Introductions to Linguistics
Lecture 1: 11-09-2023
What is a natural human language?
What makes human language different?
What you are saying has a meaning.
Humans evolve their language.
Defining a natural human language:
Questions relevant to human language:
1. Is it compositional (is the meaning made of contrastive smaller meaningful units, e.g.
pat/bat vs pit/bit)?
2. Is it acquired by offspring?
3. Is it creative (can speakers create new forms never heard by others?)
4. Is it interactive?
5. Is it bound to the here and now?
6. Is there an arbitrary relation between form and meaning?
‘Language is not a good communication system, it is not efficient: There is not one way to
say some things’.
Your brain does not care if stimuli is spoken or signed. It converts the stimuli to the meaning.
Iconicity: Showing a visual representation of a word/ text. →
Is language rule-governed?
Grammars: sets of rules
Natives’ knowledge of these rules is unconscious.
Voiceless consonants: with a stop in your voice.
Reflectives are pronouns that refer back to original
subjects.
Ditransitive verbs: needs a what and a where
→ He puts (what) (where).
Unique trait of human: language capacity
Universalism does not imply uniformity.
Universalism refers to some core structural properties of language:
language despite their differences are organized around the same principles
Compositionality: sentences and theri meanings derive from combinations of their parts.
Phonemes: H/e/s/a/v/e/d/th/e/g/i/r/l
Morphemes: He/save+d/the/girl
Words: He+saved+the+girl
Sentence: He saved the girl
Meaning can be found by looking at the structure.
1
, Lecture 2: The parser - 14-09-2023
The human parser is sensitive to hierarchy and not linear order.
Parents and community speakers/signers do not teach children about such hierarchies.
One letter on itself does not have to mean something specific to form a meaningfull unit with
other letters.
What is linguistics about?
Study of language structure:
How small meaningful elements are combined into larger units:
Sounds = Phonetics and phonology
Word structure = Morphology
Sentence structure = Syntax
How such combined units are interpreted:
Utterance meaning = Semantics
Language use/ language in context = Pragmatics
Linguistic structure: Recursion
Powerful principle of combination in language = Recursion
The ability to create new entities from existing ones of the same type.
The book → about → Mother’s Day.
Noun phrase → preposition → noun phrase
The language user:
The cognitive system of the language user:
- World knowledge
- Linguistic knowledge → competence vs. performance → Mental lexicon
- Knowledge of language use → communicative competence
FIGURE 2.5!
The mental lexicon:
- Not ordered alphabetically but related through meaning or
sound (Different for everyone, thicker the line, better the
connection) →
- Closest approximations in natural languages could be
classifier languages.
Language in the brain: Left hemisphere
- Broca’s area: Syntax → grammatics
- Wernicke’s area: Semantics
- Gyrus angularis: Word retrieval
2
Lecture 1: 11-09-2023
What is a natural human language?
What makes human language different?
What you are saying has a meaning.
Humans evolve their language.
Defining a natural human language:
Questions relevant to human language:
1. Is it compositional (is the meaning made of contrastive smaller meaningful units, e.g.
pat/bat vs pit/bit)?
2. Is it acquired by offspring?
3. Is it creative (can speakers create new forms never heard by others?)
4. Is it interactive?
5. Is it bound to the here and now?
6. Is there an arbitrary relation between form and meaning?
‘Language is not a good communication system, it is not efficient: There is not one way to
say some things’.
Your brain does not care if stimuli is spoken or signed. It converts the stimuli to the meaning.
Iconicity: Showing a visual representation of a word/ text. →
Is language rule-governed?
Grammars: sets of rules
Natives’ knowledge of these rules is unconscious.
Voiceless consonants: with a stop in your voice.
Reflectives are pronouns that refer back to original
subjects.
Ditransitive verbs: needs a what and a where
→ He puts (what) (where).
Unique trait of human: language capacity
Universalism does not imply uniformity.
Universalism refers to some core structural properties of language:
language despite their differences are organized around the same principles
Compositionality: sentences and theri meanings derive from combinations of their parts.
Phonemes: H/e/s/a/v/e/d/th/e/g/i/r/l
Morphemes: He/save+d/the/girl
Words: He+saved+the+girl
Sentence: He saved the girl
Meaning can be found by looking at the structure.
1
, Lecture 2: The parser - 14-09-2023
The human parser is sensitive to hierarchy and not linear order.
Parents and community speakers/signers do not teach children about such hierarchies.
One letter on itself does not have to mean something specific to form a meaningfull unit with
other letters.
What is linguistics about?
Study of language structure:
How small meaningful elements are combined into larger units:
Sounds = Phonetics and phonology
Word structure = Morphology
Sentence structure = Syntax
How such combined units are interpreted:
Utterance meaning = Semantics
Language use/ language in context = Pragmatics
Linguistic structure: Recursion
Powerful principle of combination in language = Recursion
The ability to create new entities from existing ones of the same type.
The book → about → Mother’s Day.
Noun phrase → preposition → noun phrase
The language user:
The cognitive system of the language user:
- World knowledge
- Linguistic knowledge → competence vs. performance → Mental lexicon
- Knowledge of language use → communicative competence
FIGURE 2.5!
The mental lexicon:
- Not ordered alphabetically but related through meaning or
sound (Different for everyone, thicker the line, better the
connection) →
- Closest approximations in natural languages could be
classifier languages.
Language in the brain: Left hemisphere
- Broca’s area: Syntax → grammatics
- Wernicke’s area: Semantics
- Gyrus angularis: Word retrieval
2
