Introduction to Linguistics

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Introduction to Linguistics
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Introduction to Linguistics

• Teacher Simon Smith (???)
• Dr Smith, Simon or ?? OK
• Smith or Teacher not OK
• This semesters course
• the basics of linguistic analysis
• the sounds of languages
• the structure of sentences and individual words
• the study of meaning.

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About me

• I first came to Taiwan in 1991
• BA in Linguistics and Chinese, Leeds
• MSc in Machine Translation, Manchester
• PhD in Statistical Language Modeling, Birmingham
• Post-doctoral year at Academia Sinica
• This is my fourth year at Ming Chuan

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Why study Linguistics?

• Linguistics related to your English studies
• But also a science
• The scientific study of language
• You will get a good grasp of linguistic
  principles
• You will understand more about how languages
  (including English and Chinese) work.
• Linguistics asks such questions as
• How did language begin?
• Why is it easy for kids to learn their first
  language, but difficult for adults?
• What exactly is language?
• That one, we begin to answer next week!

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Why take this course?

• Its taught (mostly) in English
• Your English reading, writing, listening and
  speaking will all improve
• Its taught in a Western way you will
• think critically
• discuss issues with classmates and teacher
• question what classmates, teacher and even famous
  linguists say
• You will learn to
• describe your own ideas, and others ideas, in a
  logical way, by giving presentations to the class
• write a medium-length essay, in the Western
  tradition (probably not until next semester)

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Course grades written work

• In-class or homework exercises every two weeks or
  so
• There will be one or two short quizzes

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Course grades discussion presentation

• Discussion
• You will discuss Linguistics and Language in
  small groups
• Presentation
• You will get extra credit for presenting your
  discussion for the whole class

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Class rules

• Attendance is mandatory
• Assistant class leader please take attendance at
  break time
• More than 4 missed classes (whether for sickness,
  sports, laziness, ??, ??, or any reason) 0!
• If you arrive late, you must apologize and
  explain the reason
• Please dont eat hot food
• Please switch off your phone
• Please dont chatter while Im speaking
• Work only on class material during class time

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Class website

• http//mcu.edu.tw/ssmith
• Here you will find
• These PowerPoint slides
• Syllabus, recommended reading and websites
• Your grades
• Check grades on-line after quizzes and exercises
  are returned to you

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Textbook

• Yule, The Study of Language (Cambridge, 2006)
• There should be enough copies in the store
• You must buy a copy
• You must bring it next week and every week

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Course syllabus
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Next semester

• We will look at some other topics
• Psycholinguistics
• Sociolinguistics
• Computational linguistics
• Corpus linguistics
• There are a lot of flavors of linguistics!

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But this semester

• Well look at the different linguistic strata
  (layers)

Linguistics
Sounds of language
Grammar
Meaning
Phonetics
Phonology
Morphology
Syntax
Semantics
Pragmatics
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?????????!

• A standard way to express this phonetically
• ??? ??? ??? ?? ?????? ? ?? ??
• Another way, using Hanyu Pinyin
• wo3 jue2 de5 zhe4 ge5 jiao4 shi4 tai4 re4
• In phonetics terms, this utterance (sentence)
  contains
• vowels (like ?)
• and consonants (like ?)
• There are also semivowels (like ?)
• And there are diphthongs (??,?)
• And there is information about the tone (pitch)

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?????????! - morphology

• A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning
• ? and ? have meanings (although ? is not normally
  used independently as a word)
• so, ? and ? are morphemes
• and they can be put together to form a word ??
• If the utterance had been ????
• we would say that ?? has two morphemes, ? and ?
• ? is called a plural morpheme

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?????????! - syntax

• We can also say
• ????,?????!
• I dont think we can really say
• ???????????, because it sounds very strange
• And we certainly cant say something like
• ?????????, although we might understand it if
  someone said it
• But if someone said
• ????,?????, we would probably have no idea what
  they were talking about
• This is because of syntactic rules governing
  Mandarin.

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And now, a semantic example

• You can choose different words, and get more or
  less the same meaning
• Like ??, or ???, or ?????
• But some lexical choices (possible words) are
  not available
• ????(?)????
• ????????(?)
• This is because the classifier ? selects a human
  noun
• And because ? modifies substances like liquids,
  not spaces like rooms

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In pragmatics

• ?????????!
• Is it only a comment on the temperature?
• Or does it really mean something like
• Please can you turn the air-conditioning on?
• In English, Im not sure can mean No
• And ????? generally means Im not going
• Pragmatics tells us to look beyond the sentence
  to find the real meaning

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In your free time

• Look at the diagram again, and try to understand
  it.

Linguistics
Sounds of language
Grammar
Meaning
Phonetics
Phonology
Morphology
Syntax
Semantics
Pragmatics
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And take a look at ????

• On this website
• http//zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikipediaE8AFADE
  8A880E5ADA6E9A696E9A1B5
• Get some practice reading simplified Chinese!
• And read about Animals and Human Languages in
  Chapter 2 of your book.

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Introducing Linguistics

• What do linguists do?
• Grammar, and other aspects of language
• Relationships between languages
• How is linguistics used in the real world?

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What do linguists do?

• They dont necessarily learn languages
• Linguist and ??? are confusing terms
• They are often interested in the structure of
  languages. They might
• specialize in one language, or a group of
  languages
• compare different languages
• study features shared by all languages

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Many linguists study grammar

• Syntax
• the way words are arranged to make sentences
• John had lunch / John lunch had
• Morphology
• the way words are modified to fit the
  circumstances
• John had lunch / John have lunch
• Linguists study
• what people actually say
• not what they should say!

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The sort of things linguists look at in syntax

• Syntax (the way words are arranged to make
  sentences)
• John saw the girl with the telescope
• ??????????

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And in morphology

• Affixation hardly used in Chinese
• My son has 73 Ultramen
• ?(??)???73?????(?)
• Compounding
• rare in English greenhouse, blackbird
• productive in Chinese
• Verb-object compounds ??, ??
• Resultative compounds ???, ???
• Stump compounds ??

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Phonology the sounds of a language

• Has ???? lost the sounds ????
• Why do we sometimes hear
• ??? ??????

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Historical linguistics

• How languages are related
• Language families
• Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan
• Areal linguistics
• Greek, Bulgarian
• Mostly borrowed words also shared grammatical
  features
• Chinese, Korean, Japanese
• How language changes over time
• sounds poor vs paw, suit.
• vocab ??, ??. Calque ????, skyscraper,
  gratte-ciel
• grammar Did you eat yet? Adversative passive ?

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Sociolinguistics

• Diglossia high and low prestige languages
• The role of Mandarin and Taiwanese in a bilingual
  society
• The changing role of English in Taiwan society
  borrowing, or showing off?
• case and size code-switching, or lexicalized
  Chinese words?

Ta-hsüeh-shih-ching
Ta-hsüeh-shih-ching
Ta-hsüeh-shih-ching
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Applications for linguistics

• Speech disorders
• Forensic linguistics
• Accent detection
• Style verification (eg police style)
• Language teaching
• Computational applications
• Machine translation
• Speech recognition and synthesis
• Language identification