intro-language.md

author	title
Bharathi Ramana Joshi	Notes on 'An Introduction to Language'

What Is Language?

• Language is what makes us human?
• What does it mean to "know" a language?
• Ugandan practise --- kintu ("thing") for a newborn, muntu ("person") after they learn language
• Sound system of a language (what sounds can occur, in what combinations can these sounds occur etc)
• Vocabulary
• Relationship between speech sounds and meanings they represent is arbitrary
• Linguistic system of a language
  1. Phonology: the sound system
  2. Morphology and lexicon: structure and properties of words
  3. Syntax: rules for constructing phrases and sentences
  4. Semantics: ways in which sounds and meanings are related
• Linguistic competence: knowledge of the linguistic system itself
• Linguistic performance: how well can one employ linguistic competence?
• E.g. monks taking vows of silence have no linguistic performance, yet they retain their linguistic competence
• Descriptive grammar: grammar attempting to describe the common parts of language used by people
• Prescriptive grammar: grammar attempting to prescribe how people ought to use language
• Pedagogical/teaching grammar: grammars for people to learn languages
• Universal Grammar(UG): blueprint for the grammars of all possible human languages
• Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: relates language and cognition
  1. Linguistic determinism: language determines individuals' cognition
  2. Linguistic relativism: language affects individuals' cognition

Brain and Language

• Neurolinguistics: study of neural and biological foundations of language
• Aphasia: language damage caused by disease or trauma
• Borca's area: front part of left hemisphere where the French surgeon Paul Broca proposed language is localized.
• Wernicke's area: lesions in the ares of the left hemisphere temporal lobe, where the German neurologist Carl Wernicke proposed language is localized.
• Lateralization: localization of function to one hemisphere of the brain
• Borca's aphasia: labored speech and word-finding difficulties, affects ability to form sentences with rules of syntax. Agrammatic language is produced.
• Wernicke's aphasia: syntactically valid, semantically incoherent. Difficulty finding words, use nonsense words/gibberish.
• Neural connections exist among phonetically alike and semantically related words.
• Tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon.
• Amonia: inability to find the word one wishes to speak.
• Deaf speakers with brain damage show aphasia with sign language.
• Language is a separate cognitive model.
• Plasticity of the brain decreases with age --- children whose left-hemispheres are surgically removed develop linguistic abilities in their right-hemisphere (one theory suggests removing the left-hemisphere merely unlocks the latent potential for language in the right-hemisphere), but removal in adults results in severe permanent loss of the faculty of language.
• However, right hemisphere is also involved in language acquisition --- children whose right hemispheres are removed do not develop language.

Morphology: The Words of Language

• Content words (aka open class words): words carrying semantic content (e.g. children, anarchism, purple, etc).

• Function words (aka closed class words): words carrying little/no semantic content, but specify grammatical relations.

• E.g. of word with no semantic content is it in "it's raining".

• Brain treats function words and content words differently. E.g. when asked to count the number of Fs in the following:

  FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULTS OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS

  people usually come up with 3, when the answer is 6 (people forget to count OFs)

• In slips of tongues, people usually switch content words but rarely function words.

• They play a different role in language acquisition as well, children tend to omit function words first, e.g. "doggie barking".

• Morpheme: most elemental unit of grammatical form (e.g. boy, boy + ish, boy + ish + ness). It is an arbitrary unit of sound and meaning, aka linguistic sign.

• Morphology (morph + ology): science of (word) forms

• Morphemes may have one or more syllables, e.g. 'a' (single syllable, as in amoral or asexual), 'crocodile'.

• Meaning of a morpheme must be constant. However, two similar sounding morphemes may have different meanings (e.g. 'er' in 'singer' and 'nicer' mean two different things) and two similar meaning morphemes and sound differently (e.g. 'er' and 'ster' in 'singer' and 'singster' mean the same thing). Emphasis on (sound, meaning) tuple.

• Discreteness is one of the fundamental properties of human language --- morphemes form words, words form phrases, phrases form sentences.

• Components of morphological knowledge: what are the individual morphemes, what are the rules for combining them.

• Free morphemes are words by themselves (boy, cat, shoe) and bound morphemes are not words by themselves, but parts of larger words (prefixes un-, a-, bi and suffixes -ing, -er)

• Suffixes in one language may be prefixes in another and vice versa

• Affixes may play different roles in different languages

• Infix: in-fuckin-credible

• Circumfixing: both prefixing and suffixing, with possibly parts of the base morpheme chopped off. E.g. German does it.

• Morphologically complex words are made up of root morpheme + one or more affixes

• Root may or may not be a word by itself.

• Root word + affix = stem

• Base = root word or stem with affix

• Bound roots: roots that do not occur in isolation and acquire meaning only when used in combination with other morphemes, e.g. 'ceive' in 'conceive', 'receive', 'perceive', etc

• Derivational morpheme: morphemes like -ify and -cation which when added to a base form a new word (called the derived word) with new meaning.

• Derivational morphemes have semantic content, they may change the grammatical class to which words belong. They may/may not change sounds of other morphemes in the word, e.g. sane/sanity & need/needless.

• Morphological analysis: essentially pattern matching?