EGZAMIN LICENCJACKI
ZAGADNIENIA Z ZAKRESU JĘZYKOZNAWSTWA 2007

THE PROPERTIES OF LANGUAGE

Defining features of human language:

(features that are unique for human language and are unlikely to be found in the communication systems of other creatures)

Onomatopoeia (occasionally spelled onomatopœia) is a word or a grouping of words that imitates the sound it is describing, suggesting its source object, such as “bang”, “click”, "buzz", "pop", or "untz" or animal noises such as “moo”, “oink”, “quack”, or “meow". Onomatopoeic words exist in every language, although they are different in each. For example: 

    * In Latin, tuxtax was the equivalent of “bam” or “whack” and was meant to imitate the sound of blows landing.

    * In Ancient Greek, koax was used as the sound of a frog croaking.

    * In Dutch, kukeleku indicates the characteristic sound of rooster's crow.

    * In Korean, mung mung (멍멍) is onomatopoeia for the sound of a dog barking.

    * In Chinese, miāo (喵) is the sound a cat makes.

    * In Japanese, doki doki is used to indicate the (speeding up of the) beating of a heart (and thus excitement).

    * Whereas in Hindi, dhadak (pronounced /ˈd̪əɖək/) is the word for a person's heartbeat, indicative of the sound of one single beat.

    * In French, vlan is used for the sound of a gun or cannon firing.

    * In Haitian Creole, bip imitates the sound of a collision (ex. a car crash).

    * In Turkish, hapşurmak is the verb for to sneeze, based on the sound hapshoo made by a person who sneezes.

ICONIC SIGNS - signs that look like what they are referring to; form 'resembles' meaning.

e.g. onomatopoeia - iconic relation between meaning and form.

DISPLACEMENT - a property of human language that allows to talk about things and events not present in the immediate environment. We can refer to past and future time, and to other locations. Animal communication is generally considered to lack this property (only bee communication has displacement in an extremely limited form; the bee can direct other bees to a food source but it must be the most recent one).

Additionally, displacement enables us to talk about things and places whose existence we cannot even be sure of. We can refer to mythical creatures, demons, fairies, angels, Santa Claus, and recently invented characters such as Superman. It is the displacement that allows people to create fiction and to describe possible future worlds.

ARBITRARINESS - this property is demonstrated by the forms of human language. In general, there is no 'natural' connection between a linguistic form and its meaning. The forms do not 'fit' the objects they denote. Arbitrariness makes the language system more flexible and adaptable, but it also makes it more difficult and laborious to learn.

There are words, however, which have sounds which seem to 'echo' the sounds of objects of activities. E.g. cuckoo, crash, or slurp which are onomatopoeic.

PRODUCTIVITY ('creativity' or 'open-endedness') - a property that allows to create completely new utterances, never heard before. A child learning language is especially active in forming and producing utterances which he/she has never heard before, which is a proof that language is not learned solely by means of imitation and memorization. It is an aspect of language which is linked to the fact that the potential number of utterances in any human language is infinite.

Fixed reference - a feature of animal language; each signal is fixed as relating to a particular object or occasion. E.g. vervet monkey's language system has signals indicating danger but for a snake is CHUTTER and for an eagle is RRAUP, and in the case of new situation they wouldn't be able to manipulate its 'language' and produce a new sound (there is no evidence).

CULTURAL TRANSMISSION - when you acquire a language in a culture with other speakers and not from parental genes. E.g. a Chinese infant brought up from birth by English speakers in the US, may have physical characteristics inherited from its natural parents, but it will inevitably speak English. This property is crucial in the human acquisition process.

DISCRETENESS - the sounds used in language are meaningfully distinct. For example, p and b sounds when used in a language are completely different. In general, each sound in the language is treated as discrete.

DUALITY ('double articulation') - language is organized at two levels simultaneously. In terms of speech production we have the physical level at which we can produce individual sounds, like n, b and i . the other level is when we produce those sounds in a particular combination, as in bin or in a totally different one like nib. So at one level - distinct sounds, at another level - distinct meanings.

Dog won't produce oowf or foow instead of woof.

MEDIUM TRANSFERABILITY - a property according to which language is independent of the medium in which language-signals are realized. Thus it is possible to read aloud what is written and, conversely, to write down what is spoken. It is a property which, as we shall see, depends upon others and which, with them, contributes to the flexibility and adaptability of language-systems.

Non-defining features of human language:

reflexiveness - speech sounds can refer to themselves; we can use language to talk about language.

prevarication - we can lie with speech signs; speakers can - intentionally - make utterances that are false or meaningless. But it is now well-known that many animals use behavior explicitly designed to deceive or mislead, e.g. chameleon or dog pretending to be dead.

vocal-auditory channel - speech is transmitted chiefly through sound; it is used when we speak (visual channel is used when we read). Human linguistic communication id typically generated via the vocal organs and perceived via the ears. Linguistic communication, however, can also be transmitted without sound, via writing or via the sign languages of the deaf. Moreover, many other species (e.g. dolphins) use the vocal-auditory channel.

reciprocity/interchangeability - any speaker/sender of a linguistic signal can also be a listener/receiver; all members of species can make the signs.

total feedback - we monitor our own speech output; speakers have total auditory feedback for their messages, simultaneous with listeners.

specialisation - linguistic signals don't normally serve any other type of purpose, such as breathing or feeding, it is only used for talking.

semanticity - language carries meaning; words or signs or symbols stand for other things (e.g. objects, actions, or concepts); the symbols or words should evoke a mental representation of the objects that they symbolize.

non-directionality - linguistic signals can be picked up by anyone within hearing, even unseen;

rapid fade - speech disappears almost immediately after spoken.

HUMAN ANIMAL LANGUAGE

It is very unlikely that animals understand human language. Rather, the standard explanation is that animals produce a particular behavior in response to a particular sound-stimulus, but don't actually `understand' the meaning of words uttered.

Chimpanzees and language

A large number of experiments on chimpanzees, a specie that resembles humans most, had been made in order to teach them human language.

Spoken Language

The most common way of trying to teach chimpanzees spoken human language is raising them together with human children. Two most remarkable examples are:

Gua (Luella and Winthrop Kellog) - in the 1930s the two scientists were raising Gua with their infant son. As a result, Gua was able to understand about 100 words, she couldn't `say' any of them, however.

Viki (Catherine and Keith Hayes) - in the 1940s the two scientist were raising Viki as if she were a human child. Their attempt was to teach Viki to `say' English words. Poorly as it was, Viki managed to produce her versions of words like mama, papa, cup. Nevertheless, it had become clear that non-human primates do not have a physically structured vocal tract which is suitable for producing human speech.

Sign language

Washoe (Beatrix and Allen Gardner) - beginning in 1961, the Gardners raised Washoe like a human child in a comfortable domestic environment. Sign language, a version of American Sign Language, was used when with Washoe. As a result, she came to use more than a hundred words, with many more being her passive vocabulary. She also seemed capable of holding rudimentary conversations, as well as inventing new forms from two known (eg. Water bird for a swan).

Symbols (Plastic shapes, keys on keyboard)

Sarah (Ann and David Premack) - also in 1960s, Sarah was taught to use plastic shapes in order to make `sentences'. Each shape was associated with an object or action, however, they were arbitrary. Sarah was able to understand complex structures, as well as produce simple sentences.

Lana (Duane Rumbaugh) - the language Lana was learning consisted of a set of symbols on a computer keyboard. When she wanted something, she had to push a number of keys in a right order, `imitating' sentences.

Nim Chimpsky (Herbert Terrace) - an argument against accepting the achievements of Washoe, Sarah and Lana was Nim, on whom since 1973 Herbert Terrace worked. Over two years, under controlled conditions Nim learnt a large number of single words from the American Sign Language, developed two-word combinations, and used them in appropriate circumstances. However, videotaped record proved, that the longer `utterances' were repetitions of simple structures, not an expansion into more complex areas of language. Moreover, he rarely initiated interaction, limiting only to responding to the teachers' signs and very often repeating them.

Terrace's conclusion was that chimpanzees are clever creatures who learn to produce a certain type of behavior (signing) in order to get rewards. Consequently, their signing is not linguistic behavior at all, as, he argued, it might have been just conditioned reflex rather than indication of language capability.

Other examples of animal communication

Animal communication is finite in the amount of messages that can be conveyed.

Birds - despite the fact, that imitative bird calls (e.g. parrots) have little in common with human language, their natural calls and songs are similar in their communicative function. Bird calls (one or more short notes) convey messages associated with immediate environment (danger, feeding, nesting, flocking etc.). Bird songs (more complex patterns of notes) are used to “stake out” territory and to attract mates. Bird songs resemble human language in that there may be many “dialects” within the same species.

Bees - bee dance is used in order to transmit the location of a food source. It contains elements of spatial displacement. Despite the fact, that the amount of messages that can be conveyed is finite, the system is only confined to a single subject. The absence of creativity makes bee communication qualitatively different from human language.

Whales - While the complex and haunting sounds of the Humpback Whale (and some Blue Whales) are believed to be primarily used in sexual selection, the simpler sounds of other whales have a year-round use. While toothed dolphins (including the Orca) are capable of using echolocation (essentially the emission of ultra-sonic beams of sound waves) to detect the size and nature of objects very precisely, baleen whales do not have this capability. Further, unlike some fish such as sharks, a whale's sense of smell is not highly developed. Thus given the poor visibility of aquatic environments and the fact that sound travels so well in water, human-audible sounds play a role in such whales' navigation. For instance, the depth of water or the existence of a large obstruction ahead may be detected by loud noises made by baleen whales.

Dolphins produce various types of sounds, including clicks, burst-pulse emissions, and whistles. Clicks are used for echolocation, the dolphin's form of sonar. Through echolocation, the dolphin can examine its world through sound, by listening to the echoes returning from objects struck by the clicks. Burst-pulse sounds may indicate the dolphin's emotional state, ranging from pleasure to anger. However, these type of vocalizations have been little studied and much remains to be learned about them. Whistles may be used for communication, but it is still an open question as to whether, or how much, of whistle communication is intentional versus unintentional (e.g., rapidly repeated whistling may be elicited by stress, without any specific intention to convey that emotional state to others). During the 1960s, researchers attempted to determine whether the whistle vocalizations might be a form of language. Investigators recorded whistles from many dolphins in many different situations, but failed to demonstrate sufficient complexity in the vocalizations to support anything approaching a human language system. Some of the early work instead pointed to the stereotypy of the whistles from individual dolphins, leading David and Melba Caldwell to suggest that the whistle functioned principally as a “signature,” with each individual dolphin producing a unique signature. Presumably, this enabled that individual to be identified by others. Other researchers have noted, however, that there can be a great deal of flexibility in the whistle. Douglas Richards, James Wolz, and Louis Herman, at the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory at the University of Hawaii, reported a study showing that a dolphin could use its whistle mode to imitate a variety of sounds generated by a computer and broadcast underwater into the dolphin's habitat. Peter Tyack later reported that one dolphin could imitate another's whistle, thereby possibly referring to or calling that individual. As was noted earlier, referring symbolically to another individual, or to some other object or event in the environment, is one of the basic characteristics of a language. However, we still do not know to what extent the dolphin's whistles may be used to refer to things other than themselves or another dolphin. This is a fruitful area for additional study, however.

The clever Hans phenomenon

A claim that animals could understand human language, a horse called Clever Hans, who used hoofbeats to answer arithmetical questions and tap letters of alphabet, was also discredited. As it turned out, Hans was responding to subtle visual cues provided by those asking the question, and if the person didn't know the answer, Hans would get the answers wrong.

1. THE ORIGINS OF LANGUAGE (GLOTTOGONY,GLOSSOGENY)

There are speculations, not facts. We simply don't know how language originated. We suspect that some type of spoken language developed between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, well before written language (about 5,000 years ago). Yet, among the traces of earlier periods of life on earth, we never find any direct evidence or artifacts relating to the speech of our distant ancestors that might tell us how language was back in the early stages. Perhaps because of this absence of direct physical evidence, there has been no shortage of speculation about the origins of human speech.

Natural evolution hypothesis. At some point in their evolutionary development humans acquired a more sophisticated brain which made language invention and learning possible.  In other words, at some point in time humans evolved a language acquisition device, whatever this may be in real physical terms.  The simple vocalizations and gestures inherited from our primate ancestors then quickly gave way to a creative system of language--perhaps within a single generation or two. /Mention the hypothesis about rewiring the visual cortex of the brain into a language area./  According to the natural evolution hypothesis, as soon as humans developed the biological, or neurological, capacity for creative language, the cultural development of some specific system of forms with meanings would have been an inevitable next step. 

      This hypothesis cannot be proven either.  Archeological evidence unearthed thus far, seems to indicate that modern humans, Homo sapiens, emerged within the last 150,000 years.  By 30,000, BC all other species of humanoids seem to have been supplanted by Homo sapiens.  Could the success of our species vis-a-vis other hominids be explained by its possession of superior communicative skills?  Speaking people could teach, plan, organize, and convey more sophisticated information.  This would have given them unparalleled advantage over hominid groups without creative language.  Of course, no one knows whether other species of humanoids--Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalis -- used creative language.  Perhaps they also did. In any case, Homo sapiens, "the wise human," should perhaps really be called Homo loquens, "the speaking human" because language and humans are everywhere found together, whereas wisdom among humans is much more selectively distributed.

Invention hypotheses. There are several hypotheses as to how language might have been consciously invented by humans based on a more primitive system of hominid communication.  Each hypothesis is predicated on the idea that the invention of language and its gradual refinement served as a continuous impetus to additional human mental development. None of the invention hypotheses I will mention is convincing and most sane linguists agree that the origin of language is still a mystery.  But the inventive, sarcastic names given these hypotheses by their critics prove that even linguists can at times be creative.

There are four imitation hypotheses that hold that language began through some sort of human mimicry of naturally occurring sounds or movements:

The divine source

In the biblical tradition, God created Adam and “whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof”. Alternatively, following a Hindu tradition, language came from Sarasvati, wife of Brahma, creator of the universe. In most religions, there appears to be a divine source who provides humans with language. In an attempt to rediscover this original divine language, a few experiments have been carried out, with rather conflicting results. The basic hypothesis seems to have been that, if human infants were allowed to grow up without hearing any language around them, then they would spontaneously begin using the original God-given language.

An Egyptian pharaoh named Psammetichus tried the experiment with two newborn babies more than 2,500 years ago. After two years in the company of goats and a mute shepherd, the children were reported to have spontaneously uttered, not an Egyptian word, but something that was identified as the Phrygian word bekos, meaning `bread'. The pharaoh concluded that Phrygian, an older language spoken in a part of what is modern Turkey, must be the original language. That seems very unlikely. The children may not have picked up this `word' from any human source, but as several commentators have pointed out, they must have heard what the goats were saying. (First remove the -kos ending, which was added in the Greek version of the story, then pronounce be- as you would the English word bed without -d at the end. Can you hear a goat?)

King James the Fourth of Scotland carried out a similar experiment around the year 1500 and the children were reported to have started speaking Hebrew. It is unfortunate that all other cases of children who have been discovered living in isolation, without coming into contact with human speech, tend not to confirm the results of these types of `divine-source' experiments. Very young children living without access to human language in their early years grow up with no language at all. (We will consider the case of one such child later in chapter 13.) If human language did emanate from a divine source, we have no way of reconstructing that original language, especially given the events in a city called Babel, “because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth”, as described in the book of Genesis (11: 9).

The natural sound source

A quite different view of the beginnings of language is based on the concept of natural sounds. The suggestion is that primitive words could have been imitations of the natural sounds which early men and women heard around them. When an object flew by, making a CAW-CAW sound, the early human tried to imitate the sound and used it to refer to the thing associated with the sound. And when another flying creature made a COO-COO sound, that natural sound was adopted to refer to that kind of object. The fact that all modern languages have some words with pronunciations that seem to echo naturally occurring sounds could be used to support this theory. In English, in addition to cuckoo, we have splash, bang, boom, rattle, buzz, hiss, screech, and forms such as bow-wow. In fact, this type of view has been called the `bow-wow' theory of language origin. While it is true that a number of words in any language are onomatopoeic (echoing natural sounds), it is hard to see how most of the soundless as well as abstract things in our world could have been referred to in a language that simply echoed natural sounds. We might also be rather skeptical about a view that seems to assume that a language is only a set of words used as `names' for things.

It has also been suggested that the original sounds of language may have come from natural cries of emotion such as pain, anger and joy. By this route, presumably, Ouch! came to have its painful connotations. But Ouch! and other interjections such as Ah!, Ooh!, Wow! or Yuck!, are usually produced with sudden intakes of breath, which is the opposite of ordinary talk. We normally produce spoken language on exhaled breath. Basically, the expressive noises people make in emotional reactions contain sounds that are not otherwise used in speech production and consequently would seem to be rather unlikely candidates as source sounds for language.

One other natural sound proposal has come to be known as the `yo-he-ho' theory. The idea is that the sounds of a person involved in physical effort could be the source of our language, especially when that physical effort involved several people and had to be coordinated. So, a group of early humans might develop a set of grunts, groans and curses that were used when they were lifting and carrying large bits of trees or lifeless hairy mammoths. The appeal of this theory is that it places the development of human language in some social context. Human sounds, however they were produced, must have had some principled use within the social life of early human groups. This is an important idea that may relate to the uses of humanly produced sounds. It does not, however, answer our question regarding the origins of the sounds produced. Apes and other primates have grunts and social calls, but they do not seem to have developed the capacity for speech.

The oral-gesture source:

This theory goes further back in time when people used physical gestures to communicate their ideas. It is thought that over time they started to use not only their hands, but also movement of the mouth, lips and tongue which subsequently developed into speech as we know it.

  Pooh-Pooh

According to this hypothesis, the first words developed from sighs of pleasure, moans of pain, and other semi-involuntary cries or exclamations. These vocalisms then became the names of the phenomena that made people say them.

Most of the objections to the "ding-dong" hypothesis apply here also. Such words are found in most languages; they are conspicuous by their proverbial nature and incomplete assimilation into the lexicon. Moreover, they are culturally determined, and themselves show a great deal of arbitrariness.[

A somewhat different hypothesis is the "ta-ta" hypothesis. Charles Darwin hypothesized (though he himself was sceptical about his own hypothesis) that speech may have developed as a sort of mouth pantomime: the organs of speech were used to imitate the gestures of the hand. In other words, language developed from gestures that began to be imitated by the organs of speech--the first words were lip icons of hand gestures.

All of these theories do not explicitly explain how language originated, but linguists and anthropologists could agree on when and why that was possible. It is now clear that our ancestors, Neanderthals, were only able to produce few sounds, as it could be examined from their remains dating back to about 60,000 BC. The reconstructed Neanderthal skeleton dating about 35,000 years resembles the modern humans being, which indicates the approximate time of when the oral communication begun.

In their efforts to explain the origin of language, 19th century philosophers and linguists proposed a number of hypotheses noteworthy for their names, although none of the hypotheses has gained more scientific credibility than any other. The first such names were coined by the Danish scholar Otto Jesperson as a way of deriding the hypotheses as simplistic speculation. Once the names caught on, new hypotheses that have arisen often have been given names with a similar style. It seems unlikely that one hypothesis describes the whole process; more likely, multiple mechanisms described by multiple hypotheses, working together or one after another, contributed to the development of languag. One of the more charming views on language origin was suggested by Otto Jespersen. He proposed a theory stating that language derived from song as an expressive rather than a communicative need, with love being the greatest stimulus for language development.

Gestural theory

The gestural theory states that language developed from gestures that were used for communication. During the time language developed, humans lived in social groups, and provided for themselves by hunting and foraging. Some kind of communication system was needed, which was the drive to develop language.

Two types of evidence support this theory.

1. Gestural language and vocal language depend on similar neural systems. The regions on the cortexthat are responsible for mouth and hand movements are bordering to each other.

2. Nonhuman primates can use gestures or symbols for at least primitive communication.

Research found strong support for the idea that verbal language and sign language depend on similar neural structures. Patients who used sign language, and who suffered from a left-hemisphere lesion showed the same disorders with their sign language as vocal patients did with their spoken language. Other researchers found that the same left-hemisphere brain regions were active during sign language as during the use of vocal or written language.

There is also evidence for the use of gestures by primates. The theory assumes that if spoken language evolved from gestures used by our ancestors, those gestures are likely to have been transferred genetically rather than culturally. In this case, the same gestures should still be transferred genetically in humans and should still be found in all human groups, and also apes should use some of this group of gestures. A likely example of this gesture is the begging gesture that both humans and chimpanzees use, with their hands stretched out.

The important question for gestural theories is why there was a shift to vocalizing. There are two likely explanations:

1. Our ancestors started to use more and more tools, meaning that their hands were occupied and could not be used for gesturing.

2. Gesturing requires that both can see each other. There are many situations in which individuals need to communicate even without visual contact, for instance when a predator is closing in on somebody who is up in a tree picking fruit.

Humans still use hand and facial gestures when they speak, especially when people meet who have no language in common.

Monogenesis

A related question concerns the possibility of linguistic monogenesis, a hypothesis that holds that there was one single protolanguage (the "Proto-World language") from which all other languages spoken by humans descend. The linguists Joseph Greenberg and Merritt Ruhlen have advocated such a position. The reconstruction of such a protolanguage, if it exists, would be the Holy Grail of historical linguistics.

Some have gone as far as to claim that there exist etymological root words that are supposed to exist in all languages. Nicholas Marr contended that the protolanguage had been composed of merely four roots, *sal, *ber, *yon and *rosh to which all other words may be traced.

These suggestions are viewed with extreme skepticism by mainstream linguists; they insist that phonetic laws must first be proposed that explain how these roots took their forms in the "daughter" languages, and in the absence of such explanation they reject the entire hypothesis. For these linguists, there may or may not have been such an original protolanguage; the intervening centuries of linguistic change have obscured any trails needed to recover it.

glossogenetics - focusses mainly on the biological basis of the formation and development of human language

Physiological Adaptation

Some of the physical aspects of humans that make the production of speech possible or easier are not shared with other creatures: Human teeth are upright and roughly even in height. Human lips have an intricate muscle interlacing. The human mouth is relatively small, can be opened and closed rapidly and contains a very flexible tongue.

The human larynx (or 'voice box') is special as well as the pharynx above the vocal cords can act as a resonator for any sounds produced.

The human brain is lateralized and has specialized functions in each of the two hemispheres. The functions that are analytic, such as tool-using and language, are largely confined to the left hemisphere of the brain for most humans. All languages require the organizing and combining of sounds or signs in specific constructions.

Speech and Writing

Many of the speculations on the origin of language deal with the question of how humans started to interact with each other. However there are two major functions of language use:

• The interactional function has to do with how humans use language to interact with each other socially or emotionally.

• The transactional function has to do with communicating knowledge, skills and information.

This transactional function will have developed, in part, for the transfer of knowledge from one generation to the next. And while there are cultures that rely mainly on their oral tradition, in many cases, as speech by its nature is transient, the desire for a more permanent record must have developed: written language.

James IV of Scotland (1473-1513) is said to have carried out a similar experiment to Psammetichus. The account given in the History of Robert Lindesay of Pitscottie runs as follows:

The king took a dumb woman and put her in Inchkieth, and gave her two young children in company with her, and furnished them of all necessary things pertaining to their nourishment, that is to say food, drink, fire and candle, clothes, with all other kinds of necessaries which is required to man or woman, desiring the effect hereof to come to know what language the children would speak when they came to lawful age. Some say they spoke good Hebrew, but as to myself I know not but by hearsay.

The physical adaptation source

Instead of looking at types of sounds as the source of human speech, we can look at the types of physical features humans possess, especially those that are distinct from other creatures, which may have been able to support speech production. We can start with the observation that, at some early stage, our ancestors made a very significant transition to an upright posture, with bi-pedal (on two feet) locomotion, and a revised role for the front limbs.

Some effects of this type of change can be seen in physical differences between the skull of a gorilla and that of a Neanderthal man from around 60,000 years ago. The reconstructed vocal tract of a Neanderthal suggests that some consonant-like sound distinctions would have been possible. We have to wait until about 35,000 years ago for features in reconstructions of fossilized skeletal structures that begin to resemble those of modern humans. In the study of evolutionary development, there are certain physical features, best thought of as partial adaptations, which appear to be relevant for speech. They are streamlined versions of features found in other primates. By themselves, such features would not necessarily lead to speech production, but they are good clues that a creature possessing such features probably has the capacity for speech.

Teeth, lips, mouth, larynx and pharynx

Human teeth are upright, not slanting outwards like those of apes, and they are roughly even in height. Such characteristics are not very useful for ripping or tearing food and seem better adapted for grinding and chewing. They are also very helpful in making sounds such as f or v. Human lips have much more intricate muscle interlacing than is found in other primates and their resulting flexibility certainly helps in making sounds like p or b. The human mouth is relatively small compared to other primates, can be opened and closed rapidly, and contains a smaller, thicker and more muscular tongue which can be used to shape a wide variety of sounds inside the oral cavity. The overall effect of these small differences taken together is a face with more intricate muscle interlacing in the lips and mouth, capable of a wider range of shapes and a more rapid delivery of sounds produced through these different shapes.

The human larynx or `voice box' (containing the vocal cords) differs significantly in position from the larynx of other primates such as monkeys. In the course of human physical development, the assumption of an upright posture moved the head more directly above the spinal column and the larynx dropped to a lower position. This created a longer cavity called the pharynx, above the vocal cords, which acts as a resonator for increased range and clarity of the sounds produced via the larynx. One unfortunate consequence of this development is that the lower position of the human larynx makes it much more possible for the human to choke on pieces of food. Monkeys may not be able to use their larynx to produce speech sounds, but they do not suffer from the problem of getting food stuck in their windpipe. In evolutionary terms, there must have been a big advantage in getting this extra vocal power (i.e. a larger range of sound distinctions) to outweigh the potential disadvantage from an increased risk of choking to death.

The human brain

In control of organizing all these more complex physical parts potentially available for sound production is the human brain, which is unusually large relative to human body size. The human brain is lateralized, that is, it has specialized functions in each of the two hemispheres. Those functions that control motor movements involved in things like speaking and object manipulation (making or using tools) are largely confined to the left hemisphere of the brain for most humans. It may be that there is an evolutionary connection between the language-using and tool-using abilities of humans and that both are involved in the development of the speaking brain. Most of the other approaches to the origins of speech have humans producing single noises to indicate objects in their environment. This activity may indeed have been a crucial stage in the development of language, but what it lacks is any structural organization. All languages, including sign language, require the organizing and combining of sounds or signs in specific arrangements. We seem to have developed a part of our brain that specializes in making these arrangements.

If we think in terms of the most basic process involved in tool-making, it is not enough to be able to grasp one rock (make one sound); the human must also be able to bring another rock (other sounds) into proper contact with the first in order to develop a tool. In terms of language structure, the human may have first developed a naming ability by producing a specific and consistent noise (e.g. bEEr) for a specific object. The crucial additional step was to bring another specific noise (e.g. gOOd) into combination with the first to build a complex message (bEEr gOOd). Several thousand years of evolution later, humans have honed this message-building capacity to a point where, on Saturdays, watching a football game, they can drink a sustaining beverage and proclaim This beer is good. As far as we know, other primates are not doing this.

The genetic source

We can think of the human baby in its first few years as a living example of some of these physical changes taking place. At birth, the baby's brain is only a quarter of its eventual weight and the larynx is much higher in the throat, allowing babies, like chimpanzees, to breathe and drink at the same time. In a relatively short period of time, the larynx descends, the brain develops, the child assumes an upright posture and starts walking and talking.

This almost automatic set of developments and the complexity of the young child's language have led some scholars to look for something more powerful than small physical adaptations of the species over time as the source of language. Even children who are born deaf (and do not develop speech) become fluent sign language users, given appropriate circumstances, very early in life. This seems to indicate that human offspring are born with a special capacity for language. It is innate, no other creature seems to have it, and it isn't tied to a specific variety of language. Is it possible that this language capacity is genetically hard-wired in the newborn human?

As a solution to the puzzle of the origins of language, this innateness hypothesis would seem to point to something in human genetics, possibly a crucial mutation, as the source. This would not have been a gradual change, but something that happened rather quickly. We are not sure when this proposed genetic change might have taken place or how it might relate to the physical adaptations described earlier. However, as we consider this hypothesis, we find our speculations about the origins of language moving away from fossil evidence or the physical source of basic human sounds toward analogies with how computers work (e.g. being pre-programmed or hard-wired) and concepts taken from the study of genetics. The investigation of the origins of language then turns into a search for the special `language gene' that only humans possess.

If we are indeed the only creatures with this special capacity for language, then will it be completely impossible for any other creature to produce or understand language?

HISTORY OF WRITING

Oto co mamy na ten temat w materiałach Kaji:

Origins of writing - from pictures to graphic signs
writing (definition): graphic representation of lg
beginnings -(not writing yet) - cave drawings
first “real” writing system: Sumerians (pictographic > into logographic, so called cuneiform -pismo klinowe)
from this > a syllabic system: West Semitic syllabary
from this > Greek alphabet (a symbol - letter - stands for a sound -consonant or vowel)
from Greek alphabet > Roman or Cyrillic
Separately developed systems: hieroglyphic writing (mixed: consonantal + pictographic - both types of information included)
American Indians: the Cherokee syllabary

A oto moje:

A writing system is a type of symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in language. Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that one must usually understand something of the associated language in order to successfully read and comprehend the text. Contrast this with other possible symbolic systems such as information signs, painting, maps, and mathematics, which do not necessarily depend upon prior knowledge of a given language in order to extract their meaning. All writing systems require:

• a set of defined base elements or symbols, individually termed characters or graphemes, and collectively called a script;

• a set of rules and conventions understood and shared by a community, which arbitrarily assign meaning to the base elements, their ordering, and relations to one another;

• a language (generally a spoken language) whose constructions are represented and able to be recalled by the interpretation of these elements and rules;

• some physical means of distinctly representing the symbols by application to a permanent or semi-permanent medium, so that they may be interpreted (usually visually, but tactile systems have also been devised).

• Human attempts to represent information visually can be traced back to drawings which were made ate least 20 000 years ago or to clay tokens from 10 000 years ago.

• However, writing which is based on some type of alphabetic script can only be traced back to inscriptions dated around 3000 years ago.

• Much of the evidence used in the reconstruction of ancient writing systems comes from inscriptions on stone or tablets found in the rubble of ruined cities.

• 1^st petroglyphs- 20 000 years ago- each image used once- no regular system;

• 2^nd PICTOGRAMS- 15 000 B.C.- form petroglyphs when they came to represent particular images in a consistent way;

• 3^rd IDEOGRAMS- when an image started representing more abstract ideas sun: daytime, heat; involved an abstract concept, required learning, they were more distinct form the object; Modern examples: sings like no smoking, restaurant, hotel.

• 4^th LOGOGRAMS- when symbols began to represent words in language (word-writing); 1^st: Sumerians (in modern Iraq) between 5 000 and 6000 -cuneiform- wedge- shaped. The relationship between the word and the entity it represented was arbitrary. Cuneiform is usually referred to as the earliest writing system known. Modern Chinese is to a large extent based on a logogram system (Chinese symbols characters represent words and not sounds of the spoken lg).

• 5^th REBUS WRITING- the symbol for one entity is taken to represent the sound of the spoken word used to refer to that entity. That symbol then comes to be used whenever that sound occurs in words e.g. eye (I) symbol “o”, “+o” would be cross eye.

• 6^th SYLLABIC WRITING- when a writing system employs a set of symbols to represent the pronunciation of syllables, it is described as syllabic writing. Japanese is a partially syllabic writing system. Indian tribe: Cherokee used syllabic. Phoenicians between 3 000 and 4000 years ago- they had a fully developed syllabic system by 1000 BC.

• 7^th ALPHABETIC WRITING- the symbols are used to represent single sounds; an alphabet- a set of written symbols which each represents a single type of sound. The Greeks took the Phoenicians' writing system and took the process of alphabetization a step further- they also used separate symbols for vowel sounds. This alphabet was later modified by the Romans (Western Europe) and also into the Cyrillic alphabet (Eastern Europe) which is the base for the writing system in Russia today.

• Hieroglyphs (from the Greek word for "sacred carving") is a system of writing which employs pictures which can represent either syllables, single sounds (only consonants) or whole words.

The phonemic principle- The writing systems of some languages are based on the phonemic principle of having one letter (or combination of letters) per phoneme and vice-versa. Ideally, speakers can correctly write whatever they can say, and can correctly read anything that is written.

The rebus principle- Written symbols are borrowed to represent new words with the same sounds regardless of what these symbols originally mean. Rebus Principle (Linguistics) is using the existing symbols, such as pictograms, purely for their sounds regardless of their meaning, to represent new words. Many ancient writing systems used Rebus principle to represent abstract words, which otherwise would be hard to be represented by pictograms. The most often used hypothetical example to illustrate the Rebus principle is the representation of the sentence “I see you” by using the pictographs of “eye - sea - ewe”.

A rebus (Latin: "by things") is a kind of word puzzle which uses pictures to represent words or parts of words.

VOCAL TRACT

The main areas of articulation for consonants are the lips, upper front teeth, alveolar ridge, hard palate, soft palate, uvula, the pharynx and the larynx.  The tongue can be viewed as consisting of five main areas: the tip, blade, front, back and root.  An articulation is a narrowing or constriction of the vocal tract caused by an active articulator approaching a passive articulator, or by two active articulators approaching one another.  Articulations may be simple and consist of only one constriction, or they may be complex and consist of two equal constrictions (a double articulation) or of a primary and a secondary articulation

Examples of sounds at different places of articulation:

BILABIAL	p	m
LABIODENTAL	f	v
DENTAL	θ	ð
ALVEOLAR	s	d
POSTALVEOLAR	ʃ	ʒ	ɹ
RETROFLEX	ʈ	ɖ
PALATAL	c	ʝ
VELAR	k	g
UVULAR	q	ɢ
PHARYNGEAL	ħ	ʕ
GLOTTAL	ʔ

The manner of articulation is not a simple feature, but comprises a number of different and largely independent dimensions.  First the articulators may constrict the airstream to different degrees: either blocking it completely, or constricting enough to cause air turbulence, or leaving a considerable gap for the air to pass without turbulence.  Secondly, the soft palate may be raised, preventing nasal airflow, or lowered, allowing such flow.  Thirdly, a closure may be made on the midline of the oral cavity with or without a lateral opening allowing air to escape over the rims of the tongue.  The rate of release of a closure is the fourth factor distinguishing speech sounds.  A further aspect of manner of articulation concerns the speed of the whole gesture for the articulation; for taps, the articulators are in contact for only a very brief period.

The subglottal and supragottal vocal tract

Many locations inside the tract are referenced from their position from the glottis:

Subglottal: below the glottis

Supraglottal: above the glottis

active articulator:

The active articulator is the part of the vocal tract that moves in order to form a constriction. The usual active articulators, together with their Latinate adjectives, are:

lip	labial
tongue tip	apical
tongue blade	laminal
tongue body	dorsal
tongue root	radical

Passive articulator:

The passive articulator is the part of the vocal tract that the active articulator comes closest to in forming the constriction. (Since most of the active articulators are parts of the tongue, most of the passive articulators are parts of the roof of the mouth.)

The following table shows the passive articulators, their Latinate terms, and the active articulators that they are normally paired with:

Passive articulator	Adjective	Usual active articulator(s)
lip	labial	the other lip
upper teeth	dental	lower lip, tongue blade, tongue tip
alveolar ridge	alveolar	tongue tip, tongue blade
postalveolar region	postalveolar	tongue blade, tongue tip
hard palate	palatal	tongue body (sometimes tongue tip)
soft palate	velar	tongue body
uvula	uvular	tongue body
pharyngeal wall	pharyngeal	tongue root

The active and the passive articulator together define the constriction's place of articulation.

Phonation ( the contribution the larynx makes to speech.)

Vocal folds

There are a number of different ways in which the vocal folds can vibrate -- and also ways in which they can fail to vibrate. For example, the vocal folds might be completely closed and not vibrating (as they are during a glottal stop), or they might be open, i.e., held apart and not vibrating, as they are for almost all other voiceless sounds.

Recall that there are a variety of possible timing relationships between when the main constriction of a consonant happens and when voicing starts . We can simply use the terms "voiced" and "voiceless" to answer the question of what the vocal cords are doing:

-In voiced sounds, the vocal cords are vibrating.

- In voiceless sounds, the vocal cords are not vibrating

The vocal cords can do a number of things. They can:

• be held so wide apart that the air makes no sound passing through them. (This is nice when you have to breathe 24 hours a day, but not as useful for speaking.)

• be held closer together, so that the air passing through them becomes turbulent. This quality of sound is called breathiness. It is what is happening in apsiration and in the sound [h].

• be held together so that the air passing through them causes them to vibrate. This is called voicing.

• be held together so tightly that no air can pass through at all, as in a glottal stop.

Airstream mechanism

Any sound of human language involves modifying a stream of moving air. In almost all sounds of almost all languages, this moving airstream is creating by pushing air out from the lungs (technically, the pulmonic egressive airstream mechanism). All sounds of English (and the other common European languages) are pulmonic egressive. But it's possible for the air to be set in motion in other ways. Sounds which use one of the other three most common airstream mechanisms are called ejectives, implosives, and clicks.

The vocal tract (the articulators and their function):

The vocal tract starts with the lungs, which act as a pressure or airflow source. As phonation begins, lung pressure rapidly rises above atmospheric, driving the air from the lungs through the trachea and into the midsection of the tract - the larynx.

The larynx is considered to be the area from the superior tracheal rings to the epiglottis. It is a flexible structure that can move several centimeters up and down. It is composed mostly of cartilage and smooth tissue, including only a single bone (the hyoid) which itself floats with respect to the skeleton

Next is the thyroid cartilage, the largest and most prominent of the vocal tract cartilage. The anterior-most portion of the thyroid cartilage is the laryngeal prominence, or "Adam's Apple".

Next are vocal folds and glottis. glottis: formed by a constriction in the glottis (the air passage through the larynx or voicebox, between the vocal folds). The two most common glottal sounds are the glottal stop [
] and the glottal fricative [h].

Above the vocal folds and before the mouth and nasal cavities is the region known as the pharynx. Immediately following the vocal folds are the ventricular (or false) folds. These are a soft band of tissue that can, under some circumstances, press together and assume the role of the vocal folds. Usually this occurs when the vocal folds have been damaged through disease or overuse.

Next comes the epiglottis, a cartilage whose main function is to fold over the trachea and tightly seal it when food or water is being ingested. During breathing or phonation, it relaxes and forms a resonating chamber in the supraglottal region. As it is movable, it is one way that we are able to change the resonating qualities of our tract in order to form different phonemes.

Above the epiglottis is pharyngeal cavity and the openings to the oral and nasal tracts. The tongue is an important means of changing the cross-sectional area of the oral tract at different distances from the glottis. There are different parts of the tongue: the back of the tongue, the blade and the tip of the tongue.

Next there is uvula (the small organ that hangs at the back of the velum), the velum (the soft palate), the palate ( roof of the mouth), the alveolar ridge ("bumpy" part of the roof of the mouth immediately behind the upper front teeth), teeth, and lips.

The principal organs of articulation

PHONETICS

1. The definition of phonetics:

Phonetics (from the Greek word φωνή, phone meaning 'sound, voice') is the study of the sounds of human speech. It is concerned with the actual properties of speech sounds (phones), and their production, audition and perception. Phonetics deals with the sounds themselves rather than the contexts in which they are used in languages.

2. Basic branches of phonetics:

Phonetics has three main branches:

* articulatory phonetics, concerned with the positions and movements of the lips, tongue, vocal tract and folds and other speech organs in producing speech;

* acoustic phonetics, concerned with the properties of the sound waves and how they are received by the inner ear; and

* auditory phonetics, concerned with speech perception, principally how the brain forms perceptual representations of the input it receives.

3. The description of consonants:

In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a sound in spoken language that is characterized by a closure of the vocal tract sufficient to cause audible turbulence.

Each consonant can be distinguished by several features:

* The manner of articulation is the method that the consonant is articulated, such as nasal (through the nose), stop (complete obstruction of air), or approximant (vowel like).

* The place of articulation is where in the vocal tract the obstruction of the consonant occurs, and which speech organs are involved. Places include bilabial (both lips), alveolar (tongue against the gum ridge), and velar (tongue against soft palate). Additionally, there may be a simultaneous narrowing at another place of articulation, such as palatalisation or pharyngealisation.

* The phonation of a consonant is how the vocal cords vibrate during the articulation. When the vocal cords vibrate fully, the consonant is called voiced; when they do not vibrate at all, it's voiceless.

* The length is how long the obstruction of a consonant lasts. This feature is borderline distinctive in English, as in "wholly" [hoʊlli] vs. "holy" [hoʊli], but cases are limited to morpheme boundaries.

* The articulatory force is how much muscular energy is involved. This has been proposed many times, but no distinction relying exclusively on force has ever been demonstrated.

3a. Voicing:

voiced the vocal folds are held lightly together so that they vibrate with

egressive pulmonic air

voiceless the vocal folds are held apart, allowing egressive pulmonic air to pass

unhindered

A voiced sound is produced when air expelled from the lungs causes the vocal folds to vibrate. This produces a fundamental tone accompanied by several non-harmonic overtones. The resulting sound is modified by movements in the vocal tract, by the volume of the airflow and by the degree of constriction of the vocal cords. Vowels are usually voiced, as are many consonants.

If the vocal folds are lax and not sufficiently close to vibrate, then the sound (usually a consonant) is voiceless.

3b. Places of articulation:

In articulatory phonetics, the place of articulation (also point of articulation) of a consonant is the point of contact, where an obstruction occurs in the vocal tract between an active (moving) articulator (typically some part of the tongue) and a passive (stationary) articulator (typically some part of the roof of the mouth).

bilabial the lower lip articulates against the upper lip

labiodental the lower lip articulates against the upper teeth

dental the tongue tip articulates against the upper teeth (also referred to as

interdental)

alveolar the tongue tip and/or blade articulates against the teeth ridge

post-alveolar the tongue front articulates immediately behind the teeth ridge

palatal the tongue front articulates against the hard palate

velar the tongue back articulates against the soft palate

labial-velar the lips are rounded simultaneously with velar articulation

glottal the vocal folds themselves are the place of articulation

c. Manners of articulation:

In linguistics (articulatory phonetics), manner of articulation describes how the tongue, lips, and other speech organs involved in making a sound make contact. Often the concept is only used for the production of consonants. For any place of articulation, there may be several manners, and therefore several homorganic consonants.

* Plosive, or oral stop, where there is complete occlusion (blockage) of both the oral and nasal cavities of the vocal tract, and therefore no air flow. Examples include English /p t k/ (voiceless) and /b d g/ (voiced). If the consonant is voiced, the voicing is the only sound made during occlusion; if it is voiceless, a plosive is completely silent. What we hear as a /p/ or /k/ is the effect that the onset of the occlusion has on the preceding vowel, and well as the release burst and its effect on the following vowel. The shape and position of the tongue (the place of articulation) determine the resonant cavity that gives different plosives their characteristic sounds.

* Nasal stop, usually shortened to nasal, where there is complete occlusion of the oral cavity, and the air passes instead through the nose. The shape and position of the tongue determine the resonant cavity that gives different nasal stops their characteristic sounds. Examples include English /m, n/.

* Fricative, sometimes called spirant, where there is continuous frication (turbulent and noisy airflow) at the place of articulation. Examples include English /f, s/ (voiceless), /v, z/ (voiced), etc. Most languages have fricatives, though many have only an /s/. However, the Australian languages are almost completely devoid of fricatives of any kind.

* Sibilants are a type of fricative where the airflow is guided by a groove in the tongue toward the teeth, creating a high-pitched and very distinctive sound. These are by far the most common fricatives. Fricatives at coronal (front of tongue) places of articulation are usually, though not always, sibilants. English sibilants include /s/ and /z/.

* Lateral fricatives are a rare type of fricative, where the frication occurs on one or both sides of the edge of the tongue. The "ll" of the Welsh language and the "hl" of Zulu are lateral fricatives.

* Affricate, which begins like a plosive, but this releases into a fricative rather than having a separate release of its own. The English letters "ch" and "j" represent affricates.

* Flap, often called a tap, is a momentary closure of the oral cavity. The "tt" of "utter" and the "dd" of "udder" are pronounced as a flap in North American English.

* Trill, in which the articulator (usually the tip of the tongue) is held in place, and the airstream causes it to vibrate. The double "r" of Spanish "perro" is a trill. Trills and flaps, where there are one or more brief occlusions, constitute a class of consonant called rhotics.

* Approximant, where there is very little obstruction. Examples include English /w/ and /r/.

* One use of the word semivowel is a type of approximant, pronounced like a vowel but with the tongue closer to the roof of the mouth, so that there is slight turbulence. In English, /w/ is the semivowel equivalent of the vowel /u/, and /j/ (spelled "y") is the semivowel equivalent of the vowel /i/ in this usage.

* Lateral approximants, usually shortened to lateral, are a type of approximant pronounced with the side of the tongue. English /l/ is a lateral. Together with the rhotics, which have similar behavior in many languages, these form a class of consonant called liquids.

plosive an articulator effects a complete, air-tight, closure in the mouth, while the soft palate is raised (also referred to as stop articulation)

nasal an articulator effects a complete, air-tight, closure in the mouth, while the soft palate is lowered

fricative an articulator effects a partial closure in the mouth, such that the passage of air at that place creates friction; the soft palate is raised.

affricate a single articulator effects first a plosive, then a fricative, articulation at the same, or a close, place; the soft palate is raised

lateral an articulator effects a partial closure in the mouth by allowing its sides to be free of any contact; the soft palate is raised (also referred to as lateral approximant)

approximant an articulator approaches a place of articulation closely, but without friction; the soft palate is raised (also referred to as frictionless continuant)

vowel no articulator effects any kind of closure or close approach towards any place of articulation. Vowel articulation may be either monophthongal, ie all articulators are relatively stable within a syllable (also referred to as pure or simple) or diphthongal, ie one or more articulator moves significantly within a single syllable (also referred to as a glide or complex).

4. The classification of consonants:

4a. Obstruents:

An obstruent is a consonant sound formed by obstructing outward airflow, causing increased air pressure in the vocal tract.

Obstruents are those articulations in which there is a total closure or a stricture causing friction, both groups being associated with a noise component; in this class there is a distinctive opposition between voiceless and voiced types.

Obstruents are subdivided into stops, fricatives, and affricates. Obstruents are prototypically voiceless, though voiced obstruents are common. This contrasts with sonorants, which are rarely voiceless.

4b. Sonorants.

In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant is a speech sound that is produced without turbulent airflow in the vocal tract. Essentially this means that a sound is sonorant if it can be produced continuously at the same pitch. For example vowels are sonorants, as are consonants like /m/ and /l/. Other consonants, like /d/ or /k/, cannot be produced continuously and so are non-sonorant. In addition to vowels, phonetic categorizations of sounds that are considered sonorant include approximants, nasal consonants, taps, and trills. In the sonority hierarchy, all sounds higher than fricatives are sonorants.

Sonorants are those articulations in which there is only a partial closure or an unimpeded oral or nasal scape of air; such articulations, typically voiced, and frequently frictionless, without noise component, may share many phonetic characteristics with vowels.

The word resonant is sometimes used for these non-turbulent sounds. In this case, the word sonorant may be restricted to non-vocoid resonants; that is, all of the above except vowels and semivowels. However, this usage is becoming dated.

Sonorants contrast with obstruents, which do cause turbulence in the vocal tract. Among consonants pronounced far back in the throat (uvulars, pharyngeals) the distinction between an approximant and a voiced fricative is so blurred that such sounds as voiced uvular fricative ([ʁ]) and voiced pharyngeal fricative ([ʕ]) often behave like sonorants. The pharyngeal consonant is also a semivowel corresponding to the vowel /a/.

5. The description of vowels:

In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language that is characterized by an open configuration of the vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, which are characterized by a constriction or closure at one or more points along the vocal tract. A vowel is also understood to be syllabic: an equivalent open but non-syllabic sound is called a semivowel.

5a. the position of the tongue

Height refers to the vertical position of the tongue relative to either the roof of the mouth or the aperture of the jaw. In high vowels, such as [i] and [u], the tongue is positioned high in the mouth, whereas in low vowels, such as [a], the tongue is positioned low in the mouth. Sometimes the terms open and close are used as synonyms for low and high for describing vowels. The International Phonetic Alphabet identifies seven different vowel heights, although no known language distinguishes all seven:

* close vowel (high vowel)

* near-close vowel

* close-mid vowel

* mid vowel

* open-mid vowel

* near-open vowel

* open vowel (low vowel)

Backness refers to the horizontal tongue position during the articulation of a vowel relative to the back of the mouth. In front vowels, such as [i], the tongue is positioned forward in the mouth, whereas in back vowels, such as [u], the tongue is positioned towards the back of the mouth. The International Phonetic Alphabet identifies five different degrees of vowel backness, although no known language distinguishes all five:

* front vowel

* near-front vowel

* central vowel

* near-back vowel

* back vowel

5b. the shape of the lips

Roundedness refers to whether the lips are rounded or not. In most languages, roundedness is a reinforcing feature of mid to high back vowels, and not distinctive. Usually the higher a back vowel, the more intense the rounding. However, some languages treat roundedness and backness separately, such as French and German (with front rounded vowels), most Uralic languages (Estonian has a rounding contrast for /o/ and front vowels), Turkic languages (with an unrounded /u/), Vietnamese (with back unrounded vowels), and Korean (with a contrast in both front and back vowels).

Different kinds of labialization are also possible. The Japanese /u/, for example, is not rounded like English /u/, where the lips are protruded (or pursed), but neither are the lips spread to the sides as they are for unrounded vowels. Rather, they are compressed in both directions, leaving a slot between the lips for the air to escape. (See Vowel roundedness for illustrations.) Swedish and Norwegian are two of the few languages where this feature is contrastive, having both protruded-lip and compressed-lip high front vowels. In many treatments, both are considered a type of rounding, and are often called endolabial rounding (compressed, where the insides of the lips approach each other) and exolabial rounding (pursed, where the margins of the lips approach each other). However, some phoneticians do not believe that these are subsets of a single phenomenon of rounding, and prefer instead the three independent terms rounded, compressed, and spread (for unrounded).

5c. the position of the soft palate

The soft palate (or velum, or muscular palate) is the soft tissue constituting the back of the roof of the mouth. The soft palate is distinguished from the hard palate at the front of the mouth in that it does not contain bone.

It is movable, consisting of muscle fibers sheathed in mucous membrane, and is responsible for closing off the nasal passages during the act of swallowing.

The soft palate's motion during breathing is responsible for the sound of snoring. Touching the soft palate evokes a strong gag response in most people.

The soft palate also functions during speech to separate the oral cavity (mouth) from the nose, in order to produce the oral speech sounds. If this separation is incomplete, air escapes through the nose during speech and the speech is perceived as hypernasal.

6. the classification of vowels

Tongue Height

The first aspect of vowel classification that you will be introduced to is that of tongue height. Vowels are classified in terms of how much space there is between the tongue and the roof of the mouth, which is determined by the height of the tongue.

There are three primary height distinctions among vowels: high, low, and mid.

Tongue Backness

The second aspect of vowel classification that you will be introduced to is that of tongue backness. Vowels are classified in terms of how far the raised body of the tongue is from the back of the mouth, which is called the backness of the tongue.

There are three primary height distinctions among vowels: front, back, and central.

Lip Rounding

Another aspect of vowel classification is the presence or absence of lip rounding. Some vowels, such as the vowels and , are formed with a high degree of lip rounding. Such vowels are called rounded vowels. Some vowels, such as and , are formed without such rounding, and are called unrounded vowels.

Tense vs. Lax

Another aspect of vowel classification is commonly characterized in terms of the tenseness or laxness of the articulators. Some vowels, such as the vowels and [e], are formed with a high degree of tenseness. Such vowels are called tense vowels. Some vowels, such as and , are formed without a high degree of tenseness, and are called lax vowels.

7. the definition of a diphthong:

In phonetics, a diphthong (also gliding vowel) (Greek δίφθογγος, "diphthongos", literally "with two sounds," or "with two tones") is a monosyllabic vowel combination involving a quick but smooth movement from one vowel to another, often interpreted by listeners as a single vowel sound or phoneme. While "pure" vowels, or monophthongs, are said to have one target tongue position, diphthongs have two target tongue positions. Pure vowels are represented in the International Phonetic Alphabet by one symbol: English "sum" as /sʌm/, for example. Diphthongs are represented by two symbols, for example English "same" as /seɪm/, where the two vowel symbols are intended to represent approximately the beginning and ending tongue positions.

8. the classification of diphthongs:

Falling (or descending) diphthongs start with a vowel of higher prominence (higher pitch or louder) and end in a vowel with less prominence, like /aɪ̯/ in "eye", while rising (or ascending) diphthongs begin with a less prominent vowel and end with a more prominent vowel, like /ɪ̯a/ in "yard". The element with less prominence in the diphthong may be transcribed as a semivowel in the case that there is a corresponding one, thus e.g. /ja/. However, when the whole diphthong is analysed as being one single phoneme, both elements are often transcribed as vowels. Note also that in languages like English and Italian, rising diphthongs are considered not true diphthongs by many phoneticians, but sequences of a semivowel and a vowel.

In closing diphthongs, the second element is more close than the first (e.g. [ai]); in opening diphthongs, more open (e.g. [ia]). Closing diphthongs tend to be falling, and opening diphthongs are generally rising, because open vowels are more sonorous and therefore tend to be more prominent. However, exceptions to this rule are not rare in the world's languages. In Finnish, for instance, the opening diphthongs /ie/ and /uo/ are true falling diphthongs, since they begin louder and with higher pitch and fall in prominence during the diphthong (this is indicated by bolding in the previous transcriptions).

A centering diphthong is one that begins with a more peripheral vowel and ends with a more central one, such as /ɪə/, /ɛə/, and /ʊə/ in Received Pronunciation or /iə/ and /uə/ in Irish. Many centering diphthongs, namely those that begin with a close or close-mid vowel, are also opening diphthongs (eg. [iə], [uə]).

Some languages contrast short and long diphthongs, the latter usually being described as having a long first element. Languages that contrast three quantities in diphthongs are extremely rare, but not unheard of: Northern Sami is known to contrast long, short and finally stressed diphthongs, the last of which are distinguished by a long second element.

9. phonetic and phonemic transcription

Phonetic transcription (or phonetic notation) is the visual system of symbolization of the sounds occurring in spoken human language. The most common type of phonetic transcription uses a phonetic alphabet (such as the International Phonetic Alphabet).

Phonemic transcription is the most common type of phonetic transcription, used in many English dictionaries.

How does phonemic transcription work? Suppose we have two different English sounds. Should we give them separate symbols in transcriptions? In phonemic transcription, the answer is "yes" only if there is an English word where saying one sound instead of another changes the meaning.

For example, saying "d" instead of "t" in the word bet changes the meaning (the word becomes bed), therefore we use separate symbols for "d" and "t" in phonemic transcriptions. In other words, we say that "t" and "d" are two separate phonemes.

On the other hand, the "flap t" (in this pronunciation of the word letter) and the regular "t" (in this one) are two very different sounds. However, there are no English words where saying the "flap t" instead of the regular "t" (or the other way around) changes the meaning. Therefore, in phonemic transcription, we use the same symbol for the "flap t" and the regular "t". In other words, we say that the "flap t" and the regular "t" are the same phoneme.

PHONOLOGY

1. Definition of phonology:

Phonology is the description of the systems and patterns of speech sounds in a language. It is, in effect, based on a theory of what every speaker of a language unconsciously knows about the sound patterns of that language. Phonology is concerned with the abstract or mental aspect of the sounds in lg rather than with the actual physical articulation, An important part of phonology is studying which sounds are distinctive units within a language. In English, for example, /p/ and /b/ are distinctive units of sound.

2. Difference between phonology and phonetics:

Phonology (Greek φωνή (phōnē), voice, sound + λόγος (lógos), word, speech, subject of discussion), is a subfield of linguistics which studies the sound system of a specific language (or languages). Whereas phonetics is about the physical production and perception of the sounds of speech, phonology describes the way sounds function within a given language or across languages.

3. Phoneme: is the theoretical representation of a sound. It is a sound of a language as represented (or imagined) without reference to its position in a word or phrase. A phoneme, therefore, is the conception of a sound in the most neutral form possible and distinguishes between different words or morphemes — changing an element of a word from one phoneme to another produces either a different word or obvious nonsense.

Phonemes are not the physical segments themselves, but mental abstractions of them. A phoneme could be thought of as a family of related phones, called allophones, that the speakers of a language think of, and hear or see, as being categorically the same and differing only in the phonetic environment in which they occur.

An essential property of a phoneme is that it functions contrastively, eg in English there are two phonemes: /f/ and /v/

Note that slash marks are conventionally used to indicate a phoneme, eg /p/

4. distinctive feature is the most basic unit of phonological structure that may be analyzed in phonological theory.

This is just to remind you what the names are, you should have already known them (at least some) if not the definition seems to be explained at length, ps: (anterior is the same as alveolar ) .

1. syllabic/nonsyllabic [+/-syl]. Syllabic sounds are those that constitute syllable peaks, nonsyllabic sounds are those that do not.

2. consonantal/nonconsonantal [+/-cons]. Consonantal sounds are produced with a sustained vocal tract constriction at least equal to that required in the production of fricatives; nonconsonantal sounds are produced without such a constriction. (Obstruents, nasals, liquids vs. vowels and glides.)

3. sonorant/obstruent [+/-son]. Sonorant sounds are produced with a vocal tract configuration sufficiently open that the air pressure inside and outside the mouth is approximately equal. Obstruent sounds are produced with a vocal tract constriction sufficient to increase the air pressure inside the mouth significantly over that of the ambient air. (Vowels, glides, liquids, nasals vs. stops and fricatives.)

4. dental/nondental [+/-cor]. dental sounds are produced by raising the tongue blade toward the teeth or the hard palate; nondental sounds are produced without such a gesture. (Dentals, alveolars, palato-alvcolars, palatals vs. labials, velars, uvulars, pharyngeals.)

5. anterior/posterior [+/-ant]. Anterior sounds are produced with a primary constriction at or in front of the alveolar ridge, while posterior sounds are produced with a primary constriction behind the alveolar ridge. (Labials, dentals, alveolars vs. palato-alveolrs, palatals, velars, uvulars, pharyngeals.)

6. labial/nonlabial [+/-lab]. As the term implies, labial sounds are formed with a constriction at the lips, while nonlabial sounds are formed without such a constriction. (Labial consonants, rounded vowels vs. all other sounds.)

7. distributed/nondistributed [+/-distr]. Distributed sounds are produced with a constriction that extends for a considerable distance along the midsaggital axis of the oral tract; nondistributed sounds are produced with a constriction that extends for only a short distance in this direction. (Sounds produced with the bladce or front of the tongue vs. sounds produced with the tip of the tongue. This feature may also distinguish bilabial sounds from labiodental sounds.)

8. high/nonhigh [+/-high]. High sounds are produced by raising the body of the tongue toward the palate; nonhigh sounds are produced without such a gesture. (Palatals, velars, palatalized and velarized consonants, high vowels and glides vs. all other sounds.)

9. back/nonback [+/-back]. Back sounds are produced with the tongue body relatively retracted; nonback or front sounds are produced with the tongue body relatively advanced. (Velars, uvulars, pharyngeals, velarrs and pharyngealized consonants, central vowels and glides, back vowels and glides vs. all others.)

10. low/nonlow [+/-low]. Low sounds are produced by drawing the body of the tongue down away from the roof of the mouth; nonlow sounds are produced without such a gesture. (Pharyngeal and pharyngealizcd consonants, low vowels vs. all others.)

11. rounded/unrounded [+/-round]. Rounded sounds are produced with protrusion of the lips; unrounded sounds are produced without such protrusion. (Rounded consonants and vowels vs. unrounded consonants and laterals.)

12. continuant/stop [+/-cont]. Continuants are formed with a vocal tract configuration allowing the airstream to flow through the midsaggital region of the oral tract: stops are produced with a sustained occlusion in this region. (Vowels, glides, resounds, fricativcs vs. nasal and oral stops, laterals.)

13. lateral/central [+/-lat]. Latteral sounds, the most familiar of which is [l], are produced with the tongue placed in such a way as to prevent the airstream flowing outward through the center of the Mouth, while allowing it to pass over one or both sides of the tongue, central sounds do not involve such a constriction. (Lateral sonorants, fricatives and affricates vs. all other sounds.)

14. nasal/oral [+/-nas]. Nasal sounds are produced by lowering the velum and allowing the air to pass outward through the nose; oral sounds are produced with velum raised to prevent the passage of air through the nose. (Nasal stops, nasalized consonants, vowels and glides vs. all other sounds.)

15. advanced/unadvanced tongue root [+/-ATR]. As its name implies, this feature is implemented by drawing the root of the tongue forward, enlarging the pharyngeal cavity and often raising the tongue body as well; [-ATR] sounds (do not involve this gesture. ([+ATR] vowels such as [i,u,e,o] vs. [-ATR] vowels.)

16. tense/lax [+/-tense]. Tense vowels are produced with a tongue body or tongue root configuration involving a greater degree of constriction than that found in their lax counterparts; this greater degree of constriction is frequently accompanied by greater length. (Tense vowels vs. lax vowels.) We note that this feature and the last (ATR) are not known to cooccur distinctively in any language and may be variant implementations of a single feature category.

17. strident/nonstrident [+/-strid]. Strident sounds are produced with a complex constriction forcing the airstream to strike two surfaces, producing high-intensity fricative noise; nonstrident sounds are produced without such a constriction. (Sibilants, labiodentals, uvulars vs. all other sounds.) The feature [+strid] is found only in fricatives and affricates.

18. spread/nonspread glottis [+/-spread]. Spread or aspirated sounds are produced with the vocal cords drawn apart, producing a nonpcriodic (noise) component in the acoustic signal; nonspread or unaspirated sounds are produced without this gesture. (Aspirated consonants, breathy voiced or murmured consonants, voiceless vowels and glides vs. all others.)

19. constricted/nonconstricted glottis [+/-cotistr]. Constricted or glottalizcd sounds are produced with the vocal cords drawn together, preventing normal vocal cord vibration; nonconstrictcd (nonglottalizccl) sounds are produced without such a gesture. (Fricatives, implosives, glottalized or laryngealized consonants, vowels and glides vs. all others.)

20. voiced/voiceless [+/- voiced]. Voiced sounds are produced with a laryngeal configuration permitting periodic vibration of the vocal cords; voiceless sounds lack such periodic vibration. (Voiced vs. voiceless consonants.)

5. allophone is one of several similar phones that belong to the same phoneme. We may distinguish complementary allophones, which are distributed regularly within the idiolect of the same speaker according to phonetic environment, from free variants, which are a matter of personal habit or regional accent. For example, [pʰ] as in pin and [p] as in spin are allophones for the phoneme /p/ in the English language because they occur in complementary distribution.

6. Complementary distribution in linguistics is the relationship between two different elements, where one element is found in a particular environment and the other element is found in the opposite environment. It often indicates that two superficially different elements are in fact the same linguistic unit at a deeper level.

7. Free variation in linguistics is the phenomenon of two (or more) sounds or forms appearing in the same environment without a change in meaning and without being considered incorrect by native speakers. Examples from English include:

* glottalization of voiceless stops in word-final position: for example, the word stop may be pronounced with a plain unaspirated [p], [stɑp], or with a glottalized [pˀ], [stɑpˀ]

* the word economics may be pronounced with /i/ or /ɛ/ in the first syllable; although individual speakers may prefer one or the other, and although one may be more common in some dialects than others, both forms are encountered within a single dialect and sometimes even within a single idiolect

* the comparative of many disyllabic adjectives can be formed either with the word more or with the suffix -er, for example more stupid or stupider.

When phonemes are in free variation, speakers are strongly aware of the fact, and will note, for example, that tomato is pronounced differently in British and American English, or that either has two pronunciations which are fairly randomly distributed. However only a very small proportion of English words show such variations.

8. Phonological processes:

Assimilation is a phonological process where a phone becomes similar to a nearby phone.

This is probably the most common phonological process in all languages.

(1) Complete (total) assimilation: one phone becomes identical to another phone.

(2) Partial assimilation: one phone acquires the same feature as another phone (place,

manner, voicing, height, backness, rounding, etc.)

Direction of assimilation:

• Regressive Assimilation

• Assimilation in which a sound influences the preceding segment.

• E.g. indefinite, impossible, incomplete

• Progressive Assimilation

• Assimilation in which a sound influences the following segment.

• E.g. books, bags

Dissimilation:
Two Sounds Becoming Less Alike

• Fifths: [f ၉ f 6 s] [f ၉ f t s]

Three fricatives fricative+stop+fricative

Deletion

• A process that removes a segment from certain phonetic context.

• In English, a schwa [Ⴋ] is often deleted when the next vowel in the word is stressed.

Supposed :/s'p

z/ instead of /s
'p

z

Insertion

• A process that inserts a segment into a particular environment.

• For example:

• in careful speech) something is pronounced

Metathesis

• A process that reorders a sequence of segments

• For example:

• Brid (Old English) Bird (Modern English)

9. The structure of the syllable:

Words can be cut up into units called syllables. Humans seem to need syllables as a way of segmenting the stream of speech and giving it a rhythm of strong and weak beats, as we hear in music. Syllables don't serve any meaning-signaling function in language; they exist only to make speech easier for the brain to process. A word contains at least one syllable.

Syllables have internal structure: they can be divided into parts. The parts are onset and rhyme; within the rhyme we find the nucleus and coda. Not all syllables have all parts; the smallest possible syllable contains a nucleus only. A syllable may or may not have an onset and a coda.

Onset: the beginning sounds of the syllable; the ones preceding the nucleus. These are always consonants in English. The nucleus is a vowel in most cases, although the consonants [ r ], [ l ], [ m ], [ n ], and the velar nasal (the 'ng' sound) can also be the nucleus of a syllable. In the following words, the onset is in bold; the rest underlined.

read flop strap

10. Phonotactics:

Branch of linguistics that refers to sounds and phonemes that occur in a given language.

Possible variations in sound clusters in a syllables:

INITIAL (onset)

• V ( exception ʊ -cannot stand on its own )

• CV (exception ŋ +v cannot occur)

• CCV

• CCCV (the maximum)

CCCV :

STREET

STRONG

SCREAM S + VOICELESS PLOSIVE + APPROXIMANT

SPRING

SPLASH

S + P + R, L

S + T + R J + U: always

S + K + R, W, L, J

FINAL (CODA)

• V

• VC (exception: /r/ /j/ /w/ /h/ - cannot occur)

• VCC

• VCCC

• VCCCC (eg: teksts)

/ŋ/ there Has to be a short vowel before it eg. : sʌŋ, sɒŋ, kɪŋ, bæŋ

ð

z

ʒ cannot be followed by: /l/ /r/ /j/ /w/

ŋ

MORPHOLOGY

The definition of morphology

Morphology is the study of forms. It was originally used in biology but since the middle of 19th century has also been used to describe that type of investigation which analyzes all those basic elements (morphemes) which are used in a language.

Inflection vs. derivation

Inflectional morphemes - never change the grammatical category of a word e.g. old and older are adjectives.

Derivational morpheme - can change the grammatical category of word. The verb teach becomes the noun teacher if we add the derivational morpheme -er.

Whenever there is a derivational suffix and inflectional suffix attached to the same word, they always appear in that order. First the derivational -er attaches to teach, then -s is added to form teachers.

Word

A word is a unit of language that carries meaning and consists of one or more morphemes which are linked more or less tightly together, and has a phonetical value. Typically a word will consist of a root or stem and zero or more affixes. Words can be combined to create phrases, clauses, and sentences. A word consisting of two or more stems joined together is called a compound.

Classes of words

Lexical Content Words - In English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs make up a largest part of the vocabulary. They are content words of language, which are sometimes called open class words because we can and regularly do add new words to these classes. E.g. word download entered English language with the computer revolution.

Function Words - Other syntactic categories include “grammatical” or “function” words. Conjunctions, prepositions, the articles and pronouns have been referred to as being closed class words. With the growth of feminist movement, some proposals have been made for adding a new neutral singular pronoun, which would be neither masculine nor feminine and which could be used as the general, or generic form.

These classes of content and function words appear to have psychological and neurological validity. Some brain - damaged person have greater difficulty in using or understanding function words than content words. The important feature of these two classes is the function rather that their degree of “openness”. What is an open class in one language may be closed in other.

The definition of the morpheme

Words consists in elements. All these elements are called morphemes. It is “a minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function”. Reopen - consists in three morphemes. Open is one minimal unit, then re- (meaning `again') and minimal unit of grammatical function is -ed (past tense).

The types of morphemes

Free and bound morphemes

Free morphemes - they can stand by themselves as single words, e.g. open, tour. They can be generally considered as a set of separate English words forms. When they are used with bound morphemes, the basic word-form involved is technically known as the stem. There are however number of English words where `stem' is not a free morpheme e.g. receive (re- is a bound morpheme but -ceive is not a free morpheme).

Free morphemes fall into two categories:

1. Lexical morphemes - set of ordinary nouns, adjectives and verbs - they carry the content of the message we convey.

2. Functional morphemes - Example: and, but, when, because, one, near, that, it etc. These are conjunctions, propositions, articles and pronouns. It is the closed word class.

Bound morphemes - they cannot normally stand alone but are typically attached to another form, e.g. re-, -ist. They can be also called affixes - all affixes in English language are also bound morphemes.

1. Derivational morphemes - they are used to make new words in language and are also used to make words of a different grammatical category from the stem. They include suffixes and prefixes. Circumfix - these are morphemes which are attached to a root or stem morpheme both initially and finally. They are also sometimes called discontinuous morphemes. An example is German language where past participle of regular verbs is formed by adding prefix ge- and suffix -t.

2. Inflectional morphemes - They are not used to produce new words in the language. They indicate aspects of the grammatical function of a word. They are used to show if a word is plural or singular etc.

Noun + -`s(possessive), -s (plural)

Verb + -s (3^rd person), - ing (progressive), -ed (past tense), -en(past participle)

Adjective + -est (superlative), -er (comparative)

Suppletion

There are no rules to determine the plural forms of exceptional nouns like child/children, man/men etc. When children are acquiring the grammar they have to learn that the plural form of child is children and that the past form of go I went. For this reason we often hear children say mens, goed. They first learn the regular rules and until they learn the exceptions to these rules, they apply them generally to all the nouns and verbs. The irregular forms must be listed separately in our mental dictionary as suppletive forms. When a new word enters the language it is the regular inflectional rules that apply.

In linguistics and etymology, suppletion is the use of one word as the inflected form of another word when the two words are not cognate. Instances of suppletion in a particular language are overwhelmingly restricted to its most commonly-used lexical items. For those learning a language, suppletive forms will be seen as "irregular" or even "highly irregular".

In English, the past tense of the verb go is went, which comes from the past tense of the verb wend, archaic in this sense. (The modern past tense of wend is wended.) There is also a suppletive use of the perfect tense of be to distinguish an experiential sense ("He has been to France") from a resultative sense ("He has gone to France").

Types of word formation:

Derivation

There are morphemes in English that are called derivational morphemes because when they are conjoined to other morphemes or words, a new word is a derived, or formed. The derived would have a different meaning than the original word and may even be in a different grammatical class than the underived word. When verb is suffixed with -able the result is and adjective. When suffix -en is added to adjective a verb may be derived.

Not all derivational morphemes cause change in grammatical class. Many prefixes fall into this category, e.g.: a + moral, ex + wife, semi + annual or music + an, long + er.

New words may enter the dictionary in this fashion, created by the application of morphological rules. When one word like Commun + ist enterers the language other possible forms will not, such as Commun + ite or Commun + ian. The redundancy of such alternative forms, all of which conform to the regular rules of word formation, may explain some of the accidental gaps in the lexicon.

There are many other derivational morphemes in English and other languages such as the suffixes meaning “diminutive”, as in the word pig + let.

Some of the morphological rules are productive, meaning that they can be used freely to form new words from the list of free and bound morphemes. E.g. suffix able. It means that something is ”fit for being done”. VERB + able = able to be VERB-ed

Un- - this prefix means “not”. And combined with adjectives forms the antonym. Un + ADJECTIVE = not-ADJECTIVE.

Accidental gaps - sad - *unsad

Compounding

Compounds are new words that are formed by stringing together other words. There is almost no limit on the kinds of combinations that occur in English.

When two words are in the same grammatical category, the compound will be: noun + noun (girlfriend); adjective + adjective (red-hot).

In many cases words fall into different categories. Then the class of the second, or final word will be the grammatical category of the compound: noun + adjective = lifelong; verb + noun= pickpocket.

Compounds formed with prepositions are in the category of nonprepositional part of compound: overtake.

Though two - word compounds are the most common in English, it would be difficult to state an upper limit: three - time loser, Four - dimensional space - time etc.

Spelling does not tell us what sequence of words constitutes a compound; How the compound is spelled is idiosyncratic:

• With hyphen: gold-tail

• No separation: blackbird

• Space: smoke screen

You cannot always tell by the words the compound contains the meaning of it. It is now always the sum of meanings of words in the compound. Blackboard may be green or white.

By underlying the juxtaposition of words, different grammatical relations are expresses: boathouse is not a house for boats.

The meaning of prefix un-, which is the part of many compounds, must be learnt. But not all meanings can be figured out (flatfoot = policeman). Therefore words as well as the morphemes must be listed in our dictionaries. The morphological rules are also in the grammar, revealing the relations between words and providing the means for forming new words.

Other languages also have rules for conjoining words to form compounds:

French “cure-dent” - toothpick; German”

Blending

Blends are compounds that are: “less than compounds”. Smog, from smoke + fog; motel form motor + hotel. These are blends that have attained full lexical status in English. There are also blends that have limited acceptance, like Cranapple = cranberry + apple.

Clipping

In linguistics, clipping is the word formation process which consists in the reduction of a word to one of its parts. Clippings are, also, known as "shortenings."

Clipping mainly consists of the following types:

1. Back clipping

2. Fore-clipping

3. Middle clipping

4. Complex clipping

Back clipping

Back clipping is the most common type, in which the beginning is retained. The unclipped original may be either a simple or a composite. Examples are: ad (advertisement), cable (cablegram), doc (doctor), exam (examination), gas (gasoline), math (mathematics), memo (memorandum), gym (gymnastics, gymnasium) mutt (muttonhead), pub (public house), pop (popular concert), trad (traditional jazz).

Fore-clipping

Fore-clipping retains the final part. Examples are: phone (telephone), varsity (university), chute (parachute), coon (racoon), gator (alligator), pike (turnpike).fax ; faxsmile transmission

Middle clipping

In middle clipping the middle of the word is retained. Examples are: flu (influenza), tec (detective), polly (apollinaris), jams (pyjamas), shrink (head-shrinker).

Complex clipping

Clipped forms are also used in compounds. One part of the original compound most often remains intact. Examples are: cablegram (cable telegram), op art (optical art), org-man (organization man), linocut (linoleum cut). Sometimes both halves of a compound are clipped as in navicert (navigation certificate). In these cases it is difficult to know whether the resultant formation should be treated as a clipping or as a blend, for the border between the two types is not always clear. According to Bauer (1993), the easiest way to draw the distinction is to say that those forms which retain compound stress are clipped compounds, whereas those that take simple word stress are not. By this criterion bodbiz, Chicom, Comsymp, Intelsat, midcult, pro-am, sci-fi, and sitcom are all compounds made of clippings.

According to Marchand (1969), clippings are not coined as words belonging to the standard vocabulary of a language. They originate as terms of a special group like schools, army, police, the medical profession, etc., in the intimacy of a milieu where a hint is sufficient to indicate the whole. For example, in school slang originated exam, math, lab, and spec(ulation), tick(et = credit) originated in stock-exchange slang, whereas vet(eran), cap(tain), are army slang. While clipping terms of some influential groups can pass into common usage, becoming part of Standard English, clippings of a socially unimportant class or group will remain group slang.

Backformation

1) New words may be formed from existing words by “subtracting” an affix thought to be part of the old word e.g. peddle was derived from peddler. Such words are colled back-formatios.

2) In etymology, the process of back-formation is the creation of a neologism [a word, term, or phrase which has been recently created ("coined")] by reinterpreting an earlier word as a derivation and removing apparent affixes, or more generally, by reconstructing an "original" form from any kind of derived form (including abbreviations or inflected forms). The resulting new word is called a back-formation.

The simplest case is when a longer form of a word pair predates what would usually be the basic form. For example, the noun resurrection was borrowed from Latin, and the verb resurrect was then derived from it. We expect the suffix -ion to be added to a verb to create a noun; when as in this case the suffix is removed from the noun to create the verb, this is a back-formation.

Back formation becomes a kind of folk etymology when it rests on an erroneous understanding of the morphology of the longer word. For example, the singular noun asset is a back-formation from the plural assets. However, assets is originally not a plural; it is a loan-word from Anglo-Norman asetz (modern French assez). The -s was erroneously taken to be a plural inflection.

Back-formation in the English language

Many words came into English by this route: Pease was once a mass noun but was reinterpreted as a plural, leading to the back-formation pea. The noun statistic was likewise a back-formation from the field of study statistics. In Britain the word burgle came into use in the 19th century as a back-formation from burglar (although in some parts of North America burglarize is usually used).

Even though many English words are formed this way, new coinages may sound strange, and are often used for humorous effect. For example, gruntled or pervious (from disgruntled and impervious) would be considered mistakes today, and used only in humorous contexts. Frequently back-formations begin in colloquial use and only gradually become accepted. For example, burger (and beefburger, cheeseburger, etc., from hamburger) is in common use today though it would have been considered awkward or colloquial as late as the 1940s; and enthuse (from enthusiasm) is gaining popularity, though it is still considered substandard by some today.

The mechanics of back-formation

Back-formations of borrowed terms generally do not follow the rules of the original language. For example Homo sapiens is Latin for thinking man. As with all Linnaean species names, this is singular in Latin (plural would be homines sapientes) but it is sometimes mistakenly treated as plural in English, with the corresponding singular back-formation Homo sapien. Similarly antipodes, borrowed from Greek via Latin, has the apparent form of a plural noun, and is sometimes treated as such, with antipode taken to mean "an antipodal point". The final podes is indeed plural, meaning feet, and the corresponding singular would be transliterated as pous (foot). However antipodes itself is a compound of anti (opposite) and podes (feet). As such, it is not a plural noun at all, and the singular *antipous, if it existed at all, would mean "a substitute foot." ("Opposite a foot" would be anti poda.)

Some regard such divergence as incorrect, or as a mark of ignorance. Others assert that a language is determined by its usage and that strictly applying such a principle of correctness would render English a highly irregular blend of Anglo-Saxon, Latin, French and every other language from which it had ever borro

More examples of back-formation

• accrete from accretion

• acculturate from acculturation

• air-condition from air conditioning

• arm (weapon) from arms

• babysit from babysitter

• back-form from back-formation

• biograph from biography

• brainwash from brainwashing

• burgle from burglar

• destruct from destruction

• diagnose from diagnosis

• dry-clean from dry cleaning

• edit from editor

• ghostwrite from ghostwriter

• greed from greedy (the noun was originally "greediness")

Conversion

In linguistics, conversion, also called zero derivation, is a kind of word formation; specifically, it is the creation of a word from an existing word without any change in form. Conversion is more productive in some languages than in others; in English it is a fairly productive process.

Often a word of one lexical category (part of speech) is converted from a word of another lexical category; for example, the noun green in golf (referring to a putting-green) is derived ultimately from the adjective green. Conversions from adjectives to nouns and vice versa are both very common and unnotable in English; much more remarked upon is verbing, the creation of a verb by a converting a noun or other word.

The boundary between conversion and functional shift (the extension of an existing word to take on a new syntactic function) is not well-defined.

Coinage

1) coinage - invention a new word or phrase e.g. Kodak, Aspirin, Zipper, Kleenex

2) neologism - (from Greek [neos] = new; [logos] = word) is a word, term, or phrase which has been recently created ("coined") — often to apply to new concepts, to synthesize pre-existing concepts, or to make older terminology sound more contemporary. Neologisms are especially useful in identifying  inventions, new phenomena, or old ideas which have taken on a new cultural context. The term e-mail, as used today, would be an example of a neologism.

3) Words and phrases are often created, or "coined," by combining existing words, or by giving words new and unique suffixes and/or prefixes. For example, the word "video" had been used to describe any visual image on a television screen, and "tape" to describe a thin strip; the word "videotape" was invented in 1953 as a combination of these two, named by combining the words for two of its key features. Further, the words "video" and "audio" themselves were not borrowed from the Latin until the twentieth century, when new technology required words to define the two concepts. Words which are combined are often shortened or lengthened, such as "smoke" and "fog" becoming smog (1905). Words coined in such a way are called portmanteaus.

Words can also be created through abbreviation, acronym (such as laser), by intentionally rhyming with existing words, or simply through playing with sounds.

Another illustration of coinage is seen in the word dot-com (1994), denoting a company that relies on the Internet for most or all of its business, which arose due to the frequency of businesses including ".com" in their company name. As the Internet became a major market force, it required the creation of an easy term to describe these businesses. This is an easily pinpointed example of how a new idea can quickly become a new word, or neologism, usually based on a void in the then-current language or a need to expedite the expression of an idea which is gaining popularity. New words often enter the language through mass media, the Internet, or through word of mouth—especially, many linguists suspect, by younger people.

Words and phrases can also be created as an attempt to frame a political issue, in order to cause the listener of the word or phrase to interpret the issue as coiner intends. A contemporary example where two phrases have been coined to frame the same issue in opposite ways are "pro-life" and "pro-choice".

Acronyms

1) Acronyms are words derived from the initials of several words. Such words are pronounced as the spelling indicates e.g. UNICEF from United Nations International Childrens Emergency Fund or Radar from Radio detecting and raging.

When the string of letters is not easily pronounced as a word, the acronym is produced by sounding out each letter, as in NFL for National Football League.

2)Acronyms and initialisms are abbreviations, such as NATO, laser, and IBM, that are formed using the initial letters of words or word parts in a phrase or name. Acronyms and initialisms are usually pronounced in a way that is distinct from that of the full forms for which they stand: as the names of the individual letters (as in IBM), as a word (as in NATO), or as a combination (as in IUPAC).

There is sharp disagreement on the difference in meaning between the terms acronym and initialism; Another term, alphabetism, is sometimes used to describe abbreviations pronounced as the names of letters.

SEMANTICS

Semantics - the study of the meaning of words, phrases and sentences (objective & general meaning, not subjective and local);

Conceptual meaning - covers basic, essential components of meaning which are conveyed by literal use of a word.Example: a needle - 'thin, sharp, steel, instrument';

Associative meaning - 'associations' or 'connotations' attached to a word.Example: a needle - 'painful';

Connotated meaning - refers to noncriterial, nondefining characteristic features of a concept: He is an early bird - not true for every bird;

Stylistic meaning - reflected in the choice of words depends on social context; expresses what is communicated of the social circumstances of a language; Example: Kupił sobie nowy samochód.

Kupił sobie nowy wóz. Kupił sobie nową brykę.Some social circumstances of an utterance.

Affective meaning - signals that attitude of a speaker towards a listener; some social context is also present here; Example: - Shut up!; - Could you please lower your voice a little?

Reflected meaning - one word (lexical unit) has two meanings from which one is more prominent and makes the other meaning ambigiuous; Example: - You must really love you wife. <deduction> - Oh, yes! I must. <obligation>

Collocative meaning - results from collocurrence of certain words together; shows what is communicated through associations with other words that tend to occur together; Example: (when a man say - it's OK): - What a pretty girl!(when a man says - homo): - What a pretty boy!

Thematic meaning - which elements of a sentence we think as the most important ones; what is communicated through the way a message is organised; Example: Chłopiec bawił się piłką. emphasis on „piłką“; Piłką bawił się chłopiec. - emphasis on „chłopiec“

Semantic features: certain nouns can only go with certain verbs; decomposition into some features (+) or (-): ±animate, ±human, ±male;

Example: The _________ is reading a book.

N (+human)

However, decomposition into features does not really work!!! What about such nouns as: advice, threat, warning?

Oddness - syntactically correct, but semantically odd;

Example: The hamburger ate a man.

Noun hamburger is not capable of 'eating' (but man has it).

Semantic roles - words are not treated as 'containers' of meaning, but we can look at the 'roles' they fulfil within the situation described by a sentence.Example: The boy kicked the ball.

a) agent - entity that performs the action ('the boy'); agents are typically human (non-human forces, machines or creatures also possible);

b) theme - the entity th t i involved on or affected by the action ('the ball');

c) instrument - entity that is used by the agent (I'm writing with a pen.);

d) experiencer - the person who has a feeling, a perception or a state; if you see, know or enjoy something, you do not really have to perform any action (so you are not an agent);

e) location - (on the table, in the room);

f) source - where the entity moves from;

g) goal - where the entity moves to;

Lexical relations - characterising the meaning of a word not in terms of its component features, but in terms of its relationship to other words; relations between words (other elements);

a) synonyms - two or more forms with very closely related meanings, which are often, but not always, intersubstitutable in sentences; Examples: broad - wide, almost - nearly, cab-taxi;

b) antonyms - two forms with opposite meanings (quick - slow, big - small);

- gradable antonyms - used in comparative constructions (bigger than - smaller than); the negative of one member of the gradable pair does not necessarily imply the other (the dog is not old - is doesn't necessarily mean that the dog is young);

- non-gradable antonyms ('complementary pairs') - normally not used in comparative structures; the negative of one member does imply the other (the person is not dead - does indeed mean that the person is alive);

- reversives - one word in pair is not negative to the other (tie - untie); untie does not mean not tie; also: enter - exit;

c) hyponyms - the meaning of one form is included in the meaning of another - hierarchical relationship; Examples: daffodil - flower, dog - animal, carrot - vegetable; horse and dog - co-hyponyms of animal;

d) homophones - two or more different (written) forms have the same pronunciation: bare - bear, meat - meet, flour - flower;

e) homonyms - words which have quite separate meanings, but which have accidentally come to have exactly the same form; one form (written or spoken) has two or more unrelated meanings: bank (of a river, institution), pupil (at school, in the eye);

f) polysemy - one form (written or spoken) having multiple meanings which are all related by extension: head (object on top of the body and on top of a glass of beer), foot (of person, of bed, of mountain);

g) metonymy - the substitution of a word referring to an attribute for the thing that is meant, as for example the use of the crown to refer to a monarch;

h) collocation - words frequently occurred together;

PRAGMATICS

the definition of pragmatics

The branch of semiotics that deals with the relationship between signs, especially words and other elements of language, and their users.

major issues in pragmatics

- linguistic and situational context

- deixis

- reference

- anaphora

- maxims of conversation

- implicature

- speech acts

- presupposition

sentence meaning vs. utterance meaning

Knowing the meaning of a sentence includes knowing what event or situation the sentence is all about, what objects, persons, place, time, and so on are involved.

The distinction between what sentences mean, and what people mean by uttering those sentences:

· study of sentence/linguistic meaning = semantics

· study of utterance/speaker meaning = pragmatics

Sentences have invariant/context-independent properties—an invariant meaning in virtue of the meaning of the words (the way those words are put together).

Utterances are fairly concrete things: they happen; they're spoken; they're heard; they're out there in the world. The meaning of an utterance is context-dependent, in that it depends on the context in which it is used and the intentions behind its use.

linguistic and situational context

linguistic context (co-text) - discourse that surrounds a language unit and helps to determine its interpretation

situational context - extra linguistic factors

J.L Austin's theory of speech acts

The philosopher J.L. Austin (1911-1960) claims that many utterances (things people say) are equivalent to actions. When someone says: “I name this ship” or “I now pronounce you man and wife”, the utterance creates a new social or psychological reality. We can add many more examples:

• Sergeant Major: Squad, by the left… left turn!

• Referee: (Pointing to the centre circle) Goal!

• Groom: With this ring, I thee wed.

Speech act theory broadly explains these utterances as having three parts or aspects: locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts.

• Locutionary acts are simply the speech acts that have taken place.

• Illocutionary acts are the real actions which are performed by the utterance, where saying equals doing, as in betting, plighting one's troth, welcoming and warning.

• Perlocutionary acts are the effects of the utterance on the listener, who accepts the bet or pledge of marriage, is welcomed or warned.

performatives

Are sentences that actually involve doing - performing something.

Verbs like: bet, promise, warn. `I bet u 5 dollars the Yankees win'

constatives

Are sentences that give only some facts.

Constatives: affirming, alleging, announcing, answering, attributing, claiming, classifying, concurring, confirming, conjecturing, denying, disagreeing, disclosing, disputing, identifying, informing, insisting, predicting, ranking, reporting, stating, stipulating

typology of speech acts (illocutionary acts) by J.R. Searle

Searle posits five illocutionary points:

1) Assertives: statements that may be judged true or false because they purport to describe a state of affairs in the world;

2) Directives: statements that attempt to make the auditor´s actions fit the propositional content;

3) Commissives: statements which commit the speaker to a course of action as described by the propositional content;

4) Expressives: statements that express the “sincerity condition of the speech act”; and

5) Declaratives: statements that attempt to change the world by “representing it as having been changed”

That is, when we speak (or write) we are doing one or more of the following: asserting, directing, commiserating, expressing, or declaring.

felicity conditions

These are conditions necessary to the success of a speech act. They take their name from a Latin root - “felix” or “happy”. They are conditions needed for success or achievement of a performative. Only certain people are qualified to declare war, baptize people or sentence convicted felons. In some cases, the speaker must be sincere (as in apologizing or vowing). And external circumstances must be suitable: “Can you give me a lift?” requires that the hearer has a motor vehicle, is able to drive it somewhere and that the speaker has a reason for the request. It may be that the utterance is meant as a joke or sarcasm, in which case a different interpretation is in order. Loosely speaking, felicity conditions are of three kinds: preparatory conditions, conditions for execution and sincerity conditions.

sincerity conditions

At a simple level these show that the speaker must really intend what he or she says. In the case of apologizing or promising, it may be impossible for others to know how sincere the speaker is. Moreover sincerity, as a genuine intention (now) is no assurance that the apologetic attitude will last, or that the promise will be kept. There are some speech acts - such as plighting one's troth or taking an oath - where this sincerity is determined by the presence of witnesses. The one making the promise will not be able later to argue that he or she didn't really mean it.

A more complex example comes in the classroom where the teacher asks a question, but the pupil supposes that the teacher knows the answer and is, therefore, not sincere in asking it. In this case “Can you, please, tell me X?” may be more acceptable to the child than “What is X?”

We can also use our understanding of sincerity conditions humorously, where we ask others, or promise ourselves, to do things which we think the others know to be impossible: “Please can you make it sunny tomorrow?”

direct vs. indirect speech act

 Direct Speech Acts  Indirect Speech Acts

Speech Acts

Amusing Examples

Make an assertion

There's a dragon in your bed

Request information

What's in your bed?

Make a request

Please take out the garbage

Make a threat

I'll get you for that!

Give a command

Open the window!

Give a warning

Don't bother me!

Give advice

You should come to class more often.

Make bets

I'll bet you can't eat all of it.

Speech Act

Amusing Examples

Assertion

Did you know there's a dragon in your bed?

Request information

I have no idea what that is in your bed.

Make a request

The garbage is still in the kitchen.

Make a threat

You wouldn't want your nose broken, would you?

Give a warning

Maybe you should take a look in your bed.

Give advice

Maybe you should occasionally attend class.

Make bets

5$ says he'll say 'Trust me'.

(Remember that performative language can only be direct.)

The hallmark of an indirect speech act is that its literal meaning is different from its intended meaning. People are intuitively aware of this, and that's why we can play around as follows:

* A: "Could you please pass me the salt?"

* B: "Yes, I could." (does nothing)

politeness

The politeness principle is a series of maxims, which Geoff Leech has proposed as a way of explaining how politeness operates in conversational exchanges. Leech defines politeness as forms of behaviour that establish and maintain comity. That is the ability of participants in a social interaction to engage in interaction in an atmosphere of relative harmony. In stating his maxims Leech uses his own terms for two kinds of illocutionary acts. He calls representatives “assertives”, and calls directives “impositives”.

Politeness is relevant to the concept of face.

face

Face, in pragmatics, is one's public self-image. This is the emotional and social sense of self that every person has and expects everyone else to recognize. Politeness is showing awareness of another person's face.

We have : face-threatening act (when u say sth that represents a threat to another person's slef image)

face-saving act (when u say sth that lessens the possible threat to another's face)

negative face - the need to be independent and to have freedom from imposition

positive face - the need to be connected, to belong, to be a member of the group

Example of: face-saving act that emphasizes a person's negative face:

`I'm sorry to bother you…; I know u r busy but…'

face-saving act that emphasizes a person's positive face:

`Let's do this together…; You and I have the same problem, so…'

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Cohesion - Ties or connections which exists within texts. The Use of cohesive links, which bind the structures within the text.

Cohesive links - they give us some insight into how writers structure what they want to say. Lexical links - words which link sentences - it, this, that. Grammatical links - the use of grammatical devices in order to connect two sentences (moreover, however).

Coherence - THe process of trying to understand a text.

Speech events - e..g debate, interview, various types of discussions. These events vary on a number of factors: roles of the speaker/hearer; their relationship (if the speakers are friends, strangers), topic of the conversation; setting, context.

Turn taking - English conversation can be described as an acticity where two or more poeple take turns at speaking. Typically one person speaks at a time and there tends to be an avoidance of silence between taking turns.

Completion point - participants of a conversation wait until one speaker indicates that (s)he has finished by signalling a completion point. Speakers can mark their turns 'complete' on a number of ways: by asking questions, or by pausing. People can signal if they want to speak on a number of ways - making short, repetitive sounds, use facial body expressions.

Grace's cooperative principle - assumption about conversation is that participants are cooperating with each other.

"Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged"

Supporting this principle are four maxims:

1.Quantity - make your contribution as informative as is require, but not more or less than required (to make long story short, I won't bore you with all the details, etc).

2.Quality - Do not say that which you believe is false or for which you lack evidence (Now correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not absolutely sure, but...)

3. Relation - be relevant, stick to the point

4. Manner - Be clear, brief, orderly.

Implicature - an additional conveyed meaning to a relevant information.

Background knowledge - we build interpretations of what we read using a lot more information that is actually in the words on the page. We actually create what the text is aoubt based on our expectations of what normally happens. In attempting to describe this phenomena researchers use: schema and script.

A schema is a general term for a conventional knowledge structure which exists in memory. ("supermarket schema" - food displayed on shelves, arranged in aisles)

Script - a particular kind of schema, a dynamic schema in which a series of conventional actions take place. Like going to movies (buy ticked, popcorn, watch a movie)

Deixis - there are some words in lg that cannot be interpreted at all unless the physical context (of the speaker) is known. Out of the context it is vague. Deixis - pointing via lg. Any expression used to point to person(my, you) is person deixis. Place deixis points to location (here, there). Deixis which points to time (tomorrow) is time deixis. They all have to be interpreted in terms of what person has in mind.

Reference - an act by which a spekar/writer uses lg to enable a listener/reader to indentify sth. Words do not refer to anything. People do.

Inference - we can use names of people to refer to things (chomsky - a book) Any additional info used by the listener to connect what is said to what must be meant (Picasso is in the museum - the painting).

Anaphora -A subsequent reference to an already introduced entity (Can I borrow your book-antecedent? It is on the table).

Capaphoric reference - a reference to an entity further in the text.

Presupposition - when a speaker uses referring expessions like (this, he, Shakespare) in normal circumstances, she is wokring with an assumption that hearer knows which referent is intended. What a spekar assumes is true or is known by the hearer can be described as presupposition (Your brother is here. - Presupposition - you have a brother).

Discourse - A continous stretch of lg larger than a sentence, a coherent unit such as a sermon, joke, narrative.

D. Analysis - involves study oflg in use (communication). Aim is to show and to interpret the relationship between these regularities and the meaning, prposes expressed through discourse.

text analysis - is the study of the formal linguistic devices that distinguish a text from random sentences.

Substitution - three types: nominal (noun), verbal, clausal. Parts of a predecing text are replaced by subsituting them.

Annie says you drink too much. So do You!.Verb S.

Is it going to rain? I think so! Clausal S

Ellipsis - occurs when some essential structure element is ommited from a sentence or clause and can be recovered by referring to an element in the preceding text.

I like the blue hat. I prefer the green.

Communication analysis attempts to describe and explain the ways in which conversation works. Data should be derived from a naturally occuring instances of everyday interaction.

SOCIOLINGUISTICS

Language standard- a standard language is a particular variety of a language that has been given either legal or quasi-legal status. As it is usually the form promoted in schools and the media, it is usually considered by speakers of the language to be more "correct" in some sense than other dialects. Usually, but not always, based on the tongue of a capital city, a standard language is defined by the selection of certain regional and class markers, and the rejection of others. This is the version of a language that is typically taught to learners of the language as a foreign language, and most texts written in that language follow its spelling and grammar norms. Functions of the standard language: (1) it joins all the dialects together, (2) people speaking that language identify with it, (3) thanks to it people distinguish one nation from the other, (4) it gives and opportunity to describe the language, (5) it gives prestige.

Prestige- there are many factors that come into play when talking about the prestige of a language. It is important to note that dialects are intimately related to the notion of prestige within a society. Usually the standard dialect is the dialect that is associated with prestige in the society at large. However, though a speaker may speak a non-standard variety of a language, she or he may gain prestige within her or his dialect community by using the non-standard variety. This thus brings two concepts: (1) Overt Prestige: this refers to speakers of non-standard varieties who adopt (to some degree) the standard variety. The term Overt Prestige is used to indicate that the speaker is seeking to associate her or himself with the general prestigious dialect within a society. (2) Covert Prestige: this refers to speakers who choose not to adopt a standard dialect. The term Covert Prestige is used because the prestige associated with this choice is that gained from within group social identification. In simple terms, overt prestige is about seeking prestige by assimilating to the standard, while covert prestige is about not choosing to assimilate to the standard.

Vernacular- the ordinary spoken language of a group or geographical area (can be that of a tribe), as opposed to literary language. Vernacular refers to the native language of a country or locality. In general linguistics, it is used to describe local languages as opposed to lingua franca, official standards or global languages. It is sometimes applied to nonstandard dialects of a global language.

Dialect- the form of a language spoken in a particular geographic area, or the form characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers within a given area, such as an occupational, social or ethnic dialect. Covers varieties of pronunciation but also differences in grammar and vocabulary. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors, such as social class.

Isogloss- an isogloss is the geographical boundary of a certain linguistic feature, e.g. the pronunciation of a vowel, the meaning of a word, or use of some syntactic feature

Mutual intelligibility- linguists use creation of mutual intelligibility to determine whether two dialects are varieties of the same language or two separate languages. That is, if speakers of the two dialects can converse fluently (without intentional study or extraordinary effort) with one another, although they recognize themselves to be speaking different varieties of the language, then we are looking at two dialects of the same language. Intelligibility between languages can be asymmetric, with speakers of one understanding more of the other than speakers of the other understand of the first. It is when it is relatively symmetric that it is characterized as 'mutual'. According to some definitions, two or more languages that demonstrate a sufficiently high degree of mutual intelligibility should properly not be considered two distinct languages but, in fact, multiple variants of the same language.

Idiolect- an idiolect is a variety of a language unique to an individual. It is manifested by patterns of word selection and grammar, or words, phrases, idioms, or pronunciations that are unique to that individual. Every individual has an idiolect; the grouping of words and phrases is unique, rather than an individual using specific words that nobody else uses. While often passing unnoticed in speech, some idiolects, particularly unusual ones employed by famous individuals, are immortalized (like in Lech Wałęsa's case).

Accent- in linguistics, an accent is pronunciation characteristic of a particular group of people relative to another group. It is restricted to all varieties in pronunciation.

Slang- the use of clang, or colloquial language, introduces many new words into the language by recombining old words into new meanings. Slang is the use of highly informal words and expressions that are not considered standard in the speaker's dialect or language. Slang is very often colloquial; the language and dialect tend to be specific to a particular territory. Slang terms are frequently particular to a certain subculture, such as musicians, and members of a minority. All the same, slang expressions can spread outside their original arena and become commonly understood.

Jargon- jargon is terminology, much like slang, that relates to a specific activity, profession, or group. It develops as a kind of shorthand, to express ideas that are frequently discussed between members of a group, and also to distinguish those belonging to a group from those who are not. Every conceivable science, profession, trade and occupation has its own set of words, some of which are considered to be “slang” and others “technical”. Jargon can be distinguished from terminology in that it is informal and essentially part of the oral culture of a group, with limited formal or written expression. Many jargon terms have non-jargon equivalents which would be used in print or when addressing non-specialists.

Register- in linguistics a register is a subset of a language used for a particular purpose or in a particular social setting. For example in a religious register we expect to find some expressions not found elsewhere (Ye shell be blessed by Him). There may also be a legal register (We are ready to take the whiteness stand). One of the key features of a register is the use of special jargon.

Style- it is a different kind of “dialect” we use in different life situations. We speak differently to our parents, teachers or friends. Every one of us have at least two styles: informal and formal. Choice of the style depends on the interlocutor. For example in Polish we have five styles: colloquial, artistic, official (formal-urzędowy), religious, scientific.

Style-shifting- all people, regardless of what dialect they speak, control a range of speech styles. Depending on who they are talking to, and where they are, they use different styles of speech. This is called style shifting. For example we speak differently when talking to a) friends, b) parents, c) professors. We maybe casual with friends, more formal but still familiar with parents, and most formal with professors. There are a number of dimensions along which we exhibit variation in speech style. These involve pronunciation (how carefully we pronounce some words), syntax (using some structures which would be sometimes considered incorrect- for example in standard speech we use "there are + plural noun" and "there is + singular noun". But, in more casual speech registers, people often say "there's three problems with your analysis"), and vocabulary (we all know, for example, which words are "dirty" words in our language and when they are acceptable and when they are not acceptable to use. We also know which words are high-brow words that we use to impress people).

Language and gender- it seems that the language is used differently by men and women. (1) female speakers tend to use more prestigious forms than male speakers with the same general social background, (2) different pronunciation of certain words was found in some North American Indian languages (Gros Venre), (3) women generally discuss their personal feelings whereas men appear to prefer non-personal topics such as sport and news, (4) men tend to respond to an expression of feelings or problems by giving advice on solutions, while women are more likely to mention personal experiences that match or connect with the other woman's, (5) women seek connection via language whereas men are more competitive and concerned with power via language, (6) in mixed-gender pairs having conversations, the rate of man interrupting women is substantially greater than the reverse, (7) women are reported to use more expressions associated with tentativeness, such as `hedges' (sort of, kind of) and `tags' (isn't it?, don't you?). There are the attempts to eliminate gender bias in English vocabulary (spokesperson, police officer).

Taboo- a taboo is a strong social prohibition against words, objects, actions, discussions, or people that are considered undesirable or offensive by a group, culture, or society. Breaking the taboo is usually considered objectionable or abhorrent. Taboo words are not to be used, o at least, not in “polite company”. When the act is taboo, reference to this act may also become taboo. That is, first you are forbidden to do something; then you are forbidden to talk about it. What acts or words are forbidden reflect the particular customs and views of the society. (some religious words are forbidden to be used in other situations that church- take God's name in vain, also some words related to sex). Also two or more words or expressions can have the same linguistic meaning, with one acceptable and the others taboo.

Existence of taboo words or taboo ideas stimulates creation of euphemisms (there are words or phrases that replaces a taboo word or serves to avoid frightening or unpleasant subject). Example: urinate- water the horse.

Bilingualism- a country that has two official languages national or regional (like Canada and Belgium). Also communities within a country where their members commonly use two languages in their daily lives. Also a person who can use two languages. If a person is equally competent in both languages she/he can be classified as a co-ordinate bilingual. In case of far form perfect bilingualism, one language will be dominant and the other subordinate; where a person may have to translate from one language into the other.

Multilingualism- a country where there are two or more official languages national or regional (Switzerland). Also communities within a country where their members commonly use two or more languages in their daily lives. Also a person who can use two or more languages. Multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population. The term multilingualism covers the meaning of the word bilingual. The choice of language depends on the participants, context (where), subject, function (why we talk about sth.), but also distance between people, social status, formality, realized function.

Diglossia- a situation where two very different varieties of language co-exist in a speech community, each with a distinct range of social functions. Many cases where for example members of community use one dialect for more public or formal purposes and the other in more informal, colloquial situations. There we can distinguish high dialect (standard) and low dialect (vernacular). There are two types of diglossia: extended diglossia (when people use two different languages- Paraguay: Spanish and Guarani), limited diglossia (when two variants of the same language are used- high and low dialect).

Minority languages- minority language is a language spoken by a minority of the population of a country. Such people are termed "linguistic minorities". Some minority languages are defined by legislation or constitutional documents and afforded some form of official support. Some minority languages are simultaneously also official languages, including the Irish language (Gaelic) in the Republic of Ireland. Likewise, some national languages are often considered minority languages, insofar as they are the national language of a stateless nation.

Language planning- language planning refers to deliberate efforts to influence the behavior of others with respect to the acquisition, structure, or functional allocation of language. Typically it will involve the development of goals, objectives and strategies to change the way language is used. At a governmental level, language planning takes the form of language policy. Many nations have language regulatory bodies which are specifically charged with formulating and implementing language planning policies. Government has to make sure that schools teach proper language, public texts have to be good in terms of language, people can obtain advice about proper language usage, propagate of the language out side of the country's borders.

Language policy (connected to language planning)- designed to favor or discourage the use of a particular language or set of languages. Although nations historically have used language policies most often to promote one official language at the expense of others, many countries now have policies designed to protect and promote regional and ethnic languages whose viability is threatened. Four directions: (1) assimilation (the country forces all people to know the standard language- Afghanistan, Iraq), (2) linguistic pluralism (like in Belgium- French and Flemish; Canada- French and English), (3) vernacularisation (enriching the local variant), (4) internationalization (usage of the language which is not the national language- like if former colonies).

Pidgin- a pidgin is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups who do not share a common language, in situations such as trade. Pidgins usually have no native speakers, but are learned as second languages, and they usually have low prestige with respect to other languages. Grammar of pidgin is based on one language and vocabulary on the second (they are from genetically different languages). The creation of a pidgin usually requires: (1) prolonged, regular contact between the different language communities, (2) a need to communicate between them, (3) an absence of (or absence of widespread proficiency in) a widespread, accessible interlanguage. Substratum (tribal language on which the incoming language flows- grammar of pidgin is based on it), superstratum (the incoming language-vocabulary is based on it).

Creole language- a pidgin language that has acquired native speakers. When a pidgin is acquired by children as their native language it becomes Creole. Popular Creole is Melanesian Pidgin (Tok Pisin). Creoles become fully developed languages, having more lexical items and a broader array of grammatical distinctions than pidgin. In time, they become languages as complete in every way as other languages. Creole language can: (1) become standard languages, (2) can be decreolisation (when the Creole language reconverges with one of the standard languages from which it originally derived), (3) diglossia happens (Creole next to the standard language).

Lingua franca- a lingua franca is any language widely used beyond the population of its native speakers. It is usually the language of the most influential nation(s) of the time. Any given language can become a lingua franca if at least two speakers use it to communicate and the given language is not their native one.

LANGUAGE CULTURE

Language universals

All languages have certain properties:

-every human language can be learned by children

-it employs an ordinary symbol systems and can be used to send and receive messages by its users

-every language has nounlike and verblike components which are organized within a limited set of patterns to produce complex utterances

-there are certain established relationships for example if a language uses fricative sounds it invariably also uses stops, if a language places objects after verbs it will also sue prepositions.

Language relativity

Each language embodies a worldview, with quite different languages embodying quite different view, so that speakers of different languages think about the world in quite different ways (Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis).

Linguistic determinism(Sapir-Whorf hypothesis)

Language determines thought. You can only think in the categories which your language allows you to think in. A much quoted example is the number of words the Eskimos have for'snow'. English has only one word'snow', whereas the Eskimo, viewing similar scenes may see a large number of different entities. But although English don't have single terms for different kinds of snow, they create expressions by manipulating their language for example, wet snow, spring snow….strong and weak hypothesis:

-strong-language and thought are equaled, one can't think a thought that can't be expressed in one's lg

-weak-thought may be influenced by the lg, it is easier to think a thought that is easily expressible in one's lg

(un) translatability

This is a property of a text, or of any utterance in one language, for which no equivalent text or utterance can be found in another language. Quite often , a text or utterance that is considered 'untranslatable' is a lacuna or lexical gap. That is to say that there is no one-to-one equivalence between the word, expression or turn of phrase in the target language. A translator can resort to number of translation procedures to compensate: adaptation, borrowing, calque, compensation.

1. Adaptation=free translation. Translator replaces a social, cultural, reality in the source text with a corresponding reality in the target text for example, the detectives Dupoud and Dupout became famous Thompson and Thomson in English. This is particularly notable in the translation of the names of Disney characters.

2. Borrowing-the translator uses a word or expression from the source text in the target language.

3. Calque-translator translates an expression (word) literally into the target language, translating the elements of the expressions word for word.

4. Compensation-translator solves the problem of concepts of the source text that can't take the same form in the target language.

Basic color terms

There are several criteria on whether a term is basic or not-frequency, familiarity of this usage to average members of the language community. Different lgs have different color-terms and you can't translate precisely terms from one language into another-, for example, in Russian there is no single word for blue.

If a language encodes fewer than 11 categories of basic color terms there are strict limitations on which categories it may encode.

All lgs contain terms for white and black.

If a lg contains 3 terms-+red

If a lg contains 4 terms-either+ green or+ yellow

If a lg contains 5 terms-both green and yellow

If a lg contains 6terms-+blue

If a lg contains 7terms-+brown

If a lg contains more than 8 it contains purple, pink, orange or gray

Codability

Linguistic codability is an ease with which a language tag can be used to distinguish one item from another. Something can be coded because one word in English might not mean the same thing as a similar word in Spanish

PSYCHOLINGUISTIC

Lateralization - specialization the left hemisphere for language (one-sideness)

Dichotic listening test - experimental technique demonstrating that language functions must be located in the left hemisphere.

Assumption before the test: a signal coming in the right ear will go to the left hemisphere, and a signal coming in the left ear will go to the right hemisphere.

Test: a man sits with a set of earphones on and is given two different sounds (np. dog and cat)simultanously, one through each earphone.

Result: When asked to say what was heard, he more often correctly identifies the sound which came through the right ear.

Split brain studies - “Split-brain” refers to an operation that is performed to divide the human brain into two quite separate halves. In this operation the corpus callosum is cut.

''Three patients who were seeking relief from epilepsy had undergone surgery that severed the corpus callosum - the superhighway of neurons connecting the halves of the brain. By working with these patients, my colleagues (...) and I witnessed what happened when the left and right hemispheres were unable to communicate with each other.

It became clear that visual information no longer moved between the two sides. If we projected an image to the right visual field - that is, to the left hemisphere, which is where information from the right field is processed - the patients could describe what they saw. But when the same image was displayed to the left visual field, the patients drew a blank: they said they didn't see anything.”

Aphasia - impairment (uszkodzenie) of language function due to localized brain damage which leads to difficulty in understanding or producing lingustic forms.

Broca's aphasia - reduced amount of speech, distorted articulation, slow and effortful speech.

Example: water... man... no... woman...child...no, man...and girl...

Wernicke' s aphasia - when someone can produce very fluent speech, but it is difficult to make sense of it.

Example: ''I can't talk all of the things I do, and part of the part I can go all right, but I can't tell from the other people.”

Anomia - difficulty in finding the correct words. (What's ink for? -to do with a pen)

Speech comprehension - Wernicke's area

Speech production - Broca's area

Bottom-up process - In a bottom-up approach the individual base elements of the system are first specified in great detail. These elements are then linked together to form larger subsystems, which then in turn are linked, sometimes in many levels, until a complete top-level system is formed.

(bottom-up approach to reading/listening: focuses on the form, on individual sounds, sentence word sterss, rythm; “listen and list down...)

Top-down process - in a top-down approach an overview of the system is first formulated, specifying but not detailing any first-level subsystems. Each subsystem is then refined in yet greater detail, sometimes in many additional subsystem levels, until the entire specification is reduced to base elements.

(in reading/listening:,focuses on the meaning to practice comprehension)

Anticipation errors - These are errors that your application can anticipate, such as attempting to read a file that does not exist or attempting to open a connection with an invalid connection string.

-situations where the external input to the program is not what was

expected. Examples might be garbage input typed by the user, or an out-of-range reading from a temperature sensor.

Spoonerism - (czyli slip-of the tongue); np. interchange of two initial sounds: a tup of tea, a long shory stort, beel fetter ;)

Tip-of the-tongue - when you feel that some word is just eluding you, that you KNOW the word, but it just won't come to the surface. Example: you say

participate instead of precipitate

apartment instead of appointment itp.

synchronic and diachronic linguistics; causes of language change: principle of the least effort, imperfect learning, language contact; types of sound change, morphological change, lexical change, syntactic change and semantic change; language families, cognates, comparative reconstruction, Proto-Indo-European.

HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS

Synchronic linguistics A study of language that looks at a language within the same time period.

Diachronic linguistics The study of language development through time and history, in contrast with the study of a language at a particular time.

Contact The phenomenon the arises when two different linguistic groups are brought together, it may range from long term and intense to short term and casual.

Cognates Two words in different languages that are of the same descend and are similar in form and meaning.

The principle of least effort is a theory of user behavior held among researchers in the field of library and information science. The principle states that an information-seeking client will tend to use the most convenient search method, in the least exacting mode available. Information-seeking behavior stops as soon as minimally acceptable results are found. This theory holds true regardless of the user's proficiency as a searcher, or their level of subject expertise. Also this theory takes into account the user's previous information seeking experience. The user will use the tools that are most familiar and easy to use that find results. The principle of least effort is known as a “deterministic description of human behavior.”[1] The principle of least effort applies not only in the library context, but also to any information seeking activity. For example, one might consult a generalist co-worker down the hall rather than a specialist in the another building, so long as the generalist's answers were within the threshold of acceptability.

Sound changes:

Assimilation, or the influence of one sound on an adjacent sound, is perhaps the most pervasive process. An extremely common assimilation process is responsible for the variation in how the prefix in- is pronounced. Before alveolar consonants and vowels it is simply [in], as in intractable and ineligible, but before velar consonants it usually takes on a velar pronunciation, as in incredible, which in fast speech usually starts with [iŋcr-], and before bilabial consonants it has the bilabial pronunciation [im], which is actually reflected in the orthography, as in impossible.

Metathesis involves the change in order of two adjacent sounds. For example Modern English third is from OE thrid , and Modern English bright underwent the opposite change, its ancestor being beorht. But this is not a regular sound change. Not all "vowel + r" words changed the relative order of these segments, and sometimes we get variation in a single word. Already by the time of Old English, there were two forms of the word for "ask": ascian and acsian. We don't know which form was metathesized from the other, but we do know that ascian won out in the standard language, while the descendent of acsian lives on in many non-standard dialects.

Splits are more rare than mergers, and usually arise when a formerly conditioned alternation loses the environment that provided the original conditioning, and the previously conditioned alternation becomes two independent sounds that contrast with each other. This is basically what happened when /f/ and /v/ split in English (/v/ having previously been an alternate of /f/ when /f/ occurred in an intervocalic position). Plurals like loaves and leaves to loaf and leaf are reflexes of this old alternation.

Loss involves the loss of a sound from a language, as when English lost the velar fricative [x] (like the ch in German Bach, which is still written in some words as gh (e.g. bright, night, rough).

Syncope and apocope are the loss of medial and final sounds respectively. Middle English 'tame' in the past tense was /temede/. It lost both its medial and final vowels to become Modern English /teymd/. These are usually conditioned changes that do not involve loss of the same sound elsewhere.

Prothesis and epenthesis are the introduction of additional sounds, initially and medially respectively. The addition of the /e/ that made Latin words like scola 'school' into Portuguese escola is an example. As for epenthesis, an example from English is the /d/ inserted into ME thunrian to give us the Modern English thunder, or the short vowel inserted in front of the inflectional suffixes -s and -d when they follow similar sounds.

Analogy. Another common type of change which breaks up historical regularity in favor of synchronic regularity is analogy. This is most frequently a morphological change, where the inherited form for some category is replaced by a form which has been extended from some slightly different category. Usually, this is the way in which irregularities are levelled out.

An example of this is the creation of the form helped to replace the older holp. The ending -ed was extended to this verb on analogy with other regular verbs in the language, like played and worked.

Types of language change

All languages are constantly changing. The causes are many and varied.

Lexical changes

The constant influx of new words in the English language would make it an obvious choice of investigation into language change, although it is difficult to define precisely and accurately the vocabulary available to speakers of English. Throughout its history English has not only borrowed words extravagantly from other languag es but has re-combined and recycled them to create new meanings. Anglo-saxon and Scandinavian influence exists from the period of old english which is foreign to modern eyes. A large influx of French came about as a result of the Norman Invasion in the middle english period. This softened and refined the language and allowed it to evolve closer to the modern form. Exploration and trade as well as the expansion of education and literacy allowed the language to develop further. In general greater dialectual contact led to greater influx of loanwords and resulted in the rich form of english we have today. Many linguists such as David Crystal agree that our language could not have evolved into its rich form had it not been for its history of invaders and the greater global expansion and contact with other rich cultures that have had their input in this global language. Dictionary writers try to keep track of the change in language by recording the appearance in the language of new words, or new usages for old words. The most notorious of these is Dr Samuel Johnson with his dictionary published in 1755.

Phonetic and phonological changes

The sociolinguist William Labov famously recorded the change in pronunciation in a relatively short period in the American resort of Martha's Vineyard and showed how this was the result of social tensions and processes. Even in the relatively short time that broadcast media have been available, we can observe the difference between the `marked' pronunciation of the newsreaders of the 1940s and the 1950s and the more neutral, `unmarked' pronunciation of today. The greater acceptance and fashionability of regional accents in the media may also reflect a more democratic, less formal society.

Small-scale phonological changes are difficult to map and record, especially as the technology of sound recording only goes back a hundred years or so. So the only evidence we have of how language has changed over the centuries is written evidence of what human languages have sounded like.

Spelling changes

The modern obsession with spelling is a fairly recent trend. Differences in spelling are very often the most immediately obvious thing about a text from a previous century. In the pre-print era, when literacy was much less common, there was no fixed system and in the handwritten manuscripts that survive, words are spelt according to regional pronunciation and personal preference.

The development of the printing press, however, presented printers with dilemmas: texts from the fifteenth through to the seventeenth centuries show many internal inconsistencies, with the same word often being spelled differently within the same text. Famously, Shakespeare spelled his own name in many different ways. Additionally, they were tempted to choose from the various spellings based on typographical criterion, e.g. to get uniform line lengths when assembling type pieces on a composing stick. It being easier to make one of the lines of type longer than to make the other lines shorter, word lengths tended to standardize on the longer spellings.

Unfortunately modern spellings were not the result of a single consistent system; rather, they show evidence of previous pronunciations which had changed over time. For example, the spelling of words such as "night" would have represented the original pronunciation, the "gh" representing a sound similar to that found in the Scottish "loch". Other examples that were previously pronounced include the 'k' in 'knee' and 'knight' and the 'ch' in 'chicken' and 'cheese' was once pronounced 'k' also.

You could say that spelling is stuck in the 15th Century, when William Caxton chose the East Midland dialect i.e. London (Wessex) variety of English for his first print in 1476. He had to discriminate against many duplicate words used in other areas of England (such as the East Anglia, Northumberland and Mercia). For example, the Southern word 'eyren' was unintelligible with the Northern equivalent, 'egges' (modern 'eggs'). Of course, you know which form became dominant by the fact that 'eyren' is not used in Modern English.

Semantic changes

The appearance of a new word is only the beginning of its existence. Once it becomes part of the language the meanings and applications it has for speakers can shift dramatically. Therefore, when reading a text from the past, you may think you recognize a word but may actually misunderstand the sense it conveyed when it was written. For example, 'villain' once meant a peasant, or farmhand, but now means a criminal individual. This has undergone pejoration, which means that a negative meaning has come to be attached to this word. Conversely, other words have undergone amelioration, where a positive meaning comes to be understood. If we consider the slang word 'wicked' (generally meaning 'evil'), it now means in a colloquial context, 'brilliant'.

Other semantic change includes narrowing and broadening. Narrowing a word semantically limits its alternative meanings. For example the word 'girl' once meant 'a young child' and 'hound' (spelt 'hund') meant 'all canines', and now of course it means a particular type. Examples of words that have been broadened semantically include 'dog' (which once meant a particular breed) and 'gay' which now means 'homosexual' as well as, albeit in an unfashionable, archaic way, 'brightly decorated' or 'joyful'.

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