Linguistics 105 * Words and Sounds

Lecture Number One

A Survey of Linguistics

Why Linguistics is Important

A. Philosophical Concerns

1. The Innateness Hypothesis (Descartes) Why does only one species possess speech? Is it because that species is qualitatively different from other species, not another species but another kind of species? If so, that species is like God, apart from all other animals. Like God, it has special responsibilities.

2. The nature of the mind (conceptual categories and mental processes) How do we mean? What is meaning? How is it related to speech?

(1)	fast car	_______s fast
	fast typist	_______s fast
	fast road	_______? fast
	fast buck	_______? fast
(2)	an occasional sailor walked by
(3)	a criminal lawyer
	a moral philosopher
	a civil engineer

3. Summary: Semantics is the study of types of mental categories; how semantic categories are related to linguistic categories (words, sentences); how all are interrelated to produce the human mind.

B. Psychological Concerns: Can we prove innateness?

1. Tests for Innateness

No history of development
Predisposition in the species
No variation in the species
Physiological correlates

2. First- and Second-Language Acquisition

LANGUAGE LEARNABILITY. How do children master such a complex system as language in such a short period of time (between two and six years of age)? If they learn by repetition, why do they say things they have never heard?

Error	Never
daddy go?	*Is daddy?
mommy cookie?	*Is that, *that mommy's?
good doggie	*You are, *are a, *a good

ANIMAL COMMUNICATION. Can only humans learn to speak? If so, why? Chimpanzees share almost 99% of their genes with humans. Shouldn't they be able to speak in some language?

3. Language Processing
SPEECH ERRORS. Why do we make the kinds of errors in speaking that we do and not others which are logically just as possible. Do speech errors tell us something about why humans can speak?

Error	Target
He was turking Talkish	talking Turkish
Bucknell Universary	Bucknell University
Work is the curse of the drinking man	Drinking is the curse of the working man

4. Neurolinguistics
HEMISPHERIC SPECIALIZATION. Where and how is the language faculty controlled in the brain? Is there a language area which accounts genetically for innateness? Are linguistic universals inherited like handedness? 98% of us maintain language processing areas in the left hemisphere, which also controls the right side of the body. SPEECH THERAPY (dyslexia, aphasiology) should reveal the breakdown of language facility along componential boundaries.

4. Summary: Psycholinguistics examines speech performance to provide insight into which species can speak, how they do so, and how language is learned, stored and processed. It explores the ontology of language in the brain to determine the relation of language and the mind.

C. Sociological Interest: Basis of Culture, Society, and Political Power

1. The Nature of Culture and Society

LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY. Do linguistic structures affect cognitive structures, the way we think, the way we perceive the world (Von Humboldt, Whorf, Sapir meet Berlin & Kay)? Do people speaking languages with fewer words for color perceive fewer colors? To what extent does cultural context determine language?

Figure 1: Basic Color Terms in English, Shona and Bassa
English
	purple	blue	green	yellow	orange	red
Shona	cipswuka	citema		cicena		cipswuka
Bassa	hui			zðza

2. Dialects and Political Dominance.

BLACK ENGLISH is simply a dialect whose grammatical and sound rules differ from the standard. Many whites speak the same dialect in the South. Some rules which differ from those in the upper-class dialects: Phonology: Delete /r l/ except before vowels :

car(d) : cah(d)

help : hep

Syntax: Omit auxiliaries be and have where they are contracted in Standard American English:

He nice.

Dey mine,

but : He be bad someday(s) (habitual be) vs. He bad today (specific).

SEXISM IN LANGUAGE. Russian has gender and distinguishes male and female referents, e.g.

student	student-ka
'male student'	'female student'

However, the feminine form is NOT used to refer to positions of authority, e.g. the feminine form of the word for 'secretary', sekretar'-ûa, is not used to refer to a woman who heads a party organization; only the masculine form is.

sekretar'	sekretar'-ûa
'male secretary'	'female secretary'

However, the feminine form IS used if referring to an office secretary. The reason is that the feminine form may be regularly used to insult a male, for example, to call a male a (feminine) dura is worse than to call him a (masculine) durak.

The issue of sexism in American English is in the forefront of political correctness today. How do we resolve these issues in, for example, English compound words with suffix -man, or in the use of "generic he."

LEGAL CONCERNS. How does society judge the accused? What if the accused does not speak English fluently, or speaks a dialect that is considered "sub-standard"? Juries decide cases based on the communicative weight of spoken arguments and testimony. How does pronunciation, "prescribed grammaticality," and semantics effect the decision? How do we deal with the deaf in our justice system? Perhaps more fundamentally, what is a jury's understanding of it's assignment, and how do linguistic loopholes effect their decisions?

3. Summary. Sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics explores the way language is woven into culture and society. It can also seek to eliminate prejudices based on linguistic variation.

D. Computational linguistics

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. Can a computer reproduce human speech and other intelligence?

AI HYPOTHESIS #1: computer can simulate cerebral processes
AI HYPOTHESIS #2: computer can do the same thing as brain

Summary. Computational linguistics (1) provides us with a way of testing linguistic hypotheses and possibly (2) a way of understanding linguistic processes.

E. Practical Applications

1. Voice recognition (courts, computers) and speech synthesis (voice-response computers)
2. Prejudicial language (law, social activism)
3. Speech pathology (aphasiology, language learning)
4. Foreign language teaching and learning
5. Coersive language (advertising, politics), politically correct lang. (publishing, social activism)

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