Linguistics 001

Spring 2009

Professors David Embick and Charles Yang

Basics

• An introduction to the scientific study of language

• No prerequisites

• Satisfies Gen.Req. V/Sector VII

Webpage

• Information about readings and other matters will appear on the webpage

• Homework assignments (and solutions) will appear there as well

• Syllabus too• http://ling.upenn.edu/courses/Spring_2009/ling001

Recitations

201 REC F 11-12NOON WILL 421 Light

202 REC F 12-1PM STIT B30 Light

203 REC F 12-1PM WILL 5 Lannon

204 REC R 3-4PM WILL 4 Lannon

205 REC R 3-4PM WILL 5 Gorman

206 REC R 4-5PM WILL 5 Gorman

• NO RECITATIONS WEEK 1

Meetings

• Office Hours:– Embick: Wed. at 2, Williams 601– Yang: Fri. at 2, Williams 608

• Meet with your TA during the section, or make an appointment

Grading

Homework assignments 40%Midterm exam 20%(Cumulative)Final exam 40%

100% (BUT) IN BORDERLINE CASES ATTENDANCE IN

RECITATIONS AND ACTIVE PARTICIPATION WILL AFFECT WHETHER OR NOT GRADES ARE ROUNDED UP OR

ROUNDED DOWN

Exams

• Midterm: An in-class midterm exam on Wednesday, March 4 will test knowledge of basic facts and concepts covered in the first half of the course. It will take the form of multiple-choice, matching, and short-answer questions requiring you to explain or illustrate a particular concept in linguistics.

• Final: A comprehensive final exam will cover material from the entire course, with more emphasis on the second half (since it was not included on the midterm). Date will be posted on the webpage/announced in class. Like the midterm, it will consist of multiple-choice, matching, and short-answer questions. We will of course remind you several times about time, place, etc.

Homework Assignments

• Several homeworks will be assigned

• They will be for practice and extension of the concepts discussed in class

• In the normal case the homeworks will be available on the course webpage (as noted above)

Homework, Part II• Homeworks are graded on a scale of 1-10• Homeworks will be returned in sections• Homeworks will be posted on Wednesdays

and due the next Wednesday at the beginning of class

• Late homeworks (turned in from Wed. after noon to Thurs. at 3pm) will be penalized (see webpage for details)

• The latest any homework will be accepted is Thursday at 3, the time of the first sections

Homework, Part III (Rules)

1) Assignments are due Wednesday at noon

2) Email submissions are not accepted unless permission has been granted for e.g. illness; then make arrangements to email it to your TA

3) Makeup assignments are not available except in cases of documented emergencies

4) Include your recitation number on your homework!

For more details see the webpage

Readings

• Bulkpack: Will be available next week at the IKON copy center (in Levine Hall, at 33-34th and Walnut)

• Additional readings; class announcements and webpage

What the course is about

Basic idea and outline

The Subject of the Course

• The scientific study of human language; in particular, some aspects of human language and its structure

• Some facets of language make it apparently unique in the biological world and in the study of cognition. Moreover, language is creative and complex in a way that warrants careful study

Aspects of Language

• We are concerned with the objective study of language; not claims about how language ‘should’ be made by so-called experts

• By ‘language’ here we mean roughly the system of principles that account for linguistic expressions; languages that actually exist (or existed) and are used by people

Some facts about language

• Creativity: We automatically produce and understand utterances we have never heard before, whether they make ‘sense’ or not:

Seventeen and one half turtles wearing yellow hats with penguins on them began to simultaneously yodel as I approached the food truck.

Put differently: Languages have a finite number of words, from which infinite sentences can be created/understood; it’s not just about ‘making sense’

(More) facets of language

Moreover: Our production and comprehension of complex linguistic utterances is automatic and (typically) effortless. That is,

• We do not have to think about using language any more than we have to think about walking or about using vision

• Compare this with e.g. computer systems, which cannot come close to this performance

Facets of language, cont.

Language is universal-- every human society ever known has language

• Unlike cultural inventions or technology-- which vary in complexity from culture to culture-- every human society has complex language

• As we will see in the course, language does not seem to correlate with “general intelligence”

• This suggests that humans have a biological capacity for language, when coupled with cases in which children ‘invent’ complex language (to be discussed later)

Facets of language, cont. II

One well-known(?) fact about language: children acquire language easily and without explicit instruction.

• It should be clear that adults do not have this capacity; acquiring language in adulthood is difficult and typically results in sub-native performance

• This suggests a biological window of opportunity for acquiring a language natively

Innateness

• A research program initiated by Chomsky; two major points

– Producing and understanding novel utterances indicates speakers must have a mental grammar-- a kind of ‘program’ for constructing/understanding sentences

– These grammars are acquired by children who are exposed to fragmentary and noisy evidence, i.e. without explicit knowledge of the rules, which, as we will see, are quite complex.

– This leads to the idea that the human brain is ‘pre-equipped’ to learn language, in the same way that children are programmed to walk, see, etc.

Goals

• We are going to investigate the idea that language is innate or an ‘instinct’ by

– Looking at the structure of language; and

– Looking at how language works in the brain, develops in history, compares with communication in other species, etc.

In the next slides we will look at some of the subdivisions of linguistic structure

Linguistic Structures, I

• Phonetics/Phonology: The sounds of a language, and how they combine

There are many aspects of this that speakers do, but are not aware of….

Example: the sounds [p], [t], [k] in English are pronounced with a puff of air (‘aspirated’) at the start of a word:

pill till kill

This is not the case when [s] precedes:

spill still skill

• In general:– How to represent speech sounds– How these sounds combine/change etc.

Structures, II

• Morphology: The structure of words. Some words seem simple, e.g. cat. But others are made out of parts:

vapor-ize un-attain-able un-lock-ing-sSometimes the rules are complex, and the

same pieces can combine in different ways:Un-(lock-able): can’t be locked

(un-lock)-able: capable of being unlocked

Structures, III

• Syntax: How words combine to form sentences:

(a ‘*’ means that a sentence is deviant, in a way that we’ll define later in the course):

1) The tall man… 2) *The man tall…

2) I saw John and Mary.

3) *Who did you see Mary and?

Structures IV

• Semantics/Pragmatics: What words/sentences mean, and how this relates to how they are used.

• Example: compare– John hammered the metal flat.– John hammered the metal naked. Or: Why is it that

Is it cold?Is sometimes a real question, and sometimes a way

of getting someone to close a window?

Plan

• Examine different aspects of linguistic structure, like those sketched above

• After looking at such structures, we will be ready to investigate further questions, not limited to

1) Languages of the world2) The acquisition of language3) Language and the brain4) Language change and history5) Reading and writing6) Animal communication and evolution7) Language and Computation