Visual-written (written language): requires explicit instruction.
Started as representations of some auditory-vocal or visual-gesture language.
Semanticity
All the forms in language have a meaning or function.
Sign
A pairing of a form with a meaning.
Semiotics
How is a form linked with a meaning.
Icon: The form resembles the meaning.
Index: The form resembles a result of the meaning.
Symbol: The form is associated with the meaning arbitrarily, by convention.
Cultural Transmission.
People learn a language from other people.
Languages propagate by cultural transmission.
There are no genetic or hereditary influences on what languages you can learn.
Displacement
A monkey makes an alarm call only when it sees a predator. It can’t talk about a predator that isn’t present.
Productivity
Linguistic units can be recombined to express novel meanings.
e.g., good+ness, bad+ness.
You can express an infinite number of new ideas by recombining parts.
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title: "IPA Chart with Sounds – International Phonetic Alphabet Sounds"
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description: "The interactive International Phonetic Alphabet chart and online resource. Listen to each of the sounds from the International Phonetic Alphabet. IPA chart sounds and symbols."
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Phonology is the structure of sounds as they combine together to form words and utterances in a language.
Contrastive and Non-Contrastive Sounds
Two sounds are contrastive when substituting one for the other results in a distinct word.
Minimal pair
Minimal Pair
A minimal pair is a pair of words that differ only in one sound, which demonstrates that a certain pair of sounds is contrastive.
In English, [pʰ] and [b] form a minimal pair (bat[bæt] and pat[pʰæt]) and are contrastive, but[pʰ] and [p] are not.
In Korean, [p], [pʰ], and [p͈] are contrastive because they form minimal pairs: 불[pul], 풀[pʰul], and 뿔[p͈ul].
When two or more allophones of the same Phoneme occur in mutually exclusive phonetic environments, they are said to be in complementary distribution. When allophones are in complementary distribution, there is a Conditioning Environment.
In English, /æ/ is realized as [æ̃] before [m], [n], [ŋ], and [æ] otherwise.
A phonological rule describes how underlying phonemes translate into actual phones.
By applying phonological rules to a phonemic form, the phonetic form is derived.
A phonological rule is written in the format of Phoneme -> Phone / Conditioning Environment.
Palatization: /t/ -> [t͡ʃ] / before [i] or [j], /k/ -> [t͡ʃ] / before [i] or [j], /d/ -> [d͡ʒ] / before [i] or [j], /g/ -> [d͡ʒ] / before [i] or [j], /s/ -> [ʃ] / before [i] or [j], /z/ -> [ʒ] / before [i] or [j]
(e.g., did you?/dɪd ju/ -> [dɪdʒu])
Place assimilation: /ʌn/ -> [ʌ̃n] / before an alveolar consonant, /ʌn/ -> [ʌ̃m] / before an bilabial consonant, /ʌn/ -> [ʌ̃ŋ] / before an velar consonant
(e.g., unstable/ʌn'steɪbl̥/ -> [ʌ̃n'steɪbl̥], unbelievable/ʌnbə'livəbl̥/ -> [ʌ̃mbə'livəbl̥], unclear/ʌn'kliɹ/ -> [ʌ̃ŋ'kʰliɹ])
Voiceless stop insertion: ø -> [p] / between [m] and [s], ø -> [k] / between [ŋ] and [s]
(e.g., strength /stɹɛŋθ/ -> [stɹɛ̃ŋkθ], hamster /hæmstɹ̩/ -> [hæ̃mpstɹ̩])
Vowel insertion rule: “ø → [ə] / between two consonants of the same place and manner of articulation a the end of a word (e.g., blast/blæstd/ → [blæstəd]`)
A natural class is a set of phones that share a phonetic feature to the exclusion of all other features. (e.g., nasality for the phones [m], [n], [ŋ].)
Common Natural Classes
Obstruents: All stops, fricatives, and affricates
Sonorants: All non-obstruents.
Labials: Bilabial or labiodental consonants.
Sibilants: [s, z, ʃ, ʒ, t͡ʃ, d͡ʒ]s A natural class is a set of [[Phone|phones]] that share a phonetic feature to the exclusion of all other features. e.g., nasality for the phones [m], [n], [ŋ]`.
A phonemic inventory is a finite set of phonemes from which all words are built.
Consonant Inventories
Consonants inventories are systematic, they use a few contrasting features to create many phonemes. For example, obstruents usually cross multiple places of articulation with multiple kinds of voicing.
Languages usually have between 15~30 consonante (min 6, max 164)
English Consonant Phonemes (24)
title: "Good News !Xoon People/Language Movie Trailer"image: "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/2D3WPTt0ndE/hqdefault.jpg"description: "This is: Good News !Xoon People/Language Movie Trailer c65897 [c65897t]Other names for this program are: ǂAmte ka ka pXoma ka ke LUKE, Chapta OneOther names ..."url: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2D3WPTt0ndE"favicon: "https://www.youtube.com/s/desktop/cf14c559/img/favicon_32x32.png"aspectRatio: "75"
!Xoon has 164 consonant phonemes
Vowel Inventories
Vowels are maximally distinctive. They spread out to occupy extreme parts of the vowels space.
Phonotactics is the study of restrictions on sounds within a language.
Adapting Loanwords
Loanwords are adapted to the native phonotactics by deleting or inserting phonemes.
Deleting: Delete the troublesome phonemes.
(e.g., Greek/pterodaktyl/→ English/ˌtɛɹəˈdæktl̩/)
Inserting: Insert vowels to break up the troublesome consonant clusters.
(e.g., Polish/gdansk/→ English/gəˈdænsk/, English Plastic/plæs.tɪk/→ Japanese/pɯ.ɾa.sɯ.tɕi.k:ɯ/)
Gaps
A gap is a massing word in the lexicon.
Accidental Gaps: Possible forms that do not occur. Phonotactics permits them.
(e.g., flempt, krusle, shwardingalini)
Systematic Gaps: Impossible forms that do not occur. Phonotactics does not permit them.
(e.g., *tlurble, *mlakthabolrb, *fshult)
Morphology is the study of the structure of words.
Morpheme
Morpheme
A morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that conveys a regular meaning.
In other words, a morpheme is a form-meaning paring that cannot be analyzed into parts.
/ʌntʌtʃəbl̩/→/ʌn/(not) + /tʌtʃəbl̩/(can be touched)→/ʌn/(not) + /tʌtʃ/(make contact) + /əbl̩/(can be done)
Polysynthetic languages are languages where words consist of very many bound morphemes, such that a sentence can often be expressed in a single word.
Greenlandic, Navajo
Greenlandic example: Aliikkusersuillammassuaanerartassagaluarpaalli
Morpheme breakdown: aliikku-sersu-i-llammas-sua-a-nerar-ta-ssa-galuar-paal-li
Translation: However, they will say that he is a great entertainer, but …
A sentence expresses a complete meaning.
The meaning of every morpheme must be memorized. However, the meaning of every sentence is predictable given the parts.
A speaker’s unconscious knowledge of how a language works.
A sentence is grammatical in a language if it follows the rules in the mental grammar of that language.
A sentence is ungrammatical if it breaks t hose rules: that is, if it is something that people would not say.
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously., * Green sleep colorless furiously ideas.
I have a friend who is always full of ideas, good ideas and bad ideas, fine ideas and crude ideas, old ideas and new ideas. Before putting his new ideas into practice, he usually sleeps over them to let them mature and ripen. However, when he is in a hurry, he sometimes puts his ideas into practice before they are quite ripe, in other words, while they are still green. Some of his green ideas are quite lively and colorful, but not always, some being quite plain and colorless. When he remembers that some of his colorless ideas are still too green to use, he will sleep over them, or let them sleep, as he puts it. But some of those ideas may be mutually conflicting and contradictory, and when they sleep together in the same night they get into furious fights and turn the sleep into a nightmare. Thus my friend often complains that his colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
Prescriptive Grammar
Someone’s ideas about what makes for correct or good writing.
Descriptive Grammar
A description of the rules people actually follow in normal language use.
Two words or phrases are in the same syntactic categories if and only if you can interchange them every sentence without making the sentence ungrammatical.
Common Syntactic Categories and Phrases
Noun Phrases (NP):
Take determiners (the, a, his, few, some, most, this) as specifiers.
Modified by AdjPs, PPs, AdvPs, and NPs.
May consist of a single pronoun (Pro).
Verb Phrases (VP):
Take NP as complements, depending on the transitivity:
Intransitive: takes only a subject (sleeps, eats).
Transitive: takes a subject and direct object (hit, smokes).
Ditransitive: takes a subject, direct object and indirect object (gave).
Modified by AdvP, PP, and NP of time.
Adjective phrases (AdjP): Take qualifiers (very, quite, a little) as specifiers answering “how.”
Prepositional Phrases (PP): Take NP as complement (into the room), qualifiers as specifiers (straight onto the bed).
Adverb Phrases (AdvP): Take qualifiers (very, too) as specifiers.
Conjunctions (Conj): Combines two phrases of the same type (XP + XP -> XP). (e.g., for, and, nor, but, or, yet, although)
Start with a sentence and figure out how it could have been generated by the rules.
Start with a sentence "Sally thought the dog chased the furry cat".S├─ NP│ └─ PropN: Sally└─ VP ├─ SV: thought └─ S ├─ NP │ ├─ Det: the │ └─ N: dog └─ VP ├─ TV: chased └─ NP ├─ Det: the └─ N ├─ Adj: furry └─ N: cat
Process of Parsing a Sentence
Label the categories for all the individual words.
Find a sequence of categories that matches the right-hand side of a rule.
Draw a tree with the left-hand side of the rule on top.
Repeat until you have a single tree that covers all the words in the sentence.
Lexical Semantics is a study of the sense and reference of words.
Proper names refer to one specific entity. However, common nouns, adjectives, and intransitive verbs refer to sets of entities.
Relationships Between Words
Homonyms: Words that sound the same, but have totally unrelated meanings. (e.g., two and to)
Polysemous: A word has multiple, related meanings.
Hyponym: X is a hyponym of Y if and only if the reference of Y is a superset of the reference of X.
Hypernym: X is a hypernym of Y if and only if the reference of Y is a subset of the reference of X.
Synonyms: X and Y are synonyms if and only if they have the same reference.
Antonyms: X and Y are antonyms if and only if their references contrast in some way.
Complementary antonyms: Two words X and Y are complementary antonyms if and only if there is no entity in the reference of both X and Y.
Gradable antonyms: Gradable antonyms identify different directions on a scale.
Meronymy: A part-whole relationship where an individual component makes up part of a larger whole. (e.g., wheel is a meronym of car).
Semantic Ambiguity
Lexical ambiguity: A word is lexically ambiguous if it has two or more possible meanings in a sentence.
(e.g., My bat is one of the best things in the world.)
Structural ambiguity: A sentence has more than one structures that leads to more than one possible meanings.
(e.g., Young men and women dominate the company.)
Scope ambiguity: There’s more than one way to distribute the NPs doing the action in the sentence.
(e.g., in a sentenceFour body builders moved two trucks., the number of trucks could be 8 or 2 in total)
Mind Representation of the Sense of a Word
Dictionary-Style Definitions: Dictionary definitions are circular.
Mental Images: different People may get different images for the same word
Usage-Based Definitions: The sense of a word is defined in terms of the contexts where it can be used.
Composition of Adjectives and Nouns
Pure intersection The Reference of the Adj+N is the intersection of the reference of the Adj and the reference of the N.
(e.g., Healty cow, Blue suit)
Relative intersection: The Reference of the Adj+N is a subset of the reference of the N, defined by the Adj.
(e.g., Tall person, Loud music, Good food)
Nonintersection: The Reference of the Adj+N combination is not necessarily a subset of the reference of the N.
(e.g., alleged crime, potential customer)
Anti-intersection: The Reference of the Adj+N combination is definitely not a subset of the reference of the N
(e.g., fake gun, imitation leather)
Thematic roles describe the semantic relationships between verbs and their arguments. Violating these semantic requirements leads to semantic anomalies rather than ungrammaticality e.g. *The small train loves chocolate.
Thematic Roles for NP
Agent: the entity that intentionally performs an action. (e.g., Winnie in Winnie fought the bear.)
Experiencer: the entity that experiences a psychological state. (e.g., Charles in Charles felt sad about his Discovery.)
Theme: the entity affected by an action. (e.g., the boulder in I push the boulder with all my might.)
Benefactive: the entity that benefits from an action. (e.g., us in He wiped the tables clean for us.)
Source: the entity from which something is moved by performing an action. (e.g., Spain in I traveled from Spain to Italy.)
Goal: the entity toward which an action is directed. (e.g., Italy in I traveled from Spain to Italy.)
Instrument: the object in which the action is completed with. (e.g. an axe in I slashed the body up with an axe.)
Thematic Grids
A thematic grid lists these thematic roles in order for a specific verb context.
Dive: <Agent> (e.g., The puppy dove)
Devour: <Agent, Theme> (e.g., A big monster devoured the kid)
Give: <Agent, Theme, Goal> (e.g., Susie gave a bucket to Charlie)
Borrow: <Agent, Theme, Source> e.g., My dad borrowed $10,000 from me.
Sometimes we intentionally violate the maxims in an extreme and obvious way because we know the listener will consciously notice the violation and draw an Implicature.
Alice: I can run ten miles.
Bob: Yeahm, and I'm the Queen of England.
When a group of speakers speaks in a way that is noticeably different from another group, that group speaks a dialect.
A group of people that speaks a dialect is called a speech community.
Phonological and phonetic variations are called accents.
If two people speaking two dialects can understand each other, the two dialects are mutually intelligible.
If two dialects are mutually intelligible, then they are the same language.
If two dialects are mutually unintelligible, then they are different languages.
Dialect Continuum
Sometimes dialects form a dialect continuum. A situation where neighboring dialects are mutually intelligible, but distant dialects are not.
Social dialects are associated with a particular class, race, and/or gender.
Class and Rhoticity: In the northeast US, non-rhoticity(e.g., fourth floor[fɔəθ flɔə]) is a major feature of working-class dialect.
On the other hand, in the UK, non-rhotic dialects are high-class, and rhotic dialects are working-class.
What words and categories are available? (e.g., color categories)
Metaphor
What underlying metaphors does a language use to describe events? (e.g., past-behind, future-front relationship in English)
Marking
What categories must be expressed according to the grammar of a language? (e.g., grammatical gender)
Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis
Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis
The linguistic relativity hypothesis is the idea that the language someone speaks affects how they think and perceive the world.
Strong Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
The language you speak determines the thoughts you can think. It does not have experimental support.
Weak Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
The language you speak has some influence on the thoughts you think.
Experimental Tasks
The main purpose of the experiments below is to disprove the Strong Hypothesis and show that when language use is blocked (e.g., verbal interference) or external cues are given, human cognitive abilities remain fundamentally similar across languages.
Color Perception (Chip Sorting Task)
Procedure
Show a color chip to subjects
Wait five seconds
Make the subject select the color chip presented before among similar color chips.
Result
Discrimination is faster/easier when two color chips cross linguistic category boundaries.
Verbal interference: when subjects repeat words back during the 5-second delay, this categorical advantage disappears.
Words serve as a cognitive tool that aid thinking but do not fundamentally change thinking.
Numerical Cognition (Nuts in a Can Task)
Procedure
Experimenter throw some nuts into a can.
Ask a subject to put in the same number of nuts.
Result
Pirahã speakers (a one-two-many language without exact numbers) perform worse on large quantities than English speakers.
Verbal interference: when English speakers were asked to repeat back a bunch of words, their advantage disappears and performance drops to the Pirahã level.
Number words act as a cognitive tool for exact counting.
Spatial Relations (Spatial Rotation Task)
Spatial Relations
Relative space languages: languages that use words that indicate directions from the perspective of the speaker or the perspective of the listener. (left, right, front, back)
Absolute space languages: languages that indicate directions relative to fixed landmarks. (e.g., North, South, East, West)
Task
Subject views an arrow pointing ahead on Table 1, then turns 180 degrees to face Table 2.
Relative language speakers: Pick B (preserves relative direction: right / front).
Absolute language speakers: Pick A (preserves absolute direction: North).
Landmark Effect
When a prominent stable landmark (e.g., a window or door) is visible, English speakers also switch to fixed/absolute reasoning (Pick A).
Time Relations (Temporal Metaphors)
Languages use different underlying metaphors to describe abstract things.
Underlying metaphor: time=moneyspending time, wasting time, investing time on a project, budget your time wisely
Underlying metaphor: time duration=length The summer was long, The winter will be short
Underlying metaphor: time=space: The future is ahead of us, The past is behind us
Pictograms became conventionalized and stylized over generations into symbols representing ideas.
While symbolized, they still represented meanings directly rather than specific words or morphemes, making them too vague for legal texts, proper names, or function words like “the” or “from.”
Logographic systems provide transcend the time, region, language, and permitting high visual information compression, but they negatively impact literacy rates. Conversely, phonographic systems facilitate easier literacy learning but lack long-term textual continuity.
A pairing of a form with a meaning.
How is a form linked with a meaning.
International Phonetic Alphabet Chart
Speech Organs
American English Vowels
Tonal Languages (pink: pitch-accent languages, red: tone languages)
English Consonant Phonemes (24)
Vowel inventories
Morphological processes can be productive or unproductive.
The morphological complexity of a language is how many morphological processes a word undergoes on average.
Degree of prefixing and suffixing
Turkish example
Link to originalSwahili example
Sometimes dialects form a dialect continuum. A situation where neighboring dialects are mutually intelligible, but distant dialects are not.
What is your generic term for a sweetened carbonated beverage?
What would you call this bug?
What do you call a traffic situation where several roads meet in a circle and you have to get off at a certain point?
Do you pronounce “pajamas” as
Do you pronounce “route” as
American Dialects
The linguistic relativity hypothesis is the idea that the language someone speaks affects how they think and perceive the world.
Verbal interference: when subjects repeat words back during the 5-second delay, this categorical advantage disappears.
Words serve as a cognitive tool that aid thinking but do not fundamentally change thinking.
Number words act as a cognitive tool for exact counting.
Sumer, ~3500 BCE.
Sumer, ~3000 BCE.
Egypt, ~2900 BCE.
Bee + Leaf = Belief
Chinese evolution
Link to originalMayan script
Japanese (Hiragana, Katakana)
Arabic, Hebrew
