Lecture 1: IntroductionLecture 1: Introduction[Note: these are lightly edited versions of overheads and notes used in class. They are provided in order to help you study, but they are not a substitute for coming to class and being prepared. The notes are incomplete, and will often be hard to make sense of if you were not in class.]
Language is...
Variation in words shows arbitrary sound-meaning correspondences
Building blocks of many different sizes: reusability makes for creativeness
Variation in how sounds are combined
Japanese
English
Difference: Japanese (i) lacks an r/l contrast, (ii) requires syllables to have the shape Consonant-Vowel, hence the additional vowels.
Word Order Variation
There is a good deal of word order variation across languages, indicating that the word order that a language uses is somewhat arbitrary. [However, there are some word orders that are not found (e.g. e).]
Similar cross-linguistic variation can be seen in morphology (how words are built).
Investigation of language has shown that our knowledge of language is a prodigious system of unconscious knowledge. There are many things you 'know' about your language that you are quite unaware of.
What are the vowel sounds of American English?
In fact there are 15 for most speakers of American English ... were you aware of this? You already know it, in that you can easily recognize what are and are not vowels of your language.
Some Grammatical and Ungrammatical Sentences of English
There are lots of things that you know about what is and is not a grammatical sentence of English, that you have never been taught or read in a grammar book.
[Note: while most of the class shared the instructor's intuition that this sentence 'sounded fine', but turned out to be impossible to interpret, for one group of students were able to get the interpretation for this "Not just I have been to Paris".]
Specific to humans: different from other animal systems.
Specialized parts of the brain handle it, e.g. Broca's area: needed for speaking
Learning it is linked to a biological schedule: if a person is exposed to language too late, he won't succeed in learning it (see move on Genie in second week of classes).
Linked to specific parts of the genetic code: genetic disorders have been reported which either make people have difficulties with language but not other mental abilities (Specific Language Impairment) or difficulties with many mental abilities, but not with language (Williams' Syndrome).
Word meanings: descriptive and prescriptive (Websters & American Heritage)
Grammaticality judgments (prescriptive)
Systematicities about 'non-literary' English
(e) does not generally allow the interpretation of (d), for speakers who can use 'anything' or 'nothing' in (c). Interestingly, similar patterns are found in other languages which allow the equivalent of "I didn't say nothing" (in many languages such forms belong to the prestige dialect).
Arbitrariness of (non)-standard pronunciations