INTRODUCTION TO GENERAL LINGUISTICS
The word linguistics comes from Latin lingua,'language'. Linguistics is therefore the study of language.
What is language? Language is a means of communication, a medium for thought, a social institution, a political issue, a pillar of national identity. A linguist is interested in all these aspects, but we will first discuss it in its capacity of the system of communication. Its primary function seems to be the »transmission« of information about the reality around us, the reproduction of this reality in the mind of those who do not experience it firsthand. Or, as Bloomfield puts it, “ Language enables one person to make a reaction when another person has the stimulus...” Language is a system of signs which refer to reality and evoke their (approximate) replicas in the mind of the addressees. In its broader sense, language can be defined as any sign system; in the narrower sense it is a system of verbal signs. What is a sign? Charles S. Pierce calls it "...something that relates to something else for someone in some respect or capacity"... From the point of view of sensory reception, sign systems can be divided into: a. auditory: speech, physiological sounds, whistling, music, Morse code ... b. visual: sign language for deaf-mute, kinaesthetic, writing systems, traffic signs ... c. tactile: Braille Alphabet, shaking hands, rubbing noses, embraces, Tadoma method ... d. olfactory: scents, incense … e. gustatory: symbolic food such as bread and salt, sweet preserve, birthday cake, Easter eggs, ham, horseradish; in China egg (fertility - to announce the birth), duck (fidelity – served at wedding parties) noodles – longevity (unlucky to cut them), tangerines, oranges sound like luck and wealth – for New Year...) The nature of the relation between the sign and its referent is the basis for distinguishing three types of signs: - icons: the relation between the sign and the referent is transparent and relatively easy to detect (e.g. a sign pointing to a stairway) - indexes: the relation between the sign and the referent is less transparent and often reflects cause-effect relation (e.g. skidding car a sign of slippery road) - symbols: the relation is not transparent, and it is often culture specific (e.g. a horse- shoe as a sign of good luck). Language is a system of linguistic (verbal) signs. Most of linguistic signs are symbolic.
Where does language come from: where, when, how did it all begin?
The interest in the nature of human language is as old as the human race itself. No religious or any other ideological system ignores it. Most religions describe the emergence of language as a gift of some divine force, often the very creation of the universe is an perlocutionary act:
"Let there be light," and there was light. 4God saw that the light was good and he separated the light from the darkness. 5God called the light "day," and the darkness he called "night." And there was evening, and there was morning - the first day. (Genesis 1, 1-5) So out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name… (Exodus 2, 19) In the beginning this was Self alone, in the shape of a person. He, looking around him, saw nothing but himself. He first said: “This is I”. Therefore he became I by name. (Brrr hadānnr yaka Uapnissr ad 1.4.1) The divine gift was an ideal language, which Man later corrupted when falling out of grace. The scientific discipline that deals with the questions of the origin of language in child and in human race is called glossogentics. Scientists were looking for bio-physiological predispositions for verbal communication in humans (hyoid bone and hypoglossal nerve). The emergence of so-called Homo loquens probably coincides with the upper Palaeolithic period (50-30.000 BC). The Neanderthal man (70.000-35.000 BC) had a vocal tract similar to the Cro-Magnon Man, but the common belief is that his ability to articulate a variety of distinctive sounds was limited. The inability to produce a variety of sounds by no means precludes the existence of language. An elaborate gesture system was possible, for example instructions how to use tools. Some believe that verbal communication started as a by- product of facial mime once Man stood up on his two feet, especially when hands were occupied with work. The main (unanswered) question remains the continuity vs. discontinuity dilemma. In modern linguistics, the view prevails that language evolved gradually. The gradualist theory, however, has not been proven yet. All attested languages, even the oldest ones, are as complex as those spoken today. Neither has the question of monogenesis or polygenesis of languages been answered. Another question that still remains unresolved is the monogenesis or polygenesis of languages Just as Man is the peak of evolution among animals, human language is supposedly the best and the most complex of communication systems. Do animals have human-like language? Verve monkeys use facial expressions, distinct alarm cries for different predators, which display arbitrariness. Infant verve monkeys seem to learn the language and respond sooner to calls than produce them correctly. Arbitrariness is displayed in communication of other animals as well: bees, whales, prairie dogs, dolphins, apes... Can animals be taught human languages? In the 1940's Katherine and Keith Hayes brought up a baby chimpanzee, Viki, alongside their own child for 16 months. Viki was claimed to recognize about 100 spoken words, but voiced with difficulty only a few (momma, poppa, cup, up). Since the vocal tract of primates is different from that of modern man (the tongue is different, the larynx is higher and there is little sign of the pharynx), another pair of psychologists took different approach. In the 1970’s, Beatrice and Allen Gardner decided to teach American Sign Language to their chimpanzee Washoe. She learned to use 150 signs. This method was improved with the use of plastic tokens. David and Ann Premack taught their chimpanzee Sarah to compose whole sentences by using symbolic tokens (If Sarah takes the banana, Mary won't give Sarah chocolate). Is language innate or acquired? Children learn languages similarly - they all go through the same sequence of stages: 1. at the age of 6 months: babbling cooing, word recognition 2. at the age of 1 year: first words (names, nouns before verbs); first nasal and oral stops, early vowels (a, i, u), labials before other places of articulation, CV structure, over-extension and under-extension of meaning 3. at the age of 2 years: first grammatical forms 4. at the age of 4 years: basic mastery of the language Noam Chomsky believes that language is innate, that a child is born with the matrix of a universal grammar, the rules of which are then applied to the language of the environment. This genetic matrix has to be exposed to human language in the first five years of the child's life in order to be activated. Feral children (wolf children, wild children) are reported in many legends (cf Romulus and Remus). In reality, feral children lack basic social skills and can never make up for the lost time. One of the earliest reported cases is the one of Victor of Aveyron. He was about 12 years old when found in France in the 18th century. He had been deprived of human company for at least 7 years. Despite the efforts of his teacher he was unable to speak, although he could understand and read to some extent. Two Indian girls, Kamala and Amala, were found at the approximate age of 8 years after having lived among wolves. Amala died relatively soon, Kamala understood about 50 words nine years later, at her death. In 1970 Genie was discovered, an American girl, who had been kept in complete isolation by her father since her birth. She had been severely punished if she emitted any sound. She learned a few words immediately after her discovery and her subsequent progress in speech was considerable. THE HISTORY OF LINGUISTICS Ancient Greece
Sophists The earliest Greek writings about the language come from the pragmatic needs of sophists in the 5th century B.C. As teachers of rhetoric or, as Aristotle put it, “the art of persuasion”, they studied the use of language in public discourse. According to Gorgias, one of the more prominent sophists from Sicily, a successful rhetorician could speak convincingly on any subject, regardless his experience in the field.
Philosophers In contrast to the pragmatic interest in the linguistic form, other Greek philosophers, like Plato or Aristotle, speculated about the nature and origin of language. The main question was whether the forms and the meanings of words were naturally related or not (are they merely iconic/indexical signs or symbolic signs). In Cratylus, Plato makes Socrates conclude that originally the form-meaning relationships of words must have been natural, but convention later obscured them. Plato's view on the language is naturalist. In contrast to this view, conventionalists, like Aristotle, believed in the arbitrariness or symbolic nature of language. Another issue addressed was the regularity of the language. There are anomalies and analogies to be found, but which are more basic? Naturalists tended to be anomalists – since the relationship between the word and its meaning is natural, analogies are a secondary produce of the use. Conventionalists were analogists – language is primarily a well organized system of conventions, but the use corrupts the system with anomalies.
Grammarians Although the first rudimentary grammar books were written by Stoics in Athens around 300 BC, the need for a thorough description of Greek arose with the conquests of Alexander the Great, when it became the official language of the entire eastern Mediterranean region and Old Persia. Teaching Greek became one of the pillars of Hellenisation. Monumental libraries were established in bigger towns (Alexandria) and scholars were encouraged to study the literature and the language of Homer and classical writers of Athens from the 5th century BC. These older texts were considered to represent the finest ideal of the Greek language. Since the contemporary vernacular speech differed from it, reading them required comments, descriptions, instruction. The ground was laid for the first descriptive and prescriptive grammar. The first grammar of Greek which survives was written in the Greek colony of Alexandria by Dionysius Thrax about 100 BC. Its title was τέχνη γραμματική, Techne grammatike ‘the art of grammar’ (gramma γράμμα ‘letter’ < graphein γράφειν ‘to draw, to write’). The book contains instructions for accurate loud reading, with due regard for prosody. The second chapter contains explanations of the literary expressions, the third notes on phraseology and subject matter, the fourth the discovery of etymologies, the fifth the working out of analogical regularities and the sixth the appreciation of literary composition as the noblest part of grammar. Techne grammatike was the model for the so-called traditional grammars for 13 centuries to come. Many grammars of European languages applied the grammatical categories of Greek, even though they were non-existent in that particular language. In fact, modern linguist terminology is predominantly Greek. This is especially true of those linguistic branches that were the strongest in ancient Greece – etymology, phonetics, and morphology. Etymology < etumon ἔ τυμον ‘true sense’ arose from discussions on the nature of language. Phonetics was initially concerned with letters, with orthography. Stoics distinguished three aspects of gramma: its phonetic value [a], its form <α> and its name “alpha”. Roman grammarians called these three aspects potestas, figura, nomen. As far as grammar is concerned, it focused on the formal aspect of words. Plato divided the sentence into two parts – the nominal and the verbal. Dionysius wrote about 7 word classes: nouns, verbs, adverbs, participles, conjunctions and articles. The classification was based on the forms (categories) associated with the word class. Besides the basic terminology and categories, the most important contribution of ancient Greece to European languages is the Greek alphabet. The first writing system was devised during the 2nd millennium B.C. in Mycenae. It was a syllabic system with some logograms known as the Linear B1. It was largely confined to uses in administration and accountancy. During the dark ages of Dorian conquest the knowledge of this writing system was lost. The Greek alphabet as we know it today developed independently from an adaptation of Phoenician script in the first millennium BC. At that time the script was largely a set of consonant signs, which were taken from old Semitic logograms. Greek alphabet is the source of all known European scripts: Glagolitic, Cyrillic, Roman, Gothic, even Runic....
Phoenician script Greek alphabet
1 Linear A, a not completely decoded script, is associated with Minoan culture on the island Crete Ancient Rome
The Romans had contacts with the Greek culture through Greek settlements in the south of Italy, long before they imposed their rule over the Hellenic world during the 3rd and 2nd century BC. The expansion of Rome was almost complete by the beginning of Christian era. In his History of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon, an English historian from the 18th century wrote: “If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus (AD 96-180).” From the very beginning of their rule, the Romans readily acknowledged the superiority of Greek culture. In the eastern half of the empire Greek remained the main language (in the western, with virtually no contact with the old world, Romance languages evolved from Vulgar Latin). Vergil’s famous summary of the role of Rome was “Let others (i.e. Greeks) excel if they will in the arts, while Rome keeps the peace of the world”. From the 3rd century BC Greek works were systematically translated into Latin. In such a vast empire, interpreters must have been in great demand. Translations were numerous, and the teaching of Latin widely spread. Roman scholars approached the description and the study of language in the same manner as Greeks and they retained the categories and views of Greek grammarians. This is seen also in the work of four most famous Roman linguists: Varro, Quintilian, Donatus and Priscian. The first famous Roman scholar that we have to mention in relation to the study of language was Marcus Terentius Varro (116-27 BC). In his Nine books of Disciplines he identified nine liberal arts (i. e. education befitting free citizens): grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, musical theory, medicine and architecture. In De Lingua latina he provided some famous etymological analyses: ca(ro) da(ta) ver(mibus) ‘flesh given to worms’, volpes – vol + pes etc.. He assumed that Latin borrowed from Greek much more than was the case (unaware of the common proto-Indo-European origin of the two languages). In grammar, he followed Greek tradition. He distinguished between derivational and inflexional formation. He defined word classes on the basis of their morphological properties: nouns and adjectives (case inflexion), verbs (tense inflections), participles (both), adverbs (none). Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (Quintilian) was a Roman rhetorician from the 1st century AD. He was born in Spain and sent to Rome by his father to study rhetoric. In his late years he opened a school of rhetoric in Rome. The emperor Vespasian supported education of the ruling class and Quintilian was able to dedicate his time to writing. He tutored Domitian’s two grand-nephew and heirs. His best known work is Institutio Oratoria, the Institute of Oratory, which provided not only the theory of rhetoric but some general advice for the education and development of an orator as an honourable man, vir bonus, who "should never, like so many, be led by a desire to win applause to neglect the interest of the actual case". The first two centuries AD were the golden age of Pax Romana, of the Greco-Roman civilization in the Mediterranean world. In the 3rd and in the 4th centuries things started to change. The first important change concerned the recognition of Christianity as the official religion in the empire. The second event was the splitting of the Roman world into two halves. Rome ceased to be the administrative capital under Diocletian, his successor Constantine transferred his government to Byzantium in 330. By the end of the 4th century the empire was administratively divided into two parts, each governed by its own emperor. The east, Byzantium, remained Hellenised until it fell to Turks in 1453. Rome endured as the capital of Church until the Great Schism in 11th century. Just as the expansion of Hellenism under Alexander the Great inspired Greek grammarians to describe the properties of “correct” Greek language, Latin grammarians directed their attention to the language of classical literature, and grammar served as the introduction and foundation of this study. Two grammarians stand out: Donatus and Priscian. Aelius Donatus (4th century AD) was a rhetorician and grammarian. He was the tutor of St Jerome. He wrote Ars Grammatica (about 330) which consists of two parts. Ars Minor describes the eight parts of speech (noun, pronoun, verb, adverb, participle, conjunction, preposition, and interjection). It was written in the form of questions and answers and was so popular in the Middle Ages that donet became the eponym for a rudimentary treatise of any sort. Ars Maior is longer and on a more elevated plane on stylistic faults and graces. Priscianus Caesariensis or Priscian (about 500) taught Latin grammar in Constantinople in the beginning of the 6th century. He wrote Institutiones grammaticae (foundations of grammar), which ran into hundreds of manuscripts. A number of Latin grammars were written from the first century AD onwards in different parts of the Roman Empire. All of them followed either Priscian’s or Donatus’ grammars, which were founded on Greek grammar books. This tradition carried on into the Middle Ages. Some say that in the confusion of the following centuries, when the Latin west was shattered beyond recognition, Latin grammarians were the main defenders of the classical heritage.
The Middle Ages During the first six centuries after the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire (in 476 the last Roman emperor was deposed by Odoaker, a Germanic chieftain) much of classical literature was lost and the study of Greek was greatly reduced. But in the monasteries, abbeys, churches and later universities, education was preserved. Although many distrusted the pagan literature of the Antiquity, the language was studied and taught and in many ways the early medieval linguistics simply follows the steps of the late antiquity.
Speculative grammar In the second half of the Middle Ages, from 1100 onwards, linguistic studies had an important role scholastic philosophy. This is the era of the Gothic architecture and literature and the founding of several universities. The Roman Church provided the central authority, but also the basis of a cultural unity of Europe. The most significant development in linguistics is the output “speculative grammars” or treatises De modis significandi (on the modes of signifying) from a number of writes (Modistae) during the high period of scholastic philosophy (1200-1350). Scholasticism was the result of the integration of Aristotelian philosophy and Catholic theology by thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas (After the 12th century, Greek language and Greek philosophy became more available). In the (simplified) modistic sytem things possess certain properties or modes of being (modis essendi). The mind apprehends these by active modes of understanding (modis intelligendi). In the language then the mind confers meanings on vocal sounds, which become words and convey meanings (modis significandi). Every part of speech or word class is distinguished by its representation of reality. So Priscian word classes are explained in the following manner by Thomas of Erfurt: nōmen: a part of speech signifying by means of the mode of an existent or of something with distinctive characteristics. The mode is the mode of stability and permanence. verbum: a part of speech signifying through the mode of temporal process, detached from the substance pronōmen: same as nomen, expect that it is without distinctive characteristics... Speculative grammars made the greatest innovation in the field of syntax. Syntactic sentence components, such as subject and predicate were identified, new terms and concepts were introduced, such as government (regimen). The acceptability of the sentence requires that word classes must be properly chosen, that words must be properly inflected and that words must be properly collocated: cappa nigra *cappa categorica *Lapis amat filium Scholastics were not the last group of philosophers that took a keen interest in the language. Their work was continued by philosophers in the 17th and 18th century (rationalists like René Descartes and Leibnitz, empiricist like John Locke and Francis Bacon). They, too, sought parallels between the mind and the language.
Renaissance
Renaissance in the broadest sense of the word is the beginning of the modern world that is traditionally and somewhat symbolically associated with the year 1500 and a huge cultural revolution caused by three major events. The first one was the fall of Byzantium in 1453, the second one the discovery of America in 1492 and the third one Martin Luther’s Reformation in 1517. When Byzantium, or Constantinople, as it was named after Emperor Constantine, succumbed to Turks in 1457, many scholars fled to the west. There, in Italy, they reawakened the interest in the classical works of art and in the study of classical Latin and Greek. This was the Latin of the high Antiquity and not the Latin of the medieval Church and scholarship. Erasmus of Rotterdam wrote a book “De recta Latini Graecique sermonis pronuntiatione”, which clearly shows his intent – a grammar book should enable the reader to get fully acquainted and appreciative of Horace, Cicero, Vergil, not just to communicate with one’s contemporaries in the scholarly world. Following the examples of Socrates and Plato, education was no longer just a path to faith but was to serve the excellence of man. Humanities (liberal arts) were promoted in education at universities across Europe. The idealization of the classical Greek and Latin languages by no means diminished the interest in contemporary vernacular languages. The first descriptions (grammar books) of languages other than Latin and Greek go back to the Middle Ages. The rapid spread of the Arab power in the 7th and 8th and the Biblical status of Hebrew motivated the study of these two languages. Vernacular grammars of Provencal and Catalan, also dating in the late Middle Ages, pointed out the differences between these two languages and their common ancestor, Latin. Grammar books of Spanish and Italian appeared in the 15th century, that of French in the 16th. The technological progress, the invention of print by movable type in particular, made books available to a much broader public. The motivation was also very strong: in Europe, Reformation, which required that people read the Bible (in their own language), elsewhere the endeavours of missionaries spreading Christianity and, last but not least, the international trade with indigenous peoples from all the continents (Quechua, Nahuatl, Japanese, Chinese...). In the 16th century, most European languages got not only their first printed book (Bible, Catechism) but also at least some rudimentary description or grammar book. Pierre Ramée (Petrus Ramus, 1515) was perhaps the most famous of Renaissance grammarians. He was vividly opposed to Aristotelian scholasticism and modistic grammar. He championed the humanistic teaching of classical languages through classical literature, while modern languages should be studies by observing the usage of their speakers. 19th Century and Historical Linguistics
By the end of the 18th century the scientific progress in all spheres of life accumulated such enormous quantities of new data that some kind of categorisation had to be made. Carl Linné did that for plants (1735), Lavoisier for chemical elements (1789), Cuvier for invertebrate animals (1817). Lamarck was the first to explain the diversity of species with the struggle for survival. The transmutation of species through natural selection is the core of the theory of evolution formulated by Charles Darwin (1859) Linguistics was not unaffected by these movements and trends in natural sciences. There had been some attempts of cataloguisation of languages before (Gesner, Adelung – the Lord’s prayer in 1000 languages, the search for the original parent language), but this time the classification of languages in language families and the search for their ultimate ancestor was to be done on scientific basis and with scientific methodology. The entire 19 th century was in fact dedicated to this task. Just as paleontolologists tried to reconstruct the already extinct ancestral living beings, linguists no longer looked for the parent language among the extant languages (like in the past in Hebrew). They believed that by comparing the oldest varieties of related languages, they could artificially reconstruct the original forms. That the languages spoken in Europe, especially Latin and Greek, Latin and Romance languages were similar was established already in the Middle Ages and during Renaissance. But at the end of the 18th century, an important discovery was made by Sir William Jones, a British judge, philologist and scholar in Calcutta. He became fascinated by Sanskrit, the classical Indian language, and its similarities with Latin and Greek. He concluded that these languages had evolved from the same parent language, and that Celtic and Germanic languages could be added to the family. Jones sent his findings to Europe, where they attracted the attention of Franz Bopp, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Jacob Grimm, Rasmus Rask and Friedrich Schlegel, who dedicated their work to establishing the genealogical tree of Indo-European languages and reconstruction of their parent language. They applied the so- called
Comparative method The basis of this method is the search for phonemic correspondences in related words: English German Slovene Czech Swahili foam Feim pena pĕna povu field Feld polje pole shamba five fünf pet pĕt tano fist Faust pest pĕst ngumi Languages can be pronounced as related when the phonemic correspondences are systematic and consistent, and more pronounced in older varieties of the compared languages: Slovene English French mati, mater- [mʌðə] [mɛR ] m + V + … (r?) Old Church S. Old English Latin māter mōðor māter m + V: + dental + V + r Once the genetic relation of languages has been established, it is possible to reconstruct their parent language: Old English far- < Germanic *far- Old Frisian far- Old High German far- Old Swedish far- Gothic far- Germanic *far- (faran ‘travel’) < Indo-European *por- Latin por- (portare ‘carry’) Greek por- (porēomai ‘I travel’) Russian por- (poróm ‘ferry’)
IE * por- > Germ. * far- > OE far- IE *p > Germ. *f = sound law IE *o > Germ. *a = sound law
In the second half of the 19th century, the so-called neo-grammarians (Ausgust Schleicher, Karl Verner, Karl Brugmann, August Leskien, Bertold Delbrück) brought the theory of the regularity of sound change (i. e. “sound laws”) to perfection. Their main postulates were: Sound change is absolutely regular, as regular as a natural law. The object of linguistic investigation is idiolect not the language system. The most important level of description is the autonomous sound level. The chief goal of linguistic investigation is the description of historical change. Structuralism
The term structuralism refers to many linguistics schools which all have one approach in common: language should be studied as a structure, as a model, and each linguistic element should be observed from the point of view of its position in the system. The turning point in the history of linguistics is embodied in the work of Ferdinand de Saussure (1858-1913). Although he started out as a historical linguist, he is commonly recognized as the founder of structuralism in linguistics. His teachings were published posthumously by his students under the title Cours de la linguistique générale (1916) (‘course in general linguistics’).
Synchronic vs. diachronic Saussure compared the study of language to a study of a chess game. One can either observe the sequence of moves or assess the position of chess pieces on the board at each point of the game. The former approach is diachronic, the latter synchronic. To understand the change from stage A to stage B, one must first understand A and B. Synchronic and diachronic modes of explanation are complementary, but the synchronic description precedes the diachronic explanation.
Langue vs. parole Saussure’s dichotomy langue – parole represents the difference between language-system and language-behaviour. To Saussure, language (langue) is an abstract concept, the sum of all relations and entities, ideal and common to all its speakers. Language as parole is all the utterances of speakers, their linguistic behaviour, which may (and in reality does) digress from the ideal of the langue.
Linguistic sign Each linguistic sign has two poles: the signified and the signifier. The former is content, the latter the outer form of the sign. The relation between the two poles is arbitrary and arbitrariness is one of the essential properties of any linguistic system. The same concept (signified), e.g. the chemical substance consisting of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen, can be referred to either as H2O, water, Wasser, voda, eau, o-mizu, wara, ur... (signifier). The signifying range of the sign, however, is arbitrary, but not indeterminate. It is defined by its position in the network of relations to other signs of the same system.
Paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations Paradigmatic relations are relations of substitution, of selection. A linguistic sign is in paradigmatic relation with all those linguistic signs that could replace it, from among which it has been chosen. In the word bet, for example, the phoneme /b/ is in paradigmatic relation with all other phonemes of the English language which could take its place. In contrast to that, /b/ is in syntagmatic relations with the phonemes /e/ and /t/. Syntagmatic relations are therefore relations of combination. Saussure’s structuralism took two different directions. In Europe, it evolved into functionalism of the Prague Circle, in America into formal generativism of Noam Chomsky.
Levels of linguistic analysis Phonetics and Phonology
Phonetics Phonetics is concerned with the physical essence of language, with speech sounds. The word phonetics is of Greek origin: phōnēticos < phōnei 'speak' < phōnē 'spound'. Speech sounds can be analysed from the point of view of their production, transmission and reception. Phonetics is consequently subdivided into: Articulatory phonetics Acoustic phonetics Auditory phonetics Articulatory phonetics is the oldest one, since both the acoustic and the auditory analysis of speech sounds were feasible only after the appropriate technology had become available. Ever since the 16th century, linguists tried to come up with some universally applicable descriptive tools and categories. One of the most successful is the IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet, which was proposed in 1888 by the International Phonetic Association. IPA symbols are rendered in square brackets []. Articulatory phonetics describes speech sounds by referring to the values of articulatory features, which represent the position and the function of individual speech organs during the production of a given phone. Some of the more common descriptive features of articulatory phonetics are the flow of the airstream, the manner of articulation, the place of articulation and the voice. The airstream flow The production of human speech is closely related to the physiology of breathing. The air stream is the medium of sound and its direction is the first feature of phonetic description. Speech sounds which are produced during the exhalation of air from lungs are pulmonic egressive sounds. About 20% of languages, e. g. Native American, Caucasian, African, have ejectives. These are glottalic egressive voiceless consonants. Even fewer, about 13% of languages, have implosives voiced stops, which are glottalic ingressive and pulmonic egressive at the same time. Lingual airstream flow is typical of clicks. During the articulation of clicks the vocal tract is closed and the air stream flow is limited to the oral cavity. The obstruction to the air stream- manner of articulation The airstream exhaled from lungs can have a free passage or it can encounter an obstruction. In the former case, the result is the production of vowels, in the latter the production of obstruent consonants (plosives, fricatives, affricates). Sonorant consonants and semi-vowels are positioned between the two groups: the airstream does encounter and obstacle, but it is either very weak (approximants, semi-vowels) or by-passed (nasals, trills, laterals) so that the sonority of such sounds comes close to that of vowels. The type of the obstruction to the airstream defines the manner of articulation. If it is complete, the consonants are called stops or plosives. If it is partial, causing only friction, the resulting sounds are fricatives (with hissing and hushing sibilants). The articulation of affricates involves the combination of total closure and fricative release. A less pronounced air release after the total closure is the manner of articulation called aspiration (aspirated consonants). Place (point) of articulation The location, where the articulator comes into contact (or near contact) with the passive location in the vocal tract, thereby causing the obstruction to the airstream, is referred to as the place (point) of articulation. The articulator is typically the tongue (coronal), either the tip, the blade, the body, or the root (apical, laminal, dorsal, radical), the lip (labial), the uvula (uvular), vocal cords (glottal). The passive places of articulation are typically the lips (labial), the teeth (dental), the ridge behind the teeth (alveolar), the hard palate (palatal), the soft palate (velar), the pharynx (pharyngeal), the larynx (laryngeal) etc. Phonation (voicing) In the broader sense of the word, phonation refers to any oscillation in the laryngeal area, in the narrower sense it involves the oscillation of the vocal cords, in which case it is synonymous with voicing. In some languages the effect of “voiced/voiceless” obstruents is not so much the result of the vibration of the vocal cords as of the force of the air stream. The alternative terms fortis (instead of voiceless) and lenis (instead of voiced) are preferred. Other types of phonation which are contrastive in some languages are harshness, creakiness, strident, murmuring etc. Vowel descriptors Since the articulation of vowels is characterized by a free passage of the airstream, the descriptors which are commonly used for consonants would not work. A system of referential vowels, called the cardinal vowel system, was designed by Daniel Jones in the 1920’s. The three descriptors of the vowel articulation are: the position of the tongue, the part of the tongue involved in the shaping of the resonance chamber and the shape of the lips. There are two systems of cardinal vowels, the primary and the secondary:
Primary cardinal system > Secondary cardinal system = shape of lips reversed spread rounded rounded spread
C1 [i] ⇒ C9 [y] C8 [u] ⇒ C16 [ɯ] C2 [e] ⇒ C10[ø] C7 [o] ⇒ C15 [ɤ] C3 [ɛ] ⇒ C 11 [œ] C6 [ɔ] ⇒ C14 [ ∧ ] C4 [a] ⇒ C12 [Œ] C5 [ɑ] ⇒ C13 [ɒ]
Phonology
A speech sound (phone) becomes a linguistic sign when it is integrated into a system of relations to other speech sounds of the same language. Two speech sounds which are in paradigmatic relation are contrastive phones or phonemes. A phoneme is therefore the smallest segment of speech employed to form meaningful contrast between utterances.
Just as any speech sound, phonemes can be “decomposed” (described) into articulatory features, which are called distinctive or contrastive. As a linguistic sign a phoneme has its range, which means that the exact phonetic realization may vary. Two different phonetic realizations of a phoneme which are in complementary distribution are called the allophones of that phoneme. If the distribution is not complementary, the two phones are said to be in free variation. The example of the former is the aspirate and the non-aspirate bilabial /p/ in put or sport respectively. The example of the latter is the pronunciation of the initial vowel in the word economic. In a language, two phones may be in phonemic, allophonic or, in some cases, free relations. For two phones to be called the phonemes of a particular language, they must be in phonemic relation in at least one pair of morphs. This criterion is called the criterion of the minimal pair. Of all the possible combinations of articulatory features, languages possess a finite number of phonemes. The average size of phonemic systems is about 30 contrastive phonemes, but the number can be as low as 11 (a Papuan language Rotokas) or as high as 144 (a Khoi-San language !Xũ).
All languages have pulmonic egressive phonemes, Caucasian, American in some African languages also ejectives, implosives and clicks. All languages have both vowels and consonants. The most universal consonants are the stops /p, t, k/, 90% of languages have also fricative phonemes /f, š, s/. In two thirds of languages phonation (voice) is a distinctive feature in stops, in one third of languages also in fricatives. Most languages have at least one nasal /n/ and one liquid /l/ or /r/. More than 50 % of languages have 5 vowels: /i, u, e, o, a/. The smallest number of vowels is 3 /i, u, a/.
In some languages suprasegmental features, such as the length of segments, the stress, the pitch, the tone, and even the register, are contrastive. Phonemes which differ only in the height or in the movement of the tone are tonemes. Tonal languages are founds among African, South-East Asian, Sino-Tibetan and Native American languages.
Syntagmatic phonology
The combination of phonemes into longer strings is not free. It is restricted by phonotactic rules, which are specific for different languages. These rules generally refer to the syllable structure, i. e. to how different speech segments are positioned with respect to the most sonorous among them. The scale of sonority is as follows, starting with the lowest:
[p t k] < [b d ɡ] < [s f θ] < [z v ð] < [m n] < [l] < [r] < [i u] < [e o] < [a]
A typical syllable structure is
σ
O R
N C with σ = syllable; O = onset; R = rhyme; N = nucleus; C = coda
The position of the nucleus is occupied by the most sonorous segment, typically a vowel or a vowel-like consonant (liquid, nasal, semi-vowel). All languages permit the syllabic structure CV (consonant as the onset, vowel as the nucleus) and V (bare nucleus). Not all languages permit consonant clusters (either as the onset or as the coda). In Japanese, for example, borrowings such as truck, beefsteak ice-cream, become toraku, bifuteku, aisukuremu. In Hawaiian, merry Christmas becomes mele kalikamaka...
Morphology
The minimal sequence of phonemes with a constant meaning (function) of its own is a morpheme: farm-er-s = farming + agent noun + plural Morphemes cannot be broken down into smaller meaningful units: The sleep-walk-ing albatross chant-ed a dream-y lullaby Morphemes can be identified on the basis of their meaning/function which they preserve in another environment: Swahili: Ninasoma. ‘I am reading’ Anasoma. ‘He/she is reading’ Tunasoma. ‘We are reading’ Alisoma. ‘He/she read’ Nitasoma. ‘I will read’ Tutasoma. ‘We will read’ soma ‘read’ ni ‘1st sg’ a ‘3rd sg’ tu ‘1st pl’ na ‘present’ li ‘past’ ta ‘future’
Morphs, morphemes, allomorphs
Some linguists, like David Crystal, define a morpheme as an abstract concept, and morph as a concrete category. In generative grammar, a morpheme is a morph which stands in meaningful contrast to another morph. Morphs which perform the same function (not in meaning contrast) in complementary distribution are allomorphs. The English nouns plural endings [s], [z], [ɪz] are three allomorphs of the same morpheme {S}.
Types of morphemes There are different criteria for the categorisation of morphemes: the use, the function and the location. From the point of view of the use, all morphemes can be subdivided into free morphemes and bound morphemes. The former can be used on their own, the latter are always attached to other morphemes farm, the, albatross : (farm)er, (farm)s, (sleepwalk)ing, (dream)y, (chant)ed, vs. -er, -ess, -y…. : -s, -ed, -en…
From the point of view of their function, morphemes are lexical or grammatical. Lexical morphemes are either root morphemes or derivational morphemes. Grammatical morphemes called inflections. Bound morphemes (affixes) can precede (prefixes), follow (suffixes) or may be inserted between root morphemes (infixes). The morphemes which make up a word determine the inner morphological structure of that word. From that point of view words are products of different types of the process of word formation:
1. Compounds/ compounding = combination of root morphemes bookcase, hairdo, wallpaper, portefeuille, rascacielos, listopad, gubidan, rokopis, kažipot, Donaudampfschiffahrtgesellshaftskapitän…
2. Derivatives/ derivation = combination of root morphemes and affixes, the result is either the change of meaning or (most frequently) the change of the word class: treat-ment, mordern-ize, un-friend-ly, princess…
A special type of derivation is back-formation: a word which is (seemingly) a derivative is stripped off the derivational morpheme: gate-crash(er), vivisect(ion), pop(ular), dine (< dinner), laze ( Sometimes the word changes its class without any overt affix (zero derivational morpheme). This process is called conversion: uncle me no uncle, to out-Harod Harod, the hall could dance 40 couples 3. Clips/ clipping = reduction of one part of the word • fax(imile), doc(tor), teach(er), taxi(meter), cab(riolet), (omni)bus… 4. blends / blending = combination of clips • motel < motor + hotel • brunch < breakfast + lunch • smog < smoke + fog • snirt < snow + dirt • slide < slip + glide • slender < slim + tender • sitcom < situational comedy • Chunnel < Channel + tunnel • snob < sin nobilitatis (?) Abbreviations are blends of extreme clips: U.S.A, P.O.W, S.O.S, B.B.C, R.S.V.P, GDP, GNP Acronyms are abbreviations which are treated (and pronounced) as words: laser < light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation radar < radio detection and ranging scuba < self-contained underwater breathing apparatus wasp < white Anglo-Saxon Protestant aids < acquired immune deficiency syndrome RAM < random access memory ROM < read only memory yuppie < young urban professional dink < double income no kids nimy < not in my backyard 5. Reduplication = full or partial repetition of a morpheme Finnish: ruoka (food), ruokaruoka (proper food) koti (home), kotikoti (home of your parents) Cranberry morphemes A cranberry morpheme is a morpheme that cannot be assigned a (constant) meaning or function, although most of the time it has evolved from a genuine morpheme: cranberry < *cran + berry ( Metanalysis Metanalysis is the act of breaking down word into morphemes “incorrectly”: a napron > an apron a nadder > an adder an eke name > a nick name hamburger < hamburg + er , *ham + burger > cheeseburger Grammatical morphemes – inflexions Grammatical morphemes or inflexions convey the information pertaining to grammatical categories. As bound morphemes they are attached to verbal stems (for tense, aspect, mood, person, number... encodement), nominal stems (for number, case gender... encodement), adjectival or adverbial stems (for degree, number, case, gender ...) etc. The list of grammatical categories, their potential values and rankings vary across languages, but some of them are almost universal: • All languages have at least two word classes - [+N, -V] and [-N, +V], most of them also [-N, -V]. • If a language encodes grammatical number, the contrast [+more than one] : [- more than one] precedes [-more than two]: [+more than two], i. e. plural is more universal than dual, trial or paucal... • Almost all languages have some system of noun categorization into genders or classes. • All languages distinguish between the 1st, the 2nd and the 3rd person. • If a language displays tense, the contrast [+anterior] : [-anterior] precedes the encodement [+e posterior]. The more relevant the information in the life of a language community, the more economical its encodement within the system: • boy – girl • bull – cow • actor – actress • cock sparrow - hen sparrow • male eagle – female eagle In English the formal encodement of gender is most economical in nouns referring to humans or domestic animals. Morphological typology of languages Languages can be classified on the basis of the prevailing morphological structure of words. 1. Isolating languages - free morphemes prevail In isolating or analytical2 languages free morphemes prevail, which means that words are mostly monosyllabic. The ratio of morphemes to words is close to 1. Vietnamese is believed to have the lowest ratio (1.06), Inuit the highest (3.6). The present-day English has 1.68 morphemes per word, in Old English the ratio was above 2. Other isolating languages include Mandarin Chinese, Thai, Khmer, Lao, Tibetan and many other languages spoken in South East Asia. Example from Vietnamese: Cái thằng chồng em nó chẳng ra gì. FOCUS CL husband I (as wife) he not turn.out what "That husband of mine, he is good for nothing” 2. Agglutinative languages Agglutinative languages are a subgroup of synthetic languages, which use both bound and free morphemes. In agglutinative languages the boundaries between morphemes are clear, and each (bound) morpheme has only one meaning/function. Example from Turkish: Singular Plural Nominative kadin kadin-lar Genitive kadin-in kadin-lar-in Dative kadin-a kadin-lar-a Agglutination is the prevailing type of word formation not only in Turkish but also in other Altaic languages (Turkish, Mongolian and Manchu-Tungus) in Uralic languages (Finnish, Hungarian), Dravidian languages, Bantu languages, Japanese and Korean. 3. Fusional (inflectional) languages: Fusional or inflectional languages are synthetic languages, which employ free and bound morphemes. Unlike agglutinative languages, fusional languages do not have clear boundaries between morphemes, and one morpheme may convey (fuse) more than one grammatical category, sometimes together with the lexical content. ženskam, hišam, them… 2 According to some classifications, analytical languages are a subcategory of isolating languages which lack even derivational bound morphemes. Most Indo-European languages belong to this type, as well as Semitic and many Sami languages. In Semitic languages the morphological structure of words is a little specific. The stem consists of consonants, bound morphemes are vocalic infixes: ”book“ بببببkitāb ”books“ ببببب ببkutub ”booklet“ ببببببببkutayib ”writing“ ببببببkitābat .writer” etc“ بببب kātib 4. Polysynthetic and incorporative languages In polysynthetic languages the morpheme to word ratio is very high. Bound morphemes prevail. Many polysynthetic languages are also incorporative, which means that the word typically contains more than one root morpheme. Yupik: Angyaghllangyugtuq Angyag – hlla - ng - yug - tuq boat aug. case optative 3r sg “He wants a big boat” Chukchi: təmeyŋəlevtəpeɤtərkən t - ə - meyŋ - ə - levt - ə - peɤt - ə - rkən 1st sg big head pain imperfactive “I have a terrible headache” Morphological typology is determined by the prevailing morphological structure of the language. There are no clear types, however. In fact, some languages could be called a mixed type. In English we find evidence of all kinds of structures: • Isolation: Mary will take care of it. • Agglutination: children's walked... • Fusion: them, were • Incorporation: babysit Syntax The word syntax comes from Greek: σύν ‘together‘ τάξις ‘ordering’ Syntax is the study of rules for the construction of sentences in natural languages. Sentences are not just a string of words put together in a random fashion. There are more than one way of forming sentences with the same words, but of the three examples given below (a) and (b) are acceptable and (c) is not. a, a, been, blue, boy, dress, following, girl, has, in, newspaper, that, the, with a) The boy with a newspaper has been following that girl in a blue dress. b) The girl with a newspaper has been following that boy in a blue dress. c) *The has dress been in newspaper following that a with blue boy girl. It is not only the sequence (order) of the words in (a) and (b) that ultimately determines their respective meanings, but also their hierarchical organization. Some words seem to stand out and others surround them, modifying or supporting them. Obviously, a sentence can be broken down into constituent parts on several levels. The best way to start this parsing is at the level of the sentence: The young man with a paper // has been following a girl in a blue dress. The criterion applied is the criterion of substitution. Each of the two constituents can be replaced and the sentence still remains well formed: Peter / hurts. The young man with a paper and has been following a girl in a blue dress can be further divided into constituents, down to the morphemic or even phonemic level has been following / a girl in a blue dress. a girl/ in a blue dress a / girl in / a blue dress a / blue dress blue/ dress The constituency of a sentences can be presented in the following graphic way: the young man followed a girl in a blue dress Each constituent of a lower order is an immediate constituent to the constituent which directly supersedes it in the hierarchy of the structure. Constituents can be labelled on the basis of their function or on the basis of their internal structure. From the functional point of view, the constituent the young man is the subject of the sentence. From the point of view of its structure, it is a nominal (noun) phrase (NP), named so after its most prominent constituent, the noun man (the headword of the NP). The number of possible combinations of syntactic constituents is not infinite, and some patterns seem to be more common than others: S - P - (A) John sleeps (well) S - P - (IO) - DO - (A) Peter gave (Mary) the book (yesterday) S - P - SC - (A) Joseph was a carpenter (in Nazareth) S - P - DO - OC (A) They elected him Mayor (two years ago) (S=subject, P=predicator, IO=indirect object, DO=direct object, SC=subject complement, OC=object complement, A=adjunct) The way in which to break down sentences into constituents can be described in the form of the so-called Phrase Structure Rules (Rewrite Rules): A duck // bit / the burglar: S → NP – VP NP → DET – N VP → VP – NP VP → V ------DET → a, the N → duck, burglar V → bit The first four rules are categorical, the last three are lexical. (S=sentence, NP=noun phrase, VP=verb phrase, DET=determiner, N=noun, V=verb) Lexical items can be labelled in terms of the position which they can take in the phrasal structures: burglar N duck N bit V [_NP] slept V [_ (PP)(A)] put V [_ NP PP] the D Generative Grammar Generative grammar is linguistic analysis which aims to discover how to form grammatical sentences in natural languages. The foundations were laid down by Noam Chomsky in 1957 (Syntactic Structures) and 1965 (Theory of Syntax). Chomsky claims that many characteristics of languages stem from the fact that they are all governed by universal grammar, an innate matrix which determines the rules of the deep structure of the language. Exposed to a specific linguistic environment, a child acquires the competence (I-language), which includes transformational rules for the generation of an infinite number of grammatical utterances (performance, E-language). Generative grammar evolved in many directions and Chomsky himself modified some of his earlier postulates. In Principles and Parameters a distinction is made between universal rules (principles) that are valid for all languages, and specific rules (parameters) which may be »switched on« in some, but not in other languages. So, for example, all languages have the category of the sentence subject (principle), but some languages are allowed to omit it (pro- drop parameter). Semantics Semantics is the study of the meaning. The word comes from the Greek word sema, semaino ‘meaning, sense’. In traditional structural linguistics the meaning of a linguistic unit (word, phrase, sentence...) is a combination of those distinctive features of a referent which the speakers consider contrastive and relevant. The meaning of the English word girl, for example, is a combination of the attributes [+ human, - adult, + female], but not [+/- pretty, +/- blonde, +/- playful, +/- silly], although the actual girl (referent) that we have in mind when we use the word may have all these and more characteristics. The distinctive features or semantic components which “qualify” a word to be potentially an appropriate label for a particular referent are denotative; those which refer to the social or emotional context in which it is used are connotative. Lexical (Word) Semantics Lexical semantics studies the semantic relations among words. Since words do not relate directly to referents but rather to combinations of contrastive semantic components, the meaning of a word can be applied to many referents, which may differ in many non- contrastive semantic components. This feature is called semantic range. Semantic range therefore defines the set of items (referents) that can be identified by a particular word. So, for example, the word dog may be used with reference to a poodle, a boxer, a terrier, but not a fox, a wolf or a cat. A set of words (lexemes) which are semantically related and cover a given conceptual domain (e.g. words for colours, animals, disciplines...) form a semantic field. Semantic relations Hyponymy and hypernymy: animal mammal, insect, bird dog, cat, cow... poodle, spaniel, terrier… A word is a hyponym in relation to another word, to its hypernym, if it contains all the semantic components of the hypernym and some additional ones. So the word animal is a hypernym to all words within its semantic range, which make up the semantic field of animals. The word mammal is a hyponym in relation to the word animal and hypernym to words such as dog, cat, cow etc. Synonymy Words that share (almost) all semantic components are synonyms: difficult – hard, child – kid, begin – commence.... In most cases, synonyms are context sensitive or marked for style: Cf. He is a hard worker ǂ He is a difficult worker. Antonymy Words with the opposite meanings are antonyms. There are three types of antonymy: a) binary (complementary, exclusive): night – day, dead – alive b) non-binary (gradual) small – big, hot – cold, young – old c) converse: buy – sell, teach – learn, give – receive… Polysemy and Homonymy Both polysemes and homonyms are words that are the same in form, but their meanings are different. The distinction between these two groups is sometimes difficult to make. Generally speaking, polysemes originate in the same word which developed secondary meanings through the process of semantic change, but still kept the original one. A polyseme could be therefore defined as a word with more than one meanings. Examples of polysemes are: star, bank, crane, court… Homonyms are words which have the same form, but are historically unrelated. They may share the acoustic form only, in which case they are homophones (meet – meat, knight – night), the written form, in which case they are homographs (wind – wind) or both: (bill < Lat. Bulla, bill < OE bill 'sword' < Norse bīldr, OHG bill 'pick-axe'). Unlike polysemes, homonyms are separate lemmas in dictionaries. Sentence Semantics The semantic content of a sentence is called proposition. It consists of the predicate and the arguments. The predicate refers to what is going on; the arguments refer to whoever/whatever is involved in the situation/activity and to the circumstances surrounding them. The arguments are assigned semantic or roles, which determine thematic relations among the argument: Agent, doer, actor: John is writing a letter Experiencer: John loves Mary Patient, Theme: John was hit by Peter. John has a car) Recipient, Beneficiary: Mary gave John a book. Cause: Mary is unhappy because of John. Instrument: This key opens the front door Direction, Goal: Let's go home Location: The meeting is in room 15. Time: Tomorrow we go skiing. Last night the old man told the children the story of his life. last night = Time the old man = Agent told = Predicate the children = Beneficiary the story of his life = Theme Pragmatics While semantics is the study of the meaning of linguistic entities, pragmatics is the study of language in the process of communication, of what the speaker implies and what the listener infers on the basis of their shared knowledge, assumptions and the context of the utterance. According to Paul Grice, the essential principle, which makes communication possible, is the principle of cooperation. The listener assumes that the speaker forms his/her message by providing the optimum quantity and quality of relevant information in the most effective manner. The recipient must decide which of the possible senses (meanings) of the word is the right one: That argument is a real winner! Nobody understands me! He’s still quite green, isn’t he? Sometimes, the addressee relies on the rules of the discourse structure (text linguistics): Henry was a good king. People liked him. (coherence and cohesion) Are you coming to the party? - Is Peter coming? (question – answer) Often, extra-linguistic considerations have to be taken into account: What's for dinner? – Tony broke his leg. Pink sinks are the latest fashion, Madam. - My dishwasher’s red. Sorry, no dogs. Sorry, no rabbits. No head injury is too trivial to ignore. One flew over the cuckoo’s nest.