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Summary Linguistics 3: The Study of Language
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Summary of the chapters discussed in The Study of Language. Does not include The Story of English (the second part of this course).
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Linguisti cs 3: the study of languageGeorge Yule: 7 t h editi on
Chapter 1: The Origin (p. 1 – 11)
Spoken language developed between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, written language originated
about 5000 years ago.
o Onomatopeia: words that are similar to the noises they describe splash, bang, buzz, etc.
o Pooh-pooh theory: words/sounds developed from the instinctive sounds people make in
emotional circumstances. These sounds are usually produced with sudden intakes of breath
Ouch! Ah! Phew!
Human breathing while speaking is about 90% exhalation with only about 10% of time saved for
quick in-breaths.
Chapter 2: Animal & human language (p. 13 – 26)
Only humans are capable of reflexivity, which means we can use language to think and talk about
language itself.
o Displacement: being able to refer to past and future time Yesterday I did…
o Arbitrariness: the absence of any natural connection between a word and the object duck
is arbitrary, quack is non-arbitrary (because quack is the literal sound and the word to
describe the sound).
o Cultural transmission: the process whereby a language is passed on from one generation to
the next.
o Productivity/creativity: creating new expressions by manipulating their linguistic resources to
describe new objects and situations.
o Fixed reference: the lack of productivity in animal communication
Chapter 16: Written language (p. 247 – 260)
Pictographic ideographic logographic /morphographic syllabic consonantal alphabetic
o Pictographic: drawings that mean a word = sun
o Ideographic: the drawing becomes simple and has more meanings = sun, warmth,
daylight, etc
o Logographic/morphographic: one symbol to represent the meaning of a word, the
relationship between the symbol and word is now arbitrary. = sun
o Phonographic writing: the symbols are adapted to represent sounds.
o Syllabic writing: each symbol represents the pronunciation of a syllable.
o Consonantal alphabet: symbols representing consonant sounds and the reader filling in the
vowels (Hebrew and Arabic).
o Alphabetic writing: single symbol for a single sound.
,Chapter 5: Word formation (p. 58 – 73)
o Neologism: a new word
Not creativity/productivity: creativity is creating new expressions with already
existing words while a neologism is an entirely new word.
o Etymology: the study of the origin and history of a word.
Word formation processes
o (True) coinage: thinking up a completely new word Kleenex – clean
o Eponym: create words from proper nouns/own names jumbo olives – elephant
o Latin/Greek roots: thermometer (thermos + metron)
o Borrowings: taking over a word from another language croissant
o Loan translations/calques: direct translation into the borrowing language
übermensch becomes superman
o Compounds: joining two or more words together sleepwalk
o Blends: joining parts of words together smog = smoke + fog
o Clippings: reducing a word of more than one syllable to a shorter form fax used to
be facsimile
o Hypocorisms: reducing words to one syllable, then adding -y or -ie telly –
television
o Backformations: changing a word’s function by removing a morpheme bulldozer –
bulldoze
o Conversion: changing a word’s function without any reduction to bottle – a bottle
o Derivational processes: adding affixes (pre-, suf- or infixes) unhappily
o Acronyms: taking the initial letters of a set of words CD = compound disk
Chapter 6: Morphology (p. 75 – 91)
The definition of a morpheme is a minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function
Tourists
Tour + ist + s
Travel for pleasure person who plural
Minimal units of meaning grammatical function
, o Free morphemes: morphemes that can stand by themselves
o Bound morphemes: morphemes that normally cannot stand alone and are typically attached
to another form all affixes are bound morphemes.
o Stems: free morphemes that are used with bound morphemes attached
un + dress + ed
prefix stem suffix
bound free bound
o Functional morphemes/function words: we need function words to make our sentences
grammatical articles, copular verbs, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, auxiliary verbs,
etc
o Lexical morphemes/content words: we need content words to make our sentences
meaningful nouns, adjectives, adverbs, lexical verbs, etc.
o Derivational morphemes: when you ass a bound morpheme to a stem to create a new word
with a new meaning. The word you’ve created is a derived word, the morpheme that was
added is a derivational morpheme.
Beauty + ify = beautify
noun derivational morpheme derived word
o Derived word vs. compound: a compound is formed with two free morphemes, a derived
word is a stem with a derivational morpheme.
o Inflectional morpheme: bound morphemes with a strictly grammatical function (indicating
tense, number, gender, etc) Jim’s, 2 sisters, laughing, likes, been, loudest
8 inflectional morphemes
o -s: third person singular present waits
o -ed: past tense waited
o -ing: present participle waiting
o -en: past participle (irregular) eaten
o -s: plural donuts
o –‘s: possessive Lisa’s
o -er: comparative shorter
o -est: superlative shortest
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