Introduction to Linguistics

Phonetics: study of the sounds of speech

•Phonology deals with the sound systems languages

•Phonetics deals with the physical realisation of the elements of the sound system, e.g. how the sound is physically produced (articulatory phonetics), or the acoustic characteristics of the speech sound (acoustic phonetics)

•Phonology: study of sound systems in particular languages

The field of articulatory phonetics is a subfield of phonetics. In studying articulation, phoneticians explain how humans produce speech sounds via the interaction of different physiological structures.

Key concepts: the phone

•Each time a speech sound is produced it is different

•Each time you produce a /t/ it will be ever so slightly different

•The actual realisation of a sound is influenced by its environment

•(tea, too, try, bat, later)

•Hence the concept of the phone: a physical realisation of a speech sound

Key Concepts: the phoneme

•The smallest speech sound that has linguistic value

•When a series of phones are similar in terms of articulation and can be distinguished from another group in terms of meaning and collocation, the group is given a name e.g. /t/. This is a phoneme.

•The phoneme is an abstract term, specific to a particular language.

•A phoneme has a range of realisations as phones, called allophones

•The phoneme /t/ can be physically realised as (i.e. has the following allophones):

• [th] take, ten
• [t] in steal, store
• [?] butter, rat, (glottal stop)

Phonotactic Constraints

= Language specific combinations of sounds

Examples:

1  In some Romance languages, the  [st-] consonant cluster

     is not possible >> strait/straight pronounced as [estreit]

2  In English, the sounds  [kn-]  and  [gn-]

     are not permitted at the beginning

     of a new word – however, they do

     exist in both German and Dutch; e.g. know ,but acknowledge

3  psycho, psychology, psalm, pseudo

A speaker is said to have an accent in Lx if at some level their pronunciation of Lx is not identical with that of native speakers of Lx.

i.Individual sounds (e.g. Spanish [X] replaces [h] in “hundred”)

ii.Sound combinations (phonotactic constraints)

iii.Suprasegmentals (melody, intonation etc)

a formal representation of the grammatical structure of a sentence in terms of its individual constituents

In syntactic analysis, a constituent is a word or a group of words that function(s) as a single unit within a hierarchical structure.

Zeichen!

There are two basic types of ambiguity: (1) lexical ambiguity (the presence of two or more possible meanings within a single word) and (2) syntactic ambiguity (the presence of two or more possible meanings within a single sentence or sequence of words).

Lexical ambiguity:

•Do you believe in clubs for young people?' someone asked W.C. Fields. 'Only when kindness fails,' replied Fields.”

•"Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend; inside it's too hard to read.” (Groucho Marx)

Syntactic ambiguity

In English grammar, syntactic ambiguity is the presence of two or more possible meanings within a single sentence or sequence of words. Also called structural ambiguity or grammatical ambiguity. Compare with lexical ambiguity (the presence of two or more possible meanings within a single word).

In syntactic ambiguity, the same sequence of words is interpreted as having different syntactic structures. In contrast, semantic ambiguity is where the structure remains the same, but the individual words are interpreted differently.

• How does Word word-count define words?
• Which language has the most words?
• What are some of the problems in defining words? (think of: dog, dogs, doglike, dogging etc)

Inflectional morphology serves the purpose of indicating the syntactic/grammatical function of the word in the sentence:

• Der Vater sieht den Sohn
• Den Vater sieht der Sohn
• My father’s house (genitive/possession)
• live, lives, living, lived

An inflection expresses one or more grammatical categories with a prefix, suffix or infix, or another internal modification such as a vowel change.For example, the Latin verb ducam, meaning "I will lead", includes the suffix -am, expressing person (first), number (singular), and tense (future). The use of this suffix is an inflection. In contrast, in the English clause "I will lead", the word lead is not inflected for any of person, number, or tense; it is simply the bare form of a verb.