LINA02H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Linguistic Universal, Linguistic Typology, Markedness
LINA02 Lec1
• Language Typology
• Goals for today
o Gain appreciation of apparent massive diversity of human languages
o At the same time, understand that Human Language is fundamentally one type
of system; Language Universals
▪ Language Universal: There are common properties among these
languages that they share.
• Latin is evolved into different languages.
• Why do language die?
-Their speakers use them less and less in favor of a language that appears to offer
greater economic or educational opportunities.
-It happens over 3 generations.
-Majority of laguages do’t have protectio of a atioal goveret.
• Why is language revitalization/documentation important?
Linguists want to figure out what is a possible/impossible language, and if observed
language keep shrinking, our job becomes harder.
• Difference between language and a dialect: Mutual Intelligibility.
• Different approaches to language classification:
o Genetic Classification: Group language into families based on common origin.
o Linguistic Typology
▪ Classify languages based on their structural characteristics
▪ Similar sound patterns, grammatical structures, etc...
▪ Goal: Identify linguistic universals = structural characteristics that occur in
all or most languages
• What are language universals?
o A grammatical characteristic present in all or most languages.
o A grammatical characteristic that depends on the presence of another
grammatical characteristic within the language.
• The nature of Language Universals
o Absolute Universals
o Universal Tendencies
o Implicational Universals
o Markedness
• Vowel Inventories
o Keep the distance as far as possible.
o Vowel Inventories: Universals
• Consonant Inventories
o Consonant Inventories: Implicational Universals
• Syllable Variation
o Syllable Structure
• Typology: Morphology
o Words vs Morpheme
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