those are our class notes for linguistic chapter 7, 9, 10 and 11.
I just convert them into graphic organizer.
do make full use of it!
insha Allah u can do it!
ganbatte kudasai!
p/s there will be some errors regarding the bullets and arrows. but, i believe u can still read it..
Chapter 7 - LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
CONCEPT | MECHANISM 1 | MECHANISM 2 |
Children do not learn language through memorizing the sentences of the language, they acquire a system of grammatical rules. Extract the intricate system of rules from the language heard and reinvent the grammar. | 1957 – BEHAVIOURIST PSYCHOLOGY (B.F Skinner) proposed Behaviourist principle : that language was a kind of verbal behavior. So, children learn through imitation, reinforcement, analogy and similar processes. | 1959 – Noam Chomsky showed that language is a complex cognitive system that couldn’t be acquired by behaviourist principles. |
Behaviourist principle
IMITATION | CORRECTION AND REINFORCEMENT | ANALOGY | STRUCTURED INPUT |
How? Listen to what is said and imitate that speech. Children unable to produce sentence outside of the rules of their developing grammar. Exp : Adult-he’s going out, Child-he go out Fails because children who are unable to speak for neurological or psychological reasons are able to learn the language spoken to them and understand it. After overcome their speech impairment, they immediately use the language for speaking | How? Children learn to produce correct (grammatical) sentence because they are positively reinforced when they say something grammatical and negatively reinforced (corrected) when they say something ungrammatical. Roger Brown and his colleagues at Harvard University reported that correction seldom occurs, when it does, it’s for mispronunciation or incorrect reporting of facts, not for “bad grammar.” Adults will sometimes recast children’s utterance into an adultlike form. Exp : child – it fall. Mother – it fell? Mother provides the correct model without actually correcting the child. Parents tend to focus on correctness of content more than on grammaticality (children confused) Even they correct syntax, they didn’t explain how or what. | How? Hearing a sentence and using it as a model to form other sentences. Exp 1 - ‘I painted a red barn’-> ‘I painted a barn red’ : correct Exp 2 – ‘I saw a red barn’ -> ‘I saw a barn red’ : incorrect Connectionist model : no grammatical rules are stored anywhere, it represented by a set of neuron-like connections between different phonological system (between play-played -> dance-danced) | Motherese : special “simplified” language / child-direct speech (CDS) (informal : baby talk) How? Speak more slowly and more clearly, higher pitch, exaggerate intonation with generally grammatical sentences. Exp : Do you want your juice now? Studies show that motherese does not significantly affect the child’s language development. Properties of motherese get child’s attention and reassure them. |
complex cognitive system
CHILDREN CONSTRUCT GRAMMAR | THE INATENESS HYPOTHESIS | STAGES IN LANGUAGE ACQUISITION |
Language acquisition is a creative process. They extract the rules of the grammar from the language they hear around them. Linguists believe that children are equipped with an innate template or blueprint for language -> Universal Grammar (UG) | Observation that the grammar a person ends up is vastly determined by his linguistic experiences. Imitation, reinforcement, analogy or structured input will not led children to formulate a phrase structure tree. Input children get is a sequence of sounds – create phrase structures and the rules they acquire are sensitive to this structure. Children extract from the linguistic environment those rules of grammar that are language specific (word order, movement rules). They do not need to learn universal structure like structure dependency/ general principles (heads of categories can take complements) UG predicts that all languages will conform to the principles of UG. | Language acquisition of children is faster than adult, but is not instantaneous. 1st words -> virtual adult competence (take 3-5 years) Linguistic stages: babbling -> acquire 1st words -> put words together into sentences. Stages is similar, possibly universal. Like adults, children have grammatical categories such as NP and VP, rules of building phrase structure and for moving constituents, as well as phonological, morphological and semantic rules, they adhere to universal principle such as structure dependency. |
1. THE PERCEPTION AND PRODUCTION OF SPEECH SOUNDS
· Adults find it difficult to differentiate between the allophones of one phoneme, but for infants it comes naturally.
· Infants can perceive voicing contrasts, place of articulation and contrast in manner of articulation.
· Infants appear to be born with the ability to perceive those sounds that are phonemics in one language
BABBLING | FIRST WORDS |
- Earliest stage in language acquisition. - Not linguistic chaos (infants begin to babble at around 6 months) - 12 most frequent consonants make up 95% of the consonants infants use in their babbling. - The early babbles consist mainly of repeated consonant-vowel sequence (mama, gaga, dada) - At the end of 1st year, babbles come to include those sounds and sound combination that occur in the target language. - Babbles begin to sound like words even did not have any specific meaning. - Human are born with predisposition to discover the units that serve to express linguistic meanings. - At a genetically specified neural development, the infant will begin to produce these units-sounds or gestures-depending on the language input the baby receives. | - Sometime after the age of 1, the child begins to repeatedly use the same strings of sounds to mean the same thing. - They realize that sounds are related to meaning. - Holophratsic or ‘whole phrase’stage -> utterances consist of only one word but mean to convey more complex message. - Exp : ‘down’ mean ‘making a request to be put down’ or ‘maybe commenting on the toy that has been fallen down.’ |
2.SEGMENTING THE SPEECH STREAM
Ø Speech is a continuous stream broken only by breath pauses.
Ø Studies show that infants are remarkably good at extracting information from continuous speech.
Ø English has stressed syllable. (bisyllabic content words -> trochaic-stress is on the 1st word, iambic stress is on the 2nd word)
Ø Preferential listening technique “At just few months old infants can discriminate native and non-native speaker”.
Ø About 9 months old, English-speaking children prefer to listen to listen to bisyllabic words with initial rather than final stress.
Ø Infants were able to distinguish the words from nonwords.
Ø Babies are sensitive to statistical information and linguistic structure to extract words from the input.
Ø Younger infants (7-and-a-half months old) respond to frequency.
Ø Older infants (9months old) attend to stress, allophonic and phonotactic information.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF GRAMMAR (the acquisition of…)
1. PHONOLOGY. | 2. WORD MEANING | 3. MORPHOLOGY | |
· 1st words : monosyllabic with a CV (consonant-vowel) form. · The order of acquisition classes. 1. Vowels 2. Manner of articulation for consonants. (nasal -> glides -> stops -> liquids -> fricatives -> affricates) 3. Place of articulation (labials -> velars -> alveolars -> palatals) Ø When children first begin to contrast one pair of a set ( /p/ and /b/ ), they also begin to distinguish between similar pairs ( /t/ and /d/ ) Ø Children at this stage can perceive or comprehend many more phonological contrasts than they can produce. Ø A child’s first word show many substitutions of one feature for another or one phoneme for another (light is pronounced yight). Ø Substitution is simplifications of the adult pronunciation. | • Phonological regularities – The child’s early vocabulary also provides insight into how children use words and construct word meaning. • Illustrates child may extend the meaning of a word from a particular referent to encompass a larger class • Eg : J.P. used ‘dog’ only when pointing to a real dog, but later he used the word for pictures of dogs in various books. • His use of this word shows his developing use of language for social purposes. • At earlier stage J.P. was using words to convey a variety of ideas and feelings, as well as his social awareness • For children, they have to figure out exactly what the word refers to. • Eg : Upon hearing the word dog in the presence of a dog, how does the child know that dog can refer to any 4 legged, hairy, barking creature? • A child often overextend a word’s meaning for example a child may learn a word such as papa or daddy, which she first uses only for her own father, and then extend it’s meaning to apply to all men. • After the child has acquired her first 75 to 100 words, the overextended meanings start to narrow until they correspond to those of the other speakers of the language. • Underextension – early language learning which a lexical item is used in an overly restrictive away • Eg : for children to first apply a word like bird only to the family’s pet canary without making a connection to birds in the tree outside. • Overextended • Narrow in on the adult language • Eg : based on physical attributes such a size, shape & texture • Underextended • Broaden their scope until they match the target language · Children learn approximately 14000 words a day for the first 6 years of their lives that averages to about 5000 words per year | • Overgeneralization – occurs when children treat irregular verbs and nouns as if they were regular. • Children often say the words wrongly because they have to go through 3 phases • Phase 1 • Child uses the correct term such as brought or broke • The words are treated as separate lexical entries • Phase 2 • Crucial because child constructs a rule for forming the past tense & attaches the regular past-tense morpheme to all verbs • Children look for general • Eg :play, hug , break & bring • Phase 3 • The child learns that there are exceptions to the rule and then once again uses brought and broke with the difference being that these irregular forms will be related to the root forms • Children acquiring languages with richer inflectional morphologies than English reveal that they learn agreement at a very early age. • Eg : English agreement rule ‘add s to the verb’ for third-person, singular subjects. • Children as young as 2 years old respect these agreement requirements when producing NPs. • Children also show knowledge of the derivational rules of their language and use these rules to create new words | |
4. PRAGMATICS | 5. SYNTAX |
• Context is needed to determine the reference of pronouns. • Children are not always sensitive to the needs of their interlocutors and they may fail to establish the referents for pronouns. • Younger children have difficulty with the shifting reference of these pronouns- I and You . • A typical error that children make at this age is to refer to themselves as ‘you’ • Children lack of pragmatic awareness in the way they sometimes use articles. Like pronouns the interpretation of articles depends on context. • | • When children are still in the holophrastic stage, adults listening to the one-word utterances often feel that the child is trying to convey a more complex message. • At this stage children have knowledge of syntactic rules. • Children as young as 17 months can understand the difference between sentences. • Eg: Ernie is tickling Bert – Bert is tickling Ernie • The children cannot be relying on the words alone to understand the meanings. • 18 months old can distinguish between subject and object wh questions and as a result children’s syntactic competence is ahead of their productive abilities, which is how their phonology develops. • At 2nd birthday children begin to put words together. • Then, they begin to form actual two- word sentences with clear syntactic and semantic relations. • Eg: allgone sock hi Mommy more wet it ball • The early utterances can express a variety of semantic and syntactic relations. • Eg : noun+noun sentences such as Mommy sock can express a subject+object relation in • the situation when the mother is putting the sock on the child, or a possessive relation when the child is pointing to Mommy’s sock. • Mean length of utterances (MLU) is the average length of the utterances the child is producing at a particular point. • It can be measured in terms of morphemes and words. • Children with the same MLU are likely to have similar grammars even though different ages. • In the earliest multiword utterances, children are inconsistent in their use of function words. • During this stage children often sound as if they are sending an e-message or reading an old-fashioned telegram that is why it is called telegram speech. • First stage – telegraphic speech is due to performance limitations- there is an upper limit on the length of utterance a child can produce. • 2nd stage – early grammatical stage similar to languages like Italian or Spanish that allow subject pronouns to be dropped. • Children never violate the word-order rules of their language • In languages with relatively fixed word order, such as English and Japanese, children use the required order (SVO in English, SOV in Japanese) from the earlier stage. • Telegraphic speech is very good evidence against the hypothesis that children learn sentences by imitation. • Adults-even when speaking motherese-do not drop function words when they talk to children. • Children have a grasp of the principles of phrase and sentence formation and of the kinds of structure dependencies and is revealed by constituent structure tree • Semantic bootstrapping – children first use the meaning of the word to figure out its category. • Eg : the child may have the rules like if a word refers to physical object, it’s a noun or if a word refers to an action, it’s a verb. • But not all these rules can be applied. • Word frames also help the child to determine when words belong to same category. • Eg : If a child knows that see is a verb,then he could also deduce that all the other words appearing in the same frame are also verbs. • The most frequent frames typically consist of function words, determiners like the or a pronouns-it or one • 2 years old respond more appropriately to grammatical commands such as find the bird than to commands with ungrammatically positioned function word as in find was bird. • Between the ages of 2;6 and 3;6 a virtual language explosion occurs. • 3;0, most children are consistent in their use of function morphemes and begun to produce and understand complex structures. • Past the age 3;6 children can generally form grammatical wh questions with proper Aux inversion. • Beyond 4;0 depending on the individual much of adult grammar has bee acquired |
SETTING PARAMETERS
• One such parameter determines whether the head of a phrase comes before or after its complements.
• Eg :whether the order of the VP is verb object (VO) as in English or (OV) as in Japanese.
• According to parameter model of UG the child does not actually have to formulate a word-order rule.
• The English-speaking child can quickly figure out that the head comes before its complements, a Japanese-speaking child can equally well determine that his language is head final.
• Parameters involve the verb movement rules
• In some languages the verb can move out of the VP to higher positions in the phrase structure tree.
• The children have set the parameter at the correct value for their language.
• This supports the hypothesis that the parameter is set early in development and cannot be done.
• The parameters of UG limit the grammatical options to a small well-defined set- is my language head first or head last, does my language have verb movement and so on.
• Parameters greatly reduce the acquisition burden on the child and contribute to explaining the ease and rapidity of language acquisition.
KNOWING MORE THAN ONE LANGUAGE | THE ROLE OF INPUT |
There are many ways in acquiring a second language. People might have learnt it in schools, colleges or in a workplace. Others might have been living in a community which more than one language is spoken. Second language acquisition refers to the acquisition of a second language by someone who has already acquired a first language. It is also referred to as sequential bilingualism. Bilingual language acquisition refers to as simultaneous acquisition of two languages beginning in infancy which is also known to be simultaneous bilingualism. In Africa and Asia, bilingualism or even multilingualism is norm. In US and European countries, bilingualism is often viewed as a transitory phenomenon associated with immigration. In early studies, language mixing is viewed negatively but now, it seems to be clear that some amount of language mixing is a normal part of the early bilingual acquisition process. Initially, it was taken as a child is confused with both the languages but now it’s not necessarily needed to be considered as any language problem | One issue that concerns bilingualism is the relationship between language input and proficiency. One input condition is that one person and one language which means one parent speaks only one language to the child. The idea is that keeping the two languages separate in the input will make it easier for the child to acquire each without influence from the other. in this manner, it will keep the two languages separately from each other. some may have more or less exposure to the two languages, some may hear one language more than the other and some may ultimately have one language that is dominant to a lesser or greater degree. However, a child should receive roughly equal amounts of input in the two languages to achieve native proficiency in both. |
SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
People are introduced to second language (L2) after they have achieved native competence in first language (L1).
IS L2 ACQUISITION THE SAME AS L1 ACQUISITION? | NATIVE LANGUAGE INFLUENCE IN L2 ACQUISITION | THE CREATIVE COMPONENT OF L2 ACQUISITION | IS THERE A CRITICAL PERIOD FOR L2 ACQUISITION? |
· · Adults do not simply pick up L2 · Requires special attention · Do not achieve native-grammatical competence in L2, especially pronunciation. Make syntactic or morphological errors. · L2ers make word order errors. · Make morphological errors in grammatical gender and case. · Success of language learners depend on age, talent, motivation and the setting where the language is spoken. · Linguist who study L2 acquisition, believe second language acquisition is something different from first language acquisition. · This hypothesis is known as fundamental difference hypothesis. · Like L1ers, L2erns construct grammars. · The intermediate grammars that L2ers create on their way to the target have been called interlanguage grammars. · L2ers construct grammar using problem solving skills and not principles used for language acquisition. | · Adult L2ers already have a fully developed grammar of their first language. · One cannot suppress the ability to use the rules of one’s own language. · L2ers at the beginning stage of acquiring their L2 seem to rely on L1 grammar. · ( involve the transfer of grammatical rules from their L1) · Obvious influence in phonology, syntax and morphology.( it is the wholesale transfer of a particular piece of grammar) | · · It would be oversimplification to think that L2 acquisition involves only the transfer of L1 properties to L2 interlanguage. · There is a strong creative component to L2 acquisition. · Many language-particular parts of the L1 grammar do not transfer. · Why certain L1 rules transfer to the interlanguage grammar and other’s don’t is not well understood. · Speakers with different l1s go through similar L2 stages. | Age is a significant factor in L2 acquisition. The younger a person is when exposed to second language, the more likely she is to achieve native-like competence. · Although age is an important factor in achieving native-like L2 competence, it is certainly possible to acquire a second language as an adult. · It more appropriate to say that L2 acquisition abilities gradually decline with age. |
CHAPTER 9 - LANGUAGE IN SOCIETY
DIALECT
Dialect | Regional Dialects |
· Individuals and groups can’t speak exactly alike. (Ex; New Yorkers, Texans, and Hispanic, all of these countries exhibit variation in the way they speak English) · When there are systematic differences in the way groups speak a language, we say that each group speaks a dialect of that language. · Dialects are mutually intelligence forms of a language that differ in systematic ways. · Every speaker from different background speaks at least one dialect. · A dialect is not inferior or degraded form of language, and logically could not be so because a language is a collection of dialects. · When dialects become mutually unintelligible- when the speakers of one dialect group can no longer understand the speakers of another dialect group- these dialect become different language. · Hindi and Urdu are mutually intelligible languages spoken in Pakistan and India. · Dialects and languages reflect the underlying grammars and lexicons of their speakers, · Dialect merges into each other, forming dialect continuum. · Mutual intelligibility, degree of grammatical difference, the existence of political and social boundaries are the factors to be looked on when we want to differ between a language and a dialect. · The using of rule- of- thumb definition, referring to dialects of one language as mutually intelligible linguistic system, with systematic differences are the method that can be used to determined a dialects. · Dialect diversity develops when the changes that occur in one region or group do not spread. · Dialect levelling is movement toward greater uniformity and less variation among dialects. | · Each version of the language is referred to as a regional dialect. · How dialects develop is illustrated by the pronunciation of words with an r in different parts of United States. · Early 18 century, the British in southern England were dropping their r’s before consonants and at the ends of words. By the end of the 18 century, r-drop was a general rule among the early settlers in New England and the southern Atlantic seaboard. · Regional phonological or phonetic distinctions are often referred to as different accents. · Accent refers to the characteristic of speech that conveys information about speaker’s dialect depends to which country he or she belong to or which sociolinguistic one belong to. · The term accent is also refer to the speech of non-native speaker, who have learned a language as a second language. · Unlike regional dialect accents, such foreign accents do not reflect differences in the speech of the community where the language was learned. · Regional dialects may differ not only in their pronunciation but also in their lexical choices and grammatical rules. |
DIFFERENCES
Phonological | Lexical | Syntactic |
· The pronunciation of British English (or many dialects of it) differs in systematic ways from pronunciations in many dialects of American English. · The most consistent difference occurred in the placement of primary stress, with most Americans putting stress on the first syllable and most British on the second or third in polysyllabic words like cigarette, applicable, and laboratory. · The British vowels described in the phonetics chapter are used by speakers of the dialect called RP (Received Pronunciation). · In this dialect, h is pronounced at the beginning of the both head and herb, whereas in most American English dialect h is not pronounced in herb. · In some British English dialects the h is regularly dropped from most words in which it is pronounced in America such as house, pronounced {aᶷs} and hero as {iro}. | · Regional dialects may differ in the words people use for the same object, as well as in phonology. · For example, people take lift to the first floor in England, but an elevator in the United States; they may fill up with petrol (not gas) in London; in Britain a public school is ‘private’ (you have to pay), and if a student showed up there wearing pants (“underpants”) instead of trousers (‘pants’), he would be sent home to get dressed. | · Dialects can also be distinguished by systemic syntactic differences. · Eg: 1. John will eat and Mary will eat. →John and Mary will eat. In the Ozark dialect of southern Missouri, the following conjoining also possible. 2. John will eat and Mary will eat. →John will eat and Mary. · In (1) VP will eat in the first conjunst is deleted. · In (2) VP in the second conjunct is deleted. · The Ozark dialect differs in allowing the second VP to delete. · Most dialects constrains verb phrases to contain no more than one modal verb. · Some of the dialects permit double modals also exhibit double objects and a-prefixing with progressives. · Several distinguishing syntactic characteristics contribute to a bundle of syntactic isoglosses that separate these regional dialects. · The pronoun I occurs when me would be used in other dialects. This difference is a syntactically conditioned morphological difference. · Although regional dialects differ in pronounciation, vocabulary, and syntactis rules, the differences are minor when compared with the totality of the grammar. |
Social Dialects | The “Standard” Language Purists | Banned Languages |
· Social boundaries and class differences are as confining as the physical barrier than define the regional dialects. · Social boundaries that give rise to dialect variation are numerous. · May be based on on socioeconomic status, religious, ethnic, or racial differences, country of origin, and even gender. · Social dialects is dialect differences because of social factors. · As opposed by regional dialects that are spawned by geographical factors. | · Prescriptive grammarians, or language purists, usually consider the dialect used by political leaders and national newscasters as the correct form of the language. · The dominant, or prestige, dialect is often called the standard dialect. Standard American English (SAE). · SAE is idealization. · Have social function. · Use in a group may bind people together / provide a common written form for multidialectal speakers. · The upper class had words and pronounciation peculiar to it. · The main characteristics of U speech is the avoidance of non-U speech. · Non-U speech habits often include hypercorrections, deviations from the norm thought to be proper English. · Dialects represents different set of rules or lexical items represented in the minds of its speakers. | · Language purists wish to prevent language or dialect differentiation because of the false belief that some languages are better than others. · Languages and dialects have also be banned as a mean of political control. · American Indian were banned in federal and state schools on reservations. · The use of sign language of the deaf was once banned. Children in schools for the deaf were often punished if they used any gestures at all. · The aim was to teach deaf children to read lips and to communicate through sound. |
AFRICAN AMERICAN ENGLISH
African American English | Phonological Difference between African American English and SAE | Syntactic Differences between AAE and SAE |
· A social dialect of North American English that has been a victim of prejudicial ignorance. · African American English (AAE) is spoken by a large population of American of African descent. · African American has created the social boundaries that permit this dialect to thrive. · A vast body research shoes that there are the same kinds of linguistics differences between AAE and SAE as occur between many of the world’s major dialects. | r-Deletion Ø AAE includes the rules of r-deletion that deletes /r/ everywhere excepts before a vowel. Ø Neutralization of [ɪ] and [ɛ]before nasal consonants, producing identical pronounciation of pin and pen. Ø Diphthong /Ↄɪ / reduction partucularly before /l/ to the simple vowel /Ͻ/ Ø Loss of interdental fricatives; regular features is the change of a /Ѳ/to /f/ and /Ò/to /v/. | Ø Multiple negative;governed by rules of syntax and are not illogical. Ø Deletion of the verb “Be”; in African American English sentences is deleted whereas in SAE it cant be deleted. Ø Habitual “Be”;in AAE this distinction is made sytactically; an uninflected form of be is used if the speaker is referring to habitual state. Ø “There” replacement; some AAE dialects replaces SAE there with it’s in positive sentences, and don’t or ain’t in negative sentences. |
Lingua franca | Pidgin | creole |
Lingua franca à where groups desire social or commercial communication, one language is often used by many common agreement. · English has been called “the lingua franca of the whole world” and is standardly used at international business meetings and academic conferences. · More frequently, lingua francas serve as a trade languages. o Eg: Hindi and Urdu are the lingua francas of India and Pakistan. · Certain lingua francas arise naturally; others are instituted by government policy and interaction. | Pidgin à a language which has developed from a mixture of 2 languages. It is used as a way of communicating by people who do not speak each other’s languages. Pidgin English / French etc à when it is spoken in a simple way, often with many mistakes, either by a foreigner or to a foreigner. o Eg: “He come here?” he asked in pidgin English Superstrate / lexifier language à most of the lexical items of the pidgin come from the language of the dominant group. Substrate languages à the other language or languages also contribute to the lexicon and grammar, but in less obvious way. Creole à has all the grammatical complexity of ordinary languages. Pidginisation à (the creation of a pidgin) thus involves a simplification and a reduction in the number of domains of use. | Creolization à in contrast, involves the linguistic expansion in the lexicon and grammar of existing pidgins, and an increase in the contexts of use. · While standard English has 14 distinct vowel sounds, pidgins commonly have only 5-7 and each phoneme may have many allophonic pronunciations. · Typically, pidgins lack grammatical words such as auxiliary verbs, prepositions and articles, and inflectional morphology including tense and case endings, as in : o He bad man “ He is a bad man “ o I no go bazaar “ I’m not going to the market “ Creole · Creole is defined as a language that has evolved in a contact situation to become the native language of a generation of speakers. · Children are able to construct a creole because they used their innate linguistic capacities to rapidly transform the pidgin into a full-fledged language. This would account for the many grammatical properties that creoles have in common, for example, SVO word order and tense and aspect distinctions. · Various linguists believe that creoles are the result of imperfect second language learning of the lexifier or dominant language by adults and the “transfer” of grammatical properties from their native non-European languages. o For eg: invariant verb forms, lack of determiners, and the use of adverbs rather than verbs and auxiliaries to express tense and modality. |
Bilingualism | Codeswitching |
Bilingualism à refers to the ability to speak two( or more ) languages, either by an individual speakers, individual bilingualism, or within a society, societal bilingualism. · The situations under which people become bilingual may vary. Some people grow up in a household in which more than one language is spoken; others move to a new country where they acquire the local language, usually from people outside the home. · Still others can learn second language in school. · In communities with rich linguistic diversity, contrast between speakers of different languages may also lead to bilingualism. · Bilingualism (or multilingualism) also refers to the situation in nations in which two (or more) languages are spoken and recognized as official or national languages. o Eg: many countries including Canada- where English and French are both official languages. | Codeswitching à is a speech style unique to bilinguals, in which fluent speakers switch languages between or within sentences, as illustrated by the following sentence : Sometimes I’ll start a sentence in English and termino en espanol. Sometimes I’ll start a sentence in English and finish it in Spanish. · Codeswitching is a universal language-contact phenomenon that reflects the grammars of both languages working simultaneously. o Examples: 1. Johan hat mirgesagt that you were going to leave Johan told me that you were going to leave. ( German- English) 2. Chigum ton-uls ops-nunde, I can’t but it. As I don’t have money now, I can’t buy it. ( Korean-English ) · Codeswitching occurs wherever groups of bilinguals speak the same two languages. Furthermore, codeswitching occurs in specific social situations, enriching the repertoire of the speakers. · A common misconception is that codeswitching is indicative of a language disability of some kind, for example, that bilinguals use codeswitching as a coping strategy for incomplete mastery of both languages, or that thay are speaking broken language. |
Language & education
“Ebonics” |
· children who speak a dialect of English that differs from the language of instruction may also be disadvantages in school setting. · One approach to this problem has been to discourage children from speaking African American English (AAE) and to correct each departure from Standard American English (SAE) that the children produce. · SAE is presented as the ‘correct’ way to speak and AAE as substandard or incorrect. · This approach has been criticized as being psychologically damaging to the child as well as impractical. · One’s language/dialect expresses group identity and solidarity with friends and family. A child may take rejection of his language as a rejection of him and his culture. · A more positive approach to teaching literacy to speaker s of nonstandard dialects is to encourage bidialectalism. This approach teaches children to take pride in their language, encouraging them to use it in informal circumstances, with family and friends, while also teaching them in SAE that is necessary for reading, writing, and classroom discussion. |
Second language teaching method
synthetic approach | analytic approach. |
· The synthetic approach stresses the teaching of the grammatical, lexical, phonological, and functional units of the language step by step. · This is a bottom-up method. The task of the learner is to put together – or synthesize- the discrete elements that make up the language. · An extreme example of the synthetic approach is the grammar translation method. It favored up until the mid 1960s, in which students learned lists of vocabulary, verb paradigms, and grammatical rules. · The teacher typically conducted class in the native language, focusing on the grammatical parsing of texts, and there was little or no contextualization of the language being taught. | · The analytic approach is more top-down. The goal is not to explicitly teach the component parts of rules of the target language. · Rather, the instructor selects topics, texts, or tasks that are relevant to the needs and interests of the learner, whose job then is to discover the constituent parts of the language. |
LANGUAGE AND SEXISM | ||||
· Women may be referred to as a castrating female, ballsy women’s libber, or courageous feminist advocate. · Words with women also abound with abusive or sexual overtones: · Few sexual term exist for men, Boy toy, stud muffin, hunk, or jock (not pejorative in the same way) · It’s clear that language reflects sexism. It reflects any societal attitude, positive or negative (language are definitely flexible and expressive) · There are male/female pairs of words.
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Language in use
styles | SLANG | JARGON AND ARGOT |
· Meaning: A linguistic variant appropriate to a particular social context. · most speakers of a language speak different ways between: -Friends -Job interaction/presenting a report in class -Talking to small children -Talking with parents · These “situational dialects” are called styles, or registers. · Nearly everybody has at least formal and informal style. In an informal style, the rules of contractions are used more often, syntactic rules of negation and agreement may be altered, and many words that are used that do not occur in the formal style. · Informal style, although permitting certain abbreviations, and deleting not permitted in formal speech, are also rule-govern. Ø Example: questions are often shortened with the subject you and the auxiliary verb deleted. Ø Running the marathon? Or You running the marathon? Or more formal Are you running the marathon? But you cannot shorten the question to *Are running the marathon? · Informal talk is not anarchy. It is rule-governed, but the rules of deletion, contraction, and word choice are different from those of formal language. · The use of styles is often a means of identification with a particular group. (eg: family, gang, church, team) or a means of excluding groups believed to be hostile or undesirable (cops, teachers, parents) | · Meaning: words and expressions used in very informal settings (common slang), often to indicate membership in a particular social group (in-group slang). · The use of slang: -has introduced many new words into the language by recombining old words into new meanings. v Example: spaced out, right on, hang-up, and rip-off. o -introduced entirely new words v Example: barf, flub and dis. v -consists of ascribing entirely new meaning to old words. v Example: raveà broadened its meaning to “an all-night dance party”. Ø ecstasy (slang for a kind of drug)àto provoke wakefulness. Ø cribàone’s home Ø posseàone’s cohort Ø grass and potàwidened their meaning to ‘marijuana’ Ø pig and fuzz à derogatory terms for ‘police officer’ Ø another exampleà rap, cool, dig, stoned, bread, split and suck · There are scads of source of slang: · Comes from the underworld: crack, payola, to hang paper. · Comes from the college campuses: crash, wicked, peace. · Comes from the White House: pencil (writer), still (photographer), football (black box of security secrets) Slang meets a variety of social needs rather than a corruption of the language. | · Practically, every conceivable science, profession, trade, and occupation ues specific slang terms called jargon, or argot. · The computer age is not only ushered in a technological revolution, it also introduced a slew of jargon, called, slangily, “computerese”, used by computer “hackers” and others. Ø A few words that are familiar to most people are modem (from modulator-demodulator), bit (from binary digit) and byte (from eight bits). Ø Acronym and alphabetic abbreviations abound in computer jargon. ROM (read-only memory), RAM (random access memory), and CPU (central processing unit). Jargon, like all types of slang, spreads from a narrow group that originally embraced it until it is used and understood by a large segment of the population. |
CHAPTER 10 : LANGUAGE CHANGE-The Syllables of Time
1. PHONOLOGY
Phonological Change | Phonological Rules | The Great Vowel Shift |
· Regular sound correspondences illustrate changes in the phonological system of a language. · The velar fricative /x/ is no longer part of the phonemic inventory of most Modern English dialects. · All words that were pronounced with an /x/ no longer include this sound. · For example: Night used to be pronounced [nixt] Drought used to be pronounced [druxt] · This phonological change- the loss of /x/- took place between the times of Chaucer and Shakespeare. · In some cases it disappeared altogether, as in light and night · In other cases the /x/ became a /k/, as in elk. · These examples show that the addition and the loss of phonemes change the inventory of sounds in a language. · An allophone of a phoneme may, through sound change, become a separate phoneme, thus adding to the phonemic inventory. · The phoneme /f/ had theallophone [v] when it occurred between vowels. So ofer /ofer/ meaning “over” was pronounced [ეver]. · Old English also had a long consonant phoneme /f:/ that contrasted with /f/ between vowels. · This made it possible for English to have minimal pairs involving [f] and [v] such as feel and veal. · In American sign language many signs that were originally formed at the waist or chest level are now produced at a higher level near the neck or upper chest, a reflection of changes in “phonology”. | · An interaction of phonological rules may result in changes in the lexicon. · The noun house and bath were once differentiated from the verbs house and bathe by the fact that the verbs ended with a short vowel sound. · This general rule added voicing to inter-vocalic fricatives. · Thus the /s/ in the verb house was pronounced (z) · The set of phonological rules can change both by addition and loss of rules. | · Between 1400 and 1600 a major change took place in English, resulted in new phonemic representations of words and morphemes. · This phonological restructuring is known as the Great Vowel Shift. · The seven long, or tense, vowels of Middle English underwent the following change: Shift Middle English Modern English  [i:] [aI] [u:] [aμ] [e:] [i:] [o:] [u:] [ε:] [e:] [ე:] [o:] [a:] [e:]· By diagramming the Great Vowel Shift on a vowel chart, we can see that high vowels [i:] and [u:] became the diphthongs [aI] and [aU] · The long vowels underwent an increase in tongue height, as if to fill in the space vacated by high vowels. [a:] was fronted to become [e:]. |
2. MORPHOLOGY
· Like phonological rules, rules of morphology may be lost, added, or changed. · Latin had case ending, suffixes on the noun based on its thematic role or its grammatical relationship to the verb. · The following is a declension, or list of cases, for the Latin noun lupus, “wolf”: | · English corresponding to the nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and vocative cases existed in Latin and in Old English but not in Modern English, where word order and prepositions convey the same information. · Ancient Greek and Sanskrit also had extensive case systems expressed through noun suffixing, as did Old English, as illustrated bt the following noun forms: · English retains the genitive case, which is written with an apostrophe s, as in Robert’s dog. · Pronouns retain a few more case distinctions: he/she are nominative, him/her accusative and dative, and his/hers are genitive. |
3. Syntactic Change
· In modern English, adjectives generally precede the nouns they modify. · There some exceptions to the Adj-Noun order in Modern English. · Syntactic change in English and other languages is most evident in the changes of permitted word orders. · Good illustrations of the interrelationship of the various modules of the grammar. · Changes in syntax were often influenced by changes in morphology, and then in turn by changes in the phonology of the language. · When the rich system of case-endings of Old English became simplified in part because of phonological changes, speakers of English were forced to rely more heavily on word order to convey the function of noun phrases. · In earlier stages of English the verb had a richer system of subject-verb agreement. - E.g.: singe (I sing), singest (you sing), singeth (he sings), and singen (we, plural you, they sing). · Therefore also possible to identify the subject on the basis of verb inflection. · In Modern English the only marker of agreement is the third person singular –s in He sings. · In Old English the VP was head final, as indicate by the following PS rule: VP à NP V · The Old English phrase structure was like the phrase of Dutch and German, closely related languages. · The English VP (but not German and Dutch) underwent a change in parameter setting and became head initial as below: VP à V NP | · As the result Modern English has SVO word order whereas Old English (and modern Dutch and German) have a basic SOV word order. · However Modern English still has remnants of the original SOV word order in “old-fashioned” kinds of expressions such as I thee wed. · As morphological distinctions vanished over the centuries, word order became stricter. · Older forms of English had a more general rule that moved the first verbal element, which meant that if no auxiliary occurred in the sentence, then the main verb moved. · In English the rule of question formation changed, so that now only auxiliary verbs move and if no auxiliary verb is present, a ‘do’ fills its role. · Modern English, with its rudimentary case system, defines grammatical relations structurally: the direct object is the NP that is sister to the verb. · The intro of ‘do’ allows the verb to remain in its base position, and sentence thus retains the SVO word order that most plainly indicates the subject and the object of the sentence. · Another syntactic change in English affected the rules of comparative and superlative constructions. · Today we form the comparative by adding –er to the adjective or by inserting ‘more’ before it; the superlative is formed by adding –est or by inserting most. · Unlike in Malory’s Tales of King Arthur, written in 1470, which double comparatives and double superlatives occur: more gladder, moost shamefullest. · The loss of Old English noun and verb morphology resulted in stricter word order in Modern English, gave rise to a syntactic change from a null-subject grammar to one that requires subject. |
4. LEXICAL CHANGE
Addition of new words | Word coinage | Words from names |
Changes in category · Changes in parts of speech · For example, noun is change to verb · Require new words to describe changes in technology, sports, entertainment.. · New words are born through derivational processes, back formation and compounding · Includes out and out word coinage, derived words from names, blending words to form new words, shortening old words to form new ones, forming acronyms, and borrowing words from other languages | · May be created outright to fit some purpose · Many words are added to English such as Kodak, nylon, Orlon, and Dacron · Specific brand names such as Xerox, Band-Aid, Kleenex, Jell-O, Brillo and Vaseline · Sciences have giving the new words coinage such as asteroid, neutron, krypton, and vaccine · These are to describe the objects or processes arising from scientific investigation · Sometimes, words originally coined for one purpose such as Google the name of a company and serve related purpose such as google means to search on the Internet · Bound morpheme may enter the language. · Prefix e- such as e-mail, e-trade, e-commerce · -zilla a bound morpheme which gives meaning huge or extreme | · Eponyms are words that are coined from proper names and are another of the many creative ways that the vocabulary of a language expands · Sandwich is taken from the Fourth Earl of Sandwich, who put his food between two slices of bread so that he could eat while he gambled · Robot is taken after the mechanical creatures in the Czech writer Karel Capek’s play R.U.R, the initials standing for Rossums’ Universal Robots · Gargantuan is taken from named of Gargantua the creature with a huge appetite created by Rabelais · Jumbo is taken after an elephant brought to the United States by P.T. Barnum |
LOSS OF WORDS | Blends |
· A word is lost through inattention · Beseem taken from Romeo and Juliet means “to be suitable” · Mammet means doll or puppet · The words used in long years ago, two bits meaning twenty five cents · Lickety-split meaning very fast. · All of these are no longer used. · Technological changes cause for the loss of words | · Combining two words, but parts of the words that are combined are deleted. · Smog comes from smoke+fog · Bruch comes from breakfast + lunch · Motel comes from motor+hotel |
5. SEMANTIC CHANGE
Broadening | Narrowing | Meaning shifts |
· When the meaning of a word becomes broader, it means everything it used to mean and more. · Middle English word dogge referred to a specific breed of dog but was eventually broadened to encompass all members of the canis familiaris. · The word holiday meant a day of religious significance from holy day. | · In seventh-century English, meat meant ‘food’ and flesh meant ‘meat’ · Since that time, semantic change has narrowed the meaning of meat to what it is in Modern English · The meaning of deer is narrowed to a particular kind of animal. · Today hound means a special kind of dog. | · Lexical item may undergo is a shift in meaning. · The word knight once meant youth but shifted to mounted man at arms · By Middle English period it had come to mean ‘naïve’ and only in Modern English does it mean ‘foolish’. |
THE GENETIC CLASSIFICATION OF LANGUAGE |
- The similarities between English and German is pervasive. e.g (man/Mann) - English, German, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic are sisters. - Non-Germanic language: French or Russian - The Romance language are also sister language whose parent is Latin - Germanic and Romance languages are truly cousins - Languages such as Greek, Armenian, Albanian and even extinct Hittite and Tocharian are distant cousin. - The Baltic language Lithuanian is related to English as is its sister language, Latvian - Hindi and Bengali are distantly related to English - Persian and Kurdish is a distant cousin of English |
CHAPTER 11 WRITING: THE ABC’S OF LANGUAGE
The history of writing |
There are many legends and stories about the invention of writing. Greek legend has it that Cadmus, Prince of Phoenicia and founder of the city of Thebes, invented the alphabet and brought it with him to Greece. In one Chinese fable, the four eyed – dragon – god Cang Jie invented writing, but in another, writing first appeared as markings on the back of the chi-lin, a white unicorn of Chinese legend. In other myths, the Babylonian god Nebo and the Eygyption god Thoth gave writing as well as speech to humans. The Talmunic scholar Rabbi Akiba believe that the alphabet existed before humans were created, and according to Hindu tradition the Goddess Saraswati, wife of Brahma, invented writing. |
Pictogram & Ideogram | Ideogram |
- the roots of writing were the early drawings made by ancient humans. - Pictogram and ideogram were created by human beings more than 20 000 years ago. - Pictogram is the direct images of the object it represent. - There is non- arbitrary relationship between the form and the meaning of the symbol. - Pictogram is use today in international road sign where the native language of the region might not be understood by the travelers. - such symbols do not depends on words - A picture of the sun could represent warm, heat, light, daytime and so on. - A few examples of pictograms:  | — Ideogram origins from pictograms where pictogram began to represent ideas rather than object. — Also know as idea picture or idea writing. — The different between the pictogram and ideogram is ideogram tend to be less direct translation — Meanwhile pictogram tends to be more literal. — The ideogram becomes a linguistic symbol when one has to learn the words of the language that the ideogram represents. — To interpret the symbol of the picture This stage was a revolutionary step in the development of writing system. |
Cunieform | The Rebus Principle |
Introduction • Writing stems from the records left by the Sumerians. • They left innumerable clay tablets containing business documents, epics, prayers, proverbs, and so on. • Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary Project published electronically of their written language. • The writing system of the Sumerians is the oldest ones. • Sumerians: -commercially oriented people -their business deals became increasingly complex. • An elaborate pictography was developed, along with a system of tally. Sumerians: -commercially oriented people -their business deals became increasingly complex. • An elaborate pictography was developed, along with a system of tally. • The tables harden in desert sun to produce permanent records. • This form of writing is known as CUNEIFORM. • As cuneiform evolved, users began to think of symbols more in terms of the name of things it represents. • Eventually, cuneiform script represents words of language. • Such system is called– LOGOGRAPIC or WORD WRITTNG. • LOGOGRAMS- symbols of the word-writing system, are ideograms that represent in addition to the concept, the word or morpheme in that language for that concept • Cuneiform writing system - Borrowers – used to represent the sound of syllables in their language. • Evolved – syllabic writing system Syllabic writing system • Each syllable represented by its own symbol • Words – written syllable by syllable • Emoticons - Emoticons are strings of text characters that, when viewed sideways, form a face expressing a particular emoticon. • They are used mostly in e-mail and text messaging to express a feeling • They are a modern pictographic system similar to cuneiform in that the same symbols are combined in different manners to convey different concepts | Definition A representation of words by pictures of objects whose names sound like the word. Written symbols are borrowed to represent new words with the same sounds regardless of what these symbols originally mean.Phonographic Symbol A graphic sign that does not has a visual relationship to the word it represents. It stands for the sounds that represent the word. A single sign that can be used to represent all words with the same sounds - the homophones of the language. Examples    • This is not an efficient system because in many languages words cannot be divided into sequences of sounds that have meaning by themselves. • Example: To represent the word English in English according to the Rebus Principle. Eng by itself does not mean anything, nor does glish. |
FROM HIERO GLYPHICS TO THE ALPHABET | Word writing | Syllabic Writing |
At the time that Sumerian pictography was flourishing ( around 4000 B.C.), the Egyptians , used a similar system which the Greeks later called hieroglyphics (hiero, “sacred,” +glyphikos, “carvings”). These sacred carvings originated as pictography as shown below.  “EYE” Eventually these pictograms came to represent both the concept and the word for the concept. Most alphabetic systems in use today derive from the Greek system | v Written character represents the meaning and pronunciation of each word. v Writing system in China and Japan is different. v Each Character represents a word or morpheme. v Longer words are formed through compounding. ü E.g. maimai (buy & sell) v A word-writing system would be awkward for English because of the pervasiveness of inflected verb forms. v These are difficult to represent without a huge proliferation of characters. v Even without the need to represent inflectional forms, Chinese dictionary contains tens of thousands of characters. v To promote literacy, Chinese government has undertaken character simplification program from time to time. | v More efficient compare with word-writing system. v Less taxing on the memory. v Language with rich structure of syllables containing many consonant clusters cannot be efficiently written with a syllabary. v The Japanese language is more suitable for syllabic writing. v Can be phonologically represented about 100 syllables. v Mostly of the consonant-vowel(CV). v No underlying consonant clusters. |
Consonantal Alphabet Writing | Alphabetic Writing |
Consonants? Oxford Dictionary: noun. A basic speech sound in which the breath is at least partly obstructed and which can be combined with a vowel to form a syllable. Example: /k/, /s/, /b/ Semitic languages Arabic HebrewArabic Are written with alphabets that consist only of consonants: ‘ktb’ is associated with ‘write’. Katab : to write Aktab : I write Kitab: a book Inflectional & derivational processes can be expressed by different vowels(a,I,u) inserted into the triconsonantal roots(ktb, etc.) In writing, they don’t need vowels. Consonants and vowels Consonants are fully developed alphabets Vowels are diacritic marks ب ت | Introduction — Easy to learn. — Convenient to use. — Maximally efficient. ◦ For transcribing any human language. — Sometimes, sound writing is used in place of alphabetic writing. ◦  One sound one letter King Seijong’s law on Alphabetic Writing — He designed a phonemic alphabet. — He realized more than 30,000 Chinese characters used to write Korean discouraged literacy. — So, King Seijong had introduced the Korean Alphabet called Hangul. ◦ Hangul is Korean alphabet which had 17 consonants and 11 vowels. ◦ Was designed on the phonemic principle. — The consonants are drawn so as to depict the place and manner of articulation. — While, the vowels are drawn as long vertical or horizontal lines, sometimes with smaller marks. — The Hangul characters are grouped into squarish blocks. ◦ Each corresponding to syllable(syllabary). — Difference on English writing and Korean Writing. European alphabet — Use Latin(Roman) letters. — Adding diacritic marks to accommodate individual characteristics of a particular language. — Diaciritic marks used in writing systems of tone languages. – Thai to indicate the tone of a syllable. — Eg: ◦ Spansih use ń to represent the palatalized nasal phoneme. ◦ German use an umlaut for certain of its vowel sounds that did not exist in Latin. – űber Diagraph — Languages that use two letters together. — To present a single sound. — Eg: ◦ sh /∫/ as in she. ◦ ch /t∫/ as in chop. ◦ ng /sІn/ as sing. ◦ oa /lof/ As in loaf. |
Coarse time line of the development of the Roman alphabet.
— 15000 B.C.E - Cave drawing as pictograms.
4000 B.C.E - Sumerian cuneiform.
— 3000 B.C.E - Hieroglyphics.
— 1500 B.C.E - West Semitic Syllaboary of the Phoenicians.
— 1000 B.C.E - Ancient Greeks borrow the
Phoenician consonantal alphabet.
— 750 B.C.E - Etruscans borrow the Greek alphabet.
— 500 B.C.E - Romans adapt the Etruscans/Greco alphabet to Latin
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