Transcript Psycholinguistics 02

Psycholinguistics 02
Linguistic Principles
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Basic grammatical concepts
Insights from sign language
Transformational grammar
Issues in grammatical theory
Basic Grammatical Concepts
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Duality of patterning
Morphology
Phrase structure
Linguistic productivity
Duality of Patterning
• A small number of meaningless elements on
one hand and a large number of meaningful
elements on the other hand
• Phonology: phones , phonemes
words
• Morphology: morphemes
words
• Syntax: rules
sentences
Morphology
• Forms of the meaning
• Free morphemes
• Bound morphemes
Linguistic Productivity
• Ability to create and comprehend novel
utterances
• We produce new sentences always in terms
of referents and often in terms of forms.
• We store rules for creating sentences instead
of storing sentences.
Discussion
• Teachers often complain that students
cannot remember the language points that
appear in the texts they have learned. They
believe that all this is due to the laziness on
the part of the students. If students were
more hard working as to learn the texts by
heart, they would be familiar with these
points. Commend on the justification of this
complaint.
Sign Language
• Clip 1
• Clip 2
• Clip 3
Differences Between Signed and Spoken
Languages
• Arbitrariness: language is an arbitrarily designed
system. There is no intrinsic relationship between
the set of sounds and the object to which the
sounds refer.
• Iconicity: signs resembling the objects or activities
to which they refer. Sign language possesses a
high degree of iconicity. The degree of iconicity
can decline over time.
• Simultaneous & sequential structure: spoken
language is largely sequential in nature while sign
language can be organized spatially more than
temporally.
Similarities Between Signed and Spoken
Languages
• Duality of patterning: hand configuration
(19 values), place of articulation (12 values)
and movement (24 values) see figure 2-4.
• Morphology: ASL has a rich morphological
system.
• Linguistic productivity: sign embedding
occurs in ASL.
• Phrase structure: ASL has SVO patterns
Significance of Sign Language
• Language production: ASL is independent of
breathing. Comparison with the respiratory pause
in speaking can be interesting.
• Language acquisition: the role of environment in
deaf children’s language acquisition.
• Link between language and the brain: the left
hemisphere is regarded as more verbal and the
right as more skilled at spatial tasks.
Discussion
• The study of sign language gives some
insight into the nature of language, and
brings into focus some topics such as
language production, language acquisition
and the link between language and the brain.
Do you know other researches in linguistics
that have the similar function?
Criteria of Good Theory
• Observational adequacy: the grammar must
specify what is and what is not an
acceptable sequence in the language.
• Descriptive adequacy: the grammar must
specify the relationships between various
sequences in the language.
• Explanatory adequacy: the ability to explain
the role of linguistic universals in language
acquisition.
Deep and Surface Structure
• Sentences have more than one level of structure.
• Deep structure: the underlying structure of a
sentence that conveys the meaning of a sentence.
• Surface structure: the superficial arrangement of
constituents and is closer to how the sentence is
actually pronounced.
• Transformational rules
• Sentences come from a two-part process: phrase
structure rules to generate the underlying tree
structure of the deep structure and a sequence of
transformational rules to generate the surface
structure.
Freud, Jung and Mind
• Sigmund Freud
• Carl Jung
The Freudian Model
• According to Freud, the
mind is composed of three
parts: the conscious mind,
the preconscious mind,
and the unconscious mind.
• The conscious mind
contains all the thoughts
and ideas that one is aware
of. It is the awake, active
mind.
The Freudian Model
The unconscious mind contains a record
of every piece of information that has
been absorbed by the mind. As a
person goes through life, the
unconscious mind stores memories of
all the events, lessons, and
observations experienced by the
individual. The unconscious is a vast
warehouse of memories, knowledge,
desires, and fears. The unconscious
contains so much that we are not even
aware of most of it.
The Freudian Model
• Between the conscious mind and the
unconscious mind is the
preconscious. The preconscious is a
thin veil, like the surface of the water
that divides the air above from the deep
water below. This preconscious acts as a
filter between the conscious and the
unconscious. Sometimes the conscious
mind needs to recall something, so the
conscious mind reaches down through
this veil and grabs whatever memory it's
looking for and brings it into
consciousness.
The Jungian Model
• Jung believes that there is a lot
more to a person's psyche than
dreams and repressed
memories. He calls the whole
iceberg the psyche. The
psyche embodies everything
about the person's mind,
conscious and unconscious—
including personality, likes
and dislikes, intellect, etc.
The Jungian Model
• Within every person there
is a complementary gender
component: men have a
feminine side and women
a masculine side. He calls
the feminine side of a man
the anima and the
masculine side of a woman
the animus.
The Jungian Model
• He also proposes that everyone has
a shadow side, an opposite
personality. In other words,
everyone has personality traits that
are opposite to his or her dominant
personality traits. For example,
someone may generally be
considered a very generous person,
yet sometimes he or she may
behave in a stingy manner.
The Jungian Model
• He finds that many cultures contain similar
myths and legends, similar experiential
threads in the various cultures, similar
recurring images within a culture and some
recurring images from culture to culture. He
asserts that these recurring cultural images
are part of a deeper collective unconscious
that is imprinted in all humans, as if it is a
genetic trait passed down from generation to
generation starting with the first humans on
the planet.
Psychological Reality of Grammar
• Derivational theory of complexity (DTC):
the distance between surface and deep
structure would be an accurate index of the
psychological complexity of the sentence.
• (37) the sun is not shining.
• (38) the sun is shining.
• Counter-evidences were found in the
sentences such as
Lexical Versus Structural Approaches
• Transformational grammar takes the grammatical
constituent as the most basic unit of analysis.
• Lexical theories emphasize more on individual
lexical items than structural theories.
• In most grammars, the lexical entry includes its
meaning, spelling, pronunciation and syntactic
characteristics (part of speech, pattern).
• In lexical-functional grammar (Bresnan:1978),
lexical entries also includes the various forms of
word and the different kinds of sentences into
which each form would fit.
e.g. (be) kiss: agent=object; patient=subject
Language Innateness
• Empiricists claim that children acquire
language from linguistic experience.
• Nativists believe that children are born with
some linguistic knowledge.
• Supporting evidence for innateness: deaf
children invented a form of gestural
language similar to ASL. Children acquire
the mother tongue within 2-3 years.
Parameter-setting Theory
• Children are born with the parameters and
with the values of the parameters. What
they must learn from experience is which
value is present in their native language.
Psychological Reality of Grammar
• (39) the boy was bitten.
• (40) the boy was bitten by the wolf.
• Trace theory: the moved constituent leaves
a trace at its earlier location.
• (42) the nurse who was stationed on the
seventh floor [trace] invited the chauffeur to
go dancing this evening.
Phrase structure
• constituents of a sentence
• Parsing
• S
NP+VP
V NP
NP Attributive clause (S)