Chapter One

What is language?What is it we know about language?

Chap 1 cont..

• Acquisition vs Learning a language• Design features of language— - Semanticity -- Arbitrariness -- Discreteness --Displacement --Productivity -- Duality of Patterning

Animal language

• Vervet Monkey• Honey bees• Birds• Cetaceans They lack some features of human languageDo animals have human like communication

system?--Washoe and Nim

What is grammar?

• It is the knowledge of grammar that allows us to create sentences we’ve never heard or uttered before.

• Generative grammar—”a description in the form of a set of rules for producing the grammatical sentences of a language.”

Prescriptive and Descriptive Grammar

• Descriptive grammar– describes the rule system we use to produce sentences, regardless of the social value we may attach to those sentences.

• Prescriptive grammar—prescribes or defines how we are supposed to speak, typically according to some authority– positive social value.

• E.g. I don’t know who to see; I don’t know whom to see

Grammar across Space and Time

• Varieties of English– American (Boston), British, Jamaican, ect.

• Dialects– a variety of a language that differs from other varieties in grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary and that is spoken and understood by a particular group, which might be identified by region, ethnicity, social class, etc

Universal Grammar

• The set of linguistic rules common to all languages; hypothesized to be part of human cognition.

• These core grammatical rules must have similar properties across languages, forming a kind of basic grammatical “blue-print.” These core properties make up what linguists refer to as Universal Grammar, or UG

UG

• One simple rule of UG seems to be that all languages combine subjects and predicates to form larger units, clauses.

• The two common word orders—SVO (English)– pg.14SOV (Japanese)– pg. 14The principal of UG seems to be that subjects in

some languages can be silent, e.g. Italian, Arabic.—null subject language

UG (cont.)

• French and English are not null subject languages.

• Linguistic parameters –metaphorical on/off switch.

• Sign Language Grammar—ASL is a null subject language much like Hindi, Japanese and Italian

The Scientific Study of Language

• What is that we know about language? Here are some of the basic facts about language: (pg. 17)

• Noam Chomsky and Generative Grammar• He introduced Generative grammar—It

describes a finite set of rules that we use to generate the possible sentences in our language. Some of these generative rules might also be grounded in the Universal Grammar and thus common to all languages.

Rationalism and Empiricism

• Rationalism– philosophy based on the idea that we use innate knowledge, or reason, to make sense of the world

• Empiricism– Philosophy based on the idea that we gain knowledge not through reason but through experience and that the mind starts out as a blank slate.

Rationalism and Empiricism (cont.)

• Prior to Chomsky, most of the linguists such as Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and Leonard Bloomfield were descriptive linguists.

• Descriptive linguists are more interested in what was observable about language and describe what they found.

• Chomsky’s theory falls under the rationalist approach which states the grammatical rules and principles that make up our linguistic hardwiring, though not observable can be inferred from the study of child language.

Rationalism and Empiricism (cont.)

• Linguistics universal can also be inferred from the study of many languages, even though no one person will ever study all of them.

• Chomsky’s ideas were supported by Eric Lennerberg, a neuropyschologist.

• Structural linguistics– Saussure’s influence on Chomsky’s work was in linguistic competence and linguistics performance.

Structural Linguistics

• Linguistic competence– is our unconscious knowledge of languages

• Linguistics performance—Utterances that are produced.

• The difference between linguistic competence and performance can be illustrated by slips of tongue.

• The scientific study tells us that none of us ”knows” the language better than another, and that value judgments that are attached to performance are just opinions based on social perceptions and attitudes.

Subfields of linguistics (pg.22)

• Grammar• Pragmatics• Sociolinguistics• Neurolinguistics• Psycholinguistics• Computational Linguistics• Historical Linguistics• Anthropological Linguistics