Linguistics

- study of the meaning of morphemes and words

- meaning is conventional

- meaning is part of our linguistic knowledge

- meaning is stored in our mental warehouse= the LEXICON

- attributes do not have to be common to all category members

- some attributes are more important for categiry membership than others

- category boundaries are fuzzy

- familiy resemblance is important

- items can be substituted by other items (cats with dogs)

- paradigmatic contrasts indicate which words are likely to belong to the same word class

- items from a semantic set can be grouped together

- items occur within the same construction 

- co-occurence rstrictions within syntax

- syntagmatic relations indicate compatible combinations

- items with syntagmatic relations > co-occurence patterns

- vary in the varieties of a language 

- real language use

- internal meaning relations between words within the vocabulary

- sameness of meaning

- total synonymy is exceptional

- oppostiteness of meaning

- binary opposites excluding each other (either/or)

- binary opposites functioning as poles of a scales 

young > old

unmarked: How big is your house?

marked: How small is your house?

- binary opposites implying each other

teacher -student

master-servant

- binary opposites implying movement or change of direction

arrive-depart

- hierarchical relationship between a general term and more specific instances -> `kind-of`relationships

- hyperonym/hypernym: the superordinate term flower

- hyponym: the subordinate term tulip, rose, daffodil

- hierarchial relationships between a general term and more specific  instances -> `part-of`relationships

- holonym: the superordinate term hand

- meronym: the subordinate term palm, wrist, finger

- one word- different, but related (shades of) meaning mouse

not to be confused with Homonymy

- similarity of form, but no common core of meaning 

Homophony: different spelling, same pronounciation

Homography: same spelling, different pronounciation

Ferdinand de Saussure: language vs. parole

Noam Chomsky: competnce vs. performance

John L. Austin/John R. Searle

-Truth conditions: a sentence is either true or false or meaningless-> sentence must contain proposition about the world

No truth.based evaluation possible, utterances do things in the world

-> in using speech we perform acts: SPEECH ACTS

-Illocution(speech intention, force of saying something) as central act

 - illocution: investigated mostly in speech act theory, locutinary act examined to a certain extent, perlocution hardest evaluate

 -speech act is often understood as illocutionary act

 -speech act theory to a large exten theory of illcutionary roles

-actual wording

-saying something, using sounds, words with meanings

-effect

-what is achieved by saying something

Linguistic context (->cotext)

-linguistic environment of an utterance, i.e. the words used before or after it

Non-linguistic (or èxtra`-linguistic) context:

-where the utterance is made

- what objects/other people are preent 

-what actions are taking place

-the relationship between speaker and hearer etc.

-communication relies on shared knowledge of how to identify and classify an untterance a a particular type of act 

-no 1:1 relation between syntactic sentence types and illocutionary acts

-speech acts may be indirect not only their form, but also in their content

-there must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect. This includes uttering certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances, which all must be appropriate

-the procedure must be executed by all participants correctly and completely

-if the procedure requieres certain thoughts or feelings, then a person participating in procedure must in fct have those thoughts or feelings, and the participants must behave accordingly

language in use -> context dependence 

-relevenat constraints of the communicative situation influence language use, language variation and discourse

Context: 

-communicative situation

-background knowledge, including:cultural general knowledge, interpersonal knowledge

-co-textual context -> COTEXT

-verbal context

-surrounding text of an utterance

-influences way we interpret utterances

-the more co-text, the more secure the interpretation

conversational maxims:

1. Quantity

2. Quality

3. Relevance

4. Manner

-constraints problem: what sort of language changes are possible

-transition problem: how does the feature spread in the community

-embedding problem:which factors affect language change

-evaluation problem: how do members of the community evaluate the change

-actuation problem: how did the change start in the first place, by whom, and why not elsewhere

-phonetics/phonology

-morphology

-lexicon

-syntax

-pragmatic/discourse analysis

1. variation everywhere

2. irregularities

3. analysing older literary texts

4. the social life of language

5. different levels interact

6.  language change is inevitable

-evidence of linguistic variation-films, radio, instant messaging logs, discussion forums, podcasts

-all from different contexts

-uniformitarian principle-linguistic processes obervable are assumed to apply in the past as well

orderly heterogeneity

-language is rule-governed, speech habits of a community, mostly subconcious knowledge

-different ways of saying the same thing>language variation

-language variability is normally analysed in smaller units, so-called features of a variety

-main levels:sounds (phonteics/phonology), words (lexis/vocabulary), and structures/patterns (grammar and syntax) + more recently communicative patterns (pragmatics, discourse analysis)