LING 200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 20: Arbitrariness, Turner Syndrome, Mutual Intelligibility
Wednesday, November 29th, 2017
Exam information
Final exam
• The final exam will be held on Monday, December 18th from 2pm to 5pm.
• The final is cumulative! It will cover all of what we’ve talked about this semester
Final exam format
Types of questions on the exam
1. Multiple choice
2. True/false
3. Fill in the blank
4. 2 shor t problem sets (1 morphological)
5. Shor t answer
Final exam format
• Multiple choice and true/false will be automatically graded (bring a pencil!)
• Short answer – 3 sentence answers.
Final exam review
• Next Wednesday’s class will be a review session for the final exam.
• This session will be
What’s at stake when languages are lost?
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find more resources at oneclass.com
Why care?
• Cultural reasons• Language is an integral part of culture and a symbol for group
identity
• “Language embodies the intellectual wealth of the people who use it.” (Ken Hale)
• Traditional spiritual practices• Artistic and mythological histories
Why care?
• Scientific reasons
• Local knowledge about medicinal plants, local ecology, weather and climate patterns
• The loss of linguistic diversity limits what we can learn about the structure of language
cognition and subsequently the human mind.
• The study of linguistic typology helps us learn what is and is not possible in human
language
• Certain language families are disproportionately advantaged/disadvantaged
Wrapping up
• Challenges faced by speakers of minority languages • A few particularly encouraging
success stories• Too commonly...
• speakers of minority languages feel pressured to shift to a dominant language
• minority languages become endangered and are eventually lost • Alarming for
scientific and cultural reasons
Because myths about language are often involved in language shift, find them and fight
them!
Irish
• Its decline began under English rule in the seventeenth century• By the end of British
rule, Irish was spoken by less than 15% of the
national population• Still facing decline, but...
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find more resources at oneclass.com
• Irish is a compulsory language in mainstream English-speaking schools (didn’t seem
to help)
• Increase in urban speakers, who tend to be young, well-educated and middle-class
(does seem to help)
Hebrew
• At one point, Hebrew was a liturgical and literary language only • No one’s native
language by the 2nd century CE
• Revival of Hebrew took place in the late 1800s and early 1900s • Now there are
approx. 5 million speakers
• Taught in schools, then used in meetings and public activities, then... Children learn it
as their first language
What did we cover this semester?
The big take away messages
• All languages are complex, rule-governed systems • no language is ”better” than any
other
• The Innateness Hypothesis• Certain universal aspects of language are present at
birth• Universal Grammar underlies all human grammatical systems
Universal Grammar• We can think of Universal Grammar (UG) as the blueprint
underlying all
human languages.• Universal Grammar is hardwired into human brains
• Linguistic abilities are not taught• There are characteristics that all human languages
share
• This point of view is referred to as Mentalism
Innateness
• Many supporting arguments come from topics in language acquisition...
• Poverty of the stimulus
• Critical period
• Sign languages
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Final exam: the final exam will be held on monday, december 18 th from 2pm to 5pm, the final is cumulative! It will cover all of what we"ve talked about this semester. Types of questions on the exam: multiple choice, true/false, fill in the blank, 2 shor t problem sets (1 morphological, shor t answer. Final exam format: multiple choice and true/false will be automatically graded (bring a pencil!, short answer 3 sentence answers. Final exam review: next wednesday"s class will be a review session for the final exam, this session will be. Why care: cultural reasons language is an integral part of culture and a symbol for group identity, language embodies the intellectual wealth of the people who use it. (ken hale, traditional spiritual practices artistic and mythological histories. Because myths about language are often involved in language shift, find them and fight them!
