Language and Linguistics

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Language and Linguistics

   

• This section of the course is about language ...
  the vehicle for holding and transmitting culture
• We will cover the origins of human language the
  structure of language historical linguistics
  sociolinguistics and the history of writing.

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Language origins

   

• Evidence for the evolution of language comes from
  anatomy comparative anatomy of modern humans
  and chimps and comparative anatomy of hominids
  through time and from primate sign language,
  experiments in tool making, and comparative
  linguistics.
• The capacity for language, like the capacity for
  culture, was part of biological evolution.

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The capacity for language evolved

• We do not know much about the details of language
  evolution but we do know that the capacity for
  language, like the capacity for culture, was part
  of biological evolution.
• There have not been any hominids on Earth except
  for H. sapiens for 40,000 years.
• That is probably how long it has been since the
  currently observable human capacity for language
  has been part of our repertoire.

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On being primitive

• There are technologically primitive societies on
  Earth hunters and gatherers who never took part
  in the Neolithic revolution, much less the
  preindustrial state revolution or the industrial
  revolution or the post-industrial revolution now
  underway.
• But there are no primitive people on Earth.
• Humans have equal capacity for acquiring
  language.
• All human languages ever known can transmit any
  culture, even the most technologically complex.

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Language and biology

• The evolution of language and the development of
  the human hand and the ability to make tools are
  probably all related.
• The voice box and neurological complexity have
  all evolved.
• We know from endocranial casts that the area of
  the brain devoted to speech began developing as
  early as H. habilis.

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Speech and handedness

• The speech area of the brain is adjacent to the
  area devoted to the control of the human hand.
• Oldowan tool makers were mostly right handed.
• Chimps can make stone tools they dont do that
  in the wild but when they do in experiments in
  captivity, they do not show any preference for
  right- or left handedness (Stanley Ambrose,
  Science 2001).
• William Haviland points out that handedness is
  associated with lateralization of the brain, as
  is language.

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Hypoglossal canal

• By half a million years ago, in H. erectus, we
  see a major increase in the size of the
  hypoglossal canal which could accommodate
  larger nerves for controlling the tongue.
• By the time we get to Neanderthals, the
  hypoglossal canal is the same size as it is in
  fully modern humans (though this is
  controversial).

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Hyoid bone and language

• U-shaped bone at the base of the tongue that
  supports the tongue muscles.
• In Neanderthals, the hyoid shows that the larynx
  was as developed as that in modern humans.
• And the thorax had expanded to the same size as
  that of modern humans breath control required
  for continual speech.

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Washoe and other chimps

• Experiments with chimps and other apes show they
  are capable of much more than we thought, in
  terms of language.
• Chimps do not have the physical apparatus for
  human speech, but Beatrice and Allan Gardner
  taught Washoe, a female chimp, 160 signs in
  Ameslan.

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Generalizing signs

• Washoe moved beyond the signs and generalized
  them and combined them.
• She learned open for one door, and then used it
  to ask for other doors to be opened
• She asked for refrigerators to be opened and
  pointed to open drawers and briefcases.

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Washoe and Lucy generalize

• Washoe and Lucy (trained by Roger Fouts)
  generalized the sign for feces to mean dirty.
• Lucy used the term as an expletive when she got
  mad at Fouts for not giving her something.
• Lucy invented cry hurt food for radishes,
  water bird for swans, candy fruit for
  watermelons.
• Chimps and other great apes achieve the
  linguistic capacity of a 23 year old human.

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Comparative linguistics and language origins

• Brent Berlin and Paul Kay studied 110 languages
  and found seven stages in the development of
  color terms.
• All languages have at least two terms, white and
  black, or color and lack of color.
• When languages acquire a third term, it is always
  red.
• When languages acquire a fourth term, it is
  either green or yellow.

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Berlin and Kays study

• At 5 terms, we get green or yellow, depending on
  which entered at stage IV.
• At 6 terms, blue enters, and at 7 terms, brown
  enters.
• At the final stage of 8 or more terms, purple,
  pink, orange, gray or combinations of these terms
  enter the lexicon.
• Moreover, color lexicons become more complex as
  societies become more complex.

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Brown and Witkowskis study

• Replicated Berlin and Kays work on color using
  names for organisms.
• At stage I of lexical complexity for organisms,
  there is a word for plant.
• Next, languages distinguish trees from all other
  plants.
• Then grerb enters the lexicon grass and/or
  herb.

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From bush to wug

• Then bush enters, and then grass, and the vine.
• In the animal kingdom, the simplest lexicons
  distinguish animals from plants.
• Then fish enter the lexicon, and then
• Bird
• Snake
• wug (worm and bug)
• Mammal

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Complexity of the lexicon

• But complexity of the lexicon for organisms is
  very plastic, as comparisons between urban and
  primitive peoples shows.
• People in small-scale societies can name from
  400-800 plants.
• In urban areas, this is just 40-80.
• And they recognize even fewer, as John Gatewood
  showed in his research on loose talk.

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Pidgins and creoles

• Recent studies of Pidgins and creoles also shed
  light on the evolution of language.
• Pidgin languages are always second languages.
• They develop when speakers of different languages
  try to communicate, often for purposes of trade.
• The lexicon usually comes from one language, and
  the grammar from the other.

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Hawaiian Creole

• Creole languages develop from pidgins, but as
  people develop native capacity in a pidgin, the
  structure changes.
• Hawaii is a good case. In the late 19th century,
  Filipinos, Puerto-Ricans, Anglo-Americans,
  Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and American Blacks
  all came to work on the plantations there.

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Bickertons study

• Derek Bickerton studied Hawaiian Creole in 1975
  when it was a fully developed language.
• Compared the structural properties of Hawaiian
  Creole to other creoles.
• Found similarity in the use of particles for
  modifying verb roots to produce tense, and
  similarities in the use of singular, plural and
  neutral number markers.

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• Bickerton suggests that the similarities across
  creoles are because of a genetic substrate in
  humans.
• This substrate produces basic structural
  properties in languages at the early stage of
  development.
• Noam Chomsky referred to this as the biological
  basis of the capacity for language acquisition.

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Language complexity and evolution

• Others now studying child languages across the
  world to test whether this is true.
• If it is, then the theory would be that the more
  child-like a language, the easier it is to learn
  and the more like early language it must be.
• But languages are getting simpler English and
  modern German from early German, Spanish, Italian
  and French from Latin.
• So the whole picture is not yet clear.

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Childrens language acquisition

• 12 - 13 months name objects
• 18 20 months one-word sentences
• 18 24 months two-word sentences

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• The experiment at Washington State University on
  language origins.

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Structure of language

• We shift now to the structure of language. There
  are two main approaches
• Immediate constituents approach Leonard
  Bloomfield
• Transformational grammar approach Noam Chomsky

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IC grammar

• Collect native utterances and build up the
  grammar by discovering the parts.
• This is still used in learning languages and in
  understanding how any language works.
• The person most responsible for the IC approach
  was Leonard Bloomfield, a founder of structural
  linguistics just after WW I.

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Chomskys observation

• The IC approach doesnt account for the fact that
  humans can learn languages or for the fact that
  languages are generative
• From a finite number of rules operating on a
  finite number of words, we can encode and decode
  an infinite number of well-formed sentences.

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Transformational-generative grammar

• TG grammar makes it possible to understand
  language play.
• It makes understandable the fact that sentences
  can have many meanings because they are similar
  surface representations of different roots.
• Flying planes can be dangerous.
• I dont like Johns cooking.

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Four parts of grammar

• Phonology
• Morphology
• Syntax
• Semantics
• The phonological rules are acquired first, and
  are the most difficult rules to acquire in a
  second language after childhood.
• Well see this in the Kissinger effect later.

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Writing is not the same as language

• Language is an ideal concept, like race, and only
  exists in the surface representations.
• Speech and writing are different surface
  representations of language, and writing is not a
  better representation than speech.

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Writing

• Writing is associated with the development of
  trade in the context of the state, but not all
  states develop writing.
• Present at Uruk, in SW Iran, around 5500ya. The
  system began with many symbols and became reduced
  over a period of 400 years.
• Writing invented independently at least twice in
  the world.

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• It may have been invented three times in the Old
  World In the Indus Valley, in the Middle East,
  and in China
• May have been an example of stimulus diffusion
  from the Middle East to the other Old World
  centers of ancient civilization.
• Writing was invented independently in the New
  World.

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English phonology

• English has 46 phonemes and many allophones.
• We discover the phonemes of a language by looking
  for short, minimal pairs, like pig/big in
  English to isolate distinctive features.
• Here we see that voicing is the distinctive
  feature because p and b are both bilabial stops,
  but only one is voiced.
• In English, we have stops, fricatives,
  affricates, nasals, and liquids.

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Phonemes and allophones

• A phoneme is a set of similar sounds which native
  speakers of a language think of as being alike.
• Allophones are the members of the set, like
  English, p and ph, in poke and spoke, tough
  and stuff.
• Recall the concept of an allele an alternative
  expression of a gene.

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The vocal apparatus

• We make these various sounds by regulating our
  breath and parts of our vocal apparatus.
• The apparatus is capable of making all sounds in
  all languages, but each language has a subset of
  the possible sounds.

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http//www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Summer_2003/ling
001/lecture4.html
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http//www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Summer_2003/ling
001/lecture4.html
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Voiceless stops

• Stops, or plosives, are made by forming the mouth
  and tongue in a particular way and forcing the
  air to stop temporarily on the way out of the
  mouth during speech.
• The letters p, t, and k represent the three
  common voiceless stops in English.
• The p sound is a bilabial stop
• The t sound is an apico-dental stop
• The k sound is a velar stop

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http//www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Summer_2003/ling
001/lecture4.html
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Voiced stops

• Each voiceless stop has its voiced counterpart in
  English, so we have
• p, t, k
• b, d, g
• Note the meaningful differences between the words
  ten and den, pig and big, cut and gut, curl and
  girl.
• The difference is the single, distinctive feature
  of voicing.

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More on allophones

• The t sound has several allophones in English.
• Word initial, before a vowel, the t sound is
  heavily aspirated.
• Put your hand up to your mouth and say torrid
  tango.

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• Say itty bitty the t in the middle of each
  word has no aspiration. Word medially and
  intervocalically, the t sound is unaspirated.
• Native speakers of English find it hard to make a
  word-initial, prevocalic, unaspirated t like
  the t in patter.
• Native speakers of Spanish use this sound
  incorrectly in English, especially when its and
  word initial and prevocalic.
• Spanish simply has no aspirated t.

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• But English speakers use the t sound incorrectly
  in Spanish English has no word-initial,
  prevocalic unaspirated stops.
• taco and thaco
• But note that Taco Bell is English, not Spanish,
  so Thaco Bell is incorrect.

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Affricates

• The word saturate has an affricate in it for
  many dialects of American English.
• An affricate is a combination of a stop and a
  fricative, a /t/ and a /sh/, in this case.
• One of the allophones of /t/ is /ch/ when
  followed by the glide sound /y/ and the vowel
  sound /u/ as in satch-yur-ate.
• Some people say matoor, dropping the glide
  before the /u/, and thus converting the phoneme
  /t/ to its prevocalic aspirated allophone.

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Dialect allophones

• British dialects of English dont have the ch
  allophone for t at all.
• They say matyoor, separating the glide and the u
  vowel and adopting the prevocalic aspirated
  allophone for t.

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English phonology

• The phonology of the grammar comprises the rules
  for the sounds of the language which sounds can
  be made, and how the sounds can occur in various
  positions in words.
• We have 46 phonemes in American English,
  including 11 vowels in most dialects of American
  English.
• Sleek hawk high-front to low-back vowels

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The ten vowels of English

• I see o sew
• v sit U put
• e set u ooze
• æ cat b sofa
• a hot
• saw

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Diphthongs

• Many Americans have nine, rather than ten vowels.
• cot and caught
• marry, merry, Mary
• There are only six squiggles to represent the ten
  vowels, plus four diphthongs
• say toy cow my
• ei oi ao ai

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The Kissinger effect

• Why take you through these details of phonology?
• To show you how much you have to learn in order
  to become a native speaker of a language.
• No one has a better vocabulary or a better
  command of the syntax and the semantics of
  English than Henry Kissinger does.
• But Kissinger came to the U.S. when he was 15
  years old, by which time, his phonology was
  locked into German.

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Morphology

• Morphology comprises the rules of the grammar for
  constructing meaningful chunks of sounds.
• A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning in a
  language.
• Bound and unbound morphemes.
• -un is a bound morpheme with many allomorphs
• illegal immaterial inactive ignoble
• il im in ig

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Past tense and plural nouns in English

• Plural s z ?z
• part parts bag bags rose roses
• Past t d ?d
• slip slipped bag bagged want wanted
• What rules govern these transformations?

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Sociolinguistics

• Language and gender
• The use of honorifics and hedging in speech
• Some language, like Japanese, have quite strong
  rules about how men and women should speak.

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Gendered speech in Japanese

• yamada ga musuko to syokuzi o tanosinda
• yamada      son      dinner      enjoyed
• yamada-san ga musuko-san to o-syokuzi o
  tanosim-are-ta
• yamada-HON      son-HON      HON-dinner   
  enjoyed-HON
• Both sentences mean "Yamada enjoyed dinner with
  his son."
• Bonvillain, Nancy. 2000. Language, culture, and
  communication the meaning of messages. 3rd ed.
  Upper Saddle River, NJ Prentice Hall, 2000.

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Gendered registers

• Women in the U.S. use question mode for
  declarative statements as part of a softening, or
  hedging speech register.
• Men also use softening modes, but in different
  situations.
• It remains to be seen whether the amount of
  softening differs between men and women.

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Sociolinguistics dialects

• Social status marked by language
• Labovs study of the r in fourth floor at
  Kleins (20), Macys (51) and Saks Fifth
  Avenue (62)
• Code switching and dialects
• Ebonics is a dialect of English

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Sapir-Whorf hypothesis language and thought

• We know that we can say things in one language
  that we cant in another.
• But we also know that translation is possible.
• Edward Sapir and his student, Benjamin Lee Whorf,
  hypothesized that we think the way we think
  because of our language.

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Verbs and thought

• For example, there are two verbs for to be in
  Spanish, depending on whether a phenomenon is
  transitory or permanent.
• There are two verb forms in Turkish, depending on
  whether one knows the action or knows about the
  action.
• Verbs in Navajo are marked for the shape of the
  object spoken about.
• SVO (English), SOV (Japanese), VSO (Welsh).

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Is the S/W hypothesis correct?

• Spanish and German require that the speaker
  categorize everyone as familiar or not. What does
  all this do to our everyday thinking?
• Sapir said that Human beings...are very much at
  the mercy of the particular language which has
  become the medium of expression for their
  society (1929).
• This is the strong form of linguistic
  determinism, which is not accepted.

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The weak form of linguistic relativity

• Variations in language structure do structure
  thought, but we do not know how much.
• In Israel, the U.S., and Finland, children
  incorporate gender roles at different ages. The
  languages of these countries have correspondingly
  different levels of gender labeling.

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Historical linguistics

• Lexicostatistics and glottochronology based on
  the idea that the core vocabulary of languages is
  changes at a constant rate about 14 per 1000
  years.
• Morris Swadesh showed that this was more-or-less
  the case for many written languages.
• The claim is that, with caution, we can use this
  to examine the evolution of nonwritten languages.

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Lexicostatistics

• Based on the systematic comparison of cognates
  across languages to determine the times since two
  languages separated from a common ancestor.

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Reconstructing preliterate languages

• We use these principles to reconstruct languages
  that do not have writing
• Fox Cree Menomeni Ojibwa
• pematesiwa pematesiw pematesew pimatisi
• niyawi niyaw neyaw niyaw
• posiwa posiw posew pisi
• he lives
• my body
• he embarks

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1066 and all that

• beef cattle
• pork pig
• mutton sheep
• venison deer
• chicken chicken
• dine, cogitate, endeavor, acquire, read, thing,
  build, want, sad, big
• defecate, copulate, urinate, expectorate
• garbage and target

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When did we get these words?

• village
• garage
• collage

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Indo-European language sub-families

• Indo-Iranian
• Italic
• Germanic
• Celtic
• Baltic
• Slavic
• Albanian
• Greek language
• Armenian language
• Thracian
• Dacian
• Phrygian
• Anatolian
• Tocharian

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Germanic

• German, Frisian, Dutch, Afrikaans, English,
  Norwegian, Danish, Swedish
• German Bavarian, Swabian, Alsatian, Cimbrian,
  Rimella, Reinfrankisch, Pennsylvania,
  Luxembourgeois, Swiss German, Yiddish

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Italic

• Portuguese, Galician, Spanish, Ladino, Asturian,
  Aragonese, Catalan, Valencian, French, Wallon,
  Jerais, Poitevain, Piccard, Occitan, Lengadocian,
  Gascon, Auvergnat, Limosin, Franco-Provencal,
  Rumantsch, Sursilvan, Fiulian, Ladin, Italian
  (and all its variants), Rumanian, Sardinian

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214,000,000
173,000,000
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• Note, however, that 150m people speak Russian as
  a second language.
• French and English are spoken as second languages
  by 50-75m people each.
• Malay-Indonesian, French, Urdu, Punjabi, Korean,
  Telegu, Tamil, Marathi, Italian, Cantonese round
  out the top 20 and are spoken by at least 25m
  each.

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The vanishing languages

• 5 of the worlds languages are spoken by 95 of
  the worlds people
• 95 of the worlds languages are spoken by 5 of
  the worlds people

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A few facts about vanishing languages

• Of 220 Indian languages still spoken in Mexico,
  17 are nearing extinction.
• Of the 168 American Indian languages listed for
  the United States, 71 are extinct or soon will
  be.
• Breton probably had 1.4m speakers in 1900. It is
  now down to perhaps 400k speakers.

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The case of Navaho

• Navajo was down to fewer than 5000 speakers in
  the 19th century. It made a dramatic comeback and
  had over 100,000 speakers in the 1970s.
• Now, it too, may be headed for extinction, even
  though it is said to have over 150k speakers.

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Whats the problem?

• One could argue that language die-off is just
  part of natural evolution.
• The language of Cesar is not spoken today, and
  the language is Jesus is spoken by a few hundred
  speakers.
• Nothing catastrophic seems to have happened . . .
  Why worry now?

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Language diversity and survival

• Language diversity did not cause the evolutionary
  success of Homo sapiens.
• Some fraction of human knowledge however, is
  stored in the languages remaining today.
• Whatever that fraction is, can we afford to lose
  it?

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The language disappearance experiment

• I wouldnt be so worried about the mass
  extinction of languages if I had 20 or 30 planets
  on which to conduct this experiment.
• We do not know if its enough to rescue knowledge
  rather than languages.

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Whats being done?

• Anthropologists and linguists who are concerned
  about language preservation are helping to
  preserve and to vitalize languages.