Linguistics Giới thiệu ngôn ngữ học

Linguistics
2009

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Basics
• An introduction to the scientific study of language
• No prerequisites

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Grading
Homework assignments
Participation
(Cumulative)Final exam

50%
10%
40%
100% (BUT)
IN BORDERLINE CASES ATTENDANCE
AND ACTIVE PARTICIPATION WILL
AFFECT WHETHER OR NOT GRADES
ARE ROUNDED UP OR ROUNDED DOWN
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What the course is about
Basic idea and outline

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The Subject of the Course
• The scientific study of human language; in particular, some
aspects of human language and its structure
• Some facets of language make it apparently unique in the
biological world and in the study of cognition. Moreover,
language is creative and complex in a way that warrants
careful study

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Aspects of Language
• We are concerned with the objective study
of language; not claims about how language
‘should’ be made by so-called experts
• By ‘language’ here we mean roughly the
system of principles that account for
linguistic expressions; languages that
actually exist (or existed) and are used by
people
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Some facts about language
•

Creativity: We automatically produce and
understand utterances we have never heard
before, whether they make ‘sense’ or not:
Seventeen and one half turtles wearing yellow
hats with penguins on them began to
simultaneously yodel as I approached the
food truck.
Put differently: Languages have a finite
number of words, from which infinite
sentences can be created/understood; it’s
not just about ‘making sense’
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(More) facets of language

•

•

Moreover: Our production and
comprehension of complex linguistic
utterances is automatic and (typically)
effortless. That is,
We do not have to think about using language
any more than we have to think about walking
or about using vision
Compare this with e.g. computer systems,
which cannot come close to this performance
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Facets of language, cont.
Language is universal-- every human society ever
known has language
•
Unlike cultural inventions or technology-- which
vary in complexity from culture to culture-every human society has complex language
•
As we will see in the course, language does not
seem to correlate with “general intelligence”
•
This suggests that humans have a biological
capacity for language, when coupled with cases
in which children ‘invent’ complex language (to
be discussed later)
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Facets of language, cont. II
One well-known(?) fact about language:
children acquire language easily and
without explicit instruction.
• It should be clear that adults do not have
this capacity; acquiring language in
adulthood is difficult and typically results
in sub-native performance
• This suggests a biological window of
opportunity for acquiring a language
natively

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Innateness
•

A research program initiated by
Chomsky; two major points
–
–

–

Producing and understanding novel utterances indicates
speakers must have a mental grammar-- a kind of
‘program’ for constructing/understanding sentences
These grammars are acquired by children who are
exposed to fragmentary and noisy evidence, i.e. without
explicit knowledge of the rules, which, as we will see, are
quite complex.
This leads to the idea that the human brain is ‘preequipped’ to learn language, in the same way that children
are programmed to walk, see, etc.

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Goals
•

We are going to investigate the idea that

language is innate or an ‘instinct’ by
– Looking at the structure of language; and
– Looking at how language works in the brain,
develops in history, compares with communication
in other species, etc.

In the next slides we will look at some of the
subdivisions of linguistic structure
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Linguistic Structures, I
• Phonetics/Phonology: The sounds of a
language, and how they combine
There are many aspects of this that speakers do, but
are not aware of….
Example: the sounds [p], [t], [k] in English are pronounced with a puff of
air (‘aspirated’) at the start of a word:
pill till
kill
This is not the case when [s] precedes:
spill still
skill

• In general:
– How to represent speech sounds
– How these sounds combine/change etc.

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Structures, II
• Morphology: The structure of words. Some
words seem simple, e.g. cat. But others are
made out of parts:
vapor-ize un-attain-able un-lock-ing-s
Sometimes the rules are complex, and the
same pieces can combine in different ways:
Un-(lock-able): can’t be locked
(un-lock)-able: capable of being unlocked
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Structures, III
•

Syntax: How words combine to form
sentences:
(a ‘*’ means that a sentence is deviant, in a
way that we’ll define later in the course):
1) The tall man…
2) *The man tall…
2) I saw John and Mary.
3) *Who did you see Mary and?
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Structures IV
• Semantics/Pragmatics: What
words/sentences mean, and how this

relates to how they are used.
• Example: compare
– John hammered the metal flat.
– John hammered the metal naked.
 Or: Why is it that
Is it cold?
Is sometimes a real question, and sometimes a way
of getting someone to close a window?
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Plan
•
•

Examine different aspects of linguistic structure, like
those sketched above
After looking at such structures, we will be ready to
investigate further questions, not limited to
1) Languages of the world
2) The acquisition of language
3) Language and the brain
4) Language change and history
5) Reading and writing
6) Animal communication and evolution
7) Language and Computation

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