Transcript How to be a language detective The Language Detective Villiers Park 9-13 July 2007
How to be a language detective
The Language Detective Villiers Park 9-13 July 2007
Methodologies for language study
Introspection Use an existing corpus Collect a new corpus
Introspection
What is or is not possible for you as a speaker Example: constraints on the beginning of syllables that begin with /s/ in English –
still, spill, skill; strike; sprain; scratch;
*stl-; splint; *skl- etc.
How widespread is this constraint – is it peculiar to you? To the dialect of English you speak? To English? How would you answer those questions?
Corpora
Large collections of machine readable text Can contain spoken or written language, or both Can represent contemporary language or language from earlier periods Can represent one or more than one language Bas Aarts’ talk tomorrow night
Collecting your own corpus
Could be for a variety of purposes: language attitudes; regional variation; language change; linguistic universals; etc.
Will make your research unambiguously unique!
Representativeness
Exercise
(a) (b) (c) (d) (e) Each group to discuss possible methods for investigating the following linguistic questions, then report back in a plenary session in 15 minutes Is the word order of English and Japanese different? If so, in what ways is it different?
How has the marking of negation in French changed over time?
Do men speak more than women?
Do the Hopi people of Arizona, USA, have any way of referring to the concept of time?
What is a noun?
The tools of the trade
Describing phonology How would you transcribe this: You could use ordinary letters, but that wouldn’t distinguish the different qualities of the two ‘types’ of
IPA
IPA originated in nineteenth century as a uniform means of representing the spoken sounds of the world’s languages Has a wide range of uses (e.g. in SLT, in foreign language learning, phonological theory) Uniformity means that anyone trained in using the IPA knows what any other writer is trying to represent when she gives IPA transcriptions
IPA detective work
Using the IPA chart, spend 15 minutes in groups trying to transcribe the phrases on the handout into English orthography.
The IPA transcription of these phrases was based on a particular regional accent of English. Which one? What particular features of the transcription helped you to identify that accent?
A difficult case
The Lakhota exercise – things to work out (a) Generally which words in Lakhota correspond to which words in English?
(b) (c) (d) (e) (f) What is the word order?
How are person, number and grammatical role marked?
Do interrogatives have a different marking from declaratives?
How are the clauses coordinated?
Is there a noun marker?
Lakhota English correspondences
lakhota ‘Indian’; matho ‘bear’; hoksila ‘boy’ wičha- ‘them’; ma- ‘me’; ni- ‘you (obj.)’; tuwa ‘someone’ (indef.); wičhasa ‘someone’ (def.); no marking for 3s; ‘ya-’ you (subj.); -pi ‘they’; wa- ‘I’ kte ‘killed’; čho ‘called’; hi ‘came’ Ki = noun marker; he = question particle čha = ‘and’, when the subject of clause A is different from the subject of clause B; na = ‘and’ when the two subjects are the same
Word order
Word order is SOV where S and O are full nouns; pronouns are attached to the verb lakhota ki Indian NOUN wičha 3PlObj kte killed matho Bear ki NOUN wa 1SSubj kte killed
1s 2s 3s 3pl
Person, number and role
subject wa ya Ø -pi object ma ni Ø wičha-
Assignments 1 and 2
Ass. 1 I came, and the Indians and the bears killed them Someone killed you and called me Someone killed you and someone (maybe somebody else) called me He or she killed you Ass. 2 Who did he or she kill?
Who killed him or her?
Assignment 3
2.
3.
4.
1.
lakhota ki hokšita ki ktepi čha matho ki hi yahi na lakhota ki yakte tuwa wačho he wičhaša ki hipi čha tuwa wičhakte