Introduction to Linguistics
English Summary ZHAW
English Summary ZHAW
Set of flashcards Details
| Flashcards | 15 |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Category | English |
| Level | University |
| Created / Updated | 10.01.2017 / 16.01.2017 |
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Introduction W01
What is linguistics?
•Applied linguistics identifies relevant communication-based problems in society, analyses them and offers solutions
•Typical areas: translation, interpreting, language testing,
•Communication problems based on mutual misunderstandings, ambiguities etc.
•Aviation: what exactly causes misunderstanding?
- Production of sounds
- Acoustic properties of sounds
- Syntactic ambiguities (e.g. flying planes can be dangerous)
Introduction W01
What does phonetics study?
Phonetics: study of the sounds of speech
Introduction W01
What’s the difference between phonetics and phonology?
•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)
Introduction W01
What does phonology study?
•Phonology: study of sound systems in particular languages
Introduction W01
Main features of articulatory phonetics
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.
Introduction W01
phone, allophone, phoneme
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)
Introduction W01
phonotactic constraints (see psycho- but rhapsody, know but acknowledge)
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
Introduction W01
what is an accent?
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)
Syntax W05
what is meant by constituent structures?
a formal representation of the grammatical structure of a sentence in terms of its individual constituents
Syntax W05
what is a constituent?
In syntactic analysis, a constituent is a word or a group of words that function(s) as a single unit within a hierarchical structure.
Syntax W05
How can you determine a constituent? Criteria? Explain by drawing constituent structures for:
- I looked at the flowers in the garden (2 interpretations)
- In the garden I looked at the flowers (1 interpretation)
Zeichen!
Syntax W05
Syntactic ambiguities
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).
Syntax W05
Semantic ambiguities
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.
Semantics/Pragmatics W09
Different interpretations of the word “word”
- 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)
Semantics/Pragmatics W09
inflection
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.
