LING 1 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1-10: Categorical Perception, Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously, Optimality Theory
Chapter 1: What is Language?
● Knowing a language doesn’t entail just knowing a lot of words. We unconsciously use a
profound amount of knowledge when engaging in the simplest of conversations.
Speakers use a finite set of rules to produce and understand an infinite set of possible
sentences.
● Grammar: rules of a language that includes
○ Phonology: the sound system
○ Morphology and lexicon: the structure and property of words
○ Syntax: how words may be combined into p ng and how they associate with one
another
■ The pairing of sound and meaning is completely abritrary. If one did not
know what ‘apple’ meant, one could not be able to discern the meaning
just from looking at the word. Vice versa.
● This goes for hand gestures of sign languages as well
● Linguistic comptence (knowledge): knowledge of grammar, language, and all the
rules) vs Linguistic performance (behavior): includes physical/mental/psychological
aspects of producing language such as memory and endurance
○ Descriptive grammar: represents the unconscious linguistic knowledge/capacity
of the language’s speakers
■ Mental grammar: something every speaker of a language possesses
○ Prescriptive grammar: tries to dictate what grammar should be
○ Teaching grammar: written to help people learn a foreign language or dialect in
their own language
○ Universal grammar: provides blueprint for grammars of all possible human
languages
■ Consists of the innate part of the human language faculty that makes
language development in children possible.
● Children learn language through exposure, not teaching
● Sign language shows us hearing and producing is not a prerequisite to language; are
visual-gestural systems that are as fully developed and structurally complex as spoken
languages
○ ASL (American Sign Language) used in the US
● Basic property of human language: creativity—a speaker’s ability to combine the basic
linguistic units to form an infinite set of “well-formed” grammatical sentences, most of
which new and original.
○ Discretement and displacement allow our language to differ from that of other
species
● The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis holds that the particular language we speak determines or
influences our thoughts and perceptions of the world.
Chapter 2: Morphology: The Words of a Language
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● Morphemes: elemental units of a language that make up words
○ knowing a word or morpheme means knowing
■ Form: sound/gesture
■ Meaning
■ Linguistic sign is the (arbitrary) pairing of sound and meaning
○ Free morphemes stand alone (girl, the)
■ Open class: content words of language (tree, car)
■ Closed class: function words (of, the, at)
○ Bound morphemes include affixes or bound roots
■ Prefixes, suffixes, circumfixes (discontinuous morphemes), infixes
■ Derivational affixes create new words (new meaning): derived words
● Certain derivations of a word can be blocked when a new word
enters lexicon by morphological rules
● Type i: change the pronunciation fo the root (specfic vs specificity)
● Type 2: pronunciation of the root remains the same (plant, planter)
■ Inflectional affixes makes grammatical changes to the words
● mark properties such as tense, number, person, etc.
● Sail, sails, sailing, sailed
■ Complex words have root and stems (affixes)
○ Productive morphological rules: apply freely to appropriate term
■ “Re-” is a very versitile prefix that can be attatched to many different roots
■ Inflectional morphology, like “-s” is very productive
○ Suppletive forms
■ Don’t follow inflective morphology
● Mans men, bringed brought
○ Compound words: a word created by uniting two root words (“homework”)
○ Back formations: words created by misinterpreting an affix look-alike
■ ex: -er as an actual affix; verb peddle was formed under the mistaken
assumption that peddler was peddle + -er.
● These rules apply to sign language as well
Chapter 3: Syntax, the Sentence Patterns of Language
● Syntax: sentences and their structures
● All native language speakers have mental (unconscious) knowledge of the rules of
syntax; they know how words/prhases should be grouped together into sentences to
have meanings
○ Able to produce and understand an infinite number of new sentences
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○ Able to recognize ambiguities and can correctly interpret grammatical relations in
an object, such of that between a subject and direct object
○ How words/word groups are hiearchically arranged into natural units with respect
to one another
■ Constituents: natural groupings/parts of a sentence
● stand alone test, pronoun/do test, move as a unit test
● ; every sentence has at least 1 constituent
● Corresponds to a node on a tree. Exclusively under same node
■ 2+ const. ->Structural ambiguity comes from syntactically correct
variance in structure (grouping) that give sentences multiple meanings
● structural ambiguity: A sentence has two or more trees=
● lexical ambiguity: words with double meanings
○ Knowledge of language (and syntax) is creative in that it is not limited to a fixed
repetoire of expressions
■ Sentences can contain nonsensewords but still follow syntactic rules
● Syntactic categories: family of expressions that can be substituted without the loss of
grammaticality; universal to all lanugages
○ Syntactic categories include
■ Phrasal catagories:
● noun phrase (NP) and verb phrase (VP), adjective phrase (AdjP),
adverb phrase (AdvP) prepositional phrases (PP)
■ Lexical categories: such as noun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition
■ Functional categories: have grammatical functions rather than descriptive
meanings
● Determiniers (articles), demonstratives (this, that, these),
quantifiers (each, every, all), tense (T), complementizers (hoped
that)
○ Includes modal auxilaries (helping words)
■ might, can, could, must, will etc
○ Categories defined by placement in a sentence, what categories they are placed
with, and their inflections, NOT meaning
● Sentence structure can be represented with phase structure trees/constituent
structure trees, which include:
1. Linear order of words
2. Identification of syntactic category of words/phrases
3. hiearchical grouping of syntactic categories
○ Constituents grouped under nodes; higher nodes dominate all nodes below it and
immediately dominate the nodes right beneath it.
■ Sisters: Categories within the same level in hiearchy; immediately
dominated by same node
● Hiearchal structure is universal and specified by x-bar schema
■ Phrase structure rules
● Set of finite syntactical rules; templates that phrase tree diagrams
match to be grammatical
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find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Knowing a language doesn"t entail just knowing a lot of words. We unconsciously use a profound amount of knowledge when engaging in the simplest of conversations. Speakers use a finite set of rules to produce and understand an infinite set of possible sentences. Grammar: rules of a language that includes. Morphology and lexicon: the structure and property of words. Syntax: how words may be combined into p ng and how they associate with one another. The pairing of sound and meaning is completely abritrary. If one did not know what apple" meant, one could not be able to discern the meaning just from looking at the word. Linguistic comptence (knowledge): knowledge of grammar, language, and all the. This goes for hand gestures of sign languages as well rules) vs linguistic performance (behavior): includes physical/mental/psychological aspects of producing language such as memory and endurance. Descriptive grammar: represents the unconscious linguistic knowledge/capacity of the language"s speakers.
