1st 2nd and 3rd Study Guides

General and Applied Linguistic
1st Study Guide

1. What is linguistics? Consider Linguistics as a science, and as such, the
characteristics proper to any science.
2. Consider the branches of Linguistics. Remember the main classification into
General Linguistics and Applied Linguistics.
3. What is descriptive and comparative Linguistics? How are they different?
4. How did Linguistics as a science emerge? Consider the history of Linguistics.
Remember it began with the Indian Empire. Do not forget to mention the Greeks,
the Romans, the Middle ages, the Renaissance, and the late 19th and 20th centuries.
5. How Linguistics changed from both America and Europe? Who were Ferdinand de
Saussure and his ideas? And what about Noam Chomsky and his theories?
6. How does Linguistics obtain data? How has the computer age changed this process?
7. Which is the domain of Linguistics
8. Which are the theories for the development of language? Refer to the different
sources such as the divine source, the natural sound source, anthropological
evidence, archeological evidence, primatological evidenc, genetic evidence, etc.
9. Provide your own definition of language.
10. Be able to explain different definitions of language such as the one given by David
Crystal:
language is the human vocal noise, or the representation of this noise in writing,
used systematically and conventionally by a community for purposes of
communication.
Compare the stated definition of language by David Crystal with:
language can be defined as a system of conventional vocal signs by means of
which human beings communicate.
11. Consider the design features of language (the properties of human language) that
distinguish it from the different systems of communication used by animals.
Compare language with the bee waggle dance and the vervet monkey calls.
12. What is sign language? Whats the difference between sign language and gestures?
What makes sign language so complex? Explain.
13. When did written records appear? Explain the development of writing systems
considering pictograms, ideograms, logograms, the rebus system, the syllabic
writing, the alphabetic writing, and provide examples of each.
14. Language history and change: define what language family trees and cognates are.
How are languages reconstructed? How did English change from Old English to the
Contemporary version we use nowadays?
15. What is Sociolinguistics? Define standard language. Make a difference between
accent and dialect. What does dialectology study? What are regional dialects?
What is an isogloss (dialect boundaries)? What does the phrase dialect
continuum refer to? What is the difference between bilingualism and diglossia?
What are pidgins and creoles?
16. Language and society: dialects, regional dialects, accents, dialects of English, social
dialects, the standard, African-American English, languages in contact, lingua
franca, pidgins, creoles, language in use, styles, slang, jargon and argot,
euphemisms, racial and national, language and sexism.
17. Language and culture: what is culture? The philosophy of language: what is
linguistic relativity? Describe the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, provide examples.
Describe cognitive categories, classifiers, and social categories.
18. Brain and language: the localization of language, brain plasticity and lateralization
in early life, the critical period.
1.
Linguistic: is the scientific study of human natural language. Linguistics examines
language as part of human behavior from a psychological and a social and cultural aspect
and attempts to determine which characteristics are unique to a language and which are
universal. There are three aspects to this study: language form, language meaning, and
language in context.
2.
Branches of the linguistic:
Descriptive linguistics: Studying particular languages and provides the data which confirm
or refute the propositions and theories put forward in general linguistics.
General linguistic: is more theoretical and applied linguistics is more practical and the
testing of the theories.
Diachronic linguistics: (Historical) Traces the historical development of the language and
records the changes that have taken place in it between successive points in time:
diachronic is equivalent to historical. Of particular interest to linguists throughout the
nineteenth century.
Synchronic linguistics: (Non- historical) presents an account of the language as it is at
some particular point in time.
Theoretical linguistics: Studies language and languages with a view to constructing a
theory of their structure and functions and without regard to any practical applications that
the investigation of language and languages might have. Goal: formulation of a satisfactory
theory of the structure of language in general.
Applied linguistics: is concerned with practical issues involving language in the life of the
community. The most important of these is the learning of second or foreign languages.
Others include language policy, multilingualism, language education, the preservation and
revival of endangered languages, and the assessment and treatment of language difficulties.
Micro linguistics: Adopts the narrow view and concerned solely with the structures of the
language system in itself and for itself.
Macro linguistics: Adopts the broader view. Concerned with the way languages are
acquired, stored in the brain and used for various functions; interdependence of language
and culture; physiological and psychological mechanisms involved in language behavior.
3.
Comparative linguistics: is a branch of historical linguistics that studies languages to
establish connections between them. Connections may be genetic, meaning the languages
have a common ancestral language and belong to the same language family, or may result
from cultural contact between unrelated languages. The fundamental technique of
comparative linguistics is to compare phonological systems, morphological systems,
syntax, and the lexicon of two or more languages using techniques such as the comparative
method.
Descriptive linguistics: is the work of objectively analyzing and describing how language
is actually used (or how it was used in the past) by a group of people in a speech
community. It is study of the description of the internal phonological, grammatical, and
semantic structures of languages.
4.
The history of Linguistics:
Certainly the most interesting non-Western grammatical traditionand the most original
and independentis that of India, which dates back at least two and one-half millennia and
which culminated with the grammar of Panini, of the 5th century bce. There are three major
ways in which the Sanskrit tradition has had an impact on modern linguistic scholarship. As
soon as Sanskrit became known to the Western learned world, the unravelling of
comparative Indo-European grammar ensued, and the foundations were laid for the whole
19th-century edifice of comparative philology and historical linguistics. But, for this,
Sanskrit was simply a part of the data; Indian grammatical learning played almost no direct
part. Nineteenth-century workers, however, recognized that the native tradition of phonetics
in ancient India was vastly superior to Western knowledge, and this had important
consequences for the growth of the science of phonetics in the West. Third, there is in the
rules or definitions (sutras) of Panini a remarkably subtle and penetrating account of
Sanskrit grammar. The construction of sentences, compound nouns, and the like is
explained through ordered rules operating on underlying structures in a manner strikingly
similar in part to modes of modern theory. As might be imagined, this perceptive Indian
grammatical work held great fascination for 20th-century theoretical linguists. A study of
Indian logic in relation to Paninian grammar alongside Aristotelian and Western logic in
relation to Greek grammar and its successors could bring illuminating insights.
The Romans, who largely took over, with mild adaptations to their highly similar language,
the total work of the Greeks, are important not as originators but as transmitters. Aelius
Donatus, of the 4th century ce, and Priscian, an African of the 6th century, and their
colleagues were slightly more systematic than their Greek models but were essentially
retrospective rather than original. Up to this point a field that was at times called ars
grammatica was a congeries of investigations, both theoretical and practical, drawn from
the work and interests of literacy, scribe ship, logic, epistemology, rhetoric, textual
philosophy, poetics, and literary criticism.
It is possible that developments in grammar during the Middle Ages constitute one of the
most misunderstood areas of the field of linguistics. It is difficult to relate this period
coherently to other periods and to modern concerns because surprisingly little is accessible
and certain, let alone analyzed with sophistication. By the mid-20th century the majority of
the known grammatical treatises has not yet been made available in full to modern
scholarship, so not even their true extent could be classified with confidence. These works
must be analyzed and studied in the light of medieval learning, especially the learning of
the schools of philosophy then current, in order to understand their true value and place.
The field of linguistics has almost completely neglected the achievements of this period.
Students of grammar have tended to see as high points in their field the achievements of the
Greeks, the Renaissance growth and rediscovery of learning (which led directly to
modern school traditions), the contemporary flowering of theoretical study (people usually
find their own age important and fascinating), and, since the mid-20th century, the
astonishing monument of Panini. Many linguists have found uncongenial the combination
of medieval Latin learning and pre modern philosophy.
It is customary to think of the Renaissance as a time of great flowering. There is no doubt
that linguistic and philological developments of this period are interesting and significant.
Two new sets of data that modern linguists tend to take for granted became available to
grammarians during this period: (1) the newly recognized vernacular languages of Europe,
for the protection and cultivation of which there subsequently arose national academies and
learned institutions that live down to the present day; and (2) the languages of Africa, East
Asia, the New World, and, later, of Siberia, Central Asia, New Guinea, Oceania, the Arctic,
and Australia, which the voyages of discovery opened up. Earlier, the only non-IndoEuropean grammar at all widely accessible was that of the Hebrews (and to some extent
Arabic); Semitic in fact shares many categories with Indo-European in its grammar. Indeed,
for many of the exotic languages, scholarship barely passed beyond the most rudimentary
initial collection of word lists; grammatical analysis was scarcely approached.
5.
Two main approaches to language study, one European and one American, unite to form the
modern subject of linguistics. The European approach has its focus on written records and
it is interested in historical analysis and interpretation.
Historical linguists study the history of specific languages as well as general
characteristics of language change. The study of language change is also referred to as
"diachronic linguistics" (the study of how one particular language has changed over
time), which can be distinguished from "synchronic linguistics" (the comparative study of
more than one language at a given moment in time without regard to previous stages).
Historical linguistics was among the first sub-disciplines to emerge in linguistics, and was
the most widely practiced form of linguistics in the late 19th century. However, there was a
shift to the synchronic approach in the early twentieth century with Saussure, and became
more predominant in western linguistics with the work of Noam Chomsky.
Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist that introduced the study of principles
governing the structure of being languages.
He founded the structuralist school of thought which claims that language can be studied as
self-contained and structured system at a single point in time.
Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, logician, political
commentator, social justice activist, and anarcho-syndicalist advocate. Sometimes
described as the "father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic
philosophy. He has spent most of his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT), where he is currently Professor Emeritus, and has authored over 100 books. He has
been described as a prominent cultural figure, and was voted the "world's top public
intellectual" in a 2005 poll. He believes that we are born with a predisposition to learn
language. The essence of his theories of language acquisition state that human beings are
pre-wired to learn language and in fact are born with the basic rules for language intact.
Many of the unique details of any specific language structure are heavily influenced by the
environment, but according to Chomsky, the human brain is ready made to quickly acquire
language at specific stages in the developmental process.
6.
Many procedures are available for obtaining data about language. They range from
carefully planned intensive field investigation in a foreign country of casual introspection
about ones mother tongue carried out in an armchair at home.
Informants: In all cases, someone has to act as a source of language data- an informant or
consultant. Informants are native speakers of a language who provide utterances for
analysis and other kinds of information about the language (e.g. translation, comments
about correctness, or judgements on usage),
Recording: Today, data from an informant are often tape recorded. This enables the
linguistics claims about the language to be checked, and provides a way of making those
claims more accurate (difficult pieces of speech can be listened to repeatedly).
Corpora: A representative sample of language, compiled for the purpose of linguistic
analysis, is known as corpus. A corpus enables the linguist to make objective, statements
about frequency of usage, and it provides accessible data for the use of different researches.
Experiments: Experimental techniques are widely used in linguistics, especially in those
fields that have been influenced by the methods of sciences where experimentation is
routine. Phonetics is the subject most involved in this approach. In grammar and semantics,
experimental studies usually take the form of controlled methods for eliciting judgements
about sentences or the elements they contain.
Reconstruction: The limiting case of linguistic study, one might imagine, is when no data
are available at all- as in the case of the historical study of language where written records
are lacking. But it is possible to break through even this apparent barrier, by using the
reconstruction techniques of comparative philology. The forms of Proto-Indo-European
and other reconstructed languages may be totally hypothetical in status, but they have
nonetheless become a major field of linguistic enquiry.
The computer age: Since the 1980s, the chief focus of computational linguistic research has
been in the area known as Natural Language Processing (NLP). Here, the aim is to devise
techniques which will automatically analyzed large quantities of spoken (transcribed) or
written text in ways broadly parallel to what happens when human carry out this task. NLP
deals with computational processing of text in natural human languages.
The field of NLP emerged out of machine translation in the 1950s and was later much
influenced by work on artificial intelligence. There was a focus on devising intelligent
programs which aimed to simulate aspect of human behavior, such as the way people can
infer meaning from what has been said, or use their knowledge of the world to reach a
conclusion. Most recently, particular attention has been paid to the nature of discourse and
there has been a confrontation with the vast size of the lexicon, using the large amounts of
lexical data now available in machine-readable from commercial dictionary projects.
7.
The domain of Linguistics
Language domains: Is a consensual domain in which the coupled organisms orient each
other in their internally determined behavior through interactions that have been specified
during their coupled ontogenies.
These are where a language is spoken, such as a nation or institution, a shop, bank, office,
or school, or home. Language domains are plural and not only relate to the nation and
family; they add another layer of complexity when attempting to understand language in
education policies. Other domains may be related to social and community networks,
religious, business, academic research and research through education institutions,
textbooks and multinational corporations. Schools as a language-specific domain have a
large impact on the situation of languages, multilingualism (or its lack), cultural rights; and
the related links to identity, inequalities or educational achievement.
8.
Theories for development of language: Different sources:
The divine source: In the most religions, appears to be a divine source who provides
humans with language. In an attempt to rediscover this original divine language, a few
experiments have been carried out, with rather conflicting results. The basic hypothesis
seems to have been that, if human infants were allowed to grow up without hearing any
language around them, then they would spontaneously begin using the original God-given
language.
The natural sound source:
bow-wow theory: Primitive words could have been referred to in a language that
simply echoed natural sounds. The early human tried to imitate the sound and used
it to refer to the thing associated with the sound.
ouch!, Ah!, Ooh!, Wow! or Yuck! : These sounds have come from natural cries of
emotion such as pain, anger and joy. Basically, the expressive noises people make in
emotional reactions contain sounds that are not otherwise used in speech
production.
yo-he-ho theory: The sounds of a person involved in physical effort could be the
source of our language, especially when that physical effort involved several people
and had to be coordinated.
The physical adaptation source: It looks at the types of physical features humans possess,
especially those that are distinct from other creatures, which may have been able to support
speech production. In the study of evolutionary development, there are certain physical
features, best thought of as partial adaptations, which appear to be relevant for speech.
Teeth, lips, mouth, larynx and pharynx.
The human brain: It is lateralized, it has specialized functions in each of the two
hemispheres. Those functions that control motor movements involved in things like
speaking and object manipulation are largely confined to the left hemisphere. All
languages, including sign language, require the organizing and combining of sounds or
signs in specific arrangements. We seem to have developed a part of our brain that
specializes in making these arrangements.
The genetic source: Human offspring are born with a special capacity for language. It is
innate, no other creature seems to have it, and it isnt tied to a specific variety of language.
This innateness hypothesis would seem to point to something in human genetics, possibly
a crucial mutation, as the source. This would not have been a gradual change, but
something that happened rather quickly.
9.
Language: is the human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of
communication. Is a human system of communication that uses arbitrary signals, such as
voice sounds, gestures, or written symbols. Also, we can say that language is a body of
words and system of communication by written or spoken word, which is used by the
people of a particular country or area.
10.
Different definitions of language:
"Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas,
emotions and desires by means of voluntarily produced symbols." (Edward Sapir,
Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech. Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1921)
"A language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by means of which a social group
cooperates." (B. Bloch and G. Trager, Outline of Linguistic Analysis. Waverly Press, 1942)
From now on I will consider a language to be a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each
finite in length and constructed out of a finite set of elements." (Noam Chomsky, Syntactic
Structures, 1957)
"A language consists of symbols that conveymeaning, plus rules for combining those
symbols, that can be used to generate an infinite variety of messages." (Wayne Weiten,
Psychology: Themes And Variations, 7th ed. Thomson Wadsworth, 2007)
language is the human vocal noise, or the representation of this noise in writing, used
systematically and conventionally by a community for purposes of communication.
Compare the stated definition of language by David Crystal with: language can be defined
as a system of conventional vocal signs by means of which human beings communicate.
The first definition refers to the speech and handwriting as language of community. In the
other hand, the second definition also refers to speech but the author focuses more in signs
by a community for purpose of communication.
11.
The design features of language:
1-Vocal-auditory channel: This means that the standard human language occurs as a
vocal (making sounds with the mouth) type of communication which is perceived by
hearing it.
2-Broadcast transmission and directional reception: This means that the human
language signal is sent out in all directions, while it is perceived in a limited direction.
For spoken language, the sound perpetuates as a waveform that expands from the point
of origin (the mouth) in all directions. This is why a person can stand in the middle of a
room and be heard by everyone (assuming they are speaking loudly enough). However,
the listener hears the sound as coming from a particular direction and is notably better
at hearing sounds that are coming from in front of them than from behind them.
3-Rapid fading (transitoriness): This means that the human language signal does not
persist over time. Speech waveforms fade rapidly and cannot be heard after they fade.
This is why it is not possible to simply say "hello" and have someone hear it hours later.
Writing and audio-recordings can be used to record human language so that it can be
recreated at a later time, either by reading the written form, or by playing the audiorecord.
4-Interchangeability: This means that the speaker can both receive and broadcast the
same signal. This is distinctive from some animal communications such as that of the
sticklefish. The sticklefish make auditory signals based on gender (basically, the males
say "I'm a boy" and the females say "I'm a girl"). However, male fish cannot say "I'm a
girl," although they can perceive it. Thus, sticklefish signals are not interchangeable.
5-Total feedback: This means that the speaker can hear themself speak and can
monitor their language performance as they go. This differs from some other simple
communication systems, such as traffic signals. Traffic signs are not normally capable
of monitor their own functions (a red light can't tell when the bulb is burned out, i.e.).
6-Specialization: This means that the organs used for producing speech are specially
adapted to that task. The human lips, tongue, throat, etc. have been specialized into
speech apparati instead of being merely the eating apparati they are in many other
animals. Dogs, for example, are not physically capable of all of the speech sounds that
humans produce, because they lack the necessary specialized organs.
7-Semanticity: This means that specific signals can be matched with specific
meanings. This is a fundamental aspect of all communication systems. For example, in
French, the word selmeans a white, crystalline substance consisting of sodium and
chlorine atoms. The same substance is matched with the English word salt. Anyone
speaker of these languages will recognize that the signal sel or salt refers to the
substance sodium chloride.
8-Arbitrariness: This means that there is no necessary connection between the form of
the signal and the thing being referred to. For example, something as large as a whale
can be referred to by a very short word. Similarly, there is no reason that a four-legged
domestic canine should be called a dog and not a chien or a perro or an anjing (all
words for 'dog' in other languages). Onomatopoeic words such as "meow" or "bark" are
often cited as counter-examples, based on the argument that they are pronounced like
the sound they refer to. However, the similarity if very loose (a dog that actually said
"bark" would be very surprising) and does not always hold up across languages
(Spanish dogs, for example, say "guau"). So, even onomatopoeic words are, to some
extent, arbitrary.
9-Discreteness: This means that the basic units of speech (such as sounds) can be
categorized as belonging to distinct categories. There is no gradual, continuous shading
from one sound to another in the linguistics system, although there may be a continuum
in the real physical world. Thus speakers will perceive a sound as either a [p] or a [b],
but not as blend, even if physically it falls somewhere between the two sounds.
10-Displacement: This means that the speaker can talk about things which are not
present, either spatially or temporally. For example, human language allows speakers to
talk about the past and the future, as well as the present. Speakers can also talk about
things that are physically distant (such as other countries, the moon, etc.). They can
even refer to things and events that do not actually exist (they are not present in reality)
such as the Easter Bunny, the Earth having an emperor, or the destruction of Tara
in Gone with the Wind.
11-Productivity: This means that human languages allow speakers to create novel,
never-before-heard utterances that others can understand. For example, the sentence
"The little lavender men who live in my socks drawer told me that Elvis will come back
from Mars on the 10th to do a benefit concert for unemployed Pekingese dogs" is a
novel and never-before-heard sentence (at least, I hope it is!), but any fluent speaker of
English would be able to understand it (and realize that the speaker was not completely
sane, in all probability).
12-Traditional Transmission: This means that human language is not something
inborn. Although humans are probably born with an ability to do language, they must
learn, or acquire, their native language from other speakers. This is different from many
animal communication systems where the animal is born knowing their entire system,
e.g. bees are born knowing how to dance and some birds are born knowing their species
of bird-songs (this is not true of all birds).
13-Duality of patterning: This means that the discrete parts of a language can be
recombined in a systematic way to create new forms. This idea is similar to
Productivity. However, Productivity refers to the ability to generate novel meanings,
while Duality of patterning refers to the ability to recombine small units in different
orders.
The communication systems of other creatures, such as monkey and bees, do not appear to
have a productivity (or creativity or open-endedness) and it is linked to the fact that the
potential number of utterances in any human language is infinite. Vervet monkeys have
thirty-six vocal calls. Nor does it seem possible for creatures to produce new signals to
communicate novel experiences or events. The worker bee, normally able to communicate
the location of a nectar source to other bees, will fail to do so if the location is really new.
In one experiment, a hive of bees was placed at the foot of a radio tower and a food source
placed at the top. Ten bees were taken to the top, shown the food source, and sent off to tell
the rest of the hive about their find. The message was conveyed via a bee dance and the
whole gang buzzed off to get the free food. They flew around in all directions, but couldn't
locate the food. (Its probably one way to make bees really mad.) The problem seems to be
that bee communication has a fixed set of signals for communicating location and they all
relate to horizontal distance. The bee cannot manipulate its communication system to create
a new message indicating vertical distance. According to Karl von Frisch, who conducted
the experiment, the bees have no word for up in their language and they cant invent one.
12.
A sign language: is a language which uses manual communication and body language to
convey meaning, as opposed to acoustically conveyed sound patterns. This can involve
simultaneously combining hand shapes, orientation and movement of the hands, arms or
body, and facial expressions to fluidly express a speaker's thoughts.
Although both Sign and Gestures involve the use of the hands (with other parts of the
body), they are rather different. Sign is like speech and is used instead of speaking. The
gestures are just part of the communicative act being performed.
What makes sign language so complex is that it is conventional and depend on social
knowledge, I mean, what is and is not considered offensive in a particular social world. For
example, in Britain, the use of two fingers (the index and middle fingers together) raised in
a V-shape traditionally represents one sign. (victory) when the back of the hand faces the
sender and a quite different sign (= I insult you in a very offensive way) when the back of
the hand faces the receiver of the signal.
13.
Written Records:
We may be able to trace human attempts to represent information visually back to cave
drawings made at least 20,000 years ago, or to clay tokens from about 10,000 years ago,
which appear to have been an early attempt at bookkeeping, but these artifacts are best
described as ancient precursors of writing. The earliest writing for which we have clear
evidence is the kind that Geoffrey Nunberg is referring to as cuneiform marked on clay
tablets about 5,000 years ago.
Cave drawings may serve to record some event and, and they are usually treated as part of a
tradition of pictorial art.
Pictograms: They came to represent particular images in a consistent way. A form such as
might come to be used for the sun. An essential part of this use of a representative
symbol is that everyone should use a similar form to convey a roughly similar meaning.
That is, a conventional relationship must exist between the symbol and its interpretation.
Ideograms: It is considered to be part of a system of idea-writing. A fixed symbolic form,
such as , and come to be used for heat and daytime, as well as for sun. It is moving
from something visible to something conceptual. For example, in Chinese writing, the
character was used for a river, and had its origins in the pictorial representation of a
stream flowing between two banks.
Logograms: When symbols are used to represent words in a language, they are described
as examples of word-writing, or logograms. In early Egyptian writing, the ideogram for
water was . Much later, the derived symbol came to be used for the actual word
meaning water. Cuneiform writing is a good example of logographic writing that is the
system used by the Sumerians around 5,000 years ago. The form of the symbol can be
compared to a typical pictographic representation of the same fishy entity. Another example
are many Chinese written symbols, or characters, are used as representations of the
meaning of words, or parts of words, and not of the sounds of spoken language.
Ribus writing: One way of sing existing symbols to represent the sounds of language is
through a process known as rebus writing. In this process, the symbol for one entity is
taken over as the symbol for the sound of the spoken word used to refer to the entity. That
symbol then comes to be used whenever that sound occurs in any words.
We can create an example, working with the sound of the English word eye. We can
imagine how the pictogram could have developed into the logogram . This logogram is
pronounced as eye and, with the rebus principle at work, you could then refer to yourself as
(I), to one of your friends as (Crosseye).
Syllabic writing: When a writing system employs a set of symbols each one representing
the pronunciation of a syllable, it is described as syllabic writing.
Modern Japanese can be written with a set of single symbols representing spoken syllables
and is consequently often described as having a (partially) syllabic writing system, or a
syllabary. The Cherokee community creates written messages from the spoken language. In
these Cherokee examples: (ho), (sa) and (ge),
Alphabetic writing: An Alphabet is essentially a set of written symbols, each one
representing a single type of sound. Words written in Semitic languages such as Arabic and
Hebrew, in everyday use, largely consist of symbols for the consonant sounds in the word,
with the appropriate vowel sounds being supplied by the reader (or rdr). This type of
writing system is sometimes called a consonantal alphabet. The early Greeks used separate
symbols to represent the vowel sounds as distinct entities, and so created a remodeled
system that included vowels. This change produced a distinct symbol for a vowel sound
such as a (called alpha) to go with existing symbols for consonant sounds such as b
(called beta), giving us single-sound writing or an alphabet.
14.
Language history and change:
A language tree model is a means of visualizing the development of languages. Strictly
speaking, this is the linguistic equivalent of a family tree. It is also fraught with the same
problems of missing evidence and supposition to fill the gaps. The ultimate goal of the
language tree model is to find the mother tongue of all humans, if such a language ever
existed. The creation of such tree models is a part of language comparison and is the result
of numerous studies into the origins and commonalities of languages across the world.
Cognates are words that have a common etymological origin. This learned term derives
from the Latin cognatus (blood relative). Cognates within the same language are called
doublets.
Cognates do not need to have the same meaning, which may have changed as the languages
developed separately.
In the nineteenth centuries many philologists attempted to find some common roots of
contemporary languages, as they noticed many similarities in their forms. Thus, certain
family connections were traced and language genealogic trees were created. Up to now
about thirty detailed trees have been made describing relations between 4000 distinct
languages. The family tree of Indo-European languages consists of over twenty tongues.
The analysis of the relations between languages is possible because of common words that
exist in those languages and derive from a mutual ancestor. Words that have a very similar
form in different languages and share, or used to share their meaning are called cognates.
For instance the English words mother and father are cognates of the German
words Mutterand Vater. When two languages share a large number of cognates certain
procedures are applied in order to reconstruct the original forms of the common ancestors.
The principles of such procedures are fairly simple: if in a set of cognates consisting of ten
words seven of them begin with [k] sound and three with [g] sound according to the
majority principle it is assumed that the majority of words have kept the original sound,
while the rest changed with time. The most natural development principle describes the
most common sound-change patterns which enable the reconstruction of sound changes in
cognates:
Vowels in the final position frequently disappear: vino -> vin
Voiceless sounds between vowels became voiced: muta -> muda
Stops turn into fricatives: ripa -> riva
If a consonant is at the end of a word it becomes voiceless: rizu -> ris
With the above mention set of rules it is possible not only to follow the history of language
change, but also to determine the common ancestors of languages. The primary sources for
what developed as the English language were the Germanic languages spoken by a group of
tribes from northern Europe who moved into the British Isles in the fifth century. From this
early version of Englisc, now called Old English, we have many of the most basic terms in
the language: mann (man), wf (woman), cild (child), hus (house), mete (food),
etan (eat), drincan (drink) and feohtan (fight). These pagan settlers also gave us some
weekday names, commemorating their gods Woden and Thor. However, they did not
remain pagan for long. From the sixth to the eighth century, there was an extended period
during which these Anglo-Saxons were converted to Christianity and a number of terms
from Latin (the language of the religion) came into English at that time. The origins of the
contemporary English words angel, bishop, candle, church, martyr, priest and school all
date from this period.
The event that marks the end of the Old English period, and the beginning of the Middle
English period, is the arrival of the Norman French in England, following their victory at
Hastings under William the Conqueror in 1066. These French-speaking invaders became
the ruling class, so that the language of the nobility, the government, the law and civilized
life in England for the next two hundred years was French. It is the source of words like
army, court, defense, faith, prison and tax.
In a number of changes from Middle to Modern English, some sounds simply disappeared
from the pronunciation of certain words, resulting in the silent letters of contemporary
written English. Word-initial velar stops [k] and [g] are no longer pronounced before nasals
[n], but we still write the words knee and gnaw with the remnants of earlier pronunciations.
Another example is a velar fricative /x/ that was used in the older pronunciation of nicht as
[nIxt] (close to the modern German pronunciation), but is absent in the contemporary form
night, as [najt]. A remnant of this sound is still present in some dialects, as at the end of the
Scottish word loch, but it is no longer used by most English speakers.
The sound change known as metathesis involves a reversal in position of two sounds in a
word. This type of reversal is illustrated in the changed versions of these words from their
earlier forms.
The most sweeping change in the form of English sentences was the loss of a large number
of inflectional affixes from many parts of speech. Notice that, in the previous examples, the
forms sealde (he gave) and sealdest (you gave) are differentiated by inflectional suffixes
(-e, -est) that are no longer used in Modern English. Nouns, adjectives, articles and
pronouns all had different inflectional forms according to their grammatical function in the
sentence.
The most obvious way in which Modern English differs from Old English is in the number
of borrowed words that have come into the language since the Old English period.
Two other processes are described as broadening and narrowing of meaning. An
example of broadening of meaning is the change from holy day as a religious feast to the
very general break from work called a holiday.
The reverse process, called narrowing, has overtaken the Old English word hund, once used
for any kind of dog, but now, as hound, used only for some specific breeds. Another
example is mete, once used for any kind of food, which has in its modern form meat
become restricted to only some specific types.
None of these changes happened overnight. They were gradual and probably difficult to
discern while they were in progress. Although some changes can be linked to major social
changes caused by wars, invasions and other upheavals, the most pervasive source of
change in language seems to be in the continual process of cultural transmission. Each new
generation has to find a way of using the language of the previous generation.
15.
The term sociolinguistics is used generally for the study of the relationship between
language and society. This is a broad area of investigation that developed through the
interaction of linguistics with a number of other academic disciplines. It has strong
connections with anthropology through the study of language and culture, and with
sociology through the investigation of the role language plays in the organization of social
groups and institutions. It is also tied to social psychology, particularly with regard to how
attitudes and perceptions are expressed and how in-group and out-group behaviors are
identified.
We use all these connections when we try to analyze language from a social perspective.
Standard language: the variety of a language treated as the official language and used in
public broadcasting, publishing and education. For example: Someone wants to learn
English as a second or foreign language.
Àccent is restricted to the description of aspects of pronunciation that identify where an
individual speaker is from, regionally or socially. It is different from the term `Dialect,
which is used to describe features of grammar and vocabulary as well as aspects of
pronunciation.
Dialectology: to distinguish between two different dialects of the same language (whose
speakers can usually understand each other) and two different languages (whose speakers
cant usually understand each other). This is not the only, or the most reliable, way of
identifying dialects, but it is helpful in establishing the fact that each different dialect, like
each language, is equally worthy of analysis. It is important to recognize, from a linguistic
point of view, that none of the varieties of a language is inherently better than any other.
They are simply different.
Regional dialects: Is used to describe features of grammar and vocabulary as well as

aspects of pronunciation. We recognize that the sentence: -You dont know what youre
talking about- will generally look the same whether spoken with an American accent or a
Scottish accent. Both speakers will be using Standard English forms, but have different
pronunciations. However, this next sentence: Ye dinnae ken whit yer haverin aboot has
the same meaning as the first, but has been written out in an approximation of what a
person who speaks one dialect of Scottish English might say. There are differences in
pronunciation (e.g. whit, aboot), but there are also examples of different vocabulary (e.g.
ken, haverin) and a different grammatical form (dinnae). While differences in vocabulary
are often easily recognized, dialect variations in the meaning of grammatical constructions
are less frequently documented.
The existence of different regional dialects is widely recognized and often the source of
some humor for those living in different regions. A lot of survey research to the
identification of consistent features of speech found in one geographical area compared to
another. The traditional study of regional dialects tended to concentrate on the speech of
people in rural areas. These dialect surveys often involve painstaking attention to detail and
tend to operate with very specific criteria in identifying acceptable informants
Isogloss represents a boundary between areas with regard to that one particular linguistic
item. If a very similar distribution is found for another two items, such as a preference for
pail to the north and bucket to the south, then another isogloss, probably overlapping the
first, can be drawn on the map. When a number of isoglosses come together in this way, a
more solid line, indicating a dialect boundary, can be drawn.
Refer to a range of dialects spoken across some geographical area that differ only slightly
between neighboring areas, but as one travels in any direction, these differences accumulate
in such a way that speakers from opposite ends of the continuum are no longer mutually
intelligible.
16.
Language and society:
Dialects of English: The major native dialects of English are often divided by linguists into
three general categories: the British Isles dialects, those of North America, and those of
Australasia. Dialects can be associated not only with place, but also with particular social
groups. Within a given English-speaking country, there will often be a form of the language
considered to be Standard English the Standard Englishes of different countries differ,
and each can itself be considered a dialect. Standard English is often associated with the
more educated layers of society.
Accent and dialect: Technically, the term Àccent is restricted to the description of
aspects of pronunciation that identify where an individual speaker is from, regionally or
socially. It is different from the term `Dialect, which is used to describe features of
grammar and vocabulary as well as aspects of pronunciation.
Dialects: A regional or social variety of a language distinguished by pronunciation,

grammar, or vocabulary, especially a variety of speech differing from the standard literary
language or speech pattern of the culture in which it exists.
Regional dialects: The existence of different regional dialects is widely recognized and
often the source of some humor for those living in different regions. A lot of survey
research to the identification of consistent features of speech found in one geographical
area compared to another. The traditional study of regional dialects tended to concentrate
on the speech of people in rural areas. These dialect surveys often involve painstaking
attention to detail and tend to operate with very specific criteria in identifying acceptable
informants.
Social dialects: the study of social dialects has been mainly concerned with speakers in
towns and cities. In the social study of dialect, it is social class that is mainly used to define
groups of speakers as having something in common.
English as a second or foreign
language.
Isogloss: represents a boundary between areas with regard to that one particular linguistic
Language contact: occurs when two or more languages or varieties interact. The study of
language contact is called contact linguistics. Multilingualism has likely been common
throughout much of human history, and today most people in the world are multilingual.
When speakers of different languages interact closely, it is typical for their languages to
influence each other. Language contact can occur at language borders or as the result of
migration, with an intrusive language acting as either a superstratum or a substratum.
Language contact occurs in a variety of phenomena, including language convergence,
borrowing and relexification. The most common products are pidgins, creoles, codeswitching, and mixed languages. Other hybrid languages, such as English, do not strictly fit
into any of these categories.
Lingua francas, Pidgins and Creoles:
For various reasons, groups of people speaking diverse languages are often thrown into
social contact. When this occurs, a common language must be found to serve as a medium
of communication. Sometimes, by common agreement, a given language (not necessarily a
native language of anyone present) known to all the participants is used; a language used in
this fashion is known as a lingua franca. The term lingua franca derives from a trade
language of this name used in Mediterranean ports in medieval times.
Until about the eighteenth century, European scholars used Latin as a lingua franca. In the
contemporary world, English serves as a lingua franca in numerous social and political
situations where people require a common language. For example, English has become a
lingua franca for international scientific journals and international scientific meetings.
Historically, another kind of situation has often arisen in which people come into contact,
sharing no common language: namely, when one group is or becomes politically and
economically dominant over another.
This has been typical of colonial situations, in which the dominant group desires trade with,
or colonization of, the subordinate group. In such situations, pidgin languages (or pidgins)
have developed, having the following important properties:
1. The pidgin has no native speakers but is used as a medium of communication between
people who are native speakers of other languages.
2. The pidgin is based on linguistic features of one or more other languages and is a
simplified language with reduced vocabulary and grammatical structure.
When a pidgin develops beyond its role as a trade or contact language and becomes the first
language of a social community, it is described as a creole. A creole develops as the first
language of the children of pidgin speakers and there is an expansion of its vocabulary and
grammar and begins to acquire rules. Thus, unlike pidgins, creoles have large numbers of
native speakers.
Language in use:
Slang: slang or colloquial speech, describes words or phrases that are used instead of
more everyday terms among younger speakers and other groups with special interests.
Taboo language. Euphemisms: Taboo words are those that are to be avoided entirely, or at
least avoided in mixed company or polite company. Typical examples involve
common swear words such as Damn! or Shit!. Taboo language is not limited to obscenity
sacred language can also be taboo.
In place of these words, certain euphemismsthat is, polite substitutes for taboo words
can be used, including words such as darn (a euphemism for damn), heck (a euphemism for
hell ), gee or jeez (a euphemism for the exclamation Jesus!), and so on. An amusing
example is the current expression, the F word, which is a euphemism for that notorious
English word that many newspapers spell as f---.
Formal and informal Language Styles: Formal speech occur in social contexts that are
formal, serious, often official in some sense, in which speakers feel they must watch their
language and in which manner of saying something is regarded as socially important.
Informal speech in our use of that term occurs in casual, relaxed social settings in which
speech is spontaneous, rapid, and uncensored by the speaker. Social settings for this style of
speech would include chatting with close friends and interacting in an intimate or family
environment or in similar relaxed settings.
Social barriers: African American English (AAE). Also known as Black English or
Ebonics, AAE is a variety used by many (not all) African Americans and other speakers
(e.g. Puerto Rican groups in New York). It has a number of characteristic features that,
taken together, form a distinct set of social markers.
Social barriers such as discrimination and segregation serve to create marked differences
between social dialects. In the case of AAE, those different features have often been
stigmatized as bad language. Although AAE speakers continue to experience the effects of
discrimination, their social dialect often has covert prestige among younger speakers in
other social groups, particularly with regard to popular music, and certain features of AAE
may be used in expressions of social identity by many who are not African American.
Jargon and Argot: One of defining feature of a register is the use of jargon, which is
special technical vocabulary associated with a specific area of work or interest. In social
terms, jargon helps to create and maintain connection among those who see themselves as
insiders in some way and to exclude outsiders. Even the criminal underworld has its
own jargon, often referred to as argot.
Language and sexism: By typical definition, sexist language is considered to be any
language that is supposed to include all people, but, unintentionally (or not) excludes a
gender-this can be either males or females. Sexist language is especially common in
situations that describe jobs-common assumptions include that all doctors are men, all
nurses are women, all coaches are men, or all teachers are women. Most people would
agree that these assumptions are largely untrue today, though the language used often
perpetuates the stereotypes.
17.
We use the term culture to refer to all the ideas and assumptions about the nature of things
and people that we learn when we become members of social groups. It can be defined as
socially acquired knowledge. This is the kind of knowledge that, like our first language,
we initially acquire without conscious awareness. We develop awareness of our knowledge,
and hence of our culture, only after having developed language. The particular language we
learn through the process of cultural transmission provides us, at least initially, with a
readymade system of categorizing the world around us and our experience of it.
According to linguistic relativity it seems that the structure of our language, with its
predetermined categories, must have an influence on how we perceive the world. In its
weak version, this idea simply captures the fact that we not only talk, but to a certain extent
probably also think about the world of experience, using the categories provided by our
language. In its strong version, called linguistic determinism, the idea is restated as
language determines thought, meaning that we can only think in the categories provided
by our language.
In linguistics, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis states that there are certain thoughts of an
individual in one language that cannot be understood by those who live in another
language.
The hypothesis states that the way people think is strongly affected by their native
languages.
It also states that language and culture are so closely connected that one defines the other.
For example, Margaret Mead pointed out that some of the South Pacific people whom she
studied did not have a word for "war" in their vocabularies. Interestingly, these people did
not participate in war. So, the hypothesis is that we must be able to think of some
phenomenon before we can name it or experience it.
While Eskimos and Norwegians have many different words for snow, describing it in ways
that would probably the meaningless to us, people who lived in tropical rain forests would
not have had even a single word for snow. Today, because of the ubiquity mass
communications, snow is probably universally understood.
Cognitive categories:
As a way of analyzing cognition, or how people think, we can look at language structure for
clues, not for causes. The fact that Hopi speakers inherit a language system in which clouds
have animate as a feature may tell us something about a traditional belief system, or way
of thinking, that is part of their culture and not ours. In the Yagua language, spoken in Peru,
the set of entities with animate as a feature includes the moon, rocks and pineapples, as
well as people. In the traditions of the Yagua, all these entities are treated as valued objects,
so that their cultural interpretation of the feature animate may be closer to the concept
having special importance in life rather than the concept having life, as in the cultural
interpretation of most English speakers.
Classifiers:
We know about the classification of words in languages like Yagua because of grammatical
markers called classifiers that indicate the type or class of noun involved. For example, in
Swahili (spoken in East Africa), different prefixes are used as classifiers on nouns for
humans (wa-), non-humans (mi-) and artifacts (vi-), as in watoto (children), mimea
(plants) and visu (knives). In fact, a conceptual distinction between raw materials (miti,
trees) and artifacts made from them (viti, chairs) can be marked simply by the classifiers
used.
In the Australian language Dyirbal, traditional uses of classifiers indicated that men,
kangaroos and boomerangs were in one conceptual category while women, fire and
dangerous things were in another. Exploring cultural beliefs (e.g. The sun is the wife of
the moon) can help us make sense of aspects of
an unfamiliar world view and understand why the moon is classified among the first set and
the sun among the second.
Classifiers are often used in connection with numbers to indicate the type of thing being
counted. In the following Japanese examples, the classifiers are associated with objects
conceptualized in terms of their shape as long thin things (hon), flat thin things (mai) or
small round things (ko).
banana ni-hon two bananas
syatu ni-mai two shirts
ringo ni-ko two apples
The closest English comes to using classifiers is when we talk about a unit of certain
types of things. There is a distinction in English between things treated as countable (shirt,
word, chair) and those treated as non-countable (clothing, information, furniture). It is
ungrammatical in English to use a/an or the plural with non-countable nouns (i.e. a
clothing, an information, two furnitures).
To avoid these ungrammatical forms, we use classifier-type expressions such as item of or
piece of, as in an item of clothing, a bit of information and two pieces of furniture. The
equivalent nouns in many other languages are treated as countable, so the existence of a
grammatical class of non-countable entities is evidence of a type of cognitive

categorization underlying the expression of quantity in English.
Social categories:
Words such as uncle or grandmother, discussed earlier, provide examples of social
categories. These are categories of social organization that we can use to say how we are
connected or related to others. We can provide technical definitions (e.g. parents brother),
but in many situations a word such as uncle is used for a much larger number of people,
including close friends, who are outside the class of individuals covered by the technical
definition. The word brother is similarly used among many groups for someone who is not
a family member. We can use these words as a means of social categorization, that is,
marking individuals as members of a group defined by social connections.
18.
Brain plasticity and lateralization in early life, the critical period: The apparent
specialization of the left hemisphere for language is usually described in terms of lateral
dominance or lateralization (one-sidedness). It is generally thought that the lateralization
process begins in early childhood. It coincides with the period during which language
acquisition takes place. During childhood, there is a period when the human brain is most
ready to receive input and learn a particular language. This is known as the critical period.
To conclude, the specific aspects of language ability can be accorded specific locations in
the brain. This is called the localization view and it has been used to suggest that the brain
involved in hearing a word, understanding it, then saying it, would follow a definite pattern.
2nd Study Guide

1. What is phonetics? What does it study? What are allophones?
2. What is phonology? What are phonemes? Whats the difference between phonetics
and phonology?
3. What are vowel sounds? What are consonant sounds?
4. What is the vowel diagram, what does it represent? What are cardinal vowels
(definition only)?
5. Which are the changes or alterations that vowels can undergo? Refer to lengthening,
shortening, rhoticization and nasalization.
6. How can consonants be described or analyzed? Refer to manner of articulation,
place of articulation, and voicing.
7. Provide a definition of syllable. Whats the structure for syllables in English?
8. What are prosodic features of language? Be able to talk about intonation, rhythm,
accentuation and tempo.
9. Whats tone? What are tone languages?
10. What is morphology? What does it study? Refer to morphemes, and their
classification into bound and free morphemes, and into the four main categories of
morphemes: inflectional, derivational, lexical and functional. Be prepared to
analyze an utterance into its morphemes.
11. What are allomorphs? Provide examples.
12. What is grammar? Provide a definition of grammar.
13. Make a distinction between the two main approaches of studying grammar:
prescriptive and descriptive grammar.
14. Which are the parts of speech? Whats agreement in grammar analysis? Whats
grammatical gender?
15. What is Universal Grammar and the Universal Grammar Device? (N. Chomsky)
16. Whats syntax? Provide a definition of syntax and phrase.
1.
Phonetics: Is the general study of the characteristics of speech sounds. It is divided into 3
main branches, corresponding to these 3 distinctions:
Articulatory phonetics, which is the study of how speech sounds are made, or
articulated.
Acoustic phonetics, which deals with the physical properties of speech as sound
waves in the air.
Auditory phonetics (or perceptual phonetics) which deals with the perception, via
the ear, of speech sounds.
Allophones: In phonology, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds
(or phones) used to produce a simple phoneme. Although a phonemes allophones are all
alternative pronunciations for a phoneme, the specific allophone selected in a given
situation is often predictable.
2.
Phonology: is based on a theory of what every speaker of a language unconsciously knows
about the sound patterns of that language. Because of phonology is concerned with the
abstract set of sounds in a language that allow us to distinguish meaning in the actual
physical sounds that we say and hear.
Phoneme: Each one of these meaning-distinguishing sounds in a languageis described as
phoneme. A phoneme is a single sound type which come to be represented by a single
written symbol.
Difference between Phonetics and Phonology: is that phonetics deals with the physical
production of these sounds; where phonology is the study of sounds patterns and their
meanings, both within and across languages.
3.
Vowels sounds: are produced with a relatively free of air. Theyre typically voiced. To
describe vowel sounds, consider the way in which the tongue influences the shape trough
which the airflow must pass.
Consonant sounds: is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of
the vocal track.
4.
A vowel diagram or vowel chart is a schematic arrangement of the vowels. Depending on
the particular language being discussed, it can take the form of a triangle or a quadrilateral.
Vertical position on the top of the diagram denotes the vowel closeness, with close vowels
at the top of the diagram, and horizontal position denotes the vowel blackness, with front
vowels at the left of the diagram. In the vowel diagram, convenient reference points are
provided for specifying tongue position.
Cardinal vowels: The cardinal vowel (CV) was devised to provide a set of reference points
for the articulation and recognition of vowels. Its dimension corresponds to the vowel space
in the centre of the mouth where these sounds are articulated. The positions of the front
centre and back of the tongue are represented by vertical lines.
5.
The changes or alterations of vowels:
Lengthening of vowels: In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a
vowel sound.
Traditionally, the vowels / e/-/i/-/a /-/o/- /ju/ are said to be the long counterparts
of the vowels //-/e/-//-/ /-/ / which are said to be short.
Rhotic vowel: In phonetics, a rhotic vowel is a vowel that is modified in a way that
results in a lowering in frequency of the third formant.
Rhotic vowels can be articulated in various ways; the tip or blade of the tongue may be
turned up during at last part of the articulation of the vowel (a retroflex articulation) or
the back of the tongue may be bunched: in addition the vocal tract may often be
constricted in the region of the epiglottis.
Nasalization: In phonetics, nasalization is the production of a sound while the velum is
lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound
be the mouth.
Nasal vowels are represented by a tilde above the symbol for the sound to be nasalized:
[] is the nasalized equivalent for [a].
6.
Manner of articulation: We can also describe the same sounds in terms of how they are
articulated. Such a description is necessary if we want to be able to differentiate between
some sounds which, in the preceding discussion, we have placed in the same category.
Stops: Of the sounds we have already mentioned, the set [p], [b], [t], [d], [k], [g] are
all produced by some form of stopping of the airstream (very briefly) then letting it
go abruptly. This type of consonant sound, resulting from a blocking or stopping

effect on the airstream, is called a stop (or a plosive).
Fricatives: The manner of articulation used in producing the set of sounds [f], [v],
[],[d], [s], [z], [], [_] involves almost blocking the airstream and having the air push
through the very narrow opening. As the air is pushed through, a type of friction is
produced and the resulting sounds are called fricatives.
Affricates: If you combine a brief stopping of the airstream with an obstructed
release which causes some friction, you will be able to produce the sounds [t] and
[d].
Nasals: when the velum is lowered and the airstream is allowed to flow out through
the nose to produce [m], [n], and [], the sounds are described as nasals. These three
sounds are all voiced.
Liquids: The [l] sound is called a lateral liquid and is formed by letting the airstream
flow around the sides of the tongue as the tip of the tongue makes contact with the
middle of the alveolar ridge. The [r] sound is formed with the tongue tip raised and
curled back near the alveolar ridge. They are both voiced
Glides: The sounds [w] and [j] are described as glides. These sounds are typically
produced with the tongue in motion (or gliding) to or from the position of a vowel
and are sometimes called semi-vowels or approximants. They are both voiced. The
sound [h] is voiceless and can be classified as a glide because of the way it combines
with other sounds. In some descriptions, it is treated as a fricative.
Place of articulation: Once the air has passed through the larynx, it comes up and out
through the mouth and/or the nose. Most consonant sounds are produced by using the
tongue and other parts of the mouth to constrict, in some way, the shape of the oral cavity
through which the air is passing. The terms used to describe many sounds are those which
denote the place of articulation of the sound: that is, the location inside the mouth at which
the constriction takes place.
Bilabials: These are sounds formed using both (= bi) upper and lower lips (= labia).
The initial sounds in the words pat, bat and mat are all bilabials.
Labiodentals: These are sounds formed with the upper teeth and the lower lip.
Dentals: These sounds are formed with the tongue tip behind the upper front teeth.
The term interdentals is sometimes used for these consonants when they are
pronounced with the tongue tip between (= inter) the upper and lower teeth.
Alveolars: These are sounds formed with the front part of the tongue on the alveolar
ridge, which is the rough, bony ridge immediately behind and above the upper teeth.
Palatals: If you feel back behind the alveolar ridge, you should find a hard part in the
roof of your mouth. This is called the hard palate or just the palate. Sounds which are
produced with the tongue and the palate are called palatals (or alveopalatals).
Velars: Even further back in the roof of the mouth, beyond the hard palate, you will
find a soft area, which is called the soft palate, or the velum. Sounds produced with
the back of the tongue against the velum are called velars.
Glottals: There is one sound that is produced without the active use of the tongue
and other parts of the mouth. This sound is usually described as a voiceless glottal.
The glottis is the space between the vocal cords in the larynx. When the glottis is
open, as in the production of other voiceless sounds, and there is no manipulation of
the air passing out of the mouth, the sound produced is that represented by [h].
Voicing:
Voiceless: /p/-/t/-/k/-/f/-/s/-//-//-/ t/-/h/
Voiced: /b/-/d/-/g/-/v/-/z/-//-//-/m/-/n/-//-/r/-/j/-/w/
7.
The structure for syllables in English: A syllable must contain a vowel (or vowel-like)
sound. The most common type of syllable in language also has a consonant (C) before the
vowel (V) and is typically represented as CV. Technically, the basic elements of the syllable
are the onset (one or more consonants) and the rhyme. The rhyme (sometimes written as
rime) consists of a vowel, which is treated as the nucleus, plus any following
consonant(s), described as the coda.
8.
Prosodic features of speech:
Prosodic features (sometimes known as suprasegmental phonology) are those aspects of
speech which go beyond phonemes and deal with the auditory qualities of sound. In spoken
communication, we use and interpret these features without really thinking about them.
There are various conventional ways of representing them in writing, although the nuances
are often hard to convey on paper. Prosodic features are features that appear when we put
sounds together in connected speech. It is as important to teach learners prosodic features
as successful communication depends as much on intonation, stress and rhythm as on the
correct pronunciation of sounds.
In linguistics, intonation is variation of spoken pitch that is not used to distinguish words;
instead it is used for a range of functions such as indicating the attitudes and emotions of
the speaker, signalling the difference between statements and questions, and between
different types of questions, focusing attention on important elements of the spoken
message and also helping to regulate conversational interaction.
In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a
word, or to certain words in a phrase or sentence. Stress is typically signalled by such
properties as increased loudness and vowel length, full articulation of the vowel, and
changes in pitch. The terms stress and accent are often used synonymously, but they are
sometimes distinguished, with certain specific kinds of prominence (such as pitch accent,
variously defined) being considered to fall under accent but not under stress. In this case,
stress specifically may be called stress accent or dynamic accent.
Although rhythm or isochrony, is not a prosodic variable in the way that pitch or loudness
are, it is usual to treat a language's characteristic rhythm as a part of its prosodic phonology.
It has often been asserted that languages exhibit regularity in the timing of successive units
of speech, a regularity referred to as isochrony, and that every language may be assigned
one of three rhythmical types: stress-timed, syllable-timed and mora-timed.
In linguistics, tempo or speed is to some extent a matter of idiolect. Whilst its use is not
wholly systematic. Although individual speakers differ from others in their personal
speaking rate (tempo), all speakers appear to use changes in speaking rate in a meaningful
way.
9.
Tone: is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning that
is, to distinguish or to inflect words.
Tone language is a language which intonation can change the meaning of a word. English
language has different levels.
10.
Morphology: this term, which literally means the study of forms and the type of
investigation that analyze all the basic elements used in language.
Morphemes: Word forms may consist of a number of elements. These elements are
describe as morphemes. A morpheme is a minimal unit of meaning or grammatical
function. Units of grammatical function include forms used to indicate past tense or plural.
There are 2 types of morphemes:
Free morphemes: are morphemes that can stand be themselves as single words. For
example: open, tour, etc.
Bound morphemes: The morphemes that cannot normally stand alone and are
typically attached to another form. For example: -re, -ist, -ed, -s, etc.
Free morphemes can be lexical or functional:
Lexical morphemes: They are ordinary nouns, adjectives and verbs that we think of
as the words that carry the content of the message we transmit.
Functional morphemes: This set consists largely of the function words in the
language such as conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns.
Bound morphemes are classified into two categories:

Derivational and inflectional morphemes
Derivational morpheme: They are used to make new words or to make words of a
different grammatical category from the stem. For example: affixes.
Inflectional morphemes: They are not use to produce new words in the language, but rather
to indicate aspects of the grammatical function of the word. For example: -ed, -s, etc.
11.
Allomorphs: It is a variant form of a morpheme. It occurs when a unit of meaning can vary
in sound without changing meaning. For example: Bus=Buses (plural form)
Man=Men
12.
Grammar: is the set of structural rules governing the composition of clauses, phrases, and
words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and
this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics,
semantics, and pragmatics.
13.
The two main approaches of studying grammar: prescriptive and descriptive grammar.
The descriptive approach: It is interested to describe the regular structures of the
language as it was used, not according to some view of how it should be used.
The prescriptive approach: It is characterized as an approach which set out rules for
the proper use of a language. For example: You must no t end a sentence with a
preposition
14.
Parts of Speech: Traditional grammar classifies words based on 8 parts of speech: the
verb, the noun, the pronoun, the adjective, the adverb, the preposition, the conjunction, and
the interjection.
Each part of speech explains not what the word is, but how the word is used. In fact, the
some word can be a noun in one sentence and a verb or adjective in the next sentence.
Agreement: Is the concordance that must exist within a sentence between the pronoun,
noun, verb, etc.
This concordance consists in:
Number: whether the noun is singular or plural
Person: 1st, 2nd, 3rd.
Tense: the form of the verb.
Gender: female entities (she, her) male entities (he, his) and things or creatures (it,
its)
Grammatical Gender: Is based on the type of the noun (masculine and feminine) and is
not tied to sex. Nouns are classified according to their gender class and, typically, articles
and adjectives have different forms to agree with the gender of the noun.
15.
Universal Grammar and the Universal Grammar Device by N. Chomsky
The author argued that human brain contains a limited set of rules for organizing language.
This implies in term that all languages have a common structural basis; the set of rules is
what is known as Universal Grammar. The Universal Grammar consists of a set of
unconsciously constraints that let us decide whether a sentence is correctly formed. The
process by which, in any given language, certain sentences that come to their minds, only
those that conform to a deep structure encoded in the brain is circuits.
16.
In linguistics, syntax is the set of rules, principles, and processes that govern the structure
of sentences in a given language. When we concentrate on the structure and ordering of
components within a sentence, we are studying the syntax of a language. The term syntax
is also used to refer to the study of such principles and processes. The word syntax comes
originally from Greek and literally means a putting together or arrangement.
3rd Study Guide

1. What is Sociolinguistics? Define standard language. Make a difference between
accent and dialect. What does dialectology study? What are regional dialects?
What is an isogloss (dialect boundaries)? What does the phrase dialect
continuum refer to? What is the difference between bilingualism and diglossia?
What are pidgins and creoles? What is language planning?
2. Language and society: dialects, regional dialects, accents, dialects of English, social
dialects. What role do education and occupation play? What are social markers?
And speech style and style shifting? What is understood by the standard language?
What is African-American Vernacular English? What happen when languages are in
contact? What do you understand by lingua franca, pidgins and creoles? Language
in use: what are styles, slang, jargon and argot, euphemisms? How do some factors
change a language? Such as: racial and national, language and sexism.
3. Language and culture: what is culture? The philosophy of language: what is
linguistic relativity? Describe the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, provide examples.
Describe cognitive categories, classifiers, and social categories.
4. Brain and language: Neurolinguistics. Which are the parts of the brain? The
localization of language: Brocas area, Wernickes area, the motor cortex and the
arcuate fasciculus. What does the localization view imply? Language malfunctions:
tip of the tongue phenomenon; slips of the tongue; slips of the ear.
5. Speech impairments: aphasia. Brocas aphasia; Wernickes aphasia; conduction
aphasia. What does dichotic listening demonstrate?
6. Brain plasticity and lateralization in early life, the critical period. Study case:
Genie
7. Conflicting terminology: what is the difference between first language, second
language and foreign language?
8. L1 acquisition or First Language Acquisition: which are the basic requirements for
language acquisition? What is the acquisition schedule? What is caregiver speech?
What is its importance in the childs developing language?
9. Stages in L1 acquisition: cooing and babbling. Are these stages present in all human
babies? What does their presence in deaf children suggest about the nature of
language? The one-word stage: one word or holophrastic stage? The two-word
stage: main characteristics. Telegraphic speech: main characteristics.
10. The acquisition process: developing morphology; developing syntax; forming
questions; forming negatives; developing semantics: overextension and
overgeneralization.
1.
The term sociolinguistics is used generally for the study of the relationship between
language and society. This is a broad area of investigation that developed through the
interaction of linguistics with a number of other academic disciplines. It has strong
connections with anthropology through the study of language and culture, and with
sociology through the investigation of the role language plays in the organization of social
groups and institutions. It is also tied to social psychology, particularly with regard to how
attitudes and perceptions are expressed and how in-group and out-group behaviors are
identified.
We use all these connections when we try to analyze language from a social perspective.
Àccent is restricted to the description of aspects of pronunciation that identify where an
individual speaker is from, regionally or socially. It is different from the term `Dialect,
which is used to describe features of grammar and vocabulary as well as aspects of
pronunciation.
Dialectology: It is to distinguish between two different dialects of the same language
(whose speakers can usually understand each other) and two different languages (whose
speakers cant usually understand each other). This is not the only, or the most reliable, way
of identifying dialects, but it is helpful in establishing the fact that each different dialect,
like each language, is equally worthy of analysis. It is important to recognize, from a
linguistic point of view, that none of the varieties of a language is inherently better than
any other. They are simply different.
Regional dialects: Is used to describe features of grammar and vocabulary as well as
aspects of pronunciation. We recognize that the sentence: -You dont know what youre
talking about- will generally look the same whether spoken with an American accent or a
Scottish accent. Both speakers will be using Standard English forms, but have different
pronunciations. However, this next sentence: Ye dinnae ken whit yer haverin aboot has
the same meaning as the first, but has been written out in an approximation of what a
person who speaks one dialect of Scottish English might say. There are differences in
pronunciation (e.g. whit, aboot), but there are also examples of different vocabulary (e.g.
ken, haverin) and a different grammatical form (dinnae). While differences in vocabulary
are often easily recognized, dialect variations in the meaning of grammatical constructions
are less frequently documented.
The existence of different regional dialects is widely recognized and often the source of
some humor for those living in different regions. A lot of survey research to the
identification of consistent features of speech found in one geographical area compared to
another. The traditional study of regional dialects tended to concentrate on the speech of
people in rural areas. These dialect surveys often involve painstaking attention to detail and
tend to operate with very specific criteria in identifying acceptable informants.
Isogloss represents a boundary between areas with regard to that one particular linguistic
Dialect continuum: Refer to a range of dialects spoken across some geographical area that
differ only slightly between neighboring areas, but as one travels in any direction, these
differences accumulate in such a way that speakers from opposite ends of the continuum
are no longer mutually intelligible.
Language planning: choosing and developing an official language or languages for use in
government and education.
Diglossia: is when two languages or language varieties exist side by side in a community.
e.g. High variety which is used in government, the media and education. The other Low
variety used with family, friends etc. (Indonesia is a good example)
Bilingualism: is the use of two languages either by an individual or by a group of speakers.
The difference between Diglossia and Bilingualism would be how the languages are used in
society i.e. Diglossia - clear usage differences - High vs Low.
2.
Dialects: A regional or social variety of a language distinguished by pronunciation,
grammar, or vocabulary, especially a variety of speech differing from the standard literary
language or speech pattern of the culture in which it exists.
Regional dialects: The existence of different regional dialects is widely recognized and
often the source of some humor for those living in different regions. A lot of survey
research to the identification of consistent features of speech found in one geographical
area compared to another. The traditional study of regional dialects tended to concentrate
on the speech of people in rural areas. These dialect surveys often involve painstaking
attention to detail and tend to operate with very specific criteria in identifying acceptable
informants.
Accent: Aspects of pronunciation that identify where a speaker is from, in contrast to
dialect.
Dialects of English: The major native dialects of English are often divided by linguists into
three general categories: the British Isles dialects, those of North America, and those of
Australasia. Dialects can be associated not only with place, but also with particular social
groups. Within a given English-speaking country, there will often be a form of the language
considered to be Standard English the Standard Englishes of different countries differ,
and each can itself be considered a dialect. Standard English is often associated with the
more educated layers of society.
Social dialects: The study of social dialects has been mainly concerned with speakers in
towns and cities. In the social study of dialect, it is social class that is mainly used to define
groups of speakers as having something in common.
Although the unique circumstances of every life result in each of us having an individual
way of speaking, a personal dialect or idiolect, we generally tend to sound like others with
whom we share similar educational backgrounds and/or occupations. Among those who
leave the educational system at an early age, there is a general pattern of using certain
forms that are relatively infrequent in the speech of those who go on to complete college.
Those who spend more time in the educational system tend to have more features in their
spoken language that derive from a lot of time spent with the written language, so that
threw is more likely than throwed and who occurs more often than what in references to
people. The observation that some teacher talks like a book is possibly a reflection of an
extreme form of this influence from the written language after years in the educational
system.
As adults, the outcome of our time in the educational system is usually reflected in our
occupation and socio-economic status. The way bank executives, as opposed to window
cleaners, talk to each other usually provides linguistic evidence for the significance of these
social variables. In one of the earliest studies in sociolinguistics, Labov (1966) combined
elements from place of occupation and socio-economic status by looking at pronunciation
differences among salespeople in three New York City department stores. They were Saks
Fifth Avenue (with expensive items, upper-middle-class status), Macys (medium-priced,
middle-class status) and Kleins (with cheaper items, working class status).
Social marker: Is a linguistic feature that marks the speaker as a member of a particular
social group. There are pronunciation features that function as social markers. One feature
that seems to be a fairly stable indication of lower class and less education, throughout the
English speaking world. Another social marker is called [h]-dropping, which makes the
words at and hat sound the same. It occurs at the beginning of words.
Style and style shifting: In sociolinguistics, a style is a set of linguistic variants with
specific social meanings. In this context, social meanings can include group membership,
personal attributes, or beliefs. Linguistic variation is at the heart of the concept of linguistic
stylewithout variation there is no basis for distinguishing social meanings. Variation can
occur syntactically, lexically, and phonologically. Style-shifting is a term in sociolinguistics
referring to alternation between styles of speech included in a linguistic repertoire of an
individual speaker. As noted by Eckert and Rickford, in sociolinguistic literature terms style
and register sometimes have been used interchangeably. Style-shifting is a manifestation of
intraspeaker (within-speaker) variation, in contrast with interspeaker (between-speakers)
variation. It is a voluntary act which an individual effects in order to respond to or initiate
changes in sociolinguistic situation (e.g., interlocutor-related, setting-related, topic-related).
Language contact: occurs when two or more languages or varieties interact. The study of
language contact is called contact linguistics. Multilingualism has likely been common
throughout much of human history, and today most people in the world are multilingual.
When speakers of different languages interact closely, it is typical for their languages to
influence each other. Language contact can occur at language borders or as the result of
migration, with an intrusive language acting as either a superstratum or a substratum.
Language contact occurs in a variety of phenomena, including language convergence,
borrowing and relexification. The most common products are pidgins, creoles, codeswitching, and mixed languages. Other hybrid languages, such as English, do not strictly fit
into any of these categories.
Lingua francas, Pidgins and Creoles: For various reasons, groups of people speaking
diverse languages are often thrown into social contact. When this occurs, a common
language must be found to serve as a medium of communication. Sometimes, by common
agreement, a given language (not necessarily a native language of anyone present) known
to all the participants is used; a language used in this fashion is known as a lingua franca.
The term lingua franca derives from a trade language of this name used in Mediterranean
ports in medieval times.
Until about the eighteenth century, European scholars used Latin as a lingua franca. In the
contemporary world, English serves as a lingua franca in numerous social and political
situations where people require a common language. For example, English has become a
lingua franca for international scientific journals and international scientific meetings.
Historically, another kind of situation has often arisen in which people come into contact,
sharing no common language: namely, when one group is or becomes politically and
economically dominant over another.
This has been typical of colonial situations, in which the dominant group desires trade with,
or colonization of, the subordinate group. In such situations, pidgin languages (or pidgins)
have developed, having the following important properties:
1. The pidgin has no native speakers but is used as a medium of communication between
people who are native speakers of other languages.
2. The pidgin is based on linguistic features of one or more other languages and is a
simplified language with reduced vocabulary and grammatical structure.
When a pidgin develops beyond its role as a trade or contact language and becomes the first
language of a social community, it is described as a creole. A creole develops as the first
language of the children of pidgin speakers and there is an expansion of its vocabulary and
grammar and begins to acquire rules. Thus, unlike pidgins, creoles have large numbers of
native speakers.
African American Vernacular English (AAVE). The term vernacular has been used
since the Middle Ages, first to describe local European languages (low prestige) in contrast
to Latin (high prestige), then to characterize any non-standard spoken version of a language
used by lower-status groups. So, the vernacular is a general expression for a kind of social
dialect, typically spoken by a lower-status group, which is treated as non-standard because
of marked differences from a socially prestigious variety treated as the standard language.
Language in use:
Slang: slang or colloquial speech, describes words or phrases that are used instead of
more everyday terms among younger speakers and other groups with special interests.
Taboo language. Euphemisms: Taboo words are those that are to be avoided entirely, or at
least avoided in mixed company or polite company. Typical examples involve
common swear words such as Damn! or Shit!. Taboo language is not limited to obscenity
sacred language can also be taboo.
In place of these words, certain euphemismsthat is, polite substitutes for taboo words
can be used, including words such as darn (a euphemism for damn), heck (a euphemism for
hell ), gee or jeez (a euphemism for the exclamation Jesus!), and so on. An amusing
example is the current expression, the F word, which is a euphemism for that notorious
English word that many newspapers spell as f---.
Formal and informal Language Styles: Formal speech occur in social contexts that are
formal, serious, often official in some sense, in which speakers feel they must watch their
language and in which manner of saying something is regarded as socially important.
Informal speech in our use of that term occurs in casual, relaxed social settings in which
speech is spontaneous, rapid, and uncensored by the speaker. Social settings for this style of
speech would include chatting with close friends and interacting in an intimate or family
environment or in similar relaxed settings.
Social barriers: African American English (AAE). Also known as Black English or
Ebonics, AAE is a variety used by many (not all) African Americans and other speakers
(e.g. Puerto Rican groups in New York). It has a number of characteristic features that,
taken together, form a distinct set of social markers.
Social barriers such as discrimination and segregation serve to create marked differences
between social dialects. In the case of AAE, those different features have often been
stigmatized as bad language. Although AAE speakers continue to experience the effects of
discrimination, their social dialect often has covert prestige among younger speakers in
other social groups, particularly with regard to popular music, and certain features of AAE
may be used in expressions of social identity by many who are not African American.
Jargon and Argot: One of defining feature of a register is the use of jargon, which is
special technical vocabulary associated with a specific area of work or interest. In social
terms, jargon helps to create and maintain connection among those who see themselves as
insiders in some way and to exclude outsiders. Even the criminal underworld has its
own jargon, often referred to as argot.
Language and sexism: By typical definition, sexist language is considered to be any
language that is supposed to include all people, but, unintentionally (or not) excludes a
gender-this can be either males or females. Sexist language is especially common in
situations that describe jobs-common assumptions include that all doctors are men, all
nurses are women, all coaches are men, or all teachers are women. Most people would
agree that these assumptions are largely untrue today, though the language used often
perpetuates the stereotypes.
3.
The philosophy of language:

We use the term culture to refer to all the ideas and assumptions about the nature of things
and people that we learn when we become members of social groups. It can be defined as
socially acquired knowledge. This is the kind of knowledge that, like our first language,
we initially acquire without conscious awareness. We develop awareness of our knowledge,
and hence of our culture, only after having developed language. The particular language we
learn through the process of cultural transmission provides us, at least initially, with a
readymade system of categorizing the world around us and our experience of it.
According to linguistic relativity it seems that the structure of our language, with its
predetermined categories, must have an influence on how we perceive the world. In its
weak version, this idea simply captures the fact that we not only talk, but to a certain extent
probably also think about the world of experience, using the categories provided by our
language. In its strong version, called linguistic determinism, the idea is restated as
language determines thought, meaning that we can only think in the categories provided
by our language.
In linguistics, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis states that there are certain thoughts of an
individual in one language that cannot be understood by those who live in another
language.
The hypothesis states that the way people think is strongly affected by their native
languages.
It also states that language and culture are so closely connected that one defines the other.
For example, Margaret Mead pointed out that some of the South Pacific people whom she
studied did not have a word for "war" in their vocabularies. Interestingly, these people did
not participate in war. So, the hypothesis is that we must be able to think of some
phenomenon before we can name it or experience it.
While Eskimos and Norwegians have many different words for snow, describing it in ways
that would probably the meaningless to us, people who lived in tropical rain forests would
not have had even a single word for snow. Today, because of the ubiquity mass
communications, snow is probably universally understood.
Cognitive categories:
As a way of analyzing cognition, or how people think, we can look at language structure for
clues, not for causes. The fact that Hopi speakers inherit a language system in which clouds
have animate as a feature may tell us something about a traditional belief system, or way
of thinking, that is part of their culture and not ours. In the Yagua language, spoken in Peru,
the set of entities with animate as a feature includes the moon, rocks and pineapples, as
well as people. In the traditions of the Yagua, all these entities are treated as valued objects,
so that their cultural interpretation of the feature animate may be closer to the concept
having special importance in life rather than the concept having life, as in the cultural
interpretation of most English speakers.
Classifiers:
We know about the classification of words in languages like Yagua because of grammatical
markers called classifiers that indicate the type or class of noun involved. For example, in
Swahili (spoken in East Africa), different prefixes are used as classifiers on nouns for
humans (wa-), non-humans (mi-) and artifacts (vi-), as in watoto (children), mimea
(plants) and visu (knives). In fact, a conceptual distinction between raw materials (miti,
trees) and artifacts made from them (viti, chairs) can be marked simply by the classifiers
used.
In the Australian language Dyirbal, traditional uses of classifiers indicated that men,
kangaroos and boomerangs were in one conceptual category while women, fire and
dangerous things were in another. Exploring cultural beliefs (e.g. The sun is the wife of
the moon) can help us make sense of aspects of an unfamiliar world view and understand
why the moon is classified among the first set and the sun among the second.
Classifiers are often used in connection with numbers to indicate the type of thing being
counted. In the following Japanese examples, the classifiers are associated with objects
conceptualized in terms of their shape as long thin things (hon), flat thin things (mai) or
small round things (ko).
banana ni-hon two bananas
syatu ni-mai two shirts
ringo ni-ko two apples
The closest English comes to using classifiers is when we talk about a unit of certain
types of things. There is a distinction in English between things treated as countable (shirt,
word, chair) and those treated as non-countable (clothing, information, furniture). It is
ungrammatical in English to use a/an or the plural with non-countable nouns (i.e. a
clothing, an information, two furnitures).
To avoid these ungrammatical forms, we use classifier-type expressions such as item of or
piece of, as in an item of clothing, a bit of information and two pieces of furniture. The
equivalent nouns in many other languages are treated as countable, so the existence of a
grammatical class of non-countable entities is evidence of a type of cognitive
categorization underlying the expression of quantity in English.
Social categories:
Words such as uncle or grandmother, discussed earlier, provide examples of social
categories. These are categories of social organization that we can use to say how we are
connected or related to others. We can provide technical definitions (e.g. parents brother),
but in many situations a word such as uncle is used for a much larger number of people,
including close friends, who are outside the class of individuals covered by the technical
definition. The word brother is similarly used among many groups for someone who is not
a family member. We can use these words as a means of social categorization, that is,
marking individuals as members of a group defined by social connections.
4.
Brain and language:
Neurolinguistics: Is the study of the relationship between language and the brain.
Wernickes area: The part shown as (2) in the illustration is the posterior speech cortex, a
part of the brain in the left hemisphere involved in language comprehension.
Brocas area: The part shown as (1) in the illustration is technically described as the
anterior speech cortex, a part of the brain in the left hemisphere involved in speech
production.
The part shown as (3) in the illustration is the motor cortex, an area that generally controls
movement of the muscles (for moving hands, feet, arms, etc.).
The part shown as (4) in the illustration is a bundle of nerve fibers called the arcuate
fasciculus. This was also one of Wernickes discoveries and is now known to form a crucial
connection between Wernickes and Brocas areas.
Specific aspects of language ability can be accorded specific locations in the brain. This is
called the localization view and it has been used to suggest that the brain activity involved
in hearing a word, understanding it, then saying it, would follow a definite pattern. The
word is heard and comprehended via Wernickes area.
This signal is then transferred via the arcuate fasciculus to Brocas area where preparations
are made to produce it. A signal is then sent to part of the motor cortex to physically
articulate the word.
The tip of the tongue phenomenon: Difficulty in getting brain and speech production to
work together smoothly. Minor production difficulties of this sort may provide possible
clues to how our linguistic knowledge is organized within the brain.
There is, for example, the tip of the tongue phenomenon in which we feel that some word is
just eluding us, that we know the word, but it just wont come to the surface; that some
words in the store are more easily retrieved than others.
For example, speakers produced secant, sextet and sexton when asked to name a particular
type of navigational instrument (sextant).
Mistakes of this type are some times referred to as: malapropisms.
Slips of the tongue: Another type of speech error is commonly described as a slip of the
tongue. This produces expressions such as a long shorystort (instead of make a long story
short), use the door to open the key, and a fifty-pound dog of bag food.
Slips of this type are sometimes called spoonerisms after William Spooner, an Anglican
clergyman at Oxford University, who was renowned for his tongue-slips.
E.g.: black bloxes: black boxes.
Slips of the ear: How the brain tries to make sense of the auditory signal it receives. These
have been called slips of the ear. It may also be the case that some Malapropisms (e.g.
transcendental medication) originate as slips of the ear. However, some problems with
language production and comprehension are the result of much more serious disorders in
brain function.
5.
Speech impairments:
Aphasia is defined as an impairment of language function due to localized brain damage
that leads to difficulty in understanding and/or producing linguistic forms.
Brocas aphasia: a language disorder in which speech production is typically reduced,
distorted, slow and missing grammatical markers.
Wernickes aphasia: a language disorder in which comprehension is typically slow while
speech is fluent, but vague and missing content words.
Conduction aphasia: a language disorder associated with damage to the arcuate fasciculus
in which repeating words or phrases is difficult.
An experimental technique that has demonstrated a left hemisphere dominance for syllable
and word processing is called the dichotic listening test. This technique uses the generally
established fact that anything experienced on the right-hand side of the body is processed in
the left hemisphere, and anything on the left side is processed in the right hemisphere.
6.
Brain plasticity and lateralization in early life, the critical period: The apparent
specialization of the left hemisphere for language is usually described in terms of lateral
dominance or lateralization (one-sidedness). It is generally thought that the lateralization

process begins in early childhood. It coincides with the period during which language
acquisition takes place. During childhood, there is a period when the human brain is most
ready to receive input and learn a particular language. This is known as the critical period.
Case: Genie:
In 1970, a girl who became known as Genie, was admitted to a childrens hospital in Los
Angeles. She was thirteen years old and had spent most of her life tied to a chair in a small
closed room.
As might be expected, Genie was unable to use language when she was first brought into
care. However, within a short period of time, she began to respond to the speech of others,
to try to imitate sounds and to communicate. Her syntax remained very simple. The fact
that she went on to develop some speaking ability and understand a fairly large number of
English words provides some evidence against the notion that language cannot be acquired
at all after the critical period. Yet her diminished capacity to develop grammatically
complex speech does seem to support the idea that part of the left hemisphere of the brain is
open to accept a language program during childhood and, if no program is provided, as in
Genies case, then the facility is closed down.
In dichotic listening tests, she showed a very strong left ear advantage for verbal as well as
non-verbal signals.
When Genie was beginning to use speech, it was noted that she went through some of the
same early stages found in normal child language acquisition.
7.
First language acquisition: is remarkable for the speed with which it takes place. it
generally occurs, without overt instruction, for all children, regardless of great differences
in their circumstances, provides strong support for the idea that there is an innate
predisposition in the human infant to acquire language.
Second language acquisition: learning a language that is spoken in the surrounding
community.
Foreign language acquisition: learning a language that is not generally spoken in the
surrounding community.
8.
The basic requirements for language acquisition:
During the first two or three years of development, a child requires interaction with other
language-users in order to bring this general language capacity into operation with a
particular language. Also, the importance of cultural transmission, but is acquired in a
particular language-using environment. The child must also be physically capable of
sending and receiving sound signals in a language. The crucial requirement appears to be
the opportunity to interact with others via language.
The acquisition schedule: the child as having the biological capacity to cope with
distinguishing certain aspects of linguistic input at different stages during the early years
of life. It is sufficiently constant type of input from which the basis of the regularities in a
particular language can be worked out. Young children are seen as actively acquiring the
language by identifying the regularities in what is heard and then applying those
regularities in what they say.
Caregiver speech: human infants are certainly helped in their language acquisition by the
typical behaviour of older children and adults in the home environment. The
characteristically simplified speech style adopted by someone who spends a lot of time
interacting with a young child is called caregiver speech.
9.
Cooing and babbling: The earliest use of speech-like sounds has been described as
cooing. During the first few months of life, the child gradually becomes capable of
producing sequences of vowel-like sounds. By four months of age, the developing ability to
bring the back of the tongue into regular contact with the back of the palate allows the
infant to create sounds similar to the velar consonants [k] and [g]. By the time they are five
months old, babies can already hear the difference between the vowels and discriminate
between syllables. Between six and eight months, the child is sitting up and producing a
number of different vowels and consonants, as well as combinations such as ba-ba-ba and
ga-ga-ga. This type of sound production is described as babbling. Nasal sounds also
become more common and certain syllable sequences
This seems to indicate that human offspring are born with a special capacity for language. It
is innate, no other creature seems to have it, and it isn't tied to a specific variety of
language.
If these deaf children do not develop speech first, then their language ability would not
seem to depend on those physical adaptations of the teeth, larynx, etc., that are involved in
speaking. If all children (including those born deaf) can acquire language at about the same
time, they must be born with a special capacity to do so. The conclusion is that it must be
innate and hence genetically determined.
The one-word stage: one word or holophrastic stage: Between twelve and eighteen
months, children begin to produce a variety of recognizable single-unit utterances. This
period, traditionally called the one-word stage, is characterized by speech in which single
terms are uttered for everyday objects such as milk, cookie, cat, cup and spoon. the
term holophrastic (meaning a single form functioning as a phrase or sentence) to describe
an utterance that could be analyzed as a word, a phrase, or a sentence.
The two-word stage: can begin around eighteen to twenty months, as the childs
vocabulary moves beyond fifty words. The adult interpretation of such combinations is, of
course, very much tied to the context of their utterance.
Telegraphic speech: Between two and two-and-a-half years old, the child begins
producing a large number of utterances that could be classified as multiple-word speech.
This is characterized by strings of words (lexical morphemes) in phrases or sentences such
as this shoe all wet, cat drink milk and daddy go bye-bye. The child has clearly developed
some sentence-building capacity by this stage and can get the word order correct. While
this type of telegram-format speech is being produced, a number of grammatical inflections
begin to appear in some of the word-forms and simple prepositions (in, on) are also used.
By the age of two-and-a-half years, the childs vocabulary is expanding rapidly. By three,
the vocabulary has grown to hundreds of words and pronunciation has become closer to the
form of adult language.
10.
The acquisition process: the linguistic repertoire of the child increases, it is often assumed
that the child is, being taught the language. For the vast majority of children, no one
provides any instruction on how to speak the language. Children can be Heard to repeat
versions of what adults say on occasion and they are clearly in the process of adopting a lot
of vocabulary from the speech they hear. However, adults simply do not produce many of
the expressions that turn up in childrens speech. It is also unlikely that adult corrections
are a very effective determiner of how the child speaks. One factor that seems to be
important in the childs acquisition process is the actual use of sound and word
combinations, either in interaction with others or in word play, alone.
Developing morphology: By the time a child is two-and-a-half years old, he or she is
going beyond telegraphic speech forms and incorporating some of the inflectional
morphemes that indicate the grammatical function of the nouns and verbs used. The first to
appear is usually the -ing form in expressions such as cat sitting and mommy reading book.
The evidence suggests that the child is working out how to use the linguistic system while
focused on communication and interaction rather than correctness. Those embarrassed
parents who insist that the child didnt hear such things at home are implicitly recognizing
that imitation is not the primary force in first language acquisition.
Developing syntax: The basis of the childs speech production has been found in studies of
the syntactic structures used by young children. One child, specifically asked to repeat what
she heard, would listen to an adult say forms such as the owl who eats candy runs fast and
then repeat them in the form owl eat candy and he run fast. It is clear that the child
understands what the adult is saying. She just has her own way of expressing it.
Forming questions:
The childs first stage has two procedures. Simply add a Wh-form to the beginning
of the expression or utter the expression with a rise in intonation towards the end.
For example: Where kitty? Doggie?
In the second stage, more complex expressions can be formed, but the rising
intonation strategy continues to be used. For example: What book name? You want
eat?
In the third stage, the required inversion of subject and verb in English questions
appears (I can goCan I go?), but the Wh-questions do not always undergo the
required inversion. For examples: Can I have a piece? Did I caught it?
Forming negatives:
stage 1 seems to involve a simple strategy of putting no or not at the beginning, as
in these examples: no mitten - not a teddy bear
In the second stage, the additional negative forms dont and cant appear, and with
no and not, are increasingly used in front of the verb rather than at the beginning of
the sentence, as in these examples: He no bite you - I dont want it
The third stage sees the incorporation of other auxiliary forms such as didnt and
wont. as in the examples: I didnt caught it - He not taking it
Developing semantics: overextension and overgeneralization.
overextension and the most common pattern is for the child to overextend the
meaning of a word on the basis of similarities of shape, sound and size, and, to a
lesser extent, movement and texture. Thus the word ball is extended to all kinds of
round objects, including a lampshade, a doorknob and the moon.
The marking of regular plurals with the -s form, as in boys and cats. The acquisition
of the plural marker is often accompanied by a process of overgeneralization. The
child overgeneralizes the apparent rule of adding -s to form plurals and will talk
about foots and mans. (i.e. ending in [-z]) producing expressions like some mens
and two feets. However, they do typically precede the appearance of the -ed
inflection. Once the regular pasttense forms (walked, played) begin appearing in the
childs speech, the irregular forms may disappear for a while, replaced by
overgeneralized versions such as goed and comed.

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General and Applied Linguistic

1st Study Guide

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Regional dialects: Is used to describe features of grammar and vocabulary as well as

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Dialects: A regional or social variety of a language distinguished by pronunciation,

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grammatical class of non-countable entities is evidence of a type of cognitive

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2nd Study Guide

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go abruptly. This type of consonant sound, resulting from a blocking or stopping

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Bound morphemes are classified into two categories:

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3rd Study Guide

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The philosophy of language:

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dominance or lateralization (one-sidedness). It is generally thought that the lateralization

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