what is language
linguistics is the study of language and many aspects connected (interdisciplinary field)
what is phonology
the study of sounds of language (What are the types of sounds/sound combinations that are allowed in a language and which are not)
what are phonetics
the actual set of sounds (acoustics) when we are speakingw
what are semantics
the meaning behind speaking
what is morphology
meaning conveyed through meaningful components and how they combine together (cat vs. cats)
what is syntax
the order in which words and morphemes go together to produce a meaningful sentence
what are pragmatics
how we use it in a social context (nonverbal cues - e.g., tones)
history of babylonia
when they came in power in the middle east, they had inherited the culture of a previous civilization
history of india
oral preservation of Hindu scriptures became an important part of religious obligation of Hindu’s
history of greece
inherited by the romans (nouns, verbs, etc. in english are coming from latin language)
history of china
concepts are used to study linguistics (culturally influence languages like Japanese)
history of middle east
arabic speakers evolved overtime - had to study classical arabic as it is different when spoken compared to the quaran
Language families
- emerged in the 18th century
- Sir William Jones noticed sanskrit was similar to the language of eurpose, greek, and latin (grammatical structures were similar)
psycholinguistics
- Galton studied word association in 1879
- Meringer and Mayer (1895) studied slips of the tongue which Freud tried to analyze with his theory of psychodynamics
- Chomsky and the cognitive revolution (criticized skinner)
verbal behavior
- only considered observable phenomena such as input (stimuli) and output (response)
- behaviorism says we need to explain language as input and output
- as language was a type of behavior, its acquisition and use were explained with reinforcement (children said something correctly) and conditioning (if you said something incorrectly, others would correct it) - similar to operant conditioning
cognitive revolution
- Chomsky’s (1959) review of Skinner’s book
- a new theory called transformational grammar to account for how underlying cognitive structure can account for people’s intuitive grasp of language production and comprehension
language families - some loan words in English
words can be borrowed (e.g., curry, mango from Tamil, jungle from Hindi, adobe and alcohol from Arabic, atlas and demon from Greek)
the evolution of english
- old english from Beowulf
- chaucer gets closer to english
- languages change overtime
- 5000-6000 languages in the world
proto-indo european (PIE)
- most language in europe, west and south asia derive from a common ancestor known as PIE
