Transcript Socioloinguistics
Historical linguistics
Language classification and change
Classification
• Genetic • Typological • Areal
A very important discovery
Jones [1788] described Sanskrit: Sanskrit has a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity … than could possibly have been produced by accident.
Language families
• “Family trees”: linguists love trees!
• The world has many (how many?) languages • They can be traced back to a small number of families – Which families do English and Chinese belong to?
• The word “family” is used to describe different levels, so it is vague – The highest level node can also be referred to as the Proto-language, for example PIE
Cognates
• Words from the same root –
Maternal
and
madre
both come from
mater
– (which 3 languages, please?) • Yule 184-187 show how linguists can
rebuild
PIE and other proto-languages • Read “Word Reconstruction” carefully • Understand the example • Do study question 3, including the
reasons
Change in grammar and vocabulary
• Read about Syntactic changes and Semantic changes • Try Research Task D
Typological classification
• SVO SOV… – 6 possible types • Pro-drop vs non-pro-drop – Can you remember this? What is Chinese?
• Accusative (Japanese, Latin) vs ergative (Basque) (from wikipedia.org) (Japanese? German?)
Areal linguistics
• There is no genetic relationship between languages, but they still share features, and they are spoken in the same region • Balkan linguistic union – Albanian, Greek, Bulgarian and Romanian are all IE languages – However, they are not closely related – And yet they share certain grammatical features (case, tense etc.)
East Asian sprachbund
• Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai and others are probably unrelated genetically (like Chinese & English, also unrelated) • Various shared features – Tone – Classifiers – Monosyllabic morphemes – Topic-comment constructions • • こちらは 田中さんです。 你的衣服 , 怎么这么脏 ? (wiki again) – Politeness (changing in Chinese)
Lexical borrowing
• Lots of languages borrow extensively from English • You can probably think of many words in Chinese… how about the other way round?
• This is not really part of language classification though • Domain-specific borrowing – Legal / administrative vocab zh – Cooking fr en – Philosophy de en vn • Calque – Skyscraper gratte-ciel (fr), Wolkenkratzer (de), – Brainwash, runway (can you say why?) 摩天樓 (zh)
English
Chinese loans
• • • Phonologically similar – Easy to think of many examples • Calque/phonological hybrid – 冰淇淋 蹦及 – Cross-straits difference 電子郵件 , 伊媚兒 , EMAIL • SIZE, CASE • Taiwan Office English (why??) – 麻煩你把 candidate 的 resume fax 給我 , 我明天要 interview 他 .
Sociolinguistics
Variation in language
• What are – Accent? – Dialect?
– Language?
• Draw a tree – For English (me) – For Chinese (students) • Give some examples of lexical differences, from English and Chinese.
Social factors in accent
• Differences in accent – What are the 3 main reasons one accent differs from another?
• Place; ____; ____.
• Accent differences – Taiwan Mandarin vs standard Mandarin – English • Labov (1987) investigated “4 th floor” pronunciation, in NYC – 3 department stores (Saks Fifth Avenue, Macy’s, and Klein’s) – “higher class” speakers pronounce the /r/ • Trudgill (1974) in the UK – Found that “higher class” speakers do
not
pronounce the /r/
Register: describe the differences, please
• Would you mind giving me your full attention please?
– Shut up!
• I am writing to inform you – Just wanted to let you know • That is truly marvelous – That really rocks (what does
rock
mean?) • t/v distinctions
Diglossia
• This happens in a bilingual society • Each variety is used – With different people – In different situations – Or for different purposes • An easy example of this phenomenon, please?
• Usually there is said to be an H. variety, and an L. variety. Can you guess what H. and L. mean?
• Also Singapore; Philippines; England in the Middle Ages; many other examples
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (almost certainly incorrect, but interesting anyway!
• Sapir and Whorf, in the 1930s, said that language determines culture – Hopi (American Indian language) has a feature +/ animate – Hopi words for
cloud
and
stone
are animate – Whorf concluded that clouds and stones are animate in the Hopi world-view • Can you
disprove
the S-W hypothesis, using the knowledge you have of Spanish, French, Hungarian or German?
What was that all about?
• Definition of language • Description of the different levels of language. Analyzing – Sounds – Words – Sentences – Meaning
And then…
• Language and the mind – How language is acquired – How things sometimes go wrong • Today’s introduction to historical linguistics and language in society • Thanks for coming!