Transcript New Employee Orientation

Linguistics week 2
What do linguists do? What is
language?
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In your free time
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Look at the diagram again, and try to
understand it.Linguistics
Sounds of
language
Phonetics
Grammar
Phonology Morphology Syntax
Meaning
Semantics
Pragmatics
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And take a look at 分支學科
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On this website
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http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:%E8%
AF%AD%E8%A8%80%E5%AD%A6%E9%
A6%96%E9%A1%B5
And read about Animal “Languages” in
Chapter 1 of your book.
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Introducing Linguistics
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What do linguists do?
Grammar, and other aspects of language
Relationships between languages
How is linguistics used in the real world?
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What do linguists do?
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They don’t necessarily “learn languages”
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They are often interested in the structure of
languages. They might
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specialize in one language, or a group of languages
compare different languages
study features shared by all languages
Many linguists study speech sounds, and grammar
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Linguist and 語言學 are confusing terms
What fields, please?
A brief outline of some semester 2 topics:
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Historical linguistics
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How languages are related
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Language families
» Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan…
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Areal linguistics
» Greek, Bulgarian
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Mostly borrowed words; also shared grammatical features (any
examples?)
» Chinese, Korean, Japanese
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How language changes over time
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sounds: poor vs paw, suit.
vocab: 咖啡, 颱風. Calque: 摩天大樓, skyscraper, gratte-ciel
grammar: Did you eat yet? Adversative passive 被
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Sociolinguistics
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Diglossia: “high” and
“low” prestige languages
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The role of Mandarin and
Taiwanese in a bilingual
society
Ta-hsüeh-shih-ching
The changing role of
English in Taiwan society:
borrowing, or showing off?
case and size: codeswitching, or lexicalized
Chinese words?
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Applications for linguistics
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Speech disorders
Forensic linguistics
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Accent detection
Style verification (eg police style)
Language teaching
Computational applications
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Machine translation
Speech recognition and synthesis
Language identification
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So, what is language?
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It’s a non-count noun, here – the phenomenon of
language
Do you think the utterances of parrots and mynah
birds count as language?
What about the “animal languages” you read
about?
What about deaf signing?
What about the “sign language” you use?
What about “body language”?
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A selection of Hockett’s design features for
language 1966), "The Problem of
Universals in Language" (write them)
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Rapid Fading
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Interchangeability
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individuals who use a language can both send and receive any
permissible message within that communication system
Feedback
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message does not linger in time or space after production
users of a language can perceive what they are transmitting and
can make corrections if they make errors
Arbitrariness
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there is no logical connection between the form of the signal and
its meaning
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More design features (he actually described
15 altogether)
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Displacement
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Productivity
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users can create and understand completely novel messages
Duality (of Patterning)
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linguistic messages may refer to things remote in time and space,
or both, from the site of the communication
a large number of meaningful elements are made up of a
conveniently small number of meaningless but messagedifferentiating elements.
Prevarication
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linguistic messages can be false, deceptive, or meaningless
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Bee dancing
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http://www.skylon.co.uk/hba/beekeeping.html#da
nce
Honey bees perform a sort of dance when they
return to the hive, after finding food, which shows
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the direction relative to the sun
the distance
perhaps, the quality of the food source
Is it a kind of language?
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Does it satisfy any of Hockett’s design features?
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Duality of patterning
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A small number of phones can be
concatenated to form a very large number
of words (the lexicon)
AND, although the lexicon is finite, they
can be combined to form an infinite number
of possible utterances
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The creative aspect of language (Chomsky)
Also known as the infinity of expressions
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The infinity of expressions
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There is no upper limit on sentence length
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Some interesting examples on page 10
“One is a number…”
We can be almost as creative as we wish in
forming new sentences
Probably, no-one has ever said before:
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“Ming Chuan linguistics students usually ride
motorbikes through Manchester, wearing moccasins
and carrying a mop-bucket”
The utterance is “pragmatically odd”: it makes sense,
but…
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So, is anything possible? Can we
create any utterance we want?
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Maybe, a good utterance must “make sense”?
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But some utterances are impossible
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WRONG!: Chomsky gave the famous example
“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”
This is syntactically well-formed (although
semantically it is ill-formed)
“Sleep ideas colorless green furiously” is syntactically
ill-formed
page 11 here, practise prag, sem, synt i/f utts in chin
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So, what utterances are OK?
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We have
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a finite lexicon
an infinite number of possible utterances
no room in our brains to store all those
utterances
no requirement to make sense…
So how is it decided?
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Our linguistic knowledge
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(=our knowledge of our own language)
This consists of
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A lexicon (a finite number of words)
A grammar (count noun!): that is, a finite set of rules
stating what is possible
» Note that we are not consciously aware of what these
rules are; like the rules for muscle control!
» Now, we have 3 meanings of the word grammar!
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Back to what linguists do!
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Finite lexicon
+ finite set of rules (grammar)
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 infinity of expressions
Lexicon: easy.
- Buy a dictionary.
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Grammar: difficult.
- This is what linguists do
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