language and language processing 1

Question 1

Talking about language - context:

Answer 1

• We learn to speak as young children, without knowing we are learning
  
  • In literate societies most people learn to read at a later age
  • It’s a bit more difficult than learning to talk
  • As adults, we use language all the time usually without thinking about it
  • spoken, and for most of us, written and on-screen as well
  • and for some of us other forms, such as sign language
  • Languages are complex systems, and as language users we are only aware of limited aspects of their complexity
  • Professional linguists know rather more

Question 2

arrangement and purpose

Answer 2

• There is an arrangement on two fronts
  
  • Patterns of sound (spoken language)
  • Patterns of visual marks (written language)
  • Patterns of hand positions etc. (sign language)
  • Patterns of meaning
  • Charles Hockett (1960) – called it duality of patterning
  • The purpose is communication, in a very broad sense
  • Communicating information
  • Social interaction
  • Including “doing things with words” (e.g. “I promise….”)

Question 3

linguistics

Answer 3

• The study of language and languages
  
  • The ”arrangements” or structures in both parts are complex
  • The sounds, visual patterns, hand positions
  • And the Meanings
  • The relations between them allow languages to express meaning
  • These relations are (for the most part) arbitrary

Question 4

lingusitics and psychology

Answer 4

• Languages are complex systems
  
  • We know languages and use them all the time in our everyday lives
  • This ability to use language must depend on information stored in the mind/brain
  • And mechanisms to put that information to use, rapidly on-the-fly

Question 5

arbitrariness - emphasised by de Saussure

Answer 5

• Ferdinand de Saussure – Founder of semiotics (study of signs and meaning)
  
  • Connection between signifier and signified is fundamentally arbitrary, and different in different languages – Hund, inu, koira, chien… (German, Japanese, Finnish, French)

Question 6

Not everything is arbitrary - Sound symbolism An example of non- arbitrariness:

Answer 6

• Sound symbolism in English:
  
  • Slime, slip, slide, slick, sleek, slither, slink, sludge, slum, slump, slough…
  • Gleam, glitter, glamour, glance, glow…
  • Non-arbitrary connection between concept and word
  • Blasi et al. (2016): Patterns in certain sound-meaning connections across thousands of languages
  • e.g. “small” and i, “full” and p or b
  • Other evidence:
  • Imai et al. (2008): children learn sound-symbolic verbs more easily
  • Klink (2000): sound symbolism in brand names (“Which brand of ketchup seems thicker? Nidax or Nodax”)

Question 7

Linguistics - sub-branches:

Answer 7

· Linguistics describes language at several levels
· Sounds Letters (or other symbols in a writing system)
· Sound patterns Patterns of Letters
· Structure of phrases and sentences
· Structure of discourse/conversation/text at a higher level (???)
· Direct meaning
· Indirect Meaning
· Style

Question 8

speech sounds

Answer 8

· Different from other types of sounds that humans make (coughs, whistles, etc.)
· Phones – the sounds of speech
· Phonemes – a phoneme is a group of phones that are essentially equivalent in a given language, even though they are not exactly the same sound (e.g. the aspirated /p/ in ”pin” and the unaspirated /p/ in ”spin”)
- Put a finger in front of your mouth as you say the two words, and feel the puff of air (aspiration) in “pin” but not in “spin”
- If you change one phoneme, you change the meaning – “pin” vs “bin”

Question 9

speech sounds - further aspects

Answer 9

· Phonology – sound patterns (see Chomsky and Halle’s classic 1968 book “The Sound Pattern of English”)
· Sequences of sounds within words (“scratch” but not “sbratch” in English)
· Suprasegmental phonology (rhythm, intonation and stress timing)

Question 10

“written” language

Answer 10

· Derived from and dependent upon spoken language
· Written or printed marks on paper, computer screens etc.
· Letters (in alphabetic languages) corresponding to phonemes (though not always one-to-one, especially in English – other languages have much more regular correspondence, e.g. Spanish, Finnish)
- Other systems use syllabaries (Japanese, Cherokee, Linear B [for Mycenaean Greek – used at Knossos in Crete]) or logographs (Chinese, Mayan, Cuneiform [for a variety of Near Eastern languages])
· Rules for what strings of letters (or other symbols) are allowed.
· Punctuation

Question 11

sign languages

Answer 11

· Sign languages also have signs that can vary in their exact form from occasion to occasion, but where there are clear contrasts between one sign and another.
- by “one sign” we mean something with a fixed meaning
· As well as the basic “word”-type signs, languages such as British Sign Language and American Sign Language have systems of finger spelling as an interface between the Sign Language and written language.
· BUT sign languages are fully fledged languages in their own right, different from the languages spoken around them

Question 12

arrangements (structures) above words

Answer 12

· Word group hierarchically into phrases and larger units:
· table
· brown table
· big brown table
· the big brown table
· polished the big brown table
· Stanley polished the big brown table
· But, for example, “polished the big” is not a group, nor is “the big brown”

Question 13

above the sentence

Answer 13

· Sandra threw the brick at the window. The glass smashed into a thousand pieces
· CAUSE => EFFECT
· Is this structure (arrangement) or is this meaning?
· What about: Because Sandra threw the brick at the window, the glass smashed into a thousand pieces
- Where the cause-effect relation is explicitly signalled by the word “because” and the two-clause structure

Question 14

above the sentence 2

Answer 14

· Are there structures for different types of text?
· Many people have suggested that there are:
- Propp (Morphology of the Folktale, 1928/1968)
- the Monomyth or Hero’s Journey: Campbell (1949, The Hero with a Thousand Faces)
- three-act analysis of plays and films (setup, confrontation, resolution, sometimes satirized as beginning, middle and end)
- Story grammars? (Rumelhart, Mandler, Stein, etc.)
· Is there a distinction between form and meaning at this level?

Question 15

arrangement - on the meaning side

Answer 15

· Words have meaning – we talked last time about concepts
· Phonemes (or graphemes – letters) don’t have meanings in themselves, but allow us, via the rules of phonology and morphology, to make words that do have meanings.
· Words can have internal structure
- And this is what morphology deals with (i.e. it is the study of the internal structure of words, with reference to meaning

Question 16

morphemes

Answer 16

· Smallest meaningful unit
· Free morphemes – can be words by themselves
- Cat, table, justice, red, fast etc. etc. etc.
· Bound morphemes
- Inflectional – add grammatical information, produce a word of the same category (e.g. plural –s for nouns, third person singular present tense –s for verbs, -ed for past tense)
- Derivational – change the meaning and/or the word category (e.g. “un-”, “-ness”, “-ly”, and many more)

Question 17

meaning beyond the word

Answer 17

· Our first questions are about the literal meanings of phrases and sentences.
· The meaning of a complex phrase depends on the meanings of the words in it and the way they are put together (structurally).
· Alleged headlines, where structure (and word meaning is the second case) matters
- [Squad] [helps [dog bite] victim]]
- OR? [Squad] [helps [dog [bite victim]]
- [British left] [waffles [on Falklands]]
- OR? [British] [[left waffles] [on Falklands]]
· This idea is known as:
- The Principle of Compositionality

Question 18

meaning beyond the word 2

Answer 18

· The combination of meanings parallels the combination of parts into a structure (for example, in a very simple piece of structure, definite determiner + noun = noun phrase: “the” + “cat” = “the cat”)
· But the combination of meanings is a different type of combination
- so there have to be rules for saying what combination of meanings goes with each type of (structural) combination of parts.
· In the structure a definite determiner (“the”) can be added to a singular noun (“cat”) to make a noun phrase (“the cat”)
· On the meaning side, “cat” denotes a type of animal, and the meaning of the definite article (“the”) is that it changes the meaning from type of animal to a reference to one particular animal
- In any particular case, which cat is being referred to is determined by context – linguistic and non-linguistic (e.g. what cat is close by when the phrase is used)

Question 19

meaning beyond the sentence

Answer 19

· Sentences typically depict events, actions, state and processes (eventualities). These eventualities are related to each other, for example as cause and effect (as previously illustrated) or statement and supporting argument.
- In complex sentences, there may be more than one eventuality – one per clause
- The clauses may (or may not) be related structurally via co-ordination (e.g.”and”) or subordination (e.g. “because”) – see previous example.
- These structural relations are paralleled by meaning relations, following the principle of compositionality
· Beyond complex sentences there are issues about the meaning of larger stretches of text that have not really been resolved

Question 20

meaning beyond the sentence 2

Answer 20

· One set of issues revolves around the previously mentioned debate about whether there is formal structure above the sentence (e.g. as suggested by story grammars) and hence whether the principle of compositionality can be applied at that level to show how the meaning of extended text follows from its structure and the meaning of its parts.
· However, there are other issues that are primarily about meaning itself.

Question 21

pragmatic meaning

Answer 21

· In addition to the literal direct meaning that texts and conversations have – that we have been alluding to so far, there are other types of (indirect) meaning, sometimes referred to as pragmatic meaning, such as:
· What is taken for granted – presupposition
- “I’ve stopped eating fast food” presupposes “I used to eat fast food”
· What follows but isn’t stated – implicature
- “some of fans went to the match” implicates “not all of the fans went to the match”
· What is socially conveyed – e.g. politeness
- “pass the salt” vs “please could you pass the salt”
· What is conveyed figuratively
- “all the world’s a stage”
· What we do (other than describing things) by speaking
- “with this ring, I thee wed”

Question 22

stylistics

Answer 22

· Use of different forms of language
- Dialect
- Register (e.g. formal vs informal ways of speaking)
· Ways of using language in different types of literary text
- So, creating a link between linguistics and literary criticism
· Some overlap with pragmatics
- For example, an interest in implicature

Question 23

language and languages

Answer 23

· Linguists are interested not only in particular languages, but in what, if anything, all languages have in common
· Superficially, they are different, often very different (compare Whorf, last time)
· But are the principles, if not the details, the same across languages?
· Some linguists think they are
- In particular, Noam Chomsky has talked about a Universal Grammar, particularly in relation to ideas about the structure of phrases and sentences