the world

  10. Words in Modern and Older Indo-European Languages Equivalent to Modern English foot

  11. The Marking of Case, Number, and Gender in Latin and Modern English for the word girl

  12. Verb Endings in Romance Languages

  13. Language Typology

  14. Morphology Isolating languages—Meaning is expressed by separate words. Chinese is a very isolating language. In the construction nuan-huo te yi-fu (‘warm clothes’), the separate word te is used to indicate that the first word (nuan-huo) modifies the second word (yi-fu).

  15. Morphology (cont.) Agglutinative languages—Meaning is expressed by very complex internal structure. Turkish is a very agglutinative language. The construction çayiçtik means ‘We drank the tea’ (çay = ‘tea’; iç = ‘drink’; and tik = ‘we/past’).

  16. Morphology (cont.) Fusional languages—Meaning is expressed by inflections dependent on such factors as the case, number, and gender of a noun. Modern German is a fusional language. In the sentence Das ist ein gutes bier (‘That is a good beer’), the inflection –es on gutes indicates that the gender of the noun Bier is neuter and that the noun is marked for the nominative case.

  17. Morphology (cont.) These categories are not discrete but tend to grade off into one another. For instance, Modern English would be classified on a scale somewhere between Chinese and Modern German. Why?

  18. Syntax (from a posting on the Linguist List by Fritz Newmeyer Dear Listers, There are 16 ways that languages can divide up according to the following 4 criteria: 1. VO vs. OV word order 2. Prepositions vs. postpositions 3. N-Genitive order vs. Genitive-N order 4. N-Relative clause vs. Relative clause-N order

  19. Syntax (cont.) In Jack Hawkins' sample of 149 languages, 6 of the 16 possible combinations did not occur: VO Pr NG RelN VO Pr GN RelN VO Po NG NRel VO Po NG RelN OV Po NG RelN OV Pr NG RelN

  20. Why is Old English so different from Modern English? Internal/External influenceson language change

  21. Is there one single source language for all languages?

  22. Do languageschange or evolve? Is there a difference?

  23. Language Death

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