OLL 121: INTRODUCTION TO LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS --THE OPEN UNIVERSITY OF TANZANIA--- BY. MWL. JAPHET MASATU.
OLL 121: INTRODUCTION TO LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS.
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Language:
- A symbolic system of communication
- A
symbolic, rule-driven system of conventional signs employed for
purposes of communication, self-expression, representation, thinking and
manipulation of concepts, definition of the world and reality, storage
and transmission of knowledge, establishing and maintaining of social
relations, creating and participating in group identities, incorporating
new members into an existing group, marking boundaries with or
excluding other individuals or groups, and the creative and recreative
transformation of the world.
Language and Reality:
- Language structures and informs the way in which speakers of that language
understand the world (Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf).
People's sense of reality is embedded and embodied in the language which they
speak. Rather than describing the objective, external world, language creates
a subjective perception of it which is specific to that language and shared
by its speakers.
Innate Language Capacity in Humans:
- Linguistic
ability is located in the brain and is a function of the complex
interaction of different neuronal networks, some of them resident in
specific areas of the brain (Broca's area, Wernicki's area, basal
ganglia)
- Damage
to certain areas of the left hemisphere of the brain can lead to the
inability to articulate or comprehend speech (apahasia)
- Damage to right-hemisphere of brain can lead to inability to comprehend
emotional aspects of speech (aprosodia)
- Damage
to the basal ganglia of the brain can also result in severe impairment
of linguistic abilities, even the complete loss of language
- Universal
Grammar: all humans have a certain built-in language competence, a
common grammatical/structuring capacity existing as a deep mental
structure that gives rise to all the different grammars of the different
languages of the world (evidence for this theory is furnished by
comparative observation of different languages and of the ways in which
children learn language) (Noam Chomsky)
Universal language features:
- All
languages are systematic, ie, they have a grammar; they operate
according to identifiable rules and feature orderly classification,
sequencing, and structuring of their elements
- All
languages use sounds to convey meaning (sign language, gestural
languages, written language and artificial languages such as computer
code can be considered derivations from the original sound-based form of
language common to all humans)
- Certain sound qualities convey similar meaning in all languages:
- low
pitch associated with large physical size, dominance, intimidation, hostility, authority
- high-pitch
associated with submission, respect, obedience, friendliness (humans tend
to use high pitch when addressing babies and in courtship)
- Bouba and Kiki: what do they look like?
- The
symbols employed in language are however largely conventional &
arbitrary: i.e. there is nothing natural, eternal, essential,
pure/impure, beautiful/ugly, accurate/inaccurate, or
appropriate/inappropriate
about the specific sounds that a language uses as its
words:
- evidence from variation of onomatopoeias (echoic words) in different
languages (English dog bark: arf, arf; Spanish: guau, guau; German: wau,
wau; Japanese: wung, wung)
- Idioms:
all languages have a tendency to create expressions with meanings
which cannot be predicted from the meanings of their
constituent parts, e.g. "turn
on"; metaphors and other rhetorical figures are similar
manifestations of an ongoing tendency toward the re-symbolization of the
symbols of language
- Creativity
and productivity : using a fixed number of rules and elements, speakers
of the language can produce a virtually unlimited number
of statements. Poetry, fiction, lying, mis-representation, and even
non-sensical statements are manifestations of the creative independence
of language and its ability to create worlds and realities of its own.
- Redundancy:
language expressions tend to feature a certain degree of
overspecification of certain meanings so as to ensure the accurate
delivery of the message ("I did it myself"; "I am"). Redundancy is then a
certain inefficiency with a practical purpose.
- Markedness:
every language delimits itself from other languages and establishes
itself as different and unique by means of various features including
its vocabulary, phonemes, the specifics of its grammar, etc; a tendency
toward uniqueness is therefore, if somewhat curiously, a universal
feature of languages. The more a language deviates against the "norm" of
the average tendencies in other languages, the more "marked" it is.
- All languages change over time
Linguistics:
- The study and characterization of the rules (grammar) and systems (phonology,
morphology, syntax, lexicon, semantics, and graphics) that constitute a language
and govern the relationships between its signifiying elements. Some varieties of linguistics:
- Structural Linguistics: describes the systems and rules of language and how it operates (Ferdinand de Saussure)
- Historical
Linguistics: describes how language changes and evolves over time,
often identifying, by comparative methods, the common origins and
relationships between different languages (William Jones, Jacob Grimm,
Aron Dolgopolsky, Joseph Greenberg, Merritt Ruhlen)
- Transformational/Generative
Linguistics: considers how the features and grammar of a given language
may be related to and issue from the deep, underlying features of
Universal Grammar (Noam Chomsky)
- Poststructuralist
Linguistics: emphasizes the self-containment and self-referentiality of
language and its utterances, with special attention to the interplay
of signifiers and the illusion of meaning they create against a
background of inescapable tautology where words, ultimately, refer only
to other words (Jacques Derrida)
Systems of Language:
- Phonology: the study of the sounds of a language
- phones and phonemes
- phone: a vocal sound
- phoneme:
a minimal sound unit recognized as a distinct value by the speakers of a
language (e.g. [p], [b], [a]); the smallest sound
that can distinguish one word from another
(e.g.[f]at/[v]at, stri[f]e,
stri[v]e)
- allophones are variants of a phoneme which the speakers of
the language don't perceive as different
from that phoneme (e.g.
compare the different sounds of the "t" in "cat,"
"satin," "cater"-- they sound very different but,
to speakers of American English, they are all just t's!)
- about 100-150 human sounds (see International
Phonetic Alphabet)(only 35-45 used in English)
- Morphology: the study of significant language units (morphemes) and their combination
to form words; the specification and classification of the character and functionality of such
words and word components
- morpheme:
the smallest meaningful unit of a language (e.g. "un-like-ly" is a word
containing three morphemes and it is a morpheme itself)
- free and bound morphemes (e.g. "the" is a free morpheme,
"un-" is a bound morpheme
- affixes: morphemes which are appended to the beginning (prefixes)
or ending (suffixes) of a word to signify grammatical and other functions
- root: the basis or main part of a word to which affixes can be added
- stem: a root or a root plus another morpheme to which affixes can
be added
- inflection:
variation/transformation in the form of a word to signify different
grammatical functions or changes in meaning -- inflections can take the
form of added affixes (dog, dogs) or changes in internal parts of a word
(sing, sang, sung). Some terms associated with inflections:
- declension:
inflection of nouns, adjectives and pronouns to denote grammatical
cases of a word such as subject, direct object, indirect object,
possessor, source, location, direction, etc. (dog, dog's; I, me, my;
she, her). In languages like English, some of these meanings can also be
denoted syntactically by word order featuring prepositions and other
function words (dog, of the dog)
- comparison: inflection of adjectives to denote the degree of a quality (great, greater, greatest)
- conjugation: inflection of verbs (am, are, is, were) to denote tense, mood, subject
- number: inflection of a noun, adjective, pronoun or verb to denote singular, plural or other quantity (dog, dogs)
- gender:
inflection of a noun, adjective, or pronoun to signify association of
the specified object with a grammatical, cultural, and/or biological
group (poet, poetess; he, she; blond, blonde)
- person:
inflection of a pronoun or verb specifying the relative identity of the
subject/agent (I, you, he/she/it, we, you, they; am, is, are)
- word
compounding and derivation: creation of new words by combining existing
ones and/or by addition of affixes (life + style > lifestyle; green
+-ly > greenly )
- lexicon is the total inventory of the morphemes of a language
- lexical
categories (parts of speech): classification of words as nouns,
adjectives, adverbs, verbs, function words (prepositions, articles,
conjunctions, pronouns, auxiliaries)
- languages can be classified according to the structure of their morpheme combinations as follows:
- Isolating: words are invariable single morphemes and not combined with other morphemes; grammar
indicated by word order and function words (e.g. Chinese, Vietnamese)
- Analytic:
words can be composed of one or more morphemes but grammatical
information is largely signaled by word order (syntax) and function
words (prepositions,
articles, auxiliaries, conjunctions)(e.g. Modern
English)
- Synthetic: characterized by the use of inflections within a word (by affixes and/or changes to the word) to signify grammatical
and other meanings (e.g. classical Greek and Latin)
- Polysynthetic:
morphemes strung together into long "words" which are equivalent to
our sentences and phrases but can be inflected (e.g. Nahuatl, Algonquian
languages, Eskimo)
- Agglutinative: long "words" (effectively phrases and sentences) formed by combining/aggregating fixed morphemes (e.g.
Swahili, Turkish)
- Syntax:
the study of word order and the sequencing of words in phrases,
clauses,
and sentences. Syntax is concerned with categories such
as subject, object, verb, parts of speech, and the order in which they
can appear in a statement to convey specific meanings.
- Morphosyntax:
the different structures of languages make it evident that morphology
and syntax cannot always be separated and in fact constitute a common
system -- this is also evident by the fact that the function of a word
can be denoted by morphological inflection (e.g. dog, dog's) or by word
order (dog, of the dog)
- Semantics: the study of meaning in language
- Graphics: the writing system of a language
- Paralanguage:
extra-linguistic signals and information contributing to meaning
and supporting the functioning of the other systems of
the language. Paralanguage includes signals such as tone of voice,
pitch, tempo/speed, rhythm, pauses, volume, sighs,
coughs, gestures, body
motions, setting, cultural context, etc.)
- Prosody: study of the stress, accent, pitch, and rhythm patterns of
a language
- pitch difference: "he's here" vs "he's here?"
- stress/accent difference: "rébel" vs "rebél"
- pause: "he died happily" vs "he died, happily"
- Kinesics: body-motion, gestures accompanying language and contributing
to meaning
- proxemics (useof space, proximity between speakers)
- Pragmatics: language users' shared knowledge, attitudes, beliefs,presuppositions, physical surroundings, context/situation
of an utterance
- Deictics:
a form of both pragmatics and kinesics interested in the use of words
like this/that, here/there and accompanying physical gestures (pointing
with a finger) which could mean entirely different things when used in
different physical or other settings. Pointing toward an object with a
finger and uttering a sound may have constituted the first act of naming
and the association of a sound and a physical gesture with an object of
the material world.
Language Change:
- change as fundamental aspect of language
- systematic or sporadic
- principle of least effort: tendency to economy, efficiency
- analogy: tendency to imitation, regularity
- imperfect learning
- external pressures: social, economic, political factors; foreign influence
- slower changes in graphics/writing than in sounds of spoken language
References and Websites of Interest:
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