Ling 1 Midterm + Final Study Guide

Linguistics 1 – Fall 2022
Week 1.1: Introduction to Linguistics

● Linguistics = the scientific study of language
● Language = a subconscious process; it is a tool and a kind of knowledge
● Expletive infixation = expletive is inserted in the middle of another word (expletive = an oath or
swear word)
● Phonetics = sounds
● Phonology = understanding the sound patterns that are possible in your language and how
sounds interact
● Morphology = knowledge of word structure (lexicon = your mental dictionary)
● Syntax = knowing patterns of how words fit together
● Semantics = you know how to assign meaning to words
● Linguistic competence = what you know in your mind and what you CAN do
● Linguistic performance = what you actually do and what actually comes out of your mouth
(subject to physical limitations)
1.2: Intro continued

Features of language:
● Arbitrariness = the relationship between a word and its meaning is arbitrary
○ Form -meaning relation is not arbitrary when there is sound symbolism – words whose
pronunciation suggest their meanings:
■ Onomatopoeic words (buzz, meow, woosh…)
■ But these onomatopoeic words have different sounds in different languages
(bark for dogs is only the English sound) – so form and meaning IS arbitrary
● Creativity
○ Finite set of building blocks, but an infinite # of sentences (we can create and
understand novel sentences effortlessly)
○ There is no limit to the length of a sentence
● Universal Grammar (UG) = the set of all universal properties possessed by all languages (a set
of language “laws”)
○ If there is a UG, would this make it easier for a child to acquire a language?
● Language universals
○ Forming Q’s
○ Negating
○ Indicating an action
○ Set of discrete sounds/gestures
● Development of grammar
○ All children have similar stages of language development

○ Supports the notion of UG
● Descriptive grammar: linguists’ model of mental grammar
○ What the speaker’s rules actually are
○ What people actually say
○ NOT equivalent to anything goes
● Prescriptive rules of grammar (based on Latin for English), often used by teachers
○ What speaker’s rules “should” be
○ Ex: double negatives – double negatives do NOT make a positive
○ Negative concord = double negative is correct (ex: in Spanish or in AAVE)
○ Double negatives are grammatically correct in descriptive grammar
○ stranded/dangling prepositions = breaking the rules of prescriptive grammar: “where’s
the party at?” – this was invented by John Pryden in 1672 out of nowhere
Week 1 case study: Colorless Green Ideas

● Noam Chomsky showed there are patterns to language and we have rules in our heads that
help us form sentences – human potentiality
● Humans can produce new expressions
● Words seem indivisible, but they have many different parts to them (hinting to morphology)
● How do we know that gaps between words are there? – word boundaries show how humans
surpass machines in language knowledge
● Words → concepts – concepts are abstract yet fixed by the mind
● A strict system, yet with many degrees of freedom
● How did sound and meaning get linked together? The creation of grammar and syntax
● Grammar: organize words in a line
● The form of a sentence is independent of its meaning
● Major task: arrange a non-linear event into a linear pattern (ex: colorless green ideas sleep
furiously) – semantics (meaning) and syntax (form) can be separate
○ There is more to sentence structure than whether it has meaning (as long as it obeys the
rules of syntax)
● UG: the idea that you inherit grammar
● Differences between human languages is trivial
● It’s hard to draw a picture of negation, but languages help us think abstractly (ex: “there is not
a giraffe standing next to me”)
Week 1 reading new parts

● Teaching grammar = used to learn another language – point of reference from Native language
to new language
● Descriptive grammar has the goal of describing rules people use; it does not want to tell people
which rules to follow
● Linguistics focuses on spoken language, not as much writing (writing is taught, not learned
through exposure)
● Signed languages are the same as spoken languages: they have their own grammar and lexicon
(even in animals, we can see that gestures = signals that have fixed, singular meanings)
Week 2.1: Language and dialect — language variation

● ALL dialects are regular and rule-governed
● Dialect = any variety of a language that is shared by a group of speakers
○ Everyone speaks a dialect
○ The “prestige” dialect is often related to the ruling class, has a written form and
grammar, has fixed spelling and writing, is considered to be the “correct”
pronunciation, and is used in public
● Language variation
○ Language is used differently depending on the context
○ Varies based on context, social class, geography, gender, age, etc. (geographic dialects,
social dialects, etc.)
○ Lexical variation = using different terms to refer to the same thing (this is different
geographically)
● AAVE vs. SAE
○ AAVE uses double negatives
○ “Be” deletion: AAVE does be-deletion where SAE can do a contraction of be – there is
a direct correlation
■ He’s nice → he nice
■ They’re mine → they mine
○ AAVE has rules of grammar
● Jocks and burnouts: strong correlation between using negative concord (aka double negative)
and lower social status
● Notions of correctness – where do they come from?
○ Educational system
○ Government
○ Social class
○ Stigmatization of non-standard dialects
● Singlish = English dialect spoken in Singapore

○ Discourse particles = no direct semantic meaning, but serves a pragmatic (practical)
function – ex: “lah” = reassurance or impatience, “what” = obviousness or
contradiction
○ Ex in English: Well, you know
● Language variation is present in everyone’s speech (including in individuals)
● Part of our knowledge of language is knowing what is appropriate depending on the context
● Non-standard dialects DO have grammar.rules
○ Variation register/level of formality
2.2: Lang and Dialect Cont.:

● “Like” is used in many colloquial varieties of English
○ “Like” = a verb or comparative, but also as a filler
○ “Like” is thought to be meaningless – negative valley girl attitudes around the use of
the word
○ It is NOT meaningless!
● Uses of like:
○ Introducing a quote, thought, or reported speech: quotative complementizer “He was
like, ‘...’”
○ Signaling approximation (used like about): approximative adverb
○ Exemplification, illustration, explanation – like signals a relationship between
sentences in a discourse (discourse marker)
■ “I love Jenny. Like, she’s a little out-of-it, but like, she’s really funny.”
■ Like connects 2 sentences in this case
○ Discourse/Focus marker: “like” emphasizes what follows
■ “Could I like borrow your sweater?”
● Women/young people don’t use like more than other demographics
○ Colloquial uses of “like” have been around since the 1900’s
○ The misconception that “like” comes from valley girls – “like” precedes valley girls
● Grammatical use of “like” requires subtle + complex knowledge of discourse
○ “Like” highlights a speaker’s intelligence – it is hard to use
● Linguistic profiling: using characteristics of a person’s speech to identify them as part of a
group
○ Even just saying “hello” can show someone’s dialect
○ Negative attitudes around dialects + speakers have real world effects (especially toward
racial/ethnic and other minorities)
● Dialect differences =/= a deficiency or deterioration of a language
Week 2.3: Lang & Dialect Cont.

● Sign languages:
○ Used primarily by deaf people
○ Different medium – using hands
○ At least 100k+ ASL users in the United States
● There are many different sign languages (around 300), and they are mutually unintelligible
● There are dialects of signed languages
○ Ex: black ASL has dialectal differences
● Some signs are iconic (ex: house shows the shape of a house) but a lot of them are only iconic
once you know what they are supposed to mean
○ Signing abstract concepts is possible, so it is not just purely iconic (ex: jokes, swearing,
etc.)
○ Signed languages are just as expressive
● Signed languages are not encoded languages, they are really just different languages
○ ASL =/= English in symbols
● Temporal inflection = verbs happening once, regularly or continuously
● Fingerspelling = translate things from an oral language with no sign
○ Manual representation of the letters of language
○ ASl and BSL have different alphabets (BSL = british)
● Signed languages have grammar and are rule-governed
○ 5 parameters: shape of hand, location, movement, palm orientation, and facial
expressions
○ Restricted set of hand shapes in SL’s (just like there is a restricted set of sounds in
languages)
○ Signed languages are fully structured human languages
Week 2 reading (269-290) new info:

● Idiolect = the language of an individual speaker with its unique traits
● Dialect = systematic differences in the way groups speak a language → each group speaks a
dialect
○ Mutually intelligible forms of a language that differ in systematic ways
● Dialect continuum = dialects merge into each other; there is no sudden or major break between
dialects
● Dialect diversity develops when the changes that occur in one region or group do not spread
● Dialect leveling = movement toward greater uniformity among dialects

● Each version of the language when there are differences among geographic regions = a regional
dialect
● R-drop in English: in America, to sound more like the Southern England English, they
dropped the r from words like farmer and father
○ R-less dialect is still spoken in Boston, New York, and Savannah, Georgia
● Regional phonological or phonetic distinctions = accents
● British RP (received pronunciation) = received/accepted by the monarch
● Lexical differences – lift vs. elevator
● Syntactic differences – between you and I, between you and me
● Dialect maps and dialect atlases = concentrations defined by different word usages and varying
pronunciations form dialect areas
● Isogloss = a line drawn on the map to separate dialect areas
○ Crossing an isogloss = passing from one dialect to another
● Social dialects = dialect differences that come about because of social factors
● Language purists idealize SAE
○ SAE is an idealization; nobody speaks this dialect – if somebody did we would not
know it, because SAE is not defined precisely (like most dialects, it is not clear)
○ Teachers and linguists attempted to precisely define SAE in the 1990s, but it did not
work
● Non-U (non upper English upper class) language often includes hypercorrections: deviations
from the norm thought to be “proper English”
○ In some cases, Non-U speech is so pervasive it eventually becomes part of the prestige
dialect (ex: Often pronounced without the t, and “between you and I/me”)
● No dialect is more expressive or complex than any other dialect or language
● Banned languages: Franglais (ex: le hotdog) was banned
● Use of SL was once banned in many parts of the world
● Linguistic chauvinism prevented people from participating in voting and other civil rights
(1981: an attempt to add English as the nat’l language to the US Constitution – the “Official
English” initiative)
● AAE/AAVE versus SAE
○ R-deletion deletes /r/ everywhere except before a vowel
■ Guard and god, nor and gnaw, sore and saw, poor and poe, fort and fought,
and court and caught
○ L-deletion rule
■ Toll and toe, all and awe
○ Consonant cluster reduction rule: simplifies consonant clusters, particularly at the

ends of words and when 1 of the 2 consonants is an alveolar (/t, /d, /s, /z)
■ May delete the past-tense morpheme: meant and mend – both pronounced as
men
■ Past and passed both pronounced like pass
■ Deletion rule is more likely to apply in nouns where the final consonant does
not represent the past-tense morpheme (than in verbs like chased)
■ Final [s] and [z] are more likely to be omitted by speakers of AAE in words like
kits (to get the surface form kit) than in words where the [s] represents a plural
morpheme (as in “seats”)
■ Consonant cluster reduction can also be seen in SAE (didn’t → dint)
○ Neutralization of [dotless i] and [epsilon] before Nasal Consonants – lack of

distinction between the two
■ Pin and pen, bin and ben, tin and ten, him and hen, etc.
○ Diphthong reduction: reduces the diphthong so that boil and boy are pronounced boy
○ Loss of interdental fricatives: brother → bruver
○ AAE double negatives
○ Be contraction in SAE = be deletion in AAE
■ Here I am → Here I am (no be contraction, no deletion)
■ He is nice → he nice
○ Habitual be: John be happy = John is usually happy. John happy = John is happy now.
○ There replacement: there’s a fly messing with me → it’s a fly messing with me.
● Phonological variables of Chicano English: He loves her → he love her
● Genderlects: women and men have different words for things like stomach, delicious, etc. in
Japanese for example
HW 1 quiz questions – include in the quizlet
Week 3.1: Brain and Language

● Language is lateralized to the left hemisphere of the brain
● Corpus callosum = connects the 2 sides of the brain
● Contralateral control: input from one side of the body is sent to the opposite side of the brain
● Pseudoscience of phrenology introduced the idea of localization: different parts of the brain
control different functions
● Written and spoken language is lateralized in the left hemisphere
● Dichotic listening = different sounds played in different ears simultaneously; subjects report
hearing only one sound (the one in the right ear aka the one presented to the left hemisphere)
● Split-brain patients: severed corpus callosum – L and R hemispheres do not communicate
● Wada test: anesthetizing 1 side of a patient’s brain – without the left hemisphere, language is
not there (they cannot talk/give a linguistic response)
● Language in the left hemisphere: aphasia = a disruption in language abilities (production
and/or comprehension) due to a brain injury
● Broca’s area - Broca discovered that loss of language ability is related to the left frontal lobe
● Broca’s Aphasia: speech is broken and halted (telegraphic speech = words are often dropped
out)
○ Words make some sense, but sentence structure is incorrect
○ Also known as “agrammatic aphasia”
○ Poor comprehension of complex sentences
○ Semantics/meaning = OK, Syntax =/= OK, comprehension = mostly OK
3.2: Brain and Language cont.
● Anomia = difficulty retrieving known words
● Wernicke’s area (farther back than Broca’s area): language deficit associated with damage to an
area in the temporal lobe
● Wernicke’s aphasia:
○ Speech is fluent, but does not make much sense
○ Grammar is usually not affected
○ Problems with word choice and meaning
○ Comprehension is severely impaired
○ This is called semantic aphasia
Broca’s Aphasia Wernicke’s Aphasia
● Few words, but they make sense ● Lots of words, but they don’t make very
● Semantics is okay much sense
● Syntax is not okay ● Semantics is not okay
● Comprehension is mostly okay ● Syntax is okay
● Writing is not okay ● Comprehension is not okay
● Writing is not okay
● Writing = written version of the speaking aphasia → not a speech problem, is a brain problem
● Linguistic deficits are associated with damage to specific areas of the brain
● Language is localized to specific parts of the left hemisphere
● Deaf sign language speakers: – left hemisphere lights up (even though it is not spoken, the
language is still processed in the same area of the brain)
● Language is lateralized to the left hemisphere of the brain
● fMRI allows us to see that signed/spoken languages activate the same areas of the brain
Week 2.3: Brain and Lang. Cont.

● SLI (specific language impairment) affects around 8% of kindergarten-aged children (struggling
with functional grammatical words such as “the”) → these kids have normal IQ, only their
linguistic abilities are affected
● There is no association between IQ and language ability – SLI shows the dissociation
● Language is separate from other cognitive abilities
● William’s Syndrome: language ability is intact, but they have a low IQ – “slightly off”
semantics, extremely social, limited spatial and motor skills (mutation on chromosome 7), love
art – they produce complete and complex sentences despite having a low IQ and “low”
intelligence
● Hominem = a word that sounds like another word (or a word with multiple meanings, ex:
club)
● General intelligence is not associated with language ability
● Language savants = low IQ but very high linguistic intelligence
○ Ex: Christopher knows 20+ languages but cannot properly take care of himself
○ His memory of language is very good, but his memory of places/directions is very poor
● Language is NOT completely tied to general intelligence; it develops separately than
intelligence
● Language abilities can be preserved even when other cognitive abilities are not
● Severed corpus callosum: can easily name what is seen on the right side, but cannot say what is
on his left side (R brain cannot communicate with the language in the L hemisphere)
● Shows contralateral communication and gives us an idea of how the idea works
Week 3 case study:

● It is not possible for a person to wake up from a coma or have a stroke and end up speaking a
language to which they have no exposure – must be exposed before to speak it
● For bilingual people, aphasia affects both languages equally
● In differential recovery: both languages are recovered, but at different rates
● Selective recovery = one or more of the languages is not recovered – selective recovery is not rare
● Successive recovery = two languages are recovered, but the recovery of the second language
begins only after restoration of the first one (uncommon)
● In a multilingual patient with aphasia, recovery comes first in the person’s mother tongue
Week 3 reading: new ideas (not in previous notes above):

● Lateralization = the localization of function to one hemisphere of the brain
● Tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon: anomic aphasia/anomia have constant word-finding
difficulties
● Acquired dyslexia: a disorder in which reading ability is disrupted due to brain damage to the
left hemisphere:
○ Deep dyslexia: make word substitutions such as pain → medicine or west → east
■ Many semantic mistakes (witch vs. which)
○ Surface dyslexia: must sound out every word (like a beginner reader)
● MRIs, fPETs, and fMRIs can show the brain in action and show localized brain damage
associated with specific linguistic and nonlinguistic cognitive tasks
● Event-related potentials (ERPs) = electrical signals emitted from the brain in response to
different linguistic stimuli
● Magnetoencephalography (MEG) records small changes in the brain’s magnetic fields and
provides info on which parts of the brian are involved in particular language-related tasks
Include HW 2 questions in quizlet

Week 4.1: Phonetics
Provided vowel chart on midterm
● Phonetic inventory = set of sounds in a language (for English, this includes subsets of
consonants and vowels)
● You know how to separate a continuous stream of speech into distinct words and words into
distinct sounds
● Vocal tract: structures that work together to produce speech sounds
○ 1. Alveolar Ridge (Tah, Tah; behind teeth roof of mouth)
○ 2. Hard Palate (Middle roof of mouth)
○ 3, Soft Palate/Velum (Ngah, Ngah, Back roof of mouth)
○ 4. Uvula (Flap of skin in back of throat)
○ 5. Pharynx (Farther back)
○ 6. Glottis (Voice box, Adam’s apple, uh-oh, uh-oh)
● Orthography: phonetics =/= spelling (spelling is full of inconsistencies in regards to

pronunciation) – island, subtle, psychology – symbols are not pronounced
● IPA
○ One symbol = one sound
○ IPA is universal – it can be used to represent any human language
■ Phone = [fon]
■ Phonetics = [fə’nɛrɪks]
● Consonants vs. vowels
○ Consonants are produced with some closure in the vocal tract that impedes the flow of
air from the lungs
IPA – CONSONANTS
● Distinguished by 3 features:
○ Place of Articulation: where is the consonant produced?
■ Articulation = part of the mouth (usually the tongue) touches or interacts with
another area of the vocal tract
○ Manner of articulation
○ Voicing
● Places of articulation:
1. Bilabials: sounds produced by bringing both lips together
[p] Pie, pit
[b] Buy, bit
[m] My, mit
2. Labiodentals: sounds produced by touching the bottom lip to the upper teeth
[f] Five, fan
[v] View, van
3. Interdentals: sounds produced by inserting the tip of the tongue between the
upper teeth and the lower teeth
[θ] Thigh
[ð] Thus, thy

4. Alveolars (ridge): sounds produced by raising the tip of the tongue to the
alveolar ridge (part of the hard palate directly behind the upper front teeth)
[t] Tie, tip
[d] Die, dip
[n] Night, nip
[s] Sip
[z] Zip
[l] Light
[r] Rock
5. Palatals: sounds produced by raising the front part of the tongue to the hard
palate (bony section of the roof of the mouth behind the alveolar ridge)
[ʃ] Mission
[ʒ] Measure
[tʃ] Cheap, chin
[dʒ] Judge
[j] You
6. Velars: sounds produced by raising the back of the tongue to the soft palate or
velum
[k] Back
[g] Bag
[ŋ] Bang, sang,

rang
7. Glottals: [h] produced with the flow of air through the open glottis; [ʔ]
produced if the air is stopped completely at the glottis by tightly closed vocal
cords: glottal stop
[h] high
[ʔ] uh-oh
8. Labio-velar (bilabial and velar): sounds produced by a combination of pursed

lips and raising the back of the tongue to the velum
Family guy example video shows the difference really well
[w] witch
[ʍ] which
● Places of Articulation Review

○ Bilabials: [p], [b], [m]
■ Pie, buy, my
○ Labiodentals: [f], [v]
■ Five, view
○ Interdentals: [θ], [ð]
■ Thigh, thus
○ Alveolars: [t], [d], [n], [s], [z], [l], [r]
■ Tie, die, night, sip, zip, light, rock
○ Palatals: [ʃ], [ʒ], tʃ, dʒ, [j]
■ Mission, measure, cheap, judge, you
○ Velars: [k], [g], [ŋ]
■ Back, bag, bang
○ Glottals: [h], [ʔ]
■ High, uh-oh
○ Labio-velars: [w], [ʍ]
■ Witch, which
● Places of Articulation Practice
○ Fight: labiodental
○ Horse: glottal
○ Cat: velar
○ Baby: bilabial
○ Dog: alveolar
○ This: interdental
● Voicing: are the vocal folds vibrating (voiced) or not (voiceless/open glottal)?
● Voiceless: vocal folds/cords are apart, air flows freely through glottis
○ Super [supər]
○ [p] pear, [f] fine
● Voiced: vocal folds/cords are together, air forces through, causing vibrations
■ Buzz [bʌz]
■ [v] vine
○ [s] and [z] differ only in voicing
■ [s] is voiceless
■ [z] is voiced
● Manner of articulation: How is the consonant produced?

● Stops: There is a complete obstruction of airflow somewhere in the vocal tract
○ Oral stops: [p] [b] [t] [d] [k] [g] [ʔ] velum is raised to block the nasal cavity so that
when the stop is released, the air flows out through the mouth; sounds can only be
heard when released into a vowel or another sound
○ Nasal stops: [m] [n] [ŋ] velum is lowered to open the nasal cavity
○ Cab [kæb] vs. Cam [kæm], Raid [red] vs. Rain [ren], Rug [rʌg] vs. Rung [rʌŋ]; Oral
vs. Nasal, same place of articulation and both voiceless, different manner
● Aspiration: a brief puff of air escapes after the stop is released and the vocal folds begin
vibrating (for the voicing of the vowels)
○ Pit, Toe, Cot
■ Aspiration is transcribed like: [ph] [th] [kh]
Pool [phul] Spool [spul]
Tale [thel] Stale [stel]
Kale [khel] Scale [skel]

○ Voiceless oral stops are aspirated in word-initial position
■ American English does this; Indian English does not (ex: tin pronounced more
like din in IE)
● Fricatives: Major, but not complete, obstruction in the vocal tract – can keep going on and on
○ The opening through which the air escapes is small, so a turbulent noise is produced as
a result (ex: air escaping a punctured tire)
○ [f] fish, [v] vile, [θ] thick, [ð] thy, [s] set, [z] zipper, [ʃ] shoot, [ʒ] leisure, [h] house
○ The articulators are so close together that friction is created when the air is forced to
pass through them
○ [v] voiced, labiodental, fricative
○ [s] voiceless, alveolar, fricative
● Affricates: made by briefly stopping airflow completely, then slightly releasing closure so that a
fricative-like noise is made
○ Some phoneticians describe affricates as a stop quickly followed by a fricative
○ [tʃ] cheap, [dʒ] Joe
○ [tʃ] voiceless, palatal, affricate
○ [dʒ] voiced, palatal, affricate
● Liquids: some minor obstruction of the vocal tract with tongue, but air still passes through
○ [l], [r]
○ [l] lateral liquid: can feel the air passing by the sides of your tongue if you inhale sharply
○ [r] retroflex liquid: articulated in the alveolar region, and the tip of the tongue is curled
back behind the alveolar ridge
● Glides: very small obstruction of airflow, articulators move closer together (but not by very
much)
○ [j] palatal, [w] labio-velar
○ You -> [ju]
○ What -> [wʌt]
● Trilled [r]
○ Indian English has what is called retroflex trilled [r]
■ Not in Standard American English
○ Trill: One articulator touches another in a very rapid fire, repeating motion
■ Ex: Spanish, Indian English
○ Dialects of the same language differ in their phonetic inventories
● Consonants Review
○ Consonants are distinguished using three features:
■ Place of Articulation
■ Manner of Articulation
■ Voicing
● IPA symbols different from English orthography
○
Wreath [θ] Ring [ŋ] Breathe [ð]
You [j] Sheep [ʃ] Church [tʃ]
Measure [ʒ] Judge [dʒ] Uh-oh [ʔ]
Phonetics Summary
● Your knowledge of language includes knowledge of:
○ Phonetic inventory of your language
○ Places of articulation of sounds in your language
○ Manners of articulation of sounds in your language
○ Voicing of sounds in your language
● Dialects of English differ in their phonetic inventories
● Dialects of English differ in “rules” they apply to sounds
● Consonant review:
○ [p] = voiceless, bilabial, (oral) stop consonant
○ [b] = voiced, bilabial, (oral) stop consonant
○ [m] = voiced, bilabial, (nasal) stop consonant

VOWELS IN IPA
● Vowels – Distinguished by 4 features:
○ Tongue position (frontness/backness): how far back in your mouth is your tongue
articulating?
○ Tongue height (high/mid/low): what is the height of the tongue?
○ Tenseness: Is your tongue more tense or lax?
○ Lip rounding: Are your lips rounded or unrounded?
● Tongue position: front, central, back
○ Front: [i] beet, [ɪ] bit, [e] bait, [ɛ] bet, [æ] bat
○ Central: [ə] about, [ʌ] but, [a] cot
○ Back: [u] boot, [ʊ] book, [o] boat, [ɔ] caught
○ Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the tongue articulating front, central, and back vowels
● Tongue height: high, mid, low
○ High: [i] beet, [ɪ] bit, [u] boot, [ʊ] book,
○ Mid: [e] bait, [ɛ] bet, [ə] about, [ʌ] but, [o] boat, [ɔ] bought
○ Low: [æ] bat, [a] cot
■ Tongue position and height practice:
■ [u] boot: Back, High
■ [i] beet: Front, High
■ [e] bait: Front, Mid
■ [a] sock: Central, Low
● Vowel chart:
● Tenseness: Tense vs. Lax
○ Tense Vowels: Muscles tensed/tighter and mouth is relatively narrower
■ [i] [e] [u] [o] [a]
■ These are IPA symbols of the vowels that we were taught in grade school
■ tense vowels are slightly higher than lax vowels and slightly longer than
lax vowels
○ Lax Vowels: Muscles a bit more relaxed
■ [ɪ] [ɛ] [æ] [ʌ] [ə] [ɔ]

■ Hint: alphabet symbol for IPA = tense, IPA symbol = lax
● Lip rounding: [i] vs. [u]
○ Beet [i] vs. boot [u]
○ [i] is unrounded, [u] is rounded
○ 4 rounded: [u] boot, [ʊ] book, [o] boat, [ɔ] bought
○ 8 unrounded: [i] beet, [ɪ] bit, [e] bait, [ɛ] bet, [ə] about, [ʌ] but, [æ] bat, [a] cot
○ Note on the sound [ɔ]
■ You may not have this sound represented by [ɔ] in your phonetic inventory
■ For some speakers, [ɔ] is the vowel found in:
● Taught [thɔt], (tater) tot [that]
● Baht (Thai currency) [bat], bought [bɔt]
● Don (Ho) [dan], dawn [dɔn]
● Wok [wak], walk [wɔk]
○ Cot-Caught Merger
■ What is [ɔ] in some dialects is [a] for other speakers, [a] and [ɔ] have been
merged
■ If you’re a native English speaker from west of the Mississippi, you probably
have merged [a] and [ɔ]
○ English does not make any vowel contrasts based solely on rounding; there will be
other differences (within the other 3 characteristics above)
■ English has no rounded front vowels
■ Estonian has both rounded and unrounded front vowels, and unrounded back
vowels
● IPA Vowels: Putting the Features together
○ Beet [i] vs. boot [u]
■ [i] front, high, tense
■ [u] back, high, tense
○ Beet [i] vs. bat [æ]
■ [æ] front, low, lax
○ Beet [i] vs. bit [ɪ]
■ [ɪ] front, high, lax
○ Fit = High, front, unrounded, lax vowel - [ɪ]
○ Could = High, back rounded, lax vowel - [ʊ]
○ At = Low, front, unrounded, lax vowel - [æ]
○ Said = Mid, front, unrounded, lax vowel - [ɛ]
● IPA Vowels: Diphthongs

○ Diphthongs: combo of 2 vowels (a vowel + a glide)
■ 3 diphthongs in English
● [aj] eye
● [ɔj] boy
● [aw] house
■ Coy = [khɔj]
■ Scout = [skawt]
■ Sight = [sajt]
■ Cow = [khaw]
● Natural classes: groups of sounds that can be identified by sharing particular features
○ [t], [d], and [n] are the natural class of alveolar stops
○ Helps us understand differences between dialects – ex: Canadian Raising (diphthongs
are raised) but this is not always the case
○ Ex: [h] and [ʔ] both are glottal and voiceless
○ Consonants
■ [t] [d] [n] all are alveolar stops
■ [b] [d] [g] all voiced, oral stops
■ [m] [n] [ŋ] all voiced nasal stops
■ [f] [v] [θ] [ð] [s] [z] [ʃ] [ʒ] [h] all fricatives
■ [p] [t] [k] [f] [θ] [s] [ʃ] [h] [tʃ] all voiceless
■ [f] [θ] [s] [ʃ] [h] voiceless fricatives
○ Vowels
■ [i] [e] [u] [o] [a] tense vowels
■ [i] [ɪ] [e] [ɛ] [æ] front vowels
■ [i] [ɪ] [u] [ʊ] high vowels
■ [u] [ʊ] [o] [ɔ] back vowels
● Transcription: rendering a word in IPA
○
help [hɛlp] rad [ræd]
dig [dɪg] rude [rud]
keys [kiz] road [rod]
schedule [skɛdʒul] rod [rad]

● Reverse Transcription
○ From IPA to English orthography
[red] raid [ræd] rad
[rid] read [rud] rude
[rɪd] rid [rod] road
[rɛd] red [rad] rod
● Transcription More Examples

○ Sheep -> [ʃɪp]
○ Chirp -> [tʃɪrp]
○ Through -> [θru]
○ Shape -> [ʃep]
○ Rip -> [rɪp]
○ Creep -> [krip]
○ Cabs -> [kæbz]
○ Kissed -> [kɪst]
○ Rough -> [rʌf]
● Transcription: Potential Stumbling Blocks
○ Sometimes there are more sounds in a word than there are letters in the English spelling
■ Spinal [spajnəl]
○ Other times, there are far fewer sounds than there are letters
■ Through [θru]
○ The same letters can be used to represent different sounds
■ Misses [mɪsɪz]
○ The same sound can be represented by different letters
■ Tracked [trækt]
● Syllabic Sounds
○ Every language has rules about which sounds can function as the center of a syllable
○ Syllable nuclei in English: almost always vowels, but occasionally we allow liquids and
nasals to act as the nucleus
○ English allows syllabic [l] [r] [m] and [n]
■ [l] as in dazzle [dæzl̩]
■ [r] as in faker [fekr̩]
■ [m] as in rhythm [rɪθm̩]
■ [n] as in button [bʌʔn̩]
■
○ Syllabic consonants are marked with diacritics [ ̩ ]
○ These sounds can also be represented with a schwa [ə] + [l/r/m/n]
dazzle [-əl] [dæzəl]
faker [-ər] [fekər]
rhythm [-əm] [rɪθəm]
colon [-ən] [kolən]

○ Transcription is an attempt to accurately indicate the speech sounds that you use when
you say a word
■ So, if you have a strong intuition that there is a vowel between [z] and [l] when
you say “dazzle,” transcribe it with a schwa
● [dæzl̩]
■ If you have a strong intuition that there is no vowel between [z] and [l] when
you say “dazzle,” transcribe it with a syllabic [l̩]
● [dæzəl]
Week 4.3:
● [j] dropping in American English vs. British English
● Natural class helps us classify these differences
● American English has a rule of jod deletion in certain environments

● [r] dropping and social class – Labov 1996 in NYC saw that the local dialect of NYC is an r-less
dialect → [r]’s get dropped in word-final position and when the [r] precedes another
consonant → in NYC the pronunciation of [r] is prestigious, while it is characteristic of the
“lower classes” to drop the [r]
● Labov 1966
○ Saks (expensive)
○ Macy’s (mid-range)
○ Klein’s (low-prices)
○ At each store, he asked for the location of something on the fourth floor (so they
would say that) and then he would say excuse me? And they would repeat themselves
with careful articulation
○ [r] was retained in casual speech a lot more in the expensive stores
○ [r] was retained a similar amount in the clear articulation, and in Macy’s the careful
speech saw a big increase in [r] articulation
● [r] dropping is associated with social class, but it is not any linguistically worse or better
● In received pronunciation, the prestige dialect, [r] is dropped – opposite conclusions in
England and NYC
● Dialect differences in phonetics are not random – specific phonetic environments
● Ling. differences in dialects may be related to social class
● Phonology = how speech sounds are organized in different languages
○ “Pan” [pæn]
○ “Pancake” [pæŋ kek]
○ The alveolar nasal sound changes to a velar sound
○ “Pan bread” [pæm brɛd]
○ The n is pronounced in 3 different ways
● The alternation shows the environment in which pan is surrounded by – consonant
● Blik is a possible word in English, but lbik is not (our phonology shows us what is or is not
possible)
● American English does not permit an alveolar consonant in word-initial position immediately
followed by jod (this is why British English and American English sound different)
● Phonologists want to know:
○ What is the organization of sounds in a given language?
○ Which sounds are predictable and which sounds are unpredictable based on the
environment?
○ What is the phonetic context that allows us to predict appearances of certain sounds?
Sign language phonetics
● Handshapes = there is only a certain amount of permissible handshapes

● Handshapes vary between types of sign languages
● In spoken language, the individual sounds in a word are meaningless → in sign language, the
same is true (individual handshapes are meaningless)
● Parameters (or primes): discrete units of a sign
● 4 features of signed languages: handshape, place of articulation, movement, and palm
orientation
● Handshape → differences in handshape can lead to different words (everything else is the same)
● Can have diff. words if the hand is higher/lower/placed somewhere else
● There are ASL signs that are differentiated only by the movement of the signal – up and down
to circular can change the meaning of a sign
● Palm orientation
● Phonology in sign languages – signs interacting with each other → letters going after each
other can make them look more open or closed (because of finger position)
● Signs in SL’s can be broken down into features that make them similar to sounds – very similar
systems
● SL grammars have the same building blocks or components as spoken languages
Summary
● Phonetics helps us understand the ways that dialects and languages differ
● Phonetic features relate to attitudes around dialects
● Study of phonetics helps us understand aspects of signed languages as well (domain of
grammar is similar)
Week 5.1: Morphology

● Morphology = the study of words
○ Their structure, function and distribution
○ Ultimate goal is to understand how words are represented in the minds of native
speakers
● Knowledge of Words: Linguistic Creativity
○ “Utah is trying to out-Texas Texas” -NPR comment section
○ “I should have been sad when my flashlight batteries died, but I was delighted”
○ “His death was not murder but a just sentence, which was all that I had ever wanted to
write.” -The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen
● Knowledge of Words: Basic Questions
○ What do we know when we know a word?
■ The arbitrary sounds associated with a word
■ The word’s meaning
■ The word’s syntactic category

● Noun, verb, preposition, article, adjective, adverb, etc
■ How to use the word in a sentence:
● Teeth (noun), teethe (verb)
● Record (noun), record (verb)
■ Syntactic Categories will be important when we talk about word and
sentence formation (syntax)
○ What do we not know when we know a word?
■ We may or may not know how a word is written
■ We may or may not know a word’s etymology
● Ex: tsunami, clue
● Knowledge of Words: Mental Dictionary/Lexicon
○ Lexicon: “Mental dictionary” of words
■ Every word we know has a lexical entry
■ Includes all of the words you know and all of the information associated with
them
● Different from printed dictionaries
○ Does not include words that we don’t know
○ Includes words that we do know
■ Ex: ginormous, w00t, friend (verb), facebook (noun,
vern), mankini
● Morpheme = the smallest linguistic unit that has meaning
○ Morpheme =/= word, but all words have at least 1 morpheme
● Discreteness of language: each morpheme is a discrete unit of meaning, which we can
manipulate
○ We combine morphemes to build new words member + ship = membership, lock +
able = lockable
○ We can decompose words into their morphemes: sooner = soon + er, morphology =
morph + ology
● Types of morphemes:
○ Free morpheme: can stand alone as a complete word

■ Ex: fast, to, the, chimney, blue, see, sell, he
○ Bound morpheme: must be attached to a free morpheme
■ Ex: -ed as in walked, -ing as in walking, -s as in walks, pre- as in pre-test, re- as in
reread, un- as in undo
● Free morphemes: 2 types – context/lexical and functional
○ context/lexical morphemes have a lexical meaning (most nouns, verbs, adjs, and
adverbs are content words)
■ Ex: boyish, email, car, run, jump
■ These are open class: you can and do create new content words all the time
(ex: janky, dingus)
○ Functional morphemes serve some grammatical purpose (includes pronouns, articles,
and conjunctions – he/she/it, the/a, and/or)
■ Harder to tell the meaning
■ “Piece of paper” – what does the “of” mean by itself? It is doing something
grammatically.
■ These are close class: we cannot (usually) create new words or morphemes in
them
● Broca’s aphasics: leaves many functional morphemes out of their speech, but still include
lexical morphemes
○ BA affects only functional morphemes, leaving lexical morphemes unaffected
○ This shows that the distinction between functional and lexical morphemes is not
purely academic
● Bound morphemes: un-, -ish, -tion → these are bound morphemes because they cannot stand
alone
○ Bound morphemes are affixed to a root (therefore they are called affixes)
● 2 types of bound morphemes: inflectional and derivational
○ Inflectional morphemes are grammatical, in that they affect the grammar of the word
they attach to (they do not typically change a word’s category)
■ 8 inflectional morphemes:
-s (3rd person singular -ing (progressive)

present)
-s (plural) -en/ed (past participle)
-s (possessive) -er (comparative)
-ed (past tense) -est (superlative)

■ Bound inflectional morphemes attach to a particular category of a word
■ You can usually add them to almost every word of the particular category they
affix to:
● -ing attaches to regular verbs
● Possessive -s attaches to nouns
■ IM’s “refine” meaning – they add a tiny bit of information, but they do not
change the core meaning (walk → walked: remains a verb, adds info about
when, but does not change the action)
○ Derivational morphemes help to derive new word categories
■ Adding a DM to a word often changes both the word’s meaning and the “part
of speech”
■ Ex: -ly, -ish, pre-, post-, inter-, trans-, -tion, re-, de-
■ Bound DM’s are usually not as productive as IM’s
● DM’s more selective: sometimes it sounds weird
Derivational: Inflectional:
rerun runs
*retalk talks
recreate creates
rethink thinks
*reshut down shuts down

● Combining morphemes: we can transform words into something else all the time, but we
know what is or is not okay
○ OK: uneaten, not OK: eatenun, OK: unadmired, not OK: admiredun
● This knowledge of combining morphemes allows us to create and understand novel words
● Morphology – creative, yet structured
○ Words have structure and morphemes are the building blocks
○ You know words, but you also know morphemes
○ Morphemes are usually put together in a specific order
● Structure of words – affixes combining
○ Certain affixes (bound morphemes) attach to certain kinds of words
■ -able: loveable, workable, doable = OK, but catable, blueable = not OK
● -able can only combine with verbs
■ -ish: reddish, bookish = OK, but helpish, walkish = not OK
● -ish can only attach to nouns and adjectives
■ Affixes care what they combine with
■ Suffix -ly in English: adjective + ly = adverb
○ Word formation:
■ Rewrite = Re + write = [Re[write]]
■ Boy = Boy = [Boy]
■ Boyish = Boy + ish = [[Boy]ish]
■ Boyishness = Boy + ish + ness = [[[Boy]ish]ness]
○ Word trees: roadmap of how to build a word
■ Morphemes only combine in a particular order and only with specific
categories of other morphemes
■ Word Trees help show these ordered relationships of the morphemes within a
word
■ Ambiguous words: 2 interpretations of the word unlockable – incapable of

being locked, or capable of being unlocked
○ Affixation: a process we use to build new words by piling on affixes

■ Affix = any bound morpheme that attaches to a root
■ Prefix = an affix that attaches before the root
■ Suffix = an affix that attaches after the root
○ English causatives:
■ “I will black-en the shirt” – -en is a derivational suffix; it changes the
category of the word
■ Cannot say “I will purple-en the shirt”
○ New bound morphemes in English
■ “Intensifier” -ass → cold-ass night, big-ass burrito
■ -ass is a bound morpheme, you cannot use it to replace “very” when it
stands alone – Are you cold? Very = OK, Ass = not OK.
● He is a very ignorant man = he is an ignorant-ass man. He is very
ignorant; cannot say he is ignorant ass.
○ Infixation: an affix that attaches inside the root
■ Expletive infixation: in-fuckin-credible
■ “Iz” Infixation:
● House = H-iz-ouse
● Shit = Sh-iz-nit
■ “Homeric” Infixation
● Education = Edu-ma-cation
● Saxophone = Saxo-ma-phone
○ Circumfix: affixes that surround the root both initially and finally
■ Ex: german: lieb = love, loved = ge+lieb+t
Week 5.2
● Kanuri:
● The absence of an affix can be significant:
○ Morpheme for “he” is silent
■ Chaaha = he is tall
■ Ø = Symbol for unmarked morpheme

● Allomorph = a variant form of a morpheme
● How do we pluralize regular nouns in English?
● [s], [z], [ɪz] allomorphs of the plural morpheme, written as -s or -es

● Wug testing: we know how to pluralize novel words
●
● Sibilant = sounds that have a buzzing or hissing quality: [z], [ʃ], [tʃ], [dʒ], [s], [ʒ]
● Inflection morphemes = purely grammatical, marking tense, #, gender, case, etc.
○ They are often very productive (can attach to almost all roots/morphemes)
○ Typically comes after derivational morphemes in a word
○
● Inflection beyond English: IMs can perform a great # of functions; English is an inflection
poor language (we are limited to the set of 8 IM’s)
● Other languages: case marking – nouns have a particular form depending on their category
(subject, object, etc.)
● Case markers in Russian:
○ Viktor + a = “Viktor’s”
○ Viktor + u = “to Victor”
○ Viktor + om = “by Viktor”
○ Viktor + ye = “about Viktor”
● Case markers in English:
○ I love them.
○ They love me.
● Word formation: reduplication – forming new words by duplicating part or all of an existing
word
○ Partial Reduplication (Tagalog)
■ “bili” = buy; “bibili” = will buy
■ “pasok” = enter; “papasok” = will enter
○ Total Reduplication (Indonesian)
■ “rumah” = house; “rumahrumah” = houses
■ “ibu” = mother; “ibuibu” = mothers
○ Contrastive Focus Reduplication (CF Reduplication)
■ Put focus on the most prototypical, stereotypical example of something
■ Ex: I’ll make the tuna salad and you make the salad-salad.
■ Redupe exists in other languages like Spanish and Russian as well
■ Grammatical Constraints on CF Reduplication in English:
● “He is out-of-his-mind-out-of-his-mind”
○ *”He is out-out-of-his-mind”
○ *”He is out-of-his-mind-mind”
● “They’re sleeping together, but they’re not sleeping together-sleeping
together”
○ *”They’re sleeping together, but they’re not sleeping
together-together”
■ “Do I like you-like you? No. You’re a little too neurotic for me.”
● “Do I like-like Tom?”
● Can’t do verb + proper name
● *”Do I like Tom-like Tom? No. He’s a little too neurotic for me”
■ “I wouldn’t date-date a linguist”
■ *”I wouldn’t date a-date a linguist”
○ Reduplication in English Varieties: Singlish
■ Singlish: Native English colloquial dialect in Singapore
■ Makes extensive use of reduplication
■ To sound friendlier
● English: Why are you so uptight about this?
● Singlish: Why so serious? I just play play only lah
■ To show intimacy to people (only applicable mono-syllabic words)
● English: How time flies! My son has grown so much!
● Singlish: Time pass really fast hor? My boy-boy grow so big already
(oready) you know?!
■ To emphasize your displeasure
● English: -insert appropriate exclamation- Can you not fiddle around
with the items? They’re all going to be dirty if you do so!
● Singlish: Wa lao! Can don’t touch here touch there or not? Later all
dirty slah!
● Reduplication in English Varieties: Singlish
○ Singlish: Native English colloquial dialect in Singapore
○ Makes extensive use of reduplication
○ To sound friendlier
■ English: Why are you so uptight about this?
■ Singlish: Why so serious? I just play play only lah
○ To show intimacy to people (only applicable mono-syllabic words)
■ English: How time flies! My son has grown so much!
■ Singlish: Time pass really fast hor? My boy-boy grow so big already (oready)
you know?!
○ To emphasize your displeasure
■ English: -insert appropriate exclamation- Can you not fiddle around with the
items? They’re all going to be dirty if you do so!
■ Singlish: Wa lao! Can don’t touch here touch there or not? Later all dirty slah!
● Singlish Morphology
○ Allows for reduplication of nouns, adjectives, and verbs
○ Noun Reduplication: Adds closeness or diminutive sense
■ Examples:
● Where is your boy-boy? (boyfriend, son)
● Say who told you mummy-mummy is a graduate (Dear mom)
● I’m looking for Ry-Ry (Dear Henry)

● Jeff-Jeff, come and see this (Jeffrey sweetheart)
● Su-Su, come here (Suzie, a dog)
■ Nominal reduplication is constrained:
● Proper name must have only one syllable; this rule does not apply to
common nouns
● Ry-Ry, but not *Henry-Henry
● Jeff-Jeff, but not *Jeffrey-Jeffrey
● Su-Su, but not *Suzie-Suzie
● Can do buddy-buddy (close male friend)
○ Adjectival Reduplication
■ Plain adjectives and comparatives can be duplicated:
● Don’t always eat sweet-sweet things (very sweet)
● Make it smaller-smaller
● Come and see the lizard’s tail; black-black one (very black)
■ Superlative adjectives cannot be reduplicated:
● *Make it smallest-smallest
○ Verb Reduplication
■ Reduplicating Once (To do something a little bit)
● Let her be. She cry-cry (cry a little bit)
● I cough-cough then no more already (minor coughing)
● No traffic police...stop-stop a while (make a short stop)
■ Reduplicating Twice (Continual Action)
● Why you cough-cough-cough whole day long? (Keep coughing)
● I walk-walk-walk, then I fall down (In the act of walking)
● They choose-choose-choose so long already (In the act of choosing)
Morphology Summary:
● Knowledge of language includes:
○ Words
○ Morphemes/Allomorphs (Where to use each allomorph)
○ Properties of Morphemes
■ Free: Lexical, Functional
■ Bound: Inflectional, Derivational
○ How morphemes combine
● Multiple Types of Morphemes
○ Prefix, Suffix, Infix, Circumfix
● The inventory of morphemes and word formation processes in English varies according to
dialect
Week 6: Syntax
Textbook notes
● Grammar = the set of rules that govern all spoken language
● The rules of syntax combine words into phrases and phrases into sentences → rules define the
correct word order for a language
● Grammatical relations of a sentence: subject and direct object
● Tree diagram can be used to represent words as subunits/subtrees – “the child found a puppy”
→ “a puppy” is a constituent
● Lexical ambiguity: sentences can have different interpretations due to the multiple meanings of
words
● Structural ambiguity: sentence has more than one tree structure associated with it
○ Ex: “Sue saw the man with the telescope”
■ The seeing is done with the telescope.
■ The man is holding the telescope.
○ None of the individual words are ambiguous; the ambiguity is structural
● A family of expressions that can substitute for one another without loss of grammaticality = a
syntactic category/part of speech
●
● A tree diagram with syntactic category information = a phrase structure tree/constituent
structure tree
● Declarative sentences: asserts information

● Yes-no questions: asks for confirmation of information
● Aux inversion: an example of the transformational rule
● Deep structures vs surface structures
● Wh questions
Lecture 1
● Syntax = the study of how phrases and sentences are constructed
● Many similarities between word construction in morphology and larger sentence structures in
syntax
● 2 basic approaches
○ Words in a sentence are similar to links in a chain, or beads on a string – they are
ordered linearly, with no internal structure or hierarchy
○ Words in a sentence do have internal structure; some words are more closely connected
than others – some words might “work together” in certain operations, whereas others
would not
● Are words simply beads on a string?
○ Ian ran up the hill.
○ Ian ran up the bill.
○ From a linear perspective, these sentences look nearly identical.
○ The hill and bill seem like they should behave similarly, but they don’t. Did Ian run?
Yes, up the hill. OK Yes, up the bill. NOT OK
○ Words that are related often “move together” in certain constructions: It was up the
hill that Ian ran OK. It was up the bill that Ian ran NOT OK.
○ They behave differently.
○ Ian ran [up the hill] – up the hill is a chunk (you can move it around).
○
○ Up the bill does not form a chunk
● Words are NOT simply beads on a string
● Words are grouped into units called constituents
● Sometimes more than one “grouping” is possible
○ City to add twelve foot cops
○ Policemen who are 12 feet tall, or adding 12 cops who are on foot
● Constituents have infinitely extended length
○ Joe bought a car.
○ Joe bought an old car.
○ Joe bought a dirty olf car for $40 from the man down the street.
○ Joe bought a ____ = all appropriate answers to the question, “What did Joe buy?”
● Word order – what do you know when you know the syntax of your language?
○ Dog bites man vs. man bites dog – the word order tells you who did what to who
● You know that word order is constrained
● Basic word order varies greatly across languages
○ English basic word order: Subject-Verb-Object (SVO)
○ Tatar basic word order is different: SOV
○ Signed word order in ASL: VSO (and multiple other word orders)
● Word order matters, even when sentences dont have “real” meaning
○ Colorless green ideas sleep furiously – this is perfectly grammatical, but it is also
meaningless – a sentence can be syntactically well-formed, but have no meaning
○ Grammatical =/= understandable
● Similar building blocks across languages: sentences across languages are built using the same
syntactic categories
○ Nouns, verbs (all languages have them)
○ Adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, articles, prepositions, etc. (not all languages have
them)
● Things we translate as adjectives in English can be expressed as verbs in Wolof
● “Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana”
○ What is the category of flies? What about like?
● The traditional approach: you determine syntactic categories by looking at the meaning – this
is basically like Schoolhouse Rock
○ Verb = action or state of being
○ Noun = person, place, or thing
○ Adjective = modifier that expresses quality, quantity, or extent
○ What about when meaning is not enough to determine a word’s syntactic category?
○ But what about when meaning isn’t enough to determine a word’s syntactic category?
○ “The assassination of the senator” - the noun expresses an action
○ Annoy vs. Piss off vs. Infuriate – similar verbs, but express different extent
○ The traditional answer does not work
● The Behavioural approach: We determine a word’s syntactic category by looking at how it
behaves, not just what it means
○ A word is what it does
○ A noun is simply a word that does nouny things – Steven Pinker
○ Which words are nouns? Verbs? How do you know? → you know by the distribution
of the word
● Our intuition tells us that “toves” must be a noun given the context. Why do we have this
intuition?
● Word category tests: nouns
○ A word that can follow a definite article, indefinite article, numeral, which phrase, or a
possessor (genitive) is a noun
○ To test if book is a noun:
■ “The book” - definite determiner
■ “A book” - indefinite determiner
■ “Six books” - numbers
■ “Which book” - which phrase
■ “Mary’s books” - possessor/genitive
○ In contrast: cannot say six deviate, a deviate – deviate =/= noun
● Word category tests: verbs

○ A word that can combine with the tense suffixes (-s, -ing, -ed, etc.) is a verb
○ To test if “wipe” is a verb:
■ “She wiped the table clean:
■ “He wipes his glasses constantly”
○ In contrast: She headphoned the conversation – headphone =/= verb
● Word category tests: Adjectives
○ An item that can appear in the position following seem/seems is an adjective: ___
seems ___
■ He seems happy – OK; he seems book – not OK; he seems procrastinate – not
OK
○ If -er or -est can be added to the word, or if the word can follow more or most, then it is
an adjective
■ Happier OK; happiest OK – happy is an adjective
■ More promising OK; the most promising OK – promising is an adjective
■ More eat NOT OK
● Syntactic categories you should recognize:
○ Noun (N): Erin, cake, liberty, water
○ Verb (V): sing, walk, create
○ Preposition (P): to, about, with, in, without
○ Adjective (Adj): funny, orange, impossible
○ Adverb (Adv): quickly, fast, unfortunately, sheepishly, yesterday, very
○ Auxiliary verbs (Aux): have (as in I have eaten), had, be, was, were
○ Modal verbs (Mod): can, may, will, might, could
○ Determiner/Article (Det): a, an, the, those
● Constituency: I ate a rutabaga. The little manatee ate a rutabaga. Subject is bolded – being a
subject has nothing to do with how many words are in the phrase
○ We call chunks like “the little manatee” constituents – natural groupings of words in a
sentence
○ To form a question, the subject and the auxiliary verb invert – Will I eat a rutabaga?
Will the little manatee eat a rutabaga?
○ The little manatee acts as if it is a single unit, even though we can clearly see that it is
composed of multiple words
○ The single word I and the string of the little manatee both act as constituents
● What happens when there are multiple auxiliaries in a sentence?
○ The little manatee has been eating a rutabaga
○ Has the little manatee been eating a rutabaga?

○ When there are multiple auxiliaries, only the first one inverts with the subject.
○ The little rabbit that has hopped will eat a rutabaga.
○ To form a question, you have to move the second auxiliary (the little rabbit that has
hopped acts as a constituent – the constituent can contain an auxiliary)
○ The entire string “The little rabbit that has hopped” acts as a single unit
○ The first auxiliary after the subject (which can also contain an auxiliary)
inverts with the subject
● We have intuitions about what counts as a constituent or a unit of the syntax
● This knowledge is part of a native speaker’s knowledge of language
● There are multiple linguistic tests that we can use to test to see whether or not a given string of
words is a constituent:
○ Replacement tests
○ Stand alone tests
○ Movement tests
○ It is necessary to perform multiple tests; one failed test is not enough to give up
○ Basic principles: every sentence is a constituent. Every word is a constituent.
● Replacement tests: there are 2 types of replacement
● Pronoun replacement test (targets noun phrases): many constituents can be replaced by
pronouns such as I, he, she, you, we, there, etc.
○ When a group of words can be replaced by a pronoun and
■ The resulting sentence is grammatical
■ The resulting sentence has the same meaning
○ Then the group of words being replaced is a constituent
○ Successful pronoun replacement: I found the puppy at the park → I found him at the
park.
○ The esteemed senator greeted the governor of Michigan → The esteemed senator
greeted him. → She greeted the governor of Michigan. → She greeted him. Both are
constituents and can be grammatically replaced by pronouns while retaining the basic
meaning.
○ The old blind man found the suitcase full of money → He found it.
○
○ The triangles show the constituents we have found, but these are not the only
constituents – every sentence and every word is a constituent
○ Failed pronoun replacement: I found the puppy at the park → I found it the park →
the puppy at is not a constituent
● Do so/do too replacement test
○ Great-grandma dared cop to tase her, so he did
○ “Do-so” replacement test: similar to replacement by a pronoun – if a string can be
replaced by do so/did so or do too/did too, then that string forms a constituent
○ The constituency test targets verb phrases
○ The replacement sentence has to retain the original meaning.
○ The old man found a dollar. → Yes, the old man did so. –the string found a dollar can
be replaced by did so (Yes, the old man did so dollar = failure, found a =/= constituent)
○ She went to the West Coast. → Yes, she did so. – grammatical and retains the same
meaning
○ Julie called the governor of Missouri. → Yes, Bill did too. “Called the governor of
Missouri” is a constituent and verb phrase
○ To use do/did too, it’s most natural to change the subject
● Stand alone test: a chunk of words that can stand on its own as an answer to a question = a
constituent
○ The girl ran in the rain. Who ran in the rain? The girl. Where did the girl run? In the
rain. =OK
○ What happened in the rain? Girl ran. = Not OK – we need to run all the other
constituency tests we have to conclude that a string is not a constituent
● The movement test: When a group of words can be moved around within a sentence it
indicates that the group of words is a constituent.
○ Fronting and clefting
○ Fronting: moving a group of words to the beginning of a sentence
○ If the resulting sentence is grammatical and has the same basic meaning, then the
moved chunk is a constituent
○ The girl ran in the rain → In the rain, the girl ran. In the rain = a constituent
○ Peter has pickled hot peppers in the kitchen. → Hot peppers Peter has pickled in the
kitchen. Hot peppers = a constituent
● Syntax: summary
○ Words come in syntactic categories
○ Traditional methods of determining these categories does NOT work – meaning alone
is not sufficient to categorize a word
○ There are a # of tests we can do to determine a word’s category
○ Strings of words form chunks that are called constituents
○ There are a # of tests we can do to determine constituency
Lecture 2
● Movement test – continued
● Clefting: breaking up a sentence and feeding it into the following formula:
○ It is/was ___ that ___
○ Ex: the girl ran in the rain. It was in the rain that the girl ran – this is grammatical and
retains the original meaning
○ It was the girl that ran in the rain – both the girl and in the rain are constituents that
can be clefted
○ Cannot be clefted: It was girl ran that the in the rain – not OK
○ Many executives eat at really fancy restaurants. – really fancy restaurants can be
replaced by “there”; “eat at really fancy restaurants” can be replaced by do so – it is a
verb phrase and a constituent
● Constituency tests to trees
○ The young man bought several large crabs → the young man bought them. → several
large crabs = a constituent
○ He bought several large crabs – the young man = a constituent
○
○ All words are constituents, but this shows that words can form units that are also
constituents
○
○ Bought several large crabs is also a constituent
○ Every sentence is a constituent
○ All English sentences must contain (minimally) a noun and a verb
○ This generalization can describe the structure of very simple English sentences
■ John Slept = N + V
○ Most sentences, even very simple ones, are more complex
■ The cat slept on the mat = Det + N + V + P + Det + N
■ A + B + C + D + E is linear, it does not reflect constituency
■ A constituent that acts like a noun + a constituent that acts like a verb
■ Noun phrase + verb phrase
■ The cat and john = NP
■ Slept and slept on the mat = VP
■
○ All English sentences follow a similar pattern
● Phrase structure rule:
○ S → NP VP
○ This states that a sentence contains 2 distinct parts: a noun phrase (NP) and a verb
phrase (VP)
○ NP → (DET) (adj) N (PP)
○ Noun phrase: optional determiner (ex: the, a), optional adjective, noun, and optional
preposition phrase
○ Ex: the cute dog on the couch.
● Noun phrase rules
○ NPs are interchangeable in sentences. Where an NP appears in a sentence, you can put
in another NP.
○ Ex: John ate a chocolate pie. → John ate Alpo.
○ Pronouns can replace NPs. – He, she, and it are all NPs (If you can replace a
constituent with a pronoun, it is an NP).
○ Pronoun replacement targets NPs (successful pronoun replacement tests reveal a
constituent, and tell you what kind of constituent you are dealing with
● Verb phrase rules
○ VP → V (NP) (PP) (adv)
○ A VP can be inserted into a sentence in a position which requires a verb
○ Examples of VP’s: Ran, fell slowly into the bath, etc/
○ Check using constituency tests– “do/did so” and “do/did too” test target VPs
● Prepositional phrases
○ PP → Prep (NP)
○ Examples of PP’s with NP: to the store, from Abby, with any luck
○ Examples of PP’s without NP: looked up
● Phrase-structure trees
○ Syntactic trees allow us to see/encode the constituency of a sentence directly.
○
○ When we use trees to represent sentence structure, we must do two things:
■ Accurately represent word order
■ Identify constituents
■ Ex: up the stairs = PP
■
○ Phrase structure trees = blueprints for a sentence

○ They show us: how sentences are built and how they can be broken down into pieces
○ Phrase structure rules determine how to break down those pieces
○ We can use PS rules to help us figure out how our trees should look
● Where do these trees/constituent structures come from? How do speakers correctly structure
their utterances?
○ The leading hypothesis: speakers appeal to unconscious/internalized phrase structure
rules
○ Part of your knowledge of your native language: you know phrase structure rules that
enable you to make hierarchical constituent structures effortlessly
● Phrase structure rules: recap
○ All English sentences must minimally contain:
■ A noun phrase (subject)
■ A verb phrase (predicate)
○ We can express this generalization by writing a phrase structure rule (or “PS rule” for
short)
○ S → NP VP [s[NP Mary][VPlaughed]
○ Tree structure of Mary laughed
○ She laughed or Mary did so – both are grammatically correct and maintain the
meaning
○ John slept:
○ Susan bought a car:

Susan bought it. Yes, Susan did so.
● The cat sat on the stairs.
●
● Phrase structure rules recap:
● S → NP VP
○ The cat slept.
● NP → (DET) (Adj) N (PP)
○ (The) (cute) dog (on the couch).

● VP → V (NP) (PP) (Adv)
○ Read (the book) (quickly).
● PP → Prep (NP)
○ “At (home)”; “up”; “down”
● Terminology: There is a special terminology used to define relationships between elements in a
phrase structure tree
● This terminology makes it easier to talk about how the elements in a tree are related to one
another
● Node: a labeled branch point where the syntactic category is labeled

● NP = node (branch point) and DET and N are all nodes
● Domination: every higher node dominates all the categories beneath it
● When a continuous downward path can be traced from a node labeled X to a node labeled Y,
then X dominates Y
● In the tree below, PP dominates Prep, NP, DET, N
● Starting at one node – can draw a continuous downward path to another node
● Sisterhood/sister: two categories that are directly under the same node
DET and N are sisters and Prep and NP

are sisters
● Head of a phrase: the lexical item which determines its syntactic category (and name)
○ NP: “an extinct bird species of South America” → Species = head of the NP
○ PP: “of all shapes and sizes” → Of = head of PP; “before the end of the day” → before
= head of PP
○ VP: “bring buckets of water” and “eliminate the losing team” → bring and eliminate
are the heads of their respective VPs
● The head of an NP is always an N. The head of a VP is always a V. and etc..
● Complement: gives some added information about the head. Complements will be sisters to
the head.
● VP “ate a bagel” → Head = ate, complement = a bagel
● Every category can have a complement
● The complement may be another phrase with another head inside of it
● PP: before [the end [of the day]]
● NP: The destruction [of Rome]
● VP: Bring [buckets [of water]] or work [at home]
● All phrases must have heads
● But a head may or may not have a complement
● Heads and complements
●
● Syntax summary:
○ Constituency tests
○ We can make generalizations about sentence structure with phrase structure rules
○ How to go from constituency tests to phrase structure trees – everything found by the
tests can be reflected through the trees
○ Some technical notions (vocab) associated with PS trees
Lecture 3
● What do we know about the sentence, “Mary won a prize?” → Yes, Mary did so. (won a prize =
a VP constituent) → Yes, mary won it. (prize = a NP constituent)
●
● A prize = a complement, it gives us more information about winning → the complement to
the verb is the sister to the verb
● In English, the head of the phrase precedes its complement
● In the Japanese sentence of Taro found a dog, the complement precedes the head –
crosslinguistic differences
● Why are Japanese and English different in this syntactic way? Japanese has a different
phrase-structure rule
● VP: found a dog in English → a dog found in Japanese
● VP phrase structure rule in Japanese: VP → NP V
● Japanese PS rules:
○ S → NP VP (Taro-ga inu-o mitsukita).
○ NP → N
○ VP → NP V
○ Taro ate an apple → Taro apple ate.
○ Japanese has a SOV word order, while English has a SVO word order.
● What do PPs look like in Japanese, and where does this particular PP go?
● That boy hit the dog with a stick (English) → Japanese word order: That boy stick with dog
hit.
● S → NP VP and VP → PP NP V and PP → NP P (stick with)
●
● Malagasy: spoken in Madagascar – demonstrates VOS word order
○ The student reads the book → reads book the student (verb, object, subject)
○ PS rule for S: S → VP NP
○
○ With our PS rules, we can get a handle on how different languages have different word
orders
○
○ Differences in PS rules are one reason that word orders differ across languages
○ Part of a speaker’s knowledge of their native language is knowledge of the PS rules of
their language
● Sentences with multiple meaning: structural ambiguity
○ Sometimes, sentences have multiple meanings
○ The ambiguity may be lexical: big rig carrying fruit crashes on 210 Freeway, creates jam
– jam as in traffic or as in food?
○ Word structure/morphological ambiguity: unlockable (unable to be locked, or capable
to be unlocked)
○ Ambiguity due to different possibilities of reference: If your dog poops, please pick it
up. → it can refer to multiple things, depending on the context
○ Syntactic structure: Sherlock saw the man with binoculars (was Sherlock using the
binoculars, or did the man have binoculars?)
○ “Old men and women” – could mean old men and women of various ages, or old men
and old women
● Creating syntactic trees can be useful for understanding ambiguity
●
● Both structures are possible; each structure is associated with a distinct meaning. Constituency
matters!
● The girl bought the donut with sprinkles.
● The girl bought the donut with cash.
● The girl bought the donut with Cash.

● [with sprinkles} [with cash] and [with Cash] are all PPs – what does each PP modify?
● [with sprinkles] – modifies the donut (is the sister to the NP the donut) – NP → NP PP
○
● [with cash] – info about how the donut is being purchased (with cash is the sister to the VP;
VP → VP PP and VP → V NP) both bought the donut and bought the donut with cash are
verb phrase constituents (can be replaced by did so)
○
● [with Cash] – info about who she was with
● “The spy saw the man with a telescope” – the spy used the telescope to see the man, or the spy
saw the man who has a telescope → the different meanings are determined by the placement of
the modifying PP “with a telescope”
● “Using a telescope, the spy saw the man” - the meaning
●
● “The spy saw the man who has a telescope” - the meaning
● “The student texted a friend under the table” - either the friend is under the table, or the
texting is being done under the table
● “Under the table” gives us info about the friend
● “Texting happens under the table”
●
● Yes, the student did so (under the table).
● The constituency tests are the basis of drawing trees.
● How can English dialects be different syntactically?

● The verb be is found in both SAE and AAVE
○ SAE: John is happy. AAVE: John happy (right now) John be happy (all the time)
● AAVE has an auxiliary verb, habitual be, that SAE lacks
● One way that dialects differ is the inventory of auxiliary verbs
● Native speakers of AAVE know when it is possible to use habitual be and when it’s not
○ John tired now = OK, John be tired now = not OK (meaning clashes)
○ The use of the auxiliary habitual be is governed by rules
● “Bobby, what does your mother do everyday?” “She be at home” – she is not at home always; it
is a habitual be.
● Habitual be is systematic
●
● Habitual be does not always have to speak on the current state of the situation
● AAVE auxiliaries:
● Done refers to a completed action, recent or not.
●
● Bin = has been
● BIN = has been for a long time (capitalized = stressed)
● He done ate = he has eaten
● He BIN done ate = he ate a while ago
● Finna = going to
● AAVE has auxiliaries that are not found in SAE
● Southern dialect of English

● “Multiple modal” constructions: you might oughta, you may should, we might can, etc.
○ Still governed by rules, even though it is not found in SAE
● Unlike the case with AAVE, the modal/auxiliary verbs used in multiple modals are the same as
in SAE – The difference is that Southern English allows for different combinations of these
modals
● Subject Auxiliary Inversion: I will eat a rutabaga → Will I eat a rutabaga? I and will switch
places
● AAVE and SAE:

● The AAVE sentences: the auxiliary precedes the subject → subject-auxiliary inversion where
SAE does not have it
● Negative inversion in AAVE:
● SAE also has a restricted version of negative inversion:
● Are there any constraints on negative inversion in AAVE?

●
● The availability of negative inversion has to do with the kind of subject the sentence has (no
dog vs. the dog) – negative inversion of this kind is not found in SAE, but it is rule-governed
● More generally, where do we see Subject-Aux inversion in English?

○ Questions: John will bake a cake. Will John bake a cake?
○ AAVE negative inversion
○ Are there other places where we see that subject-aux inversion in English?
● Wh-question (who, what, when, where, why, how much, how many, which, etc.): Mary will
read that book → What will Mary read?
○ Wh- words end up at the front of the sentence because of wh-movement
○ What happens to the auxiliary and subject in the wh question? Subject-auxiliary
inversion!
○ What two processes happen in a wh- question in English? Wh-movement and
Subject-Aux inversion
● Conditional inversion is optional in conditional clauses (if…then clauses)
○ Had you arrived on time, you would’ve seen the whole play. – inversion
○ If you had arrived on time, you would’ve seen the whole play. – if, and no inversion
● Subject-auxiliary inversion: fuck inversion in British English

○ British English has what we will call a fuck inversion
○ “John is a nice guy.” – “Is he fuck a nice guy!” (aka he is NOT a nice guy)
○ Fuck inversion is emphatically negative, but fuck is not the only element that triggers it
● Malaysian English has wh-questions that look very different from SAE
Summary of subject-auxiliary inversion: cross-dialect differences

● It looks like Subject-aux inversion is employed in various dialects of English in different
contexts:
○ SAE (sub-aux inversion in yes/no questions, wh-questions)
○ AAVE (uses sub-aux inversion not present in SAE)
○ British English (fuck inversion, not present in SAE)
○ Malaysian English (no sub-aux inversion for wh-questions)
● Syntax: conclusions
○ Words come in syntactic categories
○ These categories can be discovered through category tests
○ Words on a sentence are not just like beads on a string
○ Sentences have structure, constituents, that we can identify using constituency tests
○ Part of your knowledge of language is knowledge of the PS rules of your language →
Phrase Structure rules are responsible for syntactic diffs across languages
○ We can visualize constituency using PS trees
○ Knowledge of the PS rules of your language is responsible for some types of ambiguity
○ Dialects may differ in the inventory of auxiliaries they have
○ Dialects may diff in word combinations (ex: modal words)
○ Dialects may differ in subject-auxiliary inversion
Do You Speak American?

● The farther South and West you go, the more influence of Spanish there is
● West Coast: LA to Seattle – examining the English spoken along the coast
● Mex to Max: speaking Spanglish
● Chicano English is its own thriving dialect – pitch, intonation, and lexicon indicates the dialect
differences
○ Ex: foo (fool to mean man or guy)

○ Drawing out words (intonation and pitch)
○ Throwing in Spanish words (only throwing in a few words) – this is its own dialect
● Spanish is not a threat to English; if anything, it is the other way around
● Black English influence on American is large – there is not a certain way to speak American
● Bilingual – being able to translate AAVE into mainstream American 9SAE)
● Teaching SAE while not devaluing their AAVE background
● Amy Heckerling, writer of clueless, is from the Bronx but she adds Californian slang into her
work – California teen slang was introduced to the public after Clueless became a big hit
● “Oo” fronting in California (stuff with o is pronounced more in the front in california)
● Men speak surfer dude: surfing slang has had an impact on California speech (which has a
growing influence on mainstream American)
● Skate slang and snowboarding slang also have unique lexicons: ex: ripping, dialed in, sick, etc.
● Marine Corps/military also has linguistically unique aspects
● Use of the word queer in a positive light: you can change the meaning of words
● BMW voice
● We react to voices differently when we can see the person who is talking.
● Mistrust: Baldy is more trusted when he speaks with a synthetic voice, because he looks
synthetic.
● Mismatch between voice and perceived appearance can lead to mistrust (ethnicity can have
stereotypes around it)
● Teaching computers how to speak – what frontier are we crossing?
● Computers do not understand accents or all American dialects
● If one uses SAE, they will be able to work with the computer systems more efficiently
● “Our language is not an abstract construction of dictionary makers, but has its basis broad and
low, close to the ground. Truer than ever”
Week 6 Case Study reading notes

● Speech errors = a type of linguistic data which can be systematically collected and analyzed –
provides insight about a language system
● Spoonerism
○ Ex: You have tasted the whole worm (instead of you have wasted the whole term)
○ Feature exchanges: switching of a phonetic feature (pig and vat instead of big and fat)
○ Phoneme exchange: occurs when segments are exchanged (heft lemisphere instead of
left hemisphere)
○ Word exchanges: Switching words – instead of what grammar will a child learn? →
What child will a grammar learn?
○ Phrasal exchange: an end of the sentence occurs at the fall in pitch (I haven’t satten
down and writ it instead of I haven’t sat down and written it)
● Speech errors are not just random reshuffling of words or sounds
● Malapropisms: out of place (a selection/substitution error where the speaker selects an
unintended item from her lexicon or substitutes one lexical item for another)
○ Phonologically based (his immoral soul instead of his immortal soul)
○ Semantically based (my boss’s husband instead of boss’s wife)
○ Syntactic category rule (nationalness instead of naturalness – adj replaces adj)
● Lexicon is a mental dictionary
● Substitutions are oftentimes based on phonetic similarity or semantic/pragmatic
association/similarity
● Words that are semantically associated, not just words that have the same/similar meanings, are
more strongly linked to each other than words that have less semantic association –
semantically associated – the meanings are associated
● Anticipations and perseverations: A tanadian from Toronto (T instead of C because
anticipating the T’s in Toronto) or She can she it (perservernce of sh from she mistakenly
appears instead of see)
Week 7: first language acquisition
Lecture 1
● How do children acquire their first language?
● Fact 1: Who is the teacher?
○ A mother tries to instruct the child and the instructions do not work
○ Instructive teaching does not play a primary role in FLA
○ Children acquire their first language effortlessly, without any systematic instruction
● Fact 2: What is the input data?
○ You like to eat eggs with bacon. → What do you like to eat with bacon? OK
○ You like to eat eggs and bacon. → What do you like to eat and bacon? NOT OK
○ How do we know one is OK and one is not OK from a grammatical perspective?
○ Adults, aside from speech errors and jokes, only utter grammatical sentences (positive
evidence)
○ Ambient linguistic data available to children (input) does not include ungrammatical
sentences (negative evidence)
○ The only input available to children is positive evidence
○ Children still end up being able to distinguish between grammatical and
ungrammatical sentences
● Fact 3: How do children interpret novel data?
○ There are an infinite # of grammatical sentences in English
○ Children are exposed to only a finite number of sentences
○ However, they eventually acquire the ability to generate and understand an infinite
number of sentences
● Fact 4: What errors do children make?
○ Children make “errors” in that they sometimes utter sentences adults, as matured
speakers of a language, would not utter
○ But the pattern of their “errors” seems to be selective or limited
○ They would not make certain errors that would be overgeneralized from what they
hear in adult speech
○ Regular verbs and irregular verbs – Children overgeneralize the use of -ed by attaching
it to irregular verbs
○ Do and have (auxiliary verbs) – children do not overgeneralize the -ed ending for these
○ Children’s non-adult-like errors occur in a selective, systematic, limited way
● Facts about language acquisition:
○ No instruction is involved
○ No negative evidence is available (only positive evidence is available)

○ Finite input, but infinite productivity
○ Non-adult-like errors are committed, but in a selective, limited way
○ All 4 of these facts together → known as the Logical Problem of Language Acquisition
– FLA must account for these 4 facts
○ Despite this logical problem, children still typically acquire language with little effort
○ “Poverty of the Stimulus”: input from the child’s linguistic environment does not seem
to be enough for first language acquisition – finite to infinite
● Hypotheses regarding FLA
○ Theory of imitation
○ Theory of correction/reinforcement
○ Theory of innateness
● Theory of imitation: are children imitating adult speech by uttering these sentences?
○ I finded Renee; Cowboy did fighting me; What the boy hit?; etc.
○ infants and children imitating adults (baby making faces)
○ Adults do not utter such sentences and children make errors that adults do not make
○ Not a functional theory
● Theory of correction/reinforcement
○ Common sense view
○ Language learning is based on the correction of “bad” sentences (by adults) along with:
○ Positive reinforcement for incorrect speech
○ “Now give me other one spoon!” instead of “now give me the other spoon” – the
correction and reinforcement does not work/happen – adults do not usually offer
positive or systematic reinforcement
○ Study: Brown & Hanlon 1970 – adults expressed approval after 45% of both
grammatical and ungrammatical sentences – same rate for both
○ This showed that adults don’t correct children’s grammar; they usuallt correct the
factual content and meaning
○ This does not bode well for any theory of language learning involving correction or
reinforcement
○ Parents are not successfully reinforcing or correcting their children’s language
○ Childen are doing more than just imitating their parents
● *the theories of imitation and correction/reinforcement are both factually incorrect
● What if adults rarely speak to pre-linguistic children? – children can still learn languages
● Inuit culture – children are socialized to be silent with adults, rather than verbally expressive
● From one Inuit elder: “You know that a child is acquiring the language when they know what
they are being asked to do”
● Inut mothers typically do not: Engage in vocal play with their children, try to interpret child
vocalization as speech, or respond to these vocalizations (more interested in children’s
comprehension than production)
● Kiche Mayan peoples of Guatemala: parents – address almost no speech to their babies;
however, they engage them in “real” conversation when they are around 1.5 to 2 years old
● Cultural belief of reincarnation = no need to teach the child the language
● Mohawk peoples of NY and canada: mothers and grandmothers interacting with children
spoke at a normal rate of speed
● They didn’t simplify the “elaborate prefixation, suffixation, and noun incorporation” that is
part of normal Mohawk speech
● Mothers interacted with children as though they were true conversation partners
● Caregivers in diff societies interact with young learners in different ways
● Some engage in explicit “teaching”; others don’t
● All that they share in common is the rich verbal environment that the children grow up in
● All these children learn to speak despite cultural differences
● No single method can be “essential” – they all work
● Theory of Innateness created by Noam Chomsky

● Model of innateness: developed with a primary focus on addressing the “poverty of the
stimulus” argument
● Our language knowledge is:
○ Innately specified (therefore, universal among human beings)
○ Richly structured (innate knowledge of language is called UG, universal grammar, a
“blueprint” for language
● If language is innate, why do people come to acquire various different languages as their first
language/why don’t we all speak the same language?
● Innateness: universal vs. specific
● Universal – innate component
○ Universal properties of all human language = UG
○ Categories of linguistic expressions (nouns, verbs, subjects, objects, etc.)
○ Structured sentences and phrases
● Specific – learned component
○ Properties specific to the acquired language
○ How nouns, verbs, subjects, and objects are represented in the language
○ How sentences are structured in the language using these specific parts
● UG is the seed of a grammar of any language – the seed must be watered with input of a
specific language for it to bloom as the fully developed grammar
○ Ex: if you feed the seed of UG with the input of English, you will become a native
speaker of English
● What is acquired?
○ Differences between languages:
○ Head-initial: head-complement (English) – John ate an apple.
○ Head-final: complement-head (Japanese) – John apple ate.
○ Word order acquisition: children need to determine the value of the head direction
parameter – subconsciously “is my language head-initial?”
○ What are the sounds in the language? What’s their distribution?
● Language acquisition is not driven by imitation, correction, or reinforcement
● Children’s knowledge of language is complex and shows subtle implicit knowledge of rules
● Since we are not overly taught these things, the claim is that this knowledge/system (ie UG) is
hard-wirted into the human minds/genome
● UG therefore facilitates first language acquisition, which explains why children develop
language so effortlessly, rapidly, and uniformly across species
Overview
● The ability to acquire language is innate
● All children everywhere should be able to:
○ Acquire the language of their environment
○ Acquire language rapidly and spontaneously
○ Exhibit linguistic creativity (all children will say things they have never heard)
○ Pass through similar stages of development
● Children are linguistically adults by the time they are 5-7; they are native speakers
Learning a first language – summary

● No instruction is involved
● No negative evidence is available
● Finite input, infinite productivity
● Non-adult-like errors (but in a selective, limited way)
● What model would provide the best explanation about these facts?
○ Knowledge of language is acquired on the basis of our innate, biologically programmed
structure: UG, exposure to linguistic input (specific to language/environment)
Lecture 2
● Is the development of language similar to the development of other cognitive skills?
● The chaffinch is “wired” to learn its specific birdsong – but if it is not exposed to the birdsong
within 10 months, it will never learn its song
● The critical period hypothesis: language learning in children is similar to the acquisition of
birdsong – the ability to acquire language to a native level is innate → both require
environmental input for full development → both are subject to a critical period
● Critical period = the developmental time window where environmental input is necessary for
acquisition (of language) to native-like levels
● Birth to the onset of puberty = the critical period in humans
● Imprinting: within 2 days, goslings become attached to the first moving object that they see →
if there’s no exposure during this critical period, they will shy away from all moving objects
● Critical period for version in cats: 2 week old kittens were assigned to either a vertical condition
(box with vertical lines only) or a horizontal condition for 5 hours each day
● Kittens have no visual placing reaction – kitten does not back away from objects until living in
a normal environment for several days but vision is incomplete (horizontal condition kittens
did not see moving vertical lines/objects – blind to vertically-oriented objects and also vice
versa)
● The absence of environmental inputs = normal development is not possible
● Victor of Averyon: was found in the woods and could not speak:
○ Language progress was generally poor
○ Able to comprehend language, but practically unable to produce it
○ Only 2 pronounced phrases: milk and oh my god
○ Majority of his communication was grunts and howls
● Genie from Arcadia, California – had basically no linguistic input for first 13 years of life
● She learned how to:
○ Communicate a message (verbally or nonverbally)
○ Acquire vocab (by age 17, vocab of a typical 5 year old)
● She could not learn how to use:
○ Grammatical “morphemes” ex: the, a, -ed
○ Complex syntactical structures
● Examples of Genie’s sentences:
○ “Mike paint”
○ “Open door key”
○ “Neal come happy; Neal not come sad”
● Lateralization: where does Genie process language?
○ Typical brain: the left hemisphere

○ Dichotic listening tests showed: Genie’s language processed in the right hemisphere –
when there was no language input, the right hemisphere stepped in (inaccessible left
hemisphere)
● Chelsea has a 2000+ word vocab – she had no real linguistic input until 31 (diagnosed as deaf)
● She is able to hold a job, read, and write
● However, she was unable to acquire simple word order or complex syntax: “the small a the
hat”, “orange Tim car in”
Acquisition of American Sign Language

● Deaf children whose parents don’t know sign language
● Exposed to SL only when they first meet other deaf children or adults
● Normal early childhood, except for lack of language input
● Children who were exposed to SL at a younger age are far better at it than children who were
exposed around 12 years old
● Researchers compared: Native signers (signing from birth), early ASL learners, delayed ASL
learners – all have used SL for over 20 years → Native performed the best, delayed learners
performed the worst
Second language acquisition

● Learning second language very young = indistinguishable from native speakers
● Age of arrival = a better predictor of accent than the number of years speaking English
● Age of arrival is also a better predictor of comprehenmsion than number of years speaking
English (not just about motor skill learning ability)
Childhood aphasia
● Recovery is faster and much better in children than in adults
● If aphasia is early enough, the right hemisphere can step in and take over
● 0-3 month aphasia: no effect on language
● 21-36 months: language accomplishments disappear, later re-acquired with repetition of all
stages
● 3-10 years: aphasic symptoms, but tendency for full recovery
● 11+ years: aphasic symptoms persist throughout the child’s life
● Relationship between earliness of aphasia + ability to recover
● Lateralization is tied to the critical period
Research results
● Humans have an innate ability to acquire language, but we require linguistic input from our
environment
● The input must come within a critical period (biologically determined “window of
opportunity”)
● After the critical period, humans are unable to acquire language with native-like proficiency
Summary
● Critical period: time window in which exposure to certain environmental stimuli are necessary
for normal development
● Critical periods exist for cognitive functions in animals (like birdsong in chaffinches, or vision
in cats)
● Critical periods exist for language acquisition in humans (from birth to the onset of puberty)
● After critical period has ended, it becomes nearly impossibly to acquire language to native-like
levels
● Evidence for a critical period for language comes from:
○ Studies of people who had no language input (Genie, Chelsea)
○ Studies of late vs. early acquisition of ASL
○ Studies of second language acquisition
○ Studies of childhood aphasia
Case study: Playing the Language Game

● How do children acquire language without seeming to learn it?
● It takes a short amount of time to get a kid to be a fully-functioning member of a language
community
● Do birds teach their young to fly? Do mothers teach their children how to speak? – no
● How do children know how to walk and move around?
● Noam Chomsky –learning a language is just like solving a problem → many of the processes of
mental computation are coded in the DNA/inherited
● Walking is a part of the innate programing of human beings – we are designed to walk
● “Learning” is misused with language acquisition; it has the properties of normal, physical
growth
● Chomsky’s approach is controversial – perhaps language is built-in AND learned from
exposure to properties in the environment (it is not one or the other)
● Modern linguistics is concerned with one question: how much of language is built in and how
much is learned from the environment?
● When did the boy say he hurt himself? – 2 answers: he said it in the bathtub, but he hurt
himself this afternoon
● When did the boy say how he hurt himself? – 1 possible answer: in the bathtub
● The “how” blocks one answer
● The imitation theory vs. the innateness theory
● Child has creativity – they do not simply imitate everything from their parents
● We don’t learn language the same way we learn other difficult things – we don’t have training
wheels when we learn a language
● Urinate – I’m a nate
● Children develop language skills regardless of whether mothers correct their children
● Most of language is innate, but surely you don’t inherit all of it
● We do it by analogy – new sentences are like one’s we have heard before, and that’s how we
understand them
● “I pained the red barn” – child can say “I painted the blue barn”
● You hear a sample and extend it to all new cases by similarity
● Concept of analogy DOES Not WORK – under investigation, all the analogies break down →
there must be some kind of mental computation
● John grows does not mean the same thing as it does in the sentence John grows apples.
● When do children/how do they know the difference between a subject and an object?
● Children who are 16 months old and have a limited vocabulary can understand the order of
complex sentences spoken by adults – they can absorb the information
● Word order maps objects and events in the world – this is shared by all languages
● Languages are essentially an organ of the mind/brain
● Learning word meaning is using it in the future to apply to new things
● What’s a concept? Is a meaning of a house different in my head from the meaning of the word
in others’ heads?
● Do concepts change as we grow up?
● Children are biased learners – they assume by expecting object labels to refer to the whole
object (pointing at billboard of rabbit and saying Gavagai! And people assume you are talking
about the whole rabbit, not just the ears, or fur, etc.)
● Children expect objects to have one and only one label/name
● Papua New Guinea – isolated tribes → a very linguistically unique language (700 languages for
3 million people)
● Menya people do not write their language, but their language is just as complicated as any other
● Menya has a very complex modal system

● Very small set of possibilities for building a language: where to position the verb, the noun
combination with the verb
● All languages in the world are very similar – all are dialects of one language: the human
language
● Each language has a set of pieces, and they are all put together by different rules (all languages
have rules)
● Siberian is the most inflected language in the world - no prefixes or suffixes, the affixes go in the
word and it could have a miltitde of suffixes for endings
● Universal grant – there is an underlying set of characteristics that is true of all languages, all
over the world – all human languages can ask questions, negate, and have nouns and verbs, and
indicate a difference between singular and more than one
● Why are languages so similar? – there are fixed principles that are part of our minds – our
minds have the properties of languages
● Children take irregular patterns and try to make them as regular as possible – they have a clear
sense of system (extracting out the rules of a language)
● Children make systemic errors; they don’t make “obvious” leaps (they don’t make reasonable
mistakes)
● Cultural products are rooted in human biology
● The capacity to learn language is deeply rooted in us as a species
Textbook reading – new ideas

● Innateness hypothesis is supported by the observation that people end wup with grammars
that are not directly represented in the linguistic input they receive
● The innateness of UG is called the poverty of the stimulus
● Babbling → first words → acquisition of phonology → acquisition of word meaning → the
acquisition of morphology and syntax and pragmatics (the appropriate use of language in
context)
● Development of auxiliaries (has, did, etc.)
Textbook reading: pages 291-301; 355-357.

● Lingua franca = one language often used by common agreement
● Typically a language with a broad base of native speakers
● Pidgin = a language that is used by speakers of mutually unintelligible languages who have been
brought together (they develop a language to communicate with one another that is not native
to anyone; this language is called a pidgin)
● Language of the dominant/more powerful linguistic group = superstrate or lexifier language
(ex: English is the superstrate language if Hawaii because it is spoken by the plantation
owners/is the superstrate language for Hawaiian Pidgin English)
● Other language/languages that also contribute to the lexicon and grammar in a less obvious
way = substrate languages
● Pidginization involves a simplification of languages and a reduction in the number of domains
of use
● Creolization = the linguistic expansion in the lexicon and grammar of existing pidgins, and an
increase in the contexts of use
● Pidgins usually have fewer grammatical words (bound morphology is largely absent, for
example) – they also have simple clausal structures and lack embedded or complex sentences
● Societal and individual bilingualism
● Codeswitching: occurs wherever groups of bilinguals speak the same 2 languages and occurs in
specific social situations
○ Not indicative of a language disability; instead it shows a bilingual identity and that it
has its own internal grammatical structure (ex: mis amigos finished first)
● Bilingual borrowing = occurs when a word or short expression from one language occurs
embedded among the words of a second language adapts to the regular phonology,
morphology, and syntax of the second language.
○ Ex: biscotto = cookie, biscotti = cookies in Italian
○ In English: I love biscottis with my coffee.
● Studying extinct/endangered languages is important to learn about UG and language-specific
differences
Lecture 1
● Language contact occurs when 2+ languages or dialects come into extended contact (extended
= over a period of time) with each other
● Languages (and speakers) do not exist in isolation but in social settings
● When we talk about language contact, we are talking about human contact – contact between
people who speak distinct languages
● What happens when cultures with multiple languages come into contact?
● Widespread bilingualism/codeswitching is seen in many areas of Africa and Asia
● Codeswitching – switching from one language to another when you are speaking
● Selection of a lingua franca: any language used to enable communication between groups of
people with differing native languages (natural or constructed languages) – in many parts of
the world, English is a lingua franca
● Language creation: pidgins and creoles
● Language shift/endangerment and language death – an unfortunate result of language contact
● Borrowing is extremely common and need not be the result of extended contact between
languages (it happens all the time)
○ Borrowing words: English adopted chimichangas from Spanish
○ Borrowing phonetics: English adopted [ჳ] (the jea sound) from French (only found in
words from Latin or French)
○ Borrowing morphology: English adopted incredible from French, -able/-ible then
became a productive suffix
■ Shm- reduplication in English → ex: Books, shmooks, I don’t care what you’ve
read. Or Flu, shmu, he’s not worried about getting sick. → the Shm-
reduplication has a dismissive or pejorative connotation. It was first attested in
Yiddish in the 1600; borrowed into American English in the 19th century and
became more commonly used in the 1930s. It is the source of “Joe Shmo” aka
the average guy. The Shm- sound does not occur in native English words.
○ Borrowing syntax: English has two ways of asking the reason for something: “Why”
and “how come”
■ “How come” was borrowed from Yiddish into English
■ It has a different syntactic behavior than “why”
■ “Why did John eat the Alpo?” – subject auxiliary inversion
■ “How come John ate the Alpo?” – no subject auxiliary inversion, it would be
incorrect to do so
■ The difference between syntaxes show the difference between origins of the
two phrases, despite meaning the same thing
● Language contact occurs in situations where groups of speakers of different languages come
into contact with one another through:
○ Geography
○ Conquest/war
○ Trade
○ It is usually the case that when groups come together, they are not equal in power or
prestige
● Adstrates: languages in contact that have equal prestige
● Superstrate: language of dominant group
● Lexifier language: the input language that provided most of the basic vocabulary or lexicon
(aka “superstrate”)
● Substrate: language of the less dominant or subordinate group. Typically provides most of the
phonological, and usually, grammatical features
○ Ex: superstrate = English, substrate = Native American languages
● Pidgins and creoles are languages that arise in extended contact situations: they are the result of
language creation → we will explore the similarities and differences between pidgins and
creoles
● Cases of natural language creation through groups of people having extended contact with
each other
Pidgins
● Speakers of mutually unintelligible languages are often brought together, perhaps through
economic, political, or social factors
● In order to communicate with each other, they need to overcome the lack of a common
language
● One solution: the creation of a pidgin language
● Pidgin = simplified language used in specific interactions such as business, service, and trade
● Pidgins are found across the globe – they are not rare bc language contact is not rare
● Pidgins have no native speakers – they are second languages for everyone who speaks one
● Pidgins are governed by convention – they have established vocabulary and grammatical
structures
● A person can speak a pidgin well or poorly (or somewhere in between) – they are unlike other
natural languages because they have no native speakers
● Pidgins have grammars that are simpler than the grammars of their source languages – a
simplified code (taking pieces from each language that is coming in contact)
● Simplicity of grammar is one of the characteristics of pidgins – can afford to be simple because
it’s mainly used for trade purposes
● Vocab of pidgins is usually highly restricted and contains few (if any) terms for abstract objects
Ex: Chinese Pidgin English

● Spoken in Canton, China frm about the late 17th century until around 1900
● Like many pidgins, CPE had a very restricted vocab, around 750 words
● Most of the words in the pidgin were derived from English, but modified to fit the
phonological structure of Cantonese
● Superstrate: English → Substrate: Cantonese
● The term pidgin might come from the word for “business” in CPE
● “No can do” originated in CPE
● Pidgins are not mutually intelligible with their source languages

● Pidgin forms of English are usually different enough from English that native speakers of
English will have to learn the pidgin
Nigerian Pidgin English

● Several million people speak it and none are native speakers
● A place where you would expect a pidgin to develop – there are over 400 living languages
throughout Nigeria
● Lexifier language: English (used to be a British colony)
● Heavy influence from Igbo and Yoruba
● NPE is quite difficult to understand
● Pidgin is a second (or third or fourth) language for everyone who speaks it
● Once children begin to acquire a pidgin as a native language, it becomes a creole
Creole
● As children acquire a pidgin as an L1 (first language), they transform its minimal grammar into
a thorough, complex grammar (it becomes a natural, human language)
● There are many creole languages around the world in: Caribbean, West Africa, and islands of
the Pacific (Polynesia, Micronesia, Melanesia, New Guinea)
● Creole language = language that has native speakers (the nativization of a pidgin)
● Many creoles include the word “pidgin” in their name (ex: Hawaiian Pidgin English) - this is
purely historical; HPE is a creole!
● Creoles highlight the difficulty of differentiating between dialects and languages (is it a
different dialect, or is it a completely different language?)
● Creoles are NOT “broken” versions of other languages
English Creole Data

● One language (the lexifier language) often supplies most of the vocabulary for pidgins and
creoles
● The idea that pidgins (creoles especially) are “broken” forms of other languages stems from the
existence of lexifier languages
● Guayanese Creole English data:
● Shi wuda bin sing = she would have sung (a speaker of SAE would see GCE as ungrammatical;
but that is a naive perspective – we cannot view words with the same distribution as in
standard NA English)
Creoles and colonization

● Historically, most present day creoles arose on plantations in the parts of the New World, of
the Indian and the Pacific Oceans and of West Africa colonized by Europeans
● Creoles arose because different groups of speakers needed to communicate (ex: groups of slaves
from West Africa that spoke dozens and dozens of different languages needed to communicate
with each other and with the slave owners)
● There were several possible substrate languages (e.g. Fongbe and other African languages in
Haiti), but no group was large enough or strong enough to push their one language
● In hawaii, there were Japanese, Hawaiian, Chinese, and Portuguese workers on the sugarcane
plantations – they needed to communicate and there were not enough speakers of 1 language
to dominate the group
● Hawaii and its rich blend of immigrants → at the heart is Hawaiian Pidgin English (Creole)
● Hawaiian Creole English:
○ Low status
○ Blamed for poor education test scores
○ Not college level (just casual talk)
○ Associated with lower class (stigmatized as inferior)
○ Considered substandard or broken English
○ 600,000 people speak HCE
○ It is used in the radio and in music
● Jamaican Creole English = also known as Patwa/Patois
○ It is spoken on the Caribbean Island of Jamaica

○ Not clear if it is a dialect of English or a very closely related language (it is a creole)
○ The bible (New Testament) has been translated into JCE
● Papua New Guinea Pidgin (Tok Pisin – comes from Talk Person)
○ Has native speakers
Grammatical properties of Pidgins and Creoles (phonetics and phonology)

● Simplified consonant clusters:
● It is common for consonant clusters to undergo simplification, but they do not have to
● Fricatives in English becomes stops in Creoles:
●
● These properties are quite variable; you will not find them in ALL pidgins and creoles
● Phonetics: pidgins and creoles tend to have sounds that are very common in the world’s
languages
● Usually, cross-linguistically rare sounds are not found in pidgins or creoles
● Implosive sounds (stop sounds blowing air out) – are absent
● Pidgins are not tonal, even when the input languages are tonal
● Tonal creoles are rare but can exist
● Morphology: pidgins lack inflectional morphology
● Ex: plural morphology

● Use of reduplication to avoid homonymy, to indicate plural
●
● It is not uncommon for creoles to lack inflectional morphology, but some do have it
● Plural formation (Jamaican Creole English): Plural nouns are formed by combining an
unmarked noun with 3rd plural pronoun “dem” (definites only)
Syntax of pidgins and creoles

● Pidgins may have flexible word order:
○ Jamaican Pidgin English (Mi bammy eat; mi eat bammy = I eat the cassava)
● Creoles tend to have more fixed word order:
○ Mi a-go tel shi se mi waa nyam di bammy = I will tell her that I want to eat the cassava
(in Jamaican Creole English)
● Basic word order of both pidgins and creoles tend to be Subject-verb-object (SVO)
● Ex:
● Pidgins – no complex sentences
● Creoles – fully developed grammars with complex sentences possible
● Pidgins do not have definite or indefinite articles
● Many creoles lack articles, but some do have them
● Tok Pisin does not have articles

● Some natural languages do not have articles – creoles behave the same way
● No pidgins have articles, though

● Jamaican Creole English, however, has both definite and indefinite articles
●
● Creoles have fully developed tense systems.
●
● Use of different auxiliaries, but the tenses are still there
● You can also combine these auxiliaries – he bin stay walk = he had been walking, or he bin go
stay walk = he will have been walking
Summary
● What are the distinct potential outcomes from extended language contact situations?
● Borrowing: words, grammar, syntax, sounds
● Language creation: pidgins (grammatically simplified systems) and creoles (fully expressive
languages with native speakers)
● All creoles originate as pidgins (children who acquire pidgins as native languages create the
creole, a fully-expressive, natural human language)
● Pidgins and creoles have properties in common:
○ Phonetics/phonology: consonant cluster reduction
○ Little inflection or affixation, but there can be found in creoles, never in pidgins
○ SVO word order, but pidgins, which have no native speakers, tend t have more flexible
word order
○ Creoles have fully developed tense systems
○ Pidgins tend to tolerate much more grammatical variation than creoles, which do have
native speakers
○ Even though similar, pidgins and creoles are distinct (different) results of language
contact
Lecture 2: Languages in Contact
Langage endangerment & language death – another outcome of language contact

● When a language is extinct, it’s usually because the speakers of it have adopted another
language
Language variation/diversity
● 6912 numbers of languages in the world – but with a completely unequal distribution
● 347 languages (around 5%) have over a million speakers
● 94% of world population speaks one of these (347) languages
● The remaining 95% of languages are spoken by 6% of world population – of this 95%, 497
(around 7%) are nearly extinct (with fewer than 50 speakers left)
● Most of the remaining languages are endangered (exact level of endangerment is hard to
determine)
● Median size of a language in the world: 3000 speakers
●
● 8 languages have over 100 million speakers (altogether, speakers of these languages represent
2.4 billion people)
● Top 20 languages: represent 3.5 billion speakers or more
● Linguistic diversity is not distributed equally around the world

● There are “hotspots” like New Guinea, Indonesia, India, and Mexico (high language/linguistic
diversity)
● Before European Invasion in 1492: 20 million Native Americans who spoke around 300
languages
● Today: 2 million Native Americans, 175 languages – of these 175; 55 have less than 5 speakers
(virtually extinct), 100 are endangered languages, and 20 may survive, since they are spoken by
children
● Last native speaker of Wukchumni, spoken in Northern California – a sense of loss and
urgency
Case Study: Australia

● Before European invasion: 1 mil Indigenous Australians, 500 languages
● 200 languages survive, all are endangered - only 20 of these are spoken by children
Scale of language loss

● About 90% of the world’s languages are on the verge of being lost (over the next generation or
two)
● This is a worldwide crisis
Terminology
● Language death: when the last speaker of a language dies
● Language shift: process by which a language community adopts another language
● Language death is almost always preceeded by language shift
● Language study by Crystal (2000): The study assumes that there are 6,000 languages now, and
there will be a 50% language loss in the next 100 years
● To meet that time frame, at least one language must die, on average, every two weeks or so (this
is happening at the moment; 50% is an optimistic estimate)
Language shift and language death – why should we care?

● We need diversity
● Human cultures are the result of human struggle, adversity, ingenuity, adaptation, and
creativity
● Languages – analogy to ecosystem diversity. The ecological system and its residents are valuable
in and of themselves
● Language is an integral part of culture and the loss of a language is a permanent loss to the
cultures in which the language is embedded
● Each language expresses a unique realization of the human experience
●
● Endangered languages compared to endangered species
● Language expresses identity
○ English dialects – would it be better if your dialect didn’t exist or if everyone switched
to Standard English and your dialect was no longer spoken? → feels as though
something is missing or gone
○ People are often proud of their local accents
○ Language is a very powerful group identifier
○ An accent is a clear outward sign of identification with a particular place
● Languages are repositories of history – language is the pedigree of nations; every and any
language is a window on history
● Lexicon can give us an idea of what people they encountered in the past, and who they
borrowed words from, for ex.
● For many languages, histories are only recorded in spoken language
● Beowulf is part of the English linguistic history
● Most likely, the Old English in that clip is completely unintelligible to modern English speakers
● In the case of Beowulf, we have access to the ancient story because of a written record
● Without it, the story would be lost and English speakers would have little or no access to part
of their history
● What if your language is not written down?
● The world’s languages are full of these histories
● As languages are lost, speakers lose access to part of their history
● Languages contribute to the sum total of human knowledge
● Each language is a repository of the shared and accumulated knowledge of speakers over
centuries
● People around the world have a profound awareness of the flora and fauna, rocks, soil, climate
cycles, etc. of their environment
● Imagine French had become the dominant language in Britain in 1066 after the Battle of
Hastings — there would be no Shakespeare, Chaucer, etc. → there is definitely human
knowledge out there in different languages; the loss of human language is the loss of knowledge
● Languages are interesting in themselves: they are incredibly complex manifestations of the
human mind
● Although language does not determine thought, the properties of language reflect properties
of the mind
● Loss of a language is a loss of a chance to understand something profoundly and uniquely
human
● Once a language is gone, you cannot get it back
Why do languages die?

● Factors which put people in physical danger:
○ Natural disasters leading to death or destruction of habitat
○ Ex: earthquake
○ Disease
○ Economic exploitation
○ Political conflict leading to civil war, ethnic murder, or genocide
● Factors which change the people’s culture
○ Cultural assimilation
○ Military dominance
○ Urbanization
○ Media
○ Bilingualism
Stages of assimilation:
● Pressure on people to speak dominant language
○ Results in emerging bilingualism in children (children of parents who only speak the
minority language always grow to be fluent in the majority language)
● Younger generation shifts to dominant language
○ Results in shame at using the minority language
○ Leads to self-conscious semilingualism
○ Leads to dominant language monolingualism
● One generation later: discovery of what has been lost (perhaps too late) – language shift has
occurred
Language death – forced assimilation

● Native American languages in schools: in the USA, Canada, and Australia, there were boarding
schools were native children were sent (to forcibly assimilate them and force them to abandon
their language and culture)
● Cherokee speakers in North Carolina said that they were paddled for speaking Cherokee (they
were banned from speaking it in school by the federal government)
More on language death

● Language death is similar to language shift in that it’s a gradual process
● Functions of one language are taken over in one domain after another by a different language
● We have to think about the role of different languages in society – if you wanted to speak a
language, where could you speak it?
● Language death is a process; it is not just something that happens instantly
● Language death is manifested as a gradual loss of fluency by its speakers; competence gradually
erodes over time
● Language shift is almost inevitable without active language maintenance
● Thinking that a language is no longer needed or that it is in any danger of disappearing may
result in language loss
● Rapid shift occurs when speakers are eager to “fit in” or “get on” in society (ex: Senegal;
everyone switching to French or Waluf)
What can we do to prevent language death or shift?

● Understand factors that affect language shift in the first place
○ Accept the idea of linguistic diversity in the dominant culture – applies to dialects of a
language as well as minority languages
○ Patterns of language use: socio-economic factors – the more domains a minority
language is used in (the more opportunities there are to speak it), the more chances
there is to maintain it
○ Demographic factors: how big is the community of speakers? – the community is able
to isolate itself from the influences of the majority if there is a large enough community
of speakers – in this case, language shift is much less likely to occur
■ Ex: Pennsylvania Dutch – isolated, rural communities of minorities tend to
resist language shift
■ Improved roads, buses, TV, telephone, and internet are all agents of language
shift
■ Intermarriage can accelerate language shift towards language of partner who

speaks majority language, unless multilingualism is the norm in society
○ Attitudes to the minority language by speakers of it:
■ Pride and respect of the language: language shift is faster in communities where
the ethnic language is not highly value –linguistics can help by emphasizing
that all languages are equally linguistically valuable
■ Symbol of the ethnic identity: language shift is less likely to occur or proceeds
more slowly when the ethnic language is seen as a symbol of identity
■ Language is an important component of identity and culture. Maintaining a
group’s identity and culture is important to them; they maintain their ethnic
language to maintain their identity.
○ Speakers of endangered/minority languages must have a say in the educational system
■ Show that the language can be used in education, such as the creation of
bilingual education materials
■ Training of native speakers as teachers
■ Creation of language materials that are easy to use
■ Development of written literature, both traditional and new
○ Speakers of endangered/minority languages should have access to electronic
technology, such as the internet
■ Allows speakers of minority languages to be in contact with each other
Summary
● We are facing a world wide language extinction crisis
● The crisis is more severe and immediate than the ecological extinction crises we are facing
● Many of the world’s languages (optimistically 50%) will cease to be spoken in the coming years
● This is a loss for everyone
● Language death is not inevitable
● We can do something about it!
Video 3: not a lecture – The Linguists

● Languages (smakller ones) are disappearing at a rate of 1 language/2 weeks
● Around 7000 languages exist around the world
● Areas with a history of colonization are in most dire need of language preservation
● Russian is the killer of Native Siberian languages
● Tomsk Lab of Siberian Languages – Chulym is one of the least documented Siberian languages
(has not been studied for over 30 years)
● It’s hard to study a dying language because most of the speakers are elderly (and going death)
● Chulym was viewed as a gutter language; Native Siberian children were sent to boarding
schools and banned from speaking the language
● Language is a great part of culture and identity
● Boarding schools in India: children come from around 60 minority groups and are exposed to
Hinduism and the English language
● Sora language: around 300,000 speakers (out of the billion people in India, this barely goes on
the radar)
● Sora’s numbers use a base of 12 and 20
● More than 80% of plants and animals have not been described in Western Science
● Kallawaya – group that focuses on healing practices; their language has under 100 speakers
● Bolivia was one of the most linguitically diverse countries in the world
● Digging into the Kallawaya language can help the Kallawaya healing be known by the world
● Max Chura, native speaker/Kallawaya healer
● “I went out moose hunting” is just one word/verb in Chulym
● Collecting data – the rightful owner is the community who produced it, not the
scientist/linguist
● Quechua and Kallawaya are distinct and different languages – Kallawaya is a unique language
● Scientific literature does not explain how Kallawaya is transmitted – it is not learned from
birth, it is transmitted from adult males to teenage males to avail themselves to medicinal
knowledge → this is the key to the survival of the language: Kallawaya provides their livelihood
● Children don’t have to give up a language in order to speak another one – but once they’ve
made a decision, it tends to be irreversible
● Chulym does not have a writing system – the vast majority of endangered languages are
unwritten → Vasya invented his own writing system with Russian letters
● David and Greg found 9 speakers of Chulym in Siberia – by 2008, four of them had died
Week 9: Animal Communication
Lecture 1
Intro
● Do animals have language?
● Is language unique to humans?
● If not, are animal communication systems fundamentally different from human language?
Popular media
● Animals (especially primates) are presented as having language – are these claims correct?
● We often treat our closest animals (domesticated ones) similar to the ways we treat other people
To figure out whether animals have language, we need to know the properties of human language
What are the properties of human language?
Language vs. communication

● Often conflated, but they are different

● Communication = a universal among living things
● Even bacteria communicate with each other, using chemical signaling molecules (quorum
sensing)
● Communication can happen even when the communicator doesn’t intend it to
● How to distinguish between language and communication?
● Communication = something that we do
● Language = a tool that we use (potentially for communication, but it can also be used for other
things: ex – we think to ourselves)
Types of communication
● Visual
○ Saguaro cactus flowers (as a form of visual communication) to communicate with bats
that pollenate the cactus
○ Wild blueberries and muscadine grapes have a particular color – this attracts deer who
consume the berries and spread the seeds all over
○ Fireflies: males glow when trying to attract females (light on, light off – rudimentary
system)
● Auditory
○ Birdsong
○ Whales – males repeat and add to each other’s songs to show off their memory and
volume
● Tactile
○ Social grooming: communication has a social function but it has to do with touching
● Chemical/olfactory communication
○ Skunks: some animals can communicate/send a message by scent alone
● These forms are not using language the way humans do – it is possible to have communication
without any use of language
Case studies
Clever Hans
● Horse, early 1900s
● William von Osten believed that horses and other animals were less intelligent than humans
because of a lack of educational opportunities
● Von Osten taught Hans to:
○ Tell time
○ Keep track of the calendar
○ Read and spell in German
○ Add, subtract, multiply, and divide
○ Respond correctly to verbal or written questions
● Hands would tap out answers or shake his head a # of times that corresponded to the right
answer
● Board of Education appointed a committee to investigate his claims – they concluded there
was no deception involved
● Oskar Pfungst, psychologist, found that under some conditions, Hands did much worse in
getting the correct answers
○ Ex: horse isolated from audience
○ Blinders on Hans
○ Questioner did not know the answer
● Pfngst concluded that Hans was responding to reactions of his owner and the audience
● He was picking up on unconscious, involuntary movements of the body, changes in facial
expression, and maybe even changes in heartbeat
● Pfungst was able to get Hans to start tapping by stepping in front of him and making slight
movements (without posing a question at all) – tapping would stop when Pfungst straightened
his head slightly
Alex the Parrot

● African gray parrot; trained by Dr. Pepperberg
● Impressive ability to speak and understand (for a parrot)
● Pepperberg taught Alex the “meaningful use of English speech”
● Model/Rival training: Trainer + Model/Rival + parrot
● Trainer presents objects to the model/rival and they ask the trainer questions about it
● After hearing the questions – ask Alex to name the object → if he got it correct, he would get
the item → incorrect: get corrective feedback
● The only reward is the object talked about, but after a correct response the parrot can request
something that it wants (ex: a nut)
● Alex exhibited cognitive capacities comparable to those of marine mammals, apes, and
sometimes 4-year-old children
● He correctly labeled: 50+ objects, 7 colors, 5 shapes, and quantities up to 6
● He correctly used: No, come here, wanna go __, and want __
● He understood concepts like bigger, smaller, same, and different
● He could describe a key as a key, regardless of its size or color – he had an abstract idea of what
a key was (and he could determine how the key was different from others)
● Speech sounded remarkably accurate, but it is produced very differently from humans
● Answered simple Qs about objects (ex: size, color, and material)
● Required immense amounts of training (years of direct training)
● Pepperberg does not say that Alex learned a language
● Her research interest is in concept formation in animals, not language
● We have to distinguish being intelligent from the ability to acquire human language
● Alex the parrot and Hans were intelligent, but it does not mean that they were able to acquire
human language
Properties of human language

● Interchangeability: a user can both transmit and receive messages
○ Ex: among silkworm moths, only females secrete chemicals
○ Among whistling moths, only males make territorial sounds
○ In most species of fireflies, only males “light up”
○ In most songbirds, only males sing
● Cultural transmission
○ Nature (innate) vs. nurture (learned)
○ At least some aspect of a communication system is learned from other users
(environment)
○ Children acquire the language of the people around them; parental origin is irrelevant
○ In animals:
■ Fireflies and cowbirds: entirely innate language systems
■ Birdsong can be learned, innate, or a combo of both
■ Young phoebes sing nearly correctly at 2 weeks old – completely innate
■ Phoebes will sing correctly even if raised in isolation or even if deafened after
hatching
■ In other bird species, there is a critical period for the acquisition of song
■ White crowned sparrow: hatchlings start producing subsong around 25 to 40
days – consists of soft sounds that are not the adult song (unstructured)
■ 75-80 days: “plastic song” is recognizable as the species song, but not quite the
adult form
■ 90 days: “crystallization”; the song is fixed
■ 240 days: full adult song
■ Songsparrow: critical period for acquisition of birdsong is about 20 to 70 days
■ Birds only exposed from days 3 to 7 will produce abnormal song

■ Only exposed from days 50 to 71: some deterioration in adult song since
exposure is late in the critical period
■ Only exposed after 30 days: only subsong produced; not recognizable as
characteristic of the species
■ Bird only exposed from days 35 to 56: normal song development — there is a
critical period
● Arbitrariness: there is no natural or necessary connection between a linguistic form and its
meaning; it is an arbitrary relationship
○ “Cat” in English is wundu in Wolof, but there is no change in the cats themselves
○ In signed languages too, the relation between linguistic form and meaning is arbitrary
○ Onomotapeia: “moo” and “woof” in English are different in other languages (ex: Moo
in Dutch is Boe)
● Duality of patterning: system decomposable into smaller, recombinable parts
○ A, p, r, t combine to form trap, part, and rapt
○ Smaller units recombine into larger units at 2 levels:
○ Sounds combine to form words, which have meaning (sounds by themselves have no
meaning)
○ Words combine to form sentences, which have meaning
○ This does not seem to be found in most animal communication systems
○ In most animals, the meaningful elements are not decomposable into smaller units of
analysis
○ Alex the Parrot seemed to have meaningful words, rather than meaningful sentences
○ Alex did learn some fixed phrases, but these were NOT recomibined (he did not have
sentences)
● Displacement: human language can talk about the past, present and future – as well as abstract
concepts (things that do not exist in real life or are not tangible; ex: unity, superman, Santa
Claus)
○ We can talk about places that are extremely distant and that we have never visited (ex:
other galaxies, other dimensions)
○ Most animal communication systems lack this property
○ Howler monkey makes his alarm call when he thinks he spots a jaguar (a stuffed jaguar)
– the monkey does not make the call in the absence of a predator → most animal
communication systems lack the property of displacement
○ Bees wiggling their butt can show other bees where to find food (angle of rotation of
the figure 8 dance matches the angle between the feeding station and the hive)
○ 3 types of bee dances: round dance (food source is relatively close), sickle dance
(intermediate distance), and tail-wagging dance (relatively far)
○ Bees have limited displacement abilities
○ Alex the Parrot could also ask for objects that were not present
● Prevarication: language can describe things that are not literally understood as true (imaginary)
○ Ex: we can talk about hobbits even if we don’t believe they exist
○ We can lie with language, but slightly different
○ True deception requires a Theory of Mind (speaker knows what the other person will
believe) – be careful w/ this
● Ambiguity: words in human languages can have several different meanings
○ In animal communication systems, there is no ambiguity; each call and signal has one
meaning
● Productivity: unlimited potential to express novel ideas
○ Humans are capable of creating new expressions for new objects – infinite
○ Animals have limited set of signals to choose from – fixed reference
○ They cannot produce any new signals to describe novel experiences
● Grammar: all human languages have modules of grammar
○ Phonetics
○ Phonology
○ Morphology
○ Syntax
○ Signed languages also have these properties/modules
○ Animal communication systems – if any of these are found, they exist only in very
rudimentary forms
○ Phonetics of alarm calls and dances: there is a finite set of these
Summary:
● Distinguished communication from language
● Looked at case studies of animal communication (ex: Clever Hans and Alex the Parrot)
● Looked at the properties of human language:
○ Interchangeability
○ Cultural transmission
○ Arbitrariness
○ Duality of patterning
○ Displacement
○ Prevarication
○ Ambiguity
○ Productivity
○ Grammar
● Various characteristics of human language are present in the animal kingdom – but in animals
it tends to be more rudimentary
● We can appreciate animal communication, even if it is not human language (ex: echolocation
and whale songs)
Lecture 2
Primate communication: vervet monkeys

● Since humans are primates, it may be useful to look at our closest relatives to see if they can
acquire and use language
● Vervets are Old World monkeys
● Found in savannah, forest, semi-desert of sub-Saharan Africa
● Adult males are approximately 10 lbs
● Adult females are approximately 8 lbs
● They have 3 main predators: large cats, eagles, and snakes
● They have different alarm calls for eac hclassification of predators – Vervets respond to these
behaviors differently (ex: climb higher for leopard alarm, look down or clim down trees for
eagle alarm, and stand on hind legs and look around for snake alarm)
● In one experiment, the researchers repeatedly played the leopard alarm from individual A to
other troop members (when there was no leopard and individual A was absent) → after a
while, other vervets stopped running and began to ignore A’s alarm call → the response to the
alarm calls is not automatic; they can recognize a false alarm
● After this, they played alarm call from individual B and the vervets responded normally
● The vervets responded normally to A’s eagle and snake alarms (they still trusted A, just not for
the leopard alarm calls)
● There is some sort of innate component, but vervets can also learn
● Solitary vervets do not give alarm calls; they are intended as communication and not just an
expression of anxiety or fear
● More alarm calling takes place among close kin or offspring than peripherally related group
members
● Are vervet alarm calls a type of language?
○ Interchangeability: yes, both sexes give alarm calls
○ Arbitrariness: yes, the alarm calls themselves do seem arbitrarily related to their
referents (ex: leopard alarm does not obviously sound like a leopard) – arbitrary
relation between form and meaning
○ Duality of patterning: there is no internal structure ; the alarm calls are NOT
combinable (they are just wholes)
○ Displacement: the ability to talk about things that are not there → not really; these
alarm calls are typically only performed in the presence of appropriate predator
■ Sort of; 2 grups of vervets were fighting and one group was clearly losing – one
member of the losing group gave out the leopard alarm call (the calling monkey
lied)
■ The alarm calls are intentional and this suggests that there is limited
displacement
■ No evidence of vervets “discussing” predators in their absence
○ Prevarication: talking about something the speaker knows is not true
■ The ex above shows prevarication
○ Ambiguity: no; the calls are unambiguous and refer to specific classes of predators
○ Productivity: there are 3 basic alarm calls
■ in forested areas where there are dogs helping human hunters, the vervets have
developed another call (a “dog alarm”) that is short and quiet – when other
vervets hear it, they sneak into the bush where hunters cannot follow
■ massively different than linguistic productivity in humans
○ Cultural transmission: the calls cannot be wholly innate since they seem to be deployed
at will (when vervets are alone, they do not give the alarm call)
■ There’s some learning invovled (ex: dog alarm)
■ Young vervets give the eagle alarm for a wide variety of large birds; not just for
the species that prey on vervets
■ By the time they’re adults, they have refined their “eagle” category – this shows
learning from the enviornment
● Vervets are clearly intelligent/their calls are sophisticated
● There is some overlap in the properties of the vervet alarm call system and human language
● But overall, the two seem quite distinct
Teaching human language to primates (or at least, trying to)

● Gua (a chimp) was raised in a human home and treated like a human infant, along with the
couple’s son
● Gua and the child shared many similarities:
○ Emotional reactions
○ Feeding behaviors
● He had very different cognitive development
○ His motor skills evene exceeded the child’s
○ However, he never learned to speak (while the child did)
○ Gua was able to understand 100 words, but he could not produce any intelligible ords
● Viki was also raised in a human home and actively taught to produce words
● By age 6, Viki could say mama, papa, cup, and up (very poorly articulated versions)
● Teaching chimps to speak a language did not work out very well
● Problem: chimps have a vocal tract that makes speech production essentially impossible
● Larynx is much higher in non-human primates

● The lower larynx is, the larger an animal sounds – it also helps with vocalization and vowel
production
● Humans have it permanently low, and it grows even lower in human male adolescents
● Maybe the problem is teaching chimpanzees how to speak
Teaching sign language to chimps

● 1960’s: linguistics began to recognize that signed languages have all of the structural properties
of spoken language, except for modality
● Scientists reasoned that teaching a primate a signed language might wokr because their manual
gestures are at least as dexterous as that of humans
● Washoe: started learning language at 11 months; teaching period for about 51 months
● Idea: chimps use gestures as a natural sign in their communication
● Tried to teach her ASL
● The Gardeners used the “molding” technique, in which they would show her an object and
mold her hands into the correct sign configuration
● By 60 months, Washoe had acquired about 160 signs – by 27 years old, she had about 250 signs
● She could extend a sign she learned for a specific object to the entire class of that object - she
had abstracted the concept/category in her mind
● She made multi-word utterances: Washoe sorry, go in, etc.
● There are severe problems with the data from Washoe
● She never acquired ASL since she was never exposed to it (neither the Gardeners nor any of
their assistants were actually fluent in ASL)
● The Gardeners allowed a lot of sloppiness in Washoe’s signs, since her hands were not exactly
shaped like a human’s
● In double blind experiments, Washoe gave signs referring to an object that the observers coding
Washoe’s signs could not see – Washoe’s responses corresponded to the intended object about
60% of the time → it’s difficult to interpret this because we do not know the size of the set of
objects on any particular trial (it could be that Washoe was at chance!)
● Washoe was doing more than imitating, but clearly did not control the grammar of ASL
● Another methodologicla problem: in the 1960s, not much was known about the structure of
ASL (ASL is not just English but using signs)
● Asking what’s that vs who’s that – testing differentiation between person and thing and
location, etc…
● What’s that? If Washoe answered grape (while looking at a picture of a dog) it as counted as
correct – they wanted to know if she knew the category “common noun”
● Doesn’t matter what word Washoe uses, as long as she interprets the word category correctly
● Many of Washoe’s answers were systematically simplified to get rid of repetition
● Washoe did not acquire ASL
● The data is difficult to interpret
● Strongly suggests that it’s possible to teach a chimp a substantial vocabulary of arbitrary signs
with associated meaning
● There’s little to no evidence of any linguistic structure in Washoe’s signs, and certainly no
evidence for even a substantial command of any human language
● Nim Chimpsky (named after Noam Chomsky) → Nim was a 2 week old captive-born chimp
when he started living with a human vamily (for the first 18 months, he lived with a fam that
had a non-native ASL signer) → moved into a mansion in NY
● At 9 months: systematic lang training (5 hrs a day/5 days a week) – trainers were not fluent in
ASL (they used the hand molding method)
● After 4 months of training, he produced his first sign; after 3 yrs and 8 months, Nim had about
125 signs
● He signed about 20,000 multi-sign utterances (not unique, this is his total)
● Nim never acquired ASL
● Linguistic structure: in his multi-word signs, there are tendencies but no apparent rules, like in
human language
● Majority of Nim’s (and Washoe’s) multi-signs can be classified into categories like:
○ Agent-action
○ Action-object
○ Modifier-modified
○ And a few others
● These have semantic relation, not necessarily structural or syntactical relation
● In some cases like action-object, the signs occur with equa frequency in either order
● Kick ball occurred at the same frequency as ball kick – this flexibility suggests a lack of
linguistic structure
● Nim did things, like massive repetition, that human children never do (ex: give orange me give
eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you)
● Combos that Nim produced are very different from those of a human child – very repetitive,
no additional complexity
●
● 1979 paper by Terrace:
○ The discourse context of Nim’s utterances directly reflected the teacher’s signing
○ Many multi-sign utterances Nim made were initiated by the teacher, and involved signs
that occurred immediately before in the teacher’s utterance
○ The amount of signs where the structure resulted from Nim’s control of language was
very small, and provides no evidence for linguistic structure or regularities
○ Much of the supposed evidence for Nim’s use of syntax comes from prompted
utterances that were at least partially repetitive
○ In Nim’s utterances: 90% were reactions and almost always, the signs referred to the
here and now (almost no displacement)
○ 40% were straight repetition
○ Nim interrupted the signing of the teacher
○ Nim never added new info to the situation in “conversation” with the teacher
● Conclusions of Nim study
○ Nim never acquired ASL or any other human language
○ Discourse context shows that the majority of the data from Nim’s signing was just
Nim repeating the teacher’s signs
● Koko is a lowland gorilla; Patterson has been working with her since Koko was 1 year old
● Koko is portrayed as having “really” learned ASL
● There is not much to say about her linguistically, except that there is no data to support the
claim that she has acquired ASL
● Patterson has not provided anything but summaries, charts of vocab growth, and isolated
anecdotes about Koko’s abilities
● According to Patterson:
○ 3.5 years: 100 signs
○ 5 years: 250 signs
○ Koko’s current vocab is 1000 signs and she understands written English
○ Patterson says she has systematic records: transcripts of Koko’s signing and videotapes,
but nobody has been able to study them
○ Info has only been available in Nat’l geo. and stories in the press
○ Koko has not acquired human language – data is maybe being overinterpreted by
Patterson
Overview of chimp and other primate studies:

● 20th century hypotheses: maybe these primates don’t use human lang because they lack the
opportunity to learn it?
● Even when people try to teach them, it does not work – vocal tract failed, signed languages also
failed
● Chimps and primates have made accomplishments:
○ Associate referents with arbitrary signs
○ Can learn to use signs spontaneously
○ Can learn to use signs creatively (on rare occasions)
● Limitations:
○ No gramatical structure in their system (lacking syntax, morphology)
○ Length: 2-3 sign utterances
○ Inconsistent word order
● Primates simply do not have the cognitive structures to acquire human language
Conclusions
● Chimps and other non-human primates have:
○ Small vocabularies
○ Little evidence of grammar
○ Litte evidence of productive or innovative language
○ Maybe some evidence of displacement (ability to refer to something that is not in the
here and now)
○ No non-human primate has ever acquired a signed or spoken human language
● Questions
○ Is lang unique to humans? Yes, it appears to be species specific.
○ Are animal communication systems different from human language? Some systems
share a few properties of human language, but NONE shares all of them.
○ Do animals have language? No.
Video 3: The First Signs of Washoe

● All humans acquire language; language is a characteristically human accomplishment – this is
present only in the most rudimentary forms in other animals
● Washoe may be the first chimp to have learned a human language?? The words are not in her
voice, but in her hands → she has learned sign language, she has a vocab, and chains words
together (usually in the appropriate order)
● Washoe was brought up as a human child – English was not spoken, only ASL in the presence
of Washoe
● Allen Gardner used film to document Washoe; no sound was recorded since the language was
signed
● Vicki could say 4 words after a few years: mama, papa, cup, and up (she had to hold her own
lips in position to make sounds)
● ASL/Ameslan is as complex as any spoken language – signs stand for ideas and concepts, not
for words
● Washoe’s environment was more domestic to make it more comparable to the conditions
under which language is acquired in young children
● Washoe was good at imitating gestures – signs were introduced from appropriate times and
used in games
● Shaping – Washoe’s correct signs would be enforced with the appropriate response
● Washoe asked for “more” in cases where she wanted to play more or wanted more food
● Washoe generalized her early signs (such as open, to car doors, cabinets, containers, etc.) –
shows a true understanding of the concepts
● Many of the signs she learned were iconic – closely related to the object or movement being
referred to
● 18 months: 24 signs acquired by Washoe
● Washoe used an acquired sign, hug, to express an emotional state when she saw Susan
pretending to be crying
● By the second year, her vocab was increasing, she was using signs spontaneously, etc.
● Often she did make mistakes – she signed comb for brush, for ex (showing she obviously
understands the concept) → signing became a part of her life (Washoe looked in the mirror and
signed “me”)
● Observer interpreted Washoe’s signs without seeing the image she was looking at
● Word combinations is a key part of language acquisition: ex – time eat, gimme sweet, out. Go
there.
● Washoe makes use of consistent word order (that is a __, that is a __)
● Something suggests that Washoe knew she could obtain more through the combination of
words – the evidence does not show she had a clear understanding of syntax, but she
understood the concept of it
● Lana lives in a clear plastic box with a computer; she can use symbols to request what she wants
● Lana uses Yerkish, which is designed to have a clear and unambiguous syntax – unlike ASL,
which has a looser syntax
● Question Tim groom Lana? Vs. Question Lana groom Tim? – she understands the difference
and behaves accordingly – this suggests the capacity for understanding syntax
● Washoe always used the correct word category – she had a concept of language and the power
of language (new assistants’ presence would cause Washoe to sign more slowly)
● Washoe would talk to herself in ASL
● Questioning phrases – interrogative phrases (such as who or what) → Washoe used who? And
showed questioning inflection (holding the sign for longer and having an expression on her
face)
● Changes in future procedures: teach chimps from birth, have multiple chimps so they can have
a social relationship and teach each other, and have a # of native ASL speakers on the staff →
use the full richness of the language → they want to go to maturity to see the full impact of
language acquisition
● Will chimps sign to each other? Bowie signs to Bruno to ask him for food
● Will signing mothers teach their children? Koko at the SF Zoo is being taught ASL by Penny
Patterson
● Washoe has split open an entire field of research → Washoe has attacked “the last bastion of
human uniqueness” – she rearranges signs into completely novel utterances (ex: duck = water
bird, lucy – watermelon = candy drink or fruit drink; they have their own concepts, ASL just
gives them a form of communication that humans can understand)
Week 10: Language inside and outside
Lecture 1: Language and thought
Intro
● Does language = thought?
● Is language equivalent to thought? Does language determine thought?
Is language a direct mirror of thought?

● The dog chased the cat: subject, verb, object (SVO) → English
● Dog cat chased: SOV → Korean
● Chased the dog the cat: VSO → Tagalog
● Followed the cat the dog: VOS → Malagasy
● Do diffs between these languages indicate that the speakers somehow think about events
differently?
● Socrates thought thinking was an inner form of speech (a discourse the mind carries on with
itself)
Edward Sapir
● Extremely influential linguist and psychologist – he wrote that the real world is built upon the
language habits of the group
● Different languages classify experiences differently, completely, and incommensurably (lacking
a basis of comparison in respect to a quality normally subject to comparison)
● The same experience would be encoded differently in different languages
Benjamin Lee Whorf

● Fire prevention engineer
● He worked his day job at the Hartford Fire Insurance Co. while doing linguistics on the side
● Eventually met up w/ Edward Sapir → the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis:
●
● Your native language determines how you see the world; the structure of a language influences
how speakers perceive the world around them
● Whorf’s linguistic relativity principle: users of markedly different grammars are pointed toward
different types of observations…and hence are not equivalent as observers
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: strong vs. weak form

● Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis states that the structure of a language influences how its speakers
perceive the world around them
● 2 forms of the H
● Strong form, linguistic determinism
○ the structure of a language determines how speakers think
● Weak form, linguistic relativism
○ different languages encode different categories, and speakers of different languages
think about the world in different ways
● Speakers of different languages see the world in different, incompatible ways because their
languages impose different conceptual structures on their experiences
● The bulk of Whorf’s evidence was drawn from cross-cultural comparisons
● He studied several Native American cultures
● Some claims about how languages differ:
○ Hopi language lacks tense
○ Inuit language has many words for snow
○ Color words
● Hopi = Native American language spoken in Arizona

● Whorf wrote that Hopi contains “no words, grammatical forms, constructions or expressions
that refer directly to what we call ‘time’ or to past, or future, or to enduring or lasting”
● He also said that they had “no general notion or intuition of time as a smooth-flowing
continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at an equal rate, out of a future,
through present, into a past”
● The following sentence translated from Hopi: “then indeed, the following day, quite early in
the morning at the hour when people pray to the sun, around that time then he woke up the
girl again” → this shows that Whorf was likely incorrect
● Other detailed studies of Hopi showed that Hopi speech has tense markers, metaphors for
time, and units of time
● Ex: days, # of days, weeks, months, lunar phases, seasons, and the year
● The Hopi culture has a horizon-based calendar, exact ceremonial day sequences, knotted
calendar strings, notched calendar sticks, and timekeeping devices similar to sundials
● Whorf’s claims were just factually wrong – all languages have tense and can express concepts
like time and duration
● Hopi provides rich evidence for the opposite of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
● Inuit language
● Whord claimed Inuit language to have several terms for snow:
●
● The idea is that all these different words in Inuit mean that Inuit peoples see the snow in a
more complex way (because of the differentiation the Inuit language provides)
Franz Boas
● Father of American Anthropology
● In 1911 – he wrote the Handbook of American Indian languages
● He said: Just as English has derived forms of water from a single root meaning water in some
other language, Inuit uses the apparently distinct roots
● Boas reported 4 different roots for snow in an Inuit language
Sapir-Whorf H with Inuit Language (cont.)
● In an article in 1940, Whorf claimed Inuit to have 7 roots for snow
● This was widely reprinted and cited in textbooks/popular books about language
● The estimates of the number of “snow” words kept getting inflated with retelling
● However there are many diff Inuit languages, and not all possess the same # of terms
● This # of terms to describe snow is probably matched or surpassed by skiers, regardless of their
language
Specialization based on experience:

● Different groups within a culture vary in terms of the number of words they use for things
● Consider some examples:
○ Who can name/identify more colors, a housepainter or a ling prof?
○ Who can name/identify more organs, a butcher or a surgeon?
English
● What about English “snow” words?
○ Snow, slush, sleet, avalanche, flurry, powder, dusting, hardpack, snowball, snowdrift,
snowfall, snowflake, etc. – we also have lots of snow words
● Do English speakers experience snowy environments as a winter wonderland of textures of
snow and ice?
● Reports about the Inuit language are false/exaggerated; it is not that different from English
Mismatches (between language and thought)

● Oftentimes the linguistic sense is different from the intended sense
○ “They’re living on a shoestring”
○ “You’re getting under my skin”
○ “He’s out to lunch” (can also mean he’s crazy)
Ambiguity: there are ambiguous words like bat, bug, and bank, but the concepts are clearly distinct
● A single sentence can express clearly distinct concepts
● If language were the same as thought, would it be possible to distinguish the different senses?
New words for new concepts

● When a language lacks a word or grammatical device to express something, speakers make up a
new word, invent a metaphor, or borrow words or expressions. This process would be
impossible if language determined thought (if you don’t have the word, then you don’t have
the concept? This is not true, the concept can precede the word/term for it)
● People invent new concepts and make up new words for them, like Freud with the word id
● What are the native English words for algebra, hypotenuse, ecology, etc.? These words are
borrowed into English
● It’s not just scientific terms: skandha, moksha, etc. (religious terms)
● If language determined thought, how would you have new concepts?

● We can explain a concept without having a word for it
● This is the entire basis of the comedic device “sniglets”, which comedian Rich Hall described as
“any word that does not appear in the dictionary, but should
● There are concepts that do not have words
The Case of Ildefonso

● There are several reasons to think that concepts of linguistic determinism and linguistic
relativity are on the wrong track
● let's consider some evidence:
○ Adults who lacked language
● In one case, a man, Ildefonso, was born deaf in a Mexican village and came to LA
● At 27 years old, he crossed paths with an ASL interpreter, Susan Schaller – he was no longer
languageless
● Even though he lacked language, Ildefonso had jobs
● He learned to do addition on paper in 3 minutes
● Once he started learning ASL, he was able to convey parts of his life story:
○ He grew up desperately poor and begged his parents to send him to school
○ The crops he had picked in different states
○ How he had evaded immigration authorities
● Even though he lacked language, he had thoughts and thought rationally, and was able to
convey them eventually – Ildefonso led Schaller to other language-less adults – they handled
money, played card games, and entertained each other with long pantomimed narratives
● If language really were equal to thought, what would we expect to find?
Thought in animals
● There are animals that lack language, but clearly they do have thoughts
● Chimpanzees are capable of having thoughts and being smart
● Thirsty crow drops stones into water to raise the water level to get the floating food or drink
the water
● It IS possible to have thoughts, plan things out, and be rational – even without language
Experimental testing of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

● 2 major approaches have been employed to test the validity of this H
● Test the strong view:
○ Language determines thought by seeing if the cognitive system can make distinctions
that are not linguistically represented – can we find cases of this?
● Test the weaker view:
○ Language influences thought – can we find cases of this?
Cultural variation in color terms

● If your language didn’t have separate names for these colors, would you see them the same way?
● Much of the initial research focused on an aspect of language which varies widely across
cultures
● Color terms: there are a few languages that have only 2 color terms, and some with three
(single-word color terms)
● Berlin and Kay – studied color hierarchy in 20 languages
● Rules: consist of only one morpheme, not contained within another color word, and not
restricted to a small # of objects (commonly known)
● Findings: in 2-color-term languages, the terms almost always corresponded to black and white
● In languages w/ 3 color terms, they correspond to black, white, and red
● Languages with additional terms are added as follows: yellow, green blue then brown, then
purple, pink, orange, and gray
● The color hierarchy data from this study runs contrary to Whorf’s hypothesis → it suggests a
universal physiological basis for color naming, independent of language
Cultural Variation in Color Terms – the strong view

● Hieder and Rosch: studied Dani tribe of New Guinea – they only use 2 color names (light and
dark)
● Mili = cool/dark shades (eg: blue, green, black)
● Mola = warm/light shades (eg: red, yellow, white)
● Rosch worked with the Dani and found that the adults had no difficulty in recognizing color
chips that were from an initial presentation from among distracters, even though they had no
names for the colors
● If language determines thought, then you would not expect the adults to be able to distinguish
between more than 2 colors (when they are speakers of languages with only 2 color terms)
● Additionally, they were better at recognizing focal colors (ex: the best example of blue or the
clearest example of green) than non-focal colors (just as we English speakers are)
● This data does NOT support the strong view of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
Cultural Variation in Color Terms – the weak view

● Winawer, Boroditsky and others (2007)

● English and Russian divide up blues differently
● Russia makes an obligatory distinction between light blue (goluboy) and darker blue (siniy)
● There is no word that just means “blue” in Russian
● Russian speakers were presented with various tableaus of three squares on a computer screen:
one on top and two right below it
●
● Which bottom square has the same color as the top square? – testing rxn time
● Does having different words for light blue and dark blue have any effect on perception?
● Results:
○ Russian speakers were faster to discriminate two colors when they fell into different
linguistic categories (ex: both dark blue) than when they were from the same linguistic
category
○ English speakers tested on the identical stimuli did not show an advantage in any of the
conditions
○ How much faster were the Russian speakers on average? 124 milliseconds faster (not a
big difference)
● This shows support for a weak version of the Whorfian hypothesis: categories in language affect
performance on simple perceptual color tasks
Conclusions
● The strong view of the SW H, linguistic determinism, is not supported
Empirical basis of it is incorrect:
○ Hopi has time words
○ Not only Inuit has multiple “snow” words

Evidence against the strong view can be seen in:
○ Languageless adults
○ Primates
○ Experiments with Dani
● There is some support for the weaker version of the SW H, linguistic relativism
○ Russian “blues” study: data from areas of investigation like color naming indicates that
the use of certain specific terms may influence how we think under certain
experimental conditions
○ It’s not clear how important this influence is, so that’s why we say there is some
evidence (not much)
○ “Words can have some effect on memory or categorization. Some of these experiments
have actually worked, but that is hardly surprising” – Steven Pinker (some of these
experiments may be tapping into cultural aspects unrelated to language)
● Language is language, and thought is thought

● They are NOT equivalent
● It seems there is a deep connection between the two because your own internal dialogue can
seem like a conversation with yourself
● When you hear a sentence of your language in your head, does that constitute a thought?
● Though language has some relation to thought, it is not equal to and does not determine
thought
● In the cases where language influences thought, it only has a minor effect
Lecture 2: Obscenity
Intro
● Profanity is at the interface of language and culture
○ Debates concerning profanity have been at the forefront of issues about censorship
● It also plays a role in how we think about language from a purely linguistic perspective
● Profanity does serve a purpose, although it may not be obvious
George Carlin and the FCC

● Monologue broadcasted on the radio, man was listening to it with his son and was offended
and complained to the Federal Communications Commission
● The FCC threatened the station with sanctions for having played this material
● The station appealed; case went to the SCOTUS in 1978 – in a 5:4 decision, the Court decided
that the material was not obscene
● Court also ruled that communities could now determine what was objectionable and the times
of day when these materials could be played
● 7 words you can never say on TV: he said all the bad words (ex: shit, piss, tits, cocksucker,
motherfucker, etc.)
● 2-way words (words with double meanings): ex – prick
What makes a word profane or offensive?

● Is it the sound of a word? Most likely not – we can easily find non-offensive words, which
sound rather similar to swear words
○ Punt, runt, sit, with, puck, buck, glitch, hitch, rock, bore, kits..
●
● They all describe the same thing – it’s not the concept that makes a word/phrase offensive
● Social conventions determine which words are considered profane, obscene, or abusive
● A taboo is a social custom that prohibits certain kinds of behavior
○ Ex: in American culture, there are certain things that you are not supposed to do in
public (sex, defacate, etc.)
● Profane words are those that some people in a culture believe to be unacceptable in certain
circumstances
● Profane or offensive words are taboo words
● It’s usually not the words themselves that are unacceptable; it’s those words when used with a
specific meaning or sense
○ “Ass”, “cock”, “bitch” – can be used to refer to animals OR to people/body parts
● The status of a word as obscene is determined by social custom
● There is actually little data in linguistics on which words are considered offensive/not
● Across English dialects, there are disgareements over which words are obscene/the level of
strength of obscene words
●
● There is variation in the rating of profanity across the English-speaking world, but there are
common themes
Profanity in English
● English draws its profanity from a few sources
● Profanity is from Latin, which means “outside the temple” (blasphemous; words that desecrate
the holy
● Religious figures: Jesus Christ, Jehovah, Mohammad
● Aspects of religious dogma: holy, hell, God, damn
● Some have fallen out of favor:
○ Zounds - God’s wounds
○ Gadzooks - God’s eyes
● Sex, sex organs, and sexual acts – a great many words in English:
○ Fuck, dick, pussy, skank, etc.
● Body functions:
○ Shit, piss, barf
● Slurs: derogatory reference to a person based on perceived group membership
○ Groups defined by race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, etc.
Profanity across languages
● Cantonese:
○ Most vulgar cantonese words are: (all drawn from the “sex”
category)
● Quebec French:
○ (all drawn from Catholicism and

Catholic liturgical concepts)
○ In Quebec French, words like the ones above are considered more vulgar than the
strongest vulgarities in English:
■ Foutre (fuck) or merde (shit)
● German:
○ There are profanities drawn from sex and religion categories, but fewer than English
○ German word ficken “fuck” is not commonly used in swearing
○ Lot of swear words drawn from the excretion category
● Russian:
○ Russian Academy of Language defined the most offensive Russian words:
○
○ They were banned in 2014 by the Russian government from films, concerts, theater
performances, and books
○ In fact, even derivatives of these words were also banned:
● Hausa:
○ Not offensive:
○ Offensive:
not offensive replacement:
● Similarities between Hausa and English: saying God Damn in Hausa and English can be the
same format
Avoiding bad language (profanity across languages cont.)

● Pretty much all languages have abusive terms
● Many languages also have terms which suggest abuse or swearing, but are not actually abusive
● Euphemisms: “go to bed with” or “private parts” or “powder your nose” “go to the bathroom”
● Child words: “doo doo” or “pee pee” are cute when a kid says them, instead of offensive
● There are words which are similar in form/sound to swear words; these are the basis for
euphemisms
○ Jesus → Jeez
○ Shit → sheesh, shucks
○ Fuck → fudge
○ Shut the fuck up → shut the front door
○ Damn → dang, drn
○ Damnit → dagnab it
○ Goddamnit → gosh darn it
● Knowledge of profanities and language is necessary to understand the humor of these
euphemisms
Profanity and the brain: vulgarity in Aphasias

● Jacques Lordat: physician in Montpellier, France
● At 52 he suffered a stroke, losing the ability to speak, read, and write
● He recovered and kept a diary
● Following recovery, he focused on other people with brain injuries that induced language
deficits
● Lordat case study, 1843: Priest w/ severe aphasia; his vocab was limited to just 2 words
○ Je “I“ and Foutre “fuck”
● Global aphasia: left hemisphere damage resulting in complete or near complete loss of language
○ Accompanied often by auditory deficits too
● Patient RN: could not speak + had severe comprehension deficits
○ Six word vocabulary: well, yeah, yes, no, goddamnit, and shit
○ These words were produced with clear articulation and prosody
○ Used spontaneously to answer questions and in attempts to talk
○ Unable to produce these utterances on command, and he was unable to read these
words aloud
○ A very tiny corner of his language has been preserved

● British patient:
○ His vocab retained swear words: bloody hell, fuck, fuck fuck, fuck off, fucking fucking
hell, and oh boy
○ And interjections: yes, well I know, and funny thing
○ Numerals and some proper names
○ There is a corner of language preserved despite global aphasia
● Other global aphasics:
○ Counting (1 to 10), days of the week, months of the year, nursery rhymes, familiar
phrases (“good morning”)
Hemispherectomy (very rare)

● Patient EC:
○ 47 years old in 1965
○ Had a tumor in his left hemisphere removed
○ The tumor was malignant and his symptoms didn’t improve
○ Had a second surgery to remove his entire left hemisphere (a left hemispherectomy)
○ After surgery, his attempts to speak were unsuccessful, with only isolated words – no
meaningful speech produced
○ BUT he could still use expletives (like goddamnit and shit)
Back to Vulgarity in Aphasics

● Broca’s apahsics often retain fixed phrases like “How do you do?” or “Go to hell”
● Lordat’s observation (updated): even with severe aphasia, certain kinds of speech are retained
● There is an asymmetry – automatic speech is retained; intentional speech is severely impaired
● It is possible for automatic speech to be retained, even when the person has lost (pretty much)
all other linguistic abilities
● This is evidence that automatic vs. intentional speech are housed in different parts of the brain
Right Hemisphere Damage

● Patient: 75 year old Hebrew/French bilingual man (Hebrew is his native language)
● He had a right hemisphere stroke – we expect little to no impact on language abilities
● Speech remained relatively normal except:
○ Could not recite familiar prayers or Hebrew spoken daily since childhood
○ Could not count from 1 to 20
○ Could not sing familiar songs
○ Unable to curse, unable to provide correct expletive for a situation described to him,
unable to complete a curse
● His automatic speech was impaired (aka things we just memorize)
● He has the mirror image of Broca’s aphasia (Broca’s = intentional speech impaired; automatic
speech preserved)
● In this patient, the basal ganglia of the right hemisphere were damaged
● Basal ganglia = “subcortical” structures because they are beneath the brain cortex
● The basal ganglia are involved in selecting appropriate motor actions by inhibiting actions that
we don’t want to perform
● They are closely tied to emotional centers of the brain
● In the patient with damage in the basal ganglia, the capacity for blurting out emotionally
charged language was impaired (such as cursing)
Why use profanity? – The Purpose of Offensive Language

● Words by themselves are not offensive
● Although we are told that we should not use offensive words, perhaps they do have value
● When do we use profanity? – anger and aggression are innate in human beings
● Abusive language gives us a way to express aggression without actually being aggressive
○ Of course, one can do both
● Abusive language has value in that it allows us to attack, without the consequences of an actual
attack
● Profanity is universal to all human languages due to its innate nature
Notes from the reading: 22-25
● Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: “Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor in the
world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the
particular language which has become the medium of expressio for their society…we see and
hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our
community predispose certain choices of interpretation.”
● Strong form – linguistic determinism: holds that the language we speak determines how we
perceive and think about the world → language acts like a filter on reality
● Weaker form – linguistic relativism: languages differ in the categories they encode, therefore
speakers of different languages think about the world in different ways (ex: languages break up
the color spectrum at different points)
308-312
● “Situation dialects” = styles or registers (nearly everyone has an informal and a formal style)
● No particular sound is considered to be intrinsically clean or dirty – societal taboos dictate
profanity
● Words relating to sex, sex organs, and natural bodily functions make up a large part of the set of
taboo words of many cultures (often, 2+ words can have the same linguistic meaning)
● Euphemism = a word or phrase that replaces a taboo word or serves to avoid
frightening/unpleasant subjects

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Linguistics 1 – Fall 2022

Week 1.1: Introduction to Linguistics

1.2: Intro continued

○ All children have similar stages of language development

Week 1 case study: Colorless Green Ideas

Week 1 reading new parts

Week 2.1: Language and dialect — language variation

● Singlish = English dialect spoken in Singapore

2.2: Lang and Dialect Cont.:

● Dialect differences =/= a deficiency or deterioration of a language

Week 2.3: Lang & Dialect Cont.

Week 2 reading (269-290) new info:

● Dialect leveling = movement toward greater uniformity among dialects

○ Consonant cluster reduction rule: simplifies consonant clusters, particularly at the

○ Neutralization of [dotless i] and [epsilon] before Nasal Consonants – lack of

HW 1 quiz questions – include in the quizlet

Week 3.1: Brain and Language

Broca’s Aphasia Wernicke’s Aphasia

Week 2.3: Brain and Lang. Cont.

Week 3 case study:

Week 3 reading: new ideas (not in previous notes above):

Include HW 2 questions in quizlet

Week 4.1: Phonetics

Provided vowel chart on midterm

● Orthography: phonetics =/= spelling (spelling is full of inconsistencies in regards to

[p] Pie, pit

[b] Buy, bit

[m] My, mit

[v] View, van

[ð] Thus, thy

[d] Die, dip

[n] Night, nip

[tʃ] Cheap, chin

[ŋ] Bang, sang,

8. Labio-velar (bilabial and velar): sounds produced by a combination of pursed

● Places of Articulation Review

● Manner of articulation: How is the consonant produced?

Tale [thel] Stale [stel]

Kale [khel] Scale [skel]

You [j] Sheep [ʃ] Church [tʃ]

Measure [ʒ] Judge [dʒ] Uh-oh [ʔ]

○ [m] = voiced, bilabial, (nasal) stop consonant

■ [ɪ] [ɛ] [æ] [ʌ] [ə] [ɔ]

● IPA Vowels: Diphthongs

dig [dɪg] rude [rud]

keys [kiz] road [rod]

schedule [skɛdʒul] rod [rad]

[red] raid [ræd] rad

[rid] read [rud] rude

[rɪd] rid [rod] road

[rɛd] red [rad] rod

● Transcription More Examples

faker [-ər] [fekər]

rhythm [-əm] [rɪθəm]

colon [-ən] [kolən]

● Natural class helps us classify these differences

● American English has a rule of jod deletion in certain environments