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ENSLIGH LINGUISTICS (Costa) 1 ottobre Biography:
- English Linguistics , Herbst. De Gruyter Mouton, 2010. 1-2;2.3/4;3.1/2;3.3 : the english language/linguistics 4-3.1.1;5.2.1;5.2.2 : sounds 8-8.3.3;9-9.2/6;10.6 : meaning-carrying units 11-11.2/3-11.3;11.3.1;11.4.2;11.4.7;13.1.4:13.1.4.2 : sententces 14-14.2.2;14.3-15.1;15.4.2;15.4.2.3 : meaning 17-17.3.3;18-18.4 : utterances
- topics covered from the other books 4 ottobre Inner circle: native speakers. Outer : bilingual countries (ex. India: many different languages, English is a means of communication), such as colonies: local languages + English (ex. Nigeria). Expanding : (China, Russia, Brazil, Italy, Egypt, Korea, Saudi Arabia), it's the biggest circle and it's expanding, the inner circle is the smallest. South Africa: no answer to this, the person who founded it would say "inner circle", but it's probably on the outer circle, because they also speak african. The ownership is no longer of native speakers, it's of everybody.
The EN language nowadays: 1.5 billion people speak English. ENL: English as a native language ESL: India, Nigeria EFL: English as a foreign language. (ELF: English as a lingua franca) Its peculiarity is the geographical spread (spoken in many continents) unlike ex. Chinese. Chinese is spoken by many but in only one country, whereas English is spoken worldwide. Why is EN so important? Basically for historical reasons: British Empire, WW2, simplier grammar/structure (but difficult phonology), it's a language which works well in the scientific community (especially from the Industrial Revolution). There are different varieties (BE, AE, British En, American En etc). What's going to happen to English after Brexit? When it leave, English is not going to be an official language of the EU from a legal point of view. Probably, we will always speak it even if it won't be an official language anymore.
- David Chrystal : video "Will English always be the Global Language?" his focuses on EIL: English as an international language. British Linguist. "Who knows what will happen? maybe we'll speak martian if the martians take over; many reasons for english to be famous: history + music + advertising, etc. It'll stay a global language as long as the other countries where English is the official language are powerful. Now there's no sign of the diminution of the prestige of English. The history of global English is very recent". About the future of English, he thinks that now there's no threath that Chinese becomes the Global
Intelligibily (worked-"workd"), Historical Variations of English -Old English predominantly of Germanis origins. Middle English (1100-1500) many French words entering the language. English has many more words than italian. Early Modern English (1500-1750) with a standard language emerging. Modern English (1750-up to present day). English is an Indoeuropean Germanic language. Conquers of Romans, part of the Northen part of England was Danish, French (Norman Conquest 1066) for 300 years French was the official language of England spoken by nobles. Some areas of investigation of English Linguistics: Phonetics and phonology; morphology and syntax; semantics; Discourse analysis; sociolinguistics; pragmatics, speech acts; psycholinguistics/cognitive linguistics. Applied Linguistics : Cook defines it as "the academic discipline concerned with the relation of knowledge about language to decision making in the real world". The scope of applied linguistics:
- language and education
- language work, law (workplace communication , language policies, forensic linguistics
- language, information and effect (critical discourse analysis or linguistic choises and effets in persuasive use (Fairclough), translation and interpretation, information design, lexicography. ... 1959: CAL Centre of Applied Linguistics was founded under the leadership of Ferguson. AILA Association Internationale de Linguistique Appliquée in 1964 in Nancy, France. In 1967 the British Association for Applied Linguistics BAAL held its founding meeting. the primary areas of interest for the british ass. would be "the study of language use, lang. acquisition and lan. teaching, and the fostering of inter- disciplinary collaboration in this study". The seeds were planted for an American Ass. for Applied Linguistics in the early 1970s. Special interest group under the chairmanship of Bernard Spolsky that was formed within the Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages TESOL. 8 october Corpus Linguistics Corpus Linguistics was born with computers: databank of language. It's concerned with the patterns and regularities of language use which can be revealed by systematic analysis of such corpora. One of the most important insight of CL is collocations (frequent combination of words). Language processing may be less a question of slotting individual words into a grammatical structure and far more
acquisition device: the tool of learning a language. "The child has an innate theory of potential structural descriptions". -Grammar translation language teaching -The direct method (first language banished) -Natural language learning mimicking the L1. Interesting but with many drawbacks -The communicative approach derived from the theories Educational Linguistics Born in the 1980s by Spolsky. He claims that there's no direct relation between linguistics and education. He says that some linguists think linguistics should only be theorical: desire to increase human knowledge; however, he says that others consider it to be helpful to handle any difficulties in language planning or teaching. Panacea= something that treats everything. What happens is that things are different when applied: the link is not direct. Ed Ling is an area of study that integrates the reasearch tools of linguistics and other related disciplines of the social sciences in order to investigate holistically the broad range of issues related to language and education. As an area of inquiry, ed ling is young, its naissance occured in 1980. Neurolinguistics (Sabourin and Stowe) It's about brain and the way we process a language. Acc. to the classical view, language is representes in the left hemisphere of the brain, and 2 main brain regions are
specialized for language functions...... These patiens had difficulty with language production. The specific area described as the locus is now called....... The same brain structures are used in the acquisition of L2, however, they're less efficient. Markedness: -marked -unmarked Phonetics/phonology Phonetics deals with a description of phones with formal properties of speech sounds. Function of phones: meaning -Phone: the actual sound part that we can hear. -Minimal pairs (teach - reach): a minimal/close pair consists of two words with sounds that are very similar but have different meanings. Phonetically identical with the exception of one sound. -Phoneme: is an abstract linguistic unit at the level of sound that serves to distinguih between linguistic forms with different meanings. The mental representation of a sound, the part that's stored in our brain. When we actually produce sounds, we're producing a PHONE. -Allophone: is one of several phonetic realizations of a phoneme in the form of a speech sound. Ex. th and t are two allophones of the phoneme t. These 2 allophones are in complementary distribution in that each of them can only
Consonants: 24 (Italian: 19) Lezione dell'11 ottobre 15 octobre English is not a phonographic language En is a transparent language: written and oral word are different. Many sounds have several different spellings: ex. go, though, foe, slow, boat / George, Joe, badge, village. Many same spellings have different sounds: ex. though, cough, bough, through, thought, enough (through tought though thorough thought) Learners cannot rely on the spelling of a word The problem is the opposite for native speakers - EN schoolchildren spend incredible amounts of time learning to read and to write. Many adults have very poor spelling. To learn to pronounce English correctly it is of great help to learn to read phonemic transcription and/or have a dictionary with sound. ex. their / they're / there Even predictable combinations in English are different to
those of other languages. "ai" usually corresponds to (ei) ex. pain-paid, almost never to "ai". "ch" usually, but not always, corresponds to "tò" at the start of a word, ex. "cheese" but not "choir". Is English spelling really so erratic? 83% of En words have predictable spelling, however, the remaining 17% is comprised of the most commonly used, everyday words. Therefore the greatest difficulties are faced by the learner at the start. Not enough vowel letters for vowel sounds; En doesnt use accents, umlauts, etc. English spelling reflects many archaic forms of pronunciation ex. "night" in the past, was pronounced with a fricative. En has always resisted spelling reforms and academies to set standards. En spelling became fixed in the 16/17th c. with the arrival of printing. Many of the printers were Flemish and had little knowledge of the language. En has borrowed extensively from other languages and has tended to maintain original spelling. Solution: Phonetic Symbol Sets -International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) Articulatory Phonetics: How do people produce speech? -The articulatory organs Classes of Sounds -Consonants
- learning the letter sounds
- learning the letter formation
- blending
- identifying sounds in words
- spelling the tricky words these 5 skills will be taught all together. Intonation and Stress: the key to understanding and being understood Segmental (phonemes)/ suprasmegmental (whole sentences starting from syllables) features of a language. Stress in words: -every word is made up of syllables. Some words have only one syllable, for example: book - house - fast - well -Most words, however, have more than one syllable. For ex: table (") - a gen da (3) - in tro duc tion (4) - con grat u la tions (5) - in ter con tin en tal (6) -In every English word of more than one syllable, one of the syll. is stressed. This means we say it louder and stronger than the other syllables. Putting the stress on the wrong syllable can make it difficult for your listener to understand you! Listen to the following words. Repeat each word and decide which syllable has the main stress. 'Calendar - 'vegetable - 'comfortable - 'dictionary - 'interesting - ther'mometer. Apostrofo per indicare accento, posto prima della sillaba accentata. Because we usually only stress one syllable in each word
(unless it's very long), the other syllables are unstressed, or weak. This means that we do not pronounce the vowel sound strongly in these weak syllables. Instead, we often use the schwa sound. Practice saying the following words. Take care not to stress the schwa: America (a'merica). about ( a'bout). familiar (fa'milia) la a è una schwa. Pronunciation of grammar words: -pay attention to grammar words. They are often unstressed in conversation and therefore they contain schwas. For ex, in questions that begin with "can" the letter "a" is pronounced as a schwa: ex. Can I help you? Can I sit here? The words "to" and "the" are usually pronounced with a schwa sound. Ex. take the book to thee shelf. We tried to pronounce 2 different sentences: the second was longer than the first one, but same duration of pronunciation: they both took about 5 seconds. English is a stressed language (it is also called a stress.timed language) while many other languages are syllabic (or syllable-timed).
Stress-timed: in spoken discourse only certain words are stressed. Stress tends to occur at regular intervals. It means that in English we give stress to certain wrods while other words are quickly spoken. In other languages, such as Italian, each syllable receives equal importance: in these languages there is stress, but each syllable has its own length. Syllable-timed: in spoken discourse each syllable has equal importance. Stress does not alter the pronunciation of syllables. Many speakers of syllable-timed languages do not
function words that your interlocutor wants you to focus on because they carry meaning in that context. You will soon find that you can understand and communicate more because you begin to listen for stressed words. 22 october English: stress-timed language (we only stress content words) Italian: syllable-timed language (we stress all words, even function words) Intonation It's the way in which pitch rises and falls in speech. It adds colouring, it helps understand speaker's meaning. Pitch changes according to the situation. It conveys meaning. -a naturally low/high voice: not of interest as regards intonation -in normal speech= low pitch -when arguing/being enthusiastic= higher pitch Pitch may change quickly on one syllable or slowly over a phrase. The changes in pitch (rises and falls) are described as pitch contours. Pitch changes normally happen on stressed syllables. There are 5 tones in English (the tone-unit has one tonic syllable): simple tones: -level tone _ : boredom/routine -falling \ : nothing to add Do you like it? Yes.
-rising / : more to be said: Excuse me! Yes?! (complex tones) -fall-rise : various uses; ex limited agreement, hesitancy. Do you like it? Yeah. -rise-fall : strong feelings of approval, disapproval, surprise, irony: Well done! Rising Intonation > can show encouragement too. Ex. It wont hurt. Fall-rise > uncertainty/doubt Ex. You may be right; It's possible; Can I buy it? Will you lend it to me Rising: ex You've finished?; I phoned them right away Falling: ex You've finished; Stop talking The IPA International Phonetic Alphabet: we have to be able to read it and recognize on the dictionary. It was invented towards the end of the 19th century, scholars felt the need for some kind of system in which one symbol equalled one sound. In 1886 the International Phonetic Alph. was founded in France by a group of language teachers and in 1888 it published the IPA, which has since become the standard transcription language. Basic principle: a different sybol for every distinguishable sound. There is no actual limit to the number of sounds that the human speech organs can produce, so diacritics help vary the letter symbols to account for many sounds.
VERB make up, warm up , let down Vowels: AE has 15 sounds, BE 20. Why? Lack of r-colouring (the pronunciation of r after vowels). Consonants: differences in R, L and T sounds. AE is a rhotic variety of English. AE doesn't have a difference between clear and dark L. Where the sound is always dark in AE. Intervocalic T: butter, bitter, better, latter, later, metal. Latter-ladder, metal-medal and bitter-bidder are therefore homophones. T drops after N: winter-winner. Differences in stress: in French loanwords (attaché, ballet, café, detail, debris, frontier) AE keeps the French stress whereas BE stresses the first one. Verbs ending in -ate (donate, migrate, vacate, vibrate) are stressed on the first syllable in AE and on the last one in BE. The majority of words ending in -ary, -ery or -ory (commentary, category, cemetery, dictionary, secretary) carry primary stress on the first syllable in BE and AE. But in AE there is a secondary stress. Secondary stress also appears in words ending in -mony (in AE). Testimony, ceremony and in many compounds such as cranberry. Site: tophonetics.com MORPHOLOGY It comes from Greek morphe' (form) and logos (study of something): it's the study of forms. The second level of analysis going from smaller units to larger is the morpheme. morphemes = smallest abstract linguistic unit that carries
meaning. All the morphemes of a language form its lexis. morphs = different realisations of morphemes from a phonetic/orthographic point of view. Ex. the morpheme -a indicating the indefinite article is formed by 2 phonetic and orthographic morph a if followed by a consonant and an if followed by a vowel. Types of morphemes
- Free morphemes they can be isolated and carry meaning (when, he, again, boy, happy, run).
- Bound morphemes can't be isolated cause they haven't got an autonomous meaning (-ly, -un, -dis, -ship). Bound morphemes can modify the form of words (inflectional morphology) or can create new words (derivational morphology). A bound morpheme is a morpheme which has not an autonomous meaning. It must be attached to a free morpheme to acquire meaning. Bound morphemes can't be founs in dictionaries. They don't all have the same function and are divided into 2 groups: grammatical bound morpheme and lexical bound morpheme.
- grammatical morpheme
- lexical morpheme Listed (list=free, lexical; d= bound, grammatical). Composition (compose= free, lexical; tion= bound, lexical). Inflectional morphology: it's about the grammatical function of morphemes. Ex. the morpheme -ed is used to indicate the past in verbs such as walked. Grammatical bound morphemes: -ed, -s, -ing, -er, -est.
