Chapter
I
Foreword
A.
Background
Language
is arguably what most obviously distinguishes humans from all other species.
Linguistics involves the study of that system of communication
underlying everyday .
Many
people in this world knowing the linguist and linguistics. But, they just know
it that the Linguist is the persons who can speaks many languages. Like
Language teacher or Guides. Or they will tell us that Linguistics is the
knowledge of the languages. They didn’t know what is the right answer and what
is the part of the linguistics.
Linguistics are the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics concerns itself with
describing and explaining the nature of human language. Its primary goal is to
learn about the 'natural' language that humans use every
day and how it works. Linguists ask such fundamental questions as: What aspects
of language are universal for all humans? How can we
account for the remarkable grammatical similarities between languages as apparently
diverse as English, Japanese and Arabic?
What are the rules of grammar that we language users employ, and how do we come
to 'know' them? To what extent is the structure of language related to how we
think about the world around us? A linguist, then, here refers to a
linguistics expert who seeks to answer such questions, rather than someone who
is multilingual.
B.
Purpose
of the Compilation
The
purpose of this Linguistics compilations is to compilated the lesson of the
linguistics that ever taught by the lecture for students. And completed with
the reference,from many book and searched in internet.
Chapter II
Linguistics Compilation
A.
Linguistics
Linguistics
is the scientific
study of natural
language and is one of the four subfields of anthropology.
Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical
division is between the study of language structure (grammar)
and the study of meaning
(semantics
and pragmatics).
Linguistics is narrowly defined as the scientific approach
to the study of language, but language can be approached from a variety of
directions, and a number of other intellectual disciplines are relevant to it
and influence its study.
Linguistics additionally draws on work from
such diverse fields as psychology, speech-language
pathology, informatics, computer science, philosophy, biology, human anatomy, neuroscience, sociology, anthropology, and acoustics.
Linguistics
generally involve the study not just of speech but also sign
language; the same system used
to represent language, whether by sound or sign, is widely viewed as underlying
both. Research into sign language also benefits from the insights of linguists
who are themselves native signers.
Linguistic structures are
pairings of meaning and form; such pairings are known as Saussurean signs.
In this sense, form may consist of sound patterns, movements of the hands,
written symbols, and so on. There are many sub-fields concerned with particular
aspects of linguistic structure, ranging from those focused primarily on form
to those focused primarily on meaning:
·
Phonology,
the study of sounds (or signs) as discrete, abstract elements in the speaker's
mind that distinguish meaning
·Semantics,
the study of the meaning of words (lexical semantics)
and fixed word combinations (phraseology),
and how these combine to form the meanings
of sentences.
·
Pragmatics,
the study of how utterances
are used in communicative
acts,
and the role played by context and non-linguistic knowledge in the transmission
of meaning.
Alongside these
structurally motivated domains of study are other fields of linguistics,
distinguished by the kinds of non-linguistic factors that they consider:
·
Applied
linguistics, the study of language-related issues
applied in everyday life, notably language policies, planning, and education. (Constructed
language fits under Applied linguistics.)
·
Biolinguistics,
the study of natural as well as human-taught communication systems in animals,
compared to human language.
·
Clinical
linguistics, the application of linguistic theory
to the field of Speech-Language Pathology.
·
Developmental linguistics, the study of the
development of linguistic ability in individuals, particularly the
acquisition of language in childhood.
·
Evolutionary linguistics, the study of the
origin and subsequent development of language by the human species.
·
Language
geography, the study of the geographical distribution of
languages and linguistic features.
·
Linguistic
typology, the study of the common properties of diverse
unrelated languages, properties that may, given sufficient attestation, be assumed
to be innate to human language capacity.
·
Neurolinguistics,
the study of the structures in the human brain that underlie grammar and
communication.
·
Psycholinguistics,
the study of the cognitive processes and representations underlying language
use.
B.
Linguist
linguist is used
to describe someone who either studies the field or uses linguistic
methodologies to study groups of languages or particular languages. Outside the
field, this term is commonly used to refer to people who speak many languages
or have a great vocabulary.
A linguist, then, here refers to a
linguistics expert who seeks to answer such questions, rather than someone who
is multilingual.
C. Rule of Linguistics Competence
Competence is the
subconscious knowledge that the speakers have about their native language. The
linguistic knowledge gives the speaker the ability to produce and understand
theoretically infinite number of sentences. Native speakers learn the
linguistic system of their languages - the sounds, structures, meanings, words,
and rules for putting them all together, without realizing that rules are being
learned. Competence like organization describes the potentiality of a system.
It is also defined as the speaker’s mental ‘linguistic program’. 6The
competence of a speaker is buried in the “black box” of the human brain and
countless researchers and theoreticians are trying to estimate it. It is not an
easy job and that is why there are many linguists working on gaining a coherent
picture of a given speaker’s linguistic competence.
(Chomsky, 1965) Chomsky separates 'competence' - an
idealized capacity, from the production of actual utterances - 'performance'.
According to him, competence is the ideal speaker/hearer, i.e. an idealized but
not a real person who would have a complete knowledge of language. This means
it is a person’s ability to create and understand sentences, including
sentences they have never heard before. Linguists have realized that competence
is not the only thing worth studying in linguistics, but the distinction is
important, primarily because it allows those studying language to differentiate
between a speech error and not knowing something about a language. Linguists
use this distinction to illustrate the intuitive difference between
accidentally saying swimmed and the fact that a child
or non-proficient speaker of English may not know that the past tense of swim
is swam and say swimmed consistently.
Kinds of linguistic competence
The core components of
the grammar are included in the speaker’s linguistic competence. These components
of the grammar correspond in turn to five of the major subfields of
linguistics:
·
Phonetics: The physical production and perception of the
inventory of sounds used in producing language;
·
Phonology: The mental organization of physical sounds; the patterns
formed by the way sounds are combined in a language, and the restrictions on
permissible sound combinations;
·
Morphology: The structure and formation of words;
·
Syntax: The structure and formation of sentences; possible
and impossible configurations of words; and
·
Semantics: The meaning of sentences.
D.
Linguistics Performance
(Hymes, Dell. (2000 [1965]) The actual spoken ability and comprehension of a speaker is called linguistic performance. It includes phonetic, syntactic and other speech errors.
E.g.: Try to imagine mustering up the
courage to ask your high school crush to the prom. Of course, you know how to
talk perfectly well, but the words just don't come out right. Your heart is
racing, your hands are sweating, and your throat is bone dry. All of these
factors conspire to make you . . . less than eloquent .2 E.g.: You are in a
meeting with your boss trying to figure out the best way to ask for a raise .2
E.g.: You are to give a presentation to an auditorium full of your colleagues
and superiors . Whenever your audience has the power to affect your life for
better or worse, your anxiety level may rise and your performance decline. 2
Performance refers to the
specific utterances, including grammatical mistakes and non-linguistic features
like hesitations, accompanying the use of language. Performance like structure
describes the forms actually realized as a subset of those conceivable. 3
Performance is your real world linguistic output. It may accurately reflect
competence, but may also include speech errors due to slips of the tongue or
external factors such as memory problems, etc. 5 When we speak, we usually wish
to convey some message. At some stage in the act of producing speech, we must
organize our thoughts into strings of words. Sometimes the message is garbled.
We may stammer, or pause, or produce slips of the tongue. We may even sound
like a baby, who illustrates the difference between linguistic knowledge and
the way we use that knowledge in performance. 7 E.g.: Baby: (thinking) The
apple looks lovely… it must be delicious…I want to eat it…
Baby: (saying) APPLE WANT!!
linguistics is concerned with the linguistic competence rather than the actual performance of the language user.
E.
Prescriptive
Rules of Linguistics
In linguistics,
prescription can refer both to the codification and the enforcement of
rules governing how a language should be used. These rules can cover such
topics as standards for spelling and grammar or syntax, or rules for what is deemed socially or politically correct or proper. It includes
the mechanisms for establishing and maintaining an interregional language or a
standardized spelling system. It can also include declarations of what
particular groups consider to be good taste. If these tastes are conservative,
prescription may be (or appear to be) resistant to language
change. If they are radical, prescription may be productive of neologism.
Prescription can also include recommendations for effective language usage. Prescription
can apply to most aspects of language: spelling, grammar, semantics,
pronunciation and register. Most people would subscribe to the consensus that
in all of these areas it is meaningful to describe some kinds of aberrations as
incorrect, or at least as inappropriate in particular contexts. Prescription
aims to draw workable guidelines for language users seeking advice in such
matters.
Prescription, on the other hand, is an attempt to promote
particular linguistic usages over others, often favouring a particular dialect
or "acrolect".
This may have the aim of establishing a linguistic
standard, which can aid communication over large geographical areas. It may
also, however, be an attempt by speakers of one language or dialect to exert
influence over speakers of other languages or dialects. An extreme version of
prescriptivism can be found among censors,
who attempt to eradicate words and structures which they consider to be
destructive to society.
Prescriptive is
to prescribe, or distate to the speaker, the way the language is supposedly
should be written or spoken in order for speaker to appear correct and
educated. Prescripttive rules are really rules of styles rather than rules of
grammar.
Prescription comes in two flavors, those
that are linguistically founded and those that are not. For instance, the rule
of English that subjects and verbs must agree (i.e. that when the
subject is third-person singular, the verb takes an "s" ending, like
"I/you/they run" but "he runs") can be the basis of
linguistically founded prescription, so long as the speaker is intending to
speak standard American English. Speakers of standard American English do
follow subject-verb agreement, and thus if the intention is to teach that
language, this rule should be taught.
However, prescriptivists
often stray from this type of linguistically founded recommendation. These
prescriptivists tend to be found among the ranks of language educators and
journalists, and not in the academic discipline of linguistics. Often
considering themselves speakers of the standard form of a particular language,
they may hold clear notions of what is right and wrong and what variety of
language is most likely to lead the next generation of speakers to 'success'.
For example, they may believe that all speakers of what they would call English
should follow the same rule of subject-verb agreement, while in fact some
varieties of English, which are in a sense distinct languages in their own
right, do not do subject-verb agreement the same way. The reasons for their
intolerance of non-standard dialects, treating them as "incorrect" ,
may include distrust of neologisms, connections to
socially-disapproved dialects, or simple conflicts with pet theories.
Prescriptivists often
also make linguistically unfounded recommendations that seem plausibly true,
but which have little linguistic evidence to support them. For instance, the
rule against leaving a preposition at the end of a clause or sentence (such as in
I met the professor I wrote to) is commonly believed to be 'correct'
English.[19]
However, speakers of English not only use final prepositions frequently,
indicating that it is perfectly natural English to do so, but bringing the
preposition to the front may result in a sentence that could well sound
ridiculous to any native speaker of English.[20]
F.
Descriptive Rules Of Linguistics
Linguistics is descriptive;
linguists describe and explain features of language without making subjective
judgments on whether a particular feature is "right" or
"wrong". This is analogous to practice in other sciences: a zoologist
studies the animal kingdom without making subjective judgments on whether a
particular animal is better or worse than another.
This rules are describe
the actual language of some group of speakers (and not rules actually express
generalizations and regularities about various aspects of a language). They
accept the patterns a speaker actually to discover their order and arrangement,
their origin in history or the individual, or the ways in which they are used
in thought, in science or in art, or in normal social interchange.
Prescription is
contrasted with description, which observes and records how
language is used in practice, and which is the basis of all linguistic
research. Serious scholarly descriptive work is usually based on text or corpus
analysis, or on field studies, but the term "description" includes
each individual's observations of their own language usage. Unlike
prescription, descriptive linguistics eschews value judgments and makes no
recommendations.
Descriptive linguists, on
the other hand, do not accept the prescriptivists' notion of 'incorrect usage'
in a general sense. They aim to describe the usages the prescriptivist has in
mind, either as common or deviant from some linguistic norm, as an
idiosyncratic variation, or as regularity (a rule) followed by speakers
of some other dialect (in contrast to the common prescriptive assumption that
"bad" usage is unsystematic). Within the context of fieldwork, descriptive linguistics refers to the study
of language using a descriptivist approach. Descriptivist methodology more
closely resembles scientific methodology in other disciplines. In descriptive
linguistics, nonstandard varieties of language are held to be no more or less
correct than standard varieties of languages. Whether observational methods are
seen to be more objective than prescriptive methods, the outcomes of using
prescriptive methods are also subject to description.
Prescription and
description are often seen as opposites, in the sense that one declares how
language should be while the other declares how language is. But
they can also be complementary, and usually exist in dynamic tension. Many
commentators on language show elements of both prescription and description in
their thinking, and popular debate on language issues frequently revolves
around the question of how to balance these.
G.
Language
language starts off as
recall of simple words without associated meaning, but as children grow, words
acquire meaning, with connections between words being formed. As a person gets
older, new meanings and new associations are created and vocabulary increases
as more words are learned.
Infants use their bodies,
vocal cries and other preverbal vocalizations to communicate their wants, needs
and dispositions. Even though most children begin to vocalize and eventually
verbalize at various ages and at different rates, they learn their first
language without conscious instruction from parents or caretakers. In fact
research has shown that the earliest learning begins in utero when the fetus can recognize
the sounds and speech patterns of its mother's voice.
Chomsky
[1957] assigned a mathematical correlate to the intuitive idea of a
"language". He proposed to identify a language with a set of
sentences: with the set of grammatically correct utterance forms that are
possible in the language. The goal of descriptive linguistics is then to
characterise, for individual languages, the set of grammatical sentences
explicitly, by means of a formal grammar. And the goal of explanatory
linguistic theories should then be, to determine the universal properties which
the grammars of all languages share, and to give a psychological account of
these universals.
Language
is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols which permit all people in a given
culture, or other people who have learned the system of that culture, to
communicate or to interact (Finocchiaro 1964 : 8).
Language is a system of
communication by sound, operating through the organs of speech and hearing,
among members of a given community, and using vocal symbols possessing
arbitrary conventional meanings (Pei 1966 : 141).
Language is a system of
arbitrary vocals symbols used for human to communication (wardhaugh 1972 : 3).
A
consolidation of the definitions of the language yields the following composite
definition,
1. Language
is systematic and generative.
2. Language
is a set of arbitrary symbols.
3. Those
symbols are primarily vocal, but may also be visual.
4. The
symbols have conventionalized meanings to which they refer.
5. Language
is used for communication.
6. Language
operates in a speech community or culture.
7. Language
is essentially human, although possibly not limited to humans.
8. Language
is acquired by all people in much the same way- language and language learning
both have universal characteristics.
There are four main components of language
:
· The second, morphology,
is the use of grammatical markers (indicating tense, active or passive voice
etc.).
· Pragmatics involves the rules for appropriate and effective
communication. Pragmatics involves three skills:
o using language for greeting, demanding etc.
o changing language for talking differently depending
on who it is you are talking to
o following rules such as turn taking, staying on
topic
Each component has its own appropriate
developmental periods.
H.
Language Universal
May refer to a
hypothetical, historical, mythical or constructed language to be spoken and
understood by all or most of the world's population. In some circles, it is a
language said to be understood by all living things, beings, and objects alike.
It may be the ideal of an international auxiliary language
for communication between groups speaking different primary languages. In other
conceptions, it may be the primary language of all speakers, or the only
existing language. Some mythological or religious traditions state that there
was once a single universal language among all people, or shared by humans and supernatural
beings, however, this is not supported by historical evidence.
The idea of a universal
language is at least as old as the Biblical story
of Babel. The
biblical story of Babel's fall states that there was once a time of a universal
Adamic
language (now often associated with the Kabbalah) –
and then something happened, the confusion of tongues, analogous to the
Fall of Man. In the Judeo-Christian tradition there are various attitudes
to regaining the supposed golden age, before Babel; these include optimism,
pessimism, and recourse to parody and warnings on hubris, depending
on the wished interpretation of the story.
In other traditions,
there is less interest in or a general deflection of the question. For example
in Islam the Arabic
language is the language of the Qur'an, and so
universal for Muslims. The written classical Chinese
language was and is still read widely but pronounced somewhat differently
by readers in different areas of China, in Vietnam, Korea and Japan for centuries; it was a de facto
universal literary language for a broad-based culture. In something of
the same way Sanskrit
in India was a
literary language for many for whom it was not a mother
tongue.
Comparably, the Latin language (qua
Medieval
Latin) was in effect a universal language of literati in the
Middle
Ages, and the language of the Vulgate
Bible, in the area of Catholicism which covered most of Western Europe and parts of
Northern and Central Europe also.
In a more practical
fashion, trade languages, as ancient Koine Greek,
may be seen as a kind of real universal language, that was used for
commerce.
I.
Language Competence and Performance
In
Chomsky's terminology: linguistics is concerned with the linguistic competence
rather than the actual performance of the language user. Or, in the
words of Saussure, who had emphasized this distinction before: with langue
rather than parole.
Language performance in naturalistic contexts can be
characterized by general measures of productivity, fluency, lexical
diversity, and grammatical complexity and accuracy. The use of such
measures as indices of language impairment in older children is open
to questions of method and interpretation.
Chomsky
made an emphatic distinction between the "competence" of a language
user and the "performance" of this language user. The competence
consists in the knowledge of language which the language user in principle has;
the performance is the result of the psychological process that employs this
knowledge (in producing or in interpreting language utterances).
Competence refers to one’s underlying knowledge of a
system,event,or fact. It is nonobservable,idealized ability to do something, to
perform something. Performance is the overtly observable and concrete
manifestation or realization of competence.
In reference to language, competence is your underlying knowledge of the system of a
language. Its rules of grammar,vocabulary, all the pieces of a language and how
those pieces fit together. Performance
is actual production (Speaking and writing) or the comprehension (Listening and
Reading) of linguistics events.
Reference to Ferdinand de Saussure (1916) version of
the competence and performance construct : a distinction between langue and parole as two separate phenomenon, independent of each other. “
langue exist in the form of a sum of impressions deposited in the brain of each
member of the community, parole is an individual, willful phonational acts.
Chomsky (1965) likened competence to an idealized speaker-hearer who does not display such
performance variables as memory llimitations, distractions, shifts of attention
and interest,errors,and hesitations phenomena such as repeats, false starts,
pauses, omissions, and additions.
J.
Grammars
Grammar is the structural
foundation of our ability to express ourselves. The more we are aware of how it
works, the more we can monitor the meaning and effectiveness of the way we and
others use language. It can help foster precision, detect ambiguity, and
exploit the richness of expression available in English. And it can help
everyone--not only teachers of English, but teachers of anything, for all teaching
is ultimately a matter of getting to grips with meaning. (David Crystal, "In Word and Deed," TES Teacher, April 30, 2004)
It is necessary to know
grammar, and it is better to write grammatically than not, but it is well to
remember that grammar is common speech formulated. Usage is the only test.(William Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up, 1938)
Grammar was often used to describe learning in general,
including the magical, occult practices popularly associated with the scholars
of the day.
Two definitions of grammar:
2.
A set of rules
and examples dealing with the syntax and word structures of a language, usually intended
as an aid to the learning of that language.
Grammar is study of the internal structure of
language. Rules of grammar is to determine how morphemes and words can combine
to express a specific meaning.
K.
Descriptive and Prescriptive Grammar
Descriptive
grammar (definition #1) refers to the structure of a language as it is
actually used by speakers and writers. Prescriptive grammar (definition
#2) refers to the structure of a language as certain people think it should
be used.
Both
kinds of grammar are concerned with rules--but in different ways. Specialists
in descriptive grammar (called linguists)
study the rules or patterns that underlie our use of words, phrases, clauses,
and sentences. On the other hand, prescriptive grammarians (such as most
editors and teachers) lay out rules about what they believe to be the “correct”
or “incorrect” use of language.
Descriptive grammarians
generally advise us not to be overly concerned with matters of correctness:
language, they say, isn't good or bad; it simply is. As the history of
the glamorous word grammar demonstrates, the English language is a
living system of communication, a continually evolving affair. Within a generation
or two, words and phrases come into fashion and fall out again. Over centuries,
word endings and entire sentence structures can change or disappear.
Prescriptive grammarians
prefer giving practical advice about using language: straightforward rules to help
us avoid making errors. The rules may be over-simplified at times, but they are
meant to keep us out of trouble--the kind of trouble that may distract or even
confuse our readers.
A prescriptive grammar is
one that lays down the rules for English language usage, while a descriptive
grammar synthesises rules for English usage from the language that people
actually use. A prescriptive grammarian believes that certain forms used are
correct and that others, even though they may be used by native speakers, are
incorrect. Many prescriptivists feel that modern linguistics, which tends to
place emphasis on actual rather than perceived language usage, is responsible
for a decline in the standard of language.
Descriptivists look at
the way people speak and then try to create rules that account for the language
usage, accepting alternative forms that are used regionally and also being open
to forms used in speech that traditional grammars would describe as errors.
L. Phonology
Phonology: The mental
organization of physical sounds; the patterns formed by the way sounds are
combined in a language, and the restrictions on permissible sound combinations;
Phonology
is the study of sounds (or signs) as discrete, abstract elements in the
speaker's mind that distinguish meaning.
Phonology is the
study of the grammatical system speakers use to represent language in the real
world, which organises syllable structure, intonation, tone, and - in sign
languages - hand movements. A phonologist divides an
example of language into its phonological components: for example, English cat
appears as a single syllable arranging the segments [k], [æ] and [t].
Although there are potentially infinitely many ways of producing a sound, shaping a letter or moving
a hand, phonologists are interested only in
how these group into abstract categories: for example, how and why [k] is often
perceived as different from [t], whereas in many languages, other sounds as
different as those are not.
Phonology is
a sub-field of historical linguistics, which studies the sound system of a
specific language
or set of languages and change over time. 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.
An important part of
phonology is studying which sounds are distinctive units within a language. For
example, the "p" in "pin" is aspirated while the same phoneme in
"spin" is not. In some other languages, for example Thai
and Quechua,
this same difference of aspiration or non-aspiration does differentiate
phonemes.
In addition to the
minimal meaningful sounds (the phonemes), phonology studies how sounds
alternate, such as the /p/ in English, and topics such as syllable
structure, stress, accent, and intonation.
The principles of
phonological theory have also been applied to the analysis of sign
languages, although the phonological units do not consist of sounds. The
principles of phonological analysis can be applied independently of modality because they are designed to serve as
general analytical tools, not language-specific ones.
Phonological development
From shortly after birth
to around one year, the baby starts to make speech sounds. At around two months,
the baby will engage in cooing, which mostly consists of vowel sounds. At
around four months, cooing turns into babbling which
is the repetitive consonant-vowel combinations. Babies understand more than they are able
to say.
From 1–2 years,
babies can recognize the correct pronunciation of familiar words. Babies will
also use phonological strategies to simplify word pronunciation. Some
strategies include repeating the first consonant-vowel in a multisyllable word
('TV'--> 'didi') or deleting unstressed syllables in a multisyllable word
('banana'-->'nana'). By 3–5 years, phonological awareness continues
to improve as well as pronunciation.
By 6–10 years, children can master
syllable stress patterns which helps distinguish slight differences between
similar words.
M. Phonetic
Phonetics: The
physical production and perception of the inventory of sounds used in producing
language
Phonetics focuses on the physical
sounds of speech.
Phonetics covers speech perception (how the
brain discerns sounds), acoustics (the physical
qualities of sounds as movement through air), and articulation (voice production
through the movements of the lungs, tongue, lips, and other articulators). This area
investigates, for instance, the physical realization of speech and how
individual sounds differ across languages and dialects. This research plays a
large part in computer speech recognition and synthesis.
N. Morphology
Morphology: The structure
and formation of words;
Morphology
is the study of internal structures of words and how they can be modified.
Morphology examines how linguistic
units such as words and their subparts (such as prefixes and suffixes) combine.
One example of this is the observation that while walk+ed is acceptable,
*ed+walk is not, in Engish, while in other languages such affixes can be
found wholly inside the stems they attach to.
Morphology is the study of the formal
means of expression in a language; in the context of historical linguistics,
how the formal means of expression change over time; for instance, languages
with complex inflectional systems tend to be subject to a simplification
process. This field studies the internal structure of words as a formal means
of expression.
Words as units in the
lexicon are the subject matter of lexicology.
While words are generally accepted as being (with clitics) the
smallest units of syntax,
it is clear that in most (if not all) languages, words can be related to other
words by rules. The rules understood by the speaker reflect specific patterns
(or regularities) in the way words are formed from smaller units and how those
smaller units interact in speech. In this way, morphology is the branch of
linguistics that studies patterns of word-formation within and across
languages, and attempts to formulate rules that model the knowledge of the
speakers of those languages, in the context of historical linguistics, how the
means of expression change over time.
O. Syntax
Syntax:
The structure and formation of sentences; possible and impossible
configurations of words;
Syntax
is the study of how words combine to form grammatical sentences.
Syntax is the
study of how units including words and phrases combine into sentences. For example, why is Bill
ate the fish acceptable but Ate the Bill fish not? Syntacticians
investigate what orders of words make legitimate sentences, how to succinctly
account for patterns found across sentences, such as correspondences between
active sentences (John threw the ball) and passive sentences (The
ball was thrown by John), and some types of ambiguity, as in Visiting
relatives can be boring (which has two readings!).
Syntax is the study
of the principles and rules for constructing sentences in natural
languages. The term syntax is used to refer directly to the rules
and principles that govern the sentence structure of any individual language,
as in "the syntax of Modern Irish". Modern researchers in
syntax attempt to describe languages in terms of such rules.
Many professionals in this discipline attempt to find general
rules that apply to all natural languages in the context of historical
linguistics, how characteristics of sentence structure in related languages
changed over time.
P.
Semantics
Semantics is the study of the meaning of words (lexical
semantics) and fixed word
combinations (phraseology),
and how these combine to form the meanings
of sentences.
Semantics
within linguistics refers to the study of how language conveys meaning. For example, English speakers typically realize that Chomsky's famous sentence Colorless
green ideas sleep furiously is well-formed in terms of word order, but
incomprehensible in terms of meaning. Other aspects of meaning studied here
include how speakers understand certain types of ambiguous
sentences such as A student met every professor (a different student, or
the same student?), and the extent to which sentences which are superficially
very different, such as The wine flowed freely and Much wine was
consumed, mean similar things.
Semantic development
From birth to one year,
comprehension (the language we understand) develops before production (the
language we use). There is about a 5 month lag in between the two. Babies have
an innate preference to listen to their mother's voice. Babies can recognize
familiar words and use preverbal gestures.
From 1–2 years,
vocabulary grows to several hundred words. There is a vocabulary spurt between
18–24 months, which includes fast mapping. Fast mapping is the babies' ability
to learn a lot of new things quickly. The majority of the babies' new
vocabulary consists of object words (nouns) and action words (verbs). By 3–5
years, children usually have difficulty using words correctly. Children
experience many problems such as underextensions, taking a general word and
applying it specifically (for example, 'blankie')and overextensions, taking a
specific word and applying it too generally (example, 'car' for 'van').
However, children coin words to fill in for words not yet learned (for example,
someone is a cooker rather than a chef because a child will not know what a
chef is). Children can also understand metaphors.
From 6–10 years,
children can understand meanings of words based on their definitions. They also
are able to appreciate the multiple meanings of words and use words precisely through
metaphors and puns. Fast mapping continues.
Q.
Pragmatics
Pragmatics,
the study of how utterances
are used in communicative
acts,
and the role played by context and non-linguistic knowledge in the transmission
of meaning
Pragmatics
involves the rules for appropriate and effective communication. Pragmatics
involves three skills:
a.
using language for greeting, demanding
etc.
b.
changing language for talking
differently depending on who it is you are talking to
c.
following rules such as turn taking,
staying on topic
Pragmatics is the
study of how utterances relate to the context they are spoken in. For instance,
the sentence I have two pencils can mean two very different things,
depending on whether the speaker has been asked how many pencils he has, in
which case the speaker means he has exactly two, or is just confirming that he
has at least two (such as in response to Can me and my friend borrow two
pencils from you?), leaving open the possibility that he has more. This
sort of understanding is not predictable just by knowledge of language;
speakers must also know something about the intentions and assumptions of
others to co-operate in
communication.
Pragmatics development
From birth to one year,
babies can engage in joint attention (sharing the attention of something with
someone else). Babies also can engage in turn taking activities. By 1–2
years, they can engage in conversational turn taking and topic maintenance.
At ages 3–5, children can master illocutionary intent, knowing what you
meant to say even though you might not have said it and turnabout, which is
turning the conversation over to another person.
By age 6-10,
shading occurs, which is changing the conversation topic gradually. Children
are able to communicate effectively in demanding settings, such as on the
telephone.
R.
Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics
is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society,
including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is
used, and the effects of language use on society. Sociolinguistics differs from
sociology of language in that the focus of
sociolinguistics is the effect of the society on the language, while the
latter's focus is on the language's effect on the society. Sociolinguistics
overlaps to a considerable degree with pragmatics.
It is historically closely related to Linguistic Anthropology and the distinction
between the two fields has even been questioned recently.
It also studies how
language varieties differ between groups separated by
certain social
variables, e.g., ethnicity, religion, status,
gender, level of
education,
age, etc., and
how creation and adherence to these rules is used to categorize individuals in social or
socioeconomic classes. As the usage of a language varies from place to
place (dialect),
language usage varies among social classes, and it is these sociolects
that sociolinguistics studies.
The social aspects of
language were in the modern sense first studied by Indian and Japanese
linguists in the 1930s, and also by Gauchat in Switzerland in the early 1900s,
but none received much attention in the West until much later. The study of the
social motivation of language change, on the other hand, has its
foundation in the wave model of the late 19th century. The first attested
use of the term sociolinguistics was by Thomas Callan Hodson in the title of a 1939
paper. Sociolinguistics in the West first appeared in the 1960s and was
pioneered by linguists such as William
Labov in the US and Basil Bernstein in the UK.
S.
Psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics
or psychology of language is the study of the psychological
and neurobiological
factors that enable humans
to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language.
Initial forays into psycholinguistics were largely philosophical ventures, due
mainly to a lack of cohesive data on how the human brain functioned. Modern
research makes use of biology, neuroscience, cognitive
science, linguistics, and information theory to study how the brain
processes language. There are a number of subdisciplines with non-invasive
techniques for studying the neurological workings of the brain; for example, neurolinguistics
has become a field in its own right.
Psycholinguistics
covers the cognitive processes that make it possible to generate a grammatical
and meaningful sentence out of vocabulary
and grammatical
structures, as well as the processes that make it possible to understand
utterances, words, text, etc. Developmental psycholinguistics studies children's
ability to learn language.
Psycholinguistics, which in the early 1960s was developing rapidly as part of the
general movement towards cognitive psychology, found
this anti-behaviorist emphasis congenial, and rapidly absorbed many Chomskian
ideas including the notion of generative grammar. However, as both cognitive
psychology and psycholinguistics have matured, they have found less and less
use for generative linguistics, not least because Chomsky has repeatedly
emphasised that he never intended to specify the mental processes by which
people actually generate sentences, or parse sentences that they hear or read.
T. Onomatopoeia
A sign in a shop window in Italy
proclaims "No Tic Tac", in imitation of the sound of a clock.
An onomatopoeia or
onomatopœia (from the Greek
ὀνοματοποιία;
ὄνομα
for "name" and ποιέω for "I make") (adjectival
form: "onomatopoeic" or "onomatopoetic") is a word that imitates or
suggests the source of the sound that it describes. Onomatopoeia (as an uncountable
noun) refers to the property of such words. Common occurrences of
onomatopoeias include animal noises, such as "oink" or
"meow" or "roar". Onomatopoeias are not universally the
same across all languages; they conform to some extent to the broader linguistic
system they are part of; hence the sound of a clock may be tick tock in English
and tik tak in Dutch or tic-tac in French.
Uses of onomatopoeia
In the case of a frog croaking, the
spelling may vary because different frog species around the world make
different sounds: Ancient Greek brekekekex koax koax (only in
Aristophanes' comic play The Frogs) for probably marsh
frogs; English ribbit for species of frog found in North America;
English verb "croak" for the
common frog. Related to this is the use of tibbir for the toad.
Some other very common English-language
examples include hiccup, zoom, bang, beep, and splash.
Machines and
their sounds are also often described with onomatopoeia, as in honk or beep-beep
for the horn of an automobile, and vroom or brum for the engine.
When someone speaks of a mishap involving an audible arcing
of electricity, the word "zap" is often used (and has been
subsequently expanded and used to non-auditory effects generally connoting the
same sort of localized but thorough interference or destruction similar to
produced in short-circuit sparking).
For animal sounds,
words like quack (duck), bark (dog), roar (lion) and meow (cat) are typically used in English. Some of these words are used
both as nouns and as verbs.
- ^ Ramscar, M. & Yarlett, D. (2007) Linguistic self-correction in the absence of feedback: A new approach to the logical problem of language acquisition. Cognitive Science: 31, 927-960.
- Crystal, David (1997) The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, Second Edition ISBN 0-521-55967-7
- Smyth, Herbert Weir (1920). Greek Grammar. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. pp. 680. ISBN 0-674-36250-0.
- ^ Ramscar, M. & Gitcho, N. (2007) Developmental change and the nature of learning in childhood. Trends In Cognitive Science: 11(7), 274-279.
- Tomasello, M. (2003) Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition. Harvard University Press.
6.
Fromkin,
Victoria; Bruce Hayes; Susan
Curtiss, Anna Szabolcsi, Tim
Stowell, Donca Steriade (2000). Linguistics: An Introduction to Linguistic
Theory. Oxford: Blackwell. p. 3. ISBN 0631197117
10.
See Newmeyer
1998, Language Form and Language Function (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT
Press), and Culicover and Jackendoff 2005, Simpler Syntax (OUP)
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar