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Linguistics 001 Linguistics 2009 Basics An introduction to the scientific study of language No prerequisites Grading Homework assignments 50% Participation 10% (Cumulative)Final exam 40% 100% (BUT) IN BORDERLINE CASES ATTENDANCE AND ACTIVE PARTICIPATION WILL AFFECT WHETHER OR NOT GRADES ARE ROUNDED UP OR ROUNDED DOWN What the course is about Basic idea and outline The Subject of the Course The scientific study of human language; in particular, some aspects of human language and its structure Som.
Linguistics 2009 Basics • An introduction to the scientific study of language • No prerequisites Grading Homework assignments Participation (Cumulative)Final exam 50% 10% 40% 100% (BUT) IN BORDERLINE CASES ATTENDANCE AND ACTIVE PARTICIPATION WILL AFFECT WHETHER OR NOT GRADES ARE ROUNDED UP OR ROUNDED DOWN What the course is about Basic idea and outline The Subject of the Course • The scientific study of human language; in particular, some aspects of human language and its structure • Some facets of language make it apparently unique in the biological world and in the study of cognition Moreover, language is creative and complex in a way that warrants careful study Aspects of Language • We are concerned with the objective study of language; not claims about how language ‘should’ be made by so-called experts • By ‘language’ here we mean roughly the system of principles that account for linguistic expressions; languages that actually exist (or existed) and are used by people Some facts about language • Creativity: We automatically produce and understand utterances we have never heard before, whether they make ‘sense’ or not: Seventeen and one half turtles wearing yellow hats with penguins on them began to simultaneously yodel as I approached the food truck Put differently: Languages have a finite number of words, from which infinite sentences can be created/understood; it’s not just about ‘making sense’ (More) facets of language • • Moreover: Our production and comprehension of complex linguistic utterances is automatic and (typically) effortless That is, We not have to think about using language any more than we have to think about walking or about using vision Compare this with e.g computer systems, which cannot come close to this performance Facets of language, cont Language is universal every human society ever known has language • Unlike cultural inventions or technology which vary in complexity from culture to culture-every human society has complex language • As we will see in the course, language does not seem to correlate with “general intelligence” • This suggests that humans have a biological capacity for language, when coupled with cases in which children ‘invent’ complex language (to be discussed later) Facets of language, cont II One well-known(?) fact about language: children acquire language easily and without explicit instruction • It should be clear that adults not have this capacity; acquiring language in adulthood is difficult and typically results in sub-native performance • This suggests a biological window of opportunity for acquiring a language natively 10 Innateness • A research program initiated by Chomsky; two major points – – – Producing and understanding novel utterances indicates speakers must have a mental grammar a kind of ‘program’ for constructing/understanding sentences These grammars are acquired by children who are exposed to fragmentary and noisy evidence, i.e without explicit knowledge of the rules, which, as we will see, are quite complex This leads to the idea that the human brain is ‘preequipped’ to learn language, in the same way that children are programmed to walk, see, etc 11 Goals • We are going to investigate the idea that language is innate or an ‘instinct’ by – Looking at the structure of language; and – Looking at how language works in the brain, develops in history, compares with communication in other species, etc In the next slides we will look at some of the subdivisions of linguistic structure 12 Linguistic Structures, I • Phonetics/Phonology: The sounds of a language, and how they combine There are many aspects of this that speakers do, but are not aware of… Example: the sounds [p], [t], [k] in English are pronounced with a puff of air (‘aspirated’) at the start of a word: pill till kill This is not the case when [s] precedes: spill still skill • In general: – How to represent speech sounds – How these sounds combine/change etc 13 Structures, II • Morphology: The structure of words Some words seem simple, e.g cat But others are made out of parts: vapor-ize un-attain-able un-lock-ing-s Sometimes the rules are complex, and the same pieces can combine in different ways: Un-(lock-able): can’t be locked (un-lock)-able: capable of being unlocked 14 Structures, III • Syntax: How words combine to form sentences: (a ‘*’ means that a sentence is deviant, in a way that we’ll define later in the course): 1) The tall man… 2) *The man tall… 2) I saw John and Mary 3) *Who did you see Mary and? 15 Structures IV • Semantics/Pragmatics: What words/sentences mean, and how this relates to how they are used • Example: compare – John hammered the metal flat – John hammered the metal naked Or: Why is it that Is it cold? Is sometimes a real question, and sometimes a way of getting someone to close a window? 16 Plan • • Examine different aspects of linguistic structure, like those sketched above After looking at such structures, we will be ready to investigate further questions, not limited to 1) Languages of the world 2) The acquisition of language 3) Language and the brain 4) Language change and history 5) Reading and writing 6) Animal communication and evolution 7) Language and Computation 17