Summary of Language Files (12th edition) ISBN: 9780814252703 (02)
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Content: File 1.0-1.4 File 2.0-2.3 File 3.0-3.3 & 3.5 File 4.0-4.5 File 5.0-5.2, 5.4 and 5....
Human language is an enormously complex phenomenon. The task of a linguist is to tease apart the
patterns of various aspects of human language in order to discover how language works.
File 1.2: What you know when you know a language
Linguistic competence: Our ‘hidden’ knowledge of language. You modulate it without thinking
about it.
Linguistic performance: the way that people produce and comprehend language.
o Our performance is what we do with our linguistic competence.
Performance errors: when using language you may make mistakes; mispronounce something,
jumbling words in a sentence etc. This doesn’t mean you lost your competence, but your
performance was impaired.
Since competence can’t be observed directly, linguists must use linguistic performance as a basis
for making hypotheses and drawing conclusions about what linguistic competence must be like.
They focus on consistent patterns in their study.
Communication chain: numerous steps must be carried out in order for an idea to be
communicated from one person to another.
o Noise: Interference in the chain.
Lexicon: consists of the collection of all the words that you know: what function they serve, what
they refer to, how they are pronounced and how they are related to other words.
Mental grammar: all the rules you know about your language.
o (for a linguists) a grammar is a language system. The set of all the elements and rules
that make up a language.
Your linguistic competence is stored in a lexicon and a mental grammar, which you access in
order to both produce and comprehend utterances.
Source: Dawson, H., & Phelan, M. (Eds.). (2016). Language files: materials for an introduction to
language and linguistics(Twelfth). Ohio State University Press.
File 1.3: What you don’t know when you know a language
While speech and writing are both expressions of linguistic competence, speech is more immediate
manifestation of language. Therefore, speech is the primary object of linguistic study.
Writing: The representation of language in a physical medium different from sound.
o There are several reasons why speech is considered a more basic form of language than
writing. The most important ones are the following:
Writing must be taught.
Writing doesn’t exist everywhere.
Neurolinguistics evidence (the processing and production of written language is
overlaid on the spoken language centers in the brain)
Writing can be edited.
Archeological evidence (Writing is a later historical development than spoken
language.)
Three distinct things called ‘grammar’:
, o Mental grammar: what the linguist is actually trying to understand.
o Descriptive grammar: the linguist’s description of the rules of a language as it is
spoken.
o Prescriptive grammar: the socially embedded notion of the ‘correct’ or ‘proper’ ways
to use a language.
Rules that reflect actual language use survive mostly because such rules are associated with a
particular social status.
Prescriptive rules are used as an aid in social identity marking and mobility.
Linguists don’t make use of prescriptive grammars, but rather only descriptive grammars,
which are used as a tool for discovering mental grammars.
Source: Dawson, H., & Phelan, M. (Eds.). (2016). Language files: materials for an introduction to
language and linguistics(Twelfth). Ohio State University Press.
File 1.4: Design features of language
The design features of language: Hockett’s descriptive characteristics of language:
o Mode of communication: the means by which messages are transmitted and
received. For example: voices, hand, arm, head and face movement.
o Semanticity: the property requiring that all signals in a communication system have
a meaning or function. (universal aspect of language across all communication
systems). For example: if your friend says to you ‘pizza’ you both have a similar idea
of what he is talking about.
o Pragmatic function of language: they must serve some useful purpose.
o Interchangeability: refers to the ability of individuals to both transmit and receive
messages.
o Cultural transmission: there are aspects of language that we can only acquire
through communicative interaction with other users of the system. For example:
Children learn a language through interaction with other speakers.
o Arbitrariness in language: the meaning is not in any way predictable from the form:
nor is the form dictated by the meaning.
There are some nonarbitrary aspects of language
Such as onomatopoetic words; words that are imitative of natural
sounds or have meanings that are associated with such sounds of
nature. (still different languages have different onomatopoetic words
for the same sounds, so it’s not entirely nonarbitrary.
Sound symbolism: certain sounds in words not by virtue (deugd) of
being directly imitative (nabootsend) of some sound but rather
simply by being evocative (suggestief) of a particular meaning.
o Discreteness: the property of language that allows us to combine together discrete
units in order to create larger communicative units. For example: He is fast consist of
[h] , [i], [I], [z], [f], [æ], [s] and [t]
o Displacement: the ability of a language to communicate about things, actions and
ideas that aren’t present in space or time while speakers are communicating. For
example: talking about the color red when we aren’t actually seeing it.
, o Productivity: refers to a language’s capacity for novel messages to be built up out of
discrete units. People have the ability to produce and understand any number of
novel sentences that they have never heard before, thereby expressing prepositions
that may have never been expressed before. You understand the meaning of a new
sentence by applying what you know about the rules for how words combine in your
language to the new string of words, together with the meanings of the world
themselves.
o All languages exhibit (tentoonstellen) all nine design features: any communication
system that doesn’t is therefore not a language.
o Natural languages are languages that have evolved naturally in a speech community
(this will be the object of our linguistic study here)
o Constructed languages have been specifically invented by a human and may or may
not imitate all the properties of a natural language
Constructed languages have the potential to become natural languages, if
they are learned by native speakers and adopted by a speech community.
Source: Dawson, H., & Phelan, M. (Eds.). (2016). Language files: materials for an introduction to
language and linguistics(Twelfth). Ohio State University Press.
Chapter 2 Phonetics
File 2.0: What is phonetics?
Phonetics is the study of the minimal units that make up language. For spoken language these are
the sounds of speech – the consonants, vowels, melodies and rhythms.
Articulatory phonetics: the study of the production of speech sounds.
Acoustic phonetics: the study of the transmission and the physical properties of speech
sounds.
Auditory phonetics: the study of the perception (waarneming) of speech sounds.
Source: Dawson, H., & Phelan, M. (Eds.). (2016). Language files: materials for an introduction to
language and linguistics(Twelfth). Ohio State University Press.
File 2.1: Representing Speech Sounds
In articulatory phonetics, we want to know the way in which speed sounds are produces – what parts
of the mouth are used and in what sorts of configurations. To investigate these aspects of sound
production, phoneticians have used x-ray photography. Articulatory phonetics is also done with
palatography to observe contact between the tongue and the roof of the mouth, and instruments to
measure airflow and air pressure during speech.
In acoustic phonetics, we are more interested in the characteristics of the sounds produced by these
articulations. To study acoustic phonetics, phoneticians use pictures of the sounds using tools such as
the sound spectrograph.
Auditory phonetics, focuses on how humans process speech sounds: how we perceive
pronunciation.
, The simplest and most basic method of phonetic analysis – impressionistic phonetic transcription –
is a method of writing down speech sounds in order to capture what is said and how it is
pronounced.
If the goal of having phonetic transcription system is to be able to unambiguously convey the
important aspects of the pronunciation of a given set of sounds, using a written system of symbols,
then such a system must have certain characteristics.
Each symbol should represent one sounds (or phone) only, and there should be only one
symbol for each sound.
If two sounds can distinguish one word from another, they should be represented by
different symbols.
If two sounds are very similar and their difference arises only from the context they are in,
we should be able to represent that similarity. So, the same sound is spelled using the same
letters.
The influence of one sound on a neighboring sound is known as co-articulation.
In order to create a good phonetic transcription system, we need to know what types of sounds we
are trying to transcribe. Phoneticians divide the speech stream into two main categories:
Segments: the discrete units of the speech stream and can be further subdivided into the
categories consonants and vowels.
Suprasegmentals: can be said to ‘ride on top of’ segments in that they often apply to entire
strings of consonants and vowels – these are properties such as stress, tone and intonation.
From an articulatory point of view, consonants and vowels are both made by positioning the vocal
tract in a particular configuration. However, consonants are distinguished from vowels in that
consonants are produced with a constriction somewhere in the vocal tract that impedes airflow,
while vowels have at most only a slight narrowing and allow air to flow freely through the oral cavity.
We can also distinguish consonants and vowels acoustically.
Another way we can distinguish vowels and consonants is the role each one plays in a syllable:
Monosyllabic: only a single sound (uh)
Several sounds such as sprints
Onset: any consonants that occur before the rhyme within the syllable. For example: man,
can
Rhyme: consists of the vowel and any consonants that come after it – the segments that
match in words that we think of as rhyming. For example: man, can
o All syllables have a rhyme, but onsets are optional in some languages.
o The rhyme can be further broken down into the nucleus; the vocalic part of the
rhyme and the coda; which consists of any final consonants.
Syllable structure:
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