Introduction to Cognitive Science: Linguistics Segment

1
Introduction to Cognitive Science Linguistics
Segment

• Lecture 1
• September 15, 2005.
• (2.00 p.m. 3.50 p.m.)
• Venue Meng Wah Complex Room 324
• Lecturer Dr. A. B. Bodomo
• Department of Linguistics
• ltabbodomo_at_hku.hkgt

2
Course Outline and heuristics

• Refer to Course Outline
• course objectives
• format of teaching
• reading materials
• assignments
• study questions

3
Linguistics as Cognitive Science

• Cognitive science is a relatively new discipline
  that investigates the way the human mind
  functions and how computers can simulate these
  functions. The human mind is a complex system
  that receives, stores, processes and sends out
  information. All this involves cognition, which
  refers to perceiving and knowing.
• Language is an important part of this cognitive
  process of receiving, storing, transforming and
  sending out information. We often hear or read
  information, store what we hear or read in order
  to remember it, and process this information
  before telling, or writing to, someone about it.
• Linguistics is the science of language, and is
  thus the part of cognitive science that addresses
  issues of language learning, production, and
  understanding. Students of cognitive science need
  to have a good grasp of this central aspect of
  the discipline.
• To this end, in the linguistics component of this
  introduction to cognitive science, we will
  address issues that center on the nature of
  language, its key properties and components, and
  how it is learnt and used in various contexts.

4
(No Transcript)
5
Many Approaches to Linguistics

• Diachronic/historical approaches how languages
  change over time
• Sociological approaches how languages vary
  according to different classes of speakers
• Mentalistic/cognitive approaches an
  investigation of language as a product of the
  mind i.e. language as a cognitive process
• Descartes
• Chomsky
• So how is reality represented through natural
  language? At which levels of language can we
  conceptualise objects and concepts?

6
Pronunciation Level of Phonetics/Phonology
7
Word Form/ Structure Level of Morphology

• Two morphemes white and dove
• Cantonese (Hong Kong Chinese)
• hoeng1 gong2 dak6 bit6 hang4 zing3 keoi1 'The
  Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR)
• hoeng1 gong2 wui6 ji5 zin2 laam5 zung1 sam1
• The Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition
  Centre

8
Phrase/ Sentence Structure Level of Syntax

• (1) Who did you see Chan with?
• (2)Who did you see Chan and?
• (3) ngo5 heoi3 zung1 waan4
• (4) heoi3 zung1 waan4
• (5)zung1 waan4 heoi3 ngo5

• WHITE DOVE
• PS rule
• NP ? A N
• Tree diagram

NP A N
white dove
9
Meaning Level of Semantics
What does the sign, white dove, mean? Signifier
and signified Reality, Mind, etc.

• Cantonese
• a. me1 waa2 ?
• could mean
• b. What did you say ?
• c. What language ?

• English
• a. Chan loves you more than Yan.
• could mean
• b. Chan loves you more than Yan loves you.
• c. Chan loves you more than Chan loves Yan.

10
MeaningLevel of Pragmatics

• What would white dove mean in some specialized
  contexts, cultures, etc.?
• Pragmatics meaning in context
• Its hot!!

11
Topics in the linguistics component

• PHONOLOGY
• MORPHOLOGY
• SYNTAX
• SEMANTICS
• LANGUAGE and LITERACY ACQUISITION

12
Introduction to Cognitive ScienceLinguistics
Component

• Topic 1
• Phonology and Morphology

13
Keywords

• morphology
• inflectional morphology
• derivational morphology
• morph
• morpheme
• morphophonology
• morphophoneme

• Phonology
• phonetics
• phone
• phoneme
• tone
• stress
• toneme
• tonology

14
Introduction

• Theme
• A survey of how linguistic knowledge at the level
  of phonology and morphology is represented and
  computed in the minds of speakers of a language.
• Objective
• an understanding of the basic terms and issues in
  phonology and morphology
• an interface approach rather than rigidly
  discussing these issues from phonology,
  morphology, syntax and semantics, we will look at
  how phonology interfaces with morphology and how
  syntax interfaces with semantics.

15
Phonology

• A field of cognitive science that investigates
  how sound systems of a language are represented
  in the minds of speakers
• Stillings et al (1995220) gives a concise
  specification of what phonological knowledge as
  represented in the minds of speakers is
• The phonological component of a grammar consists
  of a list of the words of that language, with the
  pronunciation of each word given as a faithful
  acoustic image coupled with direct instructions
  to the vocal tract about how to produce that
  image, and instructions to the perceptual system
  about how to recognize it.

16
Phonetics and Phonology A distinction

• Phonology
• how a set of the sounds produced by the vocal
  tract are organized into meaningful sound units
  in each language

• Phonetics
• a science that deals with the articulatory and
  acoustic properties of sounds produced by the
  vocal tract

17
Phonetics and Phonology (contd)

• IPA chart (please refer to your own copy)
• For instance, given a list of sounds that can be
  produced by the vocal tract, such as in the IPA
  chart (Phonetics), only a set of these sounds are
  meaningful in each of English, Cantonese and
  Dagaare (Phonology).

18
(No Transcript)
19
Sets of meaningful sounds in English, Cantonese,
and Dagaare
These meaningful sound units are called phonemes.
20
Phonemes

• Concrete sounds or phones give us the abstract
  concept phoneme a minimal meaningful sound unit
• basic units in phonology
• phoneme
• allophone
• phonemes in WHITE DOVE as conceptualised/
  represented in the minds of speakers
• / / / / / / / / / / /
  / ? / /

21
Allophones

• Variants of a phoneme
• Examples
• English
• p and ph as in / / stop and
  /phit/ pit
• Cantonese
• n and l as in /nei5/ and /lei5/ you
• Dagaare
• h and z as in / / and /
  / yesterday

22
Minimal pairs

• Method for identifying phonemes - analysing
  minimal pairs
• a minimal pair a pair of words that are
  identical except for a contrast in ONE sound .

• Examples in English, Cantonese, and Dagaare
• English
• /sip/ ? /s/, /tip/ ? /t/
• /pit/ ? /p/, /bit/ ? /b/
• Dagaare
• / / to enclose ? /l/
• / / to pull ? /t/

23
Suprasegmental phonemes Tone and Stress

• Tone
• meaningful pitch variations on syllables

• Stress
• the amount of force used in pronouncing a syllable

Stress and Tone can indicate differences in
meaning among pairs of words
24
Word stress in English

• Syllables may be stressed or unstressed in
  English, and some variations of stress on
  syllables of a word may cause differences in
  meaning.
• Teachers in this course are going to ensure an
  'increase of marks for cognitive science
  students.
• Teachers in this course are so kind that they
  will in'crease your marks.

25
Tone in Cantonese

• Cantonese TONES
• 6 tonemes
• high (tone 1), high rising (2), mid level (3),
  low falling (4), low rising (5), low level (6)

26
Tone in Dagaare

• Two tonemes - high and low

27
Phonological rules

• /Underlying phonological representations/
• Phonological rules
• Phonetic representation

28
Phonological rules in English, Cantonese, and
Dagaare

• English
• /p/ ? ph /
• a stop is aspirated in word initial position.
• pit but phit

• Dagaare
• a /d/ becomes r in secondary syllable position
• dide but dire eating

29
Morphology

• the field of cognitive science which studies how
  knowledge about the form or internal structure of
  words are represented and processed in the minds
  of speakers.
• divided into two main parts, inflectional
  morphology and derivational morphology
• Basic units of morphology morpheme, allomorph

30
Morphemes

• A morpheme is a minimal distinctive unit of
  grammar (Crystal 1997). A morpheme is an abstract
  term that must be captured by a concrete
  realization, the morph discrete speech unit
  e.g. white dove
• In morphology we represent units with braces.
• white doves
• Free morpheme white dove (these can stand on
  their own)
• Bound morpheme (-those that must be attached to
  another morpheme e.g. s)

31
Morphology (contd.)

• inflectional morphology and derivational
  morphology.
• Inflectional morphology knowledge through which
  speakers of a language create several paradigms
  of the same word to express various grammatical
  categories like number, person, tense, aspect,
  case, and gender

Number in English paper paper-s dog
dog-z prize prize-iz
But also child child-ren foot
feet sheep sheep zero morph
The various plural variations are said to be
allomorphs of the same plural morpheme.
32
Examples of inflectional morphemes (contd.)

• Person and number in French
• Je mang-e I eat
• Tu mang-es You eat
• Il mang-e He/she/it eat
• Nous mang-eons we eat
• Vous mang-ez You (pl) eat
• Ils mang-ent They eat

• Aspect in Cantonese
• maai5
• buy maai5-zo2
• has bought
• wan2 play
• wan2-gan2
• is playing

33
Derivational morphology

• Derivational morphology or word formation
  morphology on the other hand, is concerned with
  the speaker knowledge that underlies processes
  that form new words out of existing ones by
  adding various affixes, which are pieces of
  words.

• English Causative verbs from nouns and
  adjectives
• energy energ-ize
• sterile steril-ize
• penal penal-ize

34
Examples of derivational morphemes (contd)

• Cantonese
• zai2 (little/small) as in
• dang3 zai2 (small chair),
• syu1 zai2 (booklet)
• toei2 zai2 (small table)

• Dagaare agentive nouns from verbs
• di to eat - di-raa eater some one who
  can eat a lot
• zo to run zo-raa runner, athlete
• roam
• roamer, tourist

35
Morphophonology

• While it is possible to talk of phonology and
  morphology independently, in reality, knowledge
  about these two areas are intertwined, and
  speakers process these as such.
• Sometimes, speakers represent knowledge about
  phonemes (meaningful sound units) based on
  knowledge about some grammatical environments.

36
Morphophonologyor morphophonemics, as it is
known in North America

• the aspect of cognitive science that studies the
  classification of phonological aspects of
  knowledge representation based on knowledge about
  the grammatical aspects that affect these
  phonological representations and vice versa.
• Morphophoneme
• in parallel with a phoneme. While phonemes are
  written surrounded by slashes / /, morphophonemes
  are surrounded by braces . They are often
  written in CAPITALS (Crystal 1997).

37
Morphophonemic examples in English

• phonologically unpredictable singular plural
  alternation of words
• Knife knives
• Thief thieves
• But NOT of
• Chief chieves (chiefs)
• The morphophoneme F would then have
  morphoallophones like f for singular and v
  for plural of these words.
• Hence the need to emphasize their
  interrelationship.

38
Other examples of morphophonological phenomena

• Word or lexical stress is a morphophonemic
  operation
• Example in describing the rules of
  pronunciation we often appeal to positions of the
  word in which the sound is
• aspiration in English a voiceless stop in word
  initial position is aspirated, elsewhere i.e. in
  word median and word final, it is unaspirated.
  This is not just a phonological rule but a
  morphophenemic rule.

39
Conclusion

• Phonology and morphology are two salient aspects
  of the tacit knowledge of speakers of a language.
  It is at these levels of mental representations
  that speakers capture the sounds and structure of
  words and other minimal meaningful units of
  speech.
• An interface approach emphasizes that these two
  must not be separated into watertight
  compartments, but must recognize that there is an
  intimate interrelationship between them. This
  interrelationship is explored in the cognitive
  area of morphophonology.
• Morphology can also interface with syntax to give
  us morphosyntax. Syntax is going to be one of the
  topics of discussion in the next lecture.

40
References

• Crystal, David. 1997. A Dictionary of Linguistics
  and Phonetics. Blackwell Publishers.
• Lepore, Ernest and Zenon Pylyshyn (eds). 1999.
  What Is Cognitive Science. Blackwell Publishers.
  (especially chapters 10, 11, 12, and 13).
• Stillings, Neil and others. 1995. Cognitive
  Science An Introduction. MIT Press. (especially
  chapters 6).
• Trask, R. L. 1993. A Dictionary of Grammatical
  Terms in Linguistics. Routledge.
• Wilson, R. and Frank C. Neil (eds) 1999. The MIT
  Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. MIT Press

41
Introduction to Cognitive ScienceLinguistics
Component

• Topic 2
• Syntax and Semantics

42
Keywords

• constituent structure
• functional structure
• semantics
• pragmatics
• morphosyntax
• syntax-semantics interface
• ambiguity

• Syntax
• the mental lexicon
• phrase
• noun phrase (NP)
• verb phrase (VP)
• phrase structure
• sentence structure
• tree diagram

43
Introduction theme and objective

• Theme
• A survey of how linguistic knowledge at the level
  of syntax and semantics is represented in the
  minds of speakers of a language.
• Objective
• an understanding of the basic terms and issues in
  syntax and semantics/pragmatics
• an interface approach rather than rigidly
  discussing these issues from phonology,
  morphology, syntax and semantics, we will look at
  how syntax interfaces with semantics.

44
Syntax

• deals with the combination of words to form
  phrases and sequences.
• What are the principles that determine ways we
  can or cannot combine some words to form
  sentences?
• For example, why are some of these sentences
  correct and others wrong?
• Who did you see Mary with?
• Who did you see Mary and ?
• Ngo5 heoi3 zung1 waan4 Im going to Central
• Heoi3 zung1 waan4
• Zung1 waan4 heoi3 ngo5

45

• Syntacticians, or cognitive scientists working on
  syntax, attempt to capture this knowledge by
  positing rules.
• Consider the situation whereby a speaker of
  English, Cantonese or Dagaare wants to express
  the conceptual notion of drinking water in
  English, Cantonese or Dagaare.
• The first step is presumably to search in a
  database of words in their respective languages
  for the appropriate words to express the
  situation.

Let us call this the mental lexicon.
46
The mental lexicon of a language

• a database containing a list of all the words in
  the language, along with information about their
  grammatical category, how they combine with other
  words and ,of course, their meaning.

47
Simplified lexicons of English, Cantonese, and
Dagaare(each containing words that would express
the conceptual notion of a man having drunk water
)
English The man drank water. drank, verb,
trans. having ingested water through the
mouth man, noun, count, an adult male human
being the, article, DEF. water, noun, mass a
kind of liquid
48
Phrase Structure

• From the database of lexical items that would
  form the building blocks of linguistic structure
  expressing the conceptual notion, the next step
  is to group the words such that they would
  express the entities that take part in the action
  and the action itself.
• We would refer to this group of words as phrases,
  a phrase being defined as a structured group of
  words.
• Phrases have heads, a head of a phrase is the
  most important word in the phrase. Phrases take
  their names after the name of their heads. So a
  noun phrase (NP) is headed by a noun, verb phrase
  (VP) by a verb, etc.
• The man is an NP, drank water is a VP.
  Indeed, a VP can contain an NP, water, which just
  has only one item.

49
Sentence Structure

• words we need to express a situation are selected
  from our mental lexicon.
• we have successfully grouped them into phrases
  and units to express entities and events.

• we are ready to put these words to form complete
  strings expressing the conceptual situation. This
  is the domain of sentence analysis. We begin by
  positing phrase structure rules.

50
Phrase Structure rules

• With these phrase structure rules and the lexicon
  attached the native speaker can form or interpret
  grammatical sentences and reject ungrammatical
  ones.
• (In groups of two, spend at most 3 minutes and
  come up with phrase rules for Cantonese and
  Dagaare to express the conceptual situation of a
  man having drank water.)

• S ? NP VP
• VP ? V NP
• NP ? Art N
• V ? drank
• N ? man, water
• Art ? the

51
A constituent structure diagram in the form of a
tree structure
The first NP functions as the SUBJECT of the
sentence, the verb as the PREDICATE and the
second NP as the OBJECT. This can be represented
in a functional structure diagram
52
Functional structure diagram

• This is how we represent the syntactic knowledge
  of speakers of a language for basic sentences.
  There are however more complex cases.

An account of the syntax alone is not enough for
an adequate interpretation of sentences that
encode concepts, situations and attitudes. We
need a level of meaning to achieve this.
53
Meaning level of semantics/ pragmatics

• What does the sign, white dove, mean? Signifier
  and signified
• Reality, mind, etc
• This will be taken care of by semantics and
  pragmatics

54
Semantics

• Trask (1999 249)
• the branch of linguistics dealing with meanings
  of words and sentences.

• Crystal (1997 343)
• a major branch of linguistics devoted to the
  study of MEANING in language.

55
Meaning Level of Semantics

• English
• a. Chan loves you more than Yan.
• could mean
• b. Chan loves you more than Yan loves you.
• c. Chan loves you more than Chan loves Yan.

• Cantonese
• a. me1 waa2 ?
• could mean
• b. What did you say ?
• c. What language ?

56
Meaning Level of Pragmatics

• Crystal (1997 301)
• the study of language from the point of view of
  the users, especially of the choices they make,
  the constraints they encounter in using language
  in social interaction, and the effects their use
  of language has on the other participants in an
  act of communication.

• What would white dove mean in some specialised
  contexts, cultures, etc.?
• What about a black tie?

57
Syntax and how it interfaces with other components

• Morphosyntax
• The syntax-semantics interface

58
Syntax and Its Interfaces (Morphology)

• Interface with morphology
• ? morphosyntax
• There is a close relationship between the
  structure of words and the structure of
  sentences.
• In some languages it is even difficult to tell
  whether a particular word formation is a word or
  a sentence

59
Syntax and Its Interfaces (Morphology)

• Swahili (a language of East Africa)
• ninakupenda
• Is a word that is made up of
• ni- na-         ku -   penda I
  Tense   you  love
• (The item na- in this language marks tense.)
• In this language, this word structure can also
  stand as a sentence, thus
• Ninakupenda 'I love you'

60
Morphosyntax (contd.)
In the data above, it is better to analyse this
linguistic item both in terms of its morphology
and syntax, hence morphosyntax.

• Trask (1999176)
• the area of interface between morphology and
  syntax.

• Crystal (1997250-251)
• grammatical categories or properties for whose
  definition criteria of morphology and syntax both
  apply, as in describing the characteristics of
  words
• E.g. NUMBER in nouns constitute a morphosyntactic
  category
• number contrasts affect syntax (e.g. singular
  subject requiring a singular verb)
• they require morphological definition (e.g. add
  -s for plural)

61
The Syntax-semantics Interface

• Besides studying the formal structure of
  sentences it is also important to study how parts
  of the sentence contribute to an interpretation
  of the whole sentence.
• Such is especially the case with syntactically
  ambiguous sentences
• Chan loves you more than Yan .
• Could mean
• i. Chan loves you more than Yan loves you .
• ii. Chan loves you more than Chan loves Yan.
• Class should look for more syntactic ambiguities
  in English, Cantonese, and any other language
• e.g. I hit the man with a book.

62
Conclusion

• We have briefly shown how tacit linguistic
  knowledge can be represented at various levels of
  phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics,
  pragmatics, and their interfaces, including
  morphophonology, morphosyntax, and the
  syntax-semantics interrelationships.
• In the next lecture/topic, we shall look closely
  at how this linguistic knowledge representation
  can be formalised into an algorithm, a
  computational procedure for processing this
  linguistic knowledge.

63
References

• Crystal, David. 1997. A Dictionary of Linguistics
  and Phonetics. Blackwell Publishers.
• Lepore, Ernest and Zenon Pylyshyn (eds). 1999.
  What Is Cognitive Science. Blackwell Publishers.
  (especially chapters 10, 11, 12, and 13).
• Stillings, Neil and others. 1995. Cognitive
  Science An Introduction. MIT Press. (especially
  chapters 6).
• Trask, R. L. 1993. A Dictionary of Grammatical
  Terms in Linguistics. Routledge.
• Wilson, R. and Frank C. Neil (eds) 1999. The MIT
  Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. MIT Press

64
- END -