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CHAPTER 1. HOW TO DESCRIBE LANGUAGE USE
AND LANGUAGE KNOWLEDGE
1.1 LEVELS OF SPOKEN LANGUAGE
To organize language is by the size of the various kinds of pieces it can be divided into, from small to large. We'll start with the small units (sounds), then go on to bigger units ( words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs or conversational turns ). Levels of language: syllables in spoken language, syllabary symbols in Japanese and characters in written Chinese. 1.2 THE LEVEL OF SPEECH SOUND: THE SOUNDS OF SPOKEN WORDS Level of Speech sounds: the Phonetic level. Speech is our basic tool for connecting, isolation is deadly for mental and even physical health. Phonetics is difficult because you need to learn to make and hear unfamiliar speech sounds, and you have to learn a new writing system, the IPA (international phonetic alphabet). Some sounds can be spelled by different letters. 1.2 A) COARTICULATION This kind of articulatory anticipation is called Coarticulation, is essential for normal-sounding fluent speech. PHOTOTACTICS English allows words to begin with the sounds st but Spanish doesn't. These restrictions seem understandable if putting several consonants in a row is somehow inherently difficult. English is just one of the many languages that use the Roman alphabet. The pronunciation of English changed drastically in the 1400s and the spelling didn't change along with the pronunciation. B) THE VOCAL TRACT The vellum changes its position while we are speaking, it can lowered or raised, blocking off the connection between your pharynx and your nasal passage, so that air can't get out through your nose. This is the position of your vellum when you make most speech sounds. There they are, the meanings of the parts of the vocal tract: Alveolar ridge: the gum ridge, they are sockets that hold your teeth. Palate: the roof of your mouth. Velum: soft palate, forming the back of the roof of your mouth. Uvula: the plump little bulge that hangs like a tassel at the end of the velum. Larynx: the voice box. Pharynx: the air tube leading from the lungs to the back of both the mouth and the nose. Some parts of your tongue have some speech sound articulations: tip, blade, back, and root.
The larynx has two parts of tissue called the vocal folds. The opening between the vocal folds is called
glottis. The sound between two vowels of uh-oh is made by closing your glottis tightly, so that no air can get from your lungs into your mouth: glottal stop. It is a silence, not a sound, but in some languages, the glottal stop functions like any other consonant. A rate of vibrationn is called frequency, and the vocal fold vibration, voicing.
The mouth All four of the consonants /p/ /t/ /k/ are silences, also called stops because the air that is coming from your lungs is stopped before it gets out of your mouth. English also has the voiceless/voiced pair of alveopalatal sounds spelled ch and j written as /ʧ/ /ʤ/. They are hybrid sounds, the first one beginning by a voiceless stop and ends with the alveopalatal voiveless fricative. The second is the same but your vocal folds are vibrating during the sound of it. C) MANNER OF ARTICULATION Stops: obstructing the airstream cmpletely in the oral cavity. /p/ /b/ /t/ /d/ /k/ /g/ Fricatives: forming a nearly complete stoppage of the airstream. /f/ /v/ /θ/ /ð/ /s/ /z/ /s´/ /z´/ Affricatives : brielly stopping the airstream completely and releasing the articulators slightly so that the friction is produced. /i´/ /j´/ Nasals: lowering the vellum and letting the airstream pass primarly through the nasal cavity. /m/ /n/ /ŋ/ Glides: sounds in this group made with only a slight closure of articulation. /y/ /w/ /m/ /h/ Liquids : obstruction is formed by the articulators but is not narrow enoughh to stop the airflow or to cause friction. PLACE OF ARTICULATION : Bilabial : sounds are made with both lips, by bringing both lips together or almost together. /l/ /b/ /m/ /w/ /wh/ Labiodental : made with the lower lip against the upper from teeth. /f/ /v/ Interdental: made with the tip of the tongue between the front teeth. /θ/ /ð/ Alveolar: made with the tongue tip at or near the alveolar ridge, at the back of the top teeth and slide it upward. /t/ /d/ /s/ /r/ /n/ /l/ /z/ Palatal: made with the tongue near the palate /s´/ /z´/ /c´/ /j´/ /y/ Velar: made with the tongue near the vellum. /k/ /g/ /ŋ / Glottal: made at the glottis. /h/ D) THE NASAL CAVITY The nasal cavity adds resonance to the sound, acting like baffles. A speech is nasal if the passageway between the mouth and the nasal cavity is open. It's oral if it is closed. It is important the position of the parts of the mouth because it will help you keep a sharp mental picture of how nasal airflow is controlled. You need that picture to understand many developmental speech problems, what happens to speech sounds when someone has a stuffed-up nose, and some of the historical language changes that give us some peculiar-looking modern language patterns. THE SEMIVOWELS The semivowels are /l/ /r/ /w/ and /j/. Calling these consonants “semivowels” implies that they are in some way in between vowels and consonants. It involves the size of the air channel that you use to make these four sounds. The four semivowels have openings that are too wide to cause friction, though they aren't as wide as the openings for true vowels. What distinguishes each of these sounds from the others is the way each different tongue shape changes the sound that comes into the pharynx and mouth from the vibrating vocal folds (all four of them are voiced). /l/ and /r/ are liquids and /j/ and /w/, glides. Each of these four sounds involves a mouth and pharynx shape that we haven't seenn yet. There are an amazing number of different tongue positions that will result in saying /r/, and each person seems to use several different ones in different contexts. In /r/ /j/ and the vowels, your tongue root may move forward or backward to change the shape of your pharynx. For making English /r/, a lot of your tongue is raised up through most of the middle of your mouth; and your tongue root may be pulled back, which makes the opening of your pharynx narrower.
1.4 MORPHEMES: THE MEANINGFUL UNITS OF SPEECH
Think about the difference between the words girl and girls, the second one has two meaningful parts : girl, and the noun plural marker 's. These two meaningful pieces are called morphemes. The word girl by itself is just one morpheme, because it can stand alone, it's called a free morpheme. But the ending, because it has to be attaced to something is called a bound morpheme. A) FREE MORPHEMES I: CONTENT WORDS Content words: at least the kinds of content words that are labels for people and animals (daddy, Susie, cat), things (milk, teddy), properties (bot, nice) and actions (throw, eat), are one of the two main kinds of words that children learn early. Social-emotional words like hi, no, bye-bye are the other main kind. These words are also free morphemes, they can be said without being attached to any other word, but are content words nor function words. A content word is a word with a meaning that can be defined by referring to things and events in the real or imagined world, and these include almost all nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. B) FREE MORPHEMES II As challenging as it would be to define all the content words in that example sentence, it's nothing compared with the impossibility of defining esentially meaningless words like the and to ( infinitive marker ). They are typical examples of functions words, people with nonfluent aphasia (slow speech, short phrases, and difficult in articulating speech sounds clearly) sometimes call them, when they are trying to explain explain which words drive them crazy because they can't remember how to say them or when to use them. Definite and indefinite articles : the words the, a, an , plus, in informal speech, some as and this as ; are hard- core fundtion words. You have to explainand demonstrate their functions ( functors ). Other central examples of function words are conjunctions ( and, or but, if, because ...), the English infinitive marker to, the empty prepositions the ones that don't tell you where somethin is or is going ( of, for, by when it links a word to an author or an artist), and pronouns ( I, me, we, it, you, they, us, our, ours ). Directional prepositions like from, in, near and under. C) BOUND MORPHEMES I: INFLECTIONAL MORPHEMES: Plural markers get added to almost all nouns when you are talking about more than one, although a handful of nouns are irregular and use their own special plural markers: man/men, child/children, woman/women, ox/oxen. In these words, the past marker isn't an ending, it's the change in the vowels. A morpheme doesn't have to show up as a suffix ( or preffix ) that you can cut off; sometimes it's another kind of change in the form of a word. In children, the plural marker actually has two parts: the vowel change from /ai/ to /i/ and the -ren ending. The most widespread bound morphemes in English are called inflectional morphemes. When we talk about changing voice pitch, we use intonation or tone. Another inflectional morpheme that you know is the past tense marker. The regular one, for example the one added to walk, climb or pet , is made in writting by adding -ed. It is pronounced /t/ in walked but /d/ in climbed and /ed/ in petted. The -ed family of past tense markers gets added to most English verbs. The past tense marker in irregular words can be a vowel change, or it can be more drastic. We've alse got few verbs -all ending in -t so that they already sound like good past tenses if they are used to mean a past event ( put , let , and set ). The English third person singular marker (spelled - s at the end of the verb) is an ending that has no meaning at all, it is just required by the grammar, and are pronounced /s/, /z/ or /ez/. The most important other inflectional morphemes in English are the possessive ending that is written ' s for nouns, and the -ing added to verbs to make progressive forms like is walking, was going.
D) BOUND MORPHEMES II: DERIVATIONAL MORPHEMES AND HOW TO TAKE LONG
WORDS APART
Bound morphemes that are used to make new words are called derivational morphemes. These prefixes and endings change the meaning of the basic word to some extent, and the endings often change its grammatical class as well. Derived words are often built on one very particular meaning of the base form. E.g.: When we can't take a word apart completely because some of its pieces don't exist in English, like possible , it may have a recognizable ending like the -ible/able that makes it in adjective, or the - ion or the -er that makes it a noun, or the -ize or -ify that makesit a verb. These endings are all derivational morphemes. Compare derivational to inflectional morphemes, when we add an inflectional morpheme like a plural or a past tense marker or the progressive - ing , we don't feel that we have a new word (the meaning of the plural form is completely predictable from knowing the meaning of the singular combined with the idea of having more than one of something). But adding derivational morphemes creates combination that feel like new words. Summary: Inflectional morphemes are boound morphemes that intuitively feel like they don't make a new word when they are added to a base form, and derivational morphemes are bound morphemes that do seem to make a new word when they are added to a base form. Inflectional morphemes don't change the part of the speech but derivational ones do. But firstly, this applies only to suffixes, not prefixes; secondly, some inflections can perfectly well be considered to change a word's part of speech: the -ing form of a verb can be freely used as an adjective and sometimes as a noun ( the singingchildren) , and the possessive form of a noun behaves grammatically very much like a definite article. Third, some derivational suffix morphemes don't change the part of speech ( child, childhood ). By the way, we English speakers can use some words that were originally nouns as verbs, and the reverse as well, withouth putting any derivational ending on them to change their part of speech: a light, to light something, a house, to house something. E) COMPOUND WORDS: TAKING MORE LONG WORDS APART English speakers also make new words by joining other words together that is, by joining existing free morphemes to make compound words , like webmail, inbox, hovercraft, payback... Some of these wordscan then have derivational and/or inflectional endings added to them, as in sleep- walker-s or birdwatch-ing. 1.5 WORDS If you add an inflection like plural or past tense to a base word form, like books from book , it isn't a different word, just a different form of the same word (meaning 100% predictable). The same is true for the -ing. But you can quite predict the meanings of words that are formed by adding inflectional morphemes like cookie. If the meaning of the combination is not predictable from its parts, as in hot dog or keyboard or greenhouse, the combination is a compound word, and it is relatively likely to be listed in the dictionary. 1.6 UTTERANCES: PHRASES, CLAUSES AND SENTENCES IN SPEECH If you look at a transcript of a real conversation, you will see that people say lots of things that are treated as complete in spite of being only phrases, not complete sentences. For analysis of conversation, we divide into utterances, which may or may not be sentences.
1.9 KINDS OF LINGUISTIC KNOWLEDGE
Knowing about things in a way that you are aware of ( explicit knowledge ) and knowing how to do them (usually called tacit knowledge) are very different kinds of knowledge. Explicit knowledge: Information that you know you have and that you can put into words or communicate without actually showing someone how to do it, for example, the directions for getting to your home from where you work. Tacit knowledge: is what you know without being aware that you know it. Skills that have become automatic, like the ability to understand a sentence or tie your shoes. A) SPELLING AND SPEAKING: THE EYES FOOL THE EARS (AND THE TONGUE) It's common for speakers to think that they are pronuncing words in a citation form ( the way a word is pronounced when we say it slowly and distinctly; this may be quite different from the way we say it in ordinary speech. B) Sociolinguistics: The study of how people in different social categories and social situations use their language to show their status and their relationship with each other. It also study dialects, the way that people feel about their own dialect, and what people think about those who speak various other dialects of their language. 1.10 LANGUAGE FAMILIES AND TYPES Language typology: classifying languages by the grammatical and phonological structures that they use; for example; as grammatical gender languages, or as tone/tonal languages. The other way of classifying languages is by whether they are historically related to each other. Related languages may be typologically similar, like Spanish and Italian, or rather different from one another, like English and German. The way children and adults read, write, speak and understand English can all be affected by what other languages they learned first. A) DIFFERENCES BETWEEN LANGUAGES One of the biggest differences is whether the object of a verb comes after the verb ( I found my wallet ) as it does in English and Chinese, or before it ( I my wallet found) as it does in Japanese and Turkish and Hindi. Another substancial difference is whether you need to have a subject in every (or almost every) sentence as English, French, and German do ( It's raining, Es regnet, Il pleut), or whether you can leave out meaningless subjects and just say the equivalent of is raining , as you can in Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian. Although all languages have nouns and verbs, lots of words can be either a noun or a verb depending on the construction they are being used in. In Chinese, people can disagree about whether a word is being used as a noun or as a verb. Many languages as Russian, Finnish and Japanese don't have any definite and indefinite articles that would correspond to a or the; some, like Hebrew, have only definite articles. Before we mentioned verb agreement (the way the form of a verb can depend on the person and number of its subject) and how some languages don't have it. For Spanish and French, every verb has at least this many forms and you have to choose the right one depending on its subject. They have grammatical gender. All nouns are either masculine or feminine. Articles and most of adjectives that modify a noun also have masculine and feminine forms, and they have to agree with the noun they modify, that is, they have to have the same gender as the noun.
B) BEING SIMILAR AND BEING RELATED
A language that is spoken by people who lose contact with each other, settlers in two differents mountain valleys; or colonists who settle new countries across oceans, will change in different ways in the separate places. Different ways of speaking develop in the new places, and these become recognizably different dialects in another generation or two. Two languages are related if they have descended from the same language, somewhere back in time. All the descendents of one language are called a language family. Languages that separate only one or two thousand years ago may still look a lot alike, like the languages of Europe that came from Latin (the romance languages and dialects: French, Italian, Provençal, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Romanian, Romansh). Latin itself is part of the huge Indo-European family of languages, whose common ancestor must have been spoken about 6,000 years ago. One of those distant cousins of Latin is called Proto-Germanic , because it was the ancestor of the germanic family of languages (English, German, Dutch, and Scandinavia languages). Another cousin, called Proto-Slavic, was the ancestor of Slavic family (Russian, Polish, Czech and Bulgarian); still another was the ancestor of the Indo-Iranian languages of Iran, Afghanistan and northern India. In contrast, unrelated languages sometimes look a lot alike. This is because their speakers have been in contact, and there once were many bilingual speakers. When two languagesare spoken by the same group of people, at least one of the groups is likely to have learned a lot of words and constructions from the other (for Japanese and for Korean, which both borrowed a lot of vocabulary and morphology from Chinese. They also borrowed the oldest parts of their writing system, the original forms of the kanji in Japanese and the hanja in Korean). English and French come from different branches. But after the Norman Conquest about a thousand years ago, English absorbed a huge amount of French vocabulary and phonology, though it kept most of its germanic-type syntax. EXERCISES: CHAPTER 1.
1. Spelling difference between: merry, marry, and Mary****. What about caught, cot****? Ann and Ian? Meet and meat? Merry /ˈmerɪ/, marry /ˈmærɪ/ and Mary /ˈmeərɪ/. Caught /kɔːt/ and cot /kɒt/. Ann /æn/ and Ian /ˈɪən/. **Meet /miːt/ and meat /miːt/ (esta última mas alargada y sonora)
- What makes a sentence ambiguous. Examples: A. Referent ambiguity:** Sarah insulted Amy, and then she kicked her. B. Syntactic ambiguity: Kissing cousins can be serious trouble. C. Temporary syntactic ambiguity: The truck unloaded at the rear door was rented. (“garden path” sentence) A word, phrase, or sentence is ambiguous if it has more than one meaning.
