MAin traits of linguistics and its relationship to language

1. Introduction to
Language & Linguistics I
BOĞAZIÇI UNIVERSITY SUMMER TERM 2019
INSTRUCTOR: DR. PHIL. KONSTANTINOS SAMPANIS
UNIVERSITY OF THE AEGEAN
LECTURES 1-2

2. General Information
 Lecturer: Dr. phil. Konstantinos Sampanis
 konstantinos.sampanis@yahoo.com
 Office: 312, Department of Linguistics
 Visiting Hours: Friday 15.00 – 16.00

3. Grading
I. Class attendance & active participation: 10%
II. Readings & Assignments: 20%
III. Midterm Exam: 30%
IV. Final Exam: 40%

4. Overview of the Course Lectures
i. Course introduction Readings: Chapter 1 (pp. 1-27)
ii. Theoretical & Applied Linguistics – Linguistic Subfields
iii. Morphology Readings: Chapter 2 (pp. 33-52)
iv. Morphology Readings: Chapter 2 (pp. 57-66), Chapter 6 (pp. 224-229)
v. Syntax Readings: Chapter 3 (pp. 76-82)
vi. Syntax Readings: Chapter 3 (pp. 82-87)
vii. Syntax Readings: Chapter 3 (pp. 87-99)

5. Overview of the Course Lectures
viii. Syntax Readings: Chapter 3 (pp. 99-109)
ix. Midterm Exam
x. Semantics Readings: Chapter 4 (pp. 139-146)
xi. Semantics Readings: Chapter 4 (pp. 147-158)
xii. Phonetics Readings: Chapter 5 (pp. 189-208)
xiii. Phonology Readings: Chapter 6 (pp. 230-245)
xiv. Phonology Readings: Chapter 6 (pp. 245-251, 260-264)
xv. Linguistic Typology. Pereltsvaig 2012, Chapter 1 (pp. 1-11)
xvi. Summing up: Review & Discussion of queries

6. Literature
 Basically: FROMKIN, A.V., R. RODMAN & N. HYAMS.
(102014). An Introduction to Language.
Harcourt Brace College Publishers.
 Power-Point Presentations and additional
material will be uploaded on a dropbox
shared folder and (eventually) later in moodle.

7. What is linguistics?

8. Language & Linguistics
 What is linguistics?
Oxford’s “Lexico”: The scientific study of language and its structure, including the
study of grammar, syntax, and phonetics. Specific branches of linguistics include
sociolinguistics, dialectology, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics,
comparative linguistics, and structural linguistics. (link:
https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/linguistics)

9. Lyons 1968: 1
Language & Linguistics

10. Language & Linguistics
 And once we answer the first question, what is then language and what is
not language?
 Is there non-verbal languages (i.e. languages without “words” the way we
perceive the term ‘word’)?
 Are human beings the sole species able to speak?

11. Language is a sign system. Still, not every sign system is language.
Why is the first sign not part of a language system?

12. Language & Linguistics
 Language signs, either uttered or written, refer either to a single mental entity or activity, material
or abstract (e.g. “chair” and “truth”, existent or non-existent “elephant” or “unicorn”, or they have a
grammatical function (e.g. “before”, “and”, “towards”). Moreover, language signs can be combined
in order to form sentences. Speech is made up by sentences not by single words.
 Signs, such as the traffic ones, even when they refer to a single entity or activity, they cannot be
arranged into sentences and they do not show grammatical features. Additionally, non-linguistic
signs cannot easily refer to abstract concepts (e.g. ‘truth’, ‘dedication’, ‘forgiveness’).
 This means that language is a sign system but not every sign system is language.

13. Knowledge of Language
 To speak a language as a native speaker means to know what is right or
wrong in a particular language.
 This knowledge is acquired at the age of 5. A child may ignore several words
but its ability to construct grammatically right sentences is already available.
Obviously, this is not a result of education.
 Children learn to speak unconsciously, similar to the way they learn to stand
or walk. This means that language is an innate ability of the human brain.

14. Knowledge of Language
 In a test conducted in 1958, the psycholingust Jean
Berko Gleason introduced the famous Wug Test.
 Gleason used a non-existing word in order to see if
children can apply grammatical rules on it. Wug was
supposed to be the name of a bird that was depicted
above the word.
 The experiment showed that children are able to form a
plural even in a word that they have never heard before.
Thus, language learning is not simple repetition of what
a child has heard in its environment.

15. Knowledge of Language
Can you categorize the following words into the
respective parts of speech?
Of course you can, despite the fact that the sentence is
nonsensical!
The yinkish dripner blorked quastofically into the nindin
with the pidibs

16. Knowledge of the Sound System
 When we know a language, we know what sounds (or signs)
are used in the language and which sounds (or signs) are
not
 This also includes knowing how the sounds of the language
can be combined
 Which sounds may start a word
 Which sounds may end a word
 Which sounds may follow each other within a word

17. Knowledge of the Sound System
 When languages borrow words from other languages (loanwords) they tend to adopt
them to their sound rules:
 Turkish şinitzel < German Schnitzel
 Turkish aşk < Arabic ˁişḳ ‫ق‬ْ‫ش‬ِ‫ع‬
 Mod. Greek fistiki < Turk. fıstık < Arab. fustuq
 Spanish escuela / French école < Latin scuola (<Anc. Greek scholē)
 tomato < Nahuatl tomatl, through Spanish tomate
 A native speaker of Turkish or English for example will recognize that a string of sounds
such as krv is not allowed in their native languages. However this is a word in
Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian meaning ‘blood’.

18. Knowledge of Words
Knowing a language also means identifying certain strings of sounds as
meaningful words.
Most words in all languages are arbitrary connections of sound to
meaning
hand main nsa ruka
(English) (French) (Twi) (Russian)

19. Arbitrary relation of form and meaning
 The idea of arbitrariness of the linguistic symbol was introduced by the father
of modern linguistics Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). The
idea is that there is a conventional and arbitrary relationship between the form
(sounds) and the meaning of a word.
"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.“ (Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2))
Still, rose is called differently is other languages: e.g. vardi in Georgian, masreni in
Eastern Armenian.
The same string of sounds may have different meaning in different languages:
kara means ‘from’ in Japanese, ‘punishment’ in Polish and ‘dark’, ‘black’ in Turkish.

20. Knowledge of Words
 The conventional
and arbitrary
relationship
between form and
meaning is also
true in sign languages
From
Poizner,
Howard,
Edward
Klima,
and
Ursula
Bellugi.
What
the
Hands
Reveal
about
the
Brain
Figure:
"Arbitrary
relation
between
gestures
and
meanings
of
the
signs
for
'father'
and
'suspect'
in
ASL
&
CSL"
Copyright
©
1987
Massachusetts
Institute
of
Technology,
by
permission
of
the
MIT
Press

21. Knowledge of Words
 Sound symbolism: there are some words whose
pronunciation seems to reflect the meaning
 Onomatopoeia:
 English cock-a-doodle-doo and Finnish kukkokiekuu
 English gobble gobble and Turkish glu-glu
 English gl and the concept of sight:
 glare, glint, gleam, glitter, glossy, glance, glimpse
but there is also
 gladiator, glucose, glory, glutton, globe, etc.

22. Arbitrariness

23. Creativity of Linguistic Knowledge
 Every language has an infinite number of possible sentences
 Knowing a language enables you to:
 Create a sentence that has never been uttered before
 Understand a sentence that has never been uttered before
 Most sentences we use are new; very few sentences are stored in our brains and
it is impossible to write a dictionary including all possible sentences of a
language.

24. Creativity of Linguistic Knowledge
1)
a) a very big peanut
b) a very very big peanut
c) a very very very big peanut
d) a very very very very big peanut
etc.
2)
a) Dave left
b) Dave and Alina left
c) Dave, Dan, and Alina left
d) Dave, Dan, Erin, and Alina left
e) Dave, Dan, Erin, Jaime, and Alina left
etc.
 It is possible to insert infinite number of lexical items in a sentence:

25. Creativity of Linguistic Knowledge
It is possible to embed infinite number of sentences to another sentences:
Carnie 20
It is possible to utter a sentence like (1):
1) Rosie loves magazine ads.
It is also possible to put this sentence inside another sentence, like (2):
2) I think [Rosie loves magazine ads].
Similarly you can put this larger sentence inside of another one:
3) Drew believes [I think [Rosie loves magazine ads]].
and of course you can put this bigger sentence inside of another one:
4) Dana doubts that [Drew believes [I think [Rosie loves magazine ads]]].
and so on, and so on ad infinitum. It is always possible to embed a sentence

26. Knowledge of Sentences and
Nonsentences
 Language is more than a set of words because words must be ordered in
certain ways to create sentences
 Our knowledge of language allows us to separate possible sentences from
nonsentences
 What he did was climb a tree
 *What he thought was want a sports car
(We indicate a nonsentence (a non-grammatical sentence with an asterisk at the beginning of
the sentence).

27. Linguistic Knowledge and Performance
 Knowledge: what we know about a language (linguistic competence)
 Mostly unconscious knowledge about sounds, structures, meanings, words, and rules
for combining linguistic elements
 Performance: how we use this knowledge in actual speech production
and comprehension
 We can theoretically create an infinitely long sentence, but physical constraints make
this impossible
 In speech we stammer, pause, and produce slips of the tongue

28. Fromkin et al. 102014: 8

29. What Is Grammar?
 Grammar = a. the knowledge (competence) speakers have about the units and rules
of their language, b. a theory describing and explaining this competence.
 Rules for combining sounds into words, word formation, making sentences,
assigning meaning
 When a sentence is ungrammatical in a linguistic sense, it means that it breaks the
rules of the shared mental grammar of the language

30. Descriptive versus Prescriptive
Grammar
Linguists wish to describe a language, to show how a native speaker of a given language speaks. It is
accepted that any native speaker can tell the difference between what is grammatical and
ungrammatical.
Grammatical: a sentence conforms with the rules of the mental grammar.
Ungrammatical: a sentence deviates from the rules of this mental grammar.

31. Descriptive versus Prescriptive
Grammar
This kind of grammatical analysis is called descriptive and it does not suggest how people should
speak. It is a scientific observation and, eventually, an explanation.
This approach differs from traditional accounts of language who wanted to impose rules on how
people speak. These grammars did not want to describe but to describe, therefore they are called
prescriptive grammars. These are the grammars largely used on primary education, for example.

32. Mental Grammar
 As “Mental Grammar” we designate a set of grammatical rules which are internalized in the
human brain (in a part of it called “faculty of language”). In the scheme below, Syntax can be
understood as “mental grammar” the rules of which are applied on the Lexicon (the speaker’s
vocabulary).
 PF = Phonetic Form.
Radford 2004 :9

33. Descriptive Grammar
 Descriptive grammar: a true model of the mental grammar of language
speakers
 In other words, a descriptive grammar describes the linguistic rules that people use
when they speak their language
 The point of view of a descriptive grammarian is that grammars from every language
and dialect are equal

34. Prescriptive Grammar
 Prescriptive Grammar: attempts to prescribe what rules of
language people should use to speak “properly”
 The view of a prescriptive grammarian is that some grammars
are superior to others. Prescriptive grammars usually do not
accept dialectal variation but present a standard, official
language.
 During the Renaissance, a middle class of English speakers wished
to talk like the upper class, so they started buying handbooks that
told them how to speak “properly”
 Bishop Robert Lowth’s A Short Introduction to English Grammar
with Critical Notes (1762)

35. Prescriptive Grammar
 Lowth decided that “two negatives makes a positive,” therefore
people should not use double negatives
 Despite the fact that everybody was already using double negatives in English
(and communication was just fine). The sentence I don’t have none was then
grammatical.
 Despite the fact that many languages of the world require the use of double
negatives, e.g. French: Je ne veux parler avec personne “I don’t want to speak
with anyone” (literally: “I not-want speak with no-one”)

36. Teaching Grammar
 A teaching grammar explicitly states the rules of a language and is
used to learn another language or dialect.
 Teaching grammars assume the student already knows one language and then
compares the grammar of the new language to the one they already know.

37. Universal Grammar
 Universal Grammar (UG) refers to the universal properties
that all languages share
 Part of a biologically endowed human language faculty
 The basic blueprint that all languages follow
 It is a major goal of linguistic theory to discover the nature
of UG

38. The Development of Grammar
 All normal children acquire language relatively quickly, easily and without
instruction by “picking up” words and grammatical rules from what they hear.
 Children learn the world’s languages in the same way and pass through the
same stages of acquisition
 If children are born with UG, then they can acquire language so quickly and
easily because they already know the universal properties of language and
only need to learn the specific rules of the language(s) they are acquiring.

39. Sign Languages: Evidence for language
universals
 Deaf children exposed to sign languages go through the
same stages of language acquisition as hearing babies
 Deaf children babble with their hands
 Signed languages are organized in the brain just like spoken
languages are

40. What Is Not (Human) Language
 Some features of human language:
 Discreteness: the ability to combine linguistic units to
make larger units of meaning
 Creativity: the ability to create and understand never-
before-uttered sentences
 Displacement: the ability to talk about things that are not
physically present
 Allows for discussion of past events, abstract ideas, lying, etc.

41. What Is Not (Human) Language
 Parrots can mimic words, but their utterances carry
no meaning
 They cannot dissect words into discrete units
 Polly and Molly don’t rhyme for a parrot
 They cannot deduce rules and patterns to create new
utterances
 If the parrot learns “Polly wants a cracker” and “Polly wants
a doughnut” and learns the word “bagel,” the parrot will
not say “Polly wants a bagel”

42. What Is Not (Human) Language
 Birdcalls convey messages associated with the immediate environment
 Bird songs are used to stake out territory and attract mates
 There is no evidence of internal structure in these songs, although they may vary to
express varying degrees of intensity
 Birdcalls and songs are similar to human languages in that they contain
regional dialects, are passed down from parents to offspring, and can only be
acquired before a certain age

43. What Is Not (Human) Language
• Honeybees have a communication system that relies on dance to convey
information about the location and quality of food sources to the rest of the
hive
• Round dance: food source is within 20 feet from the hive
• Sickle dance: food source is 20 to 60 feet from the hive
• Tail-wagging dance: food source is more than 60 feet from the hive
• The number of repetitions of the basic pattern in the tail-wagging dance indicates the precise
distance, with a slower repetition rate indicating a longer distance

44. What Is Not (Human) Language
• The bee dances are theoretically able to create an infinite number of
messages
• But, the messages are confined to the subject of food sources
• If there are any special circumstances regarding the food source, the bee cannot
convey that information

45. Can Animals Learn Human Language?
 Nonhuman primates have communication systems in the wild to
convey information about the immediate environment and
emotional state (stimulus-response)
 Humans have attempted to teach human language to other
primates
 These nonhuman primates were taught sign languages because their
vocal tracts cannot produce the sounds of human language

46. Can Animals Learn Human
Language?
• Washoe
• Koko
• Nim Chimpsky
• Sarah, Lana, Sherman, Austin
• Kanzi
Researchers concluded that while nonhuman primates can string two signs
together and show flashes of creativity, their use of language is nowhere near
human linguistic ability
(but search also for the documentary “The Nim Project” revealing some dark
aspects of this research:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110120213036/http://www.project-nim.com/
Nim
Chimpsky

47. Can Animals Learn Human Language?

48. Can Animals Learn Human Language?
 “Miracles of Human Language: An Introduction to Linguistics” An introductory online
course, partially free of change, offered by the University of Leiden & Meertens
instituut (KNAW).
 https://www.coursera.org/learn/human-language
 https://www.coursera.org/learn/human-language/lecture/hVfuJ/human-language-
and-animal-communication-systems

49. Language and Thought
“It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak
forgotten, a heretical thought—that is, a thought diverging from the principles of IngSoc—
should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.”
GEORGE ORWELL, appendix to 1984 (1949), in Fromkin et al. 102014: 21.
Do you believe that our thought is shaped by our language? Can our thoughts be
manipulated by words?

50. Language and Thought
 Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: the theory that the structure of a language
influences how its speakers perceive the world around them
Fromkin et al. 102014: 22

51. Language and Thought
Fromkin et al. 102014: 22

52. Language and Thought
 Linguistic determinism: the strongest form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
which claims that the language we speak determines how we perceive the
world
 Whorf claimed that the Hopi people do not perceive time in the same way as speakers
of European languages because the Hopi language does not make grammatical
distinctions in tense

53. Language and Thought
 Linguistic relativism: a weaker form of the hypothesis which claims
that different languages encode different categories which can
influence a speaker’s perceptions of the world
 Navaho: green and blue expressed as one word
 Russian: siniy (“dark blue”) and goluboy (“light blue”)
 Zuni: yellow and orange are expressed as one word
 Spanish: rincón (the inside of a corner) vs. esquina (the outside of a corner)

54. Language and Thought
 The strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is
clearly false
 We can translate between languages
 We can learn additional languages
 If we don’t have a particular word for a concept, we can
express the concept with a string of words

55. Language and Thought
 Hopi does have a system for expressing time. Hopi uses words for
days of the week, parts of the day, etc. to express tense rather than
using word endings like English
 Although languages differ in their color terms, speakers can
perceive differences even if their language does not have a word to
express the difference

56. Language and Thought
 Some psychologists have suggested that speakers of gender-
marking languages think about objects as being gendered
 In Spanish the word “bridge” is masculine (el puente), and Spanish
speakers described a bridge with masculine adjectives such as big,
dangerous, long, strong, and sturdy
 In German, the word “bridge” is feminine (die Brücke) and German
speakers described a bridge with feminine adjectives such as beautiful,
elegant, fragile, pretty, and slender
 This evidence seems to support a weak version of linguistic
relativism

57. Language and Thought
 There is an ongoing
discussion/dispute
regarding the degree of
influence on language,
as recent publications
also show.

58. Language and Thought:
Sexism and Political Correctness
 It is believed that language reflects the patriarchal and sexist structure of most
developed societies. For example, in languages
 Masculine in the default form in languages with grammatical gender:
E ci aspettiamo che tutti gli studenti lo rispettino.
It's a code we expect all students to adhere to
Everybody should respect himself / themselves

59. Language and Thought:
Sexism and Political Correctness
Fromkin et al. 102014: 323

60. Language and Thought:
Sexism and Political Correctness
Fromkin et al. 102014: 324

61. Levels of Linguistic Analysis &
Linguistic Subfields

62. Levels of Linguistic Analysis
The language is an “hierarchical” system: it is built from small units (sounds) which combine to
make up forms and words which in turn combine to make sentences and texts (discourse).
At each stage different rules operate in order for smaller units to combine to the point of
formulating a complete sentence. Since every level makes use of different rules we also need
different methodology and distinct terminology to examine and describe each level. Therefore
we need different levels of linguistic analysis corresponding to different levels of linguistic
structure.

63. Levels of Linguistic Analysis
We postulate the following six levels of linguistic analysis corresponding to six levels of
structure:
Levels of Analysis Levels of Structure
Phonetics and phonology Sounds
Morphology Word Formation
Lexicon Words
Syntax Sentences
Semantics Meaning
Pragmatics Language in Use (Context & Discourse)

64. Levels of Linguistic Analysis
 Phonetics: examination of the articulation and physics of the sounds of all human languages
 Phonology: the sound patterns of a given language
 Morphology: the examination of how parts of words come together (e.g. stems and endings)
 Lexicon: the examination of the vocabulary of a given language
 Syntax: the examination of how words (or parts of words) are linked together.
 Semantics: the examination of meaning
 Pragmatics: the study of language use in interpersonal communication and in conjunction with
the real word circumstances (sometimes seen as part of Semantics)

65. Linguistic Subfields
 Typology: classification of world’s languages according to equivalences in their syntactic and
functional features.
 Sociolinguistics: the study of the effect of social factors (such as social class, gender, ethnicity,
religion or minority status) on language (differs from sociology of language)
 Dialectology: examination of linguistic variety based on geographical distribution.
 Linguistic anthropology: documentation of languages, study of language through context, and
study of identity through linguistic means.
 Psycholinguistics: dealing mostly with language acquisition and language disorders.
 Neurolinguistics: the investigation of how human brain processes language. It also attempts to
provide a justification for the genetic basis of language.

66. Linguistic Subfields
 Cognitive Linguistics: the interaction of language with other cognitive functions
 Historical Linguistics: origin and evolution of languages, linguistic families
 Philosophy of language: Language and our understanding of the world, formal semantics
 Second Language acquisition: description of how we learn a new language and development of
tools to facilitate the learning process
 Lexicology: analysis of the lexicon of a language
 Corpus Linguistics: collection of data
 Computational linguistics: The understanding of written and spoken language from a
computational perspective aiming at developing relevant tools.
 Forensic linguistics: the role of language in the domains of law, crime investigation, trial, and
judicial procedure.

67. Theoretical & Applied Linguistics
Linguistics
Theoretical Linguistics
Applied Linguistics

68. Assignment 1st Week
 Discuss the following exercises in Fromkin et al. 102014:
 Ex. 2 (pg. 28), ex. 5 (pg. 29), ex. 14 (pg. 30f)
 Optionally: ex. 19 (pg. 31)