Summary of chapters 1/11 and 14/20 from the book Linguistics written by A.E. Baker and K. Hengeveld. The summary is about this book but it is also about the (guest)lectures we had during Linguistics. It is written in English.
Introductions to Linguistics
Lecture 1: 11-09-2023
What is a natural human language?
What makes human language different?
What you are saying has a meaning.
Humans evolve their language.
Defining a natural human language:
Questions relevant to human language:
1. Is it compositional (is the meaning made of contrastive smaller meaningful units, e.g.
pat/bat vs pit/bit)?
2. Is it acquired by offspring?
3. Is it creative (can speakers create new forms never heard by others?)
4. Is it interactive?
5. Is it bound to the here and now?
6. Is there an arbitrary relation between form and meaning?
‘Language is not a good communication system, it is not efficient: There is not one way to
say some things’.
Your brain does not care if stimuli is spoken or signed. It converts the stimuli to the meaning.
Iconicity: Showing a visual representation of a word/ text. →
Is language rule-governed?
Grammars: sets of rules
Natives’ knowledge of these rules is unconscious.
Voiceless consonants: with a stop in your voice.
Reflectives are pronouns that refer back to original
subjects.
Ditransitive verbs: needs a what and a where
→ He puts (what) (where).
Unique trait of human: language capacity
Universalism does not imply uniformity.
Universalism refers to some core structural properties of language:
language despite their differences are organized around the same principles
Compositionality: sentences and theri meanings derive from combinations of their parts.
Phonemes: H/e/s/a/v/e/d/th/e/g/i/r/l
Morphemes: He/save+d/the/girl
Words: He+saved+the+girl
Sentence: He saved the girl
Meaning can be found by looking at the structure.
1
,Lecture 2: The parser - 14-09-2023
The human parser is sensitive to hierarchy and not linear order.
Parents and community speakers/signers do not teach children about such hierarchies.
One letter on itself does not have to mean something specific to form a meaningfull unit with
other letters.
What is linguistics about?
Study of language structure:
How small meaningful elements are combined into larger units:
Sounds = Phonetics and phonology
Word structure = Morphology
Sentence structure = Syntax
How such combined units are interpreted:
Utterance meaning = Semantics
Language use/ language in context = Pragmatics
Linguistic structure: Recursion
Powerful principle of combination in language = Recursion
The ability to create new entities from existing ones of the same type.
The book → about → Mother’s Day.
Noun phrase → preposition → noun phrase
The language user:
The cognitive system of the language user:
- World knowledge
- Linguistic knowledge → competence vs. performance → Mental lexicon
- Knowledge of language use → communicative competence
FIGURE 2.5!
The mental lexicon:
- Not ordered alphabetically but related through meaning or
sound (Different for everyone, thicker the line, better the
connection) →
- Closest approximations in natural languages could be
classifier languages.
Language in the brain: Left hemisphere
- Broca’s area: Syntax → grammatics
- Wernicke’s area: Semantics
- Gyrus angularis: Word retrieval
2
, Aphasia:
Acquired language disorder in production and comprehension in spoken, signed and/or
written language. Result of (one-sided) brain damage caused by stroke, trauma and/or tumor
Neurolinguistics experimental technics:
- fMRI: Shows which parts of the brain show increase in activity
- EEG/ ERP: When does the brain react to linguistic anomalies?
EEG: electroencephalography, ERP: event related potential
Language comprehension:
Modeling comprehension:
Interpretation → sentence comprehension (syntactic, semantic) ↴
↖ sound and/or sign recognition ← word recognition
Word recognition:
Faster recognition in the form of cohorts.
Faster recognition in meaning through priming effects.
Syntactic strategies; Hearers anticipate on frequent structural patterns
Semantic strategies: Hearers anticipate on the most likely meaning
Garden path sentence!
Grammatical encoding error: Involves switching of two lexicon items which can be both
verbs and nouns in English.
Predicate (gezegde in de zin): what is told about the subject. Contains verbs, adjectives and
nouns.
Conversations and implicatures: saying things with an underlying meaning and
understanding this meaning.
Conversational implicature: sentence meaning resultats from compositionality (meaning of
individual words) AND the interpretation that the hearer infers from the linguistic and
non-linguistics context.
Grice’s Maxims cooperation principle:
1. Relevance = info provided is relevant.
2. Quantity = info provided is enough and not too much
3. Quality = info provided is true
4. Style = (pragmatic appropriateness)
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